OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LLMs and Agentic AI in Insurance Decision-Making: Opportunities and Challenges For Africa
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we highlight the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI, in the insurance sector. We consider and emphasize the unique opportunities, challenges, and potential pathways in insurance amid rapid performance improvements, increased open-source access, decreasing deployment costs, and the complexity of LLM or agentic AI frameworks. To bring it closer to home, we identify critical gaps in the African insurance market and highlight key local efforts, players, and partnership opportunities. Finally, we call upon actuaries, insurers, regulators, and tech leaders to a collaborative effort aimed at creating inclusive, sustainable, and equitable AI strategies and solutions: by and for Africans.
Systematic Review Of Collaborative Learning Activities For Promoting AI Literacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Improving artificial intelligence (AI) literacy has become an important consideration for academia and industry with the widespread adoption of AI technologies. Collaborative learning (CL) approaches have proven effective for information literacy, and in this study, we investigate the effectiveness of CL in improving AI knowledge and skills. We systematically collected data to create a corpus of nine studies from 2015-2023. We used the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) framework to theoretically analyze the CL outcomes for AI literacy reported in each. Findings suggest that CL effectively increases AI literacy across a range of activities, settings, and groups of learners. While most studies occurred in classroom settings, some aimed to broaden participation by involving educators and families or using AI agents to support teamwork. Additionally, we found that instructional activities included all the ICAP modes. We draw implications for future research and teaching.
aiXiv: A Next-Generation Open Access Ecosystem for Scientific Discovery Generated by AI Scientists
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled AI agents to autonomously generate scientific proposals, conduct experiments, author papers, and perform peer reviews. Yet this flood of AI-generated research content collides with a fragmented and largely closed publication ecosystem. Traditional journals and conferences rely on human peer review, making them difficult to scale and often reluctant to accept AI-generated research content; existing preprint servers (e.g. arXiv) lack rigorous quality-control mechanisms. Consequently, a significant amount of high-quality AI-generated research lacks appropriate venues for dissemination, hindering its potential to advance scientific progress. To address these challenges, we introduce aiXiv, a next-generation open-access platform for human and AI scientists. Its multi-agent architecture allows research proposals and papers to be submitted, reviewed, and iteratively refined by both human and AI scientists. It also provides API and MCP interfaces that enable seamless integration of heterogeneous human and AI scientists, creating a scalable and extensible ecosystem for autonomous scientific discovery. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that aiXiv is a reliable and robust platform that significantly enhances the quality of AI-generated research proposals and papers after iterative revising and reviewing on aiXiv. Our work lays the groundwork for a next-generation open-access ecosystem for AI scientists, accelerating the publication and dissemination of high-quality AI-generated research content. Code: https://github.com/aixiv-org aiXiv: https://aixiv.science
Universal Reinforcement Learning in Coalgebras: Asynchronous Stochastic Computation via Conduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we introduce a categorial generalization of RL, termed universal reinforcement learning (URL), building on powerful mathematical abstractions from the study of coinduction on non-well-founded sets and universal coalgebras, topos theory, and categorial models of asynchronous parallel distributed computation. In the first half of the paper, we review the basic RL framework, illustrate the use of categories and functors in RL, showing how they lead to interesting insights. In particular, we also introduce a standard model of asynchronous distributed minimization proposed by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis, and describe the relationship between metric coinduction and their proof of the Asynchronous Convergence Theorem. The space of algorithms for MDPs or PSRs can be modeled as a functor category, where the co-domain category forms a topos, which admits all (co)limits, possesses a subobject classifier, and has exponential objects. In the second half of the paper, we move on to universal coalgebras. Dynamical system models, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), partially observed MDPs (POMDPs), a predictive state representation (PSRs), and linear dynamical systems (LDSs) are all special types of coalgebras. We describe a broad family of universal coalgebras, extending the dynamic system models studied previously in RL. The core problem in finding fixed points in RL to determine the exact or approximate (action) value function is generalized in URL to determining the final coalgebra asynchronously in a parallel distributed manner.
HiRQA: Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Despite significant progress in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), dataset biases and reliance on subjective labels continue to hinder their generalization performance. We propose HiRQA, Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment), a self-supervised, opinion-unaware framework that offers a hierarchical, quality-aware embedding through a combination of ranking and contrastive learning. Unlike prior approaches that depend on pristine references or auxiliary modalities at inference time, HiRQA predicts quality scores using only the input image. We introduce a novel higher-order ranking loss that supervises quality predictions through relational ordering across distortion pairs, along with an embedding distance loss that enforces consistency between feature distances and perceptual differences. A training-time contrastive alignment loss, guided by structured textual prompts, further enhances the learned representation. Trained only on synthetic distortions, HiRQA generalizes effectively to authentic degradations, as demonstrated through evaluation on various distortions such as lens flare, haze, motion blur, and low-light conditions. For real-time deployment, we introduce \textbf{HiRQA-S}, a lightweight variant with an inference time of only 3.5 ms per image. Extensive experiments across synthetic and authentic benchmarks validate HiRQA's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, strong generalization ability, and scalability.
On the need to perform comprehensive evaluations of automated program repair benchmarks: Sorald case study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

In supporting the development of high-quality software, especially necessary in the era of LLMs, automated program repair (APR) tools aim to improve code quality by automatically addressing violations detected by static analysis profilers. Previous research tends to evaluate APR tools only for their ability to clear violations, neglecting their potential introduction of new (sometimes severe) violations, changes to code functionality and degrading of code structure. There is thus a need for research to develop and assess comprehensive evaluation frameworks for APR tools. This study addresses this research gap, and evaluates Sorald (a state-of-the-art APR tool) as a proof of concept. Sorald's effectiveness was evaluated in repairing 3,529 SonarQube violations across 30 rules within 2,393 Java code snippets extracted from Stack Overflow. Outcomes show that while Sorald fixes specific rule violations, it introduced 2,120 new faults (32 bugs, 2088 code smells), reduced code functional correctness--as evidenced by a 24% unit test failure rate--and degraded code structure, demonstrating the utility of our framework. Findings emphasize the need for evaluation methodologies that capture the full spectrum of APR tool effects, including side effects, to ensure their safe and effective adoption.
Big-Stop Semantics: Small-Step Semantics in a Big-Step Judgment
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2025
Year: 2025

As is evident in the programming language literature, many practitioners favor specifying dynamic program behavior using big-step over small-step semantics. Unlike small-step semantics, which must dwell on every intermediate program state, big-step semantics conveniently jumps directly to the ever-important result of the computation. Big-step semantics also typically involves fewer inference rules than their small-step counterparts. However, in exchange for ergonomics, big-step semantics gives up power: Small-step semantics describes program behaviors that are outside the grasp of big-step semantics, notably divergence. This work presents a little-known extension of big-step semantics with inductive definitions that captures diverging computations without introducing error states. This big-stop semantics is illustrated for typed, untyped, and effectful variants of PCF, as well as a while-loop-based imperative language. Big-stop semantics extends the standard big-step inference rules with a few additional rules to define an evaluation judgment that is equivalent to the reflexive-transitive closure of small-step transitions. This simple extension contrasts with other solutions in the literature that sacrifice ergonomics by introducing many additional inference rules, global state, and/or less-commonly-understood reasoning principles like coinduction. The ergonomics of big-stop semantics is exemplified via concise Agda proofs for some key results and compilation theorems.
SurgWound-Bench: A Benchmark for Surgical Wound Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Surgical site infection (SSI) is one of the most common and costly healthcare-associated infections and and surgical wound care remains a significant clinical challenge in preventing SSIs and improving patient outcomes. While recent studies have explored the use of deep learning for preliminary surgical wound screening, progress has been hindered by concerns over data privacy and the high costs associated with expert annotation. Currently, no publicly available dataset or benchmark encompasses various types of surgical wounds, resulting in the absence of an open-source Surgical-Wound screening tool. To address this gap: (1) we present SurgWound, the first open-source dataset featuring a diverse array of surgical wound types. It contains 697 surgical wound images annotated by 3 professional surgeons with eight fine-grained clinical attributes. (2) Based on SurgWound, we introduce the first benchmark for surgical wound diagnosis, which includes visual question answering (VQA) and report generation tasks to comprehensively evaluate model performance. (3) Furthermore, we propose a three-stage learning framework, WoundQwen, for surgical wound diagnosis. In the first stage, we employ five independent MLLMs to accurately predict specific surgical wound characteristics. In the second stage, these predictions serve as additional knowledge inputs to two MLLMs responsible for diagnosing outcomes, which assess infection risk and guide subsequent interventions. In the third stage, we train a MLLM that integrates the diagnostic results from the previous two stages to produce a comprehensive report. This three-stage framework can analyze detailed surgical wound characteristics and provide subsequent instructions to patients based on surgical images, paving the way for personalized wound care, timely intervention, and improved patient outcomes.
Multi-Channel Differential Transformer for Cross-Domain Sleep Stage Classification with Heterogeneous EEG and EOG
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Classification of sleep stages is essential for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. However, manual inspection of EEG characteristics for each stage is time-consuming and prone to human error. Although machine learning and deep learning methods have been actively developed, they continue to face challenges arising from the non-stationarity and variability of electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) signals across diverse clinical configurations, often resulting in poor generalization. In this work, we propose SleepDIFFormer, a multi-channel differential transformer framework for heterogeneous EEG-EOG representation learning. SleepDIFFormer is trained across multiple sleep staging datasets, each treated as a source domain, with the goal of generalizing to unseen target domains. Specifically, it employs a Multi-channel Differential Transformer Architecture (MDTA) designed to process raw EEG and EOG signals while incorporating cross-domain alignment. Our approach mitigates spatial and temporal attention noise and learns a domain-invariant EEG-EOG representation through feature distribution alignment across datasets, thereby enhancing generalization to new domains. Empirically, we evaluated SleepDIFFormer on five diverse sleep staging datasets under domain generalization settings and benchmarked it against existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We further conducted a comprehensive ablation study and interpreted the differential attention weights, demonstrating their relevance to characteristic sleep EEG patterns. These findings advance the development of automated sleep stage classification and highlight its potential in quantifying sleep architecture and detecting abnormalities that disrupt restorative rest. Our source code and checkpoint are made publicly available at https://github.com/Ben1001409/SleepDIFFormer
Locally Pareto-Optimal Interpretations for Black-Box Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Creating meaningful interpretations for black-box machine learning models involves balancing two often conflicting objectives: accuracy and explainability. Exploring the trade-off between these objectives is essential for developing trustworthy interpretations. While many techniques for multi-objective interpretation synthesis have been developed, they typically lack formal guarantees on the Pareto-optimality of the results. Methods that do provide such guarantees, on the other hand, often face severe scalability limitations when exploring the Pareto-optimal space. To address this, we develop a framework based on local optimality guarantees that enables more scalable synthesis of interpretations. Specifically, we consider the problem of synthesizing a set of Pareto-optimal interpretations with local optimality guarantees, within the immediate neighborhood of each solution. Our approach begins with a multi-objective learning or search technique, such as Multi-Objective Monte Carlo Tree Search, to generate a best-effort set of Pareto-optimal candidates with respect to accuracy and explainability. We then verify local optimality for each candidate as a Boolean satisfiability problem, which we solve using a SAT solver. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a set of benchmarks, comparing it against previous methods for exploring the Pareto-optimal front of interpretations. In particular, we show that our approach yields interpretations that closely match those synthesized by methods offering global guarantees.
See it. Say it. Sorted: Agentic System for Compositional Diagram Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

We study sketch-to-diagram generation: converting rough hand sketches into precise, compositional diagrams. Diffusion models excel at photorealism but struggle with the spatial precision, alignment, and symbolic structure required for flowcharts. We introduce See it. Say it. Sorted., a training-free agentic system that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce editable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) programs. The system runs an iterative loop in which a Critic VLM proposes a small set of qualitative, relational edits; multiple candidate LLMs synthesize SVG updates with diverse strategies (conservative->aggressive, alternative, focused); and a Judge VLM selects the best candidate, ensuring stable improvement. This design prioritizes qualitative reasoning over brittle numerical estimates, preserves global constraints (e.g., alignment, connectivity), and naturally supports human-in-the-loop corrections. On 10 sketches derived from flowcharts in published papers, our method more faithfully reconstructs layout and structure than two frontier closed-source image generation LLMs (GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro), accurately composing primitives (e.g., multi-headed arrows) without inserting unwanted text. Because outputs are programmatic SVGs, the approach is readily extensible to presentation tools (e.g., PowerPoint) via APIs and can be specialized with improved prompts and task-specific tools. The codebase is open-sourced at https://github.com/hantaoZhangrichard/see_it_say_it_sorted.git.
Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is foundational for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the performance of deep learning models is often constrained by limited access to annotated data. Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful approach for learning robust ECG representations from unlabeled signals. However, most existing methods generate only pairwise augmented views and fail to leverage the rich temporal structure of ECG recordings. In this work, we present a poly-window contrastive learning framework. We extract multiple temporal windows from each ECG instance to construct positive pairs and maximize their agreement via statistics. Inspired by the principle of slow feature analysis, our approach explicitly encourages the model to learn temporally invariant and physiologically meaningful features that persist across time. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PTB-XL dataset. Our results demonstrate that poly-window contrastive learning consistently outperforms conventional two-view methods in multi-label superclass classification, achieving higher AUROC (0.891 vs. 0.888) and F1 scores (0.680 vs. 0.679) while requiring up to four times fewer pre-training epochs (32 vs. 128) and 14.8% in total wall clock pre-training time reduction. Despite processing multiple windows per sample, we achieve a significant reduction in the number of training epochs and total computation time, making our method practical for training foundational models. Through extensive ablations, we identify optimal design choices and demonstrate robustness across various hyperparameters. These findings establish poly-window contrastive learning as a highly efficient and scalable paradigm for automated ECG analysis and provide a promising general framework for self-supervised representation learning in biomedical time-series data.
Computational Intelligence based Land-use Allocation Approaches for Mixed Use Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Urban land-use allocation represents a complex multi-objective optimization problem critical for sustainable urban development policy. This paper presents novel computational intelligence approaches for optimizing land-use allocation in mixed-use areas, addressing inherent trade-offs between land-use compatibility and economic objectives. We develop multiple optimization algorithms, including custom variants integrating differential evolution with multi-objective genetic algorithms. Key contributions include: (1) CR+DES algorithm leveraging scaled difference vectors for enhanced exploration, (2) systematic constraint relaxation strategy improving solution quality while maintaining feasibility, and (3) statistical validation using Kruskal-Wallis tests with compact letter displays. Applied to a real-world case study with 1,290 plots, CR+DES achieves 3.16\% improvement in land-use compatibility compared to state-of-the-art methods, while MSBX+MO excels in price optimization with 3.3\% improvement. Statistical analysis confirms algorithms incorporating difference vectors significantly outperform traditional approaches across multiple metrics. The constraint relaxation technique enables broader solution space exploration while maintaining practical constraints. These findings provide urban planners and policymakers with evidence-based computational tools for balancing competing objectives in land-use allocation, supporting more effective urban development policies in rapidly urbanizing regions.
UniCoM: A Universal Code-Switching Speech Generator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single speaker's utterances, is common in real-world conversations and poses significant challenges for multilingual speech technology. However, systems capable of handling this phenomenon remain underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of suitable datasets. To resolve this issue, we propose Universal Code-Mixer (UniCoM), a novel pipeline for generating high-quality, natural CS samples without altering sentence semantics. Our approach utilizes an algorithm we call Substituting WORDs with Synonyms (SWORDS), which generates CS speech by replacing selected words with their translations while considering their parts of speech. Using UniCoM, we construct Code-Switching FLEURS (CS-FLEURS), a multilingual CS corpus designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (S2TT). Experimental results show that CS-FLEURS achieves high intelligibility and naturalness, performing comparably to existing datasets on both objective and subjective metrics. We expect our approach to advance CS speech technology and enable more inclusive multilingual systems.
M-$LLM^3$REC: A Motivation-Aware User-Item Interaction Framework for Enhancing Recommendation Accuracy with LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Recommendation systems have been essential for both user experience and platform efficiency by alleviating information overload and supporting decision-making. Traditional methods, i.e., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and deep learning, have achieved impressive results in recommendation systems. However, the cold-start and sparse-data scenarios are still challenging to deal with. Existing solutions either generate pseudo-interaction sequence, which often introduces redundant or noisy signals, or rely heavily on semantic similarity, overlooking dynamic shifts in user motivation. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel recommendation framework, termed M-$LLM^3$REC, which leverages large language models for deep motivational signal extraction from limited user interactions. M-$LLM^3$REC comprises three integrated modules: the Motivation-Oriented Profile Extractor (MOPE), Motivation-Oriented Trait Encoder (MOTE), and Motivational Alignment Recommender (MAR). By emphasizing motivation-driven semantic modeling, M-$LLM^3$REC demonstrates robust, personalized, and generalizable recommendations, particularly boosting performance in cold-start situations in comparison with the state-of-the-art frameworks.