OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understanding Large Language Model Behaviors through Interactive Counterfactual Generation and Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring their safe and reliable use. However, existing explainable AI (XAI) methods for LLMs primarily rely on word-level explanations, which are often computationally inefficient and misaligned with human reasoning processes. Moreover, these methods often treat explanation as a one-time output, overlooking its inherently interactive and iterative nature. In this paper, we present LLM Analyzer, an interactive visualization system that addresses these limitations by enabling intuitive and efficient exploration of LLM behaviors through counterfactual analysis. Our system features a novel algorithm that generates fluent and semantically meaningful counterfactuals via targeted removal and replacement operations at user-defined levels of granularity. These counterfactuals are used to compute feature attribution scores, which are then integrated with concrete examples in a table-based visualization, supporting dynamic analysis of model behavior. A user study with LLM practitioners and interviews with experts demonstrate the system's usability and effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of involving humans in the explanation process as active participants rather than passive recipients.
EchoScene: Indoor Scene Generation via Information Echo over Scene Graph Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present EchoScene, an interactive and controllable generative model that generates 3D indoor scenes on scene graphs. EchoScene leverages a dual-branch diffusion model that dynamically adapts to scene graphs. Existing methods struggle to handle scene graphs due to varying numbers of nodes, multiple edge combinations, and manipulator-induced node-edge operations. EchoScene overcomes this by associating each node with a denoising process and enables collaborative information exchange, enhancing controllable and consistent generation aware of global constraints. This is achieved through an information echo scheme in both shape and layout branches. At every denoising step, all processes share their denoising data with an information exchange unit that combines these updates using graph convolution. The scheme ensures that the denoising processes are influenced by a holistic understanding of the scene graph, facilitating the generation of globally coherent scenes. The resulting scenes can be manipulated during inference by editing the input scene graph and sampling the noise in the diffusion model. Extensive experiments validate our approach, which maintains scene controllability and surpasses previous methods in generation fidelity. Moreover, the generated scenes are of high quality and thus directly compatible with off-the-shelf texture generation. Code and trained models are open-sourced.
Phylogenetic Network Diversity Parameterized by Reticulation Number and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2025
Year: 2025

Network Phylogenetic Diversity (Network-PD) is a measure for the diversity of a set of species based on a rooted phylogenetic network (with branch lengths and inheritance probabilities on the reticulation edges) describing the evolution of those species. We consider the Max-Network-PD problem: Given such a network, find k species with maximum Network-PD score. We show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) for binary networks, by describing an optimal algorithm running in O(2r log(k)(n + r)) time, with n the total number of species in the network and r its reticulation number. Furthermore, we show that Max-Network-PD is NP-hard for level-1 networks, proving that, unless P=NP, the FPT approach cannot be extended by using the level as parameter instead of the reticulation number.
In-and-Out: Algorithmic Diffusion for Sampling Convex Bodies
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

We present a new random walk for uniformly sampling high-dimensional convex bodies. It achieves state-of-the-art runtime complexity with stronger guarantees on the output than previously known, namely in Rényi divergence (which implies TV, $\mathcal{W}_2$, KL, $χ^2$). The proof departs from known approaches for polytime algorithms for the problem -- we utilize a stochastic diffusion perspective to show contraction to the target distribution with the rate of convergence determined by functional isoperimetric constants of the target distribution.
Balance Reward and Safety Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning: A Perspective of Gradient Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving reward performance through policy adjustments may adversely affect safety performance. In this study, we aim to address this conflicting relation by leveraging the theory of gradient manipulation. Initially, we analyze the conflict between reward and safety gradients. Subsequently, we tackle the balance between reward and safety optimization by proposing a soft switching policy optimization method, for which we provide convergence analysis. Based on our theoretical examination, we provide a safe RL framework to overcome the aforementioned challenge, and we develop a Safety-MuJoCo Benchmark to assess the performance of safe RL algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the Safety-MuJoCo Benchmark and a popular safe RL benchmark, Omnisafe. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms outperform several state-of-the-art baselines in terms of balancing reward and safety optimization.
Efficient Heterogeneous Large Language Model Decoding with Model-Attention Disaggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but also introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators. Although disaggregated serving architectures have been proposed to split different phases of LLM inference, the efficiency of decoding phase is still low. This is caused by the varying resource demands of different operators in the transformer-based LLMs. Specifically, the attention operator is memory-intensive, exhibiting a memory access pattern that clashes with the strengths of modern accelerators, especially for long context requests. To enhance the efficiency of LLM decoding, we introduce model-attention disaggregation. This approach leverages a collection of cheap, memory-optimized devices for the attention operator while still utilizing high-end accelerators for other parts of the model. This heterogeneous setup ensures that each component is tailored to its specific workload, maximizing overall performance and cost efficiency. Our comprehensive analysis and experiments confirm the viability of splitting the attention computation over multiple devices. Also, the communication bandwidth required between heterogeneous devices proves to be manageable with prevalent networking technologies. To further validate our theory, we develop and deploy Lamina, an LLM inference system that incorporates model-attention disaggregation in a distributed heterogeneous cluster. Experimental results indicate that Lamina can provide 16.1 ~ 90.1% higher estimated throughput than existing solutions with similar costs.
Channel Orthogonalization in Panel-Based LIS
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Large intelligent surface (LIS) has gained momentum as a potential 6G-enabling technology that expands the benefits of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). On the other hand, orthogonal space-division multiplexing (OSDM) may give a promising direction for efficient exploitation of the spatial resources, analogous as what is achieved with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in the frequency domain. To this end, we study how to enforce channel orthogonality in a panel-based LIS (P-LIS) scenario. Our proposed method consists of having a subset of active LIS-panels coherently serving a set of users, and another subset of LIS-panels operating in a novel low-power mode by implementing a receive and re-transmit (RRTx) process. This results in an inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel, where we characterize the RRTx processing required to achieve simultaneous orthogonality in time and space. We then employ the remaining degrees of freedom (DoFs) from the orthogonality constraint to minimize the RRTx processing power, where we derive a closed-form global minimizer, allowing for efficient implementation of the proposed scheme.
Attribution in Scientific Literature: New Benchmark and Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) present a promising yet challenging frontier for automated source citation in scientific communication. Previous approaches to citation generation have been limited by citation ambiguity and LLM overgeneralization. We introduce REASONS, a novel dataset with sentence-level annotations across 12 scientific domains from arXiv. Our evaluation framework covers two key citation scenarios: indirect queries (matching sentences to paper titles) and direct queries (author attribution), both enhanced with contextual metadata. We conduct extensive experiments with models such as GPT-O1, GPT-4O, GPT-3.5, DeepSeek, and other smaller models like Perplexity AI (7B). While top-tier LLMs achieve high performance in sentence attribution, they struggle with high hallucination rates, a key metric for scientific reliability. Our metadata-augmented approach reduces hallucination rates across all tasks, offering a promising direction for improvement. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with Mistral improves performance in indirect queries, reducing hallucination rates by 42% and maintaining competitive precision with larger models. However, adversarial testing highlights challenges in linking paper titles to abstracts, revealing fundamental limitations in current LLMs. REASONS provides a challenging benchmark for developing reliable and trustworthy LLMs in scientific applications
Autoformalizing Natural Language to First-Order Logic: A Case Study in Logical Fallacy Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Translating natural language into formal language such as First-Order Logic (FOL) is a foundational challenge in NLP with wide-ranging applications in automated reasoning, misinformation tracking, and knowledge validation. In this paper, we introduce Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL2FOL), a framework to autoformalize natural language to FOL step by step using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach addresses key challenges in this translation process, including the integration of implicit background knowledge. By leveraging structured representations generated by NL2FOL, we use Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solvers to reason about the logical validity of natural language statements. We present logical fallacy detection as a case study to evaluate the efficacy of NL2FOL. Being neurosymbolic, our approach also provides interpretable insights into the reasoning process and demonstrates robustness without requiring model fine-tuning or labeled training data. Our framework achieves strong performance on multiple datasets. On the LOGIC dataset, NL2FOL achieves an F1-score of 78%, while generalizing effectively to the LOGICCLIMATE dataset with an F1-score of 80%.
A Backdoor-based Explainable AI Benchmark for High Fidelity Evaluation of Attributions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Attribution methods compute importance scores for input features to explain model predictions. However, assessing the faithfulness of these methods remains challenging due to the absence of attribution ground truth to model predictions. In this work, we first identify a set of fidelity criteria that reliable benchmarks for attribution methods are expected to fulfill, thereby facilitating a systematic assessment of attribution benchmarks. Next, we introduce a Backdoor-based eXplainable AI benchmark (BackX) that adheres to the desired fidelity criteria. We theoretically establish the superiority of our approach over the existing benchmarks for well-founded attribution evaluation. With extensive analysis, we further establish a standardized evaluation setup that mitigates confounding factors such as post-processing techniques and explained predictions, thereby ensuring a fair and consistent benchmarking. This setup is ultimately employed for a comprehensive comparison of existing methods using BackX. Finally, our analysis also offers insights into defending against neural Trojans by utilizing the attributions.
ModelShield: Adaptive and Robust Watermark against Model Extraction Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate general intelligence across a variety of machine learning tasks, thereby enhancing the commercial value of their intellectual property (IP). To protect this IP, model owners typically allow user access only in a black-box manner, however, adversaries can still utilize model extraction attacks to steal the model intelligence encoded in model generation. Watermarking technology offers a promising solution for defending against such attacks by embedding unique identifiers into the model-generated content. However, existing watermarking methods often compromise the quality of generated content due to heuristic alterations and lack robust mechanisms to counteract adversarial strategies, thus limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive and robust watermarking method (named ModelShield) to protect the IP of LLMs. Our method incorporates a self-watermarking mechanism that allows LLMs to autonomously insert watermarks into their generated content to avoid the degradation of model content. We also propose a robust watermark detection mechanism capable of effectively identifying watermark signals under the interference of varying adversarial strategies. Besides, ModelShield is a plug-and-play method that does not require additional model training, enhancing its applicability in LLM deployments. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets and three LLMs demonstrate that our method surpasses existing methods in terms of defense effectiveness and robustness while significantly reducing the degradation of watermarking on the model-generated content.
The Call for Socially Aware Language Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Language technologies have made enormous progress, especially with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). On traditional tasks such as machine translation and sentiment analysis, these models perform at near-human level. These advances can, however, exacerbate a variety of issues that models have traditionally struggled with, such as bias, evaluation, and risks. In this position paper, we argue that many of these issues share a common core: a lack of awareness of the factors, context, and implications of the social environment in which NLP operates, which we call social awareness. While NLP is getting better at solving the formal linguistic aspects, limited progress has been made in adding the social awareness required for language applications to work in all situations for all users. Integrating social awareness into NLP models will make applications more natural, helpful, and safe, and will open up new possibilities. Thus we argue that substantial challenges remain for NLP to develop social awareness and that we are just at the beginning of a new era for the field.
How to generate all possible rational Wilf-Zeilberger forms?
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2025
Year: 2025

Wilf-Zeilberger pairs are fundamental in the algorithmic theory of Wilf and Zeilberger for computer-generated proofs of combinatorial identities. Wilf-Zeilberger forms are their high-dimensional generalizations, which can be used for proving and discovering convergence acceleration formulas. This paper presents a structural description of all possible rational such forms, which can be viewed as an additive analog of the classical Ore-Sato theorem. Based on this analog, we show a structural decomposition of so-called multivariate hyperarithmetic terms, which extend multivariate hypergeometric terms to the additive setting.
FastLloyd: Federated, Accurate, Secure, and Tunable $k$-Means Clustering with Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

We study the problem of privacy-preserving $k$-means clustering in the horizontally federated setting. Existing federated approaches using secure computation suffer from substantial overheads and do not offer output privacy. At the same time, differentially private (DP) $k$-means algorithms either assume a trusted central curator or significantly degrade utility by adding noise in the local DP model. Naively combining the secure and central DP solutions results in a protocol with impractical overhead. Instead, our work provides enhancements to both the DP and secure computation components, resulting in a design that is faster, more private, and more accurate than previous work. By utilizing the computational DP model, we design a lightweight, secure aggregation-based approach that achieves five orders of magnitude speed-up over state-of-the-art related work. Furthermore, we not only maintain the utility of the state-of-the-art in the central model of DP, but we improve the utility further by designing a new DP clustering mechanism.
Probing Human Visual Robustness with Neurally-Guided Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Humans effortlessly navigate the dynamic visual world, yet deep neural networks (DNNs), despite excelling at many visual tasks, are surprisingly vulnerable to minor image perturbations. Past theories suggest that human visual robustness arises from a representational space that evolves along the ventral visual stream (VVS) of the brain to increasingly tolerate object transformations. To test whether robustness is supported by such progression as opposed to being confined exclusively to specialized higher-order regions, we trained DNNs to align their representations with human neural responses from consecutive VVS regions while performing visual tasks. We demonstrate a hierarchical improvement in DNN robustness: alignment to higher-order VVS regions leads to greater improvement. To investigate the mechanism behind such robustness gains, we test a prominent hypothesis that attributes human robustness to the unique geometry of neural category manifolds in the VVS. We first reveal that more desirable manifold properties, specifically, smaller extent and better linear separability, indeed emerge across the human VVS. These properties can be inherited by neurally aligned DNNs and predict their subsequent robustness gains. Furthermore, we show that supervision from neural manifolds alone, via manifold guidance, is sufficient to qualitatively reproduce the hierarchical robustness improvements. Together, these results highlight the critical role of the evolving representational space across VVS in achieving robust visual inference, in part through the formation of more linearly separable category manifolds, which may in turn be leveraged to develop more robust AI systems.
Updating Windows Malware Detectors: Balancing Robustness and Regression against Adversarial EXEmples
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Adversarial EXEmples are carefully-perturbed programs tailored to evade machine learning Windows malware detectors, with an ongoing effort to develop robust models able to address detection effectiveness. However, even if robust models can prevent the majority of EXEmples, to maintain predictive power over time, models are fine-tuned to newer threats, leading either to partial updates or time-consuming retraining from scratch. Thus, even if the robustness against adversarial EXEmples is higher, the new models might suffer a regression in performance by misclassifying threats that were previously correctly detected. For these reasons, we study the trade-off between accuracy and regression when updating Windows malware detectors by proposing EXE-scanner, a plugin that can be chained to existing detectors to promptly stop EXEmples without causing regression. We empirically show that previously proposed hardening techniques suffer a regression of accuracy when updating non-robust models, exacerbating the gap when considering low false positives regimes and temporal drifts affecting data. Also, through EXE-scanner we gain evidence on the detectability of adversarial EXEmples, showcasing the presence of artifacts left inside while creating them. Due to its design, EXE-scanner can be chained to any classifier to obtain the best performance without the need for costly retraining. To foster reproducibility, we openly release the source code, along with the dataset of adversarial EXEmples based on state-of-the-art perturbation algorithms.
AFDM Channel Estimation in Multi-Scale Multi-Lag Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing (AFDM) is a brand new chirp-based multi-carrier (MC) waveform for high mobility communications, with promising advantages over Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and other MC waveforms. Existing AFDM research focuses on wireless communication at high carrier frequency (CF), which typically considers only Doppler frequency shift (DFS) as a result of mobility, while ignoring the accompanied Doppler time scaling (DTS) on waveform. However, for underwater acoustic (UWA) communication at much lower CF and propagating at speed of sound, the DTS effect could not be ignored and poses significant challenges for channel estimation. This paper analyzes the channel frequency response (CFR) of AFDM under multi-scale multi-lag (MSML) channels, where each propagating path could have different delay and DFS/DTS. Based on the newly derived input-output formula and its characteristics, two new channel estimation methods are proposed, i.e., AFDM with iterative multi-index (AFDM-IMI) estimation under low to moderate DTS, and AFDM with orthogonal matching pursuit (AFDM-OMP) estimation under high DTS. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods against the original AFDM channel estimation method. Moreover, the resulted AFDM system outperforms OFDM as well as Orthogonal Chirp Division Multiplexing (OCDM) in terms of channel estimation accuracy and bit error rate (BER), which is consistent with our theoretical analysis based on CFR overlap probability (COP), mutual incoherent property (MIP) and channel diversity gain under MSML channels.
DiffuseTrace: A Transparent and Flexible Watermarking Scheme for Latent Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable a wide range of applications but raise ethical concerns regarding illegal utilization. Adding watermarks to generative model outputs is a vital technique employed for copyright tracking and mitigating potential risks associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated contents. However, post-processed watermarking methods are unable to withstand generative watermark attacks and there exists a trade-off between image fidelity and watermark strength. Therefore, we propose a novel technique called DiffuseTrace. DiffuseTrace does not rely on fine-tuning of the diffusion model components. The multi-bit watermark is a embedded into the image space semantically without compromising image quality. The watermark component can be utilized as a plug-in in arbitrary diffusion models. We validate through experiments the effectiveness and flexibility of DiffuseTrace. Under 8 types of image processing watermark attacks and 3 types of generative watermark attacks, DiffuseTrace maintains watermark detection rate of 99% and attribution accuracy of over 94%.