OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
STARCaster: Spatio-Temporal AutoRegressive Video Diffusion for Identity- and View-Aware Talking Portraits
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents STARCaster, an identity-aware spatio-temporal video diffusion model that addresses both speech-driven portrait animation and free-viewpoint talking portrait synthesis, given an identity embedding or reference image, within a unified framework. Existing 2D speech-to-video diffusion models depend heavily on reference guidance, leading to limited motion diversity. At the same time, 3D-aware animation typically relies on inversion through pre-trained tri-plane generators, which often leads to imperfect reconstructions and identity drift. We rethink reference- and geometry-based paradigms in two ways. First, we deviate from strict reference conditioning at pre-training by introducing softer identity constraints. Second, we address 3D awareness implicitly within the 2D video domain by leveraging the inherent multi-view nature of video data. STARCaster adopts a compositional approach progressing from ID-aware motion modeling, to audio-visual synchronization via lip reading-based supervision, and finally to novel view animation through temporal-to-spatial adaptation. To overcome the scarcity of 4D audio-visual data, we propose a decoupled learning approach in which view consistency and temporal coherence are trained independently. A self-forcing training scheme enables the model to learn from longer temporal contexts than those generated at inference, mitigating the overly static animations common in existing autoregressive approaches. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that STARCaster generalizes effectively across tasks and identities, consistently surpassing prior approaches in different benchmarks.
Humanoid Robot Running Through Random Stepping Stones and Jumping Over Obstacles: Step Adaptation Using Spring-Mass Trajectories
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This study proposes a step adaptation framework for running through spring-mass trajectories and deadbeat control gain libraries. It includes four main parts: (1) Automatic spring-mass trajectory library generation; (2) Deadbeat control gain library generation through an actively controlled template model that resembles the whole-body dynamics well; (3) Trajectory selection policy development for step adaptation; (4) Mapping spring-mass trajectories to a humanoid model through a whole-body control (WBC) framework also accounting for closed-kinematic chain systems, self collisions, and reactive limb swinging. We show the inclusiveness and the robustness of the proposed framework through various challenging and agile behaviors such as running through randomly generated stepping stones, jumping over random obstacles, performing slalom motions, changing the running direction suddenly with a random leg, and rejecting significant disturbances and uncertainties through the MuJoCo physics simulator. We also perform additional simulations under a comprehensive set of uncertainties and noise to better justify the proposed method's robustness to real-world challenges, including signal noise, imprecision, modeling errors, and delays. All the aforementioned behaviors are performed with a single library and the same set of WBC control parameters without additional tuning. The spring-mass and the deadbeat control gain library are automatically computed in 4.5 seconds in total for 315 different trajectories.
FIN-bench-v2: A Unified and Robust Benchmark Suite for Evaluating Finnish Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce FIN-bench-v2, a unified benchmark suite for evaluating large language models in Finnish. FIN-bench-v2 consolidates Finnish versions of widely used benchmarks together with an updated and expanded version of the original FIN-bench into a single, consistently formatted collection, covering multiple-choice and generative tasks across reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, and alignment. All datasets are converted to HuggingFace Datasets, which include both cloze and multiple-choice prompt formulations with five variants per task, and we incorporate human annotation or review for machine-translated resources such as GoldenSwag and XED. To select robust tasks, we pretrain a set of 2.15B-parameter decoder-only models and use their learning curves to compute monotonicity, signal-to-noise, non-random performance, and model ordering consistency, retaining only tasks that satisfy all criteria. We further evaluate a set of larger instruction-tuned models to characterize performance across tasks and prompt formulations. All datasets, prompts, and evaluation configurations are publicly available via our fork of the Language Model Evaluation Harness at https://github.com/LumiOpen/lm-evaluation-harness. Supplementary resources are released in a separate repository at https://github.com/TurkuNLP/FIN-bench-v2.
Automated User Identification from Facial Thermograms with Siamese Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The article analyzes the use of thermal imaging technologies for biometric identification based on facial thermograms. It presents a comparative analysis of infrared spectral ranges (NIR, SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR). The paper also defines key requirements for thermal cameras used in biometric systems, including sensor resolution, thermal sensitivity, and a frame rate of at least 30 Hz. Siamese neural networks are proposed as an effective approach for automating the identification process. In experiments conducted on a proprietary dataset, the proposed method achieved an accuracy of approximately 80%. The study also examines the potential of hybrid systems that combine visible and infrared spectra to overcome the limitations of individual modalities. The results indicate that thermal imaging is a promising technology for developing reliable security systems.
Parallel Heuristic Exploration for Additive Complexity Reduction in Fast Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents a parallel random-search method for reducing additive complexity in fast matrix multiplication algorithms with ternary coefficients $\{-1,0,1\}$. The approach replaces expensive exact evaluation with fast heuristic scoring, including the new Greedy-Intersections strategy. The method runs many independent common subexpression elimination processes in parallel, exploring the search space through random pair substitutions and diverse selection strategies while sharing promising partial solutions. Tested on 149 ternary-coefficient schemes, the method achieves lower addition counts than the state-of-the-art Greedy-Potential on 102 schemes (including 57 new best-known results for optimal-rank schemes), matches it on 45, and is outperformed on only 2. For most schemes, it provides equal or better results while being significantly faster, making it practical for algorithm exploration. All software and results are open source.
Automated Information Flow Selection for Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-scenario multi-task recommendation (MSMTR) systems must address recommendation demands across diverse scenarios while simultaneously optimizing multiple objectives, such as click-through rate and conversion rate. Existing MSMTR models typically consist of four information units: scenario-shared, scenario-specific, task-shared, and task-specific networks. These units interact to generate four types of relationship information flows, directed from scenario-shared or scenario-specific networks to task-shared or task-specific networks. However, these models face two main limitations: 1) They often rely on complex architectures, such as mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks, which increase the complexity of information fusion, model size, and training cost. 2) They extract all available information flows without filtering out irrelevant or even harmful content, introducing potential noise. Regarding these challenges, we propose a lightweight Automated Information Flow Selection (AutoIFS) framework for MSMTR. To tackle the first issue, AutoIFS incorporates low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to decouple the four information units, enabling more flexible and efficient information fusion with minimal parameter overhead. To address the second issue, AutoIFS introduces an information flow selection network that automatically filters out invalid scenario-task information flows based on model performance feedback. It employs a simple yet effective pruning function to eliminate useless information flows, thereby enhancing the impact of key relationships and improving model performance. Finally, we evaluate AutoIFS and confirm its effectiveness through extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets and an online A/B test.
rNCA: Self-Repairing Segmentation Masks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurately predicting topologically correct masks remains a difficult task for general segmentation models, which often produce fragmented or disconnected outputs. Fixing these artifacts typically requires hand-crafted refinement rules or architectures specialized to a particular task. Here, we show that Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) can be directly re-purposed as an effective refinement mechanism, using local, iterative updates guided by image context to repair segmentation masks. By training on imperfect masks and ground truths, the automaton learns the structural properties of the target shape while relying solely on local information. When applied to coarse, globally predicted masks, the learned dynamics progressively reconnect broken regions, prune loose fragments and converge towards stable, topologically consistent results. We show how refinement NCA (rNCA) can be easily applied to repair common topological errors produced by different base segmentation models and tasks: for fragmented retinal vessels, it yields 2-3% gains in Dice/clDice and improves Betti errors, reducing $β_0$ errors by 60% and $β_1$ by 20%; for myocardium, it repairs 61.5% of broken cases in a zero-shot setting while lowering ASSD and HD by 19% and 16%, respectively. This showcases NCA as effective and broadly applicable refiners.
Improving Privacy Protection in the area of Behavioural Targeting
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

This PhD thesis discusses how European law could improve privacy protection in the area of behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting, also referred to as online profiling, involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected information to show people individually targeted advertisements. To protect privacy in the area of behavioural targeting, the EU lawmaker mainly relies on the consent requirement for the use of tracking technologies in the e-Privacy Directive, and on general data protection law. With informed consent requirements, the law aims to empower people to make choices in their best interests. But behavioural studies cast doubt on the effectiveness of the empowerment approach as a privacy protection measure. Many people click "I agree" to any statement that is presented to them. Therefore, to mitigate privacy problems such as chilling effects, this study argues for a combined approach of protecting and empowering the individual. Compared to the current approach, the lawmaker should focus more on protecting people. The PhD thesis is a legal study, but it also incorporates insights from other disciplines, such as computer science, behavioural economics, and media studies. This study is among the first to discuss the implications of behavioural research for European data protection policy. The topic of whether data protection law should apply to pseudonymous data is discussed in depth. The study contains a detailed analysis of the role of informed consent in data protection law, and gives much attention to the tension between protecting and empowering the individual within data protection law.
Computer vision training dataset generation for robotic environments using Gaussian splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a novel pipeline for generating large-scale, highly realistic, and automatically labeled datasets for computer vision tasks in robotic environments. Our approach addresses the critical challenges of the domain gap between synthetic and real-world imagery and the time-consuming bottleneck of manual annotation. We leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to create photorealistic representations of the operational environment and objects. These assets are then used in a game engine where physics simulations create natural arrangements. A novel, two-pass rendering technique combines the realism of splats with a shadow map generated from proxy meshes. This map is then algorithmically composited with the image to add both physically plausible shadows and subtle highlights, significantly enhancing realism. Pixel-perfect segmentation masks are generated automatically and formatted for direct use with object detection models like YOLO. Our experiments show that a hybrid training strategy, combining a small set of real images with a large volume of our synthetic data, yields the best detection and segmentation performance, confirming this as an optimal strategy for efficiently achieving robust and accurate models.
Learning to Generate Cross-Task Unexploitable Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Unexploitable example generation aims to transform personal images into their unexploitable (unlearnable) versions before they are uploaded online, thereby preventing unauthorized exploitation of online personal images. Recently, this task has garnered significant research attention due to its critical relevance to personal data privacy. Yet, despite recent progress, existing methods for this task can still suffer from limited practical applicability, as they can fail to generate examples that are broadly unexploitable across different real-world computer vision tasks. To deal with this problem, in this work, we propose a novel Meta Cross-Task Unexploitable Example Generation (MCT-UEG) framework. At the core of our framework, to optimize the unexploitable example generator for effectively producing broadly unexploitable examples, we design a flat-minima-oriented meta training and testing scheme. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of our framework.
Two Families of Linear Codes Containing Non-GRS MDS Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

We construct two new families of linear codes by modifying the generator matrices of generalized Reed-Solomon (GRS) codes. For these codes, we explicitly derive parity-check matrices and establish necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring the MDS property. Additionally, we explore subfamilies within these constructions that are non-GRS MDS codes. We also characterize their self-orthogonal and self-dual properties and present some explicit constructions and examples.
From User Interface to Agent Interface: Efficiency Optimization of UI Representations for LLM Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

While Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great potential for automated UI navigation such as automated UI testing and AI assistants, their efficiency has been largely overlooked. Our motivating study reveals that inefficient UI representation creates a critical performance bottleneck. However, UI representation optimization, formulated as the task of automatically generating programs that transform UI representations, faces two unique challenges. First, the lack of Boolean oracles, which traditional program synthesis uses to decisively validate semantic correctness, poses a fundamental challenge to co-optimization of token efficiency and completeness. Second, the need to process large, complex UI trees as input while generating long, compositional transformation programs, making the search space vast and error-prone. Toward addressing the preceding limitations, we present UIFormer, the first automated optimization framework that synthesizes UI transformation programs by conducting constraint-based optimization with structured decomposition of the complex synthesis task. First, UIFormer restricts the program space using a domain-specific language (DSL) that captures UI-specific operations. Second, UIFormer conducts LLM-based iterative refinement with correctness and efficiency rewards, providing guidance for achieving the efficiency-completeness co-optimization. UIFormer operates as a lightweight plugin that applies transformation programs for seamless integration with existing LLM agents, requiring minimal modifications to their core logic. Evaluations across three UI navigation benchmarks spanning Android and Web platforms with five LLMs demonstrate that UIFormer achieves 48.7% to 55.8% token reduction with minimal runtime overhead while maintaining or improving agent performance. Real-world industry deployment at WeChat further validates the practical impact of UIFormer.
SIGMA: An AI-Empowered Training Stack on Early-Life Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

An increasing variety of AI accelerators is being considered for large-scale training. However, enabling large-scale training on early-life AI accelerators faces three core challenges: frequent system disruptions and undefined failure modes that undermine reliability; numerical errors and training instabilities that threaten correctness and convergence; and the complexity of parallelism optimization combined with unpredictable local noise that degrades efficiency. To address these challenges, SIGMA is an open-source training stack designed to improve the reliability, stability, and efficiency of large-scale distributed training on early-life AI hardware. The core of this initiative is the LUCIA TRAINING PLATFORM (LTP), the system optimized for clusters with early-life AI accelerators. Since its launch in March 2025, LTP has significantly enhanced training reliability and operational productivity. Over the past five months, it has achieved an impressive 94.45% effective cluster accelerator utilization, while also substantially reducing node recycling and job-recovery times. Building on the foundation of LTP, the LUCIA TRAINING FRAMEWORK (LTF) successfully trained SIGMA-MOE, a 200B MoE model, using 2,048 AI accelerators. This effort delivered remarkable stability and efficiency outcomes, achieving 21.08% MFU, state-of-the-art downstream accuracy, and encountering only one stability incident over a 75-day period. Together, these advances establish SIGMA, which not only tackles the critical challenges of large-scale training but also establishes a new benchmark for AI infrastructure and platform innovation, offering a robust, cost-effective alternative to prevailing established accelerator stacks and significantly advancing AI capabilities and scalability. The source code of SIGMA is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LuciaTrainingPlatform.
PrahokBART: A Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Khmer Natural Language Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This work introduces {\it PrahokBART}, a compact pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model trained from scratch for Khmer using carefully curated Khmer and English corpora. We focus on improving the pre-training corpus quality and addressing the linguistic issues of Khmer, which are ignored in existing multilingual models, by incorporating linguistic components such as word segmentation and normalization. We evaluate PrahokBART on three generative tasks: machine translation, text summarization, and headline generation, where our results demonstrate that it outperforms mBART50, a strong multilingual pre-trained model. Additionally, our analysis provides insights into the impact of each linguistic module and evaluates how effectively our model handles space during text generation, which is crucial for the naturalness of texts in Khmer.
A Distance Amplification Lemma for Monotonicity
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2025
Year: 2025

We show a procedure that, given oracle access to a function $f\colon \{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$, produces oracle access to a function $f'\colon \{0,1\}^{n'}\to\{0,1\}$ such that if $f$ is monotone, then $f'$ is monotone, and if $f$ is $\varepsilon$-far from monotone, then $f'$ is $Ω(1)$-far from monotone. Moreover, $n' \leq n 2^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$ and each oracle query to $f'$ can be answered by making $2^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$ oracle queries to $f$. Our lemma is motivated by a recent result of [Chen, Chen, Cui, Pires, Stockwell, arXiv:2511.04558], who showed that for all $c>0$ there exists $\varepsilon_c>0$, such that any (even two-sided, adaptive) algorithm distinguishing between monotone functions and $\varepsilon_c$-far from monotone functions, requires $Ω(n^{1/2-c})$ queries. Combining our lemma with their result implies a similar result, except that the distance from monotonicity is an absolute constant $\varepsilon>0$, and the lower bound is $Ω(n^{1/2-o(1)})$ queries.
astroCAMP: A Community Benchmark and Co-Design Framework for Sustainable SKA-Scale Radio Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project will operate one of the world's largest continuous scientific data systems, sustaining petascale imaging under strict power caps. Yet, current radio-interferometric pipelines utilize only a small fraction of hardware peak performance, typically 4-14%, due to memory and I/O bottlenecks, resulting in poor energy efficiency and high operational and carbon costs. Progress is further limited by the absence of standardised metrics and fidelity tolerances, preventing principled hardware-software co-design and rigorous exploration of quality-efficiency trade-offs. We introduce astroCAMP, a framework for guiding the co-design of next-generation imaging pipelines and sustainable HPC architectures that maximise scientific return within SKA's operational and environmental limits. astroCAMP provides: (1) a unified, extensible metric suite covering scientific fidelity, computational performance, sustainability, and lifecycle economics; (2) standardised SKA-representative datasets and reference outputs enabling reproducible benchmarking across CPUs, GPUs, and emerging accelerators; and (3) a multi-objective co-design formulation linking scientific-quality constraints to time-, energy-, carbon-to-solution, and total cost of ownership. We release datasets, benchmarking results, and a reproducibility kit, and evaluate co-design metrics for WSClean and IDG on an AMD EPYC 9334 processor and an NVIDIA H100 GPU. Further, we illustrate the use of astroCAMP for heterogeneous CPU-FPGA design-space exploration, and its potential to facilitate the identification of Pareto-optimal operating points for SKA-scale imaging deployments. Last, we make a call to the SKA community to define quantifiable fidelity metrics and thresholds to accelerate principled optimisation for SKA-scale imaging.
Design in Tiles: Automating GEMM Deployment on Tile-Based Many-PE Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Tile-based many-Processing Element (PE) accelerators can achieve competitive performance on General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM), but they are extremely hard to program, as their optimal software mapping is deeply coupled with hardware design which is unwieldy to manual deployment. We propose "Design in Tiles (DiT)", an automated framework connecting a deployment toolchain with a configurable executable model for these accelerators. For evaluation, we apply our framework to GEMM targeting a large acceleration configuration (e.g., 32x32 tiles, 1979 TFLOPS@FP8, 4 TB/s Bandwidth) comparable to an NVIDIA GH200. We achieve higher PE utilization than GH200 with its expert-tuned GEMM libraries, achieving 1.2-2.0x speedup across diverse matrix shapes.