OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Reinforcement: When Reward Is Sparse, It's Better to Be Dense
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially correct or alternative answers that verifiers under-credit, and the resulting all-or-nothing supervision limits learning. Reward models offer richer, continuous feedback, which can serve as a complementary supervisory signal to verifiers. We introduce HERO (Hybrid Ensemble Reward Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that integrates verifier signals with reward-model scores in a structured way. HERO employs stratified normalization to bound reward-model scores within verifier-defined groups, preserving correctness while refining quality distinctions, and variance-aware weighting to emphasize challenging prompts where dense signals matter most. Across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, HERO consistently outperforms RM-only and verifier-only baselines, with strong gains on both verifiable and hard-to-verify tasks. Our results show that hybrid reward design retains the stability of verifiers while leveraging the nuance of reward models to advance reasoning.
Dynamic Regret Bounds for Online Omniprediction with Long Term Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We present an algorithm guaranteeing dynamic regret bounds for online omniprediction with long term constraints. The goal in this recently introduced problem is for a learner to generate a sequence of predictions which are broadcast to a collection of downstream decision makers. Each decision maker has their own utility function, as well as a vector of constraint functions, each mapping their actions and an adversarially selected state to reward or constraint violation terms. The downstream decision makers select actions "as if" the state predictions are correct, and the goal of the learner is to produce predictions such that all downstream decision makers choose actions that give them worst-case utility guarantees while minimizing worst-case constraint violation. Within this framework, we give the first algorithm that obtains simultaneous \emph{dynamic regret} guarantees for all of the agents -- where regret for each agent is measured against a potentially changing sequence of actions across rounds of interaction, while also ensuring vanishing constraint violation for each agent. Our results do not require the agents themselves to maintain any state -- they only solve one-round constrained optimization problems defined by the prediction made at that round.
Evolutionary Profiles for Protein Fitness Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Predicting the fitness impact of mutations is central to protein engineering but constrained by limited assays relative to the size of sequence space. Protein language models (pLMs) trained with masked language modeling (MLM) exhibit strong zero-shot fitness prediction; we provide a unifying view by interpreting natural evolution as implicit reward maximization and MLM as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), in which extant sequences act as expert demonstrations and pLM log-odds serve as fitness estimates. Building on this perspective, we introduce EvoIF, a lightweight model that integrates two complementary sources of evolutionary signal: (i) within-family profiles from retrieved homologs and (ii) cross-family structural-evolutionary constraints distilled from inverse folding logits. EvoIF fuses sequence-structure representations with these profiles via a compact transition block, yielding calibrated probabilities for log-odds scoring. On ProteinGym (217 mutational assays; >2.5M mutants), EvoIF and its MSA-enabled variant achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance while using only 0.15% of the training data and fewer parameters than recent large models. Ablations confirm that within-family and cross-family profiles are complementary, improving robustness across function types, MSA depths, taxa, and mutation depths. The codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/EvoIF.
AudioMarathon: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-Context Audio Understanding and Efficiency in Audio LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Processing long-form audio is a major challenge for Large Audio Language models (LALMs). These models struggle with the quadratic cost of attention ($O(N^2)$) and with modeling long-range temporal dependencies. Existing audio benchmarks are built mostly from short clips and do not evaluate models in realistic long context settings. To address this gap, we introduce AudioMarathon, a benchmark designed to evaluate both understanding and inference efficiency on long-form audio. AudioMarathon provides a diverse set of tasks built upon three pillars: long-context audio inputs with durations ranging from 90.0 to 300.0 seconds, which correspond to encoded sequences of 2,250 to 7,500 audio tokens, respectively, full domain coverage across speech, sound, and music, and complex reasoning that requires multi-hop inference. We evaluate state-of-the-art LALMs and observe clear performance drops as audio length grows. We also study acceleration techniques and analyze the trade-offs of token pruning and KV cache eviction. The results show large gaps across current LALMs and highlight the need for better temporal reasoning and memory-efficient architectures. We believe AudioMarathon will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.
Agentic generative AI for media content discovery at the national football league
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Generative AI has unlocked new possibilities in content discovery and management. Through collaboration with the National Football League (NFL), we demonstrate how a generative-AI based workflow enables media researchers and analysts to query relevant historical plays using natural language rather than traditional filter-and-click interfaces. The agentic workflow takes a user query as input, breaks it into elements, and translates them into the underlying database query language. Accuracy and latency are further improved through carefully designed semantic caching. The solution achieves over 95 percent accuracy and reduces the average time to find relevant videos from 10 minutes to 30 seconds, significantly increasing the NFL's operational efficiency and allowing users to focus on producing creative content and engaging storylines.
WristWorld: Generating Wrist-Views via 4D World Models for Robotic Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Wrist-view observations are crucial for VLA models as they capture fine-grained hand-object interactions that directly enhance manipulation performance. Yet large-scale datasets rarely include such recordings, resulting in a substantial gap between abundant anchor views and scarce wrist views. Existing world models cannot bridge this gap, as they require a wrist-view first frame and thus fail to generate wrist-view videos from anchor views alone. Amid this gap, recent visual geometry models such as VGGT emerge with geometric and cross-view priors that make it possible to address extreme viewpoint shifts. Inspired by these insights, we propose WristWorld, the first 4D world model that generates wrist-view videos solely from anchor views. WristWorld operates in two stages: (i) Reconstruction, which extends VGGT and incorporates our Spatial Projection Consistency (SPC) Loss to estimate geometrically consistent wrist-view poses and 4D point clouds; (ii) Generation, which employs our video generation model to synthesize temporally coherent wrist-view videos from the reconstructed perspective. Experiments on Droid, Calvin, and Franka Panda demonstrate state-of-the-art video generation with superior spatial consistency, while also improving VLA performance, raising the average task completion length on Calvin by 3.81% and closing 42.4% of the anchor-wrist view gap.
Audio-Visual Separation with Hierarchical Fusion and Representation Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2025
Year: 2025

Self-supervised audio-visual source separation leverages natural correlations between audio and vision modalities to separate mixed audio signals. In this work, we first systematically analyse the performance of existing multimodal fusion methods for audio-visual separation task, demonstrating that the performance of different fusion strategies is closely linked to the characteristics of the sound: middle fusion is better suited for handling short, transient sounds, while late fusion is more effective for capturing sustained and harmonically rich sounds. We thus propose a hierarchical fusion strategy that effectively integrates both fusion stages. In addition, training can be made easier by incorporating high-quality external audio representations, rather than relying solely on the audio branch to learn them independently. To explore this, we propose a representation alignment approach that aligns the latent features of the audio encoder with embeddings extracted from pre-trained audio models. Extensive experiments on MUSIC, MUSIC-21 and VGGSound datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing existing methods under the self-supervised setting. We further analyse the impact of representation alignment on audio features, showing that it reduces modality gap between the audio and visual modalities.
SpotDiff: Spotting and Disentangling Interference in Feature Space for Subject-Preserving Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2025
Year: 2025

Personalized image generation aims to faithfully preserve a reference subject's identity while adapting to diverse text prompts. Existing optimization-based methods ensure high fidelity but are computationally expensive, while learning-based approaches offer efficiency at the cost of entangled representations influenced by nuisance factors. We introduce SpotDiff, a novel learning-based method that extracts subject-specific features by spotting and disentangling interference. Leveraging a pre-trained CLIP image encoder and specialized expert networks for pose and background, SpotDiff isolates subject identity through orthogonality constraints in the feature space. To enable principled training, we introduce SpotDiff10k, a curated dataset with consistent pose and background variations. Experiments demonstrate that SpotDiff achieves more robust subject preservation and controllable editing than prior methods, while attaining competitive performance with only 10k training samples.
Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of thought. Motivated by interpretability studies showing that the crucial computation required for reasoning tasks is concentrated in a limited range of layers, we introduce Encode-Think-Decode (ETD), a method that enhances the reasoning capabilities of a base model by training it to iterate over a small subset of reasoning-relevant layers during the mid-training stage. ETD amplifies latent reasoning while preserving the original architecture, parameter count, hyperparameters, and training data composition. When iterating on the selected layers at inference time, ETD models yield substantial gains on 17 reasoning benchmarks, including +28.4% relative accuracy improvement on GSM8K and +36% on MATH with the OLMo-2 1B Base model. We also explore an adaptive depth strategy that adjusts the computation per input token. Our results show that recursive latent reasoning offers a simple and effective path to stronger LLM reasoning.
BG-FlipIn: A Bayesian game framework for FlipIt-insider models in advanced persistent threats
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we study advanced persistent threats (APT) with an insider who has different preferences. To address the uncertainty of the insider's preference, we propose the BG-FlipIn: a Bayesian game framework for FlipIt-insider models with an investigation on malicious, inadvertent, or corrupt insiders. We calculate the closed-form Bayesian Nash Equilibrium expression and further obtain three edge cases with deterministic insiders corresponding to their Nash Equilibrium expressions. On this basis, we further discover several phenomena in APT related to the defender's move rate and cost, as well as the insider's preferences. We then provide decision-making guidance for the defender, given different parametric conditions. Two applications validate that our BG-FlipIn framework enables the defender to make decisions consistently, avoiding detecting the insider's concrete preference or adjusting its strategy frequently.
Meaningful Pose-Based Sign Language Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We present a comprehensive study on meaningfully evaluating sign language utterances in the form of human skeletal poses. The study covers keypoint distance-based, embedding-based, and back-translation-based metrics. We show tradeoffs between different metrics in different scenarios through automatic meta-evaluation of sign-level retrieval and a human correlation study of text-to-pose translation across different sign languages. Our findings and the open-source pose-evaluation toolkit provide a practical and reproducible way of developing and evaluating sign language translation or generation systems.
Optimizing Ethical Risk Reduction for Medical Intelligent Systems with Constraint Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Medical Intelligent Systems (MIS) are increasingly integrated into healthcare workflows, offering significant benefits but also raising critical safety and ethical concerns. According to the European Union AI Act, most MIS will be classified as high-risk systems, requiring a formal risk management process to ensure compliance with the ethical requirements of trustworthy AI. In this context, we focus on risk reduction optimization problems, which aim to reduce risks with ethical considerations by finding the best balanced assignment of risk assessment values according to their coverage of trustworthy AI ethical requirements. We formalize this problem as a constrained optimization task and investigate three resolution paradigms: Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), Satisfiability (SAT), and Constraint Programming(CP).Our contributions include the mathematical formulation of this optimization problem, its modeling with the Minizinc constraint modeling language, and a comparative experimental study that analyzes the performance, expressiveness, and scalability of each approach to solving. From the identified limits of the methodology, we draw some perspectives of this work regarding the integration of the Minizinc model into a complete trustworthy AI ethical risk management process for MIS.
Black-box Detection of LLM-generated Text Using Generalized Jensen-Shannon Divergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We study black-box detection of machine-generated text under practical constraints: the scoring model (proxy LM) may mismatch the unknown source model, and per-input contrastive generation is costly. We propose SurpMark, a reference-based detector that summarizes a passage by the dynamics of its token surprisals. SurpMark quantizes surprisals into interpretable states, estimates a state-transition matrix for the test text, and scores it via a generalized Jensen-Shannon (GJS) gap between the test transitions and two fixed references (human vs. machine) built once from historical corpora. We prove a principled discretization criterion and establish the asymptotic normality of the decision statistic. Empirically, across multiple datasets, source models, and scenarios, SurpMark consistently matches or surpasses baselines; our experiments corroborate the statistic's asymptotic normality, and ablations validate the effectiveness of the proposed discretization.
Deploying Tiny LVLM Judges for Real-World Evaluation of Chart Models: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with only 7B parameters have shown promise as automated judges in chart comprehension tasks. However, tiny models (<=2B parameters) still perform poorly as judges, limiting their real-world use in resource-constrained settings. To address this, we propose two approaches to ensure cost-efficient evaluation: (i) multi-criteria prompting, which combines separate evaluation criteria into a single query, and (ii) domain-adaptive transfer learning, in which we fine-tune a 2B-parameter LVLM on synthetic judgments in a chart dataset to create the ChartJudge. Experiments show that multi-criteria prompting exposes robustness gaps, which led to a huge drop in performance for 7B models, including specialized LVLM judges like LLaVA-Critic. In addition, we find that our tiny LVLM (ChartJudge) can effectively transfer knowledge from one dataset to another to make it a more specialized model. Our fine-grained analysis across chart types and query complexities offers actionable insights into trade-offs between model size, prompt design, and transferability, enabling scalable, low-cost evaluation for chart reasoning tasks.
EBGAN-MDN: An Energy-Based Adversarial Framework for Multi-Modal Behavior Cloning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-modal behavior cloning faces significant challenges due to mode averaging and mode collapse, where traditional models fail to capture diverse input-output mappings. This problem is critical in applications like robotics, where modeling multiple valid actions ensures both performance and safety. We propose EBGAN-MDN, a framework that integrates energy-based models, Mixture Density Networks (MDNs), and adversarial training. By leveraging a modified InfoNCE loss and an energy-enforced MDN loss, EBGAN-MDN effectively addresses these challenges. Experiments on synthetic and robotic benchmarks demonstrate superior performance, establishing EBGAN-MDN as a effective and efficient solution for multi-modal learning tasks.
Cross-Modal Attention Guided Unlearning in Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated immense capabilities in multi-modal understanding and inference tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires models to infer outputs based on visual and textual context simultaneously. Such inference abilities of large-scale pretrained models are often attributed to the massive scale of pre-training data collected across several domains. However, the models may memorize private and/or sensitive information during training and regurgitate it in inference. Recently, machine unlearning has been leveraged to address the leakage of private data in LLMs. VLMs add a layer of complexity to this process, as the visual context in the query may also contain sensitive information in addition to the text. To address this issue, we explore unlearning for vision-language models, specifically for the VQA task. We explore the role of visual tokens for output generation in VLMs using cross-modal attention and utilize it to formulate Cross-Modal Attention Guided Unlearning (CAGUL), a lightweight and efficient VLM unlearning framework. In contrast to computationally expensive model finetuning methods, CAGUL utilizes external modules to encode unlearning information in visual tokens of low importance for relevant queries. We find that the transformed visual tokens not only prevent leakage but also retain reference model behavior. Experimental results show that our method performs better or on par with finetuning-based baselines without altering the pre-trained model parameters or incurring retraining costs, making it a practical and effective unlearning solution for VLMs.
Automated Machine Learning for Unsupervised Tabular Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we present LOTUS (Learning to Learn with Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Scenarios), a simple yet effective method to perform model selection for multiple unsupervised machine learning(ML) tasks such as outlier detection and clustering. Our intuition behind this work is that a machine learning pipeline will perform well in a new dataset if it previously worked well on datasets with a similar underlying data distribution. We use Optimal Transport distances to find this similarity between unlabeled tabular datasets and recommend machine learning pipelines with one unified single method on two downstream unsupervised tasks: outlier detection and clustering. We present the effectiveness of our approach with experiments against strong baselines and show that LOTUS is a very promising first step toward model selection for multiple unsupervised ML tasks.
Benchmarking is Broken -- Don't Let AI be its Own Judge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

The meteoric rise of AI, with its rapidly expanding market capitalization, presents both transformative opportunities and critical challenges. Chief among these is the urgent need for a new, unified paradigm for trustworthy evaluation, as current benchmarks increasingly reveal critical vulnerabilities. Issues like data contamination and selective reporting by model developers fuel hype, while inadequate data quality control can lead to biased evaluations that, even if unintentionally, may favor specific approaches. As a flood of participants enters the AI space, this "Wild West" of assessment makes distinguishing genuine progress from exaggerated claims exceptionally difficult. Such ambiguity blurs scientific signals and erodes public confidence, much as unchecked claims would destabilize financial markets reliant on credible oversight from agencies like Moody's. In high-stakes human examinations (e.g., SAT, GRE), substantial effort is devoted to ensuring fairness and credibility; why settle for less in evaluating AI, especially given its profound societal impact? This position paper argues that the current laissez-faire approach is unsustainable. We contend that true, sustainable AI advancement demands a paradigm shift: a unified, live, and quality-controlled benchmarking framework robust by construction, not by mere courtesy and goodwill. To this end, we dissect the systemic flaws undermining today's AI evaluation, distill the essential requirements for a new generation of assessments, and introduce PeerBench (with its prototype implementation at https://www.peerbench.ai/), a community-governed, proctored evaluation blueprint that embodies this paradigm through sealed execution, item banking with rolling renewal, and delayed transparency. Our goal is to pave the way for evaluations that can restore integrity and deliver genuinely trustworthy measures of AI progress.