OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Splitting Answer Set Programs with respect to Intensionality Statements (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under which this technique is applicable, by considering not only dependencies between predicates but also their arguments and context. This allows splitting programs commonly used in practice to which previous results were not applicable.
Fail Faster: Staging and Fast Randomness for High-Performance PBT
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2025
Year: 2025

Property-based testing (PBT) relies on generators for random test cases, often constructed using embedded domain specific languages, which provide expressive combinators for building and composing generators. The effectiveness of PBT depends critically on the speed of these generators. However, careful measurements show that the generator performance of widely used PBT libraries falls well short of what is possible, due principally to (1) the abstraction overhead of their combinator-heavy style and (2) suboptimal sources of randomness. We characterize, quantify, and address these bottlenecks. To eliminate abstraction overheads, we propose a technique based on multi-stage programming, dubbed Allegro. We apply this technique to leading generator libraries in OCaml and Scala 3, significantly improving performance. To quantify the performance impact of the randomness source, we carry out a controlled experiment, replacing the randomness in the OCaml PBT library with an optimized version. Both interventions exactly preserve the semantics of generators, enabling precise, pointwise comparisons. Together, these improvements find bugs up to $13\times$ faster.
Guidelines For The Choice Of The Baseline in XAI Attribution Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Given the broad adoption of artificial intelligence, it is essential to provide evidence that AI models are reliable, trustable, and fair. To this end, the emerging field of eXplainable AI develops techniques to probe such requirements, counterbalancing the hype pushing the pervasiveness of this technology. Among the many facets of this issue, this paper focuses on baseline attribution methods, aiming at deriving a feature attribution map at the network input relying on a "neutral" stimulus usually called "baseline". The choice of the baseline is crucial as it determines the explanation of the network behavior. In this framework, this paper has the twofold goal of shedding light on the implications of the choice of the baseline and providing a simple yet effective method for identifying the best baseline for the task. To achieve this, we propose a decision boundary sampling method, since the baseline, by definition, lies on the decision boundary, which naturally becomes the search domain. Experiments are performed on synthetic examples and validated relying on state-of-the-art methods. Despite being limited to the experimental scope, this contribution is relevant as it offers clear guidelines and a simple proxy for baseline selection, reducing ambiguity and enhancing deep models' reliability and trust.
Bitstream Collisions in Neural Image Compression via Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Neural image compression (NIC) has emerged as a promising alternative to classical compression techniques, offering improved compression ratios. Despite its progress towards standardization and practical deployment, there has been minimal exploration into it's robustness and security. This study reveals an unexpected vulnerability in NIC - bitstream collisions - where semantically different images produce identical compressed bitstreams. Utilizing a novel whitebox adversarial attack algorithm, this paper demonstrates that adding carefully crafted perturbations to semantically different images can cause their compressed bitstreams to collide exactly. The collision vulnerability poses a threat to the practical usability of NIC, particularly in security-critical applications. The cause of the collision is analyzed, and a simple yet effective mitigation method is presented.
NickPay, an Auditable, Privacy-Preserving, Nickname-Based Payment System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we describe the motivation, design, security properties, and a prototype implementation of NickPay, a new privacy-preserving yet auditable payment system built on top of the Ethereum blockchain platform. NickPay offers a strong level of privacy to participants and prevents successive payment transfers from being linked to their actual owners. It is providing the transparency that blockchains ensure and at the same time, preserving the possibility for a trusted authority to access sensitive information, e.g., for audit purposes or compliance with financial regulations. NickPay builds upon the Nicknames for Group Signatures (NGS) scheme, a new signing system based on dynamic ``nicknames'' for signers that extends the schemes of group signatures and signatures with flexible public keys. NGS enables identified group members to expose their flexible public keys, thus allowing direct and natural applications such as auditable private payment systems, NickPay being a blockchain-based prototype of these.
Mask$^2$DiT: Dual Mask-based Diffusion Transformer for Multi-Scene Long Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Sora has unveiled the immense potential of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture in single-scene video generation. However, the more challenging task of multi-scene video generation, which offers broader applications, remains relatively underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose Mask$^2$DiT, a novel approach that establishes fine-grained, one-to-one alignment between video segments and their corresponding text annotations. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric binary mask at each attention layer within the DiT architecture, ensuring that each text annotation applies exclusively to its respective video segment while preserving temporal coherence across visual tokens. This attention mechanism enables precise segment-level textual-to-visual alignment, allowing the DiT architecture to effectively handle video generation tasks with a fixed number of scenes. To further equip the DiT architecture with the ability to generate additional scenes based on existing ones, we incorporate a segment-level conditional mask, which conditions each newly generated segment on the preceding video segments, thereby enabling auto-regressive scene extension. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments confirm that Mask$^2$DiT excels in maintaining visual consistency across segments while ensuring semantic alignment between each segment and its corresponding text description. Our project page is https://tianhao-qi.github.io/Mask2DiTProject.
Continual Learning With Quasi-Newton Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when neural networks learn tasks sequentially. Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) attempts to address this problem by introducing a Bayesian-inspired regularization loss to preserve knowledge of previously learned tasks. However, EWC relies on a Laplace approximation where the Hessian is simplified to the diagonal of the Fisher information matrix, assuming uncorrelated model parameters. This overly simplistic assumption often leads to poor Hessian estimates, limiting its effectiveness. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Continual Learning with Sampled Quasi-Newton (CSQN), which leverages Quasi-Newton methods to compute more accurate Hessian approximations. CSQN captures parameter interactions beyond the diagonal without requiring architecture-specific modifications, making it applicable across diverse tasks and architectures. Experimental results across four benchmarks demonstrate that CSQN consistently outperforms EWC and other state-of-the-art baselines, including rehearsal-based methods. CSQN reduces EWC's forgetting by 50 percent and improves its performance by 8 percent on average. Notably, CSQN achieves superior results on three out of four benchmarks, including the most challenging scenarios, highlighting its potential as a robust solution for continual learning.
Unsupervised Learning for Quadratic Assignment
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce PLUME search, a data-driven framework that enhances search efficiency in combinatorial optimization through unsupervised learning. Unlike supervised or reinforcement learning, PLUME search learns directly from problem instances using a permutation-based loss with a non-autoregressive approach. We evaluate its performance on the quadratic assignment problem, a fundamental NP-hard problem that encompasses various combinatorial optimization problems. Experimental results demonstrate that PLUME search consistently improves solution quality. Furthermore, we study the generalization behavior and show that the learned model generalizes across different densities and sizes.
Experience Replay Addresses Loss of Plasticity in Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Loss of plasticity is one of the main challenges in continual learning with deep neural networks, where neural networks trained via backpropagation gradually lose their ability to adapt to new tasks and perform significantly worse than their freshly initialized counterparts. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new hypothesis that experience replay addresses the loss of plasticity in continual learning. Here, experience replay is a form of memory. We provide supporting evidence for this hypothesis. In particular, we demonstrate in multiple different tasks, including regression, classification, and policy evaluation, that by simply adding an experience replay and processing the data in the experience replay with Transformers, the loss of plasticity disappears. Notably, we do not alter any standard components of deep learning. For example, we do not change backpropagation. We do not modify the activation functions. And we do not use any regularization. We conjecture that experience replay and Transformers can address the loss of plasticity because of the in-context learning phenomenon.
Toward a Cognitive Data Model: Exploring a Mind-Inspired Approach to Database Design
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

The Cognitive Data Model (CDM) is proposed. A novel approach to database design, inspired by the belief that the human brain operates with a logical data model independent of its anatomical structure. The study aims to identify and replicate this CDM to enhance database design, resolving limitations of the existing models in handling complex relationships, scalability, and adaptability. The methodology involves empirical observation, cognitive experiments, iterative modelling and critical thinking. Findings suggest that the information processing in the brain occurs sequentially with forming associations on atomic static data in a pairwise, time dependent manner. This insight led to the development of a meta framework for the brain's information processing to design CDM based on it. The CDM offers improved data modelling and database design, efficient querying, and potential applications in AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. Future research will focus on formalizing the model, implementing it in 3D environments, and developing a query language.
Learning Scene-Level Signed Directional Distance Function with Ellipsoidal Priors and Neural Residuals
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Dense geometric environment representations are critical for autonomous mobile robot navigation and exploration. Recent work shows that implicit continuous representations of occupancy, signed distance, or radiance learned using neural networks offer advantages in reconstruction fidelity, efficiency, and differentiability over explicit discrete representations based on meshes, point clouds, and voxels. In this work, we explore a directional formulation of signed distance, called signed directional distance function (SDDF). Unlike signed distance function (SDF) and similar to neural radiance fields (NeRF), SDDF has a position and viewing direction as input. Like SDF and unlike NeRF, SDDF directly provides distance to the observed surface along the direction, rather than integrating along the view ray, allowing efficient view synthesis. To learn and predict scene-level SDDF efficiently, we develop a differentiable hybrid representation that combines explicit ellipsoid priors and implicit neural residuals. This approach allows the model to effectively handle large distance discontinuities around obstacle boundaries while preserving the ability for dense high-fidelity prediction. We show that SDDF is competitive with the state-of-the-art neural implicit scene models in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering efficiency, while allowing differentiable view prediction for robot trajectory optimization.
Abstracting Geo-specific Terrains to Scale Up Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is increasingly ubiquitous in training dynamic and adaptive synthetic characters for interactive simulations on geo-specific terrains. Frameworks such as Unity's ML-Agents help to make such reinforcement learning experiments more accessible to the simulation community. Military training simulations also benefit from advances in MARL, but they have immense computational requirements due to their complex, continuous, stochastic, partially observable, non-stationary, and doctrine-based nature. Furthermore, these simulations require geo-specific terrains, further exacerbating the computational resources problem. In our research, we leverage Unity's waypoints to automatically generate multi-layered representation abstractions of the geo-specific terrains to scale up reinforcement learning while still allowing the transfer of learned policies between different representations. Our early exploratory results on a novel MARL scenario, where each side has differing objectives, indicate that waypoint-based navigation enables faster and more efficient learning while producing trajectories similar to those taken by expert human players in CSGO gaming environments. This research points out the potential of waypoint-based navigation for reducing the computational costs of developing and training MARL models for military training simulations, where geo-specific terrains and differing objectives are crucial.
Can Multi-modal (reasoning) LLMs work as deepfake detectors?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deepfake detection remains a critical challenge in the era of advanced generative models, particularly as synthetic media becomes more sophisticated. In this study, we explore the potential of state of the art multi-modal (reasoning) large language models (LLMs) for deepfake image detection such as (OpenAI O1/4o, Gemini thinking Flash 2, Deepseek Janus, Grok 3, llama 3.2, Qwen 2/2.5 VL, Mistral Pixtral, Claude 3.5/3.7 sonnet) . We benchmark 12 latest multi-modal LLMs against traditional deepfake detection methods across multiple datasets, including recently published real-world deepfake imagery. To enhance performance, we employ prompt tuning and conduct an in-depth analysis of the models' reasoning pathways to identify key contributing factors in their decision-making process. Our findings indicate that best multi-modal LLMs achieve competitive performance with promising generalization ability with zero shot, even surpass traditional deepfake detection pipelines in out-of-distribution datasets while the rest of the LLM families performs extremely disappointing with some worse than random guess. Furthermore, we found newer model version and reasoning capabilities does not contribute to performance in such niche tasks of deepfake detection while model size do help in some cases. This study highlights the potential of integrating multi-modal reasoning in future deepfake detection frameworks and provides insights into model interpretability for robustness in real-world scenarios.
Look Before Leap: Look-Ahead Planning with Uncertainty in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has demonstrated superior sample efficiency compared to model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, the presence of inaccurate models can introduce biases during policy learning, resulting in misleading trajectories. The challenge lies in obtaining accurate models due to limited diverse training data, particularly in regions with limited visits (uncertain regions). Existing approaches passively quantify uncertainty after sample generation, failing to actively collect uncertain samples that could enhance state coverage and improve model accuracy. Moreover, MBRL often faces difficulties in making accurate multi-step predictions, thereby impacting overall performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework for uncertainty-aware policy optimization with model-based exploratory planning. In the model-based planning phase, we introduce an uncertainty-aware k-step lookahead planning approach to guide action selection at each step. This process involves a trade-off analysis between model uncertainty and value function approximation error, effectively enhancing policy performance. In the policy optimization phase, we leverage an uncertainty-driven exploratory policy to actively collect diverse training samples, resulting in improved model accuracy and overall performance of the RL agent. Our approach offers flexibility and applicability to tasks with varying state/action spaces and reward structures. We validate its effectiveness through experiments on challenging robotic manipulation tasks and Atari games, surpassing state-of-the-art methods with fewer interactions, thereby leading to significant performance improvements.
Addressing Challenges in Time Series Forecasting: A Comprehensive Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The explosion of Time Series (TS) data, driven by advancements in technology, necessitates sophisticated analytical methods. Modern management systems increasingly rely on analyzing this data, highlighting the importance of effcient processing techniques. State-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) approaches for TS analysis and forecasting are becoming prevalent. This paper briefly describes and compiles suitable algorithms for TS regression task. We compare these algorithms against each other and the classic ARIMA method using diverse datasets: complete data, data with outliers, and data with missing values. The focus is on forecasting accuracy, particularly for long-term predictions. This research aids in selecting the most appropriate algorithm based on forecasting needs and data characteristics.
AIGC-assisted Federated Learning for Edge Intelligence: Architecture Design, Research Challenges and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Federated learning (FL) can fully leverage large-scale terminal data while ensuring privacy and security, and is considered as a distributed alternative for the centralized machine learning. However, the issue of data heterogeneity poses limitations on FL's performance. To address this challenge, artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) which is an innovative data synthesis technique emerges as one potential solution. In this article, we first provide an overview of the system architecture, performance metrics, and challenges associated with AIGC-assistant FL system design. We then propose the Generative federated learning (GenFL) architecture and present its workflow, including the design of aggregation and weight policy. Finally, using the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, we employ diffusion models to generate dataset and improve FL performance. Experiments conducted under various non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of GenFL on overcoming the bottlenecks in FL caused by data heterogeneity. Open research directions in the research of AIGC-assisted FL are also discussed.
DINeMo: Learning Neural Mesh Models with no 3D Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Category-level 3D/6D pose estimation is a crucial step towards comprehensive 3D scene understanding, which would enable a broad range of applications in robotics and embodied AI. Recent works explored neural mesh models that approach a range of 2D and 3D tasks from an analysis-by-synthesis perspective. Despite the largely enhanced robustness to partial occlusion and domain shifts, these methods depended heavily on 3D annotations for part-contrastive learning, which confines them to a narrow set of categories and hinders efficient scaling. In this work, we present DINeMo, a novel neural mesh model that is trained with no 3D annotations by leveraging pseudo-correspondence obtained from large visual foundation models. We adopt a bidirectional pseudo-correspondence generation method, which produce pseudo correspondence utilize both local appearance features and global context information. Experimental results on car datasets demonstrate that our DINeMo outperforms previous zero- and few-shot 3D pose estimation by a wide margin, narrowing the gap with fully-supervised methods by 67.3%. Our DINeMo also scales effectively and efficiently when incorporating more unlabeled images during training, which demonstrate the advantages over supervised learning methods that rely on 3D annotations. Our project page is available at https://analysis-by-synthesis.github.io/DINeMo/.
Raising Awareness of Location Information Vulnerabilities in Social Media Photos using LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Location privacy leaks can lead to unauthorised tracking, identity theft, and targeted attacks, compromising personal security and privacy. This study explores LLM-powered location privacy leaks associated with photo sharing on social media, focusing on user awareness, attitudes, and opinions. We developed and introduced an LLM-powered location privacy intervention app to 19 participants, who used it over a two-week period. The app prompted users to reflect on potential privacy leaks that a widely available LLM could easily detect, such as visual landmarks & cues that could reveal their location, and provided ways to conceal this information. Through in-depth interviews, we found that our intervention effectively increased users' awareness of location privacy and the risks posed by LLMs. It also encouraged users to consider the importance of maintaining control over their privacy data and sparked discussions about the future of location privacy-preserving technologies. Based on these insights, we offer design implications to support the development of future user-centred, location privacy-preserving technologies for social media photos.