OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AoI-based Scheduling of Correlated Sources for Timely Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate a real-time remote inference system where multiple correlated sources transmit observations over a communication channel to a receiver. The receiver utilizes these observations to infer multiple time-varying targets. Due to limited communication resources, the delivered observations may not be fresh. To quantify data freshness, we employ the Age of Information (AoI) metric. To minimize the inference error, we aim to design a signal-agnostic scheduling policy that leverages AoI without requiring knowledge of the actual target values or the source observations. This scheduling problem is a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem with a non-separable penalty function. Unlike traditional RMABs, the correlation among sources introduces a unique challenge: the penalty function of each source depends on the AoI of other correlated sources, preventing the problem from decomposing into multiple independent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), a key step in applying traditional RMAB solutions. To address this, we propose a novel approach that approximates the penalty function for each source and establishes an analytical bound on the approximation error. We then develop scheduling policies for two scenarios: (i) full knowledge of the penalty functions and (ii) no knowledge of the penalty functions. For the case of known penalty functions, we present an upper bound on the optimality gap that highlights the impact of the correlation parameter and the system size. For the case of unknown penalty functions and signal distributions, we develop an online learning approach that utilizes bandit feedback to learn an online Maximum Gain First policy. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed policies in minimizing inference error and achieving scalability in the number of sources.
A Continuous Energy Ising Machine Leveraging Difference-of-Convex Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be reformulated as finding the ground state of the Ising model. Existing Ising solvers are mostly inspired by simulated annealing. Although annealing techniques offer scalability, they lack convergence guarantees and are sensitive to the cooling schedule. We propose solving the Ising problem by relaxing the binary spins to continuous variables and introducing an attraction potential that steers the solution toward binary spin configurations. A key property of this potential is that its combination with the Ising energy produces a Hamiltonian that can be written as a difference of convex polynomials. This enables us to design efficient iterative algorithms that require a single matrix-vector multiplication per iteration and provide convergence guarantees. We implement our Ising solver on a wide range of GPU platforms, from edge devices to high-performance computing clusters, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms existing solvers across problem sizes ranging from small ($10^3$ spins) to ultra-large ($10^8$ spins).
Structure-aware Contrastive Learning for Diagram Understanding of Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal models, such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, have demonstrated remarkable success in aligning visual and linguistic representations. However, these models exhibit limitations when applied to specialised visual domains, such as diagrams, which encode structured, symbolic information distinct from that of natural imagery. In this paper, we introduce a novel training paradigm explicitly designed to enhance the comprehension of diagrammatic images within vision-language models. Our approach uses ``hard'' samples for our proposed contrastive learning that incorporates two specialised loss functions that leverage the inherent structural properties of diagrams. By integrating these objectives into model training, our method enables models to develop a more structured and semantically coherent understanding of diagrammatic content. We empirically validate our approach on a benchmark dataset of flowcharts, as a representative class of diagrammatic imagery, demonstrating substantial improvements over standard CLIP and conventional hard negative CLIP learning paradigms for both image-text matching and visual question answering tasks. Our findings underscore the significance of tailored training strategies for specialised tasks and contribute to advancing diagrammatic understanding within the broader landscape of vision-language integration.
Hybrid Autonomy Framework for a Future Mars Science Helicopter
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Autonomous aerial vehicles, such as NASA's Ingenuity, enable rapid planetary surface exploration beyond the reach of ground-based robots. Thus, NASA is studying a Mars Science Helicopter (MSH), an advanced concept capable of performing long-range science missions and autonomously navigating challenging Martian terrain. Given significant Earth-Mars communication delays and mission complexity, an advanced autonomy framework is required to ensure safe and efficient operation by continuously adapting behavior based on mission objectives and real-time conditions, without human intervention. This study presents a deterministic high-level control framework for aerial exploration, integrating a Finite State Machine (FSM) with Behavior Trees (BTs) to achieve a scalable, robust, and computationally efficient autonomy solution for critical scenarios like deep space exploration. In this paper we outline key capabilities of a possible MSH and detail the FSM-BT hybrid autonomy framework which orchestrates them to achieve the desired objectives. Monte Carlo simulations and real field tests validate the framework, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to both discrete events and real-time system feedback. These inputs trigger state transitions or dynamically adjust behavior execution, enabling reactive and context-aware responses. The framework is middleware-agnostic, supporting integration with systems like F-Prime and extending beyond aerial robotics.
Semantic and episodic memories in a predictive coding model of the neocortex
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Complementary Learning Systems theory holds that intelligent agents need two learning systems. Semantic memory is encoded in the neocortex with dense, overlapping representations and acquires structured knowledge. Episodic memory is encoded in the hippocampus with sparse, pattern-separated representations and quickly learns the specifics of individual experiences. Recently, this duality between semantic and episodic memories has been challenged by predictive coding, a biologically plausible neural network model of the neocortex which was shown to have hippocampus-like abilities on auto-associative memory tasks. These results raise the question of the episodic capabilities of the neocortex and their relation to semantic memory. In this paper, we present such a predictive coding model of the neocortex and explore its episodic capabilities. We show that this kind of model can indeed recall the specifics of individual examples but only if it is trained on a small number of examples. The model is overfitted to these exemples and does not generalize well, suggesting that episodic memory can arise from semantic learning. Indeed, a model trained with many more examples loses its recall capabilities. This work suggests that individual examples can be encoded gradually in the neocortex using dense, overlapping representations but only in a limited number, motivating the need for sparse, pattern-separated representations as found in the hippocampus.
ProbTest: Unit Testing for Probabilistic Programs (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes of probabilistic programs requires repeated test executions unlike deterministic programs where a single execution may suffice for each test input. This raises the following question: how many times should we run a probabilistic program to effectively test it? This work proposes a novel black-box unit testing method, ProbTest, for testing the outcomes of probabilistic programs. Our method is founded on the theory surrounding a well-known combinatorial problem, the coupon collector's problem. Using this method, developers can write unit tests as usual without extra effort while the number of required test executions is determined automatically with statistical guarantees for the results. We implement ProbTest as a plug-in for PyTest, a well-known unit testing tool for python programs. Using this plug-in, developers can write unit tests similar to any other Python program and the necessary test executions are handled automatically. We evaluate the method on case studies from the Gymnasium reinforcement learning library and a randomized data structure.
FireRedTTS-2: Towards Long Conversational Speech Generation for Podcast and Chatbot
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Current dialogue generation approaches typically require the complete dialogue text before synthesis and produce a single, inseparable speech containing all voices, making them unsuitable for interactive chat; moreover, they suffer from unstable synthesis, inaccurate speaker transitions, and incoherent prosody. In this work, we present FireRedTTS-2, a long-form streaming TTS system for multi-speaker dialogue generation, delivering stable, natural speech with reliable speaker switching and context-aware prosody. A new 12.5Hz streaming speech tokenizer accelerates training and inference, extends maximum dialogue length, encodes richer semantics to stabilize text-to-token modeling and supports high-fidelity streaming generation for real-time applications. We adopt a text-speech interleaved format, concatenating speaker-labeled text with aligned speech tokens in chronological order, and model it with a dual-transformer: a large decoder-only transformer predicts tokens at the first layer, and a smaller one completes subsequent layers. Experimental results show that FireRedTTS-2 integrates seamlessly with chat frameworks and, with minimal fine-tuning, produces emotionally expressive speech guided by implicit contextual cues. In podcast generation, it surpasses existing systems including MoonCast, Zipvoice-Dialogue, and MOSS-TTSD in objective intelligibility, speaker-turn reliability, and perceived naturalness with context-consistent prosody. Our demos are available at https://fireredteam.github.io/demos/firered_tts_2.
Unsupervised Training of Vision Transformers with Synthetic Negatives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper does not introduce a novel method per se. Instead, we address the neglected potential of hard negative samples in self-supervised learning. Previous works explored synthetic hard negatives but rarely in the context of vision transformers. We build on this observation and integrate synthetic hard negatives to improve vision transformer representation learning. This simple yet effective technique notably improves the discriminative power of learned representations. Our experiments show performance improvements for both DeiT-S and Swin-T architectures.
Curiosity-Driven Testing for Sequential Decision-Making Process
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Sequential decision-making processes (SDPs) are fundamental for complex real-world challenges, such as autonomous driving, robotic control, and traffic management. While recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) have led to mature solutions for solving these complex problems, SDMs remain vulnerable to learning unsafe behaviors, posing significant risks in safety-critical applications. However, developing a testing framework for SDMs that can identify a diverse set of crash-triggering scenarios remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose CureFuzz, a novel curiosity-driven black-box fuzz testing approach for SDMs. CureFuzz proposes a curiosity mechanism that allows a fuzzer to effectively explore novel and diverse scenarios, leading to improved detection of crashtriggering scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a multi-objective seed selection technique to balance the exploration of novel scenarios and the generation of crash-triggering scenarios, thereby optimizing the fuzzing process. We evaluate CureFuzz on various SDMs and experimental results demonstrate that CureFuzz outperforms the state-of-the-art method by a substantial margin in the total number of faults and distinct types of crash-triggering scenarios. We also demonstrate that the crash-triggering scenarios found by CureFuzz can repair SDMs, highlighting CureFuzz as a valuable tool for testing SDMs and optimizing their performance.
Fake & Square: Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers with Synthetic Data and Synthetic Hard Negatives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper does not introduce a new method per se. Instead, we build on existing self-supervised learning approaches for vision, drawing inspiration from the adage "fake it till you make it". While contrastive self-supervised learning has achieved remarkable success, it typically relies on vast amounts of real-world data and carefully curated hard negatives. To explore alternatives to these requirements, we investigate two forms of "faking it" in vision transformers. First, we study the potential of generative models for unsupervised representation learning, leveraging synthetic data to augment sample diversity. Second, we examine the feasibility of generating synthetic hard negatives in the representation space, creating diverse and challenging contrasts. Our framework - dubbed Syn2Co - combines both approaches and evaluates whether synthetically enhanced training can lead to more robust and transferable visual representations on DeiT-S and Swin-T architectures. Our findings highlight the promise and limitations of synthetic data in self-supervised learning, offering insights for future work in this direction.
Generative KI für TA
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Many scientists use generative AI in their scientific work. People working in technology assessment (TA) are no exception. TA's approach to generative AI is twofold: on the one hand, generative AI is used for TA work, and on the other hand, generative AI is the subject of TA research. After briefly outlining the phenomenon of generative AI and formulating requirements for its use in TA, the following article discusses in detail the structural causes of the problems associated with it. Although generative AI is constantly being further developed, the structurally induced risks remain. The article concludes with proposed solutions and brief notes on their feasibility, as well as some examples of the use of generative AI in TA work.
LUCIE-3D: A three-dimensional climate emulator for forced responses
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce LUCIE-3D, a lightweight three-dimensional climate emulator designed to capture the vertical structure of the atmosphere, respond to climate change forcings, and maintain computational efficiency with long-term stability. Building on the original LUCIE-2D framework, LUCIE-3D employs a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) backbone and is trained on 30 years of ERA5 reanalysis data spanning eight vertical σ-levels. The model incorporates atmospheric CO2 as a forcing variable and optionally integrates prescribed sea surface temperature (SST) to simulate coupled ocean--atmosphere dynamics. Results demonstrate that LUCIE-3D successfully reproduces climatological means, variability, and long-term climate change signals, including surface warming and stratospheric cooling under increasing CO2 concentrations. The model further captures key dynamical processes such as equatorial Kelvin waves, the Madden--Julian Oscillation, and annular modes, while showing credible behavior in the statistics of extreme events. Despite requiring longer training than its 2D predecessor, LUCIE-3D remains efficient, training in under five hours on four GPUs. Its combination of stability, physical consistency, and accessibility makes it a valuable tool for rapid experimentation, ablation studies, and the exploration of coupled climate dynamics, with potential applications extending to paleoclimate research and future Earth system emulation.
From Attack Descriptions to Vulnerabilities: A Sentence Transformer-Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

In the domain of security, vulnerabilities frequently remain undetected even after their exploitation. In this work, vulnerabilities refer to publicly disclosed flaws documented in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reports. Establishing a connection between attacks and vulnerabilities is essential for enabling timely incident response, as it provides defenders with immediate, actionable insights. However, manually mapping attacks to CVEs is infeasible, thereby motivating the need for automation. This paper evaluates 14 state-of-the-art (SOTA) sentence transformers for automatically identifying vulnerabilities from textual descriptions of attacks. Our results demonstrate that the multi-qa-mpnet-base-dot-v1 (MMPNet) model achieves superior classification performance when using attack Technique descriptions, with an F1-score of 89.0, precision of 84.0, and recall of 94.7. Furthermore, it was observed that, on average, 56% of the vulnerabilities identified by the MMPNet model are also represented within the CVE repository in conjunction with an attack, while 61% of the vulnerabilities detected by the model correspond to those cataloged in the CVE repository. A manual inspection of the results revealed the existence of 275 predicted links that were not documented in the MITRE repositories. Consequently, the automation of linking attack techniques to vulnerabilities not only enhances the detection and response capabilities related to software security incidents but also diminishes the duration during which vulnerabilities remain exploitable, thereby contributing to the development of more secure systems.
AGI as Second Being: The Structural-Generative Ontology of Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Artificial intelligence is often measured by the range of tasks it can perform. Yet wide ability without depth remains only an imitation. This paper proposes a Structural-Generative Ontology of Intelligence: true intelligence exists only when a system can generate new structures, coordinate them into reasons, and sustain its identity over time. These three conditions -- generativity, coordination, and sustaining -- define the depth that underlies real intelligence. Current AI systems, however broad in function, remain surface simulations because they lack this depth. Breadth is not the source of intelligence but the growth that follows from depth. If future systems were to meet these conditions, they would no longer be mere tools, but could be seen as a possible Second Being, standing alongside yet distinct from human existence.
Better by Comparison: Retrieval-Augmented Contrastive Reasoning for Automatic Prompt Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Automatic prompt optimization has recently emerged as a strategy for improving the quality of prompts used in Large Language Models (LLMs), with the goal of generating more accurate and useful responses. However, most prior work focuses on direct prompt refinement or model fine-tuning, overlooking the potential of leveraging LLMs' inherent reasoning capability to learn from contrasting examples. In this paper, we present Contrastive Reasoning Prompt Optimization (CRPO), a novel framework that formulates prompt optimization as a retrieval-augmented reasoning process. Our approach retrieves top k reference prompt-response pairs from the HelpSteer2 dataset, an open source collection where each response is annotated for helpfulness, correctness, coherence, complexity, and verbosity, and constructs two complementary optimization paradigms: (1) tiered contrastive reasoning, where the LLM compares high-, medium-, and low-quality exemplars (both prompts and responses) to refine its own generation through reflective reasoning, and (2) multi-metric contrastive reasoning, where the LLM analyzes the best exemplars along each evaluation dimension and integrates their strengths into an optimized prompt. By explicitly contrasting high and low quality exemplars, CRPO enables the model to deduce why certain prompts succeed while others fail, thereby achieving more robust and interpretable optimization. Experimental results on the HelpSteer2 benchmark demonstrate that CRPO significantly outperforms baselines. Our findings highlight the promise of contrastive, retrieval-augmented reasoning for advancing automatic prompt optimization.
Differentiable Expectation-Maximisation and Applications to Gaussian Mixture Model Optimal Transport
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm is a central tool in statistics and machine learning, widely used for latent-variable models such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Despite its ubiquity, EM is typically treated as a non-differentiable black box, preventing its integration into modern learning pipelines where end-to-end gradient propagation is essential. In this work, we present and compare several differentiation strategies for EM, from full automatic differentiation to approximate methods, assessing their accuracy and computational efficiency. As a key application, we leverage this differentiable EM in the computation of the Mixture Wasserstein distance $\mathrm{MW}_2$ between GMMs, allowing $\mathrm{MW}_2$ to be used as a differentiable loss in imaging and machine learning tasks. To complement our practical use of $\mathrm{MW}_2$, we contribute a novel stability result which provides theoretical justification for the use of $\mathrm{MW}_2$ with EM, and also introduce a novel unbalanced variant of $\mathrm{MW}_2$. Numerical experiments on barycentre computation, colour and style transfer, image generation, and texture synthesis illustrate the versatility of the proposed approach in different settings.
Scale, Don't Fine-tune: Guiding Multimodal LLMs for Efficient Visual Place Recognition at Test-Time
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has evolved from handcrafted descriptors to deep learning approaches, yet significant challenges remain. Current approaches, including Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enhance semantic understanding but suffer from high computational overhead and limited cross-domain transferability when fine-tuned. To address these limitations, we propose a novel zero-shot framework employing Test-Time Scaling (TTS) that leverages MLLMs' vision-language alignment capabilities through Guidance-based methods for direct similarity scoring. Our approach eliminates two-stage processing by employing structured prompts that generate length-controllable JSON outputs. The TTS framework with Uncertainty-Aware Self-Consistency (UASC) enables real-time adaptation without additional training costs, achieving superior generalization across diverse environments. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in cross-domain VPR performance with up to 210$\times$ computational efficiency gains.