OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Open, Small, Rigmarole -- Evaluating Llama 3.2 3B's Feedback for Programming Exercises
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been subject to extensive research in the past few years. This is particularly true for the potential of LLMs to generate formative programming feedback for novice learners at university. In contrast to Generative AI (GenAI) tools based on LLMs, such as GPT, smaller and open models have received much less attention. Yet, they offer several benefits, as educators can let them run on a virtual machine or personal computer. This can help circumvent some major concerns applicable to other GenAI tools and LLMs (e. g., data protection, lack of control over changes, privacy). Therefore, this study explores the feedback characteristics of the open, lightweight LLM Llama 3.2 (3B). In particular, we investigate the models' responses to authentic student solutions to introductory programming exercises written in Java. The generated output is qualitatively analyzed to help evaluate the feedback's quality, content, structure, and other features. The results provide a comprehensive overview of the feedback capabilities and serious shortcomings of this open, small LLM. We further discuss the findings in the context of previous research on LLMs and contribute to benchmarking recently available GenAI tools and their feedback for novice learners of programming. Thereby, this work has implications for educators, learners, and tool developers attempting to utilize all variants of LLMs (including open, and small models) to generate formative feedback and support learning.
MPCritic: A plug-and-play MPC architecture for reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) communities have developed vast ecosystems of theoretical approaches and computational tools for solving optimal control problems. Given their conceptual similarities but differing strengths, there has been increasing interest in synergizing RL and MPC. However, existing approaches tend to be limited for various reasons, including computational cost of MPC in an RL algorithm and software hurdles towards seamless integration of MPC and RL tools. These challenges often result in the use of "simple" MPC schemes or RL algorithms, neglecting the state-of-the-art in both areas. This paper presents MPCritic, a machine learning-friendly architecture that interfaces seamlessly with MPC tools. MPCritic utilizes the loss landscape defined by a parameterized MPC problem, focusing on "soft" optimization over batched training steps; thereby updating the MPC parameters while avoiding costly minimization and parametric sensitivities. Since the MPC structure is preserved during training, an MPC agent can be readily used for online deployment, where robust constraint satisfaction is paramount. We demonstrate the versatility of MPCritic, in terms of MPC architectures and RL algorithms that it can accommodate, on classic control benchmarks.
Efficient State Estimation of a Networked FlipIt Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The Boolean Kalman Filter and associated Boolean Dynamical System Theory have been proposed to study the spread of infection on computer networks. Such models feature a network where attacks propagate through, an intrusion detection system that provides noisy signals of the true state of the network, and the capability of the defender to clean a subset of computers at any time. The Boolean Kalman Filter has been used to solve the optimal estimation problem, by estimating the hidden true state given the attack-defense dynamics and noisy observations. However, this algorithm is intractable because it runs in exponential time and space with respect to the network size. We address this feasibility problem by proposing a mean-field estimation approach, which is inspired by the epidemic modeling literature. Although our approach is heuristic, we prove that our estimator exactly matches the optimal estimator in certain non-trivial cases. We conclude by using simulations to show both the run-time improvement and estimation accuracy of our approach.
Uncovering the Limitations of Query Performance Prediction: Failures, Insights, and Implications for Selective Query Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Query Performance Prediction (QPP) estimates retrieval systems effectiveness for a given query, offering valuable insights for search effectiveness and query processing. Despite extensive research, QPPs face critical challenges in generalizing across diverse retrieval paradigms and collections. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art QPPs (e.g. NQC, UQC), LETOR-based features, and newly explored dense-based predictors. Using diverse sparse rankers (BM25, DFree without and with query expansion) and hybrid or dense (SPLADE and ColBert) rankers and diverse test collections ROBUST, GOV2, WT10G, and MS MARCO; we investigate the relationships between predicted and actual performance, with a focus on generalization and robustness. Results show significant variability in predictors accuracy, with collections as the main factor and rankers next. Some sparse predictors perform somehow on some collections (TREC ROBUST and GOV2) but do not generalise to other collections (WT10G and MS-MARCO). While some predictors show promise in specific scenarios, their overall limitations constrain their utility for applications. We show that QPP-driven selective query processing offers only marginal gains, emphasizing the need for improved predictors that generalize across collections, align with dense retrieval architectures and are useful for downstream applications.
Fundamentals of Caching Layered Data objects
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The effective management of large amounts of data processed or required by today's cloud or edge computing systems remains a fundamental challenge. This paper focuses on cache management for applications where data objects can be stored in layered representations. In such representations, each additional data layer enhances the "quality" of the object's version but comes with an incremental cost of memory space. This layered approach proves beneficial in various scenarios, including the delivery of zoomable maps, video coding, future Virtual Reality gaming, and layered neural network models where additional data layers improve inference accuracy. In systems where users or devices demand different versions of a data object, layered representations offer flexibility for caching policies to achieve improved hit rates. In this paper, we explore the performance of various traditionally studied caching policies, such as Belady, LRU, and LFU, both with and without layering. To this end, we develop an asymptotically accurate analytical model for Layered LRU (LLRU). We study how the performance of LLRU is impacted by factors such as the number of layers, the popularity of different objects and layers, and overheads associated with storing layered representations. For instance, we show that, for LLRU, more layers are not always beneficial and indeed performance depends in subtle ways on the popularity and size profiles of layers.
Can LLMs Grasp Implicit Cultural Values? Benchmarking LLMs' Cultural Intelligence with CQ-Bench
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) refers to the ability to understand unfamiliar cultural contexts, a crucial skill for large language models (LLMs) to effectively engage with globally diverse users. Existing studies often focus on explicitly stated cultural norms, but fail to capture the subtle, implicit values that are common in daily conversation. To address this gap, we introduce CQBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' capability to infer implicit cultural values from natural conversational contexts. CQBench consists of multi character conversation based stories using values from the World Value Survey and the GlobalOpinions, with topics including ethical, religious, social, etc. Our automatic dataset construction pipeline integrates rigorous validation procedures (incorporation, consistency, and implicitness checks), achieving a 94.5% human model agreement in the final validation. To leverage CQBench data, we design three tasks of increasing complexity: attitude detection, value selection, and value extraction. These tasks evaluate whether models can detect attitude and recognize values embedded within natural dialogues rather than relying on explicit cultural knowledge. We find that while frontier models like o1 reach human level performance in value selection (0.809 F1), they still fall short in nuanced attitude detection (0.622 F1). Notably, finetuning a smaller LLaMA-3.2-3B on only 500 culturally rich examples improves performance by over 10%, even outperforming o3-mini in some cases. Using CQ-Bench, we provide insights into the current challenges in LLMs' CQ research and suggest practical pathways for enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural reasoning abilities.
Performative Drift Resistant Classification Using Generative Domain Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Performative Drift is a special type of Concept Drift that occurs when a model's predictions influence the future instances the model will encounter. In these settings, retraining is not always feasible. In this work, we instead focus on drift understanding as a method for creating drift-resistant classifiers. To achieve this, we introduce the Generative Domain Adversarial Network (GDAN) which combines both Domain and Generative Adversarial Networks. Using GDAN, domain-invariant representations of incoming data are created and a generative network is used to reverse the effects of performative drift. Using semi-real and synthetic data generators, we empirically evaluate GDAN's ability to provide drift-resistant classification. Initial results are promising with GDAN limiting performance degradation over several timesteps. Additionally, GDAN's generative network can be used in tandem with other models to limit their performance degradation in the presence of performative drift. Lastly, we highlight the relationship between model retraining and the unpredictability of performative drift, providing deeper insights into the challenges faced when using traditional Concept Drift mitigation strategies in the performative setting.
Beyond Quacking: Deep Integration of Language Models and RAG into DuckDB
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Knowledge-intensive analytical applications retrieve context from both structured tabular data and unstructured, text-free documents for effective decision-making. Large language models (LLMs) have made it significantly easier to prototype such retrieval and reasoning data pipelines. However, implementing these pipelines efficiently still demands significant effort and has several challenges. This often involves orchestrating heterogeneous data systems, managing data movement, and handling low-level implementation details, e.g., LLM context management. To address these challenges, we introduce FlockMTL: an extension for DBMSs that deeply integrates LLM capabilities and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). FlockMTL includes model-driven scalar and aggregate functions, enabling chained predictions through tuple-level mappings and reductions. Drawing inspiration from the relational model, FlockMTL incorporates: (i) cost-based optimizations, which seamlessly apply techniques such as batching and caching; and (ii) resource independence, enabled through novel SQL DDL abstractions: PROMPT and MODEL, introduced as first-class schema objects alongside TABLE. FlockMTL streamlines the development of knowledge-intensive analytical applications, and its optimizations ease the implementation burden.
Information Retrieval for Climate Impact
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

The purpose of the MANILA24 Workshop on information retrieval for climate impact was to bring together researchers from academia, industry, governments, and NGOs to identify and discuss core research problems in information retrieval to assess climate change impacts. The workshop aimed to foster collaboration by bringing communities together that have so far not been very well connected -- information retrieval, natural language processing, systematic reviews, impact assessments, and climate science. The workshop brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to the development of a technical research agenda for information retrieval to assess climate change impacts.
Neural Approaches to SAT Solving: Design Choices and Interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this contribution, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of graph neural networks applied to Boolean satisfiability problems, accompanied by an intuitive explanation of the mechanisms enabling the model to generalize to different instances. We introduce several training improvements, particularly a novel closest assignment supervision method that dynamically adapts to the model's current state, significantly enhancing performance on problems with larger solution spaces. Our experiments demonstrate the suitability of variable-clause graph representations with recurrent neural network updates, which achieve good accuracy on SAT assignment prediction while reducing computational demands. We extend the base graph neural network into a diffusion model that facilitates incremental sampling and can be effectively combined with classical techniques like unit propagation. Through analysis of embedding space patterns and optimization trajectories, we show how these networks implicitly perform a process very similar to continuous relaxations of MaxSAT, offering an interpretable view of their reasoning process. This understanding guides our design choices and explains the ability of recurrent architectures to scale effectively at inference time beyond their training distribution, which we demonstrate with test-time scaling experiments.
Medical large language models are easily distracted
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform medicine, but real-world clinical scenarios contain extraneous information that can hinder performance. The rise of assistive technologies like ambient dictation, which automatically generates draft notes from live patient encounters, has the potential to introduce additional noise making it crucial to assess the ability of LLM's to filter relevant data. To investigate this, we developed MedDistractQA, a benchmark using USMLE-style questions embedded with simulated real-world distractions. Our findings show that distracting statements (polysemous words with clinical meanings used in a non-clinical context or references to unrelated health conditions) can reduce LLM accuracy by up to 17.9%. Commonly proposed solutions to improve model performance such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and medical fine-tuning did not change this effect and in some cases introduced their own confounders and further degraded performance. Our findings suggest that LLMs natively lack the logical mechanisms necessary to distinguish relevant from irrelevant clinical information, posing challenges for real-world applications. MedDistractQA and our results highlights the need for robust mitigation strategies to enhance LLM resilience to extraneous information.
Prompting Forgetting: Unlearning in GANs via Textual Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

State-of-the-art generative models exhibit powerful image-generation capabilities, introducing various ethical and legal challenges to service providers hosting these models. Consequently, Content Removal Techniques (CRTs) have emerged as a growing area of research to control outputs without full-scale retraining. Recent work has explored the use of Machine Unlearning in generative models to address content removal. However, the focus of such research has been on diffusion models, and unlearning in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has remained largely unexplored. We address this gap by proposing Text-to-Unlearn, a novel framework that selectively unlearns concepts from pre-trained GANs using only text prompts, enabling feature unlearning, identity unlearning, and fine-grained tasks like expression and multi-attribute removal in models trained on human faces. Leveraging natural language descriptions, our approach guides the unlearning process without requiring additional datasets or supervised fine-tuning, offering a scalable and efficient solution. To evaluate its effectiveness, we introduce an automatic unlearning assessment method adapted from state-of-the-art image-text alignment metrics, providing a comprehensive analysis of the unlearning methodology. To our knowledge, Text-to-Unlearn is the first cross-modal unlearning framework for GANs, representing a flexible and efficient advancement in managing generative model behavior.
First Field-Trial Demonstration of L4 Autonomous Optical Network for Distributed AI Training Communication: An LLM-Powered Multi-AI-Agent Solution
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2025
Year: 2025

We demonstrate the first cross-domain cross-layer level-4 autonomous optical network via a multi-AI-agent system. Field trials show ~98% task completion rate across the distributed AI training lifecycle-3.2x higher than single agents using state-of-the-art LLMs.
Facilitating Instructors-LLM Collaboration for Problem Design in Introductory Programming Classrooms
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, offer significant opportunities to enhance instructional support in introductory programming courses. While extensive research has explored the effectiveness of LLMs in supporting student learning, limited studies have examined how these models can assist instructors in designing instructional activities. This work investigates how instructors' expertise in effective activity design can be integrated with LLMs' ability to generate novel and targeted programming problems, facilitating more effective activity creation for programming classrooms. To achieve this, we employ a participatory design approach to develop an instructor-authoring tool that incorporates LLM support, fostering collaboration between instructors and AI in generating programming exercises. This tool also allows instructors to specify common student mistakes and misconceptions, which informs the adaptive feedback generation process. We conduct case studies with three instructors, analyzing how they use our system to design programming problems for their introductory courses. Through these case studies, we assess instructors' perceptions of the usefulness and limitations of LLMs in authoring problem statements for instructional purposes. Additionally, we compare the efficiency, quality, effectiveness, and coverage of designed activities when instructors create problems with and without structured LLM prompting guidelines. Our findings provide insights into the potential of LLMs in enhancing instructor workflows and improving programming education and provide guidelines for designing effective AI-assisted problem-authoring interfaces.
Prompt-Reverse Inconsistency: LLM Self-Inconsistency Beyond Generative Randomness and Prompt Paraphrasing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

While the inconsistency of LLMs is not a novel topic, prior research has predominantly addressed two types of generative inconsistencies: i) Randomness Inconsistency: running the same LLM multiple trials, yielding varying responses; ii) Paraphrase Inconsistency: paraphrased prompts result in different responses from the same LLM. Randomness Inconsistency arises from the inherent randomness due to stochastic sampling in generative models, while Paraphrase Inconsistency is a consequence of the language modeling objectives, where paraphrased prompts alter the distribution of vocabulary logits. This research discovers Prompt-Reverse Inconsistency (PRIN), a new form of LLM self-inconsistency: given a question and a couple of LLM-generated answer candidates, the LLM often has conflicting responses when prompted "Which are correct answers?" and "Which are incorrect answers?". PRIN poses a big concern as it undermines the credibility of LLM-as-a-judge, and suggests a challenge for LLMs to adhere to basic logical rules. We conduct a series of experiments to investigate PRIN, examining the extent of PRIN across different LLMs, methods to mitigate it, potential applications, and its relationship with Randomness Inconsistency and Paraphrase Inconsistency. As the first study to explore PRIN, our findings offer valuable insights into the inner workings of LLMs and contribute to advancing trustworthy AI.
Adaptive Rectification Sampling for Test-Time Compute Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The newly released OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated that test-time scaling can significantly improve model performance, especially in complex tasks such as logical reasoning. Common test-time scaling methods involve generating more chains of thought (CoTs) or longer CoTs with self-correction. However, while self-correction can improve performance, it may lead to significant token waste and reduce readability of the CoT if the reasoning steps are already correct. To demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can rectify errors at a more fine-grained level, we propose Adaptive Rectification Sampling (AR-Sampling), which can guide the LLMs to self-correction at the appropriate step. AR-Sampling leverages a process-supervised reward model (PRM) as a verifier and constructed trigger sentences to guide the model in adaptive step-level rethinking. Through the experiments on GSM8K and MATH500, it indicates that our approach enables the models to rethink in more fine-grained level, improving the accuracy of solutions, while generating a reasonable number of additional tokens.
Prompt-Guided Attention Head Selection for Focus-Oriented Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The goal of this paper is to enhance pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) models for focus-oriented image retrieval with visual prompting. In real-world image retrieval scenarios, both query and database images often exhibit complexity, with multiple objects and intricate backgrounds. Users often want to retrieve images with specific object, which we define as the Focus-Oriented Image Retrieval (FOIR) task. While a standard image encoder can be employed to extract image features for similarity matching, it may not perform optimally in the multi-object-based FOIR task. This is because each image is represented by a single global feature vector. To overcome this, a prompt-based image retrieval solution is required. We propose an approach called Prompt-guided attention Head Selection (PHS) to leverage the head-wise potential of the multi-head attention mechanism in ViT in a promptable manner. PHS selects specific attention heads by matching their attention maps with user's visual prompts, such as a point, box, or segmentation. This empowers the model to focus on specific object of interest while preserving the surrounding visual context. Notably, PHS does not necessitate model re-training and avoids any image alteration. Experimental results show that PHS substantially improves performance on multiple datasets, offering a practical and training-free solution to enhance model performance in the FOIR task.