OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Xihe: Scalable Zero-Shot Time Series Learner Via Hierarchical Interleaved Block Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid advancement of time series foundation models (TSFMs) has been propelled by migrating architectures from language models. While existing TSFMs demonstrate impressive performance, their direct adoption of cross-domain architectures constrains effective capture of multiscale temporal dependencies inherent to time series data. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced during zero-shot transfer across datasets with divergent underlying patterns and sampling strategies. To address these challenges, we propose Hierarchical Interleaved Block Attention (HIBA) which employs hierarchical inter- and intra-block sparse attention to effectively capture multi-scale dependencies. Intra-block attention facilitates local information exchange, and inter-block attention operates across blocks to capture global temporal pattern interaction and dynamic evolution. Leveraging the HIBA architecture, we introduce Xihe, a scalable TSFM family spanning from an ultra-efficient 9.5M parameter configuration to high-capacity 1.5B variant. Evaluated on the comprehensive GIFT-Eval benchmark, our most compact Xihe-tiny model (9.5M) surpasses the majority of contemporary TSFMs, demonstrating remarkable parameter efficiency. More impressively, Xihe-max (1.5B) establishes new state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing previous best results by a substantial margin. This consistent performance excellence across the entire parameter spectrum provides compelling evidence for the exceptional generalization capabilities and architectural superiority of HIBA.
Training data membership inference via Gaussian process meta-modeling: a post-hoc analysis approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) test whether a data point was part of a model's training set, posing serious privacy risks. Existing methods often depend on shadow models or heavy query access, which limits their practicality. We propose GP-MIA, an efficient and interpretable approach based on Gaussian process (GP) meta-modeling. Using post-hoc metrics such as accuracy, entropy, dataset statistics, and optional sensitivity features (e.g. gradients, NTK measures) from a single trained model, GP-MIA trains a GP classifier to distinguish members from non-members while providing calibrated uncertainty estimates. Experiments on synthetic data, real-world fraud detection data, CIFAR-10, and WikiText-2 show that GP-MIA achieves high accuracy and generalizability, offering a practical alternative to existing MIAs.
SynCast: Synergizing Contradictions in Precipitation Nowcasting via Diffusion Sequential Preference Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Precipitation nowcasting based on radar echoes plays a crucial role in monitoring extreme weather and supporting disaster prevention. Although deep learning approaches have achieved significant progress, they still face notable limitations. For example, deterministic models tend to produce over-smoothed predictions, which struggle to capture extreme events and fine-scale precipitation patterns. Probabilistic generative models, due to their inherent randomness, often show fluctuating performance across different metrics and rarely achieve consistently optimal results. Furthermore, precipitation nowcasting is typically evaluated using multiple metrics, some of which are inherently conflicting. For instance, there is often a trade-off between the Critical Success Index (CSI) and the False Alarm Ratio (FAR), making it challenging for existing models to deliver forecasts that perform well on both metrics simultaneously. To address these challenges, we introduce preference optimization into precipitation nowcasting for the first time, motivated by the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback in large language models. Specifically, we propose SynCast, a method that employs the two-stage post-training framework of Diffusion Sequential Preference Optimization (Diffusion-SPO), to progressively align conflicting metrics and consistently achieve superior performance. In the first stage, the framework focuses on reducing FAR, training the model to effectively suppress false alarms. Building on this foundation, the second stage further optimizes CSI with constraints that preserve FAR alignment, thereby achieving synergistic improvements across these conflicting metrics.
A Literature Review On Stewart-Gough Platform Calibrations A Literature Review On Stewart-Gough Platform Calibrations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Researchers have studied Stewart-Gough platforms, also known as Gough-Stewart platforms or hexapod platforms extensively for their inherent fine control characteristics. Their studies led to the potential deployment opportunities of Stewart-Gough Platforms in many critical applications such as the medical field, engineering machines, space research, electronic chip manufacturing, automobile manufacturing, etc. Some of these applications need micro and nano-level movement control in 3D space for the motions to be precise, complicated, and repeatable; a Stewart-Gough platform fulfills these challenges smartly. For this, the platform must be more accurate than the specified application accuracy level and thus proper calibration for a parallel robot is crucial. Forward kinematics-based calibration for these hexapod machines becomes unnecessarily complex and inverse kinematics complete this task with much ease. To experiment with different calibration techniques, various calibration approaches were implemented by using external instruments, constraining one or more motions of the system, and using extra sensors for auto or self-calibration. This survey paid attention to those key methodologies, their outcome, and important details related to inverse kinematic-based parallel robot calibrations. It was observed during this study that the researchers focused on improving the accuracy of the platform position and orientation considering the errors contributed by one source or multiple sources. The error sources considered are mainly kinematic and structural, in some cases, environmental factors also are reviewed, however, those calibrations are done under no-load conditions. This study aims to review the present state of the art in this field and highlight the processes and errors considered for the calibration of Stewart-Gough platforms.
SIGN: Schema-Induced Games for Naming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Real-world AI systems are tackling increasingly complex problems, often through interactions among large language model (LLM) agents. When these agents develop inconsistent conventions, coordination can break down. Applications such as collaborative coding and distributed planning therefore require reliable, consistent communication, and scalability is a central concern as systems grow. We introduce Schema-Induced Games for Naming (SIGN), a naming game that examines how lightweight structure can steer convention formation. We compare schema-induced communication to unconstrained natural language and find faster convergence with up to 5.8x higher agreement. These results suggest that minimal structure can act as a simple control knob for efficient multi-agent coordination, pointing toward broader applications beyond the naming game.
Preventing Catastrophic Forgetting: Behavior-Aware Sampling for Safer Language Model Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models often lose previously aligned safety behaviors when fine-tuned on benign data, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Prior work shows that adding random safety examples can mitigate this effect, but it remains unclear which examples are most effective. We propose a behavior-aware sampling framework that selects safety examples based on two complementary factors: instruction-response behavior (e.g., refusal versus compliance) and semantic diversity across harm categories. Systematic evaluation shows that this approach substantially reduces harmful outputs while maintaining helpfulness, achieving up to a 41% reduction in harmfulness with only 0.5% additional training data. These results highlight how targeted data selection can improve the safety and efficiency of fine-tuning at scale.
Enabling Robust In-Context Memory and Rapid Task Adaptation in Transformers with Hebbian and Gradient-Based Plasticity
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models display in-context learning as an emergent effect of scale, but they rely on static weights during inference. In contrast, biological systems continually adapt via synaptic plasticity. We investigate whether explicit, biologically inspired plasticity can endow Transformers with faster in-sequence adaptation. To this end, we augment decoder-only Transformers with fast-weight modules updated either by (i) a neuromodulated Hebbian rule or (ii) the gradient-based plasticity mechanism of Duan et al. (2023). Across copying, regression, and few-shot classification tasks (CIFAR-FS, Omniglot), Hebbian plasticity consistently achieves lower loss and stronger few-shot generalization, while gradient-based updates perform best on long-horizon credit assignment. When associations are short and linearly separable, static weights suffice, defining a clear boundary condition for when plasticity helps. Analysis of learned modulatory signals reveals that gradient-based rules maintain large, persistent updates, whereas Hebbian plasticity is sharply gated around salient events. Together, these results show that explicit plasticity complements attention by enabling rapid, task-specific adaptation, and clarify when different plasticity mechanisms are most effective.
Heaven & Hell II: Scale Laws and Robustness in One-Step Heaven-Hell Consensus
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

We study Heaven-Hell dynamics, a model for network consensus. A known result establishes an exact one-step convergence threshold for systems with a single uniform hub: the per-node inbound hub weight W suffices if and only if W >= maxrest, the maximum non-hub inbound mass. We develop scale laws and operational refinements that make this threshold robust to tie-breaking policies, node-specific tolerances, targeted seeding, multiple hubs, and asynchronous updates. Our contributions include a conservation-law perspective, parameterized tie policies, tighter pointwise bounds improving on classical worst-case guarantees, one-pass fairness for asynchronous updates, and sufficient conditions for seeded convergence. All proofs are mechanized in Coq, with experiments on rings, grids, scale-free graphs, and heterogeneous weighted graphs validating tightness and gap closures
Performance Trade-offs of Optimizing Small Language Models for E-Commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer state-of-the-art performance in natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, the deployment of leading commercial models for specialized tasks, such as e-commerce, is often hindered by high computational costs, latency, and operational expenses. This paper investigates the viability of smaller, open-weight models as a resource-efficient alternative. We present a methodology for optimizing a one-billion-parameter Llama 3.2 model for multilingual e-commerce intent recognition. The model was fine-tuned using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on a synthetically generated dataset designed to mimic real-world user queries. Subsequently, we applied post-training quantization techniques, creating GPU-optimized (GPTQ) and CPU-optimized (GGUF) versions. Our results demonstrate that the specialized 1B model achieves 99% accuracy, matching the performance of the significantly larger GPT-4.1 model. A detailed performance analysis revealed critical, hardware-dependent trade-offs: while 4-bit GPTQ reduced VRAM usage by 41%, it paradoxically slowed inference by 82% on an older GPU architecture (NVIDIA T4) due to dequantization overhead. Conversely, GGUF formats on a CPU achieved a speedup of up to 18x in inference throughput and a reduction of over 90% in RAM consumption compared to the FP16 baseline. We conclude that small, properly optimized open-weight models are not just a viable but a more suitable alternative for domain-specific applications, offering state-of-the-art accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost.
FlowOpt: Fast Optimization Through Whole Flow Processes for Training-Free Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The remarkable success of diffusion and flow-matching models has ignited a surge of works on adapting them at test time for controlled generation tasks. Examples range from image editing to restoration, compression and personalization. However, due to the iterative nature of the sampling process in those models, it is computationally impractical to use gradient-based optimization to directly control the image generated at the end of the process. As a result, existing methods typically resort to manipulating each timestep separately. Here we introduce FlowOpt - a zero-order (gradient-free) optimization framework that treats the entire flow process as a black box, enabling optimization through the whole sampling path without backpropagation through the model. Our method is both highly efficient and allows users to monitor the intermediate optimization results and perform early stopping if desired. We prove a sufficient condition on FlowOpt's step-size, under which convergence to the global optimum is guaranteed. We further show how to empirically estimate this upper bound so as to choose an appropriate step-size. We demonstrate how FlowOpt can be used for image editing, showcasing two options: (i) inversion (determining the initial noise that generates a given image), and (ii) directly steering the edited image to be similar to the source image while conforming to a target text prompt. In both cases, FlowOpt achieves state-of-the-art results while using roughly the same number of neural function evaluations (NFEs) as existing methods. Code and examples are available on the project's webpage.
Reconnaissance Automatique des Langues des Signes : Une Approche Hybridée CNN-LSTM Basée sur Mediapipe
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Sign languages play a crucial role in the communication of deaf communities, but they are often marginalized, limiting access to essential services such as healthcare and education. This study proposes an automatic sign language recognition system based on a hybrid CNN-LSTM architecture, using Mediapipe for gesture keypoint extraction. Developed with Python, TensorFlow and Streamlit, the system provides real-time gesture translation. The results show an average accuracy of 92\%, with very good performance for distinct gestures such as ``Hello'' and ``Thank you''. However, some confusions remain for visually similar gestures, such as ``Call'' and ``Yes''. This work opens up interesting perspectives for applications in various fields such as healthcare, education and public services.
Do You Trust the Process?: Modeling Institutional Trust for Community Adoption of Reinforcement Learning Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Many governmental bodies are adopting AI policies for decision-making. In particular, Reinforcement Learning has been used to design policies that citizens would be expected to follow if implemented. Much RL work assumes that citizens follow these policies, and evaluate them with this in mind. However, we know from prior work that without institutional trust, citizens will not follow policies put in place by governments. In this work, we develop a trust-aware RL algorithm for resource allocation in communities. We consider the case of humanitarian engineering, where the organization is aiming to distribute some technology or resource to community members. We use a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient approach to learn a resource allocation that fits the needs of the organization. Then, we simulate resource allocation according to the learned policy, and model the changes in institutional trust of community members. We investigate how this incorporation of institutional trust affects outcomes, and ask how effectively an organization can learn policies if trust values are private. We find that incorporating trust into RL algorithms can lead to more successful policies, specifically when the organization's goals are less certain. We find more conservative trust estimates lead to increased fairness and average community trust, though organization success suffers. Finally, we explore a strategy to prevent unfair outcomes to communities. We implement a quota system by an external entity which decreases the organization's utility when it does not serve enough community members. We find this intervention can improve fairness and trust among communities in some cases, while decreasing the success of the organization. This work underscores the importance of institutional trust in algorithm design and implementation, and identifies a tension between organization success and community well-being.
Caption-Driven Explainability: Probing CNNs for Bias via CLIP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Robustness has become one of the most critical problems in machine learning (ML). The science of interpreting ML models to understand their behavior and improve their robustness is referred to as explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). One of the state-of-the-art XAI methods for computer vision problems is to generate saliency maps. A saliency map highlights the pixel space of an image that excites the ML model the most. However, this property could be misleading if spurious and salient features are present in overlapping pixel spaces. In this paper, we propose a caption-based XAI method, which integrates a standalone model to be explained into the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model using a novel network surgery approach. The resulting caption-based XAI model identifies the dominant concept that contributes the most to the models prediction. This explanation minimizes the risk of the standalone model falling for a covariate shift and contributes significantly towards developing robust ML models. Our code is available at https://github.com/patch0816/caption-driven-xai
Rethinking UX for Sustainable Science Gateways: Orientations from Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

As science gateways mature, sustainability has become a central concern for funders, developers, and institutions. Although user experience (UX) is increasingly acknowledged as vital, it is often approached narrowly--limited to interface usability or deferred until late in development. This paper argues that UX should be understood not as a discrete feature or evaluation stage but as a design-oriented perspective for reasoning about sustainability. Drawing on principles from user-centered design and systems thinking, this view recognizes that infrastructure, staffing, community engagement, and development timelines all shape how gateways are experienced and maintained over time. Based on an interview study and consulting experience with more than 65 gateway projects, the paper identifies three recurring orientations toward UX--ad hoc, project-based, and strategic--that characterize how teams engage with users and integrate design thinking into their workflows. These orientations are not a maturity model but a reflective lens for understanding how UX is positioned within gateway practice. Reframing UX as a structural dimension of sustainability highlights its role in building adaptable, community-aligned, and enduring scientific infrastructure.
Automatic Assessment of Students' Classroom Engagement with Bias Mitigated Multi-task Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

With the rise of online and virtual learning, monitoring and enhancing student engagement have become an important aspect of effective education. Traditional methods of assessing a student's involvement might not be applicable directly to virtual environments. In this study, we focused on this problem and addressed the need to develop an automated system to detect student engagement levels during online learning. We proposed a novel training method which can discourage a model from leveraging sensitive features like gender for its predictions. The proposed method offers benefits not only in the enforcement of ethical standards, but also to enhance interpretability of the model predictions. We applied an attribute-orthogonal regularization technique to a split-model classifier, which uses multiple transfer learning strategies to achieve effective results in reducing disparity in the distribution of prediction for sensitivity groups from a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.897 for the unmitigated model, to 0.999 for the mitigated model. The source code for this project is available on https://github.com/ashiskb/elearning-engagement-study .
Compositional Bias Control in Large Language Models: Preference Learning Fails, Supervision Succeeds
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) still produce gender-stereotyped language even in occupation-neutral contexts that reflect deep societal biases (Rudinger et al., 2018). To address this, prior work has proposed prompting, constrained decoding (Dathathri et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2024), post-processing, and fine-tuning-based alignment (Rafailov et al., 2023; Ravfogel et al., 2022). However, the comparative efficacy and learning dynamics remain little understood. We report a comparative analysis of six control techniques for bias mitigation: prompt-only, generate-and-filter, DFA-based Ctrl-G decoding, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP). We evaluate each method on a compositional constraint task. This task requires generating sentences that contain at least one agentic and one communal descriptor for each of the twenty Winogender-derived occupations. We quantify trade-offs between control strength and naturalness with evaluations of constraint compliance, lexical diversity, and fluency. Our results reveal key contrasts among the methods: SFT achieves 99.87 +- 0.15% compliance and high lexical diversity, while DPO, despite similar training stability, fails at 4.53 +- 0.82%. Ctrl-G guarantees perfect compliance, but at the cost of severely reduced fluency and diversity. Preference-based learning fundamentally differs: it cannot satisfy compositional constraints, as binary preference signals encode ranking, not logical conjunctions. Only explicit positive supervision enables mitigation of compositional biases; preference-based alignment fails to generalize logical structures, underscoring the limitations of preference learning and the necessity of explicit supervision for fair and fluent controlled generation.