OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards a Real-World Aligned Benchmark for Unlearning in Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Modern recommender systems heavily leverage user interaction data to deliver personalized experiences. However, relying on personal data presents challenges in adhering to privacy regulations, such as the GDPR's "right to be forgotten". Machine unlearning (MU) aims to address these challenges by enabling the efficient removal of specific training data from models post-training, without compromising model utility or leaving residual information. However, current benchmarks for unlearning in recommender systems -- most notably CURE4Rec -- fail to reflect real-world operational demands. They focus narrowly on collaborative filtering, overlook tasks like session-based and next-basket recommendation, simulate unrealistically large unlearning requests, and ignore critical efficiency constraints. In this paper, we propose a set of design desiderata and research questions to guide the development of a more realistic benchmark for unlearning in recommender systems, with the goal of gathering feedback from the research community. Our benchmark proposal spans multiple recommendation tasks, includes domain-specific unlearning scenarios, and several unlearning algorithms -- including ones adapted from a recent NeurIPS unlearning competition. Furthermore, we argue for an unlearning setup that reflects the sequential, time-sensitive nature of real-world deletion requests. We also present a preliminary experiment in a next-basket recommendation setting based on our proposed desiderata and find that unlearning also works for sequential recommendation models, exposed to many small unlearning requests. In this case, we observe that a modification of a custom-designed unlearning algorithm for recommender systems outperforms general unlearning algorithms significantly, and that unlearning can be executed with a latency of only several seconds.
Proximal Vision Transformer: Enhancing Feature Representation through Two-Stage Manifold Geometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture has become widely recognized in computer vision, leveraging its self-attention mechanism to achieve remarkable success across various tasks. Despite its strengths, ViT's optimization remains confined to modeling local relationships within individual images, limiting its ability to capture the global geometric relationships between data points. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework that integrates ViT with the proximal tools, enabling a unified geometric optimization approach to enhance feature representation and classification performance. In this framework, ViT constructs the tangent bundle of the manifold through its self-attention mechanism, where each attention head corresponds to a tangent space, offering geometric representations from diverse local perspectives. Proximal iterations are then introduced to define sections within the tangent bundle and project data from tangent spaces onto the base space, achieving global feature alignment and optimization. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms traditional ViT in terms of classification accuracy and data distribution.
PowerChain: A Verifiable Agentic AI System for Automating Distribution Grid Analyses
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Rapid electrification and decarbonization are increasing the complexity of distribution grid (DG) operation and planning, necessitating advanced computational analyses to ensure reliability and resilience. These analyses depend on disparate workflows comprising complex models, function calls, and data pipelines that require substantial expert knowledge and remain difficult to automate. Workforce and budget constraints further limit utilities' ability to apply such analyses at scale. To address this gap, we build an agentic system PowerChain, which is capable of autonomously performing complex grid analyses. Existing agentic AI systems are typically developed in a bottom-up manner with customized context for predefined analysis tasks; therefore, they do not generalize to tasks that the agent has never seen. In comparison, to generalize to unseen DG analysis tasks, PowerChain dynamically generates structured context by leveraging supervisory signals from self-contained power systems tools (e.g., GridLAB-D) and an optimized set of expert-annotated and verified reasoning trajectories. For complex DG tasks defined in natural language, empirical results on real utility data demonstrate that PowerChain achieves up to a 144/% improvement in performance over baselines.
Two Birds with One Stone: Enhancing Uncertainty Quantification and Interpretability with Graph Functional Neural Process
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful tools on graph data. However, their predictions are mis-calibrated and lack interpretability, limiting their adoption in critical applications. To address this issue, we propose a new uncertainty-aware and interpretable graph classification model that combines graph functional neural process and graph generative model. The core of our method is to assume a set of latent rationales which can be mapped to a probabilistic embedding space; the predictive distribution of the classifier is conditioned on such rationale embeddings by learning a stochastic correlation matrix. The graph generator serves to decode the graph structure of the rationales from the embedding space for model interpretability. For efficient model training, we adopt an alternating optimization procedure which mimics the well known Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed method is general and can be applied to any existing GNN architecture. Extensive experiments on five graph classification datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both uncertainty quantification and GNN interpretability. We also conduct case studies to show that the decoded rationale structure can provide meaningful explanations.
GRASP: Geospatial pixel Reasoning viA Structured Policy learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Geospatial pixel reasoning aims to generate segmentation masks in remote sensing imagery directly from natural-language instructions. Most existing approaches follow a paradigm that fine-tunes multimodal large language models under supervision with dense pixel-level masks as ground truth. While effective within the training data distribution, this design suffers from two main drawbacks: (1) the high cost of large-scale dense mask annotation, and (2) the limited generalization capability of supervised fine-tuning in out-of-domain scenarios. To address these issues, we propose GRASP, a structured policy-learning framework that integrates a multimodal large language model with a pretrained segmentation model in a cascaded manner. To enhance generalization, we introduce PRIME, a training paradigm that replaces supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to better align reasoning and grounding behaviors with task objectives. To reduce annotation costs, we design BoP-Rewards, which substitutes dense mask labels with bounding box and positive points. It further verifies outputs through two complementary signals: format, which constrains the reasoning and grounding structure to remain syntactically parsable, and accuracy, which evaluates the quality of predicted boxes and points. For evaluation, we train our method and all baselines on EarthReason and GeoPixInstruct, constructing an in-domain benchmark by merging their test sets. We further release GRASP-1k, a fully out-of-domain benchmark with reasoning-intensive queries, reasoning traces, and fine-grained masks. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) in-domain performance and up to 54\% improvement in out-of-domain scenarios, confirming that reinforcement learning with cost-aware rewards provides a robust and scalable paradigm for geospatial pixel reasoning. All code and datasets will be released publicly.
Rethinking How AI Embeds and Adapts to Human Values: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

The concepts of ``human-centered AI'' and ``value-based decision'' have gained significant attention in both research and industry. However, many critical aspects remain underexplored and require further investigation. In particular, there is a need to understand how systems incorporate human values, how humans can identify these values within systems, and how to minimize the risks of harm or unintended consequences. In this paper, we highlight the need to rethink how we frame value alignment and assert that value alignment should move beyond static and singular conceptions of values. We argue that AI systems should implement long-term reasoning and remain adaptable to evolving values. Furthermore, value alignment requires more theories to address the full spectrum of human values. Since values often vary among individuals or groups, multi-agent systems provide the right framework for navigating pluralism, conflict, and inter-agent reasoning about values. We identify the challenges associated with value alignment and indicate directions for advancing value alignment research. In addition, we broadly discuss diverse perspectives of value alignment, from design methodologies to practical applications.
Exploring AI-Enabled Test Practice, Affect, and Test Outcomes in Language Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Practice tests for high-stakes assessment are intended to build test familiarity, and reduce construct-irrelevant variance which can interfere with valid score interpretation. Generative AI-driven, automated item generation (AIG) scales the creation of large item banks and multiple practice tests, enabling repeated practice opportunities. We conducted a large-scale observational study (N = 25,969) using the Duolingo English Test (DET) -- a digital, high-stakes, computer-adaptive English language proficiency test to examine how increased access to repeated test practice relates to official DETscores, test-taker affect (e.g., confidence), and score-sharing for university admissions. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale study exploring the use of AIG-enabled practice tests in high-stakes language assessment. Results showed that taking 1-3 practice tests was associated with better performance (scores), positive affect (e.g., confidence) toward the official DET, and increased likelihood of sharing scores for university admissions for those who also expressed positive affect. Taking more than 3 practice tests was related to lower performance, potentially reflecting washback -- i.e., using the practice test for purposes other than test familiarity, such as language learning or developing test-taking strategies. Findings can inform best practices regarding AI-supported test readiness. Study findings also raise new questions about test-taker preparation behaviors and relationships to test-taker performance, affect, and behaviorial outcomes.
PlantVillageVQA: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Benchmarking Vision-Language Models in Plant Science
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

PlantVillageVQA is a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset derived from the widely used PlantVillage image corpus. It was designed to advance the development and evaluation of vision-language models for agricultural decision-making and analysis. The PlantVillageVQA dataset comprises 193,609 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs grounded over 55,448 images spanning 14 crop species and 38 disease conditions. Questions are organised into 3 levels of cognitive complexity and 9 distinct categories. Each question category was phrased manually following expert guidance and generated via an automated two-stage pipeline: (1) template-based QA synthesis from image metadata and (2) multi-stage linguistic re-engineering. The dataset was iteratively reviewed by domain experts for scientific accuracy and relevancy. The final dataset was evaluated using three state-of-the-art models for quality assessment. Our objective remains to provide a publicly available, standardised and expert-verified database to enhance diagnostic accuracy for plant disease identifications and advance scientific research in the agricultural domain. Our dataset will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SyedNazmusSakib/PlantVillageVQA.
Towards Deeper Understanding of Natural User Interactions in Virtual Reality Based Assembly Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

We explore natural user interactions using a virtual reality simulation of a robot arm for assembly tasks. Using a Wizard-of-Oz study, participants completed collaborative LEGO and instructive PCB assembly tasks, with the robot responding under experimenter control. We collected voice, hand tracking, and gaze data from users. Statistical analyses revealed that instructive and collaborative scenarios elicit distinct behaviors and adopted strategies, particularly as tasks progress. Users tended to use put-that-there language in spatially ambiguous contexts and more descriptive instructions in spatially clear ones. Our contributions include the identification of natural interaction strategies through analyses of collected data, as well as the supporting dataset, to guide the understanding and design of natural multimodal user interfaces for instructive interaction with systems in virtual reality.
Token Homogenization under Positional Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates token homogenization - the convergence of token representations toward uniformity across transformer layers and its relationship to positional bias in large language models. We empirically examine whether homogenization occurs and how positional bias amplifies this effect. Through layer-wise similarity analysis and controlled experiments, we demonstrate that tokens systematically lose distinctiveness during processing, particularly when biased toward extremal positions. Our findings confirm both the existence of homogenization and its dependence on positional attention mechanisms.
Reconciling Communication Compression and Byzantine-Robustness in Distributed Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Distributed learning enables scalable model training over decentralized data, but remains hindered by Byzantine faults and high communication costs. While both challenges have been studied extensively in isolation, their interplay has received limited attention. Prior work has shown that naively combining communication compression with Byzantine-robust aggregation can severely weaken resilience to faulty nodes. The current state-of-the-art, Byz-DASHA-PAGE, leverages a momentum-based variance reduction scheme to counteract the negative effect of compression noise on Byzantine robustness. In this work, we introduce RoSDHB, a new algorithm that integrates classical Polyak momentum with a coordinated compression strategy. Theoretically, RoSDHB matches the convergence guarantees of Byz-DASHA-PAGE under the standard $(G,B)$-gradient dissimilarity model, while relying on milder assumptions and requiring less memory and communication per client. Empirically, RoSDHB demonstrates stronger robustness while achieving substantial communication savings compared to Byz-DASHA-PAGE.
Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection) and data-oriented threats (e.g., data exfiltration), time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) remain largely unexplored in this context. TOCTOU arises when an agent validates external state (e.g., a file or API response) that is later modified before use, enabling practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps or payload injection. In this work, we present the first study of TOCTOU vulnerabilities in LLM-enabled agents. We introduce TOCTOU-Bench, a benchmark with 66 realistic user tasks designed to evaluate this class of vulnerabilities. As countermeasures, we adapt detection and mitigation techniques from systems security to this setting and propose prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing. Our study highlights challenges unique to agentic workflows, where we achieve up to 25% detection accuracy using automated detection methods, a 3% decrease in vulnerable plan generation, and a 95% reduction in the attack window. When combining all three approaches, we reduce the TOCTOU vulnerabilities from an executed trajectory from 12% to 8%. Our findings open a new research direction at the intersection of AI safety and systems security.
Sharpness-Aware Geometric Defense for Robust Out-Of-Distribution Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection ensures safe and reliable model deployment. Contemporary OOD algorithms using geometry projection can detect OOD or adversarial samples from clean in-distribution (ID) samples. However, this setting regards adversarial ID samples as OOD, leading to incorrect OOD predictions. Existing efforts on OOD detection with ID and OOD data under attacks are minimal. In this paper, we develop a robust OOD detection method that distinguishes adversarial ID samples from OOD ones. The sharp loss landscape created by adversarial training hinders model convergence, impacting the latent embedding quality for OOD score calculation. Therefore, we introduce a {\bf Sharpness-aware Geometric Defense (SaGD)} framework to smooth out the rugged adversarial loss landscape in the projected latent geometry. Enhanced geometric embedding convergence enables accurate ID data characterization, benefiting OOD detection against adversarial attacks. We use Jitter-based perturbation in adversarial training to extend the defense ability against unseen attacks. Our SaGD framework significantly improves FPR and AUC over the state-of-the-art defense approaches in differentiating CIFAR-100 from six other OOD datasets under various attacks. We further examine the effects of perturbations at various adversarial training levels, revealing the relationship between the sharp loss landscape and adversarial OOD detection.
Towards Alignment-Centric Paradigm: A Survey of Instruction Tuning in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Instruction tuning is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, safety constraints, and domain-specific requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the full pipeline, encompassing (i) data collection methodologies, (ii) full-parameter and parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies, and (iii) evaluation protocols. We categorized data construction into three major paradigms: expert annotation, distillation from larger models, and self-improvement mechanisms, each offering distinct trade-offs between quality, scalability, and resource cost. Fine-tuning techniques range from conventional supervised training to lightweight approaches, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and prefix tuning, with a focus on computational efficiency and model reusability. We further examine the challenges of evaluating faithfulness, utility, and safety across multilingual and multimodal scenarios, highlighting the emergence of domain-specific benchmarks in healthcare, legal, and financial applications. Finally, we discuss promising directions for automated data generation, adaptive optimization, and robust evaluation frameworks, arguing that a closer integration of data, algorithms, and human feedback is essential for advancing instruction-tuned LLMs. This survey aims to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to design LLMs that are both effective and reliably aligned with human intentions.
Multi-Agent Visual-Language Reasoning for Comprehensive Highway Scene Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a multi-agent framework for comprehensive highway scene understanding, designed around a mixture-of-experts strategy. In this framework, a large generic vision-language model (VLM), such as GPT-4o, is contextualized with domain knowledge to generates task-specific chain-of-thought (CoT) prompts. These fine-grained prompts are then used to guide a smaller, efficient VLM (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-7B) in reasoning over short videos, along with complementary modalities as applicable. The framework simultaneously addresses multiple critical perception tasks, including weather classification, pavement wetness assessment, and traffic congestion detection, achieving robust multi-task reasoning while balancing accuracy and computational efficiency. To support empirical validation, we curated three specialized datasets aligned with these tasks. Notably, the pavement wetness dataset is multimodal, combining video streams with road weather sensor data, highlighting the benefits of multimodal reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate consistently strong performance across diverse traffic and environmental conditions. From a deployment perspective, the framework can be readily integrated with existing traffic camera systems and strategically applied to high-risk rural locations, such as sharp curves, flood-prone lowlands, or icy bridges. By continuously monitoring the targeted sites, the system enhances situational awareness and delivers timely alerts, even in resource-constrained environments.
Deep Learning with Self-Attention and Enhanced Preprocessing for Precise Diagnosis of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia from Bone Marrow Smears in Hemato-Oncology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a prevalent hematological malignancy in both pediatric and adult populations. Early and accurate detection with precise subtyping is essential for guiding therapy. Conventional workflows are complex, time-consuming, and prone to human error. We present a deep learning framework for automated ALL diagnosis from bone marrow smear images. The method combines a robust preprocessing pipeline with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to standardize image quality and improve inference efficiency. As a key design, we insert a multi-head self-attention (MHSA) block into a VGG19 backbone to model long-range dependencies and contextual relationships among cellular features. To mitigate class imbalance, we train with Focal Loss. Across evaluated architectures, the enhanced VGG19+MHSA trained with Focal Loss achieves 99.25% accuracy, surpassing a strong ResNet101 baseline (98.62%). These results indicate that attention-augmented CNNs, coupled with targeted loss optimization and preprocessing, yield more discriminative representations of leukemic cell morphology. Our approach offers a highly accurate and computationally efficient tool for automated ALL recognition and subtyping, with potential to accelerate diagnostic workflows and support reliable decision-making in clinical settings.