OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TUNI: Real-time RGB-T Semantic Segmentation with Unified Multi-Modal Feature Extraction and Cross-Modal Feature Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation improves the environmental perception of autonomous platforms in challenging conditions. Prevailing models employ encoders pre-trained on RGB images to extract features from both RGB and infrared inputs, and design additional modules to achieve cross-modal feature fusion. This results in limited thermal feature extraction and suboptimal cross-modal fusion, while the redundant encoders further compromises the model's real-time efficiency. To address the above issues, we propose TUNI, with an RGB-T encoder consisting of multiple stacked blocks that simultaneously perform multi-modal feature extraction and cross-modal fusion. By leveraging large-scale pre-training with RGB and pseudo-thermal data, the RGB-T encoder learns to integrate feature extraction and fusion in a unified manner. By slimming down the thermal branch, the encoder achieves a more compact architecture. Moreover, we introduce an RGB-T local module to strengthen the encoder's capacity for cross-modal local feature fusion. The RGB-T local module employs adaptive cosine similarity to selectively emphasize salient consistent and distinct local features across RGB-T modalities. Experimental results show that TUNI achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models on FMB, PST900 and CART, with fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Meanwhile, it achieves an inference speed of 27 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX, demonstrating its real-time capability in deployment. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/TUNI.
Hierarchical MLANet: Multi-level Attention for 3D Face Reconstruction From Single Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recovering 3D face models from 2D in-the-wild images has gained considerable attention in the computer vision community due to its wide range of potential applications. However, the lack of ground-truth labeled datasets and the complexity of real-world environments remain significant challenges. In this chapter, we propose a convolutional neural network-based approach, the Hierarchical Multi-Level Attention Network (MLANet), for reconstructing 3D face models from single in-the-wild images. Our model predicts detailed facial geometry, texture, pose, and illumination parameters from a single image. Specifically, we employ a pre-trained hierarchical backbone network and introduce multi-level attention mechanisms at different stages of 2D face image feature extraction. A semi-supervised training strategy is employed, incorporating 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) parameters from publicly available datasets along with a differentiable renderer, enabling an end-to-end training process. Extensive experiments, including both comparative and ablation studies, were conducted on two benchmark datasets, AFLW2000-3D and MICC Florence, focusing on 3D face reconstruction and 3D face alignment tasks. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Exploring Expert Specialization through Unsupervised Training in Sparse Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the internal organization of neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning interpretability. We address this challenge by exploring a novel Sparse Mixture of Experts Variational Autoencoder (SMoE-VAE) architecture. We test our model on the QuickDraw dataset, comparing unsupervised expert routing against a supervised baseline guided by ground-truth labels. Surprisingly, we find that unsupervised routing consistently achieves superior reconstruction performance. The experts learn to identify meaningful sub-categorical structures that often transcend human-defined class boundaries. Through t-SNE visualizations and reconstruction analysis, we investigate how MoE models uncover fundamental data structures that are more aligned with the model's objective than predefined labels. Furthermore, our study on the impact of dataset size provides insights into the trade-offs between data quantity and expert specialization, offering guidance for designing efficient MoE architectures.
LaV-CoT: Language-Aware Visual CoT with Multi-Aspect Reward Optimization for Real-World Multilingual VQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

As large vision language models (VLMs) advance, their capabilities in multilingual visual question answering (mVQA) have significantly improved. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proven to enhance interpretability and complex reasoning. However, most existing approaches rely primarily on textual CoT and provide limited support for multilingual multimodal reasoning, constraining their deployment in real-world applications. To address this gap, we introduce LaV-CoT, the first Language-aware Visual CoT framework with Multi-Aspect Reward Optimization. LaV-CoT incorporates an interpretable multi-stage reasoning pipeline consisting of Text Summary with Bounding Box (BBox), Language Identification, Spatial Object-level Captioning, and Step-by-step Logical Reasoning. Following this reasoning pipeline, we design an automated data curation method that generates multilingual CoT annotations through iterative generation, correction, and refinement, enabling scalable and high-quality training data. To improve reasoning and generalization, LaV-CoT adopts a two-stage training paradigm combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Language-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by verifiable multi-aspect rewards including language consistency, structural accuracy, and semantic alignment. Extensive evaluations on public datasets including MMMB, Multilingual MMBench, and MTVQA show that LaV-CoT achieves up to ~9.5% accuracy improvements over open-source baselines of similar size and even surpasses models with 2$\times$ larger scales by ~2.6%. Moreover, LaV-CoT outperforms advanced proprietary models such as GPT-4o-0513 and Gemini-2.5-flash. We further conducted an online A/B test to validate our method on real-world data, highlighting its effectiveness for industrial deployment. Our code is available at this link: https://github.com/HJNVR/LaV-CoT
Space-Time Tradeoffs for Spatial Conjunctive Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Given a conjunctive query and a database instance, we aim to develop an index that can efficiently answer spatial queries on the results of a conjunctive query. We are interested in some commonly used spatial queries, such as range emptiness, range count, and nearest neighbor queries. These queries have essential applications in data analytics, such as filtering relational data based on attribute ranges and temporal graph analysis for counting graph structures like stars, paths, and cliques. Furthermore, this line of research can accelerate relational algorithms that incorporate spatial queries in their workflow, such as relational clustering. Known approaches either have to spend $\tilde{O}(N)$ query time or use space as large as the number of query results, which are inefficient or unrealistic to employ in practice. Hence, we aim to construct an index that answers spatial conjunctive queries in both time- and space-efficient ways. In this paper, we establish lower bounds on the tradeoff between answering time and space usage. For $k$-star (resp. $k$-path) queries, we show that any index for range emptiness, range counting or nearest neighbor queries with $T$ answering time requires $Ω\left(N+\frac{N^k}{T^k}\right)$ (resp. $Ω\left(N+\frac{N^2}{T^{2/(k-1)}}\right)$) space. Then, we construct optimal indexes for answering range emptiness and range counting problems over $k$-star and $k$-path queries. Extending this result, we build an index for hierarchical queries. By resorting to the generalized hypertree decomposition, we can extend our index to arbitrary conjunctive queries for supporting spatial conjunctive queries. Finally, we show how our new indexes can be used to improve the running time of known algorithms in the relational setting.
A Note on Constructive Canonical Splitter Strategies in Nowhere Dense Graph Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

The radius-$r$ splitter game is played on a graph $G$ between two players: Splitter and Connector. In each round, Connector selects a vertex $v$, and the current game arena is restricted to the radius-$r$ neighborhood of $v$. Then Splitter removes a vertex from this restricted subgraph. The game ends, and Splitter wins, when the arena becomes empty. Splitter aims to end the game as quickly as possible, while Connector tries to prolong it for as long as possible. The splitter game was introduced by Grohe, Kreutzer and Siebertz to characterize nowhere dense graph classes. They showed that a class $\mathscr{C}$ of graphs is nowhere dense if and only if for every radius $r$ there exists a number $\ell$ such that Splitter has a strategy on every $G\in \mathscr{C}$ to win the radius-$r$ splitter game in at most $\ell$ rounds. It was recently proved by Ohlmann et al. that there are only a bounded number of possible Splitter moves that are progressing, that is, moves that lead to an arena where Splitter can win in one less round. The proof of Ohlmann et al. is based on the compactness theorem and does not give a constructive bound on the number of progressing moves. In this work, we give a simple constructive proof, showing that if Splitter can force a win in the radius-$r$ game in $k$ rounds, then there are at most $(2r+1)^{\,2^{k-1}-1}$ progressing moves.
From customer survey feedback to software improvements: Leveraging the full potential of data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Converting customer survey feedback data into usable insights has always been a great challenge for large software enterprises. Despite the improvements on this field, a major obstacle often remains when drawing the right conclusions out of the data and channeling them into the software development process. In this paper we present a practical end-to-end approach of how to extract useful information out of a data set and leverage the information to drive change. We describe how to choose the right metrics to measure, gather appropriate feedback from customer end-users, analyze the data by leveraging methods from inferential statistics, make the data transparent, and finally drive change with the results. Furthermore, we present an example of a UX prototype dashboard that can be used to communicate the analyses to stakeholders within the company.
Prototypical Contrastive Learning For Improved Few-Shot Audio Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Few-shot learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training models with limited labeled data, addressing challenges in scenarios where large-scale annotation is impractical. While extensive research has been conducted in the image domain, few-shot learning in audio classification remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we investigate the effect of integrating supervised contrastive loss into prototypical few shot training for audio classification. In detail, we demonstrate that angular loss further improves the performance compared to the standard contrastive loss. Our method leverages SpecAugment followed by a self-attention mechanism to encapsulate diverse information of augmented input versions into one unified embedding. We evaluate our approach on MetaAudio, a benchmark including five datasets with predefined splits, standardized preprocessing, and a comprehensive set of few-shot learning models for comparison. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in a 5-way, 5-shot setting.
Sustaining Research Software: A Fitness Function Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by leveraging the concept of fitness functions from evolutionary architecture. Fitness functions are automated, continuously evaluated metrics designed to ensure that software systems meet desired non-functional, architectural qualities over time. We define a set of fitness functions tailored to the unique requirements of research software, focusing on findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR). These fitness functions act as proactive safeguards, promoting practices such as modular design, comprehensive documentation, version control, and compatibility with evolving technological ecosystems. By integrating these metrics into the development life cycle, we aim to foster a culture of sustainability within the research community. Case studies and experimental results demonstrate the potential of this approach to enhance the long-term FAIR of research software, bridging the gap between ephemeral project-based development and enduring scientific impact.
KAN-SR: A Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Guided Symbolic Regression Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce a novel symbolic regression framework, namely KAN-SR, built on Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KANs) which follows a divide-and-conquer approach. Symbolic regression searches for mathematical equations that best fit a given dataset and is commonly solved with genetic programming approaches. We show that by using deep learning techniques, more specific KANs, and combining them with simplification strategies such as translational symmetries and separabilities, we are able to recover ground-truth equations of the Feynman Symbolic Regression for Scientific Discovery (SRSD) dataset. Additionally, we show that by combining the proposed framework with neural controlled differential equations, we are able to model the dynamics of an in-silico bioprocess system precisely, opening the door for the dynamic modeling of other engineering systems.
HHI-Assist: A Dataset and Benchmark of Human-Human Interaction in Physical Assistance Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The increasing labor shortage and aging population underline the need for assistive robots to support human care recipients. To enable safe and responsive assistance, robots require accurate human motion prediction in physical interaction scenarios. However, this remains a challenging task due to the variability of assistive settings and the complexity of coupled dynamics in physical interactions. In this work, we address these challenges through two key contributions: (1) HHI-Assist, a dataset comprising motion capture clips of human-human interactions in assistive tasks; and (2) a conditional Transformer-based denoising diffusion model for predicting the poses of interacting agents. Our model effectively captures the coupled dynamics between caregivers and care receivers, demonstrating improvements over baselines and strong generalization to unseen scenarios. By advancing interaction-aware motion prediction and introducing a new dataset, our work has the potential to significantly enhance robotic assistance policies. The dataset and code are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/hhi-assist/home
Efficient Learning-Based Control of a Legged Robot in Lunar Gravity
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal budgets are highly restricted, these robots need energy-efficient control approaches that easily transfer to multiple gravity environments. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based control approach for legged robots with gravity-scaled power-optimized reward functions. We use our approach to develop and validate a locomotion controller and a base pose controller in gravity environments from lunar gravity (1.62 m/s2) to a hypothetical super-Earth (19.62 m/s2). Our approach successfully scales across these gravity levels for locomotion and base pose control with the gravity-scaled reward functions. The power-optimized locomotion controller reached a power consumption for locomotion of 23.4 W in Earth gravity on a 15.65 kg robot at 0.4 m/s, a 23 % improvement over the baseline policy. Additionally, we designed a constant-force spring offload system that allowed us to conduct real-world experiments on legged locomotion in lunar gravity. In lunar gravity, the power-optimized control policy reached 12.2 W, 36 % less than a baseline controller which is not optimized for power efficiency. Our method provides a scalable approach to developing power-efficient locomotion controllers for legged robots across multiple gravity levels.
Scalable Training for Vector-Quantized Networks with 100% Codebook Utilization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Vector quantization (VQ) is a key component in discrete tokenizers for image generation, but its training is often unstable due to straight-through estimation bias, one-step-behind updates, and sparse codebook gradients, which lead to suboptimal reconstruction performance and low codebook usage. In this work, we analyze these fundamental challenges and provide a simple yet effective solution. To maintain high codebook usage in VQ networks (VQN) during learning annealing and codebook size expansion, we propose VQBridge, a robust, scalable, and efficient projector based on the map function method. VQBridge optimizes code vectors through a compress-process-recover pipeline, enabling stable and effective codebook training. By combining VQBridge with learning annealing, our VQN achieves full (100%) codebook usage across diverse codebook configurations, which we refer to as FVQ (FullVQ). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FVQ is effective, scalable, and generalizable: it attains 100% codebook usage even with a 262k-codebook, achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance, consistently improves with larger codebooks, higher vector channels, or longer training, and remains effective across different VQ variants. Moreover, when integrated with LlamaGen, FVQ significantly enhances image generation performance, surpassing visual autoregressive models (VAR) by 0.5 and diffusion models (DiT) by 0.2 rFID, highlighting the importance of high-quality tokenizers for strong autoregressive image generation.
Optimizing Freight Rail Electrification: A Framework for Charge Station Selection and Battery Charge/Swap Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

Battery electric freight trains are crucial for decarbonization by providing zero-emission transportation alternatives. The proper adoption of battery electric freight trains depends on an efficient battery electrification strategy, involving both infrastructure setup and charge scheduling. The study presents a comprehensive model for the optimal design of charging infrastructure and charge scheduling for each train. To provide more refueling flexibility, we allow batteries to be either charged or swapped in a deployed station, and each train can carry multiple batteries. This problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. To obtain real-time solutions for a large scale network, we develop three algorithms to solve the optimization problem: (1) a Rectangle Piecewise Linear Approximation technique, (2) a Fixed Algorithm heuristic, and (3) Benders Decomposition algorithm. In computational experiments, we use the three proposed algorithms to solve instances with up to 25 stations. Statistical analysis verifies that Benders Decomposition outperforms the other two algorithms with respect to the objective function value, closely followed by the Rectangle Piecewise Linear Approximation technique, and the Fixed Algorithm provides the least optimal solution.
Why Data Anonymization Has Not Taken Off
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Companies are looking to data anonymization research $\unicode{x2013}$ including differential private and synthetic data methods $\unicode{x2013}$ for simple and straightforward compliance solutions. But data anonymization has not taken off in practice because it is anything but simple to implement. For one, it requires making complex choices which are case dependent, such as the domain of the dataset to anonymize; the units to protect; the scope where the data protection should extend to; and the standard of protection. Each variation of these choices changes the very meaning, as well as the practical implications, of differential privacy (or of any other measure of data anonymization). Yet differential privacy is frequently being branded as the same privacy guarantee regardless of variations in these choices. Some data anonymization methods can be effective, but only when the insights required are much larger than the unit of protection. Given that businesses care about profitability, any solution must preserve the patterns between a firm's data and that profitability. As a result, data anonymization solutions usually need to be bespoke and case-specific, which reduces their scalability. Companies should not expect easy wins, but rather recognize that anonymization is just one approach to data privacy with its own particular advantages and drawbacks, while the best strategies jointly leverage the full range of approaches to data privacy and security in combination.
Constant Time with Minimal Preprocessing, a Robust and Extensive Complexity Class
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we study the class $\mathtt{cstPP}$ of operations $\mathtt{op}: \mathbb{N}^k\to\mathbb{N}$, of any fixed arity $k\ge 1$, satisfying the following property: for each fixed integer $d\ge 1$, there exists an algorithm for a RAM machine which, for any input integer $N\ge 2$, - pre-computes some tables in $O(N)$ time, - then reads $k$ operands $x_1,\ldots,x_k<N^d$ and computes $\mathtt{op}(x_1,\dots,x_k)$ in constant time. We show that the $\mathtt{cstPP}$ class is robust and extensive and satisfies several closure properties. It is invariant depending on whether the set of primitive operations of the RAM is $\{+\}$, or $\{+,-,\times,\mathtt{div},\mathtt{mod}\}$, or any set of operations in $\mathtt{cstPP}$ provided it includes $+$. We prove that the $\mathtt{cstPP}$ class is closed under composition and, for fast-growing functions, is closed under inverse. We also show that in the definition of $\mathtt{cstPP}$ the constant-time procedure can be reduced to a single return instruction. Finally, we establish that linear preprocessing time is not essential in the definition of the $\mathtt{cstPP}$ class: this class is not modified if the preprocessing time is increased to $O(N^c)$, for any fixed $c>1$, or conversely, is reduced to $N^{\varepsilon}$, for any positive $\varepsilon<1$ (provided the set of primitive operation includes $+$, $\mathtt{div}$ and $\mathtt{mod}$). To complete the picture, we demonstrate that the $\mathtt{cstPP}$ class degenerates if the preprocessing time reduces to $N^{o(1)}$.