OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Releasing Inequality Phenomenon in $\ell_{\infty}$-norm Adversarial Training via Input Gradient Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Adversarial training (AT) is considered the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. However, a recent study revealed that \(\ell_{\infty}\)-norm adversarial training (\(\ell_{\infty}\)-AT) will also induce unevenly distributed input gradients, which is called the inequality phenomenon. This phenomenon makes the \(\ell_{\infty}\)-norm adversarially trained model more vulnerable than the standard-trained model when high-attribution or randomly selected pixels are perturbed, enabling robust and practical black-box attacks against \(\ell_{\infty}\)-adversarially trained models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Input Gradient Distillation (IGD) to release the inequality phenomenon in $\ell_{\infty}$-AT. IGD distills the standard-trained teacher model's equal decision pattern into the $\ell_{\infty}$-adversarially trained student model by aligning input gradients of the student model and the standard-trained model with the Cosine Similarity. Experiments show that IGD can mitigate the inequality phenomenon and its threats while preserving adversarial robustness. Compared to vanilla $\ell_{\infty}$-AT, IGD reduces error rates against inductive noise, inductive occlusion, random noise, and noisy images in ImageNet-C by up to 60\%, 16\%, 50\%, and 21\%, respectively. Other than empirical experiments, we also conduct a theoretical analysis to explain why releasing the inequality phenomenon can improve such robustness and discuss why the severity of the inequality phenomenon varies according to the dataset's image resolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhdnskfbeuv/Inuput-Gradient-Distillation
SIGMA: An Efficient Heterophilous Graph Neural Network with Fast Global Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph neural networks (GNNs) realize great success in graph learning but suffer from performance loss when meeting heterophily, i.e. neighboring nodes are dissimilar, due to their local and uniform aggregation. Existing attempts of heterophilous GNNs incorporate long-range or global aggregations to distinguish nodes in the graph. However, these aggregations usually require iteratively maintaining and updating full-graph information, which limits their efficiency when applying to large-scale graphs. In this paper, we propose SIGMA, an efficient global heterophilous GNN aggregation integrating the structural similarity measurement SimRank. Our theoretical analysis illustrates that SIGMA inherently captures distant global similarity even under heterophily, that conventional approaches can only achieve after iterative aggregations. Furthermore, it enjoys efficient one-time computation with a complexity only linear to the node set size $\mathcal{O}(n)$. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SIGMA achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior aggregation and overall efficiency. Notably, it obtains $5\times$ acceleration on the large-scale heterophily dataset pokec with over 30 million edges compared to the best baseline aggregation.
A Survey on Causal Discovery: Theory and Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is specifically designed to quantify the underlying relationships that connect a cause to its effect. Causal discovery is a branch of the broader field of causality in which causal graphs are recovered from data (whenever possible), enabling the identification and estimation of causal effects. In this paper, we explore recent advancements in causal discovery in a unified manner, provide a consistent overview of existing algorithms developed under different settings, report useful tools and data, present real-world applications to understand why and how these methods can be fruitfully exploited.
ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB) is a leaderboard to benchmark the performance of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models on various speech processing tasks. However, SUPERB largely considers English speech in its evaluation. This paper presents multilingual SUPERB (ML-SUPERB), covering 143 languages (ranging from high-resource to endangered), and considering both automatic speech recognition and language identification. Following the concept of SUPERB, ML-SUPERB utilizes frozen SSL features and employs a simple framework for multilingual tasks by learning a shallow downstream model. Similar to the SUPERB benchmark, we find speech SSL models can significantly improve performance compared to FBANK features. Furthermore, we find that multilingual models do not always perform better than their monolingual counterparts. We will release ML-SUPERB as a challenge with organized datasets and reproducible training scripts for future multilingual representation research.
Abstract Meaning Representation-Based Logic-Driven Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Combining large language models with logical reasoning enhances their capacity to address problems in a robust and reliable manner. Nevertheless, the intricate nature of logical reasoning poses challenges when gathering reliable data from the web to build comprehensive training datasets, subsequently affecting performance on downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel logic-driven data augmentation approach, AMR-LDA. AMR-LDA converts the original text into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, a structured semantic representation that encapsulates the logical structure of the sentence, upon which operations are performed to generate logically modified AMR graphs. The modified AMR graphs are subsequently converted back into text to create augmented data. Notably, our methodology is architecture-agnostic and enhances both generative large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, through prompt augmentation, and discriminative large language models through contrastive learning with logic-driven data augmentation. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy of our proposed method with improvement in performance across seven downstream tasks, such as reading comprehension requiring logical reasoning, textual entailment, and natural language inference. Furthermore, our method leads on the ReClor leaderboard at https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/503/leaderboard/1347. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-Equivalence-driven-AMR-Data-Augmentation-for-Representation-Learning.
UVOSAM: A Mask-free Paradigm for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation via Segment Anything Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The current state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) require extensive training on video datasets with mask annotations, limiting their effectiveness in handling challenging scenarios. However, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) introduces a new prompt-driven paradigm for image segmentation, offering new possibilities. In this study, we investigate SAM's potential for UVOS through different prompt strategies. We then propose UVOSAM, a mask-free paradigm for UVOS that utilizes the STD-Net tracker. STD-Net incorporates a spatial-temporal decoupled deformable attention mechanism to establish an effective correlation between intra- and inter-frame features, remarkably enhancing the quality of box prompts in complex video scenes. Extensive experiments on the DAVIS2017-unsupervised and YoutubeVIS19\&21 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of UVOSAM without mask supervision compared to existing mask-supervised methods, as well as its ability to generalize to weakly-annotated video datasets. Code can be found at https://github.com/alibaba/UVOSAM.
Semantic-guided modeling of spatial relation and object co-occurrence for indoor scene recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Exploring the semantic context in scene images is essential for indoor scene recognition. However, due to the diverse intra-class spatial layouts and the coexisting inter-class objects, modeling contextual relationships to adapt various image characteristics is a great challenge. Existing contextual modeling methods for scene recognition exhibit two limitations: 1) They typically model only one type of spatial relationship (order or metric) among objects within scenes, with limited exploration of diverse spatial layouts. 2) They often overlook the differences in coexisting objects across different scenes, suppressing scene recognition performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose SpaCoNet, which simultaneously models Spatial relation and Co-occurrence of objects guided by semantic segmentation. Firstly, the Semantic Spatial Relation Module (SSRM) is constructed to model scene spatial features. With the help of semantic segmentation, this module decouples spatial information from the scene image and thoroughly explores all spatial relationships among objects in an implicit manner, thereby obtaining semantic-based spatial features. Secondly, both spatial features from the SSRM and deep features from the Image Feature Extraction Module are allocated to each object, so as to distinguish the coexisting object across different scenes. Finally, utilizing the discriminative features above, we design a Global-Local Dependency Module to explore the long-range co-occurrence among objects, and further generate a semantic-guided feature representation for indoor scene recognition. Experimental results on three widely used scene datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method.
Enhancing Smart Contract Security Analysis with Execution Property Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to significant financial losses, with their increasing complexity rendering outright prevention of hacks increasingly challenging. This trend highlights the crucial need for advanced forensic analysis and real-time intrusion detection, where dynamic analysis plays a key role in dissecting smart contract executions. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a unified and generic representation of smart contract executions, complemented by an efficient methodology that enables the modeling and identification of a broad spectrum of emerging attacks. We introduce Clue, a dynamic analysis framework specifically designed for the Ethereum virtual machine. Central to Clue is its ability to capture critical runtime information during contract executions, employing a novel graph-based representation, the Execution Property Graph. A key feature of Clue is its innovative graph traversal technique, which is adept at detecting complex attacks, including (read-only) reentrancy and price manipulation. Evaluation results reveal Clue's superior performance with high true positive rates and low false positive rates, outperforming state-of-the-art tools. Furthermore, Clue's efficiency positions it as a valuable tool for both forensic analysis and real-time intrusion detection.
Combining Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Reinforcement Learning for TinyML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on microcontrollers (TinyML) is a common trend to process the increasing amount of sensor data generated at the edge, but in practice, resource and latency constraints make it difficult to find optimal DNN candidates. Neural architecture search (NAS) is an excellent approach to automate this search and can easily be combined with DNN compression techniques commonly used in TinyML. However, many NAS techniques are not only computationally expensive, especially hyperparameter optimization (HPO), but also often focus on optimizing only a single objective, e.g., maximizing accuracy, without considering additional objectives such as memory requirements or computational complexity of a DNN, which are key to making deployment at the edge feasible. In this paper, we propose a novel NAS strategy for TinyML based on multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBOpt) and an ensemble of competing parametric policies trained using Augmented Random Search (ARS) reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Our methodology aims at efficiently finding tradeoffs between a DNN's predictive accuracy, memory requirements on a given target system, and computational complexity. Our experiments show that we consistently outperform existing MOBOpt approaches on different datasets and architectures such as ResNet-18 and MobileNetV3.
FEDORA: Flying Event Dataset fOr Reactive behAvior
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The ability of resource-constrained biological systems such as fruitflies to perform complex and high-speed maneuvers in cluttered environments has been one of the prime sources of inspiration for developing vision-based autonomous systems. To emulate this capability, the perception pipeline of such systems must integrate information cues from tasks including optical flow and depth estimation, object detection and tracking, and segmentation, among others. However, the conventional approach of employing slow, synchronous inputs from standard frame-based cameras constrains these perception capabilities, particularly during high-speed maneuvers. Recently, event-based sensors have emerged as low latency and low energy alternatives to standard frame-based cameras for capturing high-speed motion, effectively speeding up perception and hence navigation. For coherence, all the perception tasks must be trained on the same input data. However, present-day datasets are curated mainly for a single or a handful of tasks and are limited in the rate of the provided ground truths. To address these limitations, we present Flying Event Dataset fOr Reactive behAviour (FEDORA) - a fully synthetic dataset for perception tasks, with raw data from frame-based cameras, event-based cameras, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), along with ground truths for depth, pose, and optical flow at a rate much higher than existing datasets.
Theoretical Guarantees of Learning Ensembling Strategies with Applications to Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Ensembling is among the most popular tools in machine learning (ML) due to its effectiveness in minimizing variance and thus improving generalization. Most ensembling methods for black-box base learners fall under the umbrella of "stacked generalization," namely training an ML algorithm that takes the inferences from the base learners as input. While stacking has been widely applied in practice, its theoretical properties are poorly understood. In this paper, we prove a novel result, showing that choosing the best stacked generalization from a (finite or finite-dimensional) family of stacked generalizations based on cross-validated performance does not perform "much worse" than the oracle best. Our result strengthens and significantly extends the results in Van der Laan et al. (2007). Inspired by the theoretical analysis, we further propose a particular family of stacked generalizations in the context of probabilistic forecasting, each one with a different sensitivity for how much the ensemble weights are allowed to vary across items, timestamps in the forecast horizon, and quantiles. Experimental results demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed method.
Benchmarking large language models for biomedical natural language processing applications and recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid growth of biomedical literature poses challenges for manual knowledge curation and synthesis. Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) automates the process. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in general domains, their effectiveness in BioNLP tasks remains unclear due to limited benchmarks and practical guidelines. We perform a systematic evaluation of four LLMs, GPT and LLaMA representatives on 12 BioNLP benchmarks across six applications. We compare their zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning performance with traditional fine-tuning of BERT or BART models. We examine inconsistencies, missing information, hallucinations, and perform cost analysis. Here we show that traditional fine-tuning outperforms zero or few shot LLMs in most tasks. However, closed-source LLMs like GPT-4 excel in reasoning-related tasks such as medical question answering. Open source LLMs still require fine-tuning to close performance gaps. We find issues like missing information and hallucinations in LLM outputs. These results offer practical insights for applying LLMs in BioNLP.
Tactile-based Exploration, Mapping and Navigation with Collision-Resilient Aerial Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This article introduces XPLORER, a passive deformable UAV with a spring-augmented chassis and proprioceptive state awareness, designed to endure collisions and maintain smooth contact. We develop a fast-converging external force estimation algorithm for XPLORER that leverages onboard sensors and proprioceptive data for contact and collision detection. Using this force information, we propose four motion primitives, including three novel tactile-based primitives: tactile-traversal, tactile-turning, and ricocheting-to aid XPLORER in navigating unknown environments. These primitives are synthesized autonomously in real-time to enable efficient exploration and navigation by leveraging collisions and contacts. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the potential of passive deformable UAVs for contact-rich real-world tasks such as non-destructive inspection, surveillance and mapping, and pursuit/evasion.
Reward Collapse in Aligning Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The extraordinary capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 are in part unleashed by aligning them with reward models that are trained on human preferences, which are often represented as rankings of responses to prompts. In this paper, we document the phenomenon of \textit{reward collapse}, an empirical observation where the prevailing ranking-based approach results in an \textit{identical} reward distribution \textit{regardless} of the prompts during the terminal phase of training. This outcome is undesirable as open-ended prompts like ``write a short story about your best friend'' should yield a continuous range of rewards for their completions, while specific prompts like ``what is the capital of New Zealand'' should generate either high or low rewards. Our theoretical investigation reveals that reward collapse is primarily due to the insufficiency of the ranking-based objective function to incorporate prompt-related information during optimization. This insight allows us to derive closed-form expressions for the reward distribution associated with a set of utility functions in an asymptotic regime. To overcome reward collapse, we introduce a prompt-aware optimization scheme that provably admits a prompt-dependent reward distribution within the interpolating regime. Our experimental results suggest that our proposed prompt-aware utility functions significantly alleviate reward collapse during the training of reward models.
Bridging the Language Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains but still struggle with non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper addresses the critical challenge of improving multilingual performance without extensive fine-tuning. We introduce a novel dynamic learning approach that optimizes prompt strategy, embedding model, and LLM per query at runtime. By adapting configurations dynamically, our method achieves significant improvements over static, best and random baselines. It operates efficiently in both offline and online settings, generalizing seamlessly across new languages and datasets. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with state-of-the-art multilingual embeddings, we achieve superior task performance across diverse linguistic contexts. Through systematic investigation and evaluation across 18 diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets we show our approach results in 10-15% improvements in multilingual performance over pre-trained models and 4x gains compared to fine-tuned, language-specific models.
Defense Against Shortest Path Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

Identifying shortest paths between nodes in a network is an important task in many applications. Recent work has shown that a malicious actor can manipulate a graph to make traffic between two nodes of interest follow their target path. In this paper, we develop a defense against such attacks by modifying the edge weights that users observe. The defender must balance inhibiting the attacker against any negative effects on benign users. Specifically, the defender's goals are: (a) recommend the shortest paths to users, (b) make the lengths of the shortest paths in the published graph close to those of the same paths in the true graph, and (c) minimize the probability of an attack. We formulate the defense as a Stackelberg game in which the defender is the leader and the attacker is the follower. We also consider a zero-sum version of the game in which the defender's goal is to minimize cost while achieving the minimum possible attack probability. We show that the defense problem is NP-hard and propose heuristic solutions for both the zero-sum and non-zero-sum settings. By relaxing some constraints of the original problem, we formulate a linear program for local optimization around a feasible point. We present defense results with both synthetic and real networks and show that our methods often reach the lower bound of the defender's cost.
Local Fragments, Global Gains: Subgraph Counting using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Subgraph counting is a fundamental task for analyzing structural patterns in graph-structured data, with important applications in domains such as computational biology and social network analysis, where recurring motifs reveal functional and organizational properties. In this paper, we propose localized versions of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) algorithms to improve both expressivity and computational efficiency for this task. We introduce Local $k$-WL, which we prove to be more expressive than $k$-WL and at most as expressive as $(k+1)$-WL, and provide a characterization of patterns whose subgraph and induced subgraph counts are invariant under Local $k$-WL equivalence. To enhance scalability, we present two variants -- Layer $k$-WL and Recursive $k$-WL -- that achieve greater time and space efficiency compared to applying $k$-WL on the entire graph. Additionally, we propose a novel fragmentation technique that decomposes complex subgraphs into simpler subpatterns, enabling the exact count of all induced subgraphs of size at most $4$ using only $1$-WL, with extensions possible for larger patterns when $k>1$. Building on these ideas, we develop a three-stage differentiable learning framework that combines subpattern counts to compute counts of more complex motifs, bridging combinatorial algorithm design with machine learning approaches. We also compare the expressive power of Local $k$-WL with existing GNN hierarchies and demonstrate that, under bounded time complexity, our methods are more expressive than prior approaches.