OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Influential scientists shape knowledge flows between science and IGO policy
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2025
Year: 2025

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) increasingly rely on scientific evidence, yet the pathways through which scientific research enters policy remain opaque. By linking 230,737 scientific papers cited in IGO policy documents (2015-2023) to their authors and collaboration networks, we identify a small group of policy-influential scientists (PI-Sci) who dominate this knowledge flow. These scientists form tightly interconnected, internationally spanning co-authorship networks and achieve policy citations shortly after publication, a distinctive feature of cumulative advantage at the science-policy interface. The concentration of influence varies by field: tightly clustered in established domains like climate modeling, and more dispersed in emerging areas like AI governance. Many PI-Sci serve on high-level advisory bodies (e.g., IPCC), and major IGOs frequently co-cite the same PI-Sci papers, indicating synchronized knowledge diffusion through shared expert networks. These findings reveal how network structure and elite brokerage shape the translation of research into global policy, highlighting opportunities to broaden the scope of knowledge that informs policy.
MIMO Pinching-Antenna-Aided SWIPT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) have recently emerged as a promising technology for improving wireless communications by establishing or strengthening reliable line-of-sight (LoS) links by adjusting the positions of pinching antennas (PAs). Motivated by these benefits, we propose a novel PASS-aided multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where the PASS are equipped with multiple waveguides to provide information transmission and wireless power transfer (WPT) for several multiple antenna information decoding receivers (IDRs), and energy harvesting receivers (EHRs), respectively. Based on the system, we consider maximizing the sum-rate of all IDRs while guaranteeing the minimum harvested energy of each EHR by jointly optimizing the pinching beamforming and the PA positions. To solve this highly non-convex problem, we iteratively optimize the pinching beamforming based on a weighted minimum mean-squared-error (WMMSE) method and update the PA positions with a Gauss-Seidel-based approach in an alternating optimization (AO) framework. Numerical results verify the significant superiority of the PASS compared with conventional designs.
The OCR Quest for Generalization: Learning to recognize low-resource alphabets with model editing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Achieving robustness in recognition systems across diverse domains is crucial for their practical utility. While ample data availability is usually assumed, low-resource languages, such as ancient manuscripts and non-western languages, tend to be kept out of the equations of massive pretraining and foundational techniques due to an under representation. In this work, we aim for building models which can generalize to new distributions of data, such as alphabets, faster than centralized fine-tune strategies. For doing so, we take advantage of the recent advancements in model editing to enhance the incorporation of unseen scripts (low-resource learning). In contrast to state-of-the-art meta-learning, we showcase the effectiveness of domain merging in sparse distributions of data, with agnosticity of its relation to the overall distribution or any other prototyping necessity. Even when using the same exact training data, our experiments showcase significant performance boosts in \textbf{transfer learning} to new alphabets and \textbf{out-of-domain evaluation} in challenging domain shifts, including historical ciphered texts and non-Latin scripts. This research contributes a novel approach into building models that can easily adopt under-represented alphabets and, therefore, enable document recognition to a wider set of contexts and cultures.
Taming Wild Branches: Overcoming Hard-to-Predict Branches using the Bullseye Predictor
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Branch prediction is key to the performance of out-of-order processors. While the CBP-2016 winner TAGE-SC-L combines geometric-history tables, a statistical corrector, and a loop predictor, over half of its remaining mispredictions stem from a small set of hard-to-predict (H2P) branches. These branches occur under diverse global histories, causing repeated thrashing in TAGE and eviction before usefulness counters can mature. Prior work shows that simply enlarging the tables offers only marginal improvement. We augment a 159 KB TAGE-SC-L predictor with a 28 KB H2P-targeted subsystem called the Bullseye predictor. It identifies problematic PCs using a set-associative H2P Identification Table (HIT) and steers them to one of two branch-specific perceptrons, one indexed by hashed local history and the other by folded global history. A short trial phase tracks head-to-head accuracy in an H2P cache. A branch becomes perceptron-resident only if the perceptron's sustained accuracy and output magnitude exceed dynamic thresholds, after which TAGE updates for that PC are suppressed to reduce pollution. The HIT, cache, and perceptron operate fully in parallel with TAGE-SC-L, providing higher fidelity on the H2P tail. This achieves an average MPKI of 3.4045 and CycWpPKI of 145.09.
Mind Games! Exploring the Impact of Dark Patterns in Mixed Reality Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Mixed Reality (MR) integrates virtual objects with the real world, offering potential but raising concerns about misuse through dark patterns. This study explored the effects of four dark patterns, adapted from prior research, and applied to MR across three targets: places, products, and people. In a two-factorial within-subject study with 74 participants, we analyzed 13 videos simulating MR experiences during a city walk. Results show that all dark patterns significantly reduced user comfort, increased reactance, and decreased the intention to use MR glasses, with the most disruptive effects linked to personal or monetary manipulation. Additionally, the dark patterns of Emotional and Sensory Manipulation and Hiding Information produced similar impacts on the user in MR, suggesting a re-evaluation of current classifications to go beyond deceptive design techniques. Our findings highlight the importance of developing ethical design guidelines and tools to detect and prevent dark patterns as immersive technologies continue to evolve.
They want to pretend not to understand: The Limits of Current LLMs in Interpreting Implicit Content of Political Discourse
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Implicit content plays a crucial role in political discourse, where speakers systematically employ pragmatic strategies such as implicatures and presuppositions to influence their audiences. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in tasks requiring complex semantic and pragmatic understanding, highlighting their potential for detecting and explaining the meaning of implicit content. However, their ability to do this within political discourse remains largely underexplored. Leveraging, for the first time, the large IMPAQTS corpus, which comprises Italian political speeches with the annotation of manipulative implicit content, we propose methods to test the effectiveness of LLMs in this challenging problem. Through a multiple-choice task and an open-ended generation task, we demonstrate that all tested models struggle to interpret presuppositions and implicatures. We conclude that current LLMs lack the key pragmatic capabilities necessary for accurately interpreting highly implicit language, such as that found in political discourse. At the same time, we highlight promising trends and future directions for enhancing model performance. We release our data and code at https://github.com/WalterPaci/IMPAQTS-PID
Not quite Sherlock Holmes: Language model predictions do not reliably differentiate impossible from improbable events
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Can language models reliably predict that possible events are more likely than merely improbable ones? By teasing apart possibility, typicality, and contextual relatedness, we show that despite the results of previous work, language models' ability to do this is far from robust. In fact, under certain conditions, all models tested - including Llama 3, Gemma 2, and Mistral NeMo - perform at worse-than-chance level, assigning higher probabilities to impossible sentences such as 'the car was given a parking ticket by the brake' than to merely unlikely sentences such as 'the car was given a parking ticket by the explorer'.
IMPA-HGAE:Intra-Meta-Path Augmented Heterogeneous Graph Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been increasingly applied to diverse downstream tasks due to their superior generalization capabilities and low annotation costs. However, most existing heterogeneous graph SSL models convert heterogeneous graphs into homogeneous ones via meta-paths for training, which only leverage information from nodes at both ends of meta-paths while underutilizing the heterogeneous node information along the meta-paths. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework named IMPA-HGAE to enhance target node embeddings by fully exploiting internal node information along meta-paths. Experimental results validate that IMPA-HGAE achieves superior performance on heterogeneous datasets. Furthermore, this paper introduce innovative masking strategies to strengthen the representational capacity of generative SSL models on heterogeneous graph data. Additionally, this paper discuss the interpretability of the proposed method and potential future directions for generative self-supervised learning in heterogeneous graphs. This work provides insights into leveraging meta-path-guided structural semantics for robust representation learning in complex graph scenarios.
ASPO: Constraint-Aware Bayesian Optimization for FPGA-based Soft Processors
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has shown promise in tuning processor design parameters. However, standard BO does not support constraints involving categorical parameters such as types of branch predictors and division circuits. In addition, optimization time of BO grows with processor complexity, which becomes increasingly significant especially for FPGA-based soft processors. This paper introduces ASPO, an approach that leverages disjunctive form to enable BO to handle constraints involving categorical parameters. Unlike existing methods that directly apply standard BO, the proposed ASPO method, for the first time, customizes the mathematical mechanism of BO to address challenges faced by soft-processor designs on FPGAs. Specifically, ASPO supports categorical parameters using a novel customized BO covariance kernel. It also accelerates the design evaluation procedure by penalizing the BO acquisition function with potential evaluation time and by reusing FPGA synthesis checkpoints from previously evaluated configurations. ASPO targets three soft processors: RocketChip, BOOM, and EL2 VeeR. The approach is evaluated based on seven RISC-V benchmarks. Results show that ASPO can reduce execution time for the ``multiply'' benchmark on the BOOM processor by up to 35\% compared to the default configuration. Furthermore, it reduces design time for the BOOM processor by up to 74\% compared to Boomerang, a state-of-the-art hardware-oriented BO approach.
Stepwise Decomposition and Dual-stream Focus: A Novel Approach for Training-free Camouflaged Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

While promptable segmentation (\textit{e.g.}, SAM) has shown promise for various segmentation tasks, it still requires manual visual prompts for each object to be segmented. In contrast, task-generic promptable segmentation aims to reduce the need for such detailed prompts by employing only a task-generic prompt to guide segmentation across all test samples. However, when applied to Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS), current methods still face two critical issues: 1) \textit{\textbf{semantic ambiguity in getting instance-specific text prompts}}, which arises from insufficient discriminative cues in holistic captions, leading to foreground-background confusion; 2) \textit{\textbf{semantic discrepancy combined with spatial separation in getting instance-specific visual prompts}}, which results from global background sampling far from object boundaries with low feature correlation, causing SAM to segment irrelevant regions. To address the issues above, we propose \textbf{RDVP-MSD}, a novel training-free test-time adaptation framework that synergizes \textbf{R}egion-constrained \textbf{D}ual-stream \textbf{V}isual \textbf{P}rompting (RDVP) via \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{S}tepwise \textbf{D}ecomposition Chain of Thought (MSD-CoT). MSD-CoT progressively disentangles image captions to eliminate semantic ambiguity, while RDVP injects spatial constraints into visual prompting and independently samples visual prompts for foreground and background points, effectively mitigating semantic discrepancy and spatial separation. Without requiring any training or supervision, RDVP-MSD achieves a state-of-the-art segmentation result on multiple COS benchmarks and delivers a faster inference speed than previous methods, demonstrating significantly improved accuracy and efficiency. The codes will be available at \href{https://github.com/ycyinchao/RDVP-MSD}{https://github.com/ycyinchao/RDVP-MSD}
Exploring Visual Prompting: Robustness Inheritance and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Visual Prompting (VP), an efficient method for transfer learning, has shown its potential in vision tasks. However, previous works focus exclusively on VP from standard source models, it is still unknown how it performs under the scenario of a robust source model: Can the robustness of the source model be successfully inherited? Does VP also encounter the same trade-off between robustness and generalization ability as the source model during this process? If such a trade-off exists, is there a strategy specifically tailored to VP to mitigate this limitation? In this paper, we thoroughly explore these three questions for the first time and provide affirmative answers to them. To mitigate the trade-off faced by VP, we propose a strategy called Prompt Boundary Loosening (PBL). As a lightweight, plug-and-play strategy naturally compatible with VP, PBL effectively ensures the successful inheritance of robustness when the source model is a robust model, while significantly enhancing VP's generalization ability across various downstream datasets. Extensive experiments across various datasets show that our findings are universal and demonstrate the significant benefits of the proposed strategy.
Deep Inertial Pose: A deep learning approach for human pose estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Inertial-based Motion capture system has been attracting growing attention due to its wearability and unsconstrained use. However, accurate human joint estimation demands several complex and expertise demanding steps, which leads to expensive software such as the state-of-the-art MVN Awinda from Xsens Technologies. This work aims to study the use of Neural Networks to abstract the complex biomechanical models and analytical mathematics required for pose estimation. Thus, it presents a comparison of different Neural Network architectures and methodologies to understand how accurately these methods can estimate human pose, using both low cost(MPU9250) and high end (Mtw Awinda) Magnetic, Angular Rate, and Gravity (MARG) sensors. The most efficient method was the Hybrid LSTM-Madgwick detached, which achieved an Quaternion Angle distance error of 7.96, using Mtw Awinda data. Also, an ablation study was conducted to study the impact of data augmentation, output representation, window size, loss function and magnetometer data on the pose estimation error. This work indicates that Neural Networks can be trained to estimate human pose, with results comparable to the state-of-the-art fusion filters.
Face recognition on point cloud with cgan-top for denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Face recognition using 3D point clouds is gaining growing interest, while raw point clouds often contain a significant amount of noise due to imperfect sensors. In this paper, an end-to-end 3D face recognition on a noisy point cloud is proposed, which synergistically integrates the denoising and recognition modules. Specifically, a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network on Three Orthogonal Planes (cGAN-TOP) is designed to effectively remove the noise in the point cloud, and recover the underlying features for subsequent recognition. A Linked Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Network (LDGCNN) is then adapted to recognize faces from the processed point cloud, which hierarchically links both the local point features and neighboring features of multiple scales. The proposed method is validated on the Bosphorus dataset. It significantly improves the recognition accuracy under all noise settings, with a maximum gain of 14.81%.
ARGOS: Anomaly Recognition and Guarding through O-RAN Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Rogue Base Station (RBS) attacks, particularly those exploiting downgrade vulnerabilities, remain a persistent threat as 5G Standalone (SA) deployments are still limited and User Equipment (UE) manufacturers continue to support legacy network connectivity. This work introduces ARGOS, a comprehensive O-RAN compliant Intrusion Detection System (IDS) deployed within the Near Real-Time RIC, designed to detect RBS downgrade attacks in real time, an area previously unexplored within the O-RAN context. The system enhances the 3GPP KPM Service Model to enable richer, UE-level telemetry and features a custom xApp that applies unsupervised Machine Learning models for anomaly detection. Distinctively, the updated KPM Service Model operates on cross-layer features extracted from Modem Layer 1 (ML1) logs and Measurement Reports collected directly from Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) UEs. To evaluate system performance under realistic conditions, a dedicated testbed is implemented using Open5GS, srsRAN, and FlexRIC, and validated against an extensive real-world measurement dataset. Among the evaluated models, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) achieves the best balance of detection performance and efficiency, reaching 99.5% Accuracy with only 0.6% False Positives and minimal system overhead.
Reading in the Dark with Foveated Event Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Current smart glasses equipped with RGB cameras struggle to perceive the environment in low-light and high-speed motion scenarios due to motion blur and the limited dynamic range of frame cameras. Additionally, capturing dense images with a frame camera requires large bandwidth and power consumption, consequently draining the battery faster. These challenges are especially relevant for developing algorithms that can read text from images. In this work, we propose a novel event-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) approach for smart glasses. By using the eye gaze of the user, we foveate the event stream to significantly reduce bandwidth by around 98% while exploiting the benefits of event cameras in high-dynamic and fast scenes. Our proposed method performs deep binary reconstruction trained on synthetic data and leverages multimodal LLMs for OCR, outperforming traditional OCR solutions. Our results demonstrate the ability to read text in low light environments where RGB cameras struggle while using up to 2400 times less bandwidth than a wearable RGB camera.
Rewriting the Budget: A General Framework for Black-Box Attacks Under Cost Asymmetry
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Traditional decision-based black-box adversarial attacks on image classifiers aim to generate adversarial examples by slightly modifying input images while keeping the number of queries low, where each query involves sending an input to the model and observing its output. Most existing methods assume that all queries have equal cost. However, in practice, queries may incur asymmetric costs; for example, in content moderation systems, certain output classes may trigger additional review, enforcement, or penalties, making them more costly than others. While prior work has considered such asymmetric cost settings, effective algorithms for this scenario remain underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a general framework for decision-based attacks under asymmetric query costs, which we refer to as asymmetric black-box attacks. We modify two core components of existing attacks: the search strategy and the gradient estimation process. Specifically, we propose Asymmetric Search (AS), a more conservative variant of binary search that reduces reliance on high-cost queries, and Asymmetric Gradient Estimation (AGREST), which shifts the sampling distribution to favor low-cost queries. We design efficient algorithms that minimize total attack cost by balancing different query types, in contrast to earlier methods such as stealthy attacks that focus only on limiting expensive (high-cost) queries. Our method can be integrated into a range of existing black-box attacks with minimal changes. We perform both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation on standard image classification benchmarks. Across various cost regimes, our method consistently achieves lower total query cost and smaller perturbations than existing approaches, with improvements of up to 40% in some settings.
Making a Pipeline Production-Ready: Challenges and Lessons Learned in the Healthcare Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Deploying a Machine Learning (ML) training pipeline into production requires good software engineering practices. Unfortunately, the typical data science workflow often leads to code that lacks critical software quality attributes. This experience report investigates this problem in SPIRA, a project whose goal is to create an ML-Enabled System (MLES) to pre-diagnose insufficiency respiratory via speech analysis. This paper presents an overview of the architecture of the MLES, then compares three versions of its Continuous Training subsystem: from a proof of concept Big Ball of Mud (v1), to a design pattern-based Modular Monolith (v2), to a test-driven set of Microservices (v3) Each version improved its overall extensibility, maintainability, robustness, and resiliency. The paper shares challenges and lessons learned in this process, offering insights for researchers and practitioners seeking to productionize their pipelines.
Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Control via Risk-Sensitive Action-Value Iteration and Quantile Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods reduce this bias by learning a distribution of the expected cost-to-go using quantile regression. However, ensuring that the learned policy satisfies safety constraints remains a challenge when these constraints are not explicitly integrated into the RL framework. Existing methods often require complex neural architectures or manual tradeoffs due to combined cost functions. To address this, we propose a risk-regularized quantile-based algorithm integrating Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) to enforce safety without complex architectures. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the contraction properties of the risk-sensitive distributional Bellman operator in Wasserstein space, ensuring convergence to a unique cost distribution. Simulations of a mobile robot in a dynamic reach-avoid task show that our approach leads to more goal successes, fewer collisions, and better safety-performance trade-offs than risk-neutral methods.