OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Increasing Information Extraction in Low-Signal Regimes via Multiple Instance Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we introduce a new information-theoretic perspective on Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) for parameter estimation with i.i.d. data, and show that MIL can outperform single-instance learners in low-signal regimes. Prior work [Nachman and Thaler, 2021] argued that single-instance methods are often sufficient, but this conclusion presumes enough single-instance signal to train near-optimal classifiers. We demonstrate that even state-of-the-art single-instance models can fail to reach optimal classifier performance in challenging low-signal regimes, whereas MIL can mitigate this sub-optimality. As a concrete application, we constrain Wilson coefficients of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) using kinematic information from subatomic particle collision events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In experiments, we observe that under specific modeling and weak signal conditions, pooling instances can increase the effective Fisher information compared to single-instance approaches.
Toward AI Matching Policies in Homeless Services: A Qualitative Study with Policymakers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Artificial intelligence researchers have proposed various data-driven algorithms to improve the processes that match individuals experiencing homelessness to scarce housing resources. It remains unclear whether and how these algorithms are received or adopted by practitioners and what their corresponding consequences are. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 policymakers in homeless services in Los Angeles, we investigate whether such change-makers are open to the idea of integrating AI into the housing resource matching process, identifying where they see potential gains and drawbacks from such a system in issues of efficiency, fairness, and transparency. Our qualitative analysis indicates that, even when aware of various complicating factors, policymakers welcome the idea of an AI matching tool if thoughtfully designed and used in tandem with human decision-makers. Though there is no consensus as to the exact design of such an AI system, insights from policymakers raise open questions and design considerations that can be enlightening for future researchers and practitioners who aim to build responsible algorithmic systems to support decision-making in low-resource scenarios.
A Globally Optimal Analytic Solution for Semi-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Nonnegative or Mixed Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Semi-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (semi-NMF) extends classical Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) by allowing the basis matrix to contain both positive and negative entries, making it suitable for decomposing data with mixed signs. However, most existing semi-NMF algorithms are iterative, non-convex, and prone to local minima. In this paper, we propose a novel method that yields a globally optimal solution to the semi-NMF problem under the Frobenius norm, through an orthogonal decomposition derived from the scatter matrix of the input data. We rigorously prove that our solution attains the global minimum of the reconstruction error. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when the input matrix is nonnegative, our method often achieves lower reconstruction error than standard NMF algorithms, although unfortunately the basis matrix may not satisfy nonnegativity. In particular, in low-rank cases such as rank 1 or 2, our solution reduces exactly to a nonnegative factorization, recovering the NMF structure. We validate our approach through experiments on both synthetic data and the UCI Wine dataset, showing that our method consistently outperforms existing NMF and semi-NMF methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy. These results confirm that our globally optimal, non-iterative formulation offers both theoretical guarantees and empirical advantages, providing a new perspective on matrix factorization in optimization and data analysis.
Strategic Incentivization for Locally Differentially Private Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients jointly train a machine learning model by sharing gradient information, instead of raw data, with a server over multiple rounds. To address the possibility of information leakage in spite of sharing only the gradients, Local Differential Privacy (LDP) is often used. In LDP, clients add a selective amount of noise to the gradients before sending the same to the server. Although such noise addition protects the privacy of clients, it leads to a degradation in global model accuracy. In this paper, we model this privacy-accuracy trade-off as a game, where the sever incentivizes the clients to add a lower degree of noise for achieving higher accuracy, while the clients attempt to preserve their privacy at the cost of a potential loss in accuracy. A token based incentivization mechanism is introduced in which the quantum of tokens credited to a client in an FL round is a function of the degree of perturbation of its gradients. The client can later access a newly updated global model only after acquiring enough tokens, which are to be deducted from its balance. We identify the players, their actions and payoff, and perform a strategic analysis of the game. Extensive experiments were carried out to study the impact of different parameters.
Lightweight Multi-Scale Feature Extraction with Fully Connected LMF Layer for Salient Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In the domain of computer vision, multi-scale feature extraction is vital for tasks such as salient object detection. However, achieving this capability in lightweight networks remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and performance. This paper proposes a novel lightweight multi-scale feature extraction layer, termed the LMF layer, which employs depthwise separable dilated convolutions in a fully connected structure. By integrating multiple LMF layers, we develop LMFNet, a lightweight network tailored for salient object detection. Our approach significantly reduces the number of parameters while maintaining competitive performance. Here, we show that LMFNet achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results on five benchmark datasets with only 0.81M parameters, outperforming several traditional and lightweight models in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our work not only addresses the challenge of multi-scale learning in lightweight networks but also demonstrates the potential for broader applications in image processing tasks. The related code files are available at https://github.com/Shi-Yun-peng/LMFNet
Gradient Surgery for Safe LLM Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Fine-tuning-as-a-Service introduces a critical vulnerability where a few malicious examples mixed into the user's fine-tuning dataset can compromise the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While a recognized paradigm frames safe fine-tuning as a multi-objective optimization problem balancing user task performance with safety alignment, we find existing solutions are critically sensitive to the harmful ratio, with defenses degrading sharply as harmful ratio increases. We diagnose that this failure stems from conflicting gradients, where the user-task update directly undermines the safety objective. To resolve this, we propose SafeGrad, a novel method that employs gradient surgery. When a conflict is detected, SafeGrad nullifies the harmful component of the user-task gradient by projecting it onto the orthogonal plane of the alignment gradient, allowing the model to learn the user's task without sacrificing safety. To further enhance robustness and data efficiency, we employ a KL-divergence alignment loss that learns the rich, distributional safety profile of the well-aligned foundation model. Extensive experiments show that SafeGrad provides state-of-the-art defense across various LLMs and datasets, maintaining robust safety even at high harmful ratios without compromising task fidelity.
Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Decoding for LLM-Based Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models have been widely applied to sequential recommendation tasks, yet during inference, they continue to rely on decoding strategies developed for natural language processing. This creates a mismatch between text-generation objectives and recommendation next item selection objectives. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing an Uncertainty-aware Semantic Decoding (USD) framework that combines logit-based clustering with adaptive scoring to improve next-item predictions. Our approach clusters items with similar logit vectors into semantic equivalence groups, then redistributes probability mass within these clusters and computes entropy across them to control item scoring and sampling temperature during recommendation inference. Experiments on Amazon Product datasets (six domains) gains of 18.5\% in HR@3, 11.9\% in NDCG@3, and 10.8\% in MRR@3 compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Hyperparameter analysis confirms the optimal parameters among various settings, and experiments on H\&M, and Netflix datasets indicate that the framework can adapt to differing recommendation domains. The experimental results confirm that integrating semantic clustering and uncertainty assessment yields more reliable and accurate recommendations.
Similarity Matters: A Novel Depth-guided Network for Image Restoration and A New Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Image restoration has seen substantial progress in recent years. However, existing methods often neglect depth information, which hurts similarity matching, results in attention distractions in shallow depth-of-field (DoF) scenarios, and excessive enhancement of background content in deep DoF settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Depth-Guided Network (DGN) for image restoration, together with a novel large-scale high-resolution dataset. Specifically, the network consists of two interactive branches: a depth estimation branch that provides structural guidance, and an image restoration branch that performs the core restoration task. In addition, the image restoration branch exploits intra-object similarity through progressive window-based self-attention and captures inter-object similarity via sparse non-local attention. Through joint training, depth features contribute to improved restoration quality, while the enhanced visual features from the restoration branch in turn help refine depth estimation. Notably, we also introduce a new dataset for training and evaluation, consisting of 9,205 high-resolution images from 403 plant species, with diverse depth and texture variations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several standard benchmarks and generalizes well to unseen plant images, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
Bridging Semantic Logic Gaps: A Cognition Inspired Multimodal Boundary Preserving Network for Image Manipulation Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The existing image manipulation localization (IML) models mainly relies on visual cues, but ignores the semantic logical relationships between content features. In fact, the content semantics conveyed by real images often conform to human cognitive laws. However, image manipulation technology usually destroys the internal relationship between content features, thus leaving semantic clues for IML. In this paper, we propose a cognition inspired multimodal boundary preserving network (CMB-Net). Specifically, CMB-Net utilizes large language models (LLMs) to analyze manipulated regions within images and generate prompt-based textual information to compensate for the lack of semantic relationships in the visual information. Considering that the erroneous texts induced by hallucination from LLMs will damage the accuracy of IML, we propose an image-text central ambiguity module (ITCAM). It assigns weights to the text features by quantifying the ambiguity between text and image features, thereby ensuring the beneficial impact of textual information. We also propose an image-text interaction module (ITIM) that aligns visual and text features using a correlation matrix for fine-grained interaction. Finally, inspired by invertible neural networks, we propose a restoration edge decoder (RED) that mutually generates input and output features to preserve boundary information in manipulated regions without loss. Extensive experiments show that CMB-Net outperforms most existing IML models. Our code is available on https://github.com/vpsg-research/CMB-Net.
Generic Calibration: Pose Ambiguity/Linear Solution and Parametric-hybrid Pipeline
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Offline camera calibration techniques typically employ parametric or generic camera models. Selecting parametric models relies heavily on user experience, and an inappropriate camera model can significantly affect calibration accuracy. Meanwhile, generic calibration methods involve complex procedures and cannot provide traditional intrinsic parameters. This paper reveals a pose ambiguity in the pose solutions of generic calibration methods that irreversibly impacts subsequent pose estimation. A linear solver and a nonlinear optimization are proposed to address this ambiguity issue. Then a global optimization hybrid calibration method is introduced to integrate generic and parametric models together, which improves extrinsic parameter accuracy of generic calibration and mitigates overfitting and numerical instability in parametric calibration. Simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate that the generic-parametric hybrid calibration method consistently excels across various lens types and noise contamination, hopefully serving as a reliable and accurate solution for camera calibration in complex scenarios.
EDGE: A Theoretical Framework for Misconception-Aware Adaptive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We present EDGE, a general-purpose, misconception-aware adaptive learning framework composed of four stages: Evaluate (ability and state estimation), Diagnose (posterior infer-ence of misconceptions), Generate (counterfactual item synthesis), and Exercise (index-based retrieval scheduling). EDGE unifies psychometrics (IRT/Bayesian state space models), cog-nitive diagnostics (misconception discovery from distractor patterns and response latencies), contrastive item generation (minimal perturbations that invalidate learner shortcuts while pre-serving psychometric validity), and principled scheduling (a restless bandit approximation to spaced retrieval). We formalize a composite readiness metric, EdgeScore, prove its monotonicity and Lipschitz continuity, and derive an index policy that is near-optimal under mild assumptions on forgetting and learning gains. We further establish conditions under which counterfactual items provably reduce the posterior probability of a targeted misconception faster than standard practice. The paper focuses on theory and implementable pseudocode; empirical study is left to future work.
Fading the Digital Ink: A Universal Black-Box Attack Framework for 3DGS Watermarking Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

With the rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a variety of digital watermarking techniques, embedding either 1D bitstreams or 2D images, are used for copyright protection. However, the robustness of these watermarking techniques against potential attacks remains underexplored. This paper introduces the first universal black-box attack framework, the Group-based Multi-objective Evolutionary Attack (GMEA), designed to challenge these watermarking systems. We formulate the attack as a large-scale multi-objective optimization problem, balancing watermark removal with visual quality. In a black-box setting, we introduce an indirect objective function that blinds the watermark detector by minimizing the standard deviation of features extracted by a convolutional network, thus rendering the feature maps uninformative. To manage the vast search space of 3DGS models, we employ a group-based optimization strategy to partition the model into multiple, independent sub-optimization problems. Experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively removes both 1D and 2D watermarks from mainstream 3DGS watermarking methods while maintaining high visual fidelity. This work reveals critical vulnerabilities in existing 3DGS copyright protection schemes and calls for the development of more robust watermarking systems.
Bio-Inspired Topological Autonomous Navigation with Active Inference in Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Achieving fully autonomous exploration and navigation remains a critical challenge in robotics, requiring integrated solutions for localisation, mapping, decision-making and motion planning. Existing approaches either rely on strict navigation rules lacking adaptability or on pre-training, which requires large datasets. These AI methods are often computationally intensive or based on static assumptions, limiting their adaptability in dynamic or unknown environments. This paper introduces a bio-inspired agent based on the Active Inference Framework (AIF), which unifies mapping, localisation, and adaptive decision-making for autonomous navigation, including exploration and goal-reaching. Our model creates and updates a topological map of the environment in real-time, planning goal-directed trajectories to explore or reach objectives without requiring pre-training. Key contributions include a probabilistic reasoning framework for interpretable navigation, robust adaptability to dynamic changes, and a modular ROS2 architecture compatible with existing navigation systems. Our method was tested in simulated and real-world environments. The agent successfully explores large-scale simulated environments and adapts to dynamic obstacles and drift, proving to be comparable to other exploration strategies such as Gbplanner, FAEL and Frontiers. This approach offers a scalable and transparent approach for navigating complex, unstructured environments.
Navigation and Exploration with Active Inference: from Biology to Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

By building and updating internal cognitive maps, animals exhibit extraordinary navigation abilities in complex, dynamic environments. Inspired by these biological mechanisms, we present a real time robotic navigation system grounded in the Active Inference Framework (AIF). Our model incrementally constructs a topological map, infers the agent's location, and plans actions by minimising expected uncertainty and fulfilling perceptual goals without any prior training. Integrated into the ROS2 ecosystem, we validate its adaptability and efficiency across both 2D and 3D environments (simulated and real world), demonstrating competitive performance with traditional and state of the art exploration approaches while offering a biologically inspired navigation approach.
OpenHAIV: A Framework Towards Practical Open-World Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Substantial progress has been made in various techniques for open-world recognition. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods can effectively distinguish between known and unknown classes in the data, while incremental learning enables continuous model knowledge updates. However, in open-world scenarios, these approaches still face limitations. Relying solely on OOD detection does not facilitate knowledge updates in the model, and incremental fine-tuning typically requires supervised conditions, which significantly deviate from open-world settings. To address these challenges, this paper proposes OpenHAIV, a novel framework that integrates OOD detection, new class discovery, and incremental continual fine-tuning into a unified pipeline. This framework allows models to autonomously acquire and update knowledge in open-world environments. The proposed framework is available at https://haiv-lab.github.io/openhaiv .
Fine-Tuning Large Language Models Using EEG Microstate Features for Mental Workload Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

This study explores the intersection of electroencephalography (EEG) microstates and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the assessment of cognitive load states. By utilizing EEG microstate features, the research aims to fine-tune LLMs for improved predictions of distinct cognitive states, specifically 'Rest' and 'Load'. The experimental design is delineated in four comprehensive stages: dataset collection and preprocessing, microstate segmentation and EEG backfitting, feature extraction paired with prompt engineering, and meticulous LLM model selection and refinement. Employing a supervised learning paradigm, the LLM is trained to identify cognitive load states based on EEG microstate features integrated into prompts, producing accurate discrimination of cognitive load. A curated dataset, linking EEG features to specified cognitive load conditions, underpins the experimental framework. The results indicate a significant improvement in model performance following the proposed fine-tuning, showcasing the potential of EEG-informed LLMs in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive AI applications. This approach not only contributes to the understanding of brain dynamics but also paves the way for advancements in machine learning techniques applicable to cognitive load and cognitive AI research.
HealthBranches: Synthesizing Clinically-Grounded Question Answering Datasets via Decision Pathways
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

HealthBranches is a novel benchmark dataset for medical Question-Answering (Q&A), specifically designed to evaluate complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). This dataset is generated through a semi-automated pipeline that transforms explicit decision pathways from medical source into realistic patient cases with associated questions and answers. Covering 4,063 case studies across 17 healthcare topics, each data point is based on clinically validated reasoning chains. HealthBranches supports both open-ended and multiple-choice question formats and uniquely includes the full reasoning path for each Q&A. Its structured design enables robust evaluation of LLMs' multi-step inference capabilities, including their performance in structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) contexts. HealthBranches establishes a foundation for the development of more trustworthy, interpretable, and clinically reliable LLMs in high-stakes domains while also serving as a valuable resource for educational purposes.