OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Patch-Level Kernel Alignment for Dense Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Dense self-supervised learning (SSL) methods showed its effectiveness in enhancing the fine-grained semantic understandings of vision models. However, existing approaches often rely on parametric assumptions or complex post-processing (e.g., clustering, sorting), limiting their flexibility and stability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Patch-level Kernel Alignment (PaKA), a non-parametric, kernel-based approach that improves the dense representations of pretrained vision encoders with a post-(pre)training. Our method propose a robust and effective alignment objective that captures statistical dependencies which matches the intrinsic structure of high-dimensional dense feature distributions. In addition, we revisit the augmentation strategies inherited from image-level SSL and propose a refined augmentation strategy for dense SSL. Our framework improves dense representations by conducting a lightweight post-training stage on top of a pretrained model. With only 14 hours of additional training on a single GPU, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of dense vision benchmarks, demonstrating both efficiency and effectiveness.
Diagonal Frobenius Number via Gomory's Relaxation and Discrepancy
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2025
Year: 2025

For a matrix $A \in Z^{k \times n}$ of rank $k$, the diagonal Frobenius number $F_{\text{diag}}(A)$ is defined as the minimum $t \in Z_{\geq 1}$, such that, for any $b \in \text{span}_{Z}(A)$, the condition \begin{equation*} \exists x \in R_{\geq 0}^n,\, x \geq t \cdot 1 \colon \quad b = A x \end{equation*} implies that \begin{equation*} \exists z \in Z_{\geq 0}^n \colon\quad b = A z. \end{equation*} In this work, we show that \begin{equation*} F_{\text{diag}}(A) = Δ+ O(\log k), \end{equation*} where $Δ$ denotes the maximum absolute value of $k \times k$ sub-determinants of $A$. From the computational complexity perspective, we show that the integer vector $z$ can be found by a polynomial-time algorithm for some weaker values of $t$ in the described condition. For example, we can choose $t = O( Δ\cdot \log k)$ or $t = Δ+ O(\sqrt{k} \cdot \log k)$. Additionally, in the assumption that a $2^k$-time preprocessing is allowed or a base $J$ with $|{\det A_{J}}| = Δ$ is given, we can choose $t = Δ+ O(\log k)$. Finally, we define a more general notion of the diagonal Frobenius number for slacks $F_{\text{slack}}(A)$, which is a generalization of $F_{\text{diag}}(A)$ for canonical-form systems, like $A x \leq b$. All the proofs are mainly done with respect to $F_{\text{slack}}(A)$. The proof technique uses some properties of the Gomory's corner polyhedron relaxation and tools from discrepancy theory.
GUIDe: Generative and Uncertainty-Informed Inverse Design for On-Demand Nonlinear Functional Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

Inverse design is a common yet challenging engineering problem, particularly for nonlinear functional responses such as mechanical behavior or spectral analysis. Deep generative models are motivated by intractability, non-existence or non-uniqueness of solutions, and the need for rapid solution-space exploration. In this study, we show that deep generative model-based and optimization-based approaches can provide incomplete solutions or hallucinate given out-of-distribution targets. To address this, we propose the Generative and Uncertainty-informed Inverse Design (GUIDe) framework, which leverages probabilistic machine learning, statistical inference, and Markov chain Monte Carlo to generate designs with targeted nonlinear behaviors. Instead of inverse mappings, i.e., response $\mapsto$ design, GUIDe adopts design $\mapsto$ response: a forward model predicts each design's nonlinear functional response and evaluates the confidence under a user-specified tolerance. Sampling the solution space by this confidence yields diverse feasible designs. Our validation on nacre-inspired materials finds solutions beyond the training range, even under out-of-distribution targets.
LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing LLM-driven NAS approaches rely heavily on prompt engineering and domain-specific tuning, limiting their practicality and scalability across diverse tasks. In this work, we propose LM-Searcher, a novel framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without the need for extensive domain-specific adaptation. Central to our approach is NCode, a universal numerical string representation for neural architectures, which enables cross-domain architecture encoding and search. We also reformulate the NAS problem as a ranking task, training LLMs to select high-performing architectures from candidate pools using instruction-tuning samples derived from a novel pruning-based subspace sampling strategy. Our curated dataset, encompassing a wide range of architecture-performance pairs, encourages robust and transferable learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LM-Searcher achieves competitive performance in both in-domain (e.g., CNNs for image classification) and out-of-domain (e.g., LoRA configurations for segmentation and generation) tasks, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and generalizable LLM-based architecture search. The datasets and models will be released at https://github.com/Ashone3/LM-Searcher.
DQS: A Low-Budget Query Strategy for Enhancing Unsupervised Data-driven Anomaly Detection Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Truly unsupervised approaches for time series anomaly detection are rare in the literature. Those that exist suffer from a poorly set threshold, which hampers detection performance, while others, despite claiming to be unsupervised, need to be calibrated using a labelled data subset, which is often not available in the real world. This work integrates active learning with an existing unsupervised anomaly detection method by selectively querying the labels of multivariate time series, which are then used to refine the threshold selection process. To achieve this, we introduce a novel query strategy called the dissimilarity-based query strategy (DQS). DQS aims to maximise the diversity of queried samples by evaluating the similarity between anomaly scores using dynamic time warping. We assess the detection performance of DQS in comparison to other query strategies and explore the impact of mislabelling, a topic that is underexplored in the literature. Our findings indicate that DQS performs best in small-budget scenarios, though the others appear to be more robust when faced with mislabelling. Therefore, in the real world, the choice of query strategy depends on the expertise of the oracle and the number of samples they are willing to label. Regardless, all query strategies outperform the unsupervised threshold even in the presence of mislabelling. Thus, whenever it is feasible to query an oracle, employing an active learning-based threshold is recommended.
GraMFedDHAR: Graph Based Multimodal Differentially Private Federated HAR
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using multimodal sensor data remains challenging due to noisy or incomplete measurements, scarcity of labeled examples, and privacy concerns. Traditional centralized deep learning approaches are often constrained by infrastructure availability, network latency, and data sharing restrictions. While federated learning (FL) addresses privacy by training models locally and sharing only model parameters, it still has to tackle issues arising from the use of heterogeneous multimodal data and differential privacy requirements. In this article, a Graph-based Multimodal Federated Learning framework, GraMFedDHAR, is proposed for HAR tasks. Diverse sensor streams such as a pressure mat, depth camera, and multiple accelerometers are modeled as modality-specific graphs, processed through residual Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs), and fused via attention-based weighting rather than simple concatenation. The fused embeddings enable robust activity classification, while differential privacy safeguards data during federated aggregation. Experimental results show that the proposed MultiModalGCN model outperforms the baseline MultiModalFFN, with up to 2 percent higher accuracy in non-DP settings in both centralized and federated paradigms. More importantly, significant improvements are observed under differential privacy constraints: MultiModalGCN consistently surpasses MultiModalFFN, with performance gaps ranging from 7 to 13 percent depending on the privacy budget and setting. These results highlight the robustness of graph-based modeling in multimodal learning, where GNNs prove more resilient to the performance degradation introduced by DP noise.
Leveraging Vision-Language Large Models for Interpretable Video Action Recognition with Semantic Tokenization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Human action recognition often struggles with deep semantic understanding, complex contextual information, and fine-grained distinction, limitations that traditional methods frequently encounter when dealing with diverse video data. Inspired by the remarkable capabilities of large language models, this paper introduces LVLM-VAR, a novel framework that pioneers the application of pre-trained Vision-Language Large Models (LVLMs) to video action recognition, emphasizing enhanced accuracy and interpretability. Our method features a Video-to-Semantic-Tokens (VST) Module, which innovatively transforms raw video sequences into discrete, semantically and temporally consistent "semantic action tokens," effectively crafting an "action narrative" that is comprehensible to an LVLM. These tokens, combined with natural language instructions, are then processed by a LoRA-fine-tuned LVLM (e.g., LLaVA-13B) for robust action classification and semantic reasoning. LVLM-VAR not only achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance on challenging benchmarks such as NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120, demonstrating significant improvements (e.g., 94.1% on NTU RGB+D X-Sub and 90.0% on NTU RGB+D 120 X-Set), but also substantially boosts model interpretability by generating natural language explanations for its predictions.
DW-A-PRM: A Dynamic Weighted Planner
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Robot path planning plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous systems to navigate safely and efficiently in complex and uncertain environments. Despite extensive research on classical graph-based methods and sampling-based planners, achieving an optimal balance between global optimality, computational efficiency, and adaptability to dynamic environments remains an open challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a hybrid path planning framework, which integrates heuristic-driven search with probabilistic roadmap construction under a dynamic weighting scheme. By coupling the global guidance of A* with the stochastic exploration of PRM, the method achieves a synergistic balance between search optimality and computational tractability. Comprehensive experiments in diverse simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently yields smoother and shorter paths while significantly reducing computational overhead compared with conventional approach and other hybrid planners. These results highlight the potential of the proposed framework as an effective and generalizable solution for real-time robotic navigation in complex environments.
A Survey of the State-of-the-Art in Conversational Question Answering Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems have emerged as a pivotal area within Natural Language Processing (NLP) by driving advancements that enable machines to engage in dynamic and context-aware conversations. These capabilities are increasingly being applied across various domains, i.e., customer support, education, legal, and healthcare where maintaining a coherent and relevant conversation is essential. Building on recent advancements, this survey provides a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art in ConvQA. This survey begins by examining the core components of ConvQA systems, i.e., history selection, question understanding, and answer prediction, highlighting their interplay in ensuring coherence and relevance in multi-turn conversations. It further investigates the use of advanced machine learning techniques, including but not limited to, reinforcement learning, contrastive learning, and transfer learning to improve ConvQA accuracy and efficiency. The pivotal role of large language models, i.e., RoBERTa, GPT-4, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Mistral 7B, and LLaMA 3, is also explored, thereby showcasing their impact through data scalability and architectural advancements. Additionally, this survey presents a comprehensive analysis of key ConvQA datasets and concludes by outlining open research directions. Overall, this work offers a comprehensive overview of the ConvQA landscape and provides valuable insights to guide future advancements in the field.
A Composable Agentic System for Automated Visual Data Reporting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

To address the brittleness of monolithic AI agents, our prototype for automated visual data reporting explores a Human-AI Partnership model. Its hybrid, multi-agent architecture strategically externalizes logic from LLMs to deterministic modules, leveraging the rule-based system Draco for principled visualization design. The system delivers a dual-output: an interactive Observable report with Mosaic for reader exploration, and executable Marimo notebooks for deep, analyst-facing traceability. This granular architecture yields a fully automatic yet auditable and steerable system, charting a path toward a more synergistic partnership between human experts and AI. For reproducibility, our implementation and examples are available at https://peter-gy.github.io/VISxGenAI-2025/.
DCV-ROOD Evaluation Framework: Dual Cross-Validation for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a key role in enhancing the robustness of artificial intelligence systems by identifying inputs that differ significantly from the training distribution, thereby preventing unreliable predictions and enabling appropriate fallback mechanisms. Developing reliable OOD detection methods is a significant challenge, and rigorous evaluation of these techniques is essential for ensuring their effectiveness, as it allows researchers to assess their performance under diverse conditions and to identify potential limitations or failure modes. Cross-validation (CV) has proven to be a highly effective tool for providing a reasonable estimate of the performance of a learning algorithm. Although OOD scenarios exhibit particular characteristics, an appropriate adaptation of CV can lead to a suitable evaluation framework for this setting. This work proposes a dual CV framework for robust evaluation of OOD detection models, aimed at improving the reliability of their assessment. The proposed evaluation framework aims to effectively integrate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data while accounting for their differing characteristics. To achieve this, ID data are partitioned using a conventional approach, whereas OOD data are divided by grouping samples based on their classes. Furthermore, we analyze the context of data with class hierarchy to propose a data splitting that considers the entire class hierarchy to obtain fair ID-OOD partitions to apply the proposed evaluation framework. This framework is called Dual Cross-Validation for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection (DCV-ROOD). To test the validity of the evaluation framework, we selected a set of state-of-the-art OOD detection methods, both with and without outlier exposure. The results show that the method achieves very fast convergence to the true performance.
Optimizing Cloud-native Services with SAGA: A Service Affinity Graph-based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2025
Year: 2025

Modern software architectures are characterized by their cloud-native, modular, and microservice-based designs. While these systems are known for their efficiency, they also face complex challenges in service optimization, especially in maintaining end-to-end quality of service across dynamically distributed services. This paper introduces a novel approach using the concept of Service Affinity to address this challenge. The proposed method, termed Service Affinity Graph-based Approach, employs a graph-based model to model the interactions among microservices. It formulates the service placement as a minimum-weight k-cut problem and utilizes an approximation algorithm for service clustering. This approach is realized through a conceptual framework that takes into account a wide range of optimization objectives, ranging from enhancing application performance and enforcing data privacy to optimizing operational costs. In addition to presenting the SAGA framework in details, this paper conducts an in-depth empirical evaluation using a prototype deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. The results demonstrate a mean latency improvement of 23.40%, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, the paper comprehensively discusses various aspects of the proposed methods, including their implications, challenges, and benefits, providing a thorough analysis of the approach's impact.
Benchmarking Robust Aggregation in Decentralized Gradient Marketplaces
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The rise of distributed and privacy-preserving machine learning has sparked interest in decentralized gradient marketplaces, where participants trade intermediate artifacts like gradients. However, existing Federated Learning (FL) benchmarks overlook critical economic and systemic factors unique to such marketplaces-cost-effectiveness, fairness to sellers, and market stability-especially when a buyer relies on a private baseline dataset for evaluation. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark framework to holistically evaluate robust gradient aggregation methods within these buyer-baseline-reliant marketplaces. Our contributions include: (1) a simulation environment modeling marketplace dynamics with a variable buyer baseline and diverse seller distributions; (2) an evaluation methodology augmenting standard FL metrics with marketplace-centric dimensions such as Economic Efficiency, Fairness, and Selection Dynamics; (3) an in-depth empirical analysis of the existing Distributed Gradient Marketplace framework, MartFL, including the integration and comparative evaluation of adapted FLTrust and SkyMask as alternative aggregation strategies within it. This benchmark spans diverse datasets, local attacks, and Sybil attacks targeting the marketplace selection process; and (4) actionable insights into the trade-offs between model performance, robustness, cost, fairness, and stability. This benchmark equips the community with essential tools and empirical evidence to evaluate and design more robust, equitable, and economically viable decentralized gradient marketplaces.
Stack Overflow Is Not Dead Yet: Crowd Answers Still Matter
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Millions of users visit Stack Overflow regularly to ask community for answers to their programming questions. However, like many other platforms, Stack Overflow consistently struggles with low user retention and declining levels of user contributions to the platform. With the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, these ongoing difficulties on Stack Overflow were further magnified, as many users moved toward ChatGPT for programming help. In this paper, we build upon recent research on this phenomenon by analyzing the transformation of user-generated content on Stack Overflow during the post-ChatGPT period. Specifically, we analyze two years of Stack Overflow data and fit multiple causal regression models to estimate the effect of ChatGPT on the length and difficulty of user questions and code examples. We confirm an acceleration of decline in user contributions but find that ChatGPT had a significant positive effect on question and answer length, code length, and question difficulty on Stack Overflow across programming languages. Our results suggest that ChatGPT has effectively raised the bar for questions on Stack Overflow, as users increasingly turn to crowdsourced platforms for help with more complex and challenging problems. With our work we contribute to the ongoing discussion on the impact of tools such as ChatGPT on help-seeking in programming and, more broadly, on collaborative knowledge creation. Our results provide actionable insights for platform operators to support information management and user retention in the aftermath of ChatGPT's launch.
GeoAnalystBench: A GeoAI benchmark for assessing large language models for spatial analysis workflow and code generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled growing interest in automating geospatial analysis and GIS workflows, yet their actual capabilities remain uncertain. In this work, we call for rigorous evaluation of LLMs on well-defined geoprocessing tasks before making claims about full GIS automation. To this end, we present GeoAnalystBench, a benchmark of 50 Python-based tasks derived from real-world geospatial problems and carefully validated by GIS experts. Each task is paired with a minimum deliverable product, and evaluation covers workflow validity, structural alignment, semantic similarity, and code quality (CodeBLEU). Using this benchmark, we assess both proprietary and open source models. Results reveal a clear gap: proprietary models such as ChatGPT-4o-mini achieve high validity 95% and stronger code alignment (CodeBLEU 0.39), while smaller open source models like DeepSeek-R1-7B often generate incomplete or inconsistent workflows (48.5% validity, 0.272 CodeBLEU). Tasks requiring deeper spatial reasoning, such as spatial relationship detection or optimal site selection, remain the most challenging across all models. These findings demonstrate both the promise and limitations of current LLMs in GIS automation and provide a reproducible framework to advance GeoAI research with human-in-the-loop support.
Multimodal Prompt Injection Attacks: Risks and Defenses for Modern LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen rapid adoption in recent years, with industries increasingly relying on them to maintain a competitive advantage. These models excel at interpreting user instructions and generating human-like responses, leading to their integration across diverse domains, including consulting and information retrieval. However, their widespread deployment also introduces substantial security risks, most notably in the form of prompt injection and jailbreak attacks. To systematically evaluate LLM vulnerabilities -- particularly to external prompt injection -- we conducted a series of experiments on eight commercial models. Each model was tested without supplementary sanitization, relying solely on its built-in safeguards. The results exposed exploitable weaknesses and emphasized the need for stronger security measures. Four categories of attacks were examined: direct injection, indirect (external) injection, image-based injection, and prompt leakage. Comparative analysis indicated that Claude 3 demonstrated relatively greater robustness; nevertheless, empirical findings confirm that additional defenses, such as input normalization, remain necessary to achieve reliable protection.