OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TUNeS: A Temporal U-Net with Self-Attention for Video-based Surgical Phase Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Objective: To enable context-aware computer assistance in the operating room of the future, cognitive systems need to understand automatically which surgical phase is being performed by the medical team. The primary source of information for surgical phase recognition is typically video, which presents two challenges: extracting meaningful features from the video stream and effectively modeling temporal information in the sequence of visual features. Methods: For temporal modeling, attention mechanisms have gained popularity due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies. In this paper, we explore design choices for attention in existing temporal models for surgical phase recognition and propose a novel approach that uses attention more effectively and does not require hand-crafted constraints: TUNeS, an efficient and simple temporal model that incorporates self-attention at the core of a convolutional U-Net structure. In addition, we propose to train the feature extractor, a standard CNN, together with an LSTM on preferably long video segments, i.e., with long temporal context. Results: In our experiments, almost all temporal models performed better on top of feature extractors that were trained with longer temporal context. On these contextualized features, TUNeS achieves state-of-the-art results on the Cholec80 dataset. Conclusion: This study offers new insights on how to use attention mechanisms to build accurate and efficient temporal models for surgical phase recognition. Significance: Implementing automatic surgical phase recognition is essential to automate the analysis and optimization of surgical workflows and to enable context-aware computer assistance during surgery, thus ultimately improving patient care.
LLMs as Workers in Human-Computational Algorithms? Replicating Crowdsourcing Pipelines with LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

LLMs have shown promise in replicating human-like behavior in crowdsourcing tasks that were previously thought to be exclusive to human abilities. However, current efforts focus mainly on simple atomic tasks. We explore whether LLMs can replicate more complex crowdsourcing pipelines. We find that modern LLMs can simulate some of crowdworkers' abilities in these ``human computation algorithms,'' but the level of success is variable and influenced by requesters' understanding of LLM capabilities, the specific skills required for sub-tasks, and the optimal interaction modality for performing these sub-tasks. We reflect on human and LLMs' different sensitivities to instructions, stress the importance of enabling human-facing safeguards for LLMs, and discuss the potential of training humans and LLMs with complementary skill sets. Crucially, we show that replicating crowdsourcing pipelines offers a valuable platform to investigate 1) the relative LLM strengths on different tasks (by cross-comparing their performances on sub-tasks) and 2) LLMs' potential in complex tasks, where they can complete part of the tasks while leaving others to humans.
Towards Sustainable Research Data Management in Human-Computer Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

We discuss important aspects of HCI research regarding Research Data Management (RDM) to achieve better publication processes and higher reuse of HCI research results. Various context elements of RDM for HCI are discussed, including examples of existing and emerging infrastructures for RDM. We briefly discuss existing approaches and come up with additional aspects which need to be addressed. This is to apply the so-called FAIR principle fully, which -- besides being findable and accessible -- also includes interoperability and reusability. We also discuss briefly the kind of research data types that play a role here and propose to build on existing work and involve the HCI scientific community to improve current practices.
Assessing the Use of AutoML for Data-Driven Software Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Background. Due to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for building software applications, companies are struggling to recruit employees with a deep understanding of such technologies. In this scenario, AutoML is soaring as a promising solution to fill the AI/ML skills gap since it promises to automate the building of end-to-end AI/ML pipelines that would normally be engineered by specialized team members. Aims. Despite the growing interest and high expectations, there is a dearth of information about the extent to which AutoML is currently adopted by teams developing AI/ML-enabled systems and how it is perceived by practitioners and researchers. Method. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we present a mixed-method study comprising a benchmark of 12 end-to-end AutoML tools on two SE datasets and a user survey with follow-up interviews to further our understanding of AutoML adoption and perception. Results. We found that AutoML solutions can generate models that outperform those trained and optimized by researchers to perform classification tasks in the SE domain. Also, our findings show that the currently available AutoML solutions do not live up to their names as they do not equally support automation across the stages of the ML development workflow and for all the team members. Conclusions. We derive insights to inform the SE research community on how AutoML can facilitate their activities and tool builders on how to design the next generation of AutoML technologies.
ESASCF: Expertise Extraction, Generalization and Reply Framework for an Optimized Automation of Network Security Compliance
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The Cyber threats exposure has created worldwide pressure on organizations to comply with cyber security standards and policies for protecting their digital assets. Vulnerability assessment (VA) and Penetration Testing (PT) are widely adopted Security Compliance (SC) methods to identify security gaps and anticipate security breaches. In the computer networks context and despite the use of autonomous tools and systems, security compliance remains highly repetitive and resources consuming. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to tackle the ever-growing problem of efficiency and effectiveness in network infrastructures security auditing by formally introducing, designing, and developing an Expert-System Automated Security Compliance Framework (ESASCF) that enables industrial and open-source VA and PT tools and systems to extract, process, store and re-use the expertise in a human-expert way to allow direct application in similar scenarios or during the periodic re-testing. The implemented model was then integrated within the ESASCF and tested on different size networks and proved efficient in terms of time-efficiency and testing effectiveness allowing ESASCF to take over autonomously the SC in Re-testing and offloading Expert by automating repeated segments SC and thus enabling Experts to prioritize important tasks in Ad-Hoc compliance tests. The obtained results validate the performance enhancement notably by cutting the time required for an expert to 50% in the context of typical corporate networks first SC and 20% in re-testing, representing a significant cost-cutting. In addition, the framework allows a long-term impact illustrated in the knowledge extraction, generalization, and re-utilization, which enables better SC confidence independent of the human expert skills, coverage, and wrong decisions resulting in impactful false negatives.
A Benchmarking Study of Vision-Based Robotic Grasping Algorithms: A Comparative Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

We present a benchmarking study of vision-based robotic grasping algorithms and provide a comparative analysis. In particular, we compare two machine-learning-based and two analytical algorithms using an existing benchmarking protocol from the literature and determine the algorithms strengths and weaknesses under different experimental conditions. These conditions include variations in lighting, background textures, cameras with different noise levels, and grippers. We also run analogous experiments in simulations and with real robots and present the discrepancies. Some experiments are also run in two different laboratories using the same protocols to further analyze the repeatability of our results. We believe that this study, comprising 5040 experiments, provides important insights into the role and challenges of systematic experimentation in robotic manipulation and guides the development of new algorithms by considering the factors that could impact the performance. The experiment recordings and our benchmarking software are publicly available.
Extracting total Amb programs from proofs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

We present a logical system CFP (Concurrent Fixed Point Logic) supporting the extraction of nondeterministic and concurrent programs that are provably total and correct. CFP is an intuitionistic first-order logic with inductive and coinductive definitions extended by two propositional operators: Restriction (binary), a strengthening of implication, and a unary operator for total concurrency. The source of the extraction are formal CFP proofs, the target is a lambda calculus with constructors and recursion extended by a constructor Amb (for McCarthy's amb) which is interpreted operationally as globally angelic choice and is used to implement nondeterminism and concurrency. The correctness of extracted programs is proven via an intermediate domain-theoretic denotational semantics. We demonstrate the usefulness of our system by extracting a nondeterministic program that translates infinite Gray code into the signed digit representation. A noteworthy feature of CFP is the fact that the proof rules for restriction and concurrency involve variants of the classical law of excluded middle that would not be interpretable computationally without Amb.This is a revised and extended version of the conference paper presented at ESOP 2022 with the same title that contains full proofs of all major results.
Dyn-E: Local Appearance Editing of Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, the editing of neural radiance fields (NeRFs) has gained considerable attention, but most prior works focus on static scenes while research on the appearance editing of dynamic scenes is relatively lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to edit the local appearance of dynamic NeRFs by manipulating pixels in a single frame of training video. Specifically, to locally edit the appearance of dynamic NeRFs while preserving unedited regions, we introduce a local surface representation of the edited region, which can be inserted into and rendered along with the original NeRF and warped to arbitrary other frames through a learned invertible motion representation network. By employing our method, users without professional expertise can easily add desired content to the appearance of a dynamic scene. We extensively evaluate our approach on various scenes and show that our approach achieves spatially and temporally consistent editing results. Notably, our approach is versatile and applicable to different variants of dynamic NeRF representations.
Settling the Sample Complexity of Online Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a ``large-sample'' regime, imposing enormous burn-in cost in order for their algorithms to operate optimally. How to achieve minimax-optimal regret without incurring any burn-in cost has been an open problem in RL theory. We settle this problem for the context of finite-horizon inhomogeneous Markov decision processes. Specifically, we prove that a modified version of Monotonic Value Propagation (MVP), a model-based algorithm proposed by \cite{zhang2020reinforcement}, achieves a regret on the order of (modulo log factors) \begin{equation*} \min\big\{ \sqrt{SAH^3K}, \,HK \big\}, \end{equation*} where $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, $H$ is the planning horizon, and $K$ is the total number of episodes. This regret matches the minimax lower bound for the entire range of sample size $K\geq 1$, essentially eliminating any burn-in requirement. It also translates to a PAC sample complexity (i.e., the number of episodes needed to yield $\varepsilon$-accuracy) of $\frac{SAH^3}{\varepsilon^2}$ up to log factor, which is minimax-optimal for the full $\varepsilon$-range. Further, we extend our theory to unveil the influences of problem-dependent quantities like the optimal value/cost and certain variances. The key technical innovation lies in the development of a new regret decomposition strategy and a novel analysis paradigm to decouple complicated statistical dependency -- a long-standing challenge facing the analysis of online RL in the sample-hungry regime.
Spectral Independence and Local-to-Global Techniques for Optimal Mixing of Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2025
Year: 2025

This monograph is an exposition on an exciting new technique known as spectral independence, which has been instrumental in analyzing the convergence rate of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. For a high-dimensional distribution defined on labelings of the vertices of an n-vertex graph, the spectral independence condition, introduced by Anari, Liu, and Oveis Gharan (2020), is a bound on the maximum eigenvalue of the nxn influence matrix whose entries capture the influence between pairs of vertices (closely related to the covariance between the variables). In the first part of the monograph, we present results showing that spectral independence (and related techniques) imply fast mixing of simple Markov chains such as the Gibbs sampler. These proofs utilize local-to-global theorems which we will detail in this work. We focus on two applications: the hard-core model on independent sets of a graph (which is a binary graphical model) and random bases of a matroid. We demonstrate several methods for establishing spectral independence, including the correlation decay approach introduced by Weitz (2006) and the analytic approach introduced by Barvinok (2015) using zero-freeness of the associated complex-valued partition function. As a consequence of the techniques presented in this monograph we obtain fast mixing of the Gibbs sampler on general graphs in the so-called tree-uniqueness region, polynomial-time mixing on general graphs at the critical point for the uniqueness threshold, and polynomial-time mixing on random regular graphs beyond the uniqueness threshold. We also utilize the local-to-global framework of spectral independence and the Trickle-Down theorem of Oppenheim (2018) to prove fast mixing of the bases-exchange walk for generating a random basis of an arbitrary matroid, which was established by Anari, Liu, Oveis Gharan and Vinzant (2019).
The detection and rectification for identity-switch based on unfalsified control
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The purpose of multi-object tracking (MOT) is to continuously track and identify objects detected in videos. Currently, most methods for multi-object tracking model the motion information and combine it with appearance information to determine and track objects. In this paper, unfalsified control is employed to address the ID-switch problem in multi-object tracking. We establish sequences of appearance information variations for the trajectories during the tracking process and design a detection and rectification module specifically for ID-switch detection and recovery. We also propose a simple and effective strategy to address the issue of ambiguous matching of appearance information during the data association process. Experimental results on publicly available MOT datasets demonstrate that the tracker exhibits excellent effectiveness and robustness in handling tracking errors caused by occlusions and rapid movements.
HUTFormer: Hierarchical U-Net Transformer for Long-Term Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Traffic forecasting, which aims to predict traffic conditions based on historical observations, has been an enduring research topic and is widely recognized as an essential component of intelligent transportation. Recent proposals on Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks~(STGNNs) have made significant progress by combining sequential models with graph convolution networks. However, due to high complexity issues, STGNNs only focus on short-term traffic forecasting (e.g., 1-h ahead), while ignoring more practical long-term forecasting. In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore long-term traffic forecasting (e.g., 1-day ahead). To this end, we first reveal its unique challenges in exploiting multi-scale representations. Then, we propose a novel Hierarchical U-Net TransFormer~(HUTFormer) to address the issues of long-term traffic forecasting. HUTFormer consists of a hierarchical encoder and decoder to jointly generate and utilize multi-scale representations of traffic data. Specifically, for the encoder, we {\color{black}propose} window self-attention and segment merging to extract multi-scale representations from long-term traffic data. For the decoder, we design a cross-scale attention mechanism to effectively incorporate multi-scale representations. In addition, HUTFormer employs an efficient input embedding strategy to address the complexity issues. Extensive experiments on four traffic datasets show that the proposed HUTFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art traffic forecasting and long time series forecasting baselines.
Turkish Native Language Identification V2
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) for the Turkish language. NLI is the task of automatically identifying an individual's native language (L1) based on their writing or speech in a non-native language (L2). While most NLI research has focused on L2 English, our study extends this scope to L2 Turkish by analyzing a corpus of texts written by native speakers of Albanian, Arabic and Persian. We leverage a cleaned version of the Turkish Learner Corpus and demonstrate the effectiveness of syntactic features, comparing a structural Part-of-Speech n-gram model to a hybrid model that retains function words. Our models achieve promising results, and we analyze the most predictive features to reveal L1-specific transfer effects. We make our data and code publicly available for further study.
Bounding the Interleaving Distance for Mapper Graphs with a Loss Function
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2025
Year: 2025

Data consisting of a graph with a function mapping into $\mathbb{R}^d$ arise in many data applications, encompassing structures such as Reeb graphs, geometric graphs, and knot embeddings. As such, the ability to compare and cluster such objects is required in a data analysis pipeline, leading to a need for distances between them. In this work, we study the interleaving distance on discretization of these objects, called mapper graphs when $d=1$, where functor representations of the data can be compared by finding pairs of natural transformations between them. However, in many cases, computation of the interleaving distance is NP-hard. For this reason, we take inspiration from recent work by Robinson to find quality measures for families of maps that do not rise to the level of a natural transformation, called assignments. We then endow the functor images with the extra structure of a metric space and define a loss function which measures how far an assignment is from making the required diagrams of an interleaving commute. Finally we show that the computation of the loss function is polynomial with a given assignment. We believe this idea is both powerful and translatable, with the potential to provide approximations and bounds on interleavings in a broad array of contexts.
The Initial Screening Order Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the role of the initial screening order (ISO) in candidate screening. The ISO refers to the order in which the screener searches the candidate pool when selecting $k$ candidates. Today, it is common for the ISO to be the product of an information access system, such as an online platform or a database query. The ISO has been largely overlooked in the literature, despite its impact on the optimality and fairness of the selected $k$ candidates, especially under a human screener. We define two problem formulations describing the search behavior of the screener given an ISO: the best-$k$, where it selects the top $k$ candidates; and the good-$k$, where it selects the first good-enough $k$ candidates. To study the impact of the ISO, we introduce a human-like screener and compare it to its algorithmic counterpart, where the human-like screener is conceived to be inconsistent over time. Our analysis, in particular, shows that the ISO, under a human-like screener solving for the good-$k$ problem, hinders individual fairness despite meeting group fairness, and hampers the optimality of the selected $k$ candidates. This is due to position bias, where a candidate's evaluation is affected by its position within the ISO. We report extensive simulated experiments exploring the parameters of the best-$k$ and good-$k$ problems for both screeners. Our simulation framework is flexible enough to account for multiple candidate screening tasks, being an alternative to running real-world procedures.
Summaries, Highlights, and Action items: Design, implementation and evaluation of an LLM-powered meeting recap system
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Meetings play a critical infrastructural role in coordinating work. The recent surge of hybrid and remote meetings in computer-mediated spaces has led to new problems (e.g., more time spent in less engaging meetings) and new opportunities (e.g., automated transcription/captioning and recap support). Advances in dialogue summarization offer the potential for improving post-meeting experiences, but fixed-length summaries often fail to meet diverse needs, such as quick overviews or detailed insights. To address these gaps, we use cognitive science and discourse theories to conceptualize two recap designs: important highlights and a structured, hierarchical minutes view, targeting complementary recap needs. We operationalize these representations into high-fidelity prototypes using dialogue summarization. Finally, we evaluate the representations' effectiveness with seven users in the context of their work meetings at Microsoft. Our results show both recap types are valuable in different contexts, enabling collaboration through discussions and consensus-building. Exploring the meaning of users adding, editing, and deleting from recaps suggests varying alignment for using these actions to improve AI-recap. Our design implications, such as incorporating organizational artifacts (e.g., linking presentations) in recaps and personalizing context, advance the discourse of effective recap designs for organizational work and support past results from cognition studies.