OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
HoMer: Addressing Heterogeneities by Modeling Sequential and Set-wise Contexts for CTR Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, which models behavior sequence and non-sequential features (e.g., user/item profiles or cross features) to infer user interest, underpins industrial recommender systems. However, most methods face three forms of heterogeneity that degrade predictive performance: (i) Feature Heterogeneity persists when limited sequence side features provide less granular interest representation compared to extensive non-sequential features, thereby impairing sequence modeling performance; (ii) Context Heterogeneity arises because a user's interest in an item will be influenced by other items, yet point-wise prediction neglects cross-item interaction context from the entire item set; (iii) Architecture Heterogeneity stems from the fragmented integration of specialized network modules, which compounds the model's effectiveness, efficiency and scalability in industrial deployments. To tackle the above limitations, we propose HoMer, a Homogeneous-Oriented TransforMer for modeling sequential and set-wise contexts. First, we align sequence side features with non-sequential features for accurate sequence modeling and fine-grained interest representation. Second, we shift the prediction paradigm from point-wise to set-wise, facilitating cross-item interaction in a highly parallel manner. Third, HoMer's unified encoder-decoder architecture achieves dual optimization through structural simplification and shared computation, ensuring computational efficiency while maintaining scalability with model size. Without arduous modification to the prediction pipeline, HoMer successfully scales up and outperforms our industrial baseline by 0.0099 in the AUC metric, and enhances online business metrics like CTR/RPM by 1.99%/2.46%. Additionally, HoMer saves 27% of GPU resources via preliminary engineering optimization, further validating its superiority and practicality.
Graph Neural Network-Based Multicast Routing for On-Demand Streaming Services in 6G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The increase of bandwidth-intensive applications in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, such as real-time volumetric streaming and multi-sensory extended reality, demands intelligent multicast routing solutions capable of delivering differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) at scale. Traditional shortest-path and multicast routing algorithms are either computationally prohibitive or structurally rigid, and they often fail to support heterogeneous user demands, leading to suboptimal resource utilization. Neural network-based approaches, while offering improved inference speed, typically lack topological generalization and scalability. To address these limitations, this paper presents a graph neural network (GNN)-based multicast routing framework that jointly minimizes total transmission cost and supports user-specific video quality requirements. The routing problem is formulated as a constrained minimum-flow optimization task, and a reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to sequentially construct efficient multicast trees by reusing paths and adapting to network dynamics. A graph attention network (GAT) is employed as the encoder to extract context-aware node embeddings, while a long short-term memory (LSTM) module models the sequential dependencies in routing decisions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method closely approximates optimal dynamic programming-based solutions while significantly reducing computational complexity. The results also confirm strong generalization to large-scale and dynamic network topologies, highlighting the method's potential for real-time deployment in 6G multimedia delivery scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/GNN-Routing.
Improving AI Efficiency in Data Centres by Power Dynamic Response
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

The steady growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated in the recent years, facilitated by the development of sophisticated models such as large language models and foundation models. Ensuring robust and reliable power infrastructures is fundamental to take advantage of the full potential of AI. However, AI data centres are extremely hungry for power, putting the problem of their power management in the spotlight, especially with respect to their impact on environment and sustainable development. In this work, we investigate the capacity and limits of solutions based on an innovative approach for the power management of AI data centres, i.e., making part of the input power as dynamic as the power used for data-computing functions. The performance of passive and active devices are quantified and compared in terms of computational gain, energy efficiency, reduction of capital expenditure, and management costs by analysing power trends from multiple data platforms worldwide. This strategy, which identifies a paradigm shift in the AI data centre power management, has the potential to strongly improve the sustainability of AI hyperscalers, enhancing their footprint on environmental, financial, and societal fields.
Visible Light Communication for Vehicular Networks: A Tutorial
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The advent of the fifth-generation technology promises to bring about more vertical applications and emerging services that include vehicular networks and intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). To achieve their vision of real-time and safetyapplications, vehicular networks rely on short-range to medium-range communications. One emerging technology that aims to provide reliability and high-data rate in short-range communications is the visible light communications (VLC). Due to its remarkable advantages, some studies have recently investigated the integration of VLC in vehicular networks and ITSs. Despite their attractive features, such networks also face several implementation issues. This paper provides an extended tutorial on the implementation of VLC-based vehicular networks. To begin with, we present the implementation characteristics of these systems and discuss some related issues. The underlying system considers a general structure with transmitters, channels, and receivers based on photodetectors and cameras, as well as standardization efforts and types of topologies. In addition, we discuss the impact of the sun and artificial light sources, flickering, dimming, throughput enhancement, uplink security, and mobility on practical implementation. Finally, we highlight some key challenges and potential solutions and provide some directions for future research investigations that could constitute an advancement toward the development of commercial VLC-based vehicular systems.
Lightweight Facial Landmark Detection in Thermal Images via Multi-Level Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Facial Landmark Detection (FLD) in thermal imagery is critical for applications in challenging lighting conditions, but it is hampered by the lack of rich visual cues. Conventional cross-modal solutions, like feature fusion or image translation from RGB data, are often computationally expensive or introduce structural artifacts, limiting their practical deployment. To address this, we propose Multi-Level Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation (MLCM-KD), a novel framework that decouples high-fidelity RGB-to-thermal knowledge transfer from model compression to create both accurate and efficient thermal FLD models. A central challenge during knowledge transfer is the profound modality gap between RGB and thermal data, where traditional unidirectional distillation fails to enforce semantic consistency across disparate feature spaces. To overcome this, we introduce Dual-Injected Knowledge Distillation (DIKD), a bidirectional mechanism designed specifically for this task. DIKD establishes a connection between modalities: it not only guides the thermal student with rich RGB features but also validates the student's learned representations by feeding them back into the frozen teacher's prediction head. This closed-loop supervision forces the student to learn modality-invariant features that are semantically aligned with the teacher, ensuring a robust and profound knowledge transfer. Experiments show that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on public thermal FLD benchmarks, notably outperforming previous methods while drastically reducing computational overhead.
What Slows Down FMware Development? An Empirical Study of Developer Challenges and Resolution Times
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Foundation Models (FMs), such as OpenAI's GPT, are fundamentally transforming the practice of software engineering by enabling the development of \emph{FMware} -- applications and infrastructures built around these models. FMware systems now support tasks such as code generation, natural-language interaction, knowledge integration, and multi-modal content creation, underscoring their disruptive impact on current software engineering workflows. However, the design, implementation, and evolution of FMware present significant new challenges, particularly across cloud-based and on-premise platforms where goals, processes, and tools often diverge from those of traditional software development. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale analysis of FMware development across both cloud-based platforms and open-source repositories. We empirically investigate the FMware ecosystem through three focus areas: (1) the most common application domains of FMware, (2) the key challenges developers encounter, and (3) the types of issues that demand the greatest effort to resolve. Our analysis draws on data from GitHub repositories and from leading FMware platforms, including HuggingFace, GPTStore, Ora, and Poe. Our findings reveal a strong focus on education, content creation, and business strategy, alongside persistent technical challenges in memory management, dependency handling, and tokenizer configuration. On GitHub, bug reports and core functionality issues are the most frequently reported problems, while code review, similarity search, and prompt template design are the most time-consuming to resolve. By uncovering developer practices and pain points, this study points to opportunities to improve FMware tools, workflows, and community support, and provides actionable insights to help guide the future of FMware development.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Exploring Variable Thresholds for Distance-Based Multi-Label Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Distance-based unsupervised text classification is a method within text classification that leverages the semantic similarity between a label and a text to determine label relevance. This method provides numerous benefits, including fast inference and adaptability to expanding label sets, as opposed to zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned neural networks that require re-training in such cases. In multi-label distance-based classification and information retrieval algorithms, thresholds are required to determine whether a text instance is "similar" to a label or query. Similarity between a text and label is determined in a dense embedding space, usually generated by state-of-the-art sentence encoders. Multi-label classification complicates matters, as a text instance can have multiple true labels, unlike in multi-class or binary classification, where each instance is assigned only one label. We expand upon previous literature on this underexplored topic by thoroughly examining and evaluating the ability of sentence encoders to perform distance-based classification. First, we perform an exploratory study to verify whether the semantic relationships between texts and labels vary across models, datasets, and label sets by conducting experiments on a diverse collection of realistic multi-label text classification (MLTC) datasets. We find that similarity distributions show statistically significant differences across models, datasets and even label sets. We propose a novel method for optimizing label-specific thresholds using a validation set. Our label-specific thresholding method achieves an average improvement of 46% over normalized 0.5 thresholding and outperforms uniform thresholding approaches from previous work by an average of 14%. Additionally, the method demonstrates strong performance even with limited labeled examples.
Reliable Cross-modal Alignment via Prototype Iterative Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Cross-modal alignment is an important multi-modal task, aiming to bridge the semantic gap between different modalities. The most reliable fundamention for achieving this objective lies in the semantic consistency between matched pairs. Conventional methods implicitly assume embeddings contain solely semantic information, ignoring the impact of non-semantic information during alignment, which inevitably leads to information bias or even loss. These non-semantic information primarily manifest as stylistic variations in the data, which we formally define as style information. An intuitive approach is to separate style from semantics, aligning only the semantic information. However, most existing methods distinguish them based on feature columns, which cannot represent the complex coupling relationship between semantic and style information. In this paper, we propose PICO, a novel framework for suppressing style interference during embedding interaction. Specifically, we quantify the probability of each feature column representing semantic information, and regard it as the weight during the embedding interaction. To ensure the reliability of the semantic probability, we propose a prototype iterative construction method. The key operation of this method is a performance feedback-based weighting function, and we have theoretically proven that the function can assign higher weight to prototypes that bring higher performance improvements. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and model backbones demonstrate the superiority of PICO, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 5.2\%-14.1\%.
A Decentralized Microservice Scheduling Approach Using Service Mesh in Cloud-Edge Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

As microservice-based systems scale across the cloud-edge continuum, traditional centralized scheduling mechanisms increasingly struggle with latency, coordination overhead, and fault tolerance. This paper presents a new architectural direction: leveraging service mesh sidecar proxies as decentralized, in-situ schedulers to enable scalable, low-latency coordination in large-scale, cloud-native environments. We propose embedding lightweight, autonomous scheduling logic into each sidecar, allowing scheduling decisions to be made locally without centralized control. This approach leverages the growing maturity of service mesh infrastructures, which support programmable distributed traffic management. We describe the design of such an architecture and present initial results demonstrating its scalability potential in terms of response time and latency under varying request rates. Rather than delivering a finalized scheduling algorithm, this paper presents a system-level architectural direction and preliminary evidence to support its scalability potential.
Evaluating Reasoning Faithfulness in Medical Vision-Language Models using Multimodal Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-language models (VLMs) often produce chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations that sound plausible yet fail to reflect the underlying decision process, undermining trust in high-stakes clinical use. Existing evaluations rarely catch this misalignment, prioritizing answer accuracy or adherence to formats. We present a clinically grounded framework for chest X-ray visual question answering (VQA) that probes CoT faithfulness via controlled text and image modifications across three axes: clinical fidelity, causal attribution, and confidence calibration. In a reader study (n=4), evaluator-radiologist correlations fall within the observed inter-radiologist range for all axes, with strong alignment for attribution (Kendall's $τ_b=0.670$), moderate alignment for fidelity ($τ_b=0.387$), and weak alignment for confidence tone ($τ_b=0.091$), which we report with caution. Benchmarking six VLMs shows that answer accuracy and explanation quality can be decoupled, acknowledging injected cues does not ensure grounding, and text cues shift explanations more than visual cues. While some open-source models match final answer accuracy, proprietary models score higher on attribution (25.0% vs. 1.4%) and often on fidelity (36.1% vs. 31.7%), highlighting deployment risks and the need to evaluate beyond final answer accuracy.
Evaluating Line-level Localization Ability of Learning-based Code Vulnerability Detection Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

To address the extremely concerning problem of software vulnerability, system security is often entrusted to Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Despite their now established detection capabilities, such models are limited by design to flagging the entire input source code function as vulnerable, rather than precisely localizing the concerned code lines. However, the detection granularity is crucial to support human operators during software development, ensuring that such predictions reflect the true code semantics to help debug, evaluate, and fix the detected vulnerabilities. To address this issue, recent work made progress toward improving the detector's localization ability, thus narrowing down the vulnerability detection "window" and providing more fine-grained predictions. Such approaches, however, implicitly disregard the presence of spurious correlations and biases in the data, which often predominantly influence the performance of ML algorithms. In this work, we investigate how detectors comply with this requirement by proposing an explainability-based evaluation procedure. Our approach, defined as Detection Alignment (DA), quantifies the agreement between the input source code lines that most influence the prediction and the actual localization of the vulnerability as per the ground truth. Through DA, which is model-agnostic and adaptable to different detection tasks, not limited to our use case, we analyze multiple learning-based vulnerability detectors and datasets. As a result, we show how the predictions of such models are consistently biased by non-vulnerable lines, ultimately highlighting the high impact of biases and spurious correlations. The code is available at https://github.com/pralab/vuln-localization-eval.
Cross-Scale Reservoir Computing for large spatio-temporal forecasting and modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We propose a new reservoir computing method for forecasting high-resolution spatiotemporal datasets. By combining multi-resolution inputs from coarser to finer layers, our architecture better captures both local and global dynamics. Applied to Sea Surface Temperature data, it outperforms standard parallel reservoir models in long-term forecasting, demonstrating the effectiveness of cross-layers coupling in improving predictive accuracy. Finally, we show that the optimal network dynamics in each layer become increasingly linear, revealing the slow modes propagated to subsequent layers.
An Explorative Study on Distributed Computing Techniques in Training and Inference of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLM) are advanced AI systems trained on extensive textual data, leveraging deep learning techniques to understand and generate human-like language. Today's LLMs with billions of parameters are so huge that hardly any single computing node can train, fine-tune, or infer from them. Therefore, several distributed computing techniques are being introduced in the literature to properly utilize LLMs. We have explored the application of distributed computing techniques in LLMs from two angles. \begin{itemize} \item We study the techniques that democratize the LLM, that is, how large models can be run on consumer-grade computers. Here, we also implement a novel metaheuristics-based modification to an existing system. \item We perform a comparative study on three state-of-the-art LLM serving techniques. \end{itemize}
Temporal Cooperative Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

Classical cooperative game theory assumes that the worth of a coalition depends only on the set of agents involved, but in practice, it may also depend on the order in which agents arrive. Motivated by such scenarios, we introduce temporal cooperative games (TCG), where the worth $v$ becomes a function of the sequence of agents $π$ rather than just the set $S$. This shift calls for rethinking the underlying axioms. A key property in this temporal framework is the incentive for optimal arrival (I4OA), which encourages agents to join in the order maximizing total worth. Alongside, we define two additional properties: online individual rationality (OIR), incentivizing earlier agents to invite more participants, and sequential efficiency (SE), ensuring that the total worth of any sequence is fully distributed among its agents. We identify a class of reward-sharing mechanisms uniquely characterized by these three properties. The classical Shapley value does not directly apply here, so we construct its natural analogs in two variants: the sequential world, where rewards are defined for each sequence-player pair, and the extended world, where rewards are defined for each player alone. Properties of efficiency, additivity, and null player uniquely determine these Shapley analogs in both worlds. Importantly, the Shapley analogs are disjoint from mechanisms satisfying I4OA, OIR, and SE, and this conflict persists even for restricted classes such as convex and simple TCGs. Our findings thus uncover a fundamental tension: when players arrive sequentially, reward-sharing mechanisms satisfying desirable temporal properties must inherently differ from Shapley-inspired ones, opening new questions for defining fair and efficient solution concepts in TCGs.
Online Allocation with Concave, Diminishing-Returns Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

Online resource allocation problems are central challenges in economics and computer science, modeling situations in which $n$ items arriving one at a time must each be immediately allocated among $m$ agents. In such problems, our objective is to maximize a monotone reward function $f(\mathbf{x})$ over the allocation vector $\mathbf{x} = (x_{ij})_{i, j}$, which describes the amount of each item given to each agent. In settings where $f$ is concave and has "diminishing returns" (monotone decreasing gradient), several lines of work over the past two decades have had great success designing constant-competitive algorithms, including the foundational work of Mehta et al. (2005) on the Adwords problem and many follow-ups. Notably, while a greedy algorithm is $\frac{1}{2}$-competitive in such settings, these works have shown that one can often obtain a competitive ratio of $1-\frac{1}{e} \approx 0.632$ in a variety of settings when items are divisible (i.e. allowing fractional allocations). However, prior works have thus far used a variety of problem-specific techniques, leaving open the general question: Does a $(1-\frac{1}{e})$-competitive fractional algorithm always exist for online resource allocation problems with concave, diminishing-returns objectives? In this work, we answer this question affirmatively, thereby unifying and generalizing prior results for special cases. Our algorithm is one which makes continuous greedy allocations with respect to an auxiliary objective $U(\mathbf{x})$. Using the online primal-dual method, we show that if $U$ satisfies a "balanced" property with respect to $f$, then one can bound the competitiveness of such an algorithm. Our crucial observation is that there is a simple expression for $U$ which has this balanced property for any $f$, yielding our general $(1-\frac{1}{e})$-competitive algorithm.