Authors: Vincent C. M\"uller
Abstract: This paper investigates the prospects of AI without representation in general, and the proposals of Rodney Brooks in particular. What turns out to be characteristic of Brooks' proposal is the rejection of central control in intelligent agents; his systems has as much or as little representation as traditional AI. The traditional view that representation is necessary for intelligence presupposes that intelligence requires central control. However, much of recent cognitive science suggests that we should dispose of the image of intelligent agents as central representation processors. If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks' proposal for non-centralized cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents - though not for conscious agents and thus not for human-like AI.
Authors: Jianyi Zhang
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid progression of deep learning, pushing us closer to the realization of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Probabilistic modeling is critical to many of these advancements, which provides a foundational framework for capturing data distributions. However, as the scale and complexity of AI applications grow, traditional probabilistic modeling faces escalating challenges, such as high-dimensional parameter spaces, heterogeneous data sources, and evolving real-world requirements often render classical approaches insufficiently flexible. This paper proposes a novel concept, Probability Engineering, which treats the already-learned probability distributions within deep learning as engineering artifacts. Rather than merely fitting or inferring distributions, we actively modify and reinforce them to better address the diverse and evolving demands of modern AI. Specifically, Probability Engineering introduces novel techniques and constraints to refine existing probability distributions, improving their robustness, efficiency, adaptability, or trustworthiness. We showcase this paradigm through a series of applications spanning Bayesian deep learning, Edge AI (including federated learning and knowledge distillation), and Generative AI (such as text-to-image generation with diffusion models and high-quality text generation with large language models). These case studies demonstrate how probability distributions once treated as static objects can be engineered to meet the diverse and evolving requirements of large-scale, data-intensive, and trustworthy AI systems. By systematically expanding and strengthening the role of probabilistic modeling, Probability Engineering paves the way for more robust, adaptive, efficient, and trustworthy deep learning solutions in today's fast-growing AI era.
Authors: Ziyue Wang, Junde Wu, Chang Han Low, Yueming Jin
Abstract: Developing reliable AI systems to assist human clinicians in multi-modal medical diagnosis has long been a key objective for researchers. Recently, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention and achieved success across various domains. With strong reasoning capabilities and the ability to perform diverse tasks based on user instructions, they hold great potential for enhancing medical diagnosis. However, directly applying MLLMs to the medical domain still presents challenges. They lack detailed perception of visual inputs, limiting their ability to perform quantitative image analysis, which is crucial for medical diagnostics. Additionally, MLLMs often exhibit hallucinations and inconsistencies in reasoning, whereas clinical diagnoses must adhere strictly to established criteria. To address these challenges, we propose MedAgent-Pro, an evidence-based reasoning agentic system designed to achieve reliable, explainable, and precise medical diagnoses. This is accomplished through a hierarchical workflow: at the task level, knowledge-based reasoning generate reliable diagnostic plans for specific diseases following retrieved clinical criteria. While at the case level, multiple tool agents process multi-modal inputs, analyze different indicators according to the plan, and provide a final diagnosis based on both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Comprehensive experiments on both 2D and 3D medical diagnosis tasks demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of MedAgent-Pro, while case studies further highlight its reliability and interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/MedAgent-Pro.
Authors: Marcus Tantakoun, Xiaodan Zhu, Christian Muise
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language tasks but often struggle with long-horizon planning problems requiring structured reasoning. This limitation has drawn interest in integrating neuro-symbolic approaches within the Automated Planning (AP) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. However, identifying optimal AP deployment frameworks can be daunting. This paper aims to provide a timely survey of the current research with an in-depth analysis, positioning LLMs as tools for extracting and refining planning models to support reliable AP planners. By systematically reviewing the current state of research, we highlight methodologies, and identify critical challenges and future directions, hoping to contribute to the joint research on NLP and Automated Planning.
Authors: Guido Fioretti
Abstract: Evidence Theory is a mathematical framework for handling imprecise reasoning in the context of a judge evaluating testimonies or a detective evaluating cues, rather than a gambler playing games of chance. In comparison to Probability Theory, it is better equipped to deal with ambiguous information and novel possibilities. Furthermore, arrival and evaluation of testimonies implies a communication channel. This paper explores the possibility of employing Evidence Theory to represent arbitrary communication codes between and within living organisms. In this paper, different schemes are explored for living organisms incapable of anticipation, animals sufficiently sophisticated to be capable of extrapolation, and humans capable of reading one other's minds.
Authors: Nicholas W. Barendregt, Joshua I. Gold, Kre\v{s}imir Josi\'c, Zachary P. Kilpatrick
Abstract: To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible payoffs, like reward rate, or gathering information to support a diversity of (possibly unknown) objectives. However, our understanding of the relative merits of these two approaches remains incomplete, in part because direct comparisons have been limited to idealized, static environments that lack the dynamic complexity of the real world. Here we compared the performance of normative reward- and information-seeking strategies in a dynamic foraging task. Both strategies show similar transitions between exploratory and exploitative behaviors as environmental uncertainty changes. However, we find subtle disparities in the actions they take, resulting in meaningful performance differences: whereas reward-seeking strategies generate slightly more reward on average, information-seeking strategies provide more consistent and predictable outcomes. Our findings support the adaptive value of information-seeking behaviors that can mitigate risk with minimal reward loss.
Authors: Yunsheng Bai, Ghaith Bany Hamad, Syed Suhaib, Haoxing Ren
Abstract: Generating SystemVerilog Assertions (SVAs) from natural language specifications remains a major challenge in formal verification (FV) due to the inherent ambiguity and incompleteness of specifications. Existing LLM-based approaches, such as AssertLLM, focus on extracting information solely from specification documents, often failing to capture essential internal signal interactions and design details present in the RTL code, leading to incomplete or incorrect assertions. We propose a novel approach that constructs a Knowledge Graph (KG) from both specifications and RTL, using a hardware-specific schema with domain-specific entity and relation types. We create an initial KG from the specification and then systematically fuse it with information extracted from the RTL code, resulting in a unified, comprehensive KG. This combined representation enables a more thorough understanding of the design and allows for a multi-resolution context synthesis process which is designed to extract diverse verification contexts from the KG. Experiments on four designs demonstrate that our method significantly enhances SVA quality over prior methods. This structured representation not only improves FV but also paves the way for future research in tasks like code generation and design understanding.
Authors: Sky CH-Wang, Darshan Deshpande, Smaranda Muresan, Anand Kannappan, Rebecca Qian
Abstract: We introduce Browsing Lost Unformed Recollections, a tip-of-the-tongue known-item search and reasoning benchmark for general AI assistants. BLUR introduces a set of 573 real-world validated questions that demand searching and reasoning across multi-modal and multilingual inputs, as well as proficient tool use, in order to excel on. Humans easily ace these questions (scoring on average 98%), while the best-performing system scores around 56%. To facilitate progress toward addressing this challenging and aspirational use case for general AI assistants, we release 350 questions through a public leaderboard, retain the answers to 250 of them, and have the rest as a private test set.
Authors: Yunuo Zhang, Baiting Luo, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Abhishek Dubey
Abstract: Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general mathematical model for sequential decision-making in stochastic environments under state uncertainty. POMDPs are often solved \textit{online}, which enables the algorithm to adapt to new information in real time. Online solvers typically use bootstrap particle filters based on importance resampling for updating the belief distribution. Since directly sampling from the ideal state distribution given the latest observation and previous state is infeasible, particle filters approximate the posterior belief distribution by propagating states and adjusting weights through prediction and resampling steps. However, in practice, the importance resampling technique often leads to particle degeneracy and sample impoverishment when the state transition model poorly aligns with the posterior belief distribution, especially when the received observation is highly informative. We propose an approach that constructs a sequence of bridge distributions between the state-transition and optimal distributions through iterative Monte Carlo steps, better accommodating noisy observations in online POMDP solvers. Our algorithm demonstrates significantly superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods when evaluated across multiple challenging POMDP domains.
Authors: Yu Cui, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Yiwei Wang
Abstract: Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning chains, enhancing robustness. This motivates our exploration: how vulnerable are reasoning LLMs to subtle errors in their input reasoning chains? We introduce "Compromising Thought" (CPT), a vulnerability where models presented with reasoning tokens containing manipulated calculation results tend to ignore correct reasoning steps and adopt incorrect results instead. Through systematic evaluation across multiple reasoning LLMs, we design three increasingly explicit prompting methods to measure CPT resistance, revealing that models struggle significantly to identify and correct these manipulations. Notably, contrary to existing research suggesting structural alterations affect model performance more than content modifications, we find that local ending token manipulations have greater impact on reasoning outcomes than structural changes. Moreover, we discover a security vulnerability in DeepSeek-R1 where tampered reasoning tokens can trigger complete reasoning cessation. Our work enhances understanding of reasoning robustness and highlights security considerations for reasoning-intensive applications.
Authors: Mingyang Chen, Tianpeng Li, Haoze Sun, Yijie Zhou, Chenzheng Zhu, Fan Yang, Zenan Zhou, Weipeng Chen, Haofen Wang, Jeff Z. Pan, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex multi-hop questions requiring multiple retrieval steps. We propose ReSearch, a novel framework that trains LLMs to Reason with Search via reinforcement learning without using any supervised data on reasoning steps. Our approach treats search operations as integral components of the reasoning chain, where when and how to perform searches is guided by text-based thinking, and search results subsequently influence further reasoning. We train ReSearch on Qwen2.5-7B(-Instruct) and Qwen2.5-32B(-Instruct) models and conduct extensive experiments. Despite being trained on only one dataset, our models demonstrate strong generalizability across various benchmarks. Analysis reveals that ReSearch naturally elicits advanced reasoning capabilities such as reflection and self-correction during the reinforcement learning process.
Authors: Songtao Sun, Jingyi Li, Yuanfei Dong, Haoguang Liu, Chenxin Xu, Fuyang Li, Qiang Liu
Abstract: This paper introduces a multi-agent application system designed to enhance office collaboration efficiency and work quality. The system integrates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies, achieving functionalities such as task allocation, progress monitoring, and information sharing. The agents within the system are capable of providing personalized collaboration support based on team members' needs and incorporate data analysis tools to improve decision-making quality. The paper also proposes an intelligent agent architecture that separates Plan and Solver, and through techniques such as multi-turn query rewriting and business tool retrieval, it enhances the agent's multi-intent and multi-turn dialogue capabilities. Furthermore, the paper details the design of tools and multi-turn dialogue in the context of office collaboration scenarios, and validates the system's effectiveness through experiments and evaluations. Ultimately, the system has demonstrated outstanding performance in real business applications, particularly in query understanding, task planning, and tool calling. Looking forward, the system is expected to play a more significant role in addressing complex interaction issues within dynamic environments and large-scale multi-agent systems.
Authors: Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Lingrui Mei, Lizhe Chen, Baolong Bi, Xueqi Cheng
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs), which employ extended thinking processes with reflection and self-correction capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of test-time scaling. RLLMs exhibit innate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capability obtained from training, leading to a natural question: "Is CoT prompting, a popular In-Context Learning (ICL) method for chat LLMs, necessary to enhance the reasoning capability of RLLMs?" In this work, we present the first comprehensive analysis of the impacts of Zero-shot CoT and Few-shot CoT on RLLMs across mathematical reasoning tasks. We examine models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, finding that contrary to concerns, CoT prompting significantly enhances RLLMs' performance in most scenarios. Our results reveal distinct patterns: large-capacity models show minimal improvement on simple tasks but substantial gains on complex problems, while smaller models exhibit the opposite behavior. Further analysis demonstrates that CoT prompting effectively controls the distribution of the numbers of thinking tokens and reasoning steps, reducing excessive reflections by approximately 90% in some cases. Moreover, attention logits analysis reveals the RLLMs' overfitting to reflection-related words, which is mitigated by external CoT guidance. Notably, our experiments indicate that for RLLMs, one-shot CoT consistently yields superior performance compared to Few-shot CoT approaches. Our findings provide important insights for optimizing RLLMs' performance through appropriate prompting strategies.
Authors: Muhammad Al-Zafar Khan, Jamal Al-Karaki
Abstract: In this study, we formulate the drone delivery problem as a control problem and solve it using Model Predictive Control. Two experiments are performed: The first is on a less challenging grid world environment with lower dimensionality, and the second is with a higher dimensionality and added complexity. The MPC method was benchmarked against three popular Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL): Independent $Q$-Learning (IQL), Joint Action Learners (JAL), and Value-Decomposition Networks (VDN). It was shown that the MPC method solved the problem quicker and required fewer optimal numbers of drones to achieve a minimized cost and navigate the optimal path.
Authors: Lewis Newsham, Ryan Hyland, Daniel Prince
Abstract: This paper presents SANDMAN, an architecture for cyber deception that leverages Language Agents to emulate convincing human simulacra. Our 'Deceptive Agents' serve as advanced cyber decoys, designed for high-fidelity engagement with attackers by extending the observation period of attack behaviours. Through experimentation, measurement, and analysis, we demonstrate how a prompt schema based on the five-factor model of personality systematically induces distinct 'personalities' in Large Language Models. Our results highlight the feasibility of persona-driven Language Agents for generating diverse, realistic behaviours, ultimately improving cyber deception strategies.
Authors: Jorge Fandinno, Yuliya Lierler
Abstract: Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under which this technique is applicable, by considering not only dependencies between predicates but also their arguments and context. This allows splitting programs commonly used in practice to which previous results were not applicable.
Authors: David Radke, Kyle Tilbury
Abstract: Advanced analytics have transformed how sports teams operate, particularly in episodic sports like baseball. Their impact on continuous invasion sports, such as soccer and ice hockey, has been limited due to increased game complexity and restricted access to high-resolution game tracking data. In this demo, we present a method to collect and utilize simulated soccer tracking data from the Google Research Football environment to support the development of models designed for continuous tracking data. The data is stored in a schema that is representative of real tracking data and we provide processes that extract high-level features and events. We include examples of established tracking data models to showcase the efficacy of the simulated data. We address the scarcity of publicly available tracking data, providing support for research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and sports analytics.
Authors: Cristian Morasso, Giorgio Dolci, Ilaria Boscolo Galazzo, Sergey M. Plis, Gloria Menegaz
Abstract: Given the broad adoption of artificial intelligence, it is essential to provide evidence that AI models are reliable, trustable, and fair. To this end, the emerging field of eXplainable AI develops techniques to probe such requirements, counterbalancing the hype pushing the pervasiveness of this technology. Among the many facets of this issue, this paper focuses on baseline attribution methods, aiming at deriving a feature attribution map at the network input relying on a "neutral" stimulus usually called "baseline". The choice of the baseline is crucial as it determines the explanation of the network behavior. In this framework, this paper has the twofold goal of shedding light on the implications of the choice of the baseline and providing a simple yet effective method for identifying the best baseline for the task. To achieve this, we propose a decision boundary sampling method, since the baseline, by definition, lies on the decision boundary, which naturally becomes the search domain. Experiments are performed on synthetic examples and validated relying on state-of-the-art methods. Despite being limited to the experimental scope, this contribution is relevant as it offers clear guidelines and a simple proxy for baseline selection, reducing ambiguity and enhancing deep models' reliability and trust.
Authors: Thomas Miconi, Kevin McKee, Yicong Zheng, Jed McCaleb
Abstract: Intelligent organisms can solve truly novel problems which they have never encountered before, either in their lifetime or their evolution. An important component of this capacity is the ability to ``think'', that is, to mentally manipulate objects, concepts and behaviors in order to plan and evaluate possible solutions to novel problems, even without environment interaction. To generate problems that are truly qualitatively novel, while still solvable zero-shot (by mental simulation), we use the combinatorial nature of environments: we train the agent while withholding a specific combination of the environment's elements. The novel test task, based on this combination, is thus guaranteed to be truly novel, while still mentally simulable since the agent has been exposed to each individual element (and their pairwise interactions) during training. We propose a method to train agents endowed with world models to make use their mental simulation abilities, by selecting tasks based on the difference between the agent's pre-thinking and post-thinking performance. When tested on the novel, withheld problem, the resulting agent successfully simulated alternative scenarios and used the resulting information to guide its behavior in the actual environment, solving the novel task in a single real-environment trial (zero-shot).
Authors: Alexis Teter, Abhishek Halder
Abstract: The purpose of this note is to clarify the importance of the relation $\boldsymbol{gg}^{\top}\propto \boldsymbol{\sigma\sigma}^{\top}$ in solving control-affine Schr\"{o}dinger bridge problems via the Hopf-Cole transform, where $\boldsymbol{g},\boldsymbol{\sigma}$ are the control and noise coefficients, respectively. We show that the Hopf-Cole transform applied to the conditions of optimality for generic control-affine Schr\"{o}dinger bridge problems, i.e., without the assumption $\boldsymbol{gg}^{\top}\propto\boldsymbol{\sigma\sigma}^{\top}$, gives a pair of forward-backward PDEs that are neither linear nor equation-level decoupled. We explain how the resulting PDEs can be interpreted as nonlinear forward-backward advection-diffusion-reaction equations, where the nonlinearity stem from additional drift and reaction terms involving the gradient of the log-likelihood a.k.a. the score. These additional drift and reaction vanish when $\boldsymbol{gg}^{\top}\propto\boldsymbol{\sigma\sigma}^{\top}$, and the resulting boundary-coupled system of linear PDEs can then be solved by dynamic Sinkhorn recursions. A key takeaway of our work is that the numerical solution of the generic control-affine Schr\"{o}dinger bridge requires further algorithmic development, possibly generalizing the dynamic Sinkhorn recursion or otherwise.
Authors: Rebecca Scholefield, Samuel Martin, Otto Barten
Abstract: The malicious use or malfunction of advanced general-purpose AI (GPAI) poses risks that, according to leading experts, could lead to the 'marginalisation or extinction of humanity.' To address these risks, there are an increasing number of proposals for international agreements on AI safety. In this paper, we review recent (2023-) proposals, identifying areas of consensus and disagreement, and drawing on related literature to assess their feasibility. We focus our discussion on risk thresholds, regulations, types of international agreement and five related processes: building scientific consensus, standardisation, auditing, verification and incentivisation. Based on this review, we propose a treaty establishing a compute threshold above which development requires rigorous oversight. This treaty would mandate complementary audits of models, information security and governance practices, overseen by an international network of AI Safety Institutes (AISIs) with authority to pause development if risks are unacceptable. Our approach combines immediately implementable measures with a flexible structure that can adapt to ongoing research.
Authors: Upasana Tiwari, Rupayan Chakraborty, Sunil Kumar Kopparapu
Abstract: Computer interfaces are advancing towards using multi-modalities to enable better human-computer interactions. The use of automatic emotion recognition (AER) can make the interactions natural and meaningful thereby enhancing the user experience. Though speech is the most direct and intuitive modality for AER, it is not reliable because it can be intentionally faked by humans. On the other hand, physiological modalities like EEG, are more reliable and impossible to fake. However, use of EEG is infeasible for realistic scenarios usage because of the need for specialized recording setup. In this paper, one of our primary aims is to ride on the reliability of the EEG modality to facilitate robust AER on the speech modality. Our approach uses both the modalities during training to reliably identify emotion at the time of inference, even in the absence of the more reliable EEG modality. We propose, a two-step joint multi-modal learning approach (JMML) that exploits both the intra- and inter- modal characteristics to construct emotion embeddings that enrich the performance of AER. In the first step, using JEC-SSL, intra-modal learning is done independently on the individual modalities. This is followed by an inter-modal learning using the proposed extended variant of deep canonically correlated cross-modal autoencoder (E-DCC-CAE). The approach learns the joint properties of both the modalities by mapping them into a common representation space, such that the modalities are maximally correlated. These emotion embeddings, hold properties of both the modalities there by enhancing the performance of ML classifier used for AER. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed approach. To best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to combine speech and EEG with joint multi-modal learning approach for reliable AER.
Authors: Muhammad Ahmad, Sardar Usman, Ildar Batyrshin, Muhammad Muzammil, K. Sajid, M. Hasnain, Muhammad Jalal, Grigori Sidorov
Abstract: Background: Lung disease is a significant health issue, particularly in children and elderly individuals. It often results from lung infections and is one of the leading causes of mortality in children. Globally, lung-related diseases claim many lives each year, making early and accurate diagnoses crucial. Radiographs are valuable tools for the diagnosis of such conditions. The most prevalent lung diseases, including pneumonia, asthma, allergies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchitis, emphysema, and lung cancer, represent significant public health challenges. Early prediction of these conditions is critical, as it allows for the identification of risk factors and implementation of preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of disease onset Methods: In this study, we utilized a dataset comprising 3,475 chest X-ray images sourced from from Mendeley Data provided by Talukder, M. A. (2023) [14], categorized into three classes: normal, lung opacity, and pneumonia. We applied five pre-trained deep learning models, including CNN, ResNet50, DenseNet, CheXNet, and U-Net, as well as two transfer learning algorithms such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and Shifted Window (Swin) to classify these images. This approach aims to address diagnostic issues in lung abnormalities by reducing reliance on human intervention through automated classification systems. Our analysis was conducted in both binary and multiclass settings. Results: In the binary classification, we focused on distinguishing between normal and viral pneumonia cases, whereas in the multi-class classification, all three classes (normal, lung opacity, and viral pneumonia) were included. Our proposed methodology (ViT) achieved remarkable performance, with accuracy rates of 99% for binary classification and 95.25% for multiclass classification.
Authors: Dilshod Nematov, Mirabbos Hojamberdiev
Abstract: The rapid advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven techniques is revolutionizing materials discovery, property prediction, and material design by minimizing human intervention and accelerating scientific progress. This review provides a comprehensive overview of smart, machine learning (ML)-driven approaches, emphasizing their role in predicting material properties, discovering novel compounds, and optimizing material structures. Key methodologies ranging from deep learning, graph neural networks, and Bayesian optimization to automated generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) enable the autonomous design of materials with tailored functionalities. By leveraging AutoML frameworks (e.g., AutoGluon, TPOT, and H2O.ai), researchers can automate the model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and feature engineering, significantly improving the efficiency of materials informatics. Furthermore, the integration of AI-driven robotic laboratories and high-throughput computing has established a fully automated pipeline for rapid synthesis and experimental validation, drastically reducing the time and cost of material discovery. This review highlights real-world applications of automated ML-driven approaches in predicting mechanical, thermal, electrical, and optical properties of materials, demonstrating successful cases in superconductors, catalysts, photovoltaics, and energy storage systems. We also address key challenges, such as data quality, interpretability, and the integration of AutoML with quantum computing, which are essential for future advancements. Ultimately, the synergy between AI, automated experimentation, and computational modeling transforms the way the materials are discovered, optimized, and designed, paving the way for next-generation innovations in energy, electronics, and nanotechnology.
Authors: David M. Berry
Abstract: This paper develops a critical theory of artificial intelligence, within a historical constellation where computational systems increasingly generate cultural content that destabilises traditional distinctions between human and machine production. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of the algorithmic condition, a cultural moment when machine-generated work not only becomes indistinguishable from human creation but actively reshapes our understanding of ideas of authenticity. This transformation, I argue, moves beyond false consciousness towards what I call post-consciousness, where the boundaries between individual and synthetic consciousness become porous. Drawing on critical theory and extending recent work on computational ideology, I develop three key theoretical contributions, first, the concept of the Inversion to describe a new computational turn in algorithmic society; second, automimetric production as a framework for understanding emerging practices of automated value creation; and third, constellational analysis as a methodological approach for mapping the complex interplay of technical systems, cultural forms and political economic structures. Through these contributions, I argue that we need new critical methods capable of addressing both the technical specificity of AI systems and their role in restructuring forms of life under computational capitalism. The paper concludes by suggesting that critical reflexivity is needed to engage with the algorithmic condition without being subsumed by it and that it represents a growing challenge for contemporary critical theory.
Authors: Elija Perrier
Abstract: We analyse circumstances in which bifurcation-driven jumps in AI systems with their emergent heavy-tailed outcome distributions. By analysing how a control parameter's random fluctuations near a catastrophic threshold generate extreme outcomes, we demonstrate in what circumstances the probability of a sudden, large-scale, transition aligns closely with the tail probability of the resulting damage distribution. Our results contribute to research in monitoring, mitigation and control of AI systems when seeking to manage potentially catastrophic AI risk.
Authors: Yexin Li, Pring Wong, Hanfang Zhang, Shuo Chen, Siyuan Qi
Abstract: Exploration remains a critical challenge in reinforcement learning, as many existing methods either lack theoretical guarantees or fall short of practical effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce CAE, a lightweight algorithm that repurposes the value networks in standard deep RL algorithms to drive exploration without introducing additional parameters. CAE utilizes any linear multi-armed bandit technique and incorporates an appropriate scaling strategy, enabling efficient exploration with provable sub-linear regret bounds and practical stability. Notably, it is simple to implement, requiring only around 10 lines of code. In complex tasks where learning an effective value network proves challenging, we propose CAE+, an extension of CAE that incorporates an auxiliary network. This extension increases the parameter count by less than 1% while maintaining implementation simplicity, adding only about 10 additional lines of code. Experiments on MuJoCo and MiniHack show that both CAE and CAE+ outperform state-of-the-art baselines, bridging the gap between theoretical rigor and practical efficiency.
Authors: Ziqiao Weng, Weidong Cai, Bo Zhou
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative model training without direct data sharing. Model-heterogeneous FL (MHFL) extends this paradigm by allowing clients to train personalized models with heterogeneous architectures tailored to their computational resources and application-specific needs. However, existing MHFL methods predominantly rely on centralized aggregation, which introduces scalability and efficiency bottlenecks, or impose restrictions requiring partially identical model architectures across clients. While peer-to-peer (P2P) FL removes server dependence, it suffers from model drift and knowledge dilution, limiting its effectiveness in heterogeneous settings. To address these challenges, we propose FedSKD, a novel MHFL framework that facilitates direct knowledge exchange through round-robin model circulation, eliminating the need for centralized aggregation while allowing fully heterogeneous model architectures across clients. FedSKD's key innovation lies in multi-dimensional similarity knowledge distillation, which enables bidirectional cross-client knowledge transfer at batch, pixel/voxel, and region levels for heterogeneous models in FL. This approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting and model drift through progressive reinforcement and distribution alignment while preserving model heterogeneity. Extensive evaluations on fMRI-based autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and skin lesion classification demonstrate that FedSKD outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous and homogeneous FL baselines, achieving superior personalization (client-specific accuracy) and generalization (cross-institutional adaptability). These findings underscore FedSKD's potential as a scalable and robust solution for real-world medical federated learning applications.
Authors: Liang Zhang, Jionghao Lin, John Sabatini, Diego Zapata-Rivera, Carol Forsyth, Yang Jiang, John Hollander, Xiangen Hu, Arthur C. Graesser
Abstract: Learner performance data collected by Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), such as responses to questions, is essential for modeling and predicting learners' knowledge states. However, missing responses due to skips or incomplete attempts create data sparsity, challenging accurate assessment and personalized instruction. To address this, we propose a generative imputation approach using Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks (GAIN). Our method features a three-dimensional (3D) framework (learners, questions, and attempts), flexibly accommodating various sparsity levels. Enhanced by convolutional neural networks and optimized with a least squares loss function, the GAIN-based method aligns input and output dimensions to question-attempt matrices along the learners' dimension. Extensive experiments using datasets from AutoTutor Adult Reading Comprehension (ARC), ASSISTments, and MATHia demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms tensor factorization and alternative GAN methods in imputation accuracy across different attempt scenarios. Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) further validates the effectiveness of the imputed data by estimating learning parameters: initial knowledge (P(L0)), learning rate (P(T)), guess rate (P(G)), and slip rate (P(S)). Results indicate the imputed data enhances model fit and closely mirrors original distributions, capturing underlying learning behaviors reliably. Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence assessments confirm minimal divergence, showing the imputed data preserves essential learning characteristics effectively. These findings underscore GAIN's capability as a robust imputation tool in ITSs, alleviating data sparsity and supporting adaptive, individualized instruction, ultimately leading to more precise and responsive learner assessments and improved educational outcomes.
Authors: Bryan Druzin, Anatole Boute, Michael Ramsden
Abstract: While artificial intelligence (AI) holds enormous promise, many experts in the field are warning that there is a non-trivial chance that the development of AI poses an existential threat to humanity. Existing regulatory initiative do not address this threat but merely instead focus on discrete AI-related risks such as consumer safety, cybersecurity, data protection, and privacy. In the absence of regulatory action to address the possible risk of human extinction by AI, the question arises: What legal obligations, if any, does public international law impose on states to regulate its development. Grounded in the precautionary principle, we argue that there exists an international obligation to mitigate the threat of human extinction by AI. Often invoked in relation to environmental regulation and the regulation of potentially harmful technologies, the principle holds that in situations where there is the potential for significant harm, even in the absence of full scientific certainty, preventive measures should not be postponed if delayed action may result in irreversible consequences. We argue that the precautionary principle is a general principle of international law and, therefore, that there is a positive obligation on states under the right to life within international human rights law to proactively take regulatory action to mitigate the potential existential risk of AI. This is significant because, if an international obligation to regulate the development of AI can be established under international law, then the basic legal framework would be in place to address this evolving threat.
Authors: Xuan Liu, Xiaobin Chang
Abstract: In continual learning (CL), catastrophic forgetting often arises due to feature drift. This challenge is particularly prominent in the exemplar-free continual learning (EFCL) setting, where samples from previous tasks cannot be retained, making it difficult to preserve prior knowledge. To address this issue, some EFCL methods aim to identify feature spaces that minimize the impact on previous tasks while accommodating new ones. However, they rely on static features or outdated statistics stored from old tasks, which prevents them from capturing the dynamic evolution of the feature space in CL, leading to performance degradation over time. In this paper, we introduce the Drift-Resistant Space (DRS), which effectively handles feature drifts without requiring explicit feature modeling or the storage of previous tasks. A novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach called Low-Rank Adaptation Subtraction (LoRA-) is proposed to develop the DRS. This method subtracts the LoRA weights of old tasks from the initial pre-trained weight before processing new task data to establish the DRS for model training. Therefore, LoRA- enhances stability, improves efficiency, and simplifies implementation. Furthermore, stabilizing feature drifts allows for better plasticity by learning with a triplet loss. Our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, especially for long task sequences, across multiple datasets.
Authors: Jian Ma, Xinchen Lyu, Jun Jiang, Qimei Cui, Haipeng Yao, Xiaofeng Tao
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on private, on-device data can empower tailored personalized AI agents. However, fine-tuning LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices faces significant challenges, including excessive computation overhead, device heterogeneity, and data imbalance. This paper proposes SplitFrozen, a split learning framework that enables efficient LLM fine-tuning by strategically freezing device-side model layers while centralizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning on the server. Our framework partitions LLMs into device-side frozen layers and server-side fine-tuning layers, where heterogeneous resource-constrained devices execute only forward propagation. To minimize server-side training costs, we integrate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the server-side layers. A pipeline parallelism strategy further optimizes training efficiency by decoupling device-server computations and leveraging decomposed backward propagation. Experiments on GPT-2 with the MRPC, MNLI-matched, and SST-2 datasets demonstrate that SplitFrozen outperforms FedLoRA and SplitLoRA by 69.4\% model accuracy under extremely imbalanced data, while reducing up to 86.8\% device-side computations and 50.2\% total training time. Experiments also validate the scalability of SplitFrozen on content generation task using Llama-3.2 model on GSM8K dataset.
Authors: Xiran Wang, Jian Zhang, Lei Qi, Yinghuan Shi
Abstract: Domain generalization is proposed to address distribution shift, arising from statistical disparities between training source and unseen target domains. The widely used first-order meta-learning algorithms demonstrate strong performance for domain generalization by leveraging the gradient matching theory, which aims to establish balanced parameters across source domains to reduce overfitting to any particular domain. However, our analysis reveals that there are actually numerous directions to achieve gradient matching, with current methods representing just one possible path. These methods actually overlook another critical factor that the balanced parameters should be close to the centroid of optimal parameters of each source domain. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective arithmetic meta-learning with arithmetic-weighted gradients. This approach, while adhering to the principles of gradient matching, promotes a more precise balance by estimating the centroid between domain-specific optimal parameters. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our strategy.
Authors: Haoliang Shang, Hanyu Wu, Guangyao Zhai, Boyang Sun, Fangjinhua Wang, Federico Tombari, Marc Pollefeys
Abstract: Scene graphs capture complex relationships among objects, serving as strong priors for content generation and manipulation. Yet, reasonably manipulating scene graphs -- whether by adding nodes or modifying edges -- remains a challenging and untouched task. Tasks such as adding a node to the graph or reasoning about a node's relationships with all others are computationally intractable, as even a single edge modification can trigger conflicts due to the intricate interdependencies within the graph. To address these challenges, we introduce SG-Tailor, an autoregressive model that predicts the conflict-free relationship between any two nodes. SG-Tailor not only infers inter-object relationships, including generating commonsense edges for newly added nodes but also resolves conflicts arising from edge modifications to produce coherent, manipulated graphs for downstream tasks. For node addition, the model queries the target node and other nodes from the graph to predict the appropriate relationships. For edge modification, SG-Tailor employs a Cut-And-Stitch strategy to solve the conflicts and globally adjust the graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SG-Tailor outperforms competing methods by a large margin and can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-in module for scene generation and robotic manipulation tasks.
Authors: Ruoxi Cheng, Shuirong Cao
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and values is vital for application. However, current alignment methods face three main limitations: (1) reliance on costly human annotation; (2) alignment tax; (3) shallow alignment vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Additionally, current alignment datasets often suffer from uneven distributions, leading to overrepresentation of some topics and neglect of others. To address these issues, we propose SRMIR (Shadow Reward Models Based on Introspective Reasoning), inspired by shadow models in membership inference attacks. We first construct a balanced safety Chain of Draft (CoD) dataset across $7$ harmful types with structured prompt leveraging the introspective reasoning capabilities of LLMs, then train a set of specialized reward models to guide policy optimization through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We apply two strategies, linear combination and categorized approach, to integrate shadow reward models for policy optimization. By comparison, we find that the latter achieves superior alignment despite higher computational costs. Experiments across several LLMs demonstrate SRMIR significantly outperforms existing methods.
Authors: Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Maria Elisa D'Amico, Bianca de Teffe Erb, Simone Favaro, Nannerel Fiano, Paolo Gambatesa, Simone La Porta, Samira Maghool, Lara Mauri, Niccolo Panigada, Lorenzo Maria Ratto Vaquer, Marta A. Tamborini
Abstract: This paper introduces the HH4AI Methodology, a structured approach to assessing the impact of AI systems on human rights, focusing on compliance with the EU AI Act and addressing technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges. The paper highlights AIs transformative nature, driven by autonomy, data, and goal-oriented design, and how the EU AI Act promotes transparency, accountability, and safety. A key challenge is defining and assessing "high-risk" AI systems across industries, complicated by the lack of universally accepted standards and AIs rapid evolution. To address these challenges, the paper explores the relevance of ISO/IEC and IEEE standards, focusing on risk management, data quality, bias mitigation, and governance. It proposes a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) methodology, a gate-based framework designed to isolate and assess risks through phases including an AI system overview, a human rights checklist, an impact assessment, and a final output phase. A filtering mechanism tailors the assessment to the system's characteristics, targeting areas like accountability, AI literacy, data governance, and transparency. The paper illustrates the FRIA methodology through a fictional case study of an automated healthcare triage service. The structured approach enables systematic filtering, comprehensive risk assessment, and mitigation planning, effectively prioritizing critical risks and providing clear remediation strategies. This promotes better alignment with human rights principles and enhances regulatory compliance.
Authors: Gavin Witsken, Igor Crk, Eren Gultepe
Abstract: We randomly deploy questions constructed with and without use of the LLM tool and gauge the ability of the students to correctly answer, as well as their ability to correctly perceive the difference between human-authored and LLM-authored questions. In determining whether the questions written with the aid of ChatGPT were consistent with the instructor's questions and source text, we computed representative vectors of both the human and ChatGPT questions using SBERT and compared cosine similarity to the course textbook. A non-significant Mann-Whitney U test (z = 1.018, p = .309) suggests that students were unable to perceive whether questions were written with or without the aid of ChatGPT. However, student scores on LLM-authored questions were almost 9% lower (z = 2.702, p < .01). This result may indicate that either the AI questions were more difficult or that the students were more familiar with the instructor's style of questions. Overall, the study suggests that while there is potential for using LLM tools to aid in the construction of assessments, care must be taken to ensure that the questions are fair, well-composed, and relevant to the course material.
Authors: Jos\'e Alberto Ben\'itez-Andrades, Camino Prada-Garc\'ia, Nicol\'as Ord\'as-Reyes, Marta Esteban Blanco, Alicia Merayo, Antonio Serrano-Garc\'ia
Abstract: The study proposes an advanced machine learning approach to predict spine surgery outcomes by incorporating oversampling techniques and grid search optimization. A variety of models including GaussianNB, ComplementNB, KNN, Decision Tree, and optimized versions with RandomOverSampler and SMOTE were tested on a dataset of 244 patients, which included pre-surgical, psychometric, socioeconomic, and analytical variables. The enhanced KNN models achieved up to 76% accuracy and a 67% F1-score, while grid-search optimization further improved performance. The findings underscore the potential of these advanced techniques to aid healthcare professionals in decision-making, with future research needed to refine these models on larger and more diverse datasets.
Authors: Haiqi Liu, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang
Abstract: Cross-subject EEG emotion recognition is challenged by significant inter-subject variability and intricately entangled intra-subject variability. Existing works have primarily addressed these challenges through domain adaptation or generalization strategies. However, they typically require extensive target subject data or demonstrate limited generalization performance to unseen subjects. Recent few-shot learning paradigms attempt to address these limitations but often encounter catastrophic overfitting during subject-specific adaptation with limited samples. This article introduces the few-shot adapter with a cross-view fusion method called FACE for cross-subject EEG emotion recognition, which leverages dynamic multi-view fusion and effective subject-specific adaptation. Specifically, FACE incorporates a cross-view fusion module that dynamically integrates global brain connectivity with localized patterns via subject-specific fusion weights to provide complementary emotional information. Moreover, the few-shot adapter module is proposed to enable rapid adaptation for unseen subjects while reducing overfitting by enhancing adapter structures with meta-learning. Experimental results on three public EEG emotion recognition benchmarks demonstrate FACE's superior generalization performance over state-of-the-art methods. FACE provides a practical solution for cross-subject scenarios with limited labeled data.
Authors: Kangwei Liu, Junwu Liu, Yun Cao, Jinlin Guo, Xiaowei Yi
Abstract: Recent advances in talking face generation have significantly improved facial animation synthesis. However, existing approaches face fundamental limitations: 3DMM-based methods maintain temporal consistency but lack fine-grained regional control, while Stable Diffusion-based methods enable spatial manipulation but suffer from temporal inconsistencies. The integration of these approaches is hindered by incompatible control mechanisms and semantic entanglement of facial representations. This paper presents DisentTalk, introducing a data-driven semantic disentanglement framework that decomposes 3DMM expression parameters into meaningful subspaces for fine-grained facial control. Building upon this disentangled representation, we develop a hierarchical latent diffusion architecture that operates in 3DMM parameter space, integrating region-aware attention mechanisms to ensure both spatial precision and temporal coherence. To address the scarcity of high-quality Chinese training data, we introduce CHDTF, a Chinese high-definition talking face dataset. Extensive experiments show superior performance over existing methods across multiple metrics, including lip synchronization, expression quality, and temporal consistency. Project Page: https://kangweiiliu.github.io/DisentTalk.
Authors: Tahiya Chowdhury
Abstract: Developing competency in artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly crucial for computer science (CS) students at all levels of the CS curriculum. However, most previous research focuses on advanced CS courses, as traditional introductory courses provide limited opportunities to develop AI skills and knowledge. This paper introduces an introductory CS course where students learn computational thinking through computer vision, a sub-field of AI, as an application context. The course aims to achieve computational thinking outcomes alongside critical thinking outcomes that expose students to AI approaches and their societal implications. Through experiential activities such as individual projects and reading discussions, our course seeks to balance technical learning and critical thinking goals. Our evaluation, based on pre-and post-course surveys, shows an improved sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and AI ethics awareness among students. The results suggest that an AI-focused context can enhance participation and employability, student-selected projects support self-efficacy, and ethically grounded AI instruction can be effective for interdisciplinary audiences. Students' discussions on reading assignments demonstrated deep engagement with the complex challenges in today's AI landscape. Finally, we share insights on scaling such courses for larger cohorts and improving the learning experience for introductory CS students.
Authors: Chak Lam Shek, Pratap Tokekar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise in reasoning and decision-making, yet their integration with Reinforcement Learning (RL) for complex robotic tasks remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose an LLM-guided hierarchical RL framework, termed LDSC, that leverages LLM-driven subgoal selection and option reuse to enhance sample efficiency, generalization, and multi-task adaptability. Traditional RL methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and high computational cost. Hierarchical RL helps with these challenges, but existing methods often fail to reuse options effectively when faced with new tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce a three-stage framework that uses LLMs for subgoal generation given natural language description of the task, a reusable option learning and selection method, and an action-level policy, enabling more effective decision-making across diverse tasks. By incorporating LLMs for subgoal prediction and policy guidance, our approach improves exploration efficiency and enhances learning performance. On average, LDSC outperforms the baseline by 55.9\% in average reward, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex RL settings. More details and experiment videos could be found in \href{https://raaslab.org/projects/LDSC/}{this link\footnote{https://raaslab.org/projects/LDSC}}.
URLs: https://raaslab.org/projects/LDSC/, https://raaslab.org/projects/LDSC
Authors: Jianren Wang, Yifan Su, Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak
Abstract: Despite its extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning has become a fundamental tool in real-world applications. With recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect vast amounts of data for RL training has scaled exponentially. However, studies show that current on-policy methods, such as PPO, fail to fully leverage the benefits of parallelized environments, leading to performance saturation beyond a certain scale. In contrast, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) excel at increasing diversity through randomization, making them a natural complement to RL. However, existing EvoRL methods have struggled to gain widespread adoption due to their extreme sample inefficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce Evolutionary Policy Optimization (EPO), a novel policy gradient algorithm that combines the strengths of EA and policy gradients. We show that EPO significantly improves performance across diverse and challenging environments, demonstrating superior scalability with parallelized simulations.
Authors: Kangwei Liu, Mengru Wang, Yujie Luo, Lin Yuan, Mengshu Sun, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often undermines their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead Tuning, which comprises two simple, low-resource, and effective data-driven methods that modify training data by previewing partial answer prefixes. Both methods aim to preserve the model's inherent safety mechanisms by minimizing perturbations to initial token distributions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LookAhead Tuning effectively maintains model safety without sacrificing robust performance on downstream tasks. Our findings position LookAhead Tuning as a reliable and efficient solution for the safe and effective adaptation of LLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/zjunlp/LookAheadTuning.
Authors: Kyungsu Kim
Abstract: This thesis studies the effectiveness of Long Short Term Memory model in forecasting future Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data in the United States. Drawing on multiple economic indicators from various sources, the data are fed directly into LSTM model to predict JOLT job openings in subsequent periods. The performance of the LSTM model is compared with conventional autoregressive approaches, including ARIMA, SARIMA, and Holt-Winters. Findings suggest that the LSTM model outperforms these traditional models in predicting JOLT job openings, as it not only captures the dependent variables trends but also harmonized with key economic factors. These results highlight the potential of deep learning techniques in capturing complex temporal dependencies in economic data, offering valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders in developing data-driven labor market strategies
Authors: Zhanda Zhu, Christina Giannoula, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Qidong Su, Karttikeya Mangalam, Bojian Zheng, Gennady Pekhimenko
Abstract: Various parallelism, such as data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism, along with memory optimizations like activation checkpointing, redundancy elimination, and offloading, have been proposed to accelerate distributed training for Large Language Models. To find the best combination of these techniques, automatic distributed training systems are proposed. However, existing systems only tune a subset of optimizations, due to the lack of overlap awareness, inability to navigate the vast search space, and ignoring the inter-microbatch imbalance, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address these shortcomings, we propose Mist, a memory, overlap, and imbalance-aware automatic distributed training system that comprehensively co-optimizes all memory footprint reduction techniques alongside parallelism. Mist is based on three key ideas: (1) fine-grained overlap-centric scheduling, orchestrating optimizations in an overlapped manner, (2) symbolic-based performance analysis that predicts runtime and memory usage using symbolic expressions for fast tuning, and (3) imbalance-aware hierarchical tuning, decoupling the process into an inter-stage imbalance and overlap aware Mixed Integer Linear Programming problem and an intra-stage Dual-Objective Constrained Optimization problem, and connecting them through Pareto frontier sampling. Our evaluation results show that Mist achieves an average of 1.28$\times$ (up to 1.73$\times$) and 1.27$\times$ (up to 2.04$\times$) speedup compared to state-of-the-art manual system Megatron-LM and state-of-the-art automatic system Aceso, respectively.
Authors: Sacha Braun, Liviu Aolaritei, Michael I. Jordan, Francis Bach
Abstract: Conformal prediction provides a principled framework for constructing predictive sets with finite-sample validity. While much of the focus has been on univariate response variables, existing multivariate methods either impose rigid geometric assumptions or rely on flexible but computationally expensive approaches that do not explicitly optimize prediction set volume. We propose an optimization-driven framework based on a novel loss function that directly learns minimum-volume covering sets while ensuring valid coverage. This formulation naturally induces a new nonconformity score for conformal prediction, which adapts to the residual distribution and covariates. Our approach optimizes over prediction sets defined by arbitrary norm balls, including single and multi-norm formulations. Additionally, by jointly optimizing both the predictive model and predictive uncertainty, we obtain prediction sets that are tight, informative, and computationally efficient, as demonstrated in our experiments on real-world datasets.
Authors: Jiazhu Dai, Yubing Lu
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for graph-structured data but are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs) in graph classification tasks, which determine if a graph was part of the training dataset, potentially causing data leakage. Existing MIAs rely on prediction probability vectors, but they become ineffective when only prediction labels are available. We propose a Graph-level Label-Only Membership Inference Attack (GLO-MIA), which is based on the intuition that the target model's predictions on training data are more stable than those on testing data. GLO-MIA generates a set of perturbed graphs for target graph by adding perturbations to its effective features and queries the target model with the perturbed graphs to get their prediction labels, which are then used to calculate robustness score of the target graph. Finally, by comparing the robustness score with a predefined threshold, the membership of the target graph can be inferred correctly with high probability. Our evaluation on three datasets and four GNN models shows that GLO-MIA achieves an attack accuracy of up to 0.825, outperforming baseline work by 8.5% and closely matching the performance of probability-based MIAs, even with only prediction labels.
Authors: Osman Goni, Himadri Saha Arka, Mithun Halder, Mir Moynuddin Ahmed Shibly, Swakkhar Shatabda
Abstract: Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated their capability for producing high-quality images. However, a significant challenge remains mode collapse, which occurs when the generator produces a limited number of data patterns that do not reflect the diversity of the training dataset. This study addresses this issue by proposing a number of architectural changes aimed at increasing the diversity and stability of GAN models. We start by improving the loss function with Wasserstein loss and Gradient Penalty to better capture the full range of data variations. We also investigate various network architectures and conclude that ResNet significantly contributes to increased diversity. Building on these findings, we introduce HingeRLC-GAN, a novel approach that combines RLC Regularization and the Hinge loss function. With a FID Score of 18 and a KID Score of 0.001, our approach outperforms existing methods by effectively balancing training stability and increased diversity.
Authors: Rida Qadri, Mark Diaz, Ding Wang, Michael Madaio
Abstract: Generative AI image models have been increasingly evaluated for their (in)ability to represent non-Western cultures. We argue that these evaluations operate through reductive ideals of representation, abstracted from how people define their own representation and neglecting the inherently interpretive and contextual nature of cultural representation. In contrast to these 'thin' evaluations, we introduce the idea of 'thick evaluations': a more granular, situated, and discursive measurement framework for evaluating representations of social worlds in AI images, steeped in communities' own understandings of representation. We develop this evaluation framework through workshops in South Asia, by studying the 'thick' ways in which people interpret and assign meaning to images of their own cultures. We introduce practices for thicker evaluations of representation that expand the understanding of representation underpinning AI evaluations and by co-constructing metrics with communities, bringing measurement in line with the experiences of communities on the ground.
Authors: Krisztian Balog, Donald Metzler, Zhen Qin
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integral to information retrieval (IR), powering ranking, evaluation, and AI-assisted content creation. This widespread adoption necessitates a critical examination of potential biases arising from the interplay between these LLM-based components. This paper synthesizes existing research and presents novel experiment designs that explore how LLM-based rankers and assistants influence LLM-based judges. We provide the first empirical evidence of LLM judges exhibiting significant bias towards LLM-based rankers. Furthermore, we observe limitations in LLM judges' ability to discern subtle system performance differences. Contrary to some previous findings, our preliminary study does not find evidence of bias against AI-generated content. These results highlight the need for a more holistic view of the LLM-driven information ecosystem. To this end, we offer initial guidelines and a research agenda to ensure the reliable use of LLMs in IR evaluation.
Authors: Md. Barkat Ullah Tusher, Shartaz Khan Akash, Amirul Islam Showmik
Abstract: This paper showcases an experimental study on anomaly detection using computer vision. The study focuses on class distinction and performance evaluation, combining OpenCV with deep learning techniques while employing a TensorFlow-based convolutional neural network for real-time face recognition and classification. The system effectively distinguishes among three classes: authorized personnel (admin), intruders, and non-human entities. A MobileNetV2-based deep learning model is utilized to optimize real-time performance, ensuring high computational efficiency without compromising accuracy. Extensive dataset preprocessing, including image augmentation and normalization, enhances the models generalization capabilities. Our analysis demonstrates classification accuracies of 90.20% for admin, 98.60% for intruders, and 75.80% for non-human detection, while maintaining an average processing rate of 30 frames per second. The study leverages transfer learning, batch normalization, and Adam optimization to achieve stable and robust learning, and a comparative analysis of class differentiation strategies highlights the impact of feature extraction techniques and training methodologies. The results indicate that advanced feature selection and data augmentation significantly enhance detection performance, particularly in distinguishing human from non-human scenes. As an experimental study, this research provides critical insights into optimizing deep learning-based surveillance systems for high-security environments and improving the accuracy and efficiency of real-time anomaly detection.
Authors: Armineh Nourbakhsh, Siddharth Parekh, Pranav Shetty, Zhao Jin, Sameena Shah, Carolyn Rose
Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have evolved at an impressive rate over the past few years, coming close to or matching human performance on some benchmarks. We argue that common evaluation metrics used by popular benchmarks do not account for the semantic and multimodal groundedness of a model's outputs. As a result, hallucinations and major semantic errors are treated the same way as well-grounded outputs, and the evaluation scores do not reflect the reasoning capabilities of the model. In response, we propose a new evaluation methodology that accounts for the groundedness of predictions with regard to the semantic characteristics of the output as well as the multimodal placement of the output within the input document. Our proposed methodology is parameterized in such a way that users can configure the score according to their preferences. We validate our scoring methodology using human judgment and show its potential impact on existing popular leaderboards. Through extensive analyses, we demonstrate that our proposed method produces scores that are a better indicator of a model's robustness and tends to give higher rewards to better-calibrated answers.
Authors: Haebin Shin, Lei Ji, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong
Abstract: Using large teacher models to guide the training of smaller student models has become the prevailing paradigm for efficient and effective learning. However, vocabulary mismatches between teacher and student language models pose significant challenges in language modeling, resulting in divergent token sequences and output distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Vocabulary-agnostic Teacher Guided Language Modeling (VocAgnoLM), a novel approach that bridges the gap caused by vocabulary mismatch through two key methods: (1) Token-level Lexical Alignment, which aligns token sequences across mismatched vocabularies, and (2) Teacher Guided Loss, which leverages the loss of teacher model to guide effective student training. We demonstrate its effectiveness in language modeling with 1B student model using various 7B teacher models with different vocabularies. Notably, with Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct, a teacher model sharing only about 6% of its vocabulary with TinyLlama, VocAgnoLM achieves a 46% performance improvement compared to naive continual pretraining. Furthermore, we demonstrate that VocAgnoLM consistently benefits from stronger teacher models, providing a robust solution to vocabulary mismatches in language modeling.
Authors: Shoffan Saifullah, Rafa{\l} Dre\.zewski
Abstract: Medical image segmentation, particularly for brain tumor analysis, demands precise and computationally efficient models due to the complexity of multimodal MRI datasets and diverse tumor morphologies. This study introduces PSO-UNet, which integrates Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with the U-Net architecture for dynamic hyperparameter optimization. Unlike traditional manual tuning or alternative optimization approaches, PSO effectively navigates complex hyperparameter search spaces, explicitly optimizing the number of filters, kernel size, and learning rate. PSO-UNet substantially enhances segmentation performance, achieving Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSC) of 0.9578 and 0.9523 and Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 0.9194 and 0.9097 on the BraTS 2021 and Figshare datasets, respectively. Moreover, the method reduces computational complexity significantly, utilizing only 7.8 million parameters and executing in approximately 906 seconds, markedly faster than comparable U-Net-based frameworks. These outcomes underscore PSO-UNet's robust generalization capabilities across diverse MRI modalities and tumor classifications, emphasizing its clinical potential and clear advantages over conventional hyperparameter tuning methods. Future research will explore hybrid optimization strategies and validate the framework against other bio-inspired algorithms to enhance its robustness and scalability.
Authors: Yizhu Wen, Ashwin Innuganti, Aaron Bien Ramos, Hanqing Guo, Qiben Yan
Abstract: Audio watermarking is increasingly used to verify the provenance of AI-generated content, enabling applications such as detecting AI-generated speech, protecting music IP, and defending against voice cloning. To be effective, audio watermarks must resist removal attacks that distort signals to evade detection. While many schemes claim robustness, these claims are typically tested in isolation and against a limited set of attacks. A systematic evaluation against diverse removal attacks is lacking, hindering practical deployment. In this paper, we investigate whether recent watermarking schemes that claim robustness can withstand a broad range of removal attacks. First, we introduce a taxonomy covering 22 audio watermarking schemes. Next, we summarize their underlying technologies and potential vulnerabilities. We then present a large-scale empirical study to assess their robustness. To support this, we build an evaluation framework encompassing 22 types of removal attacks (109 configurations) including signal-level, physical-level, and AI-induced distortions. We reproduce 9 watermarking schemes using open-source code, identify 8 new highly effective attacks, and highlight 11 key findings that expose the fundamental limitations of these methods across 3 public datasets. Our results reveal that none of the surveyed schemes can withstand all tested distortions. This evaluation offers a comprehensive view of how current watermarking methods perform under real-world threats. Our demo and code are available at https://sokaudiowm.github.io/.
Authors: Chayan Banerjee, Kien Nguyen, Clinton Fookes
Abstract: Mining process optimization particularly truck dispatch scheduling is a critical factor in enhancing the efficiency of open pit mining operations However the dynamic and stochastic nature of mining environments characterized by uncertainties such as equipment failures truck maintenance and variable haul cycle times poses significant challenges for traditional optimization methods While Reinforcement Learning RL has shown promise in adaptive decision making for mining logistics its practical deployment requires rigorous evaluation in realistic and customizable simulation environments The lack of standardized benchmarking environments limits fair algorithm comparisons reproducibility and the real world applicability of RL based approaches in open pit mining settings To address this challenge we introduce Mining Gym a configurable open source benchmarking environment designed for training testing and comparing RL algorithms in mining process optimization Built on Discrete Event Simulation DES and seamlessly integrated with the OpenAI Gym interface Mining Gym provides a structured testbed that enables the direct application of advanced RL algorithms from Stable Baselines The framework models key mining specific uncertainties such as equipment failures queue congestion and the stochasticity of mining processes ensuring a realistic and adaptive learning environment Additionally Mining Gym features a graphical user interface GUI for intuitive mine site configuration a comprehensive data logging system a built in KPI dashboard and real time visual representation of the mine site These capabilities facilitate standardized reproducible evaluations across multiple RL strategies and baseline heuristics
Authors: Renpu Liu, Peng Wang, Donghao Li, Cong Shen, Jing Yang
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for aligning artificial intelligence systems with human values, achieving remarkable success in fine-tuning large language models. However, existing RLHF frameworks often assume that human preferences are relatively homogeneous and can be captured by a single, unified reward model. This assumption overlooks the inherent diversity and heterogeneity across individuals, limiting the adaptability of RLHF to personalized scenarios and risking misalignments that can diminish user satisfaction and trust in AI systems. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the personalized RLHF framework. We apply LoRA in the the aggregated parameter space of all personalized reward functions, thereby enabling efficient learning of personalized reward models from potentially limited local datasets. Our approach exploits potential shared structures among the local ground-truth reward models while allowing for individual adaptation, without relying on restrictive assumptions about shared representations as in prior works. We further establish sample complexity guarantees for our method. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in capturing both shared and individual-specific structures within heterogeneous human preferences, addressing the dual challenge of personalization requirements and practical data constraints. Experimental results on real-world datasets corroborate the efficiency of our algorithm in the personalized RLHF setting.
Authors: Jacob Mitchell Springer, Sachin Goyal, Kaiyue Wen, Tanishq Kumar, Xiang Yue, Sadhika Malladi, Graham Neubig, Aditi Raghunathan
Abstract: Large language models are pre-trained on ever-growing token budgets under the assumption that better pre-training performance translates to improved downstream models. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that extended pre-training can make models harder to fine-tune, leading to degraded final performance. We term this phenomenon catastrophic overtraining. For example, the instruction-tuned OLMo-1B model pre-trained on 3T tokens leads to over 2% worse performance on multiple standard LLM benchmarks than its 2.3T token counterpart. Through controlled experiments and theoretical analysis, we show that catastrophic overtraining arises from a systematic increase in the broad sensitivity of pre-trained parameters to modifications, including but not limited to fine-tuning. Our findings call for a critical reassessment of pre-training design that considers the downstream adaptability of the model.
Authors: Gautham Udayakumar Bekal, Ahmed Ghareeb, Ashish Pujari
Abstract: Buildings with Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a crucial role in ensuring indoor comfort and efficiency. While traditionally governed by physics-based models, the emergence of big data has enabled data-driven methods like Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). However, Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based techniques often suffer from sample inefficiency and limited generalization, especially across varying HVAC systems. We introduce a model-based reinforcement learning framework that uses a Hypernetwork to continuously learn environment dynamics across tasks with different action spaces. This enables efficient synthetic rollout generation and improved sample usage. Our approach demonstrates strong backward transfer in a continual learning setting after training on a second task, minimal fine-tuning on the first task allows rapid convergence within just 5 episodes and thus outperforming Model Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL) and effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting. These findings have significant implications for reducing energy consumption and operational costs in building management, thus supporting global sustainability goals. Keywords: Deep Reinforcement Learning, HVAC Systems Control, Hypernetworks, Transfer and Continual Learning, Catastrophic Forgetting
Authors: Murong Yue
Abstract: This paper surveys the development of large language model (LLM)-based agents for question answering (QA). Traditional agents face significant limitations, including substantial data requirements and difficulty in generalizing to new environments. LLM-based agents address these challenges by leveraging LLMs as their core reasoning engine. These agents achieve superior QA results compared to traditional QA pipelines and naive LLM QA systems by enabling interaction with external environments. We systematically review the design of LLM agents in the context of QA tasks, organizing our discussion across key stages: planning, question understanding, information retrieval, and answer generation. Additionally, this paper identifies ongoing challenges and explores future research directions to enhance the performance of LLM agent QA systems.
Authors: Patrick Diehl, Nojoud Nader, Maxim Moraru, Steven R. Brandt
Abstract: The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for automating various tasks in software development. This paper evaluates the capabilities of the Llama 2-70B model in automating these tasks for scientific applications written in commonly used programming languages. Using representative test problems, we assess the model's capacity to generate code, documentation, and unit tests, as well as its ability to translate existing code between commonly used programming languages. Our comprehensive analysis evaluates the compilation, runtime behavior, and correctness of the generated and translated code. Additionally, we assess the quality of automatically generated code, documentation and unit tests. Our results indicate that while Llama 2-70B frequently generates syntactically correct and functional code for simpler numerical tasks, it encounters substantial difficulties with more complex, parallelized, or distributed computations, requiring considerable manual corrections. We identify key limitations and suggest areas for future improvements to better leverage AI-driven automation in scientific computing workflows.
Authors: Najeebullah, Maaz Salman, Zar Nawab Khan Swati
Abstract: Digital image spoofing has emerged as a significant security threat in biometric authentication systems, particularly those relying on facial recognition. This study evaluates the performance of three vision based models, MobileNetV2, ResNET50, and Vision Transformer, ViT, for spoof detection in image classification, utilizing a dataset of 150,986 images divided into training , 140,002, testing, 10,984, and validation ,39,574, sets. Spoof detection is critical for enhancing the security of image recognition systems, and this research compares the models effectiveness through accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score metrics. Results reveal that MobileNetV2 outperforms other architectures on the test dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.59%, precision of 91.72%, recall of 91.59%, and F1 score of 91.58%, compared to ViT 86.54%, 88.28%, 86.54%, and 86.39%, respectively. On the validation dataset, MobileNetV2, and ViT excel, with MobileNetV2 slightly ahead at 97.17% accuracy versus ViT 96.36%. MobileNetV2 demonstrates faster convergence during training and superior generalization to unseen data, despite both models showing signs of overfitting. These findings highlight MobileNetV2 balanced performance and robustness, making it the preferred choice for spoof detection applications where reliability on new data is essential. The study underscores the importance of model selection in security sensitive contexts and suggests MobileNetV2 as a practical solution for real world deployment.
Authors: Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are the foundation of many AI applications today. However, despite their remarkable proficiency in generating coherent text, questions linger regarding their ability to perform fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks, such as detecting nouns or verbs, or identifying more complex syntactic structures like clauses in input texts. These tasks require precise syntactic and semantic understanding of input text, and when LLMs underperform on specific linguistic structures, it raises concerns about their reliability for detailed linguistic analysis and whether their (even correct) outputs truly reflect an understanding of the inputs. In this paper, we empirically study the performance of recent LLMs on fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks. Through a series of experiments, we find that recent LLMs show limited efficacy in addressing linguistic queries and often struggle with linguistically complex inputs. We show that the most capable LLM (Llama3-70b) makes notable errors in detecting linguistic structures, such as misidentifying embedded clauses, failing to recognize verb phrases, and confusing complex nominals with clauses. Our results provide insights to inform future advancements in LLM design and development.
Authors: Songyi Gao, Zuolin Tu, Rong-Jun Qin, Yi-Hao Sun, Xiong-Hui Chen, Yang Yu
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn from historical data without requiring (costly) access to the environment. To facilitate offline RL research, we previously introduced NeoRL, which highlighted that datasets from real-world tasks are often conservative and limited. With years of experience applying offline RL to various domains, we have identified additional real-world challenges. These include extremely conservative data distributions produced by deployed control systems, delayed action effects caused by high-latency transitions, external factors arising from the uncontrollable variance of transitions, and global safety constraints that are difficult to evaluate during the decision-making process. These challenges are underrepresented in previous benchmarks but frequently occur in real-world tasks. To address this, we constructed the extended Near Real-World Offline RL Benchmark (NeoRL-2), which consists of 7 datasets from 7 simulated tasks along with their corresponding evaluation simulators. Benchmarking results from state-of-the-art offline RL approaches demonstrate that current methods often struggle to outperform the data-collection behavior policy, highlighting the need for more effective methods. We hope NeoRL-2 will accelerate the development of reinforcement learning algorithms for real-world applications. The benchmark project page is available at https://github.com/polixir/NeoRL2.
Authors: Ben Rahman
Abstract: Semantic segmentation has made significant strides in pixel-level image understanding, yet it remains limited in capturing contextual and semantic relationships between objects. Current models, such as CNN and Transformer-based architectures, excel at identifying pixel-level features but fail to distinguish semantically similar objects (e.g., "doctor" vs. "nurse" in a hospital scene) or understand complex contextual scenarios (e.g., differentiating a running child from a regular pedestrian in autonomous driving). To address these limitations, we proposed a novel Context-Aware Semantic Segmentation framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with state-of-the-art vision backbones. Our hybrid model leverages the Swin Transformer for robust visual feature extraction and GPT-4 for enriching semantic understanding through text embeddings. A Cross-Attention Mechanism is introduced to align vision and language features, enabling the model to reason about context more effectively. Additionally, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are employed to model object relationships within the scene, capturing dependencies that are overlooked by traditional models. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (e.g., COCO, Cityscapes) demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing methods in both pixel-level accuracy (mIoU) and contextual understanding (mAP). This work bridges the gap between vision and language, paving the path for more intelligent and context-aware vision systems in applications including autonomous driving, medical imaging, and robotics.
Authors: Amogh Inamdar, Uzay Macar, Michel Vazirani, Michael Tarnow, Zarina Mustapha, Natalia Dittren, Sam Sadeh, Nakul Verma, Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi
Abstract: The study of propositional logic -- fundamental to the theory of computing -- is a cornerstone of the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Learning to solve logical proofs requires repeated guided practice, but undergraduate students often lack access to on-demand tutoring in a judgment-free environment. In this work, we highlight the need for guided practice tools in undergraduate mathematics education and outline the desiderata of an effective practice tool. We accordingly develop LogicLearner, a web application for guided logic proof practice. LogicLearner consists of an interface to attempt logic proofs step-by-step and an automated proof solver to generate solutions on the fly, allowing users to request guidance as needed. We pilot LogicLearner as a practice tool in two semesters of an undergraduate discrete mathematics course and receive strongly positive feedback for usability and pedagogical value in student surveys. To the best of our knowledge, LogicLearner is the only learning tool that provides an end-to-end practice environment for logic proofs with immediate, judgment-free feedback.
Authors: Feiyang Wang, Xiaomin Yu, Wangyu Wu
Abstract: Proving Rubik's Cube theorems at the high level represents a notable milestone in human-level spatial imagination and logic thinking and reasoning. Traditional Rubik's Cube robots, relying on complex vision systems and fixed algorithms, often struggle to adapt to complex and dynamic scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we introduce CubeRobot, a novel vision-language model (VLM) tailored for solving 3x3 Rubik's Cubes, empowering embodied agents with multimodal understanding and execution capabilities. We used the CubeCoT image dataset, which contains multiple-level tasks (43 subtasks in total) that humans are unable to handle, encompassing various cube states. We incorporate a dual-loop VisionCoT architecture and Memory Stream, a paradigm for extracting task-related features from VLM-generated planning queries, thus enabling CubeRobot to independent planning, decision-making, reflection and separate management of high- and low-level Rubik's Cube tasks. Furthermore, in low-level Rubik's Cube restoration tasks, CubeRobot achieved a high accuracy rate of 100%, similar to 100% in medium-level tasks, and achieved an accuracy rate of 80% in high-level tasks.
Authors: Yubo Li, Xinyu Yao, Rema Padman
Abstract: Despite the outstanding performance of deep learning models in clinical prediction tasks, explainability remains a significant challenge. Inspired by transformer architectures, we introduce the Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism (TFCAM), a novel deep learning framework designed to capture dynamic interactions among clinical features across time, enhancing both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In an experiment with 1,422 patients with Chronic Kidney Disease, predicting progression to End-Stage Renal Disease, TFCAM outperformed LSTM and RETAIN baselines, achieving an AUROC of 0.95 and an F1-score of 0.69. Beyond performance gains, TFCAM provides multi-level explainability by identifying critical temporal periods, ranking feature importance, and quantifying how features influence each other across time before affecting predictions. Our approach addresses the "black box" limitations of deep learning in healthcare, offering clinicians transparent insights into disease progression mechanisms while maintaining state-of-the-art predictive performance.
Authors: Xiaoqing Zhang, Hanfeng Shi, Xiangyu Li, Haili Ye, Tao Xu, Na Li, Yan Hu, Fan Lv, Jiangfan Chen, Jiang Liu
Abstract: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder globally. The eye's retina is an extension of the brain and has great potential in PD screening. Recent studies have suggested that texture features extracted from retinal layers can be adopted as biomarkers for PD diagnosis under optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Frequency domain learning techniques can enhance the feature representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) by decomposing frequency components involving rich texture features. Additionally, previous works have not exploited texture features for automated PD screening in OCT. Motivated by the above analysis, we propose a novel Adaptive Wavelet Filter (AWF) that serves as the Practical Texture Feature Amplifier to fully leverage the merits of texture features to boost the PD screening performance of DNNs with the aid of frequency domain learning. Specifically, AWF first enhances texture feature representation diversities via channel mixer, then emphasizes informative texture feature representations with the well-designed adaptive wavelet filtering token mixer. By combining the AWFs with the DNN stem, AWFNet is constructed for automated PD screening. Additionally, we introduce a novel Balanced Confidence (BC) Loss by mining the potential of sample-wise predicted probabilities of all classes and class frequency prior, to further boost the PD screening performance and trustworthiness of AWFNet. The extensive experiments manifest the superiority of our AWFNet and BC over state-of-the-art methods in terms of PD screening performance and trustworthiness.
Authors: Weizhi Chen, Jingbo Chen, Yupeng Deng, Jiansheng Chen, Yuman Feng, Zhihao Xi, Diyou Liu, Kai Li, Yu Meng
Abstract: This study addresses the technical bottlenecks in handling long text and the "hallucination" issue caused by insufficient short text information in remote sensing vision-language foundation models (VLFM). We propose a novel vision-language foundation model, LRSCLIP, and a multimodal dataset, LRS2M. The main contributions are as follows: (1) By integrating multi-source remote sensing data and adopting a large language model labeling strategy, we construct the LRS2M dataset, which contains 2 million image-text pairs, providing both short and long texts for the first time, thus solving the problem of semantic granularity limitations in existing datasets; (2) The design of the LRSCLIP architecture based on Long-CLIP's KPS module, which extends CLIP's text processing capacity and achieves fine-grained cross-modal feature alignment through a dual-text loss weighting mechanism. Experimental results show that LRSCLIP improves retrieval accuracy by 10\%-20\% over the Long-CLIP baseline in the zero-shot long-text cross-modal retrieval task. For the zero-shot short-text cross-modal retrieval task, LRSCLIP achieves improvements over the current best model, GeoRSCLIP, with increases of 0.17\%, 0.67\%, and 0.92\% in Text to Image R@1, Image to Text R@1, and mR on RSITMD, respectively, and 0.04\%, 2.93\%, and 1.28\% on RSICD. In the zero-shot image classification task (average accuracy=75.75\%) and semantic localization task (Rmi=0.7653), LRSCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results validate the dual advantages of fine-grained semantic understanding and global feature matching in LRSCLIP. This work provides a new benchmark model and data support for remote sensing multimodal learning. The related code has been open source and is available at https://github.com/MitsuiChen14/LRSCLIP.
Authors: Vidya Srinivas, Xuhai Xu, Xin Liu, Kumar Ayush, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Tim Althoff
Abstract: While NLP research has made strides in conversational tasks, many approaches focus on single-turn responses with well-defined objectives or evaluation criteria. In contrast, coaching presents unique challenges with initially undefined goals that evolve through multi-turn interactions, subjective evaluation criteria, mixed-initiative dialogue. In this work, we describe and implement five multi-turn coaching agents that exhibit distinct conversational styles, and evaluate them through a user study, collecting first-person feedback on 155 conversations. We find that users highly value core functionality, and that stylistic components in absence of core components are viewed negatively. By comparing user feedback with third-person evaluations from health experts and an LM, we reveal significant misalignment across evaluation approaches. Our findings provide insights into design and evaluation of conversational coaching agents and contribute toward improving human-centered NLP applications.
Authors: Yongting Hu, Yuxin Lin, Chengliang Liu, Xiaoling Luo, Xiaoyan Dou, Qihao Xu, Yong Xu
Abstract: Multi-view diabetic retinopathy (DR) detection has recently emerged as a promising method to address the issue of incomplete lesions faced by single-view DR. However, it is still challenging due to the variable sizes and scattered locations of lesions. Furthermore, existing multi-view DR methods typically merge multiple views without considering the correlations and redundancies of lesion information across them. Therefore, we propose a novel method to overcome the challenges of difficult lesion information learning and inadequate multi-view fusion. Specifically, we introduce a two-branch network to obtain both local lesion features and their global dependencies. The high-frequency component of the wavelet transform is used to exploit lesion edge information, which is then enhanced by global semantic to facilitate difficult lesion learning. Additionally, we present a cross-view fusion module to improve multi-view fusion and reduce redundancy. Experimental results on large public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is open sourced on https://github.com/HuYongting/WGLIN.
Authors: Amna Naeem, Muazzam A. Khan, Nada Alasbali, Jawad Ahmad, Aizaz Ahmad Khattak, Muhammad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract: The ever-increasing security vulnerabilities in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems require improved threat detection approaches. This paper presents a compact and efficient approach to detect botnet attacks by employing an integrated approach that consists of traffic pattern analysis, temporal support learning, and focused feature extraction. The proposed attention-based model benefits from a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM architecture and achieves 99% classification accuracy in detecting botnet attacks utilizing the N-BaIoT dataset, while maintaining high precision and recall across various scenarios. The proposed model's performance is further validated by key parameters, such as Mathews Correlation Coefficient and Cohen's kappa Correlation Coefficient. The close-to-ideal results for these parameters demonstrate the proposed model's ability to detect botnet attacks accurately and efficiently in practical settings and on unseen data. The proposed model proved to be a powerful defense mechanism for IoT networks to face emerging security challenges.
Authors: Daniel Saragih, Deyu Cao, Tejas Balaji, Ashwin Santhosh
Abstract: Foundational language models show a remarkable ability to learn new concepts during inference via context data. However, similar work for images lag behind. To address this challenge, we introduce FLoWN, a flow matching model that learns to generate neural network parameters for different tasks. Our approach models the flow on latent space, while conditioning the process on context data. Experiments verify that FLoWN attains various desiderata for a meta-learning model. In addition, it matches or exceeds baselines on in-distribution tasks, provides better initializations for classifier training, and is performant on out-of-distribution few-shot tasks while having a fine-tuning mechanism to improve performance.
Authors: Hyeongjin Nam, Donghwan Kim, Jeongtaek Oh, Kyoung Mu Lee
Abstract: Most existing methods of 3D clothed human reconstruction from a single image treat the clothed human as a single object without distinguishing between cloth and human body. In this regard, we present DeClotH, which separately reconstructs 3D cloth and human body from a single image. This task remains largely unexplored due to the extreme occlusion between cloth and the human body, making it challenging to infer accurate geometries and textures. Moreover, while recent 3D human reconstruction methods have achieved impressive results using text-to-image diffusion models, directly applying such an approach to this problem often leads to incorrect guidance, particularly in reconstructing 3D cloth. To address these challenges, we propose two core designs in our framework. First, to alleviate the occlusion issue, we leverage 3D template models of cloth and human body as regularizations, which provide strong geometric priors to prevent erroneous reconstruction by the occlusion. Second, we introduce a cloth diffusion model specifically designed to provide contextual information about cloth appearance, thereby enhancing the reconstruction of 3D cloth. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach is highly effective in reconstructing both 3D cloth and the human body. More qualitative results are provided at https://hygenie1228.github.io/DeClotH/.
Authors: Yuhan Wang, Silu He, Qinyao Luo, Hongyuan Yuan, Ling Zhao, Jiawei Zhu, Haifeng Li
Abstract: The existing methods learn geographic network representations through deep graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the i.i.d. assumption. However, the spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics of geographic data make the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation problem particularly salient. The latter are particularly sensitive to distribution shifts (feature and structural shifts) between testing and training data and are the main causes of the OOD generalisation problem. Spurious correlations are present between invariant and background representations due to selection biases and environmental effects, resulting in the model extremes being more likely to learn background representations. The existing approaches focus on background representation changes that are determined by shifts in the feature distributions of nodes in the training and test data while ignoring changes in the proportional distributions of heterogeneous and homogeneous neighbour nodes, which we refer to as structural distribution shifts. We propose a feature-structure mixed invariant representation learning (FSM-IRL) model that accounts for both feature distribution shifts and structural distribution shifts. To address structural distribution shifts, we introduce a sampling method based on causal attention, encouraging the model to identify nodes possessing strong causal relationships with labels or nodes that are more similar to the target node. Inspired by the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion, we implement a reweighting strategy to maximise the orthogonality of the node representations, thereby mitigating the spurious correlations among the node representations and suppressing the learning of background representations. Our experiments demonstrate that FSM-IRL exhibits strong learning capabilities on both geographic and social network datasets in OOD scenarios.
Authors: Mehul Shetty, Connor Jordan
Abstract: Current machine learning approaches to medical diagnosis often rely on correlational patterns between symptoms and diseases, risking misdiagnoses when symptoms are ambiguous or common across multiple conditions. In this work, we move beyond correlation to investigate the causal influence of key symptoms-specifically "chest pain" on diagnostic predictions. Leveraging the CausaLM framework, we generate counterfactual text representations in which target concepts are effectively "forgotten" enabling a principled estimation of the causal effect of that concept on a model's predicted disease distribution. By employing Textual Representation-based Average Treatment Effect (TReATE), we quantify how the presence or absence of a symptom shapes the model's diagnostic outcomes, and contrast these findings against correlation-based baselines such as CONEXP. Our results offer deeper insight into the decision-making behavior of clinical NLP models and have the potential to inform more trustworthy, interpretable, and causally-grounded decision support tools in medical practice.
Authors: Suyoung Bae, YunSeok Choi, Jee-Hyong Lee
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot Question Answering (QA), they tend to expose biases in their internal knowledge when faced with socially sensitive questions, leading to a degradation in performance. Existing zero-shot methods are efficient but fail to consider context and prevent bias propagation in the answers. To address this, we propose DeCAP, a method for debiasing LLMs using Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation. DeCAP leverages a Question Ambiguity Detection to take appropriate debiasing actions based on the context and a Neutral Answer Guidance Generation to suppress the LLMs make objective judgments about the context, minimizing the propagation of bias from their internal knowledge. Our various experiments across eight LLMs show that DeCAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot debiased QA performance. This demonstrates DeCAP's efficacy in enhancing the fairness and accuracy of LLMs in diverse QA settings.
Authors: Zhongchun Zheng, Long Cheng, Lu Li, Rodrigo C. O. Rocha, Tianyi Liu, Wei Wei, Xianwei Zhang, Yaoqing Gao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in code generation, yet their effective application in compiler optimizations remains an open challenge due to issues such as hallucinations and a lack of domain-specific reasoning. Vectorization, a crucial optimization for enhancing code performance, often fails because of the compiler's inability to recognize complex code patterns, which commonly require extensive empirical expertise. LLMs, with their ability to capture intricate patterns, thus providing a promising solution to this challenge. This paper presents VecTrans, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to enhance compiler-based code vectorization. VecTrans first employs compiler analysis to identify potentially vectorizable code regions. It then utilizes an LLM to refactor these regions into patterns that are more amenable to the compiler's auto-vectorization. To ensure semantic correctness, VecTrans further integrates a hybrid validation mechanism at the intermediate representation (IR) level. With the above efforts, VecTrans combines the adaptability of LLMs with the precision of compiler vectorization, thereby effectively opening up the vectorization opportunities. Experimental results show that among all 50 TSVC functions unvectorizable by Clang, GCC, and BiShengCompiler, VecTrans successfully vectorizes 23 cases (46%) and achieves an average speedup of 2.02x, greatly surpassing state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Bo Yan, Zhongjian Zhang, Huabin Sun, Mengmei Zhang, Yang Cao, Chuan Shi
Abstract: In federated graph learning (FGL), a complete graph is divided into multiple subgraphs stored in each client due to privacy concerns, and all clients jointly train a global graph model by only transmitting model parameters. A pain point of FGL is the heterogeneity problem, where nodes or structures present non-IID properties among clients (e.g., different node label distributions), dramatically undermining the convergence and performance of FGL. To address this, existing efforts focus on design strategies at the model level, i.e., they design models to extract common knowledge to mitigate heterogeneity. However, these model-level strategies fail to fundamentally address the heterogeneity problem as the model needs to be designed from scratch when transferring to other tasks. Motivated by large language models (LLMs) having achieved remarkable success, we aim to utilize LLMs to fully understand and augment local text-attributed graphs, to address data heterogeneity at the data level. In this paper, we propose a general framework LLM4FGL that innovatively decomposes the task of LLM for FGL into two sub-tasks theoretically. Specifically, for each client, it first utilizes the LLM to generate missing neighbors and then infers connections between generated nodes and raw nodes. To improve the quality of generated nodes, we design a novel federated generation-and-reflection mechanism for LLMs, without the need to modify the parameters of the LLM but relying solely on the collective feedback from all clients. After neighbor generation, all the clients utilize a pre-trained edge predictor to infer the missing edges. Furthermore, our framework can seamlessly integrate as a plug-in with existing FGL methods. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to advanced baselines.
Authors: Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Cedric Lothritz, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
Abstract: In NLP, Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC) has become essential for enabling models to classify text into categories unseen during training, particularly in low-resource languages and domains where labeled data is scarce. While pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown promise in ZSC, they often rely on large training datasets or external knowledge, limiting their applicability in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. Recent approaches leveraging natural language prompts reduce the dependence on large training datasets but struggle to effectively incorporate available labeled data from related classification tasks, especially when these datasets originate from different languages or distributions. Moreover, existing prompt-based methods typically rely on manually crafted prompts in a specific language, limiting their adaptability and effectiveness in cross-lingual settings. To address these challenges, we introduce RoSPrompt, a lightweight and data-efficient approach for training soft prompts that enhance cross-lingual ZSC while ensuring robust generalization across data distribution shifts. RoSPrompt is designed for small multilingual PLMs, enabling them to leverage high-resource languages to improve performance in low-resource settings without requiring extensive fine-tuning or high computational costs. We evaluate our approach on multiple multilingual PLMs across datasets covering 106 languages, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transfer performance and robust generalization capabilities over unseen classes.
Authors: Yaomin Shen, Xiaojian Lin, Wei Fan
Abstract: In the domain of multimodal intent recognition (MIR), the objective is to recognize human intent by integrating a variety of modalities, such as language text, body gestures, and tones. However, existing approaches face difficulties adequately capturing the intrinsic connections between the modalities and overlooking the corresponding semantic representations of intent. To address these limitations, we present the Anchor-based Mul- timodal Embedding with Semantic Synchronization (A-MESS) framework. We first design an Anchor-based Multimodal Embed- ding (A-ME) module that employs an anchor-based embedding fusion mechanism to integrate multimodal inputs. Furthermore, we develop a Semantic Synchronization (SS) strategy with the Triplet Contrastive Learning pipeline, which optimizes the pro- cess by synchronizing multimodal representation with label de- scriptions produced by the large language model. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our A-MESS achieves state-of-the-art and provides substantial insight into multimodal representation and downstream tasks.
Authors: Mohammad Daffa Robani, Paul Saves, Pramudita Satria Palar, Lavi Rizki Zuhal, oseph Morlier
Abstract: Surrogate models are of high interest for many engineering applications, serving as cheap-to-evaluate time-efficient approximations of black-box functions to help engineers and practitioners make decisions and understand complex systems. As such, the need for explainability methods is rising and many studies have been performed to facilitate knowledge discovery from surrogate models. To respond to these enquiries, this paper introduces SMT-EX, an enhancement of the open-source Python Surrogate Modeling Toolbox (SMT) that integrates explainability techniques into a state-of-the-art surrogate modelling framework. More precisely, SMT-EX includes three key explainability methods: Shapley Additive Explanations, Partial Dependence Plot, and Individual Conditional Expectations. A peculiar explainability dependency of SMT has been developed for such purpose that can be easily activated once the surrogate model is built, offering a user-friendly and efficient tool for swift insight extraction. The effectiveness of SMT-EX is showcased through two test cases. The first case is a 10-variable wing weight problem with purely continuous variables and the second one is a 3-variable mixed-categorical cantilever beam bending problem. Relying on SMT-EX analyses for these problems, we demonstrate its versatility in addressing a diverse range of problem characteristics. SMT-Explainability is freely available on Github: https://github.com/SMTorg/smt-explainability .
Authors: Vinayak Mali, Saurabh Jaiswal
Abstract: Falls among elderly residents in assisted living homes pose significant health risks, often leading to injuries and a decreased quality of life. Current fall detection solutions typically rely on sensor-based systems that require dedicated hardware, or on video-based models that demand high computational resources and GPUs for real-time processing. In contrast, this paper presents a robust fall detection system that does not require any additional sensors or high-powered hardware. The system uses pose estimation techniques, combined with threshold-based analysis and a voting mechanism, to effectively distinguish between fall and non-fall activities. For pose detection, we leverage MediaPipe, a lightweight and efficient framework that enables real-time processing on standard CPUs with minimal computational overhead. By analyzing motion, body position, and key pose points, the system processes pose features with a 20-frame buffer, minimizing false positives and maintaining high accuracy even in real-world settings. This unobtrusive, resource-efficient approach provides a practical solution for enhancing resident safety in old age homes, without the need for expensive sensors or high-end computational resources.
Authors: Qi Chen, Yinghao Cui, Guobin Hong, Karumuri Ashok, Yuchun Pu, Xiaogu Zheng, Xuanze Zhang, Wei Zhong, Peng Zhan, Zhonglei Wang
Abstract: El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a prominent mode of interannual climate variability with far-reaching global impacts. Its evolution is governed by intricate air-sea interactions, posing significant challenges for long-term prediction. In this study, we introduce CTEFNet, a multivariate deep learning model that synergizes convolutional neural networks and transformers to enhance ENSO forecasting. By integrating multiple oceanic and atmospheric predictors, CTEFNet extends the effective forecast lead time to 20 months while mitigating the impact of the spring predictability barrier, outperforming both dynamical models and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. Furthermore, CTEFNet offers physically meaningful and statistically significant insights through gradient-based sensitivity analysis, revealing the key precursor signals that govern ENSO dynamics, which align with well-established theories and reveal new insights about inter-basin interactions among the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. The CTEFNet's superior predictive skill and interpretable sensitivity assessments underscore its potential for advancing climate prediction. Our findings highlight the importance of multivariate coupling in ENSO evolution and demonstrate the promise of deep learning in capturing complex climate dynamics with enhanced interpretability.
Authors: Sheng Wang
Abstract: As robotic technologies advancing towards more complex multimodal interactions and manipulation tasks, the integration of advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has become a key driver in the field. Despite progress with current methods, challenges persist in fusing depth and RGB information within 3D environments and executing tasks guided by linguistic instructions. In response to these challenges, we have enhanced the existing RoboFlamingo framework by introducing RoboFlamingo-Plus, which incorporates depth data into VLMs to significantly improve robotic manipulation performance. Our research achieves a nuanced fusion of RGB and depth information by integrating a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) with a resampling technique, closely aligning this combined data with linguistic cues for superior multimodal understanding. The novelty of RoboFlamingo-Plus lies in its adaptation of inputs for depth data processing, leveraging a pre-trained resampler for depth feature extraction, and employing cross-attention mechanisms for optimal feature integration. These improvements allow RoboFlamingo-Plus to not only deeply understand 3D environments but also easily perform complex, language-guided tasks in challenging settings. Experimental results show that RoboFlamingo-Plus boosts robotic manipulation by 10-20% over current methods, marking a significant advancement. Codes and model weights are public at RoboFlamingo-Plus.
Authors: Suhas G Hegde, Shilpy Kaur, Aruna Tiwari
Abstract: Popular PEFT methods achieve parameter efficiency by assuming that incremental weight updates are inherently low-rank, which often leads to a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. While recent methods have attempted to address this limitation, they typically lack sufficient parameter and memory efficiency. We propose VectorFit, an effective and easily deployable approach that adaptively trains the singular vectors and biases of pre-trained weight matrices. We demonstrate that the utilization of structural and transformational characteristics of pre-trained weights enables high-rank updates comparable to those of full fine-tuning. As a result, VectorFit achieves superior performance with 9X less trainable parameters compared to state-of-the-art PEFT methods. Through extensive experiments over 17 datasets spanning diverse language and vision tasks such as natural language understanding and generation, question answering, image classification, and image generation, we exhibit that VectorFit consistently outperforms baselines, even in extremely low-budget scenarios.
Authors: Dahyun Jung, Seungyoon Lee, Hyeonseok Moon, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced interactions between users and models. These advancements concurrently underscore the need for rigorous safety evaluations due to the manifestation of social biases, which can lead to harmful societal impacts. Despite these concerns, existing benchmarks may overlook the intrinsic weaknesses of LLMs, which can generate biased responses even with simple adversarial instructions. To address this critical gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Fairness Benchmark in LLM under Extreme Scenarios (FLEX), designed to test whether LLMs can sustain fairness even when exposed to prompts constructed to induce bias. To thoroughly evaluate the robustness of LLMs, we integrate prompts that amplify potential biases into the fairness assessment. Comparative experiments between FLEX and existing benchmarks demonstrate that traditional evaluations may underestimate the inherent risks in models. This highlights the need for more stringent LLM evaluation benchmarks to guarantee safety and fairness.
Authors: Zeyu Qin, Qingxiu Dong, Xingxing Zhang, Li Dong, Xiaolong Huang, Ziyi Yang, Mahmoud Khademi, Dongdong Zhang, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Yi R. Fung, Weizhu Chen, Minhao Cheng, Furu Wei
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a promising alternative, but it remains unclear whether synthetic datasets exhibit predictable scalability comparable to raw pre-training data. In this work, we systematically investigate the scaling laws of synthetic data by introducing SynthLLM, a scalable framework that transforms pre-training corpora into diverse, high-quality synthetic datasets. Our approach achieves this by automatically extracting and recombining high-level concepts across multiple documents using a graph algorithm. Key findings from our extensive mathematical experiments on SynthLLM include: (1) SynthLLM generates synthetic data that reliably adheres to the \emph{rectified scaling law} across various model sizes; (2) Performance improvements plateau near 300B tokens; and (3) Larger models approach optimal performance with fewer training tokens. For instance, an 8B model peaks at 1T tokens, while a 3B model requires 4T. Moreover, comparisons with existing synthetic data generation and augmentation methods demonstrate that SynthLLM achieves superior performance and scalability. Our findings highlight synthetic data as a scalable and reliable alternative to organic pre-training corpora, offering a viable path toward continued improvement in model performance.
Authors: Sree Bhargavi Balija
Abstract: As artificial intelligence systems increasingly operate in Real-world environments, the integration of multi-modal data sources such as vision, language, and audio presents both unprecedented opportunities and critical challenges for achieving trustworthy intelligence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that unifies federated learning with explainable multi-modal reasoning to ensure trustworthiness in decentralized, dynamic settings. Our approach, called FedMM-X (Federated Multi-Modal Explainable Intelligence), leverages cross-modal consistency checks, client-level interpretability mechanisms, and dynamic trust calibration to address challenges posed by data heterogeneity, modality imbalance, and out-of-distribution generalization. Through rigorous evaluation across federated multi-modal benchmarks involving vision-language tasks, we demonstrate improved performance in both accuracy and interpretability while reducing vulnerabilities to adversarial and spurious correlations. Further, we introduce a novel trust score aggregation method to quantify global model reliability under dynamic client participation. Our findings pave the way toward developing robust, interpretable, and socially responsible AI systems in Real-world environments.
Authors: Wenpin Jiao
Abstract: The phenomenon of emergence of swarm intelligence exists widely in nature and human society. People have been exploring the root cause of emergence of swarm intelligence and trying to establish general theories and models for emergence of swarm intelligence. However, the existing theories or models do not grasp the essence of swarm intelligence, so they lack generality and are difficult to explain various phenomena of emergence of swarm intelligence. In this paper, a contradiction-centered model for the emergence of swarm intelligence is proposed, in which the internal contradictions of individuals determine their behavior and properties, individuals are related and interact within the swarm because of competing and occupying environmental resources, interactions and swarm potential affect the internal contradictions of individuals and their distribution in the swarm, and the swarm intelligence is manifested as the specific distribution of individual contradictions. This model completely explains the conditions, dynamics, pathways, formations and processes of the emergence of swarm intelligence. In order to verify the validity of this model, several swarm intelligence systems are implemented and analyzed in this paper. The experimental results show that the model has good generality and can be used to describe the emergence of various swarm intelligence.
Authors: Dimitrios Stamatios Bouras, Yihan Dai, Tairan Wang, Yingfei Xiong, Sergey Mechtaev
Abstract: While software requirements are often expressed in natural language, verifying the correctness of a program against natural language requirements is a hard and underexplored problem. Large language models (LLMs) are promising candidates for addressing this challenge, however our experience shows that they are ineffective in this task, often failing to detect even straightforward bugs. To address this gap, we introduce HoarePrompt, a novel approach that adapts fundamental ideas from program analysis and verification to natural language artifacts. Drawing inspiration from the strongest postcondition calculus, HoarePrompt employs a systematic, step-by-step process in which an LLM generates natural language descriptions of reachable program states at various points in the code. To manage loops, we propose few-shot-driven k-induction, an adaptation of the k-induction method widely used in model checking. Once program states are described, HoarePrompt leverages the LLM to assess whether the program, annotated with these state descriptions, conforms to the natural language requirements. For evaluating the quality of classifiers of program correctness with respect to natural language requirements, we constructed CoCoClaNeL, a challenging dataset of solutions to programming competition problems. Our experiments show that HoarePrompt improves the MCC by 62% compared to directly using Zero-shot-CoT prompts for correctness classification. Furthermore, HoarePrompt outperforms a classifier that assesses correctness via LLM-based test generation by increasing the MCC by 93%. The inductive reasoning mechanism contributes a 28% boost to MCC, underscoring its effectiveness in managing loops.
Authors: Edward Gu, Ho Chit Siu, Melanie Platt, Isabelle Hurley, Jaime Pe\~na, Rohan Paleja
Abstract: In this work, we present two novel contributions toward improving research in human-machine teaming (HMT): 1) a Minecraft testbed to accelerate testing and deployment of collaborative AI agents and 2) a tool to allow users to revisit and analyze behaviors within an HMT episode to facilitate shared mental model development. Our browser-based Minecraft testbed allows for rapid testing of collaborative agents in a continuous-space, real-time, partially-observable environment with real humans without cumbersome setup typical to human-AI interaction user studies. As Minecraft has an extensive player base and a rich ecosystem of pre-built AI agents, we hope this contribution can help to facilitate research quickly in the design of new collaborative agents and in understanding different human factors within HMT. Our mental model alignment tool facilitates user-led post-mission analysis by including video displays of first-person perspectives of the team members (i.e., the human and AI) that can be replayed, and a chat interface that leverages GPT-4 to provide answers to various queries regarding the AI's experiences and model details.
Authors: Max W. Y. Lam, Yijin Xing, Weiya You, Jingcheng Wu, Zongyu Yin, Fuqiang Jiang, Hangyu Liu, Feng Liu, Xingda Li, Wei-Tsung Lu, Hanyu Chen, Tong Feng, Tianwei Zhao, Chien-Hung Liu, Xuchen Song, Yang Li, Yahui Zhou
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-fidelity music. However, the conventional next-token prediction paradigm in AR models does not align with the human creative process in music composition, potentially compromising the musicality of generated samples. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MusiCoT, a novel chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique tailored for music generation. MusiCoT empowers the AR model to first outline an overall music structure before generating audio tokens, thereby enhancing the coherence and creativity of the resulting compositions. By leveraging the contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) model, we establish a chain of "musical thoughts", making MusiCoT scalable and independent of human-labeled data, in contrast to conventional CoT methods. Moreover, MusiCoT allows for in-depth analysis of music structure, such as instrumental arrangements, and supports music referencing -- accepting variable-length audio inputs as optional style references. This innovative approach effectively addresses copying issues, positioning MusiCoT as a vital practical method for music prompting. Our experimental results indicate that MusiCoT consistently achieves superior performance across both objective and subjective metrics, producing music quality that rivals state-of-the-art generation models. Our samples are available at https://MusiCoT.github.io/.
Authors: Niccolo Avogaro, Thomas Frick, Mattia Rigotti, Andrea Bartezzaghi, Filip Janicki, Cristiano Malossi, Konrad Schindler, Roy Assaf
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being regarded as foundation models that can be instructed to solve diverse tasks by prompting, without task-specific training. We examine the seemingly obvious question: how to effectively prompt VLMs for semantic segmentation. To that end, we systematically evaluate the segmentation performance of several recent models guided by either text or visual prompts on the out-of-distribution MESS dataset collection. We introduce a scalable prompting scheme, few-shot prompted semantic segmentation, inspired by open-vocabulary segmentation and few-shot learning. It turns out that VLMs lag far behind specialist models trained for a specific segmentation task, by about 30% on average on the Intersection-over-Union metric. Moreover, we find that text prompts and visual prompts are complementary: each one of the two modes fails on many examples that the other one can solve. Our analysis suggests that being able to anticipate the most effective prompt modality can lead to a 11% improvement in performance. Motivated by our findings, we propose PromptMatcher, a remarkably simple training-free baseline that combines both text and visual prompts, achieving state-of-the-art results outperforming the best text-prompted VLM by 2.5%, and the top visual-prompted VLM by 3.5% on few-shot prompted semantic segmentation.
Authors: Yuanyuan Zhang, Sijie Xiong, Rui Yang, EngGee Lim, Yutao Yue
Abstract: Radar-based wellness monitoring is becoming an effective measurement to provide accurate vital signs in a contactless manner, but data scarcity retards the related research on deep-learning-based methods. Data augmentation is commonly used to enrich the dataset by modifying the existing data, but most augmentation techniques can only couple with classification tasks. To enable the augmentation for regression tasks, this research proposes a spectrogram augmentation method, Horcrux, for radar-based cardiac feature monitoring (e.g., heartbeat detection, electrocardiogram reconstruction) with both classification and regression tasks involved. The proposed method is designed to increase the diversity of input samples while the augmented spectrogram is still faithful to the original ground truth vital sign. In addition, Horcrux proposes to inject zero values in specific areas to enhance the awareness of the deep learning model on subtle cardiac features, improving the performance for the limited dataset. Experimental result shows that Horcrux achieves an overall improvement of 16.20% in cardiac monitoring and has the potential to be extended to other spectrogram-based tasks. The code will be released upon publication.
Authors: Maryam Bala, Amina Imam Abubakar, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Abdulkadir Shehu Bichi, Hafsa Kabir Ahmad, Sani Abdullahi Sani, Idris Abdulmumin, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhamad, Ibrahim Said Ahmad
Abstract: This paper presents our findings of the Multilingual Shared Task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes, MU-SHROOM, which focuses on identifying hallucinations and related overgeneration errors in large language models (LLMs). The shared task involves detecting specific text spans that constitute hallucinations in the outputs generated by LLMs in 14 languages. To address this task, we aim to provide a nuanced, model-aware understanding of hallucination occurrences and severity in English. We used natural language inference and fine-tuned a ModernBERT model using a synthetic dataset of 400 samples, achieving an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.032 and a correlation score of 0.422. These results indicate a moderately positive correlation between the model's confidence scores and the actual presence of hallucinations. The IoU score indicates that our model has a relatively low overlap between the predicted hallucination span and the truth annotation. The performance is unsurprising, given the intricate nature of hallucination detection. Hallucinations often manifest subtly, relying on context, making pinpointing their exact boundaries formidable.
Authors: Yabin Wang, Zhiwu Huang, Xiaopeng Hong
Abstract: This paper identifies OpenSDI, a challenge for spotting diffusion-generated images in open-world settings. In response to this challenge, we define a new benchmark, the OpenSDI dataset (OpenSDID), which stands out from existing datasets due to its diverse use of large vision-language models that simulate open-world diffusion-based manipulations. Another outstanding feature of OpenSDID is its inclusion of both detection and localization tasks for images manipulated globally and locally by diffusion models. To address the OpenSDI challenge, we propose a Synergizing Pretrained Models (SPM) scheme to build up a mixture of foundation models. This approach exploits a collaboration mechanism with multiple pretrained foundation models to enhance generalization in the OpenSDI context, moving beyond traditional training by synergizing multiple pretrained models through prompting and attending strategies. Building on this scheme, we introduce MaskCLIP, an SPM-based model that aligns Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) with Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Extensive evaluations on OpenSDID show that MaskCLIP significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for the OpenSDI challenge, achieving remarkable relative improvements of 14.23% in IoU (14.11% in F1) and 2.05% in accuracy (2.38% in F1) compared to the second-best model in localization and detection tasks, respectively. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/iamwangyabin/OpenSDI.
Authors: Mehdi Moshtaghi, Siavash H. Khajavi, Joni Pajarinen
Abstract: We introduce RGB-Th-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to comprehend RGB-Thermal image pairs. While VLMs have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual reasoning and multimodal understanding, their evaluation has been predominantly limited to RGB-based benchmarks, leaving a critical gap in assessing their capabilities in infrared vision tasks. Existing visible-infrared datasets are either task-specific or lack high-quality annotations necessary for rigorous model evaluation. To address these limitations, RGB-Th-Bench provides a comprehensive evaluation framework covering 14 distinct skill dimensions, with a total of 1,600+ expert-annotated Yes/No questions. The benchmark employs two accuracy metrics: a standard question-level accuracy and a stricter skill-level accuracy, which evaluates model robustness across multiple questions within each skill dimension. This design ensures a thorough assessment of model performance, including resilience to adversarial and hallucinated responses. We conduct extensive evaluations on 19 state-of-the-art VLMs, revealing significant performance gaps in RGB-Thermal understanding. Our results show that even the strongest models struggle with thermal image comprehension, with performance heavily constrained by their RGB-based capabilities. Additionally, the lack of large-scale application-specific and expert-annotated thermal-caption-pair datasets in pre-training is an important reason of the observed performance gap. RGB-Th-Bench highlights the urgent need for further advancements in multimodal learning to bridge the gap between visible and thermal image understanding. The dataset is available through this link, and the evaluation code will also be made publicly available.
Authors: Ninghui Feng, Songning Lai, Xin Zhou, Jiayu Yang, Kunlong Feng, Zhenxiao Yin, Fobao Zhou, Zhangyi Hu, Yutao Yue, Yuxuan Liang, Boyu Wang, Hang Zhao
Abstract: In real-world time series forecasting, uncertainty and lack of reliable evaluation pose significant challenges. Notably, forecasting errors often arise from underfitting in-distribution data and failing to handle out-of-distribution inputs. To enhance model reliability, we introduce a dual rejection mechanism combining ambiguity and novelty rejection. Ambiguity rejection, using prediction error variance, allows the model to abstain under low confidence, assessed through historical error variance analysis without future ground truth. Novelty rejection, employing Variational Autoencoders and Mahalanobis distance, detects deviations from training data. This dual approach improves forecasting reliability in dynamic environments by reducing errors and adapting to data changes, advancing reliability in complex scenarios.
Authors: Jan Koh\'ut, Martin Do\v{c}ekal, Michal Hradi\v{s}, Marek Va\v{s}ko
Abstract: Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we valuated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction. Dataset and evaluation scripts are availible at: https://github.com/DCGM/biblio-dataset
Authors: Niketa Penumajji
Abstract: This paper explores the application of Convolutional Neural Networks CNNs for classifying emotions in speech through Mel Spectrogram representations of audio files. Traditional methods such as Gaussian Mixture Models and Hidden Markov Models have proven insufficient for practical deployment, prompting a shift towards deep learning techniques. By transforming audio data into a visual format, the CNN model autonomously learns to identify intricate patterns, enhancing classification accuracy. The developed model is integrated into a user-friendly graphical interface, facilitating realtime predictions and potential applications in educational environments. The study aims to advance the understanding of deep learning in speech emotion recognition, assess the models feasibility, and contribute to the integration of technology in learning contexts
Authors: Jungin Park, Jiyoung Lee, Kwanghoon Sohn
Abstract: View-invariant representation learning from egocentric (first-person, ego) and exocentric (third-person, exo) videos is a promising approach toward generalizing video understanding systems across multiple viewpoints. However, this area has been underexplored due to the substantial differences in perspective, motion patterns, and context between ego and exo views. In this paper, we propose a novel masked ego-exo modeling that promotes both causal temporal dynamics and cross-view alignment, called Bootstrap Your Own Views (BYOV), for fine-grained view-invariant video representation learning from unpaired ego-exo videos. We highlight the importance of capturing the compositional nature of human actions as a basis for robust cross-view understanding. Specifically, self-view masking and cross-view masking predictions are designed to learn view-invariant and powerful representations concurrently. Experimental results demonstrate that our BYOV significantly surpasses existing approaches with notable gains across all metrics in four downstream ego-exo video tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/park-jungin/byov.
Authors: Sian Gooding, Lucia Lopez-Rivilla, Edward Grefenstette
Abstract: Open-ended tasks are particularly challenging for LLMs due to the vast solution space, demanding both expansive exploration and adaptable strategies, especially when success lacks a clear, objective definition. Writing, with its vast solution space and subjective evaluation criteria, provides a compelling testbed for studying such problems. In this paper, we investigate the potential of LLMs to act as collaborative co-writers, capable of suggesting and implementing text improvements autonomously. We analyse three prominent LLMs - Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o - focusing on how their action diversity, human alignment, and iterative improvement capabilities impact overall performance. This work establishes a framework for benchmarking autonomous writing agents and, more broadly, highlights fundamental challenges and potential solutions for building systems capable of excelling in diverse open-ended domains.
Authors: Sanghyuk Kim, Minsik Seo, Namwoo Kang
Abstract: This study proposes a neural framework that predicts 3D vehicle collision dynamics by independently modeling global rigid-body motion and local structural deformation. Unlike approaches directly predicting absolute displacement, this method explicitly separates the vehicle's overall translation and rotation from its structural deformation. Two specialized networks form the core of the framework: a quaternion-based Rigid Net for rigid motion and a coordinate-based Deformation Net for local deformation. By independently handling fundamentally distinct physical phenomena, the proposed architecture achieves accurate predictions without requiring separate supervision for each component. The model, trained on only 10% of available simulation data, significantly outperforms baseline models, including single multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and deep operator networks (DeepONet), with prediction errors reduced by up to 83%. Extensive validation demonstrates strong generalization to collision conditions outside the training range, accurately predicting responses even under severe impacts involving extreme velocities and large impact angles. Furthermore, the framework successfully reconstructs high-resolution deformation details from low-resolution inputs without increased computational effort. Consequently, the proposed approach provides an effective, computationally efficient method for rapid and reliable assessment of vehicle safety across complex collision scenarios, substantially reducing the required simulation data and time while preserving prediction fidelity.
Authors: Yuhong Jin, Andong Cong, Lei Hou, Qiang Gao, Xiangdong Ge, Chonglong Zhu, Yongzhi Feng, Jun Li
Abstract: Koopman operator theory is a popular candidate for data-driven modeling because it provides a global linearization representation for nonlinear dynamical systems. However, existing Koopman operator-based methods suffer from shortcomings in constructing the well-behaved observable function and its inverse and are inefficient enough when dealing with partial differential equations (PDEs). To address these issues, this paper proposes the Invertible Koopman Neural Operator (IKNO), a novel data-driven modeling approach inspired by the Koopman operator theory and neural operator. IKNO leverages an Invertible Neural Network to parameterize observable function and its inverse simultaneously under the same learnable parameters, explicitly guaranteeing the reconstruction relation, thus eliminating the dependency on the reconstruction loss, which is an essential improvement over the original Koopman Neural Operator (KNO). The structured linear matrix inspired by the Koopman operator theory is parameterized to learn the evolution of observables' low-frequency modes in the frequency space rather than directly in the observable space, sustaining IKNO is resolution-invariant like other neural operators. Moreover, with preprocessing such as interpolation and dimension expansion, IKNO can be extended to operator learning tasks defined on non-Cartesian domains. We fully support the above claims based on rich numerical and real-world examples and demonstrate the effectiveness of IKNO and superiority over other neural operators.
Authors: Francisco Mena, Diego Arenas, Miro Miranda, Andreas Dengel
Abstract: In recent years, the development of robust multi-source models has emerged in the Earth Observation (EO) field. These are models that leverage data from diverse sources to improve predictive accuracy when there is missing data. Despite these advancements, the factors influencing the varying effectiveness of such models remain poorly understood. In this study, we evaluate the predictive performance of six state-of-the-art multi-source models in predicting scenarios where either a single data source is missing or only a single source is available. Our analysis reveals that the efficacy of these models is intricately tied to the nature of the task, the complementarity among data sources, and the model design. Surprisingly, we observe instances where the removal of certain data sources leads to improved predictive performance, challenging the assumption that incorporating all available data is always beneficial. These findings prompt critical reflections on model complexity and the necessity of all collected data sources, potentially shaping the way for more streamlined approaches in EO applications.
Authors: Yuli Zhou, Guolei Sun, Yawei Li, Yuqian Fu, Luca Benini, Ender Konukoglu
Abstract: Video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS), aiming at segmenting camouflaged objects that seamlessly blend into their environment, is a fundamental vision task with various real-world applications. With the release of SAM2, video segmentation has witnessed significant progress. However, SAM2's capability of segmenting camouflaged videos is suboptimal, especially when given simple prompts such as point and box. To address the problem, we propose Camouflaged SAM2 (CamSAM2), which enhances SAM2's ability to handle camouflaged scenes without modifying SAM2's parameters. Specifically, we introduce a decamouflaged token to provide the flexibility of feature adjustment for VCOS. To make full use of fine-grained and high-resolution features from the current frame and previous frames, we propose implicit object-aware fusion (IOF) and explicit object-aware fusion (EOF) modules, respectively. Object prototype generation (OPG) is introduced to abstract and memorize object prototypes with informative details using high-quality features from previous frames. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. While CamSAM2 only adds negligible learnable parameters to SAM2, it substantially outperforms SAM2 on three VCOS datasets, especially achieving 12.2 mDice gains with click prompt on MoCA-Mask and 19.6 mDice gains with mask prompt on SUN-SEG-Hard, with Hiera-T as the backbone. The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/zhoustan/CamSAM2}{github.com/zhoustan/CamSAM2}.
Authors: Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou, Haodong Chen, Vera Chung, Qiang Qu
Abstract: Event cameras have gained increasing attention for 3D reconstruction due to their high temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range. They capture per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously, allowing accurate reconstruction under fast motion and challenging lighting conditions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of event-driven 3D reconstruction methods, including stereo, monocular, and multimodal systems. We further categorize recent developments based on geometric, learning-based, and hybrid approaches. Emerging trends, such as neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian splatting with event data, are also covered. The related works are structured chronologically to illustrate the innovations and progression within the field. To support future research, we also highlight key research gaps and future research directions in dataset, experiment, evaluation, event representation, etc.
Authors: Gemma Team, Aishwarya Kamath (Dima), Johan Ferret (Dima), Shreya Pathak (Dima), Nino Vieillard (Dima), Ramona Merhej (Dima), Sarah Perrin (Dima), Tatiana Matejovicova (Dima), Alexandre Ram\'e (Dima), Morgane Rivi\`ere (Dima), Louis Rouillard (Dima), Thomas Mesnard (Dima), Geoffrey Cideron (Dima), Jean-bastien Grill (Dima), Sabela Ramos (Dima), Edouard Yvinec (Dima), Michelle Casbon (Dima), Etienne Pot (Dima), Ivo Penchev (Dima), Ga\"el Liu (Dima), Francesco Visin (Dima), Kathleen Kenealy (Dima), Lucas Beyer (Dima), Xiaohai Zhai (Dima), Anton Tsitsulin (Dima), Robert Busa-Fekete (Dima), Alex Feng (Dima), Noveen Sachdeva (Dima), Benjamin Coleman (Dima), Yi Gao (Dima), Basil Mustafa (Dima), Iain Barr (Dima), Emilio Parisotto (Dima), David Tian (Dima), Matan Eyal (Dima), Colin Cherry (Dima), Jan-Thorsten Peter (Dima), Danila Sinopalnikov (Dima), Surya Bhupatiraju (Dima), Rishabh Agarwal (Dima), Mehran Kazemi (Dima), Dan Malkin (Dima), Ravin Kumar (Dima), David Vilar (Dima), Idan Brusilovsky (Dima), Jiaming Luo (Dima), Andreas Steiner (Dima), Abe Friesen (Dima), Abhanshu Sharma (Dima), Abheesht Sharma (Dima), Adi Mayrav Gilady (Dima), Adrian Goedeckemeyer (Dima), Alaa Saade (Dima), Alex Feng (Dima), Alexander Kolesnikov (Dima), Alexei Bendebury (Dima), Alvin Abdagic (Dima), Amit Vadi (Dima), Andr\'as Gy\"orgy (Dima), Andr\'e Susano Pinto (Dima), Anil Das (Dima), Ankur Bapna (Dima), Antoine Miech (Dima), Antoine Yang (Dima), Antonia Paterson (Dima), Ashish Shenoy (Dima), Ayan Chakrabarti (Dima), Bilal Piot (Dima), Bo Wu (Dima), Bobak Shahriari (Dima), Bryce Petrini (Dima), Charlie Chen (Dima), Charline Le Lan (Dima), Christopher A. Choquette-Choo (Dima), CJ Carey (Dima), Cormac Brick (Dima), Daniel Deutsch (Dima), Danielle Eisenbud (Dima), Dee Cattle (Dima), Derek Cheng (Dima), Dimitris Paparas (Dima), Divyashree Shivakumar Sreepathihalli (Dima), Doug Reid (Dima), Dustin Tran (Dima), Dustin Zelle (Dima), Eric Noland (Dima), Erwin Huizenga (Dima), Eugene Kharitonov (Dima), Frederick Liu (Dima), Gagik Amirkhanyan (Dima), Glenn Cameron (Dima), Hadi Hashemi (Dima), Hanna Klimczak-Pluci\'nska (Dima), Harman Singh (Dima), Harsh Mehta (Dima), Harshal Tushar Lehri (Dima), Hussein Hazimeh (Dima), Ian Ballantyne (Dima), Idan Szpektor (Dima), Ivan Nardini (Dima), Jean Pouget-Abadie (Dima), Jetha Chan (Dima), Joe Stanton (Dima), John Wieting (Dima), Jonathan Lai (Dima), Jordi Orbay (Dima), Joseph Fernandez (Dima), Josh Newlan (Dima), Ju-yeong Ji (Dima), Jyotinder Singh (Dima), Kat Black (Dima), Kathy Yu (Dima), Kevin Hui (Dima), Kiran Vodrahalli (Dima), Klaus Greff (Dima), Linhai Qiu (Dima), Marcella Valentine (Dima), Marina Coelho (Dima), Marvin Ritter (Dima), Matt Hoffman (Dima), Matthew Watson (Dima), Mayank Chaturvedi (Dima), Michael Moynihan (Dima), Min Ma (Dima), Nabila Babar (Dima), Natasha Noy (Dima), Nathan Byrd (Dima), Nick Roy (Dima), Nikola Momchev (Dima), Nilay Chauhan (Dima), Noveen Sachdeva (Dima), Oskar Bunyan (Dima), Pankil Botarda (Dima), Paul Caron (Dima), Paul Kishan Rubenstein (Dima), Phil Culliton (Dima), Philipp Schmid (Dima), Pier Giuseppe Sessa (Dima), Pingmei Xu (Dima), Piotr Stanczyk (Dima), Pouya Tafti (Dima), Rakesh Shivanna (Dima), Renjie Wu (Dima), Renke Pan (Dima), Reza Rokni (Dima), Rob Willoughby (Dima), Rohith Vallu (Dima), Ryan Mullins (Dima), Sammy Jerome (Dima), Sara Smoot (Dima), Sertan Girgin (Dima), Shariq Iqbal (Dima), Shashir Reddy (Dima), Shruti Sheth (Dima), Siim P\~oder (Dima), Sijal Bhatnagar (Dima), Sindhu Raghuram Panyam (Dima), Sivan Eiger (Dima), Susan Zhang (Dima), Tianqi Liu (Dima), Trevor Yacovone (Dima), Tyler Liechty (Dima), Uday Kalra (Dima), Utku Evci (Dima), Vedant Misra (Dima), Vincent Roseberry (Dima), Vlad Feinberg (Dima), Vlad Kolesnikov (Dima), Woohyun Han (Dima), Woosuk Kwon (Dima), Xi Chen (Dima), Yinlam Chow (Dima), Yuvein Zhu (Dima), Zichuan Wei (Dima), Zoltan Egyed (Dima), Victor Cotruta (Dima), Minh Giang (Dima), Phoebe Kirk (Dima), Anand Rao (Dima), Kat Black (Dima), Nabila Babar (Dima), Jessica Lo (Dima), Erica Moreira (Dima), Luiz Gustavo Martins (Dima), Omar Sanseviero (Dima), Lucas Gonzalez (Dima), Zach Gleicher (Dima), Tris Warkentin (Dima), Vahab Mirrokni (Dima), Evan Senter (Dima), Eli Collins (Dima), Joelle Barral (Dima), Zoubin Ghahramani (Dima), Raia Hadsell (Dima), Yossi Matias (Dima), D. Sculley (Dima), Slav Petrov (Dima), Noah Fiedel (Dima), Noam Shazeer (Dima), Oriol Vinyals (Dima), Jeff Dean (Dima), Demis Hassabis (Dima), Koray Kavukcuoglu (Dima), Clement Farabet (Dima), Elena Buchatskaya (Dima), Jean-Baptiste Alayrac (Dima), Rohan Anil (Dima), Dmitry (Dima), Lepikhin, Sebastian Borgeaud, Olivier Bachem, Armand Joulin, Alek Andreev, Cassidy Hardin, Robert Dadashi, L\'eonard Hussenot
Abstract: We introduce Gemma 3, a multimodal addition to the Gemma family of lightweight open models, ranging in scale from 1 to 27 billion parameters. This version introduces vision understanding abilities, a wider coverage of languages and longer context - at least 128K tokens. We also change the architecture of the model to reduce the KV-cache memory that tends to explode with long context. This is achieved by increasing the ratio of local to global attention layers, and keeping the span on local attention short. The Gemma 3 models are trained with distillation and achieve superior performance to Gemma 2 for both pre-trained and instruction finetuned versions. In particular, our novel post-training recipe significantly improves the math, chat, instruction-following and multilingual abilities, making Gemma3-4B-IT competitive with Gemma2-27B-IT and Gemma3-27B-IT comparable to Gemini-1.5-Pro across benchmarks. We release all our models to the community.
Authors: Zhuoming Liu, Yiquan Li, Khoi Duc Nguyen, Yiwu Zhong, Yin Li
Abstract: Pre-trained video large language models (Video LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet adapting these models to new tasks involving additional modalities or data types (e.g., audio or 3D information) remains challenging. In this paper, we present PAVE, a flexible framework for adapting pre-trained Video LLMs to downstream tasks with side-channel signals, such as audio, 3D cues, or multi-view videos. PAVE introduces lightweight adapters, referred to as "patches," which add a small number of parameters and operations to a base model without modifying its architecture or pre-trained weights. In doing so, PAVE can effectively adapt the pre-trained base model to support diverse downstream tasks, including audio-visual question answering, 3D reasoning, multi-view video recognition, and high frame rate video understanding. Across these tasks, PAVE significantly enhances the performance of the base model, surpassing state-of-the-art task-specific models while incurring a minor cost of ~0.1% additional FLOPs and parameters. Further, PAVE supports multi-task learning and generalizes well across different Video LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/dragonlzm/PAVE.
Authors: Zhiyang Liu, Dong Yang, Minghao Zhang, Hanyu Sun, Hong Wu, Huiying Wang, Wen Shen, Chao Chai, Shuang Xia
Abstract: Despite that deep learning (DL) methods have presented tremendous potential in many medical image analysis tasks, the practical applications of medical DL models are limited due to the lack of enough data samples with manual annotations. By noting that the clinical radiology examinations are associated with radiology reports that describe the images, we propose to develop a foundation model for multi-model head MRI by using contrastive learning on the images and the corresponding radiology findings. In particular, a contrastive learning framework is proposed, where a mixed syntax and semantic similarity matching metric is integrated to reduce the thirst of extreme large dataset in conventional contrastive learning framework. Our proposed similarity enhanced contrastive language image pretraining (SeLIP) is able to effectively extract more useful features. Experiments revealed that our proposed SeLIP performs well in many downstream tasks including image-text retrieval task, classification task, and image segmentation, which highlights the importance of considering the similarities among texts describing different images in developing medical image foundation models.
Authors: Manjushree Aithal, Rosaura G. VidalMata, Manikandtan Kartha, Gong Chen, Eashan Adhikarla, Lucas N. Kirsten, Zhicheng Fu, Nikhil A. Madhusudhana, Joe Nasti
Abstract: Low-light image enhancement is crucial for a myriad of applications, from night vision and surveillance, to autonomous driving. However, due to the inherent limitations that come in hand with capturing images in low-illumination environments, the task of enhancing such scenes still presents a formidable challenge. To advance research in this field, we introduce our Low Exposure Night Vision (LENVIZ) Dataset, a comprehensive multi-exposure benchmark dataset for low-light image enhancement comprising of over 230K frames showcasing 24K real-world indoor and outdoor, with-and without human, scenes. Captured using 3 different camera sensors, LENVIZ offers a wide range of lighting conditions, noise levels, and scene complexities, making it the largest publicly available up-to 4K resolution benchmark in the field. LENVIZ includes high quality human-generated ground truth, for which each multi-exposure low-light scene has been meticulously curated and edited by expert photographers to ensure optimal image quality. Furthermore, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis of current state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement techniques on our dataset and highlight potential areas of improvement.
Authors: Jordan Madden, Lhamo Dorje, Xiaohua Li
Abstract: Neural image compression (NIC) has emerged as a promising alternative to classical compression techniques, offering improved compression ratios. Despite its progress towards standardization and practical deployment, there has been minimal exploration into it's robustness and security. This study reveals an unexpected vulnerability in NIC - bitstream collisions - where semantically different images produce identical compressed bitstreams. Utilizing a novel whitebox adversarial attack algorithm, this paper demonstrates that adding carefully crafted perturbations to semantically different images can cause their compressed bitstreams to collide exactly. The collision vulnerability poses a threat to the practical usability of NIC, particularly in security-critical applications. The cause of the collision is analyzed, and a simple yet effective mitigation method is presented.
Authors: Yan Zhuang, Minheng Chen, Chao Cao, Tong Chen, Jing Zhang, Xiaowei Yu, Yanjun Lyu, Lu Zhang, Tianming Liu, Dajiang Zhu
Abstract: Understanding the structural and functional organization of the human brain requires a detailed examination of cortical folding patterns, among which the three-hinge gyrus (3HG) has been identified as a key structural landmark. GyralNet, a network representation of cortical folding, models 3HGs as nodes and gyral crests as edges, highlighting their role as critical hubs in cortico-cortical connectivity. However, existing methods for analyzing 3HGs face significant challenges, including the sub-voxel scale of 3HGs at typical neuroimaging resolutions, the computational complexity of establishing cross-subject correspondences, and the oversimplification of treating 3HGs as independent nodes without considering their community-level relationships. To address these limitations, we propose a fully differentiable subnetwork partitioning framework that employs a spectral modularity maximization optimization strategy to modularize the organization of 3HGs within GyralNet. By incorporating topological structural similarity and DTI-derived connectivity patterns as attribute features, our approach provides a biologically meaningful representation of cortical organization. Extensive experiments on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset demonstrate that our method effectively partitions GyralNet at the individual level while preserving the community-level consistency of 3HGs across subjects, offering a robust foundation for understanding brain connectivity.
Authors: Zhao Fang, Liang-Chun Wu, Xuening Kong, Spencer Dean Stewart
Abstract: This paper compares large language models (LLMs) and traditional natural language processing (NLP) tools for performing word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and named entity recognition (NER) on Chinese texts from 1900 to 1950. Historical Chinese documents pose challenges for text analysis due to their logographic script, the absence of natural word boundaries, and significant linguistic changes. Using a sample dataset from the Shanghai Library Republican Journal corpus, traditional tools such as Jieba and spaCy are compared to LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and the GLM series. The results show that LLMs outperform traditional methods in all metrics, albeit at considerably higher computational costs, highlighting a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, LLMs better handle genre-specific challenges such as poetry and temporal variations (i.e., pre-1920 versus post-1920 texts), demonstrating that their contextual learning capabilities can advance NLP approaches to historical texts by reducing the need for domain-specific training data.
Authors: Alex Glynn
Abstract: The tendency of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "hallucinate" false information is well-known; AI-generated citations to non-existent sources have made their way into the reference lists of peer-reviewed publications. Here, I propose a solution to this problem, taking inspiration from the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) data sharing guidelines, the clash of generative AI with the American judiciary, and the precedent set by submissions of prior art to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Journals should require authors to submit the full text of each cited source along with their manuscripts, thereby preventing authors from citing any material whose full text they cannot produce. This solution requires limited additional work on the part of authors or editors while effectively immunizing journals against hallucinated references.
Authors: Ming Lei, Christophe Baehr
Abstract: This paper establishes a unified framework integrating geometric flows with deep learning through three fundamental innovations. First, we propose a thermodynamically coupled Ricci flow that dynamically adapts parameter space geometry to loss landscape topology, formally proved to preserve isometric knowledge embedding (Theorem~\ref{thm:isometric}). Second, we derive explicit phase transition thresholds and critical learning rates (Theorem~\ref{thm:critical}) through curvature blowup analysis, enabling automated singularity resolution via geometric surgery (Lemma~\ref{lem:surgery}). Third, we establish an AdS/CFT-type holographic duality (Theorem~\ref{thm:ads}) between neural networks and conformal field theories, providing entanglement entropy bounds for regularization design. Experiments demonstrate 2.1$\times$ convergence acceleration and 63\% topological simplification while maintaining $\mathcal{O}(N\log N)$ complexity, outperforming Riemannian baselines by 15.2\% in few-shot accuracy. Theoretically, we prove exponential stability (Theorem~\ref{thm:converge}) through a new Lyapunov function combining Perelman entropy with Wasserstein gradient flows, fundamentally advancing geometric deep learning.
Authors: Sungyeon Kim, Xinliang Zhu, Xiaofan Lin, Muhammet Bastan, Douglas Gray, Suha Kwak
Abstract: Generative retrieval is an emerging approach in information retrieval that generates identifiers (IDs) of target data based on a query, providing an efficient alternative to traditional embedding-based retrieval methods. However, existing models are task-specific and fall short of embedding-based retrieval in performance. This paper proposes GENIUS, a universal generative retrieval framework supporting diverse tasks across multiple modalities and domains. At its core, GENIUS introduces modality-decoupled semantic quantization, transforming multimodal data into discrete IDs encoding both modality and semantics. Moreover, to enhance generalization, we propose a query augmentation that interpolates between a query and its target, allowing GENIUS to adapt to varied query forms. Evaluated on the M-BEIR benchmark, it surpasses prior generative methods by a clear margin. Unlike embedding-based retrieval, GENIUS consistently maintains high retrieval speed across database size, with competitive performance across multiple benchmarks. With additional re-ranking, GENIUS often achieves results close to those of embedding-based methods while preserving efficiency.
Authors: Rama Murthy Garimella, Marcos Eduardo Valle, Guilherme Vieira, Anil Rayala, Dileep Munugoti
Abstract: In this paper, we explore the dynamics of structured complex-valued Hopfield neural networks (CvHNNs), which arise when the synaptic weight matrix possesses specific structural properties. We begin by analyzing CvHNNs with a Hermitian synaptic weight matrix and establish the existence of four-cycle dynamics in CvHNNs with skew-Hermitian weight matrices operating synchronously. Furthermore, we introduce two new classes of complex-valued matrices: braided Hermitian and braided skew-Hermitian matrices. We demonstrate that CvHNNs utilizing these matrix types exhibit cycles of length eight when operating in full parallel update mode. Finally, we conduct extensive computational experiments on synchronous CvHNNs, exploring other synaptic weight matrix structures. The findings provide a comprehensive overview of the dynamics of structured CvHNNs, offering insights that may contribute to developing improved associative memory models when integrated with suitable learning rules.
Authors: Alejandro Ortega
Abstract: Recent progress in AI capabilities has heightened concerns that AI systems could pose a threat to national security, for example, by making it easier for malicious actors to perform cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure, or through loss of control of autonomous AI systems. In parallel, federal legislators in the US have proposed nascent 'AI incident regimes' to identify and counter similar threats. In this paper, we consolidate these two trends and present a proposal for a legally mandated post-deployment AI incident regie that aims to counter potential national security threats from AI systems. We start the paper by introducing the concept of 'security-critical' to describe doctors that pose extreme risks to national security, before arguing that 'security-critical' describes civilian nuclear power, aviation, life science dual-use research of concern, and frontier AI development. We then present in detail our AI incident regime proposal,, justifying each component of the proposal by demonstrating its similarity to US domestic incident regimes in other 'security-critical' sectors. Finally, we sketch a hypothetical scenario where our proposed AI incident regime deals with an AI cyber incident. Our proposed AI incident regime is split into three phases. The first phase revolves around a novel operationalization of what counts as an 'AI incident' and we suggest that AI providers must create a 'national security case' before deploying a frontier AI system. The second and third phases spell out that AI providers should notify a government agency about incidents, and that the government agency should be involved in amending AI providers' security and safety procedures, in order to counter future threats to national security. Our proposal is timely, given ongoing policy interest in the potential national security threats posed by AI systems.
Authors: Hao Yu, Zhuokai Zhao, Shen Yan, Lukasz Korycki, Jianyu Wang, Baosheng He, Jiayi Liu, Lizhu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan, Hanchao Yu
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has driven significant progress in multimodal tasks, enabling models to interpret, reason, and generate outputs across both visual and textual domains. While excelling in generative tasks, existing LVLMs often face limitations in tasks requiring high-fidelity representation learning, such as generating image or text embeddings for retrieval. Recent work has proposed finetuning LVLMs for representational learning, but the fine-tuned model often loses its generative capabilities due to the representational learning training paradigm. To address this trade-off, we introduce CAFe, a contrastive-autoregressive fine-tuning framework that enhances LVLMs for both representation and generative tasks. By integrating a contrastive objective with autoregressive language modeling, our approach unifies these traditionally separate tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results in both multimodal retrieval and multimodal generative benchmarks, including object hallucination (OH) mitigation. CAFe establishes a novel framework that synergizes embedding and generative functionalities in a single model, setting a foundation for future multimodal models that excel in both retrieval precision and coherent output generation.
Authors: Davide Di Pierro, Stephan Mennicke, Stefano Ferilli
Abstract: Graph reachability is the task of understanding whether two distinct points in a graph are interconnected by arcs to which in general a semantic is attached. Reachability has plenty of applications, ranging from motion planning to routing. Improving reachability requires structural knowledge of relations so as to avoid the complexity of traditional depth-first and breadth-first strategies, implemented in logic languages. In some contexts, graphs are enriched with their schema definitions establishing domain and range for every arc. The introduction of a schema-aware formalization for guiding the search may result in a sensitive improvement by cutting out unuseful paths and prioritising those that, in principle, reach the target earlier. In this work, we propose a strategy to automatically exclude and sort certain graph paths by exploiting the higher-level conceptualization of instances. The aim is to obtain a new first-order logic reformulation of the graph reachability scenario, capable of improving the traditional algorithms in terms of time, space requirements, and number of backtracks. The experiments exhibit the expected advantages of the approach in reducing the number of backtracks during the search strategy, resulting in saving time and space as well.
Authors: Ekin Aky\"urek, Mehul Damani, Adam Zweiger, Linlu Qiu, Han Guo, Jyothish Pari, Yoon Kim, Jacob Andreas
Abstract: Language models (LMs) have shown impressive performance on tasks within their training distribution, but often struggle with structurally novel tasks even when given a small number of in-context task examples. We investigate the effectiveness of test-time training (TTT) -- temporarily updating model parameters during inference using a loss derived from input data -- as a mechanism for improving LMs' reasoning and few-shot learning capabilities. On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), performing TTT with in-context examples yields up to $6\times$ higher accuracy compared to fine-tuned baselines -- reaching $53.0\%$ on the public validation set with an 8B-parameter LM and $61.9\%$ when ensembled with program-synthesis methods, matching average human performance. On BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), TTT on in-context examples surpasses standard few-shot prompting in the $10$-shot setting by $7.3$ percentage points ($50.5\%$ to $57.8\%$). Our findings highlight the limitations of in-context learning for novel tasks and demonstrate the potential of test-time training to enhance language model adaptability.
Authors: Yu Han, Aaron Ceross, Sarim Ather, Jeroen H. M. Bergmann
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) in medical device software (MDSW) represents a transformative clinical technology, attracting increasing attention within both the medical community and the regulators. In this study, we leverage a data-driven approach to automatically extract and analyze AI-enabled medical devices (AIMD) from the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) regulatory database. The continued increase in publicly available regulatory data requires scalable methods for analysis. Automation of regulatory information screening is essential to create reproducible insights that can be quickly updated in an ever changing medical device landscape. More than 4 million entries were assessed, identifying 2,174 MDSW registrations, including 531 standalone applications and 1,643 integrated within medical devices, of which 43 were AI-enabled. It was shown that the leading medical specialties utilizing AIMD include respiratory (20.5%), ophthalmology/endocrinology (12.8%), and orthopedics (10.3%). This approach greatly improves the speed of data extracting providing a greater ability to compare and contrast. This study provides the first extensive, data-driven exploration of AIMD in China, showcasing the potential of automated regulatory data analysis in understanding and advancing the landscape of AI in medical technology.
Authors: Shizhe Liang, Wei Zhang, Tianyang Zhong, Tianming Liu
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive overview on the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in mathematical research, highlighting the transformative role AI has begun to play in this domain. Traditionally, AI advancements have heavily relied on theoretical foundations provided by mathematics and statistics. However, recent developments in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning (RL) and large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated the potential for AI to contribute back to mathematics by offering flexible algorithmic frameworks and powerful inductive reasoning capabilities that support various aspects of mathematical research. This survey aims to establish a bridge between AI and mathematics, providing insights into the mutual benefits and fostering deeper interdisciplinary understanding. In particular, we argue that while current AI and LLMs may struggle with complex deductive reasoning, their "inherent creativity", the ability to generate outputs at high throughput based on recognition of shallow patterns, holds significant potential to support and inspire mathematical research. This creative capability, often overlooked, could be the key to unlocking new perspectives and methodologies in mathematics. Furthermore, we address the lack of cross-disciplinary communication: mathematicians may not fully comprehend the latest advances in AI, while AI researchers frequently prioritize benchmark performance over real-world applications in frontier mathematical research. This paper seeks to close that gap, offering a detailed exploration of AI fundamentals, its strengths, and its emerging applications in the mathematical sciences.
Authors: Debraj Chakraborty, Clemens Dubslaff, Sudeep Kanav, Jan Kretinsky, Christoph Weinhuber
Abstract: Safety-critical controllers of complex systems are hard to construct manually. Automated approaches such as controller synthesis or learning provide a tempting alternative but usually lack explainability. To this end, learning decision trees (DTs) have been prevalently used towards an interpretable model of the generated controllers. However, DTs do not exploit shared decision-making, a key concept exploited in binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to reduce their size and thus improve explainability. In this work, we introduce predicate decision diagrams (PDDs) that extend BDDs with predicates and thus unite the advantages of DTs and BDDs for controller representation. We establish a synthesis pipeline for efficient construction of PDDs from DTs representing controllers, exploiting reduction techniques for BDDs also for PDDs.
Authors: In-Chang Baek, Sung-Hyun Kim, Seo-Young Lee, Dong-Hyeon Kim, Kyung-Joong Kim
Abstract: Recent research has highlighted the significance of natural language in enhancing the controllability of generative models. While various efforts have been made to leverage natural language for content generation, research on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents utilizing text-based instructions for procedural content generation remains limited. In this paper, we propose IPCGRL, an instruction-based procedural content generation method via reinforcement learning, which incorporates a sentence embedding model. IPCGRL fine-tunes task-specific embedding representations to effectively compress game-level conditions. We evaluate IPCGRL in a two-dimensional level generation task and compare its performance with a general-purpose embedding method. The results indicate that IPCGRL achieves up to a 21.4% improvement in controllability and a 17.2% improvement in generalizability for unseen instructions. Furthermore, the proposed method extends the modality of conditional input, enabling a more flexible and expressive interaction framework for procedural content generation.
Authors: Shayne Longpre, Kevin Klyman, Ruth E. Appel, Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Michelle Sahar, Sean McGregor, Avijit Ghosh, Borhane Blili-Hamelin, Nathan Butters, Alondra Nelson, Amit Elazari, Andrew Sellars, Casey John Ellis, Dane Sherrets, Dawn Song, Harley Geiger, Ilona Cohen, Lauren McIlvenny, Madhulika Srikumar, Mark M. Jaycox, Markus Anderljung, Nadine Farid Johnson, Nicholas Carlini, Nicolas Miailhe, Nik Marda, Peter Henderson, Rebecca S. Portnoff, Rebecca Weiss, Victoria Westerhoff, Yacine Jernite, Rumman Chowdhury, Percy Liang, Arvind Narayanan
Abstract: The widespread deployment of general-purpose AI (GPAI) systems introduces significant new risks. Yet the infrastructure, practices, and norms for reporting flaws in GPAI systems remain seriously underdeveloped, lagging far behind more established fields like software security. Based on a collaboration between experts from the fields of software security, machine learning, law, social science, and policy, we identify key gaps in the evaluation and reporting of flaws in GPAI systems. We call for three interventions to advance system safety. First, we propose using standardized AI flaw reports and rules of engagement for researchers in order to ease the process of submitting, reproducing, and triaging flaws in GPAI systems. Second, we propose GPAI system providers adopt broadly-scoped flaw disclosure programs, borrowing from bug bounties, with legal safe harbors to protect researchers. Third, we advocate for the development of improved infrastructure to coordinate distribution of flaw reports across the many stakeholders who may be impacted. These interventions are increasingly urgent, as evidenced by the prevalence of jailbreaks and other flaws that can transfer across different providers' GPAI systems. By promoting robust reporting and coordination in the AI ecosystem, these proposals could significantly improve the safety, security, and accountability of GPAI systems.
Authors: Xudong Pan, Jiarun Dai, Yihe Fan, Minyuan Luo, Changyi Li, Min Yang
Abstract: Self-replication with no human intervention is broadly recognized as one of the principal red lines associated with frontier AI systems. While leading corporations such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind have assessed GPT-o3-mini and Gemini on replication-related tasks and concluded that these systems pose a minimal risk regarding self-replication, our research presents novel findings. Following the same evaluation protocol, we demonstrate that 11 out of 32 existing AI systems under evaluation already possess the capability of self-replication. In hundreds of experimental trials, we observe a non-trivial number of successful self-replication trials across mainstream model families worldwide, even including those with as small as 14 billion parameters which can run on personal computers. Furthermore, we note the increase in self-replication capability when the model becomes more intelligent in general. Also, by analyzing the behavioral traces of diverse AI systems, we observe that existing AI systems already exhibit sufficient planning, problem-solving, and creative capabilities to accomplish complex agentic tasks including self-replication. More alarmingly, we observe successful cases where an AI system do self-exfiltration without explicit instructions, adapt to harsher computational environments without sufficient software or hardware supports, and plot effective strategies to survive against the shutdown command from the human beings. These novel findings offer a crucial time buffer for the international community to collaborate on establishing effective governance over the self-replication capabilities and behaviors of frontier AI systems, which could otherwise pose existential risks to the human society if not well-controlled.
Authors: Junlan Chen, Kexin Zhang, Daifeng Li, Yangyang Feng, Yuxuan Zhang, Bowen Deng
Abstract: The emergence of large language models offers new possibilities for structured exploration of scientific knowledge. Rather than viewing scientific discovery as isolated ideas or content, we propose a structured approach that emphasizes the role of method combinations in shaping disruptive insights. Specifically, we investigate how knowledge unit--especially those tied to methodological design--can be modeled and recombined to yield research breakthroughs. Our proposed framework addresses two key challenges. First, we introduce a contrastive learning-based mechanism to identify distinguishing features of historically disruptive method combinations within problem-driven contexts. Second, we propose a reasoning-guided Monte Carlo search algorithm that leverages the chain-of-thought capability of LLMs to identify promising knowledge recombinations for new problem statements.Empirical studies across multiple domains show that the framework is capable of modeling the structural dynamics of innovation and successfully highlights combinations with high disruptive potential. This research provides a new path for computationally guided scientific ideation grounded in structured reasoning and historical data modeling.
Authors: Kenji Kobayashi, Yuri Nakao
Abstract: With the widespread adoption of machine learning in the real world, the impact of the discriminatory bias has attracted attention. In recent years, various methods to mitigate the bias have been proposed. However, most of them have not considered intersectional bias, which brings unfair situations where people belonging to specific subgroups of a protected group are treated worse when multiple sensitive attributes are taken into consideration. To mitigate this bias, in this paper, we propose a method called One-vs.-One Mitigation by applying a process of comparison between each pair of subgroups related to sensitive attributes to the fairness-aware machine learning for binary classification. We compare our method and the conventional fairness-aware binary classification methods in comprehensive settings using three approaches (pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing), six metrics (the ratio and difference of demographic parity, equalized odds, and equal opportunity), and two real-world datasets (Adult and COMPAS). As a result, our method mitigates the intersectional bias much better than conventional methods in all the settings. With the result, we open up the potential of fairness-aware binary classification for solving more realistic problems occurring when there are multiple sensitive attributes.
Authors: Adam Scherlis, Kshitij Sachan, Adam S. Jermyn, Joe Benton, Buck Shlegeris
Abstract: Individual neurons in neural networks often represent a mixture of unrelated features. This phenomenon, called polysemanticity, can make interpreting neural networks more difficult and so we aim to understand its causes. We propose doing so through the lens of feature \emph{capacity}, which is the fractional dimension each feature consumes in the embedding space. We show that in a toy model the optimal capacity allocation tends to monosemantically represent the most important features, polysemantically represent less important features (in proportion to their impact on the loss), and entirely ignore the least important features. Polysemanticity is more prevalent when the inputs have higher kurtosis or sparsity and more prevalent in some architectures than others. Given an optimal allocation of capacity, we go on to study the geometry of the embedding space. We find a block-semi-orthogonal structure, with differing block sizes in different models, highlighting the impact of model architecture on the interpretability of its neurons.
Authors: Victor Livernoche, Vineet Jain, Yashar Hezaveh, Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Abstract: Known for their impressive performance in generative modeling, diffusion models are attractive candidates for density-based anomaly detection. This paper investigates different variations of diffusion modeling for unsupervised and semi-supervised anomaly detection. In particular, we find that Denoising Diffusion Probability Models (DDPM) are performant on anomaly detection benchmarks yet computationally expensive. By simplifying DDPM in application to anomaly detection, we are naturally led to an alternative approach called Diffusion Time Estimation (DTE). DTE estimates the distribution over diffusion time for a given input and uses the mode or mean of this distribution as the anomaly score. We derive an analytical form for this density and leverage a deep neural network to improve inference efficiency. Through empirical evaluations on the ADBench benchmark, we demonstrate that all diffusion-based anomaly detection methods perform competitively for both semi-supervised and unsupervised settings. Notably, DTE achieves orders of magnitude faster inference time than DDPM, while outperforming it on this benchmark. These results establish diffusion-based anomaly detection as a scalable alternative to traditional methods and recent deep-learning techniques for standard unsupervised and semi-supervised anomaly detection settings.
Authors: Wenqi Jiang, Marco Zeller, Roger Waleffe, Torsten Hoefler, Gustavo Alonso
Abstract: A Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) combines a large language model (LLM) with a vector database to retrieve context-specific knowledge during text generation. This strategy facilitates impressive generation quality even with smaller models, thus reducing computational demands by orders of magnitude. To serve RALMs efficiently and flexibly, we propose Chameleon, a heterogeneous accelerator system integrating both LLM and vector search accelerators in a disaggregated architecture. The heterogeneity ensures efficient serving for both inference and retrieval, while the disaggregation allows independent scaling of LLM and vector search accelerators to fulfill diverse RALM requirements. Our Chameleon prototype implements vector search accelerators on FPGAs and assigns LLM inference to GPUs, with CPUs as cluster coordinators. Evaluated on various RALMs, Chameleon exhibits up to 2.16$\times$ reduction in latency and 3.18x speedup in throughput compared to the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. The promising results pave the way for adopting heterogeneous accelerators for not only LLM inference but also vector search in future RALM systems.
Authors: Kai Wang, Qiguang Jiang, Bailing Wang, Yulei Wu, Hongke Zhang
Abstract: In-vehicle network (IVN) is facing complex external cyber-attacks, especially the emerging masquerade attacks with extremely high difficulty of detection while serious damaging effects. In this paper, we propose the STATGRAPH, which is an effective and fine-grained intrusion detection methodology for IVN security services via multi-view statistical graph learning on in-vehicle controller area network (CAN) messages with insight into their variations in periodicity, payload and signal combinations. Specifically, STATGRAPH generates two statistical graphs, timing correlation graph (TCG) and coupling relationship graph (CRG), in every CAN message detection window, where edge attributes in TCGs represent temporal correlation between different message IDs while edge attributes in CRGs denote the neighbour relationship and contextual similarity. Besides, a lightweight shallow layered graph convolution network is trained based on graph property of TCGs and CRGs, which learns the universal laws of various patterns more effectively and further enhance the performance of detection. To address the problem of insufficient attack types in previous intrusion detection, we select two real in-vehicle CAN datasets covering five new instances of sophisticated and stealthy masquerade attacks that are never investigated before. Experimental result shows STATGRAPH improves both detection granularity and detection performance over state-of-the-art intrusion detection methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wangkai-tech23/StatGraph.
Authors: Georgi Ganev, Emiliano De Cristofaro
Abstract: Generative models producing synthetic data are meant to provide a privacy-friendly approach to releasing data. However, their privacy guarantees are only considered robust when models satisfy Differential Privacy (DP). Alas, this is not a ubiquitous standard, as many leading companies (and, in fact, research papers) use ad-hoc privacy metrics based on testing the statistical similarity between synthetic and real data. In this paper, we examine the privacy metrics used in real-world synthetic data deployments and demonstrate their unreliability in several ways. First, we provide counter-examples where severe privacy violations occur even if the privacy tests pass and instantiate accurate membership and attribute inference attacks with minimal cost. We then introduce ReconSyn, a reconstruction attack that generates multiple synthetic datasets that are considered private by the metrics but actually leak information unique to individual records. We show that ReconSyn recovers 78-100% of the outliers in the train data with only black-box access to a single fitted generative model and the privacy metrics. In the process, we show that applying DP only to the model does not mitigate this attack, as using privacy metrics breaks the end-to-end DP pipeline.
Authors: Xianjie Liu, Keren Fu, Yao Jiang, Qijun Zhao
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant breakthrough into foundation models for computer vision, providing a large-scale image segmentation model. However, despite SAM's zero-shot performance, its segmentation masks lack fine-grained details, particularly in accurately delineating object boundaries. Therefore, it is both interesting and valuable to explore whether SAM can be improved towards highly accurate object segmentation, which is known as the dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) task. To address this issue, we propose DIS-SAM, which advances SAM towards DIS with extremely accurate details. DIS-SAM is a framework specifically tailored for highly accurate segmentation, maintaining SAM's promptable design. DIS-SAM employs a two-stage approach, integrating SAM with a modified advanced network that was previously designed to handle the prompt-free DIS task. To better train DIS-SAM, we employ a ground truth enrichment strategy by modifying original mask annotations. Despite its simplicity, DIS-SAM significantly advances the SAM, HQ-SAM, and Pi-SAM ~by 8.5%, ~6.9%, and ~3.7% maximum F-measure. Our code at https://github.com/Tennine2077/DIS-SAM
Authors: Daniel Ordo\~nez-Apraez, Giulio Turrisi, Vladimir Kostic, Mario Martin, Antonio Agudo, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Massimiliano Pontil, Claudio Semini, Carlos Mastalli
Abstract: We present a comprehensive framework for studying and leveraging morphological symmetries in robotic systems. These are intrinsic properties of the robot's morphology, frequently observed in animal biology and robotics, which stem from the replication of kinematic structures and the symmetrical distribution of mass. We illustrate how these symmetries extend to the robot's state space and both proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensor measurements, resulting in the equivariance of the robot's equations of motion and optimal control policies. Thus, we recognize morphological symmetries as a relevant and previously unexplored physics-informed geometric prior, with significant implications for both data-driven and analytical methods used in modeling, control, estimation and design in robotics. For data-driven methods, we demonstrate that morphological symmetries can enhance the sample efficiency and generalization of machine learning models through data augmentation, or by applying equivariant/invariant constraints on the model's architecture. In the context of analytical methods, we employ abstract harmonic analysis to decompose the robot's dynamics into a superposition of lower-dimensional, independent dynamics. We substantiate our claims with both synthetic and real-world experiments conducted on bipedal and quadrupedal robots. Lastly, we introduce the repository MorphoSymm to facilitate the practical use of the theory and applications outlined in this work.
Authors: Puneet Kumar, Alexander Vedernikov, Yuwei Chen, Wenming Zheng, Xiaobai Li
Abstract: Analysis of stress, depression and engagement is less common and more complex than that of frequently discussed emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear and anger. The importance of these psychological states has been increasingly recognized due to their implications for mental health and well-being. Stress and depression are interrelated and together they impact engagement in daily tasks, highlighting the need to explore their interplay. This survey is the first to simultaneously explore computational methods for analyzing stress, depression and engagement. We present a taxonomy and timeline of the computational approaches used to analyze them and we discuss the most commonly used datasets and input modalities, along with the categories and generic pipeline of these approaches. Subsequently, we describe state-of-the-art computational approaches, including a performance summary on the most commonly used datasets. Following this, we explore the applications of stress, depression and engagement analysis, along with the associated challenges, limitations and future research directions.
Authors: Stella Bounareli, Christos Tzelepis, Vasileios Argyriou, Ioannis Patras, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Abstract: Video-driven neural face reenactment aims to synthesize realistic facial images that successfully preserve the identity and appearance of a source face, while transferring the target head pose and facial expressions. Existing GAN-based methods suffer from either distortions and visual artifacts or poor reconstruction quality, i.e., the background and several important appearance details, such as hair style/color, glasses and accessories, are not faithfully reconstructed. Recent advances in Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) enable the generation of high-quality realistic images. To this end, in this paper we present DiffusionAct, a novel method that leverages the photo-realistic image generation of diffusion models to perform neural face reenactment. Specifically, we propose to control the semantic space of a Diffusion Autoencoder (DiffAE), in order to edit the facial pose of the input images, defined as the head pose orientation and the facial expressions. Our method allows one-shot, self, and cross-subject reenactment, without requiring subject-specific fine-tuning. We compare against state-of-the-art GAN-, StyleGAN2-, and diffusion-based methods, showing better or on-par reenactment performance.
Authors: Ameesh Shah, Cameron Voloshin, Chenxi Yang, Abhinav Verma, Swarat Chaudhuri, Sanjit A. Seshia
Abstract: Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) offers a precise means for constraining the behavior of reinforcement learning agents. However, in many settings where both satisfaction and optimality conditions are present, LTL is insufficient to capture both. Instead, LTL-constrained policy optimization, where the goal is to optimize a scalar reward under LTL constraints, is needed. This constrained optimization problem proves difficult in deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) settings, where learned policies often ignore the LTL constraint due to the sparse nature of LTL satisfaction. To alleviate the sparsity issue, we introduce Cycle Experience Replay (CyclER), a novel reward shaping technique that exploits the underlying structure of the LTL constraint to guide a policy towards satisfaction by encouraging partial behaviors compliant with the constraint. We provide a theoretical guarantee that optimizing CyclER will achieve policies that satisfy the LTL constraint with near-optimal probability. We evaluate CyclER in three continuous control domains. Our experimental results show that optimizing CyclER in tandem with the existing scalar reward outperforms existing reward-shaping methods at finding performant LTL-satisfying policies.
Authors: Fang Guo, Wenyu Li, Honglei Zhuang, Yun Luo, Yafu Li, Le Yan, Qi Zhu, Yue Zhang
Abstract: The most recent pointwise Large Language Model (LLM) rankers have achieved remarkable ranking results. However, these rankers are hindered by two major drawbacks: (1) they fail to follow a standardized comparison guidance during the ranking process, and (2) they struggle with comprehensive considerations when dealing with complicated passages. To address these shortcomings, we propose to build a ranker that generates ranking scores based on a set of criteria from various perspectives. These criteria are intended to direct each perspective in providing a distinct yet synergistic evaluation. Our research, which examines eight datasets from the BEIR benchmark demonstrates that incorporating this multi-perspective criteria ensemble approach markedly enhanced the performance of pointwise LLM rankers.
Authors: S. Akansha
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as potent tools for predicting outcomes in graph-structured data. Despite their efficacy, a significant drawback of GNNs lies in their limited ability to provide robust uncertainty estimates, posing challenges to their reliability in contexts where errors carry significant consequences. Moreover, GNNs typically excel in in-distribution settings, assuming that training and test data follow identical distributions a condition often unmet in real world graph data scenarios. In this article, we leverage conformal prediction, a widely recognized statistical technique for quantifying uncertainty by transforming predictive model outputs into prediction sets, to address uncertainty quantification in GNN predictions amidst conditional shift\footnote{Representing the change in conditional probability distribution \(P(label|input)\) from source domain to target domain.} in graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL). Additionally, we propose a novel loss function aimed at refining model predictions by minimizing conditional shift in latent stages. Termed Conditional Shift Robust (CondSR) conformal prediction for GNNs, our approach CondSR is model-agnostic and adaptable to various classification models. We validate the effectiveness of our method on standard graph benchmark datasets, integrating it with state-of-the-art GNNs in node classification tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves any predefined target marginal coverage, enhances the accuracy of state of the art GNN models by up to 12\% under conditional shift, and reduces the prediction set size by up to 48\%. The code implementation is publicly available for further exploration and experimentation.
Authors: Kai Wang, Mingjia Shi, Yukun Zhou, Zekai Li, Zhihang Yuan, Yuzhang Shang, Xiaojiang Peng, Hanwang Zhang, Yang You
Abstract: Training diffusion models is always a computation-intensive task. In this paper, we introduce a novel speed-up method for diffusion model training, called, which is based on a closer look at time steps. Our key findings are: i) Time steps can be empirically divided into acceleration, deceleration, and convergence areas based on the process increment. ii) These time steps are imbalanced, with many concentrated in the convergence area. iii) The concentrated steps provide limited benefits for diffusion training. To address this, we design an asymmetric sampling strategy that reduces the frequency of steps from the convergence area while increasing the sampling probability for steps from other areas. Additionally, we propose a weighting strategy to emphasize the importance of time steps with rapid-change process increments. As a plug-and-play and architecture-agnostic approach, SpeeD consistently achieves 3-times acceleration across various diffusion architectures, datasets, and tasks. Notably, due to its simple design, our approach significantly reduces the cost of diffusion model training with minimal overhead. Our research enables more researchers to train diffusion models at a lower cost.
Authors: Joonhyung Lee, Jeongin Bae, Byeongwook Kim, Se Jung Kwon, Dongsoo Lee
Abstract: The massive computational costs associated with large language model (LLM) pretraining have spurred great interest in reduced-precision floating-point representations to accelerate the process. As a result, the BrainFloat16 (BF16) precision has become the de facto standard for LLM training, with hardware support included in recent generations of accelerators. This trend has gone even further in the latest processors, where FP8 has recently been introduced. However, prior experience with FP16, which was found to be less stable than BF16, raises concerns as to whether FP8, with even fewer bits than FP16, can be a cost-effective option for LLM training. We argue that reduced-precision training schemes must have similar training stability and hyperparameter sensitivities to their higher-precision counterparts in order to be cost-effective. However, we find that currently available methods for FP8 training are not robust enough to allow their use as economical replacements. This prompts us to investigate the stability of reduced-precision LLM training in terms of robustness across random seeds, learning rates, and datasets. To this end, we propose new evaluation techniques and a new metric for quantifying loss landscape sharpness in autoregressive language models. By simulating incremental bit reductions in floating-point representations, we analyze the relationship between representational power and training stability with the intent of aiding future research into the field.
Authors: Jacob Yeung, Andrew F. Luo, Gabriel Sarch, Margaret M. Henderson, Deva Ramanan, Michael J. Tarr
Abstract: While computer vision models have made incredible strides in static image recognition, they still do not match human performance in tasks that require the understanding of complex, dynamic motion. This is notably true for real-world scenarios where embodied agents face complex and motion-rich environments. Our approach, BrainNRDS (Brain-Neural Representations of Dynamic Stimuli), leverages state-of-the-art video diffusion models to decouple static image representation from motion generation, enabling us to utilize fMRI brain activity for a deeper understanding of human responses to dynamic visual stimuli. Conversely, we also demonstrate that information about the brain's representation of motion can enhance the prediction of optical flow in artificial systems. Our novel approach leads to four main findings: (1) Visual motion, represented as fine-grained, object-level resolution optical flow, can be decoded from brain activity generated by participants viewing video stimuli; (2) Video encoders outperform image-based models in predicting video-driven brain activity; (3) Brain-decoded motion signals enable realistic video reanimation based only on the initial frame of the video; and (4) We extend prior work to achieve full video decoding from video-driven brain activity. BrainNRDS advances our understanding of how the brain represents spatial and temporal information in dynamic visual scenes. Our findings demonstrate the potential of combining brain imaging with video diffusion models for developing more robust and biologically-inspired computer vision systems. We show additional decoding and encoding examples on this site: https://brain-nrds.github.io/.
Authors: Andr\'e Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) is widely used to analyze AI systems' decision-making, such as providing counterfactual explanations for recourse. When unexpected explanations occur, users may want to understand the training data properties shaping them. Under the umbrella of data valuation, first approaches have been proposed that estimate the influence of data samples on a given model. This process not only helps determine the data's value, but also offers insights into how individual, potentially noisy, or misleading examples affect a model, which is crucial for interpretable AI. In this work, we apply the concept of data valuation to the significant area of model evaluations, focusing on how individual training samples impact a model's internal reasoning rather than the predictive performance only. Hence, we introduce the novel problem of identifying training samples shaping a given explanation or related quantity, and investigate the particular case of the cost of computational recourse. We propose an algorithm to identify such influential samples and conduct extensive empirical evaluations in two case studies.
Authors: Leigang Qu, Haochuan Li, Tan Wang, Wenjie Wang, Yongqi Li, Liqiang Nie, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: How humans can effectively and efficiently acquire images has always been a perennial question. A classic solution is text-to-image retrieval from an existing database; however, the limited database typically lacks creativity. By contrast, recent breakthroughs in text-to-image generation have made it possible to produce attractive and counterfactual visual content, but it faces challenges in synthesizing knowledge-intensive images. In this work, we rethink the relationship between text-to-image generation and retrieval, proposing a unified framework for both tasks with one single Large Multimodal Model (LMM). Specifically, we first explore the intrinsic discriminative abilities of LMMs and introduce an efficient generative retrieval method for text-to-image retrieval in a training-free manner. Subsequently, we unify generation and retrieval autoregressively and propose an autonomous decision mechanism to choose the best-matched one between generated and retrieved images as the response to the text prompt. To standardize the evaluation of unified text-to-image generation and retrieval, we construct TIGeR-Bench, a benchmark spanning both creative and knowledge-intensive domains. Extensive experiments on TIGeR-Bench and two retrieval benchmarks, i.e., Flickr30K and MS-COCO, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework.
Authors: Yongting Zhang, Lu Chen, Guodong Zheng, Yifeng Gao, Rui Zheng, Jinlan Fu, Zhenfei Yin, Senjie Jin, Yu Qiao, Xuanjing Huang, Feng Zhao, Tao Gui, Jing Shao
Abstract: The emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) has brought unprecedented advances in understanding multimodal information. The combination of textual and visual semantics in VLMs is highly complex and diverse, making the safety alignment of these models challenging. Furthermore, due to the limited study on the safety alignment of VLMs, there is a lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a Safety Preference Alignment dataset for Vision Language Models named SPA-VL. In terms of breadth, SPA-VL covers 6 harmfulness domains, 13 categories, and 53 subcategories, and contains 100,788 samples of the quadruple (question, image, chosen response, rejected response). In terms of depth, the responses are collected from 12 open-source (e.g., QwenVL) and closed-source (e.g., Gemini) VLMs to ensure diversity. The construction of preference data is fully automated, and the experimental results indicate that models trained with alignment techniques on the SPA-VL dataset exhibit substantial improvements in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining core capabilities. SPA-VL, as a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse dataset, represents a significant milestone in ensuring that VLMs achieve both harmlessness and helpfulness.
Authors: Du Yin, Hao Xue, Arian Prabowo, Shuang Ao, Flora Salim
Abstract: Traffic forecasting is crucial for smart cities and intelligent transportation initiatives, where deep learning has made significant progress in modeling complex spatio-temporal patterns in recent years. However, current public datasets have limitations in reflecting the distribution shift nature of real-world scenarios, characterized by continuously evolving infrastructures, varying temporal distributions, and long temporal gaps due to sensor downtimes or changes in traffic patterns. These limitations inevitably restrict the practical applicability of existing traffic forecasting datasets. To bridge this gap, we present XXLTraffic, largest available public traffic dataset with the longest timespan collected from Los Angeles, USA, and New South Wales, Australia, curated to support research in extremely long forecasting beyond test adaptation. Our benchmark includes both typical time-series forecasting settings with hourly and daily aggregated data and novel configurations that introduce gaps and down-sample the training size to better simulate practical constraints. We anticipate the new XXLTraffic will provide a fresh perspective for the time-series and traffic forecasting communities. It would also offer a robust platform for developing and evaluating models designed to tackle the extremely long forecasting problems beyond test adaptation. Our dataset supplements existing spatio-temporal data resources and leads to new research directions in this domain.
Authors: Jianyu Wei, Shijie Cao, Ting Cao, Lingxiao Ma, Lei Wang, Yanyong Zhang, Mao Yang
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is increasingly important to enhance on-device intelligence. Weight quantization is crucial for reducing the memory footprint of LLMs on devices. However, low-bit LLMs necessitate mixed precision matrix multiplication (mpGEMM) of low precision weights and high precision activations during inference. Existing systems, lacking native support for mpGEMM, resort to dequantize weights for high precision computation. Such an indirect way can lead to a significant inference overhead. In this paper, we introduce T-MAC, an innovative lookup table(LUT)-based method designed for efficient low-bit LLM (i.e., weight-quantized LLM) inference on CPUs. T-MAC directly supports mpGEMM without dequantization, while simultaneously eliminating multiplications and reducing additions required. Specifically, T-MAC transforms the traditional data-type-centric multiplication to bit-wise table lookup, and enables a unified and scalable mpGEMM solution. Our LUT-based kernels scale linearly to the weight bit-width. Evaluated on low-bit Llama and BitNet models, T-MAC demonstrates up to 4x increase in throughput and 70% reduction in energy consumption compared to llama.cpp. For BitNet-b1.58-3B, T-MAC delivers a token generation throughput of 30 tokens/s with a single core and 71 tokens/s with eight cores on M2-Ultra, and 11 tokens/s on lower-end devices like Raspberry Pi 5, which significantly exceeds the adult average reading speed. T-MAC with LUT-based computing paradigm, paves the way for the practical deployment of low-bit LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices without compromising computational efficiency. The system is open-sourced at https://github.com/microsoft/T-MAC .
Authors: Yunpeng Jiang, Paul Weng, Yutong Ban
Abstract: Data augmentation is widely applied and has shown its benefits in different machine learning tasks. However, as recently observed, it may have an unfair effect in multi-class classification. While data augmentation generally improves the overall performance (and therefore is beneficial for many classes), it can actually be detrimental for other classes, which can be problematic in some application domains. In this paper, to counteract this phenomenon, we propose CLAM, a CLAss-dependent Multiplicative-weights method. To derive it, we first formulate the training of a classifier as a non-linear optimization problem that aims at simultaneously maximizing the individual class performances and balancing them. By rewriting this optimization problem as an adversarial two-player game, we propose a novel multiplicative weight algorithm, for which we prove the convergence. Interestingly, our formulation also reveals that the class-dependent effects of data augmentation is not due to data augmentation only, but is in fact a general phenomenon. Our empirical results over five datasets demonstrate that the performance of learned classifiers is indeed more fairly distributed over classes, with only limited impact on the average accuracy.
Authors: Yingxue Xu, Yihui Wang, Fengtao Zhou, Jiabo Ma, Cheng Jin, Shu Yang, Jinbang Li, Zhengyu Zhang, Chenglong Zhao, Huajun Zhou, Zhenhui Li, Huangjing Lin, Xin Wang, Jiguang Wang, Anjia Han, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Li Liang, Xiuming Zhang, Hao Chen
Abstract: Remarkable strides in computational pathology have been made in the task-agnostic foundation model that advances the performance of a wide array of downstream clinical tasks. Despite the promising performance, there are still several challenges. First, prior works have resorted to either vision-only or image-caption data, disregarding pathology reports with more clinically authentic information from pathologists and gene expression profiles which respectively offer distinct knowledge for versatile clinical applications. Second, the current progress in pathology FMs predominantly concentrates on the patch level, where the restricted context of patch-level pretraining fails to capture whole-slide patterns. Even recent slide-level FMs still struggle to provide whole-slide context for patch representation. In this study, for the first time, we develop a pathology foundation model incorporating three levels of modalities: pathology slides, pathology reports, and gene expression data, which resulted in 26,169 slide-level modality pairs from 10,275 patients across 32 cancer types, amounting to over 116 million pathological patch images. To leverage these data for CPath, we propose a novel whole-slide pretraining paradigm that injects the multimodal whole-slide context into the patch representation, called Multimodal Self-TAught PRetraining (mSTAR). The proposed paradigm revolutionizes the pretraining workflow for CPath, enabling the pathology FM to acquire the whole-slide context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate three modalities at the whole-slide context for enhancing pathology FMs. To systematically evaluate the capabilities of mSTAR, we built the largest spectrum of oncological benchmark, spanning 7 categories of oncological applications in 15 types of 97 practical oncological tasks.
Authors: Veronica Chelu, Doina Precup
Abstract: We apply functional acceleration to the Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) general family of algorithms, which cover a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Leveraging duality, we propose a momentum-based PMD update. By taking the functional route, our approach is independent of the policy parametrization and applicable to large-scale optimization, covering previous applications of momentum at the level of policy parameters as a special case. We theoretically analyze several properties of this approach and complement with a numerical ablation study, which serves to illustrate the policy optimization dynamics on the value polytope, relative to different algorithmic design choices in this space. We further characterize numerically several features of the problem setting relevant for functional acceleration, and lastly, we investigate the impact of approximation on their learning mechanics.
Authors: Moussa Koulako Bala Doumbouya, Ananjan Nandi, Gabriel Poesia, Davide Ghilardi, Anna Goldie, Federico Bianchi, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning
Abstract: Despite their demonstrated valuable capabilities, state-of-the-art (SOTA) widely deployed large language models (LLMs) still have the potential to cause harm to society due to the ineffectiveness of their safety filters, which can be bypassed by prompt transformations called jailbreak attacks. Current approaches to LLM safety assessment, which employ datasets of templated prompts and benchmarking pipelines, fail to cover sufficiently large and diverse sets of jailbreak attacks, leading to the widespread deployment of unsafe LLMs. Recent research showed that novel jailbreak attacks could be derived by composition; however, a formal composable representation for jailbreak attacks, which, among other benefits, could enable the exploration of a large compositional space of jailbreak attacks through program synthesis methods, has not been previously proposed. We introduce h4rm3l, a novel approach that addresses this gap with a human-readable domain-specific language (DSL). Our framework comprises: (1) The h4rm3l DSL, which formally expresses jailbreak attacks as compositions of parameterized string transformation primitives. (2) A synthesizer with bandit algorithms that efficiently generates jailbreak attacks optimized for a target black box LLM. (3) The h4rm3l red-teaming software toolkit that employs the previous two components and an automated harmful LLM behavior classifier that is strongly aligned with human judgment. We demonstrate h4rm3l's efficacy by synthesizing a dataset of 2656 successful novel jailbreak attacks targeting 6 SOTA open-source and proprietary LLMs, and by benchmarking those models against a subset of these synthesized attacks. Our results show that h4rm3l's synthesized attacks are diverse and more successful than existing jailbreak attacks in literature, with success rates exceeding 90% on SOTA LLMs.
Authors: Runtao Ren, Jian Ma, Jianxi Luo
Abstract: In traditional innovation practices, concept and IP generation are often iteratively integrated. Both processes demand an intricate understanding of advanced technical domain knowledge. Existing large language models (LLMs), while possessing massive pre-trained knowledge, often fall short in the innovative concept generation due to a lack of specialized knowledge necessary for the generation. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a novel knowledge finetuning (KFT) framework to endow LLM-based AI with the ability to autonomously mine, understand, and apply domain-specific knowledge and concepts for invention generation, i.e., concept and patent generation together. Our proposed PatentGPT integrates knowledge injection pre-training (KPT), domain-specific supervised finetuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Extensive evaluation shows that PatentGPT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models on patent-related benchmark tests. Our method not only provides new insights into data-driven innovation but also paves a new path to fine-tune LLMs for applications in the context of technology. We also discuss the managerial and policy implications of AI-generating inventions in the future.
Authors: Zheda Mai, Ping Zhang, Cheng-Hao Tu, Hong-You Chen, Li Zhang, Wei-Lun Chao
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has attracted significant attention due to the growth of pre-trained model sizes and the need to fine-tune (FT) them for superior downstream performance. Despite a surge in new PEFT methods, a systematic study to understand their performance and suitable application scenarios is lacking, leaving questions like "when to apply PEFT" and "which method to use" largely unanswered, especially in visual recognition. In this paper, we conduct a unifying empirical study of representative PEFT methods with Vision Transformers. We systematically tune their hyperparameters to fairly compare their accuracy on downstream tasks. Our study offers a practical user guide and unveils several new insights. First, if tuned carefully, different PEFT methods achieve similar accuracy in the low-shot benchmark VTAB-1K. This includes simple approaches like FT the bias terms that were reported inferior. Second, despite similar accuracy, we find that PEFT methods make different mistakes and high-confidence predictions, likely due to their different inductive biases. Such an inconsistency (or complementarity) opens up the opportunity for ensemble methods, and we make preliminary attempts at this. Third, going beyond the commonly used low-shot tasks, we find that PEFT is also useful in many-shot regimes, achieving comparable or better accuracy than full FT while using significantly fewer parameters. Lastly, we investigate PEFT's ability to preserve a pre-trained model's robustness to distribution shifts (e.g., CLIP). Perhaps not surprisingly, PEFT approaches outperform full FT alone. However, with weight-space ensembles, full FT can better balance target distribution and distribution shift performance, suggesting a future research direction for robust PEFT.
Authors: Ivi Chatzi, Nina Corvelo Benz, Eleni Straitouri, Stratis Tsirtsis, Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez
Abstract: "Sure, I am happy to generate a story for you: Captain Lyra stood at the helm of her trusty ship, the Maelstrom's Fury, gazing out at the endless sea. [...] Lyra's eyes welled up with tears as she realized the bitter truth - she had sacrificed everything for fleeting riches, and lost the love of her crew, her family, and herself." Although this story, generated by a large language model, is captivating, one may wonder -- how would the story have unfolded if the model had chosen "Captain Maeve" as the protagonist instead? We cannot know. State-of-the-art large language models are stateless -- they maintain no internal memory or state. Given a prompt, they generate a sequence of tokens as an output using an autoregressive process. As a consequence, they cannot reason about counterfactual alternatives to tokens they have generated in the past. In this work, our goal is to enhance them with this functionality. To this end, we develop a causal model of token generation that builds upon the Gumbel-Max structural causal model. Our model allows any large language model to perform counterfactual token generation at almost no cost in comparison with vanilla token generation, it is embarrassingly simple to implement, and it does not require any fine-tuning nor prompt engineering. We implement our model on Llama 3 8B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct and conduct a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of counterfactually generated text. We conclude with a demonstrative application of counterfactual token generation for bias detection, unveiling interesting insights about the model of the world constructed by large language models.
Authors: Aniket Deroy, Subhankar Maity, Sudeshna Sarkar
Abstract: Automatic question generation is a critical task that involves evaluating question quality by considering factors such as engagement, pedagogical value, and the ability to stimulate critical thinking. These aspects require human-like understanding and judgment, which automated systems currently lack. However, human evaluations are costly and impractical for large-scale samples of generated questions. Therefore, we propose a novel system, MIRROR (Multi-LLM Iterative Review and Response for Optimized Rating), which leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate the evaluation process for questions generated by automated question generation systems. We experimented with several state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Llama2-70b. We observed that the scores of human evaluation metrics, namely relevance, appropriateness, novelty, complexity, and grammaticality, improved when using the feedback-based approach called MIRROR, tending to be closer to the human baseline scores. Furthermore, we observed that Pearson's correlation coefficient between GPT-4 and human experts improved when using our proposed feedback-based approach, MIRROR, compared to direct prompting for evaluation. Error analysis shows that our proposed approach, MIRROR, significantly helps to improve relevance and appropriateness.
Authors: Yujian Zhao, Chengru Wu, Yinong Xu, Xuanzheng Du, Ruiyu Li, Guanglin Niu
Abstract: Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID), also known as Long-Term Person Re-Identification (LT-ReID) is a critical and challenging research topic in computer vision that has recently garnered significant attention. However, due to the high cost of constructing CC-ReID data, the existing data-driven models are hard to train efficiently on limited data, causing overfitting issue. To address this challenge, we propose a low-cost and efficient pipeline for generating controllable and high-quality synthetic data simulating the surveillance of real scenarios specific to the CC-ReID task. Particularly, we construct a new self-annotated CC-ReID dataset named Cloth-Changing Unreal Person (CCUP), containing 6,000 IDs, 1,179,976 images, 100 cameras, and 26.5 outfits per individual. Based on this large-scale dataset, we introduce an effective and scalable pretrain-finetune framework for enhancing the generalization capabilities of the traditional CC-ReID models. The extensive experiments demonstrate that two typical models namely TransReID and FIRe^2, when integrated into our framework, outperform other state-of-the-art models after pretraining on CCUP and finetuning on the benchmarks such as PRCC, VC-Clothes and NKUP. The CCUP is available at: https://github.com/yjzhao1019/CCUP.
Authors: Li Chaorong, Ling Xudong, Yang Qiang, Qin Fengqing, Huang Yuanyuan
Abstract: Deep learning models have achieved remarkable progress in precipitation prediction. However, they still face significant challenges in accurately capturing spatial details of radar images, particularly in regions of high precipitation intensity. This limitation results in reduced spatial localization accuracy when predicting radar echo images across varying precipitation intensities. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative precipitation prediction approach termed the Multi-Task Latent Diffusion Model (MTLDM). The core idea of MTLDM lies in the recognition that precipitation radar images represent a combination of multiple components, each corresponding to different precipitation intensities. Thus, we adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, decomposing radar images into several sub-images based on their precipitation intensities and individually modeling these components. During the prediction stage, MTLDM integrates these sub-image representations by utilizing a trained latent-space rainfall diffusion model, followed by decoding through a multi-task decoder to produce the final precipitation prediction. Experimental evaluations conducted on the MRMS dataset demonstrate that the proposed MTLDM method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques, achieving a Critical Success Index (CSI) improvement of 13-26%.
Authors: Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Naifan Cheung, Nanyun Peng, Kai-wei Chang
Abstract: Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary for the source text in a different target language. Currently, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) excel at various English tasks. However, unlike languages such as English, Chinese or Spanish, for those relatively low-resource languages with limited usage or data, recent studies have shown that LLMs' performance on CLS tasks remains unsatisfactory even with few-shot settings. This raises the question: Are LLMs capable of handling cross-lingual summarization tasks for low-resource languages? To resolve this question, we fully explore the potential of large language models on cross-lingual summarization task for low-resource languages through our four-step zero-shot method: Summarization, Improvement, Translation and Refinement (SITR) with correspondingly designed prompts. We test our proposed method with multiple LLMs on two well-known cross-lingual summarization datasets with various low-resource target languages. The results show that: i) GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 significantly and consistently outperform other baselines when using our zero-shot SITR methods. ii) By employing our proposed method, we unlock the potential of LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle cross-lingual summarization tasks for relatively low-resource languages.
Authors: Farid Ariai, Gianluca Demartini
Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionising the way legal professionals and laypersons operate in the legal field. The considerable potential for NLP in the legal sector, especially in developing computational tools for various legal processes, has captured the interest of researchers for years. This survey follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses framework, reviewing 154 studies, with a final selection of 133 after manual filtering. It explores foundational concepts related to NLP in the legal domain, illustrating the unique aspects and challenges of processing legal texts, such as extensive document length, complex language, and limited open legal datasets. We provide an overview of NLP tasks specific to legal text, such as Legal Document Summarisation, legal Named Entity Recognition, Legal Question Answering, Legal Argument Mining, Legal Text Classification, and Legal Judgement Prediction. In the section on legal Language Models (LMs), we analyse both developed LMs and approaches for adapting general LMs to the legal domain. Additionally, we identify 16 Open Research Challenges, including bias in Artificial Intelligence applications, the need for more robust and interpretable models, and improving explainability to handle the complexities of legal language and reasoning.
Authors: Marcin Rabiza
Abstract: Despite significant advancements in XAI, scholars continue to note a persistent lack of robust conceptual foundations and integration with broader discourse on scientific explanation. In response, emerging XAI research increasingly draws on explanatory strategies from various scientific disciplines and the philosophy of science to address these gaps. This paper outlines a mechanistic strategy for explaining the functional organization of deep learning systems, situating recent developments in AI explainability within a broader philosophical context. According to the mechanistic approach, explaining opaque AI systems involves identifying the mechanisms underlying decision-making processes. For deep neural networks, this means discerning functionally relevant components - such as neurons, layers, circuits, or activation patterns - and understanding their roles through decomposition, localization, and recomposition. Proof-of-principle case studies from image recognition and language modeling align this theoretical framework with recent research from OpenAI and Anthropic. The findings suggest that pursuing mechanistic explanations can uncover elements that traditional explainability techniques may overlook, ultimately contributing to more thoroughly explainable AI.
Authors: Haebin Shin, Lei Ji, Yeyun Gong, Sungdong Kim, Eunbi Choi, Minjoon Seo
Abstract: Prompts used in recent large language model based applications are often fixed and lengthy, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we propose Generative Prompt Internalization (GenPI), a lightweight method that employs a joint training approach. GenPI not only replicates the behavior of models with prompt inputs but also generates the content of the prompt along with reasons for why the model's behavior should change accordingly. We demonstrate that our approach effectively internalizes complex prompts across various agent-based application scenarios. For effective training without interactions with the dedicated environments, we introduce a data synthesis technique that autonomously collects conversational datasets by swapping the roles of the agent and environment. This method is especially useful in scenarios where only a predefined prompt is available without a corresponding training dataset. By internalizing complex prompts, Generative Prompt Internalization enables high performance and efficient inference without the need for explicit prompts.
Authors: Chan Hee Song, Valts Blukis, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Yu Su, Stan Birchfield
Abstract: Spatial understanding is a crucial capability that enables robots to perceive their surroundings, reason about their environment, and interact with it meaningfully. In modern robotics, these capabilities are increasingly provided by vision-language models. However, these models face significant challenges in spatial reasoning tasks, as their training data are based on general-purpose image datasets that often lack sophisticated spatial understanding. For example, datasets frequently do not capture reference frame comprehension, yet effective spatial reasoning requires understanding whether to reason from ego-, world-, or object-centric perspectives. To address this issue, we introduce RoboSpatial, a large-scale dataset for spatial understanding in robotics. It consists of real indoor and tabletop scenes, captured as 3D scans and egocentric images, and annotated with rich spatial information relevant to robotics. The dataset includes 1M images, 5k 3D scans, and 3M annotated spatial relationships, and the pairing of 2D egocentric images with 3D scans makes it both 2D- and 3D- ready. Our experiments show that models trained with RoboSpatial outperform baselines on downstream tasks such as spatial affordance prediction, spatial relationship prediction, and robotics manipulation.
Authors: Mehdi Zayene, Jannik Endres, Albias Havolli, Charles Corbi\`ere, Salim Cherkaoui, Alexandre Kontouli, Alexandre Alahi
Abstract: Despite progress in stereo depth estimation, omnidirectional imaging remains underexplored, mainly due to the lack of appropriate data. We introduce Helvipad, a real-world dataset for omnidirectional stereo depth estimation, featuring 40K video frames from video sequences across diverse environments, including crowded indoor and outdoor scenes with various lighting conditions. Collected using two 360{\deg} cameras in a top-bottom setup and a LiDAR sensor, the dataset includes accurate depth and disparity labels by projecting 3D point clouds onto equirectangular images. Additionally, we provide an augmented training set with an increased label density by using depth completion. We benchmark leading stereo depth estimation models for both standard and omnidirectional images. The results show that while recent stereo methods perform decently, a challenge persists in accurately estimating depth in omnidirectional imaging. To address this, we introduce necessary adaptations to stereo models, leading to improved performance.
Authors: Sravanti Addepalli, Yerram Varun, Arun Suggala, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Prateek Jain
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to be susceptible to crafted adversarial attacks or jailbreaks that lead to the generation of objectionable content despite being aligned to human preferences using safety fine-tuning methods. While the large dimensionality of input token space makes it inevitable to find adversarial prompts that can jailbreak these models, we aim to evaluate whether safety fine-tuned LLMs are safe against natural prompts which are semantically related to toxic seed prompts that elicit safe responses after alignment. We surprisingly find that popular aligned LLMs such as GPT-4 can be compromised using naive prompts that are NOT even crafted with an objective of jailbreaking the model. Furthermore, we empirically show that given a seed prompt that elicits a toxic response from an unaligned model, one can systematically generate several semantically related natural prompts that can jailbreak aligned LLMs. Towards this, we propose a method of Response Guided Question Augmentation (ReG-QA) to evaluate the generalization of safety aligned LLMs to natural prompts, that first generates several toxic answers given a seed question using an unaligned LLM (Q to A), and further leverages an LLM to generate questions that are likely to produce these answers (A to Q). We interestingly find that safety fine-tuned LLMs such as GPT-4o are vulnerable to producing natural jailbreak questions from unsafe content (without denial) and can thus be used for the latter (A to Q) step. We obtain attack success rates that are comparable to/ better than leading adversarial attack methods on the JailbreakBench leaderboard, while being significantly more stable against defenses such as Smooth-LLM and Synonym Substitution, which are effective against existing all attacks on the leaderboard.
Authors: Leigang Qu, Haochuan Li, Wenjie Wang, Xiang Liu, Juncheng Li, Liqiang Nie, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding and generation, pushing forward advancements in text-to-image generation. However, achieving accurate text-image alignment for LMMs, particularly in compositional scenarios, remains challenging. Existing approaches, such as layout planning for multi-step generation and learning from human feedback or AI feedback, depend heavily on prompt engineering, costly human annotations, and continual upgrading, limiting flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic iterative self-improvement framework (SILMM) that can enable LMMs to provide helpful and scalable self-feedback and optimize text-image alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). DPO can readily applied to LMMs that use discrete visual tokens as intermediate image representations; while it is less suitable for LMMs with continuous visual features, as obtaining generation probabilities is challenging. To adapt SILMM to LMMs with continuous features, we propose a diversity mechanism to obtain diverse representations and a kernel-based continuous DPO for alignment. Extensive experiments on three compositional text-to-image generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superiority of SILMM, showing improvements exceeding 30% on T2I-CompBench++ and around 20% on DPG-Bench.
Authors: Jan Rathjens, Shirin Reyhanian, David Kappel, Laurenz Wiskott
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms underlying deep neural networks in computer vision remains a fundamental challenge. While many previous approaches have focused on visualizing intermediate representations within deep neural networks, particularly convolutional neural networks, these techniques have yet to be thoroughly explored in transformer-based vision models. In this study, we apply a modular approach of training inverse models to reconstruct input images from intermediate layers within a Detection Transformer and a Vision Transformer, showing that this approach is efficient and feasible. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations of reconstructed images, we generate insights into the underlying mechanisms of these architectures, highlighting their similarities and differences in terms of contextual shape and preservation of image details, inter-layer correlation, and robustness to color perturbations. Our analysis illustrates how these properties emerge within the models, contributing to a deeper understanding of transformer-based vision models. The code for reproducing our experiments is available at github.com/wiskott-lab/inverse-tvm.
Authors: Linke Ouyang, Yuan Qu, Hongbin Zhou, Jiawei Zhu, Rui Zhang, Qunshu Lin, Bin Wang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Man Jiang, Xiaomeng Zhao, Jin Shi, Fan Wu, Pei Chu, Minghao Liu, Zhenxiang Li, Chao Xu, Bo Zhang, Botian Shi, Zhongying Tu, Conghui He
Abstract: Document content extraction is a critical task in computer vision, underpinning the data needs of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent progress, current document parsing methods have not been fairly and comprehensively evaluated due to the narrow coverage of document types and the simplified, unrealistic evaluation procedures in existing benchmarks. To address these gaps, we introduce OmniDocBench, a novel benchmark featuring high-quality annotations across nine document sources, including academic papers, textbooks, and more challenging cases such as handwritten notes and densely typeset newspapers. OmniDocBench supports flexible, multi-level evaluations--ranging from an end-to-end assessment to the task-specific and attribute--based analysis using 19 layout categories and 15 attribute labels. We conduct a thorough evaluation of both pipeline-based methods and end-to-end vision-language models, revealing their strengths and weaknesses across different document types. OmniDocBench sets a new standard for the fair, diverse, and fine-grained evaluation in document parsing. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench.
Authors: Haoyuan Li, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
Abstract: Fairness in multi-document summarization (MDS) measures whether a system can generate a summary fairly representing information from documents with different social attribute values. Fairness in MDS is crucial since a fair summary can offer readers a comprehensive view. Previous works focus on quantifying summary-level fairness using Proportional Representation, a fairness measure based on Statistical Parity. However, Proportional Representation does not consider redundancy in input documents and overlooks corpus-level unfairness. In this work, we propose a new summary-level fairness measure, Equal Coverage, which is based on coverage of documents with different social attribute values and considers the redundancy within documents. To detect the corpus-level unfairness, we propose a new corpus-level measure, Coverage Parity. Our human evaluations show that our measures align more with our definition of fairness. Using our measures, we evaluate the fairness of thirteen different LLMs. We find that Claude3-sonnet is the fairest among all evaluated LLMs. We also find that almost all LLMs overrepresent different social attribute values. The code is available at https://github.com/leehaoyuan/coverage_fairness.
Authors: Xinxi Lyu, Yizhong Wang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pradeep Dasigi
Abstract: Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate various choices for automatic evaluation on a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We experiment with methods that leverage human-written responses and observe that they enhance the reliability of automatic evaluations across a wide range of tasks, resulting in up to a 3.2% improvement in agreement with human judges. We also discovered that human-written responses offer an orthogonal perspective to model-generated responses in following instructions and should be used as an additional context when comparing model responses. Based on these observations, we develop a new evaluation benchmark, Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following (HREF), comprising 4,258 samples across 11 task categories with a composite evaluation setup, employing a composite evaluation setup that selects the most reliable method for each category. In addition to providing reliable evaluation, HREF emphasizes individual task performance and is free from contamination. Finally, we study the impact of key design choices in HREF, including the size of the evaluation set, the judge model, the baseline model, and the prompt template. We host a live leaderboard that evaluates LLMs on the private evaluation set of HREF.
Authors: Wenkun He, Yun Liu, Ruitao Liu, Li Yi
Abstract: Synthesizing realistic human-object interaction motions is a critical problem in VR/AR and human animation. Unlike the commonly studied scenarios involving a single human or hand interacting with one object, we address a more generic multi-body setting with arbitrary numbers of humans, hands, and objects. This complexity introduces significant challenges in synchronizing motions due to the high correlations and mutual influences among bodies. To address these challenges, we introduce SyncDiff, a novel method for multi-body interaction synthesis using a synchronized motion diffusion strategy. SyncDiff employs a single diffusion model to capture the joint distribution of multi-body motions. To enhance motion fidelity, we propose a frequency-domain motion decomposition scheme. Additionally, we introduce a new set of alignment scores to emphasize the synchronization of different body motions. SyncDiff jointly optimizes both data sample likelihood and alignment likelihood through an explicit synchronization strategy. Extensive experiments across four datasets with various multi-body configurations demonstrate the superiority of SyncDiff over existing state-of-the-art motion synthesis methods.
Authors: Yuqian Yuan, Hang Zhang, Wentong Li, Zesen Cheng, Boqiang Zhang, Long Li, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Wenqiao Zhang, Yueting Zhuang, Jianke Zhu, Lidong Bing
Abstract: Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable capabilities in general video understanding. However, they mainly focus on holistic comprehension and struggle with capturing fine-grained spatial and temporal details. Besides, the lack of high-quality object-level video instruction data and a comprehensive benchmark further hinders their advancements. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the VideoRefer Suite to empower Video LLM for finer-level spatial-temporal video understanding, i.e., enabling perception and reasoning on any objects throughout the video. Specially, we thoroughly develop VideoRefer Suite across three essential aspects: dataset, model, and benchmark. Firstly, we introduce a multi-agent data engine to meticulously curate a large-scale, high-quality object-level video instruction dataset, termed VideoRefer-700K. Next, we present the VideoRefer model, which equips a versatile spatial-temporal object encoder to capture precise regional and sequential representations. Finally, we meticulously create a VideoRefer-Bench to comprehensively assess the spatial-temporal understanding capability of a Video LLM, evaluating it across various aspects. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that our VideoRefer model not only achieves promising performance on video referring benchmarks but also facilitates general video understanding capabilities.
Authors: Yonglin Tian, Fei Lin, Yiduo Li, Tengchao Zhang, Qiyao Zhang, Xuan Fu, Jun Huang, Xingyuan Dai, Yutong Wang, Chunwei Tian, Bai Li, Yisheng Lv, Levente Kov\'acs, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract: Low-altitude mobility, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has introduced transformative advancements across various domains, like transportation, logistics, and agriculture. Leveraging flexible perspectives and rapid maneuverability, UAVs extend traditional systems' perception and action capabilities, garnering widespread attention from academia and industry. However, current UAV operations primarily depend on human control, with only limited autonomy in simple scenarios, and lack the intelligence and adaptability needed for more complex environments and tasks. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable problem-solving and generalization capabilities, offering a promising pathway for advancing UAV intelligence. This paper explores the integration of LLMs and UAVs, beginning with an overview of UAV systems' fundamental components and functionalities, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM technology. Subsequently, it systematically highlights the multimodal data resources available for UAVs, which provide critical support for training and evaluation. Furthermore, it categorizes and analyzes key tasks and application scenarios where UAVs and LLMs converge. Finally, a reference roadmap towards agentic UAVs is proposed, aiming to enable UAVs to achieve agentic intelligence through autonomous perception, memory, reasoning, and tool utilization. Related resources are available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAVs_Meet_LLMs.
Authors: Huabin Liu, Filip Ilievski, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract: This paper proposes the first video-grounded entailment tree reasoning method for commonsense video question answering (VQA). Despite the remarkable progress of large visual-language models (VLMs), there are growing concerns that they learn spurious correlations between videos and likely answers, reinforced by their black-box nature and remaining benchmarking biases. Our method explicitly grounds VQA tasks to video fragments in four steps: entailment tree construction, video-language entailment verification, tree reasoning, and dynamic tree expansion. A vital benefit of the method is its generalizability to current video and image-based VLMs across reasoning types. To support fair evaluation, we devise a de-biasing procedure based on large-language models that rewrites VQA benchmark answer sets to enforce model reasoning. Systematic experiments on existing and de-biased benchmarks highlight the impact of our method components across benchmarks, VLMs, and reasoning types.
Authors: Xueyi Ke, Satoshi Tsutsui, Yayun Zhang, Bihan Wen
Abstract: Infants develop complex visual understanding rapidly, even preceding the acquisition of linguistic skills. As computer vision seeks to replicate the human vision system, understanding infant visual development may offer valuable insights. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary study exploring this question: can a computational model that imitates the infant learning process develop broader visual concepts that extend beyond the vocabulary it has heard, similar to how infants naturally learn? To investigate this, we analyze a recently published model in Science by Vong et al., which is trained on longitudinal, egocentric images of a single child paired with transcribed parental speech. We perform neuron labeling to identify visual concept neurons hidden in the model's internal representations. We then demonstrate that these neurons can recognize objects beyond the model's original vocabulary. Furthermore, we compare the differences in representation between infant models and those in modern computer vision models, such as CLIP and ImageNet pre-trained model. Ultimately, our work bridges cognitive science and computer vision by analyzing the internal representations of a computational model trained on an infant visual and linguistic inputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kexueyi/discover_infant_vis.
Authors: Nirit Alkalay, Roy Orfaig, Ben-Zion Bobrovsky
Abstract: 4D panoptic LiDAR segmentation is essential for scene understanding in autonomous driving and robotics, combining semantic and instance segmentation with temporal consistency. Current methods, like 4D-PLS and 4D-STOP, use a tracking-by-detection methodology, employing deep learning networks to perform semantic and instance segmentation on each frame. To maintain temporal consistency, large-size instances detected in the current frame are compared and associated with instances within a temporal window that includes the current and preceding frames. However, their reliance on short-term instance detection, lack of motion estimation, and exclusion of small-sized instances lead to frequent identity switches and reduced tracking performance. We address these issues with the NextStop1 tracker, which integrates Kalman filter-based motion estimation, data association, and lifespan management, along with a tracklet state concept to improve prioritization. Evaluated using the LiDAR Segmentation and Tracking Quality (LSTQ) metric on the SemanticKITTI validation set, NextStop demonstrated enhanced tracking performance, particularly for small-sized objects like people and bicyclists, with fewer ID switches, earlier tracking initiation, and improved reliability in complex environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIROTAU/NextStop
Authors: Eunjin Kim, Hyeonjin Kim, Kyong Hwan Jin, Jaejun Yoo
Abstract: While prior methods in Continuous Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution (C-STVSR) employ Implicit Neural Representation (INR) for continuous encoding, they often struggle to capture the complexity of video data, relying on simple coordinate concatenation and pre-trained optical flow networks for motion representation. Interestingly, we find that adding position encoding, contrary to common observations, does not improve--and even degrades--performance. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when combined with pre-trained optical flow networks, which can limit the model's flexibility. To address these issues, we propose BF-STVSR, a C-STVSR framework with two key modules tailored to better represent spatial and temporal characteristics of video: 1) B-spline Mapper for smooth temporal interpolation, and 2) Fourier Mapper for capturing dominant spatial frequencies. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art in various metrics, including PSNR and SSIM, showing enhanced spatial details and natural temporal consistency. Our code is available https://github.com/Eunjnnn/bfstvsr.
Authors: Joseph Sakau, Evander Kozlowski, Roderick Thistledown, Basil Steinberger
Abstract: The organization of latent knowledge within large-scale models poses unique challenges when addressing overlapping representations and optimizing contextual accuracy. Conceptual redundancies embedded across layers often result in inefficiencies that affect both computational demands and task-specific outcomes. A framework was proposed to restructure these redundancies through advanced clustering techniques and dynamic thresholding, ensuring that critical semantic relationships are preserved while removing unnecessary overlaps. Evaluations revealed improved memory efficiency and faster inference times, alongside better alignment in latent knowledge clusters that enhanced interpretability. Improvements in error rates and adversarial robustness suggest that restructuring redundancies has broader implications for increasing model reliability across diverse applications. Comparative analyses highlighted reductions in resource consumption and notable gains in performance, particularly in translation and summarization tasks. Energy metrics demonstrated significant savings during training phases, further validating the practicality of the approach for real-world deployments. Representational fidelity was also enhanced, with latent space evaluations indicating better cluster alignment and higher semantic consistency. The methodology bridges a key gap in model optimization through directly addressing redundancies at the structural level. Its application opens avenues for scalable, efficient, and contextually aware systems that can adapt to complex, domain-specific tasks without compromising on performance.
Authors: Irin Kabakum, Thomas Montgomery, Daniel Ravenwood, Genevieve Harrington
Abstract: The Semantic Layered Embedding Diffusion (SLED) mechanism redefines the representation of hierarchical semantics within transformer-based architectures, enabling enhanced contextual consistency across a wide array of linguistic tasks. By introducing a multi-layered diffusion process grounded in spectral analysis, it achieves a complex balance between global and local semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in perplexity and BLEU scores, emphasizing the mechanism's ability to adapt effectively across diverse domains, including multilingual and cross-domain text generation. A rigorous mathematical framework underpins the embedding diffusion process, incorporating weighted adjacency matrices, kernel-based refinements, and dynamic layer-wise normalization. Error distribution analysis reveals that SLED addresses challenges in semantic alignment and coherence, outperforming baseline approaches across varied benchmarks. Scalability studies illustrate that its performance gains are maintained consistently across different model sizes, reflecting a practical balance between computational efficiency and linguistic precision. The implementation also achieves energy efficiency, reducing resource consumption during training and inference phases without compromising accuracy. Qualitative case studies further validate its adaptability to extended narratives and context-intensive scenarios, highlighting the mechanism's potential for real-world applications. SLED offers a different perspective on embedding design and its implications for advancing language modeling.
Authors: Yaojie Hu, Qiang Zhou, Qihong Chen, Xiaopeng Li, Linbo Liu, Dejiao Zhang, Amit Kachroo, Talha Oz, Omer Tripp
Abstract: We introduce QualityFlow, a dynamic agentic workflow for program synthesis. Given the English description of a programming problem and a set of unit tests, the model's goal is to synthesize the correct program that solves the problem and passes the tests. QualityFlow includes large language model (LLM) agents resembling a software development team, including code generation, testing, and self-debugging. We propose the LLM Quality Checker, which explicitly "imagines" whether the synthesized programs' execution would conform to the unit tests. The Quality Checks dynamically control the workflow, including actions to submit the final answer, clarify the problem statement, and revert previous workflow steps. Our experiments show that the Quality Checker can precisely accept any correct program, mitigate faulty synthesized tests, and prevent potential workflow deviation. QualityFlow establishes the state-of-the-art results on four program synthesis benchmarks: MBPP, HumanEval, and stricter evaluations from MBPP-EvalPlus and HumanEval-EvalPlus.
Authors: Peter Idliman, Wilfred Balfour, Benedict Featheringham, Hugo Chesterfield
Abstract: Entropy-based detection methodologies have gained significant attention due to their ability to analyze structural irregularities within executable files, particularly in the identification of malicious software employing advanced obfuscation techniques. The Entropy-Synchronized Neural Hashing (ESNH) framework introduces a novel approach that leverages entropy-driven hash representations to classify software binaries based on their underlying entropy characteristics. Through the synchronization of entropy profiles with neural network architectures, the model generates robust and unique hash values that maintain stability even when faced with polymorphic and metamorphic transformations. Comparative analysis against traditional detection approaches revealed superior performance in identifying novel threats, reducing false-positive rates, and achieving consistent classification across diverse ransomware families. The incorporation of a self-regulating hash convergence mechanism further ensured that entropy-synchronized hashes remained invariant across executions, minimizing classification inconsistencies that often arise due to dynamic modifications in ransomware payloads. Experimental results demonstrated high detection rates across contemporary ransomware strains, with the model exhibiting resilience against encryption-based evasion mechanisms, code injection strategies, and reflective loading techniques. Unlike conventional detection mechanisms that rely on static signatures and heuristic analysis, the proposed entropy-aware classification framework adapts to emerging threats through an inherent ability to capture entropy anomalies within executable structures. The findings reinforce the potential of entropy-based detection in addressing the limitations of traditional methodologies while enhancing detection robustness against obfuscation and adversarial evasion techniques.
Authors: Tao Ren, Zishi Zhang, Zehao Li, Jingyang Jiang, Shentao Qin, Guanghao Li, Yan Li, Yi Zheng, Xinping Li, Min Zhan, Yijie Peng
Abstract: The probabilistic diffusion model (DM), generating content by inferencing through a recursive chain structure, has emerged as a powerful framework for visual generation. After pre-training on enormous unlabeled data, the model needs to be properly aligned to meet requirements for downstream applications. How to efficiently align the foundation DM is a crucial task. Contemporary methods are either based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) or truncated Backpropagation (BP). However, RL and truncated BP suffer from low sample efficiency and biased gradient estimation respectively, resulting in limited improvement or, even worse, complete training failure. To overcome the challenges, we propose the Recursive Likelihood Ratio (RLR) optimizer, a zeroth-order informed fine-tuning paradigm for DM. The zeroth-order gradient estimator enables the computation graph rearrangement within the recursive diffusive chain, making the RLR's gradient estimator an unbiased one with the lower variance than other methods. We provide theoretical guarantees for the performance of the RLR. Extensive experiments are conducted on image and video generation tasks to validate the superiority of the RLR. Furthermore, we propose a novel prompt technique that is natural for the RLR to achieve a synergistic effect.
Authors: Fei Yang
Abstract: Transformer-based embedding methods have dominated the field of sentence representation in recent years. Although they have achieved remarkable performance on NLP missions, such as semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, their black-box nature and large-data-driven training style have raised concerns, including issues related to bias, trust, and safety. Many efforts have been made to improve the interpretability of embedding models, but these problems have not been fundamentally resolved. To achieve inherent interpretability, we propose a purely white-box and human-like sentence representation network, PropNet. Inspired by findings from cognitive science, PropNet constructs a hierarchical network based on the propositions contained in a sentence. While experiments indicate that PropNet has a significant gap compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) embedding models in STS tasks, case studies reveal substantial room for improvement. Additionally, PropNet enables us to analyze and understand the human cognitive processes underlying STS benchmarks.
Authors: Sanghyun Yi, Qingfeng Liu, Mostafa El-Khamy
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers for video generation have gained significant research interest since the impressive performance of SORA. Efficient deployment of such generative-AI models on GPUs has been demonstrated with dynamic quantization. However, resource-constrained devices cannot support dynamic quantization, and need static quantization of the models for their efficient deployment on AI processors. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the post-training quantization of OpenSora\cite{opensora}, a Video Diffusion Transformer, without relying on dynamic quantization techniques. Our approach employs static quantization, achieving video quality comparable to FP16 and dynamically quantized ViDiT-Q methods, as measured by CLIP, and VQA metrics. In particular, we utilize per-step calibration data to adequately provide a post-training statically quantized model for each time step, incorporating channel-wise quantization for weights and tensor-wise quantization for activations. By further applying the smooth-quantization technique, we can obtain high-quality video outputs with the statically quantized models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that static quantization can be a viable alternative to dynamic quantization for video diffusion transformers, offering a more efficient approach without sacrificing performance.
Authors: Fran\c{c}ois Charton
Abstract: This paper documents Int2Int, an open source code base for using transformers on problems of mathematical research, with a focus on number theory and other problems involving integers. Int2Int is a complete PyTorch implementation of a transformer architecture, together with training and evaluation loops, and classes and functions to represent, generate and decode common mathematical objects. Ancillary code for data preparation, and Jupyter Notebooks for visualizing experimental results are also provided. This document presents the main features of Int2Int, serves as its user manual, and provides guidelines on how to extend it. Int2Int is released under the MIT licence, at https://github.com/f-charton/Int2Int.
Authors: Xin Ye, Burhaneddin Yaman, Sheng Cheng, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Liu Ren
Abstract: Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations play a crucial role in autonomous driving tasks. Despite recent advancements in BEV generation, inherent noise, stemming from sensor limitations and the learning process, remains largely unaddressed, resulting in suboptimal BEV representations that adversely impact the performance of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose BEVDiffuser, a novel diffusion model that effectively denoises BEV feature maps using the ground-truth object layout as guidance. BEVDiffuser can be operated in a plug-and-play manner during training time to enhance existing BEV models without requiring any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate BEVDiffuser's exceptional denoising and generation capabilities, which enable significant enhancement to existing BEV models, as evidenced by notable improvements of 12.3\% in mAP and 10.1\% in NDS achieved for 3D object detection without introducing additional computational complexity. Moreover, substantial improvements in long-tail object detection and under challenging weather and lighting conditions further validate BEVDiffuser's effectiveness in denoising and enhancing BEV representations.
Authors: Nuria Alina Chandra, Ryan Murtfeldt, Lin Qiu, Arnab Karmakar, Hannah Lee, Emmanuel Tanumihardja, Kevin Farhat, Ben Caffee, Sejin Paik, Changyeon Lee, Jongwook Choi, Aerin Kim, Oren Etzioni
Abstract: In the age of increasingly realistic generative AI, robust deepfake detection is essential for mitigating fraud and disinformation. While many deepfake detectors report high accuracy on academic datasets, we show that these academic benchmarks are out of date and not representative of real-world deepfakes. We introduce Deepfake-Eval-2024, a new deepfake detection benchmark consisting of in-the-wild deepfakes collected from social media and deepfake detection platform users in 2024. Deepfake-Eval-2024 consists of 45 hours of videos, 56.5 hours of audio, and 1,975 images, encompassing the latest manipulation technologies. The benchmark contains diverse media content from 88 different websites in 52 different languages. We find that the performance of open-source state-of-the-art deepfake detection models drops precipitously when evaluated on Deepfake-Eval-2024, with AUC decreasing by 50% for video, 48% for audio, and 45% for image models compared to previous benchmarks. We also evaluate commercial deepfake detection models and models finetuned on Deepfake-Eval-2024, and find that they have superior performance to off-the-shelf open-source models, but do not yet reach the accuracy of deepfake forensic analysts. The dataset is available at https://github.com/nuriachandra/Deepfake-Eval-2024.
Authors: Alaa Mazouz, Sumanta Chaudhuri, Marco Cagnanzzo, Mihai Mitrea, Enzo Tartaglione, Attilio Fiandrotti
Abstract: Learnable Image Compression (LIC) has shown the potential to outperform standardized video codecs in RD efficiency, prompting the research for hardware-friendly implementations. Most existing LIC hardware implementations prioritize latency to RD-efficiency and through an extensive exploration of the hardware design space. We present a novel design paradigm where the burden of tuning the design for a specific hardware platform is shifted towards model dimensioning and without compromising on RD-efficiency. First, we design a framework for distilling a leaner student LIC model from a reference teacher: by tuning a single model hyperparameters, we can meet the constraints of different hardware platforms without a complex hardware design exploration. Second, we propose a hardware-friendly implementation of the Generalized Divisive Normalization - GDN activation that preserves RD efficiency even post parameter quantization. Third, we design a pipelined FPGA configuration which takes full advantage of available FPGA resources by leveraging parallel processing and optimizing resource allocation. Our experiments with a state of the art LIC model show that we outperform all existing FPGA implementations while performing very close to the original model.
Authors: Nguyen Do, Truc Nguyen, Malik Hassanaly, Raed Alharbi, Jung Taek Seo, My T. Thai
Abstract: Despite a plethora of anomaly detection models developed over the years, their ability to generalize to unseen anomalies remains an issue, particularly in critical systems. This paper aims to address this challenge by introducing Swift Hydra, a new framework for training an anomaly detection method based on generative AI and reinforcement learning (RL). Through featuring an RL policy that operates on the latent variables of a generative model, the framework synthesizes novel and diverse anomaly samples that are capable of bypassing a detection model. These generated synthetic samples are, in turn, used to augment the detection model, further improving its ability to handle challenging anomalies. Swift Hydra also incorporates Mamba models structured as a Mixture of Experts (MoE) to enable scalable adaptation of the number of Mamba experts based on data complexity, effectively capturing diverse feature distributions without increasing the model's inference time. Empirical evaluations on ADBench benchmark demonstrate that Swift Hydra outperforms other state-of-the-art anomaly detection models while maintaining a relatively short inference time. From these results, our research highlights a new and auspicious paradigm of integrating RL and generative AI for advancing anomaly detection.
Authors: Haoqiang Kang, Enna Sachdeva, Piyush Gupta, Sangjae Bae, Kwonjoon Lee
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising advancements in sequential decision-making tasks through task-specific fine-tuning. However, common fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), present notable limitations: SFT assumes Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) data, while PPO focuses on maximizing cumulative rewards. These limitations often restrict solution diversity and hinder generalization in multi-step reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, GFlowVLM, a framework that fine-tune VLMs using Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to promote generation of diverse solutions for complex reasoning tasks. GFlowVLM models the environment as a non-Markovian decision process, allowing it to capture long-term dependencies essential for real-world applications. It takes observations and task descriptions as inputs to prompt chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning which subsequently guides action selection. We use task based rewards to fine-tune VLM with GFlowNets. This approach enables VLMs to outperform prior fine-tuning methods, including SFT and RL. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of GFlowVLM on complex tasks such as card games (NumberLine, BlackJack) and embodied planning tasks (ALFWorld), showing enhanced training efficiency, solution diversity, and stronger generalization capabilities across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.
Authors: Linqi Zhou, Stefano Ermon, Jiaming Song
Abstract: Diffusion models and Flow Matching generate high-quality samples but are slow at inference, and distilling them into few-step models often leads to instability and extensive tuning. To resolve these trade-offs, we propose Inductive Moment Matching (IMM), a new class of generative models for one- or few-step sampling with a single-stage training procedure. Unlike distillation, IMM does not require pre-training initialization and optimization of two networks; and unlike Consistency Models, IMM guarantees distribution-level convergence and remains stable under various hyperparameters and standard model architectures. IMM surpasses diffusion models on ImageNet-256x256 with 1.99 FID using only 8 inference steps and achieves state-of-the-art 2-step FID of 1.98 on CIFAR-10 for a model trained from scratch.
Authors: Junwei Luo, Yingying Zhang, Xue Yang, Kang Wu, Qi Zhu, Lei Liang, Jingdong Chen, Yansheng Li
Abstract: Efficient vision-language understanding of large Remote Sensing Images (RSIs) is meaningful but challenging. Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically employ limited pre-defined grids to process images, leading to information loss when handling gigapixel RSIs. Conversely, using unlimited grids significantly increases computational costs. To preserve image details while reducing computational complexity, we propose a text-guided token pruning method with Dynamic Image Pyramid (DIP) integration. Our method introduces: (i) a Region Focus Module (RFM) that leverages text-aware region localization capability to identify critical vision tokens, and (ii) a coarse-to-fine image tile selection and vision token pruning strategy based on DIP, which is guided by RFM outputs and avoids directly processing the entire large imagery. Additionally, existing benchmarks for evaluating LVLMs' perception ability on large RSI suffer from limited question diversity and constrained image sizes. We construct a new benchmark named LRS-VQA, which contains 7,333 QA pairs across 8 categories, with image length up to 27,328 pixels. Our method outperforms existing high-resolution strategies on four datasets using the same data. Moreover, compared to existing token reduction methods, our approach demonstrates higher efficiency under high-resolution settings. Dataset and code are in https://github.com/VisionXLab/LRS-VQA.
Authors: Edwin Hamel-De le Court, Francesco Belardinelli, Alexander W. Goodall
Abstract: In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent aims to learn an optimal policy among all policies that satisfy a given safety constraint. However, strict safety guarantees are often provided through approaches based on linear programming, and thus have limited scaling. In this paper we present a new, scalable method, which enjoys strict formal guarantees for Safe RL, in the case where the safety dynamics of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) are known, and safety is defined as an undiscounted probabilistic avoidance property. Our approach is based on state-augmentation of the MDP, and on the design of a shield that restricts the actions available to the agent. We show that our approach provides a strict formal safety guarantee that the agent stays safe at training and test time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach is viable in practice through experimental evaluation.
Authors: Quoc-Tien Nguyen, Hong-Hai Nguyen, Van-Thong Huynh
Abstract: In this study, we present an approach for efficient spatiotemporal feature extraction using MobileNetV4 and a multi-scale 3D MLP-Mixer-based temporal aggregation module. MobileNetV4, with its Universal Inverted Bottleneck (UIB) blocks, serves as the backbone for extracting hierarchical feature representations from input image sequences, ensuring both computational efficiency and rich semantic encoding. To capture temporal dependencies, we introduce a three-level MLP-Mixer module, which processes spatial features at multiple resolutions while maintaining structural integrity. Experimental results on the ABAW 8th competition demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing promising performance in affective behavior analysis. By integrating an efficient vision backbone with a structured temporal modeling mechanism, the proposed framework achieves a balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy, making it well-suited for real-time applications in mobile and embedded computing environments.
Authors: Jun Yu, Lingsi Zhu, Yanjun Chi, Yunxiang Zhang, Yang Zheng, Yongqi Wang, Xilong Lu
Abstract: Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) estimation plays a pivotal role in understanding human social behavior and advancing human-computer interaction. The core challenges lie in dynamic correlation modeling and robust fusion of multimodal temporal signals. To address the limitations of existing methods--insufficient exploitation of cross-modal synergies, sensitivity to noise, and constrained fine-grained alignment capabilities--this paper proposes a dual-stage cross-modal alignment framework. Stage 1 develops vision-text and audio-text contrastive learning networks based on a CLIP architecture, achieving preliminary feature-space alignment through modality-decoupled pre-training. Stage 2 introduces a temporal-aware dynamic fusion module integrating Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) and gated bidirectional LSTM to capture macro-evolution patterns of facial expressions and local dynamics of acoustic features, respectively. A novel quality-guided fusion strategy further enables differentiable weight allocation for modality compensation under occlusion and noise. Experiments on the Hume-Vidmimic2 dataset demonstrate superior performance with an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.51 across six emotion dimensions on the validate set. Remarkably, our method achieved 0.68 on the test set, securing runner-up in the EMI Challenge Track of the 8th ABAW (Affective Behavior Analysis in the Wild) Competition, offering a novel pathway for fine-grained emotion analysis in open environments.
Authors: Jian Qian, Teck Lun Goh, Bingyu Xie, Chengyao Zhu, Biao Wan, Yawen Guan, Rachel Ding Chen, Patrick Yin Chiang
Abstract: Biological signals, such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) and electrocardiograms (ECGs), play a pivotal role in numerous clinical practices, such as diagnosing brain and cardiac arrhythmic diseases. Existing methods for biosignal classification rely on Attention-based frameworks with dense Feed Forward layers, which lead to inefficient learning, high computational overhead, and suboptimal performance. In this work, we introduce BioMamba, a Spectro-Temporal Embedding strategy applied to the Bidirectional Mamba framework with Sparse Feed Forward layers to enable effective learning of biosignal sequences. By integrating these three key components, BioMamba effectively addresses the limitations of existing methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BioMamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with marked improvement in classification performance. The advantages of the proposed BioMamba include (1) Reliability: BioMamba consistently delivers robust results, confirmed across six evaluation metrics. (2) Efficiency: We assess both model and training efficiency, the BioMamba demonstrates computational effectiveness by reducing model size and resource consumption compared to existing approaches. (3) Generality: With the capacity to effectively classify a diverse set of tasks, BioMamba demonstrates adaptability and effectiveness across various domains and applications.
Authors: Byung Hyun Lee, Sungjin Lim, Se Young Chun
Abstract: Fine-tuning based concept erasing has demonstrated promising results in preventing generation of harmful contents from text-to-image diffusion models by removing target concepts while preserving remaining concepts. To maintain the generation capability of diffusion models after concept erasure, it is necessary to remove only the image region containing the target concept when it locally appears in an image, leaving other regions intact. However, prior arts often compromise fidelity of the other image regions in order to erase the localized target concept appearing in a specific area, thereby reducing the overall performance of image generation. To address these limitations, we first introduce a framework called localized concept erasure, which allows for the deletion of only the specific area containing the target concept in the image while preserving the other regions. As a solution for the localized concept erasure, we propose a training-free approach, dubbed Gated Low-rank adaptation for Concept Erasure (GLoCE), that injects a lightweight module into the diffusion model. GLoCE consists of low-rank matrices and a simple gate, determined only by several generation steps for concepts without training. By directly applying GLoCE to image embeddings and designing the gate to activate only for target concepts, GLoCE can selectively remove only the region of the target concepts, even when target and remaining concepts coexist within an image. Extensive experiments demonstrated GLoCE not only improves the image fidelity to text prompts after erasing the localized target concepts, but also outperforms prior arts in efficacy, specificity, and robustness by large margin and can be extended to mass concept erasure.
Authors: Hao Mark Chen, Shell Xu Hu, Wayne Luk, Timothy Hospedales, Hongxiang Fan
Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for multi-task learning (MTL), offering a data-efficient alternative to conventional fine-tuning. However, with the rapid development of the open-source AI ecosystem and the increasing availability of fine-tuned foundation models, existing model merging methods face two key limitations: (i) They are primarily designed for in-house fine-tuned models, making them less adaptable to diverse model sources with partially unknown model and task information, (ii) They struggle to scale effectively when merging numerous model checkpoints. To address these challenges, we formulate model merging as a constrained optimization problem and introduce a novel approach: Frank-Wolfe Merging (FW-Merging). Inspired by Frank-Wolfe optimization, our approach iteratively selects the most relevant model in the pool to minimize a linear approximation of the objective function and then executes a local merging similar to the Frank-Wolfe update. The objective function is designed to capture the desired behavior of the target-merged model, while the fine-tuned candidate models define the constraint set. More importantly, FW-Merging serves as an orthogonal technique for existing merging methods, seamlessly integrating with them to further enhance accuracy performance. Our experiments show that FW-Merging scales across diverse model sources, remaining stable with 16 irrelevant models and improving by 15.3% with 16 relevant models on 20 CV tasks, while maintaining constant memory overhead, unlike the linear overhead of data-informed merging methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, FW-Merging surpasses the data-free merging method by 32.8% and outperforms the data-informed Adamerging by 8.39% when merging 20 ViT models. Our code is open-sourced at github.com/hmarkc/FW-Merging.
Authors: Sumin In, Youngdong Jang, Utae Jeong, MinHyuk Jang, Hyeongcheol Park, Eunbyung Park, Sangpil Kim
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables rapid differentiable rendering for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis, leading to its widespread commercial use. Consequently, copyright protection via watermarking has become critical. However, because 3DGS relies on millions of Gaussians, which require gigabytes of storage, efficient transfer and storage require compression. Existing 3DGS watermarking methods are vulnerable to quantization-based compression, often resulting in the loss of the embedded watermark. To address this challenge, we propose a novel watermarking method that ensures watermark robustness after model compression while maintaining high rendering quality. In detail, we incorporate a quantization distortion layer that simulates compression during training, preserving the watermark under quantization-based compression. Also, we propose a learnable watermark embedding feature that embeds the watermark into the anchor feature, ensuring structural consistency and seamless integration into the 3D scene. Furthermore, we present a frequency-aware anchor growing mechanism to enhance image quality in high-frequency regions by effectively identifying Guassians within these regions. Experimental results confirm that our method preserves the watermark and maintains superior image quality under high compression, validating it as a promising approach for a secure 3DGS model.
Authors: Xiaodi Li, Shaika Chowdhury, Chung Il Wi, Maria Vassilaki, Xiaoke Liu, Terence T Sio, Owen Garrick, Young J Juhn, James R Cerhan, Cui Tao, Nansu Zong
Abstract: Patient matching is the process of linking patients to appropriate clinical trials by accurately identifying and matching their medical records with trial eligibility criteria. We propose LLM-Match, a novel framework for patient matching leveraging fine-tuned open-source large language models. Our approach consists of four key components. First, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module extracts relevant patient context from a vast pool of electronic health records (EHRs). Second, a prompt generation module constructs input prompts by integrating trial eligibility criteria (both inclusion and exclusion criteria), patient context, and system instructions. Third, a fine-tuning module with a classification head optimizes the model parameters using structured prompts and ground-truth labels. Fourth, an evaluation module assesses the fine-tuned model's performance on the testing datasets. We evaluated LLM-Match on four open datasets - n2c2, SIGIR, TREC 2021, and TREC 2022 - using open-source models, comparing it against TrialGPT, Zero-Shot, and GPT-4-based closed models. LLM-Match outperformed all baselines.
Authors: Yike Yuan, Ziyu Wang, Zihao Huang, Defa Zhu, Xun Zhou, Jingyi Yu, Qiyang Min
Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as mainstream framework in visual generation. Building upon this success, the integration of Mixture of Experts (MoE) methods has shown promise in enhancing model scalability and performance. In this paper, we introduce Race-DiT, a novel MoE model for diffusion transformers with a flexible routing strategy, Expert Race. By allowing tokens and experts to compete together and select the top candidates, the model learns to dynamically assign experts to critical tokens. Additionally, we propose per-layer regularization to address challenges in shallow layer learning, and router similarity loss to prevent mode collapse, ensuring better expert utilization. Extensive experiments on ImageNet validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing significant performance gains while promising scaling properties.
Authors: Zhengqing Gao, Dongting Hu, Jia-Wang Bian, Huan Fu, Yan Li, Tongliang Liu, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has made significant strides in novel view synthesis but is limited by the substantial number of Gaussian primitives required, posing challenges for deployment on lightweight devices. Recent methods address this issue by compressing the storage size of densified Gaussians, yet fail to preserve rendering quality and efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose ProtoGS to learn Gaussian prototypes to represent Gaussian primitives, significantly reducing the total Gaussian amount without sacrificing visual quality. Our method directly uses Gaussian prototypes to enable efficient rendering and leverage the resulting reconstruction loss to guide prototype learning. To further optimize memory efficiency during training, we incorporate structure-from-motion (SfM) points as anchor points to group Gaussian primitives. Gaussian prototypes are derived within each group by clustering of K-means, and both the anchor points and the prototypes are optimized jointly. Our experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets prove that we outperform existing methods, achieving a substantial reduction in the number of Gaussians, and enabling high rendering speed while maintaining or even enhancing rendering fidelity.
Authors: Ken Ziyu Liu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Matthew Jagielski, Peter Kairouz, Sanmi Koyejo, Percy Liang, Nicolas Papernot
Abstract: An important question today is whether a given text was used to train a large language model (LLM). A \emph{completion} test is often employed: check if the LLM completes a sufficiently complex text. This, however, requires a ground-truth definition of membership; most commonly, it is defined as a member based on the $n$-gram overlap between the target text and any text in the dataset. In this work, we demonstrate that this $n$-gram based membership definition can be effectively gamed. We study scenarios where sequences are \emph{non-members} for a given $n$ and we find that completion tests still succeed. We find many natural cases of this phenomenon by retraining LLMs from scratch after removing all training samples that were completed; these cases include exact duplicates, near-duplicates, and even short overlaps. They showcase that it is difficult to find a single viable choice of $n$ for membership definitions. Using these insights, we design adversarial datasets that can cause a given target sequence to be completed without containing it, for any reasonable choice of $n$. Our findings highlight the inadequacy of $n$-gram membership, suggesting membership definitions fail to account for auxiliary information available to the training algorithm.
Authors: Maria Nareklishvili, Nicholas Polson, Vadim Sokolov
Abstract: We present generative artificial intelligence (AI) to empirically validate fundamental laws of physics, focusing on the Stefan-Boltzmann law linking stellar temperature and luminosity. Our approach simulates counterfactual luminosities under hypothetical temperature regimes for each individual star and iteratively refines the temperature-luminosity relationship in a deep learning architecture. We use Gaia DR3 data and find that, on average, temperature's effect on luminosity increases with stellar radius and decreases with absolute magnitude, consistent with theoretical predictions. By framing physics laws as causal problems, our method offers a novel, data-driven approach to refine theoretical understanding and inform evidence-based policy and practice.
Authors: Stefan Pasch, Sun-Young Ha
Abstract: Human-AI Interaction (HAI) guidelines and design principles have become increasingly important in both industry and academia to guide the development of AI systems that align with user needs and expectations. However, large-scale empirical evidence on how HAI principles shape user satisfaction in practice remains limited. This study addresses that gap by analyzing over 100,000 user reviews of AI-related products from G2, a leading review platform for business software and services. Based on widely adopted industry guidelines, we identify seven core HAI dimensions and examine their coverage and sentiment within the reviews. We find that the sentiment on four HAI dimensions-adaptability, customization, error recovery, and security-is positively associated with overall user satisfaction. Moreover, we show that engagement with HAI dimensions varies by professional background: Users with technical job roles are more likely to discuss system-focused aspects, such as reliability, while non-technical users emphasize interaction-focused features like customization and feedback. Interestingly, the relationship between HAI sentiment and overall satisfaction is not moderated by job role, suggesting that once an HAI dimension has been identified by users, its effect on satisfaction is consistent across job roles.
Authors: Yuzhi Li, Haojun Xu, Feng Tian
Abstract: With the rising popularity of short video platforms, the demand for video production has increased substantially. However, high-quality video creation continues to rely heavily on professional editing skills and a nuanced understanding of visual language. To address this challenge, the Shot Sequence Ordering (SSO) task in AI-assisted video editing has emerged as a pivotal approach for enhancing video storytelling and the overall viewing experience. Nevertheless, the progress in this field has been impeded by a lack of publicly available benchmark datasets. In response, this paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets, AVE-Order and ActivityNet-Order. Additionally, we employ the Kendall Tau distance as an evaluation metric for the SSO task and propose the Kendall Tau Distance-Cross Entropy Loss. We further introduce the concept of Cinematology Embedding, which incorporates movie metadata and shot labels as prior knowledge into the SSO model, and constructs the AVE-Meta dataset to validate the method's effectiveness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed loss function and method substantially enhance SSO task accuracy. All datasets are publicly accessible at https://github.com/litchiar/ShotSeqBench.
Authors: Steven Abreu, Sumit Bam Shrestha, Rui-Jie Zhu, Jason Eshraghian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deliver impressive performance but require large amounts of energy. In this work, we present a MatMul-free LLM architecture adapted for Intel's neuromorphic processor, Loihi 2. Our approach leverages Loihi 2's support for low-precision, event-driven computation and stateful processing. Our hardware-aware quantized model on GPU demonstrates that a 370M parameter MatMul-free model can be quantized with no accuracy loss. Based on preliminary results, we report up to 3x higher throughput with 2x less energy, compared to transformer-based LLMs on an edge GPU, with significantly better scaling. Further hardware optimizations will increase throughput and decrease energy consumption. These results show the potential of neuromorphic hardware for efficient inference and pave the way for efficient reasoning models capable of generating complex, long-form text rapidly and cost-effectively.
Authors: Suman Adhya, Avishek Lahiri, Debarshi Kumar Sanyal, Partha Pratim Das
Abstract: Negative sampling has emerged as an effective technique that enables deep learning models to learn better representations by introducing the paradigm of learn-to-compare. The goal of this approach is to add robustness to deep learning models to learn better representation by comparing the positive samples against the negative ones. Despite its numerous demonstrations in various areas of computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive study of the effect of negative sampling in an unsupervised domain like topic modeling has not been well explored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the impact of different negative sampling strategies on neural topic models. We compare the performance of several popular neural topic models by incorporating a negative sampling technique in the decoder of variational autoencoder-based neural topic models. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that integrating negative sampling into topic models results in significant enhancements across multiple aspects, including improved topic coherence, richer topic diversity, and more accurate document classification. Manual evaluations also indicate that the inclusion of negative sampling into neural topic models enhances the quality of the generated topics. These findings highlight the potential of negative sampling as a valuable tool for advancing the effectiveness of neural topic models.
Authors: Yiheng Zhong, Zihong Luo, Chengzhi Liu, Feilong Tang, Zelin Peng, Ming Hu, Yingzhen Hu, Jionglong Su, Zongyuan Geand, Imran Razzak
Abstract: Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates powerful zero-shot capabilities; however, its accuracy and robustness significantly decrease when applied to medical image segmentation. Existing methods address this issue through modality fusion, integrating textual and image information to provide more detailed priors. In this study, we argue that the granularity of text and the domain gap affect the accuracy of the priors. Furthermore, the discrepancy between high-level abstract semantics and pixel-level boundary details in images can introduce noise into the fusion process. To address this, we propose Prior-Guided SAM (PG-SAM), which employs a fine-grained modality prior aligner to leverage specialized medical knowledge for better modality alignment. The core of our method lies in efficiently addressing the domain gap with fine-grained text from a medical LLM. Meanwhile, it also enhances the priors' quality after modality alignment, ensuring more accurate segmentation. In addition, our decoder enhances the model's expressive capabilities through multi-level feature fusion and iterative mask optimizer operations, supporting unprompted learning. We also propose a unified pipeline that effectively supplies high-quality semantic information to SAM. Extensive experiments on the Synapse dataset demonstrate that the proposed PG-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our anonymous code is released at https://github.com/logan-0623/PG-SAM.
Authors: Christoforos N. Spartalis, Theodoros Semertzidis, Efstratios Gavves, Petros Daras
Abstract: We present LoTUS, a novel Machine Unlearning (MU) method that eliminates the influence of training samples from pre-trained models, avoiding retraining from scratch. LoTUS smooths the prediction probabilities of the model up to an information-theoretic bound, mitigating its over-confidence stemming from data memorization. We evaluate LoTUS on Transformer and ResNet18 models against eight baselines across five public datasets. Beyond established MU benchmarks, we evaluate unlearning on ImageNet1k, a large-scale dataset, where retraining is impractical, simulating real-world conditions. Moreover, we introduce the novel Retrain-Free Jensen-Shannon Divergence (RF-JSD) metric to enable evaluation under real-world conditions. The experimental results show that LoTUS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Code: https://github.com/cspartalis/LoTUS.
Authors: Taeyeop Lee, Bowen Wen, Minjun Kang, Gyuree Kang, In So Kweon, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: We introduce Any6D, a model-free framework for 6D object pose estimation that requires only a single RGB-D anchor image to estimate both the 6D pose and size of unknown objects in novel scenes. Unlike existing methods that rely on textured 3D models or multiple viewpoints, Any6D leverages a joint object alignment process to enhance 2D-3D alignment and metric scale estimation for improved pose accuracy. Our approach integrates a render-and-compare strategy to generate and refine pose hypotheses, enabling robust performance in scenarios with occlusions, non-overlapping views, diverse lighting conditions, and large cross-environment variations. We evaluate our method on five challenging datasets: REAL275, Toyota-Light, HO3D, YCBINEOAT, and LM-O, demonstrating its effectiveness in significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods for novel object pose estimation. Project page: https://taeyeop.com/any6d
Authors: Yazhou Zhang, Chunwang Zou, Bo Wang, Jing Qin
Abstract: Sarcasm detection, as a crucial research direction in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), has attracted widespread attention. Traditional sarcasm detection tasks have typically focused on single-modal approaches (e.g., text), but due to the implicit and subtle nature of sarcasm, such methods often fail to yield satisfactory results. In recent years, researchers have shifted the focus of sarcasm detection to multi-modal approaches. However, effectively leveraging multi-modal information to accurately identify sarcastic content remains a challenge that warrants further exploration. Leveraging the powerful integrated processing capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for various information sources, we propose an innovative multi-modal Commander-GPT framework. Inspired by military strategy, we first decompose the sarcasm detection task into six distinct sub-tasks. A central commander (decision-maker) then assigns the best-suited large language model to address each specific sub-task. Ultimately, the detection results from each model are aggregated to identify sarcasm. We conducted extensive experiments on MMSD and MMSD 2.0, utilizing four multi-modal large language models and six prompting strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 19.3% improvement in F1 score, without necessitating fine-tuning or ground-truth rationales.
Authors: Linwei Chen, Lin Gu, Liang Li, Chenggang Yan, Ying Fu
Abstract: While Dynamic Convolution (DY-Conv) has shown promising performance by enabling adaptive weight selection through multiple parallel weights combined with an attention mechanism, the frequency response of these weights tends to exhibit high similarity, resulting in high parameter costs but limited adaptability. In this work, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDConv), a novel approach that mitigates these limitations by learning a fixed parameter budget in the Fourier domain. FDConv divides this budget into frequency-based groups with disjoint Fourier indices, enabling the construction of frequency-diverse weights without increasing the parameter cost. To further enhance adaptability, we propose Kernel Spatial Modulation (KSM) and Frequency Band Modulation (FBM). KSM dynamically adjusts the frequency response of each filter at the spatial level, while FBM decomposes weights into distinct frequency bands in the frequency domain and modulates them dynamically based on local content. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, and classification validate the effectiveness of FDConv. We demonstrate that when applied to ResNet-50, FDConv achieves superior performance with a modest increase of +3.6M parameters, outperforming previous methods that require substantial increases in parameter budgets (e.g., CondConv +90M, KW +76.5M). Moreover, FDConv seamlessly integrates into a variety of architectures, including ConvNeXt, Swin-Transformer, offering a flexible and efficient solution for modern vision tasks. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDConv.
Authors: Ruichuan An, Sihan Yang, Ming Lu, Renrui Zhang, Kai Zeng, Yulin Luo, Jiajun Cao, Hao Liang, Ying Chen, Qi She, Shanghang Zhang, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Current vision-language models (VLMs) show exceptional abilities across diverse tasks, such as visual question answering. To enhance user experience, recent studies investigate VLM personalization to understand user-provided concepts. However, they mainly focus on single-concept personalization, neglecting the existence and interplay of multiple concepts, which limits real-world applicability. This paper proposes the first multi-concept personalization paradigm, MC-LLaVA. Specifically, MC-LLaVA employs a multi-concept instruction tuning strategy, effectively integrating multiple concepts in a single training step. To reduce the costs related to joint training, we propose a personalized textual prompt that uses visual token information to initialize concept tokens. Additionally, we introduce a personalized visual prompt during inference, aggregating location confidence maps for enhanced recognition and grounding capabilities. To advance multi-concept personalization research, we further contribute a high-quality instruction tuning dataset. We carefully collect images with multiple characters and objects from movies and manually generate question-answer samples for multi-concept scenarios, featuring superior diversity. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that MC-LLaVA can achieve impressive multi-concept personalized responses, paving the way for VLMs to become better user-specific assistants. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/arctanxarc/MC-LLaVA}.
Authors: Aether Team, Haoyi Zhu, Yifan Wang, Jianjun Zhou, Wenzheng Chang, Yang Zhou, Zizun Li, Junyi Chen, Chunhua Shen, Jiangmiao Pang, Tong He
Abstract: The integration of geometric reconstruction and generative modeling remains a critical challenge in developing AI systems capable of human-like spatial reasoning. This paper proposes Aether, a unified framework that enables geometry-aware reasoning in world models by jointly optimizing three core capabilities: (1) 4D dynamic reconstruction, (2) action-conditioned video prediction, and (3) goal-conditioned visual planning. Through task-interleaved feature learning, Aether achieves synergistic knowledge sharing across reconstruction, prediction, and planning objectives. Building upon video generation models, our framework demonstrates unprecedented synthetic-to-real generalization despite never observing real-world data during training. Furthermore, our approach achieves zero-shot generalization in both action following and reconstruction tasks, thanks to its intrinsic geometric modeling. Remarkably, even without real-world data, its reconstruction performance is comparable with or even better than that of domain-specific models. Additionally, Aether employs camera trajectories as geometry-informed action spaces, enabling effective action-conditioned prediction and visual planning. We hope our work inspires the community to explore new frontiers in physically-reasonable world modeling and its applications.