OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Digital Privacy Under Attack: Challenges and Enablers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

We present a comprehensive analysis of privacy attacks and countermeasures in data-driven systems. We systematically categorize attacks targeting three domains: anonymous data (linkage and structural attacks), statistical aggregates (reconstruction and differential attacks), and privacy-preserving models (extraction, reconstruction, membership inference, and inversion attacks). For each category, we analyze attack methodologies, adversary capabilities, and vulnerability mechanisms. We further evaluate countermeasures including perturbation techniques, randomization methods, query auditing, and model-level defenses, examining their effectiveness and inherent privacy-utility tradeoffs. Our analysis reveals that while differential privacy offers strong theoretical guarantees, it faces implementation challenges and potential vulnerabilities to emerging attacks. We identify critical research directions and provide researchers and practitioners with a structured framework for understanding privacy resilience in increasingly complex data ecosystems.
Information Retrieval in long documents: Word clustering approach for improving Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we propose an alternative to deep neural networks for semantic information retrieval for the case of long documents. This new approach exploiting clustering techniques to take into account the meaning of words in Information Retrieval systems targeting long as well as short documents. This approach uses a specially designed clustering algorithm to group words with similar meanings into clusters. The dual representation (lexical and semantic) of documents and queries is based on the vector space model proposed by Gerard Salton in the vector space constituted by the formed clusters. The originalities of our proposal are at several levels: first, we propose an efficient algorithm for the construction of clusters of semantically close words using word embedding as input, then we define a formula for weighting these clusters, and then we propose a function allowing to combine efficiently the meanings of words with a lexical model widely used in Information Retrieval. The evaluation of our proposal in three contexts with two different datasets SQuAD and TREC-CAR has shown that is significantly improves the classical approaches only based on the keywords without degrading the lexical aspect.
ApproxABFT: Approximate Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance for Neural Network Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

With the increasing deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in terrestrial and aerospace safety-critical applications, system reliability has emerged as a co-equal design metric alongside computational efficiency. Algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) mechanisms, characterized by architecture-agnostic and cost-effectiveness, have become a promising solution for reliability enhancement. However, conventional ABFT approaches rely on rigorous verification mechanisms where even minor computational deviations trigger error recovery processes, which not only disregards the intrinsic fault tolerance characteristics of DNN models but also incurs redundant fault tolerance processing overhead. To address these limitations, we propose an Approximate ABFT framework (ApproxABFT) that innovatively introduces adaptive error tolerance thresholds to enable selective fault recovery, activating error correction modules exclusively when computational deviations exceed predefined thresholds. This approach effectively mitigating overreaction to non-critical computational errors. Furthermore, a dynamic block granularity optimization algorithm is implemented to achieve inter-layer error sensitivity balancing. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed ApproxABFT achieves a 43.39% average reduction in redundant computing overhead compared to previous accurate ABFT, while simultaneously enhancing the tolerable soft error rate by an order of magnitude.
The Power of Static Pricing for Reusable Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

We consider the problem of pricing a reusable resource service system. Potential customers arrive according to a Poisson process and purchase the service if their valuation exceeds the current price. If no units are available, customers immediately leave without service. Serving a customer corresponds to using one unit of the reusable resource, where the service time has a general distribution. The objective is to maximize the steady-state revenue rate. This system is equivalent to the classical Erlang loss model with price-sensitive customers, which has applications in vehicle sharing, cloud computing, and spare parts management. With general service times, the optimal pricing policy depends not only on the number of customers currently in the system but also on how long each unavailable unit has been in use. We prove several results that show a simple static policy is universally near-optimal for any service rate distribution, arrival rate, and number of units in the system. When there are multiple classes of customers, we prove that static pricing guarantees 78.9% of the revenue of the optimal dynamic policy, achieving the same guarantee known for a single class of customers with exponential service times. When there is one class of customers who have a monotone hazard rate valuation distribution, we prove that a static pricing policy guarantees 90.4% of the revenue from the optimal inventory-based policy. Finally, we prove that the optimal static policy can be easily computed, resulting in the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the multi-class problem.
Effective Graph-Neural-Network based Models for Discovering Structural Hole Spanners in Large-Scale and Diverse Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

A Structural Hole Spanner (SHS) is a set of nodes in a network that act as a bridge among different otherwise disconnected communities. Numerous solutions have been proposed to discover SHSs that generally require high run time on large-scale networks. Another challenge is discovering SHSs across different types of networks for which the traditional one-model-fit-all approach fails to capture the inter-graph difference, particularly in the case of diverse networks. Therefore, there is an urgent need of developing effective solutions for discovering SHSs in large-scale and diverse networks. Inspired by the recent advancement of graph neural network approaches on various graph problems, we propose graph neural network-based models to discover SHS nodes in large scale networks and diverse networks. We transform the problem into a learning problem and propose an efficient model GraphSHS, that exploits both the network structure and node features to discover SHS nodes in large scale networks, endeavouring to lessen the computational cost while maintaining high accuracy. To effectively discover SHSs across diverse networks, we propose another model Meta-GraphSHS based on meta-learning that learns generalizable knowledge from diverse training graphs (instead of directly learning the model) and utilizes the learned knowledge to create a customized model to identify SHSs in each new graph. We theoretically show that the depth of the proposed graph neural network model should be at least $Ω(\sqrt{n}/\log n)$ to accurately calculate the SHSs discovery problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed models through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experimental results show that GraphSHS discovers SHSs with high accuracy and is at least 167.1 times faster than the comparative methods on large-scale real-world datasets.
Moderate Adaptive Linear Units (MoLU)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We propose the Moderate Adaptive Linear Unit (MoLU), a novel activation function for deep neural networks, defined analytically as: f(x)=x \times (1+tanh(x))/2. MoLU combines mathematical elegance with empirical effectiveness, exhibiting superior performance in terms of prediction accuracy, convergence speed, and computational efficiency. Due to its C-infinity smoothness, i.e. infinite differentiability and analyticity, MoLU is expected to mitigate issues such as vanishing or exploding gradients, making it suitable for a broad range of architectures and applications, including large language models (LLMs), Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs), Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Empirical evaluations show that MoLU consistently achieves faster convergence and improved final accuracy relative to widely used activation functions such as GeLU, SiLU, and Mish. These properties position MoLU as a promising and robust candidate for general-purpose activation across diverse deep learning paradigms.
Enhanced Controllability of Diffusion Models via Feature Disentanglement and Realism-Enhanced Sampling Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

As Diffusion Models have shown promising performance, a lot of efforts have been made to improve the controllability of Diffusion Models. However, how to train Diffusion Models to have the disentangled latent spaces and how to naturally incorporate the disentangled conditions during the sampling process have been underexplored. In this paper, we present a training framework for feature disentanglement of Diffusion Models (FDiff). We further propose two sampling methods that can boost the realism of our Diffusion Models and also enhance the controllability. Concisely, we train Diffusion Models conditioned on two latent features, a spatial content mask, and a flattened style embedding. We rely on the inductive bias of the denoising process of Diffusion Models to encode pose/layout information in the content feature and semantic/style information in the style feature. Regarding the sampling methods, we first generalize Composable Diffusion Models (GCDM) by breaking the conditional independence assumption to allow for some dependence between conditional inputs, which is shown to be effective in realistic generation in our experiments. Second, we propose timestep-dependent weight scheduling for content and style features to further improve the performance. We also observe better controllability of our proposed methods compared to existing methods in image manipulation and image translation.
Collective moderation of hate, toxicity, and extremity in online discussions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and issues of scalability. Counter speech, a form of collective moderation by citizens, has emerged as a potential remedy. Here, we aim to investigate which counter speech strategies are most effective in reducing the prevalence of hate, toxicity, and extremity on online platforms. We analyze more than 130,000 discussions on German Twitter starting at the peak of the migrant crisis in 2015 and extending over four years. We use human annotation and machine learning classifiers to identify argumentation strategies, ingroup and outgroup references, emotional tone, and different measures of discourse quality. Using matching and time-series analyses we discern the effectiveness of naturally observed counter speech strategies on the micro-level (individual tweet pairs), meso-level (entire discussions) and macro-level (over days). We find that expressing straightforward opinions, even if not factual but devoid of insults, results in the least subsequent hate, toxicity, and extremity over all levels of analyses. This strategy complements currently recommended counter speech strategies and is easy for citizens to engage in. Sarcasm can also be effective in improving discourse quality, especially in the presence of organized extreme groups. Going beyond one-shot analyses on smaller samples prevalent in most prior studies, our findings have implications for the successful management of public online spaces through collective civic moderation.
Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Optimal Control with State-Dependent Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Distributionally Robust Optimal Control (DROC) is a framework that enables robust control in a stochastic setting where the true disturbance distribution is unknown. Traditional DROC approaches require given ambiguity sets and KL divergence bounds to represent the distributional uncertainty; however, these quantities are often unavailable a priori or require manual specification. To overcome this limitation, we propose a data-driven approach that jointly estimates the uncertainty distribution and the corresponding KL divergence bound, which we refer to as $\mathrm{D}^3\mathrm{ROC}$. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we consider a car-like robot navigation task with unknown noise distributions. The experimental results show that $\mathrm{D}^3\mathrm{ROC}$ yields robust and effective control policies, outperforming iterative Linear Quadratic Gaussian (iLQG) control and demonstrating strong adaptability to varying noise distributions.
Calibrating Transformers via Sparse Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Transformer models have achieved profound success in prediction tasks in a wide range of applications in natural language processing, speech recognition and computer vision. Extending Transformer's success to safety-critical domains requires calibrated uncertainty estimation which remains under-explored. To address this, we propose Sparse Gaussian Process attention (SGPA), which performs Bayesian inference directly in the output space of multi-head attention blocks (MHAs) in transformer to calibrate its uncertainty. It replaces the scaled dot-product operation with a valid symmetric kernel and uses sparse Gaussian processes (SGP) techniques to approximate the posterior processes of MHA outputs. Empirically, on a suite of prediction tasks on text, images and graphs, SGPA-based Transformers achieve competitive predictive accuracy, while noticeably improving both in-distribution calibration and out-of-distribution robustness and detection.
PRIMO: Private Regression in Multiple Outcomes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce a new private regression setting we call Private Regression in Multiple Outcomes (PRIMO), inspired by the common situation where a data analyst wants to perform a set of $l$ regressions while preserving privacy, where the features $X$ are shared across all $l$ regressions, and each regression $i \in [l]$ has a different vector of outcomes $y_i$. Naively applying existing private linear regression techniques $l$ times leads to a $\sqrt{l}$ multiplicative increase in error over the standard linear regression setting. We apply a variety of techniques including sufficient statistics perturbation (SSP) and geometric projection-based methods to develop scalable algorithms that outperform this baseline across a range of parameter regimes. In particular, we obtain no dependence on l in the asymptotic error when $l$ is sufficiently large. Empirically, on the task of genomic risk prediction with multiple phenotypes we find that even for values of $l$ far smaller than the theory would predict, our projection-based method improves the accuracy relative to the variant that doesn't use the projection.
Unimodal Distributions for Ordinal Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In many real-world prediction tasks, class labels contain information about the relative order between labels that are not captured by commonly used loss functions such as multicategory cross-entropy. Recently, the preference for unimodal distributions in the output space has been incorporated into models and loss functions to account for such ordering information. However, current approaches rely on heuristics that lack a theoretical foundation. Here, we propose two new approaches to incorporate the preference for unimodal distributions into the predictive model. We analyse the set of unimodal distributions in the probability simplex and establish fundamental properties. We then propose a new architecture that imposes unimodal distributions and a new loss term that relies on the notion of projection in a set to promote unimodality. Experiments show the new architecture achieves top-2 performance, while the proposed new loss term is very competitive while maintaining high unimodality.
FCN+: Global Receptive Convolution Makes FCN Great Again
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Fully convolutional network (FCN) is a seminal work for semantic segmentation. However, due to its limited receptive field, FCN cannot effectively capture global context information which is vital for semantic segmentation. As a result, it is beaten by state-of-the-art methods that leverage different filter sizes for larger receptive fields. However, such a strategy usually introduces more parameters and increases the computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel global receptive convolution (GRC) to effectively increase the receptive field of FCN for context information extraction, which results in an improved FCN termed FCN+. The GRC provides the global receptive field for convolution without introducing any extra learnable parameters. The motivation of GRC is that different channels of a convolutional filter can have different grid sampling locations across the whole input feature map. Specifically, the GRC first divides the channels of the filter into two groups. The grid sampling locations of the first group are shifted to different spatial coordinates across the whole feature map, according to their channel indexes. This can help the convolutional filter capture the global context information. The grid sampling location of the second group remains unchanged to keep the original location information. By convolving using these two groups, the GRC can integrate the global context into the original location information of each pixel for better dense prediction results. With the GRC built in, FCN+ can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation tasks, as verified on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and ADE20K. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Zhongying-Deng/FCN_Plus.
Algorithmic neutrality
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Algorithms wield increasing power over our lives. They can and often do wield that power unfairly, and much has been said about algorithmic fairness. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has been largely neglected. I investigate algorithmic neutrality, asking: What is it? Is it possible? And what is its normative significance?
A Theory for Semantic Channel Coding With Many-to-one Source
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

As one of the potential key technologies of 6G, semantic communication is still in its infancy and there are many open problems, such as semantic entropy definition and semantic channel coding theory. To address these challenges, we investigate semantic information measures and semantic channel coding theorem. Specifically, we propose a semantic entropy definition as the uncertainty in the semantic interpretation of random variable symbols in the context of knowledge bases, which can be transformed into existing semantic entropy definitions under given conditions. Moreover, different from traditional communications, semantic communications can achieve accurate transmission of semantic information under a non-zero bit error rate. Based on this property, we derive a semantic channel coding theorem for a typical semantic communication with many-to-one source (i.e., multiple source sequences express the same meaning), and prove its achievability and converse based on a generalized Fano's inequality. Finally, numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed semantic entropy and semantic channel coding theorem.
On Onboard LiDAR-based Flying Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

A new robust and accurate approach for the detection and localization of flying objects with the purpose of highly dynamic aerial interception and agile multi-robot interaction is presented in this paper. The approach is proposed for use on board of autonomous aerial vehicles equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor. It relies on a novel 3D occupancy voxel mapping method for the target detection that provides high localization accuracy and robustness with respect to varying environments and appearance changes of the target. In combination with a proposed cluster-based multi-target tracker, sporadic false positives are suppressed, state estimation of the target is provided, and the detection latency is negligible. This makes the system suitable for tasks of agile multi-robot interaction, such as autonomous aerial interception or formation control where fast, precise, and robust relative localization of other robots is crucial. We evaluate the viability and performance of the system in simulated and real-world experiments which demonstrate that at a range of 20m, our system is capable of reliably detecting a micro-scale UAV with an almost 100% recall, 0.2m accuracy, and 20ms delay.
Fast algorithms for Vizing's theorem on bounded degree graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

Vizing's theorem states that every graph $G$ of maximum degree $Δ$ can be properly edge-colored using $Δ+ 1$ colors. The fastest currently known $(Δ+1)$-edge-coloring algorithm for general graphs is due to Sinnamon and runs in time $O(m\sqrt{n})$, where $n :=|V(G)|$ and $m :=|E(G)|$. We investigate the case when $Δ$ is constant, i.e., $Δ= O(1)$. In this regime, the runtime of Sinnamon's algorithm is $O(n^{3/2})$, which can be improved to $O(n \log n)$, as shown by Gabow, Nishizeki, Kariv, Leven, and Terada. Here we give an algorithm whose running time is only $O(n)$, which is obviously best possible. Prior to this work, no linear-time $(Δ+1)$-edge-coloring algorithm was known for any $Δ\geq 4$. Using some of the same ideas, we also develop new algorithms for $(Δ+1)$-edge-coloring in the $\mathsf{LOCAL}$ model of distributed computation. Namely, when $Δ$ is constant, we design a deterministic $\mathsf{LOCAL}$ algorithm with running time $\tilde{O}(\log^5 n)$ and a randomized $\mathsf{LOCAL}$ algorithm with running time $O(\log ^2 n)$. Although our focus is on the constant $Δ$ regime, our results remain interesting for $Δ$ up to $\log^{o(1)} n$, since the dependence of their running time on $Δ$ is polynomial. The key new ingredient in our algorithms is a novel application of the entropy compression method.
Boosting Source Code Learning with Text-Oriented Data Augmentation: An Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable advancements in source code learning, which applies deep neural networks (DNNs) to tackle various software engineering tasks. Similar to other DNN-based domains, source code learning also requires massive high-quality training data to achieve the success of these applications. Data augmentation, a technique used to produce additional training data, is widely adopted in other domains (e.g. computer vision). However, the existing practice of data augmentation in source code learning is limited to simple syntax-preserved methods, such as code refactoring. In this paper, considering that source code can also be represented as text data, we take an early step to investigate the effectiveness of data augmentation methods originally designed for natural language texts in the context of source code learning. To this end, we focus on code classification tasks and conduct a comprehensive empirical study across four critical code problems and four DNN architectures to assess the effectiveness of 25 data augmentation methods. Our results reveal specific data augmentation methods that yield more accurate and robust models for source code learning. Additionally, we discover that the data augmentation methods remain beneficial even when they slightly break source code syntax.