OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
"Why do we do this?": Moral Stress and the Affective Experience of Ethics in Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

A plethora of toolkits, checklists, and workshops have been developed to bridge the well-documented gap between AI ethics principles and practice. Yet little is known about effects of such interventions on practitioners. We conducted an ethnographic investigation in a major European city organization that developed and works to integrate an ethics toolkit into city operations. We find that the integration of ethics tools by technical teams destabilises their boundaries, roles, and mandates around responsibilities and decisions. This lead to emotional discomfort and feelings of vulnerability, which neither toolkit designers nor the organization had accounted for. We leverage the concept of moral stress to argue that this affective experience is a core challenge to the successful integration of ethics tools in technical practice. Even in this best case scenario, organisational structures were not able to deal with moral stress that resulted from attempts to implement responsible technology development practices.
Exploring Gender Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This study investigates factors influencing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems' fairness and performance across genders, beyond the conventional examination of demographics. Using the LibriSpeech dataset and the Whisper small model, we analyze how performance varies across different gender representations in training data. Our findings suggest a complex interplay between the gender ratio in training data and ASR performance. Optimal fairness occurs at specific gender distributions rather than a simple 50-50 split. Furthermore, our findings suggest that factors like pitch variability can significantly affect ASR accuracy. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of biases in ASR systems, highlighting the importance of carefully curated training data in mitigating gender bias.
The Introduction of README and CONTRIBUTING Files in Open Source Software Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

README and CONTRIBUTING files can serve as the first point of contact for potential contributors to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. Prominent open source software organizations such as Mozilla, GitHub, and the Linux Foundation advocate that projects provide community-focused and process-oriented documentation early to foster recruitment and activity. In this paper we investigate the introduction of these documents in FLOSS projects, including whether early documentation conforms to these recommendations or explains subsequent activity. We use a novel dataset of FLOSS projects packaged by the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and conduct a quantitative analysis to examine README (n=4226) and CONTRIBUTING (n=714) files when they are first published into projects' repositories. We find that projects create minimal READMEs proactively, but often publish CONTRIBUTING files following an influx of contributions. The initial versions of these files rarely focus on community development, instead containing descriptions of project procedure for library usage or code contribution. The findings suggest that FLOSS projects do not create documentation with community-building in mind, but rather favor brevity and standardized instructions.
LLM-Based Design Pattern Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Detecting design pattern instances in unfamiliar codebases remains a challenging yet essential task for improving software quality and maintainability. Traditional static analysis tools often struggle with the complexity, variability, and lack of explicit annotations that characterize real-world pattern implementations. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models to automatically identify design pattern instances across diverse codebases. Our method focuses on recognizing the roles classes play within the pattern instances. By providing clearer insights into software structure and intent, this research aims to support developers, improve comprehension, and streamline tasks such as refactoring, maintenance, and adherence to best practices.
SOK: Exploring Hallucinations and Security Risks in AI-Assisted Software Development with Insights for LLM Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor AI, and Codeium AI into software development has revolutionized the coding landscape, offering significant productivity gains, automation, and enhanced debugging capabilities. These tools have proven invaluable for generating code snippets, refactoring existing code, and providing real-time support to developers. However, their widespread adoption also presents notable challenges, particularly in terms of security vulnerabilities, code quality, and ethical concerns. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and risks associated with AI-powered coding tools, drawing on user feedback, security analyses, and practical use cases. We explore the potential for these tools to replicate insecure coding practices, introduce biases, and generate incorrect or non-sensical code (hallucinations). In addition, we discuss the risks of data leaks, intellectual property violations and the need for robust security measures to mitigate these threats. By comparing the features and performance of these tools, we aim to guide developers in making informed decisions about their use, ensuring that the benefits of AI-assisted coding are maximized while minimizing associated risks.
Programming with Pixels: Can Computer-Use Agents do Software Engineering?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Computer-use agents (CUAs) hold the promise of performing a wide variety of general tasks, but current evaluations have primarily focused on simple scenarios. It therefore remains unclear whether such generalist agents can automate more sophisticated and specialized work such as software engineering (SWE). To investigate this, we introduce $\texttt{Programming with Pixels}$ (PwP), the first comprehensive computer-use environment for software engineering, where agents visually control an IDE to perform diverse software engineering tasks. To enable holistic evaluation, we also introduce \texttt{PwP-Bench}, a benchmark of 15 existing and new software-engineering tasks spanning multiple modalities, programming languages, and skillsets. We perform an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art open-weight and closed-weight CUAs and find that when interacting purely visually, they perform significantly worse than specialized coding agents. However, when the same CUAs are given direct access to just two APIs-file editing and bash operations-performance jumps, often reaching the levels of specialized agents despite having a task-agnostic design. Furthermore, when given access to additional IDE tools via text APIs, all models show further gains. Our analysis shows that current CUAs fall short mainly due to limited visual grounding and the inability to take full advantage of the rich environment, leaving clear room for future improvements.PwP establishes software engineering as a natural domain for benchmarking whether generalist computer-use agents can reach specialist-level performance on sophisticated tasks. Code and data released at https://programmingwithpixels.com
Reinforcement Learning-based Approach for Vehicle-to-Building Charging with Heterogeneous Agents and Long Term Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Strategic aggregation of electric vehicle batteries as energy reservoirs can optimize power grid demand, benefiting smart and connected communities, especially large office buildings that offer workplace charging. This involves optimizing charging and discharging to reduce peak energy costs and net peak demand, monitored over extended periods (e.g., a month), which involves making sequential decisions under uncertainty and delayed and sparse rewards, a continuous action space, and the complexity of ensuring generalization across diverse conditions. Existing algorithmic approaches, e.g., heuristic-based strategies, fall short in addressing real-time decision-making under dynamic conditions, and traditional reinforcement learning (RL) models struggle with large state-action spaces, multi-agent settings, and the need for long-term reward optimization. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel RL framework that combines the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient approach (DDPG) with action masking and efficient MILP-driven policy guidance. Our approach balances the exploration of continuous action spaces to meet user charging demands. Using real-world data from a major electric vehicle manufacturer, we show that our approach comprehensively outperforms many well-established baselines and several scalable heuristic approaches, achieving significant cost savings while meeting all charging requirements. Our results show that the proposed approach is one of the first scalable and general approaches to solving the V2B energy management challenge.
Heterogeneous Decision Making in Mixed Traffic: Uncertainty-aware Planning and Bounded Rationality
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2025
Year: 2025

The past few years have witnessed a rapid growth of the deployment of automated vehicles (AVs). Clearly, AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) will co-exist for many years, and AVs will have to operate around HVs, pedestrians, cyclists, and more, calling for fundamental breakthroughs in AI designed for mixed traffic to achieve mixed autonomy. Thus motivated, we study heterogeneous decision making by AVs and HVs in a mixed traffic environment, aiming to capture the interactions between human and machine decision-making and develop an AI foundation that enables vehicles to operate safely and efficiently. There are a number of challenges to achieve mixed autonomy, including 1) humans drivers make driving decisions with bounded rationality, and it remains open to develop accurate models for HVs' decision making; and 2) uncertainty-aware planning plays a critical role for AVs to take safety maneuvers in response to the human behavior. In this paper, we introduce a formulation of AV-HV interaction, where the HV makes decisions with bounded rationality and the AV employs uncertainty-aware planning based on the prediction on HV's future actions. We conduct a comprehensive analysis on AV and HV's learning regret to answer the questions: 1) {How does the learning performance depend on HV's bounded rationality and AV's planning}; 2) {How do different decision making strategies impact the overall learning performance}? Our findings reveal some intriguing phenomena, such as Goodhart's Law in AV's learning performance and compounding effects in HV's decision making process. By examining the dynamics of the regrets, we gain insights into the interplay between human and machine decision making.
IMPROVE: Iterative Model Pipeline Refinement and Optimization Leveraging LLM Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Large language model (LLM) agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate the workflow of machine learning, but most existing methods share a common limitation: they attempt to optimize entire pipelines in a single step before evaluation, making it difficult to attribute improvements to specific changes. This lack of granularity leads to unstable optimization and slower convergence, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we introduce Iterative Refinement, a novel strategy for LLM-driven ML pipeline design inspired by how human ML experts iteratively refine models, focusing on one component at a time rather than making sweeping changes all at once. By systematically updating individual components based on real training feedback, Iterative Refinement improves overall model performance. We also provide some theoretical edvience of the superior properties of this Iterative Refinement. Further, we implement this strategy in IMPROVE, an end-to-end LLM agent framework for automating and optimizing object classification pipelines. Through extensive evaluations across datasets of varying sizes and domains, we demonstrate that Iterative Refinement enables IMPROVE to consistently achieve better performance over existing zero-shot LLM-based approaches.
Steganography Beyond Space-Time with Chain of Multimodal AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Steganography is the art and science of covert writing, with a broad range of applications interwoven within the realm of cybersecurity. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, its ability to synthesise realistic content emerges as a threat in the hands of cybercriminals who seek to manipulate and misrepresent the truth. Such synthetic content introduces a non-trivial risk of overwriting the subtle changes made for the purpose of steganography. When the signals in both the spatial and temporal domains are vulnerable to unforeseen overwriting, it calls for reflection on what, if any, remains invariant. This study proposes a paradigm in steganography for audiovisual media, where messages are concealed beyond both spatial and temporal domains. A chain of multimodal artificial intelligence is developed to deconstruct audiovisual content into a cover text, embed a message within the linguistic domain, and then reconstruct the audiovisual content through synchronising both auditory and visual modalities with the resultant stego text. The message is encoded by biasing the word sampling process of a language generation model and decoded by analysing the probability distribution of word choices. The accuracy of message transmission is evaluated under both zero-bit and multi-bit capacity settings. Fidelity is assessed through both biometric and semantic similarities, capturing the identities of the recorded face and voice, as well as the core ideas conveyed through the media. Secrecy is examined through statistical comparisons between cover and stego texts. Robustness is tested across various scenarios, including audiovisual resampling, face-swapping, voice-cloning and their combinations.
FactReasoner: A Probabilistic Approach to Long-Form Factuality Assessment for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks, yet they often fall short in ensuring the factual accuracy of their outputs, thus limiting their reliability in real-world applications where correctness is critical. In this paper, we present FactReasoner, a novel neuro-symbolic based factuality assessment framework that employs probabilistic reasoning to evaluate the truthfulness of long-form generated responses. FactReasoner decomposes a response into atomic units, retrieves relevant contextual information from external knowledge sources, and models the logical relationships (e.g., entailment, contradiction) between these units and their contexts using probabilistic encodings. It then estimates the posterior probability that each atomic unit is supported by the retrieved evidence. Our experiments on both labeled and unlabeled benchmark datasets demonstrate that FactReasoner often outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based methods in terms of factual precision and recall. Our open-source implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/IBM/FactReasoner.
Differentially Private Iterative Screening Rules for Linear Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Linear $L_1$-regularized models have remained one of the simplest and most effective tools in data science. Over the past decade, screening rules have risen in popularity as a way to eliminate features when producing the sparse regression weights of $L_1$ models. However, despite the increasing need of privacy-preserving models for data analysis, to the best of our knowledge, no differentially private screening rule exists. In this paper, we develop the first private screening rule for linear regression. We initially find that this screening rule is too strong: it screens too many coefficients as a result of the private screening step. However, a weakened implementation of private screening reduces overscreening and improves performance.
Tighten The Lasso: A Convex Hull Volume-based Anomaly Detection Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical task for maintaining model reliability and robustness. In this study, we propose a novel anomaly detection algorithm that leverages the convex hull (CH) property of a dataset by exploiting the observation that OOD samples marginally increase the CH's volume compared to in-distribution samples. Thus, we establish a decision boundary between OOD and in-distribution data by iteratively computing the CH's volume as samples are removed, stopping when such removal does not significantly alter the CH's volume. The proposed algorithm is evaluated against seven widely used anomaly detection methods across ten datasets, demonstrating performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. Furthermore, we introduce a computationally efficient criterion for identifying datasets where the proposed method outperforms existing SOTA approaches.
Towards Using Voice for Hedonic Shopping Motivations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Besides the utilitarian aspects of online shopping, hedonic motivations play a significant role in shaping the shopping behavior of online users. With the increased popularity of voice-enabled devices, online shopping platforms have attempted to drive online shopping on voice. However, we explain why voice might be more suitable for the hedonic aspects of shopping. We introduce a prototype that enables such focus in a voice experience and share our findings from a qualitative study.
Diffusion Models for conditional MRI generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this article, we present a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) for the generation of brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), conditioning its generation based on pathology (Healthy, Glioblastoma, Sclerosis, Dementia) and acquisition modality (T1w, T1ce, T2w, Flair, PD). To evaluate the quality of the generated images, the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Index (MS-SSIM) metrics were employed. The results indicate that the model generates images with a distribution similar to real ones, maintaining a balance between visual fidelity and diversity. Additionally, the model demonstrates extrapolation capability, enabling the generation of configurations that were not present in the training data. The results validate the potential of the model to increase in the number of samples in clinical datasets, balancing underrepresented classes, and evaluating AI models in medicine, contributing to the development of diagnostic tools in radiology without compromising patient privacy.
Quantum Machine Learning in Precision Medicine and Drug Discovery -- A Game Changer for Tailored Treatments?
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2025
Year: 2025

The digitization of healthcare presents numerous challenges, including the complexity of biological systems, vast data generation, and the need for personalized treatment plans. Traditional computational methods often fall short, leading to delayed and sometimes ineffective diagnoses and treatments. Quantum Computing (QC) and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offer transformative advancements with the potential to revolutionize medicine. This paper summarizes areas where QC promises unprecedented computational power, enabling faster, more accurate diagnostics, personalized treatments, and enhanced drug discovery processes. However, integrating quantum technologies into precision medicine also presents challenges, including errors in algorithms and high costs. We show that mathematically-based techniques for specifying, developing, and verifying software (formal methods) can enhance the reliability and correctness of QC. By providing a rigorous mathematical framework, formal methods help to specify, develop, and verify systems with high precision. In genomic data analysis, formal specification languages can precisely (1) define the behavior and properties of quantum algorithms designed to identify genetic markers associated with diseases. Model checking tools can systematically explore all possible states of the algorithm to (2) ensure it behaves correctly under all conditions, while theorem proving techniques provide mathematical (3) proof that the algorithm meets its specified properties, ensuring accuracy and reliability. Additionally, formal optimization techniques can (4) enhance the efficiency and performance of quantum algorithms by reducing resource usage, such as the number of qubits and gate operations. Therefore, we posit that formal methods can significantly contribute to enabling QC to realize its full potential as a game changer in precision medicine.
WhatELSE: Shaping Narrative Spaces at Configurable Level of Abstraction for AI-bridged Interactive Storytelling
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Generative AI significantly enhances player agency in interactive narratives (IN) by enabling just-in-time content generation that adapts to player actions. While delegating generation to AI makes IN more interactive, it becomes challenging for authors to control the space of possible narratives - within which the final story experienced by the player emerges from their interaction with AI. In this paper, we present WhatELSE, an AI-bridged IN authoring system that creates narrative possibility spaces from example stories. WhatELSE provides three views (narrative pivot, outline, and variants) to help authors understand the narrative space and corresponding tools leveraging linguistic abstraction to control the boundaries of the narrative space. Taking innovative LLM-based narrative planning approaches, WhatELSE further unfolds the narrative space into executable game events. Through a user study (N=12) and technical evaluations, we found that WhatELSE enables authors to perceive and edit the narrative space and generates engaging interactive narratives at play-time.
Independent Mobility GPT (IDM-GPT): A Self-Supervised Multi-Agent Large Language Model Framework for Customized Traffic Mobility Analysis Using Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

With the urbanization process, an increasing number of sensors are being deployed in transportation systems, leading to an explosion of big data. To harness the power of this vast transportation data, various machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods have been introduced to address numerous transportation challenges. However, these methods often require significant investment in data collection, processing, storage, and the employment of professionals with expertise in transportation and ML. Additionally, privacy issues are a major concern when processing data for real-world traffic control and management. To address these challenges, the research team proposes an innovative Multi-agent framework named Independent Mobility GPT (IDM-GPT) based on large language models (LLMs) for customized traffic analysis, management suggestions, and privacy preservation. IDM-GPT efficiently connects users, transportation databases, and ML models economically. IDM-GPT trains, customizes, and applies various LLM-based AI agents for multiple functions, including user query comprehension, prompts optimization, data analysis, model selection, and performance evaluation and enhancement. With IDM-GPT, users without any background in transportation or ML can efficiently and intuitively obtain data analysis and customized suggestions in near real-time based on their questions. Experimental results demonstrate that IDM-GPT delivers satisfactory performance across multiple traffic-related tasks, providing comprehensive and actionable insights that support effective traffic management and urban mobility improvement.