id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
2502.00299
ChunkKV: Semantic-Preserving KV Cache Compression for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference
cs.CL
To reduce memory costs in long-context inference with Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent works focus on compressing the key-value (KV) cache of different tokens. However, we identify that the previous KV cache compression methods measure token importance individually, neglecting the dependency between different tokens in the real-world language characterics. In light of this, we introduce ChunkKV, grouping the tokens in a chunk as a basic compressing unit, and retaining the most informative semantic chunks while discarding the less important ones. Furthermore, observing that ChunkKV exhibits higher similarity in the preserved indices across different layers, we propose layer-wise index reuse to further reduce computational overhead. We evaluated ChunkKV on cutting-edge long-context benchmarks including LongBench and Needle-In-A-HayStack, as well as the GSM8K and JailbreakV in-context learning benchmark. Our experiments with instruction tuning and multi-step reasoning (O1 and R1) LLMs, achieve up to 10\% performance improvement under aggressive compression ratios compared to existing methods.
2502.00300
Uncertainty Quantification of Wind Gust Predictions in the Northeast US: An Evidential Neural Network and Explainable Artificial Intelligence Approach
cs.LG physics.ao-ph stat.ML
Machine learning has shown promise in reducing bias in numerical weather model predictions of wind gusts. Yet, they underperform to predict high gusts even with additional observations due to the right-skewed distribution of gusts. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) addresses this by identifying when predictions are reliable or needs cautious interpretation. Using data from 61 extratropical storms in the Northeastern USA, we introduce evidential neural network (ENN) as a novel approach for UQ in gust predictions, leveraging atmospheric variables from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as features and gust observations as targets. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques demonstrated that key predictive features also contributed to higher uncertainty. Estimated uncertainty correlated with storm intensity and spatial gust gradients. ENN allowed constructing gust prediction intervals without requiring an ensemble. From an operational perspective, providing gust forecasts with quantified uncertainty enhances stakeholders' confidence in risk assessment and response planning for extreme gust events.
2502.00301
Contextual Morphogenesis in Large Language Models: A Novel Approach to Self-Organizing Token Representations
cs.CL
Token representations influence the efficiency and adaptability of language models, yet conventional tokenization strategies impose rigid segmentation boundaries that do not adjust dynamically to evolving contextual relationships. The introduction of contextual morphogenesis establishes a self-organizing mechanism that restructures token boundaries based on learned contextual dependencies, allowing embeddings to evolve progressively across iterative processing steps. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that dynamically adjusted tokenization contributes to reductions in perplexity while maintaining representational stability, particularly in linguistically complex domains where static segmentation fails to capture nuanced dependencies. Computational trade-offs associated with self-organizing token structures indicate that additional processing overhead remains within feasible limits, provided that optimization strategies account for segmentation update efficiency. Comparative assessments across different linguistic corpora suggest that adaptive tokenization preserves interpretability while improving alignment with contextual cues, reinforcing the potential of morphogenetic segmentation mechanisms to refine predictive accuracy. Stability analyses confirm that evolving token structures maintain consistent segmentation behaviors across varied text distributions, ensuring that representational adaptations remain linguistically coherent. The effectiveness of contextual morphogenesis in refining structural stability and predictive performance highlights its viability as an alternative to traditional tokenization methods. Further analysis of computational efficiency considerations suggests that hybrid strategies integrating both static and dynamic segmentation techniques may offer a balanced approach to optimizing representational flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency.
2502.00302
Learning to Fuse Temporal Proximity Networks: A Case Study in Chimpanzee Social Interactions
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG math.OC math.ST stat.TH
How can we identify groups of primate individuals which could be conjectured to drive social structure? To address this question, one of us has collected a time series of data for social interactions between chimpanzees. Here we use a network representation, leading to the task of combining these data into a time series of a single weighted network per time stamp, where different proximities should be given different weights reflecting their relative importance. We optimize these proximity-type weights in a principled way, using an innovative loss function which rewards structural consistency across time. The approach is empirically validated by carefully designed synthetic data. Using statistical tests, we provide a way of identifying groups of individuals that stay related for a significant length of time. Applying the approach to the chimpanzee data set, we detect cliques in the animal social network time series, which can be validated by real-world intuition from prior research and qualitative observations by chimpanzee experts.
2502.00304
HoP: Homeomorphic Polar Learning for Hard Constrained Optimization
cs.LG cs.AI math.OC
Constrained optimization demands highly efficient solvers which promotes the development of learn-to-optimize (L2O) approaches. As a data-driven method, L2O leverages neural networks to efficiently produce approximate solutions. However, a significant challenge remains in ensuring both optimality and feasibility of neural networks' output. To tackle this issue, we introduce Homeomorphic Polar Learning (HoP) to solve the star-convex hard-constrained optimization by embedding homeomorphic mapping in neural networks. The bijective structure enables end-to-end training without extra penalty or correction. For performance evaluation, we evaluate HoP's performance across a variety of synthetic optimization tasks and real-world applications in wireless communications. In all cases, HoP achieves solutions closer to the optimum than existing L2O methods while strictly maintaining feasibility.
2502.00305
DEUCE: Dual-diversity Enhancement and Uncertainty-awareness for Cold-start Active Learning
cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR
Cold-start active learning (CSAL) selects valuable instances from an unlabeled dataset for manual annotation. It provides high-quality data at a low annotation cost for label-scarce text classification. However, existing CSAL methods overlook weak classes and hard representative examples, resulting in biased learning. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel dual-diversity enhancing and uncertainty-aware (DEUCE) framework for CSAL. Specifically, DEUCE leverages a pretrained language model (PLM) to efficiently extract textual representations, class predictions, and predictive uncertainty. Then, it constructs a Dual-Neighbor Graph (DNG) to combine information on both textual diversity and class diversity, ensuring a balanced data distribution. It further propagates uncertainty information via density-based clustering to select hard representative instances. DEUCE performs well in selecting class-balanced and hard representative data by dual-diversity and informativeness. Experiments on six NLP datasets demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of DEUCE.
2502.00306
Riddle Me This! Stealthy Membership Inference for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CL cs.IR cs.LG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate grounded responses by leveraging external knowledge databases without altering model parameters. Although the absence of weight tuning prevents leakage via model parameters, it introduces the risk of inference adversaries exploiting retrieved documents in the model's context. Existing methods for membership inference and data extraction often rely on jailbreaking or carefully crafted unnatural queries, which can be easily detected or thwarted with query rewriting techniques common in RAG systems. In this work, we present Interrogation Attack (IA), a membership inference technique targeting documents in the RAG datastore. By crafting natural-text queries that are answerable only with the target document's presence, our approach demonstrates successful inference with just 30 queries while remaining stealthy; straightforward detectors identify adversarial prompts from existing methods up to ~76x more frequently than those generated by our attack. We observe a 2x improvement in TPR@1%FPR over prior inference attacks across diverse RAG configurations, all while costing less than $0.02 per document inference.
2502.00307
A Diffusion Model Translator for Efficient Image-to-Image Translation
cs.CV
Applying diffusion models to image-to-image translation (I2I) has recently received increasing attention due to its practical applications. Previous attempts inject information from the source image into each denoising step for an iterative refinement, thus resulting in a time-consuming implementation. We propose an efficient method that equips a diffusion model with a lightweight translator, dubbed a Diffusion Model Translator (DMT), to accomplish I2I. Specifically, we first offer theoretical justification that in employing the pioneering DDPM work for the I2I task, it is both feasible and sufficient to transfer the distribution from one domain to another only at some intermediate step. We further observe that the translation performance highly depends on the chosen timestep for domain transfer, and therefore propose a practical strategy to automatically select an appropriate timestep for a given task. We evaluate our approach on a range of I2I applications, including image stylization, image colorization, segmentation to image, and sketch to image, to validate its efficacy and general utility. The comparisons show that our DMT surpasses existing methods in both quality and efficiency. Code will be made publicly available.
2502.00309
Decentralized Inference for Spatial Data Using Low-Rank Models
stat.ML cs.LG stat.CO stat.ME
Advancements in information technology have enabled the creation of massive spatial datasets, driving the need for scalable and efficient computational methodologies. While offering viable solutions, centralized frameworks are limited by vulnerabilities such as single-point failures and communication bottlenecks. This paper presents a decentralized framework tailored for parameter inference in spatial low-rank models to address these challenges. A key obstacle arises from the spatial dependence among observations, which prevents the log-likelihood from being expressed as a summation-a critical requirement for decentralized optimization approaches. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel objective function leveraging the evidence lower bound, which facilitates the use of decentralized optimization techniques. Our approach employs a block descent method integrated with multi-consensus and dynamic consensus averaging for effective parameter optimization. We prove the convexity of the new objective function in the vicinity of the true parameters, ensuring the convergence of the proposed method. Additionally, we present the first theoretical results establishing the consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator within the context of spatial low-rank models. Extensive simulations and real-world data experiments corroborate these theoretical findings, showcasing the robustness and scalability of the framework.
2502.00310
SigWavNet: Learning Multiresolution Signal Wavelet Network for Speech Emotion Recognition
cs.SD cs.AI cs.CL eess.AS
In the field of human-computer interaction and psychological assessment, speech emotion recognition (SER) plays an important role in deciphering emotional states from speech signals. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to system complexity, feature distinctiveness issues, and noise interference. This paper introduces a new end-to-end (E2E) deep learning multi-resolution framework for SER, addressing these limitations by extracting meaningful representations directly from raw waveform speech signals. By leveraging the properties of the fast discrete wavelet transform (FDWT), including the cascade algorithm, conjugate quadrature filter, and coefficient denoising, our approach introduces a learnable model for both wavelet bases and denoising through deep learning techniques. The framework incorporates an activation function for learnable asymmetric hard thresholding of wavelet coefficients. Our approach exploits the capabilities of wavelets for effective localization in both time and frequency domains. We then combine one-dimensional dilated convolutional neural networks (1D dilated CNN) with a spatial attention layer and bidirectional gated recurrent units (Bi-GRU) with a temporal attention layer to efficiently capture the nuanced spatial and temporal characteristics of emotional features. By handling variable-length speech without segmentation and eliminating the need for pre or post-processing, the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art methods on IEMOCAP and EMO-DB datasets. The source code of this paper is shared on the Github repository: https://github.com/alaaNfissi/SigWavNet-Learning-Multiresolution-Signal-Wavelet-Network-for-Speech-Emotion-Recognition.
2502.00311
Sparse Gradient Compression for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
cs.LG
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks has become increasingly crucial due to their widespread use and the growing availability of open-source models. However, the high memory costs associated with fine-tuning remain a significant challenge, especially as models increase in size. To address this, parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been proposed to minimize the number of parameters required for fine-tuning LLMs. However, these approaches often tie the number of optimizer states to dimensions of model parameters, limiting flexibility and control during fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose sparse gradient compression (SGC), a training regime designed to address these limitations. Our approach leverages inherent sparsity in gradients to compress optimizer states by projecting them onto a low-dimensonal subspace, with dimensionality independent of the original model's parameters. By enabling optimizer state updates in an arbitrary low-dimensional subspace, SGC offers a flexible tradeoff between memory efficiency and performance. We demonstrate through experiments that SGC can decrease memory usage in optimizer states more effectively than existing PEFT methods. Furthermore, by fine-tuning LLMs on various downstream tasks, we show that SGC can deliver superior performance while substantially lowering optimizer state memory requirements, particularly in both data-limited and memory-limited settings.
2502.00313
Distributive Fairness in Large Language Models: Evaluating Alignment with Human Values
cs.GT cs.AI cs.CL cs.MA
The growing interest in employing large language models (LLMs) for decision-making in social and economic contexts has raised questions about their potential to function as agents in these domains. A significant number of societal problems involve the distribution of resources, where fairness, along with economic efficiency, play a critical role in the desirability of outcomes. In this paper, we examine whether LLM responses adhere to fundamental fairness concepts such as equitability, envy-freeness, and Rawlsian maximin, and investigate their alignment with human preferences. We evaluate the performance of several LLMs, providing a comparative benchmark of their ability to reflect these measures. Our results demonstrate a lack of alignment between current LLM responses and human distributional preferences. Moreover, LLMs are unable to utilize money as a transferable resource to mitigate inequality. Nonetheless, we demonstrate a stark contrast when (some) LLMs are tasked with selecting from a predefined menu of options rather than generating one. In addition, we analyze the robustness of LLM responses to variations in semantic factors (e.g. intentions or personas) or non-semantic prompting changes (e.g. templates or orderings). Finally, we highlight potential strategies aimed at enhancing the alignment of LLM behavior with well-established fairness concepts.
2502.00314
A Study on the Performance of U-Net Modifications in Retroperitoneal Tumor Segmentation
eess.IV cs.CV
The retroperitoneum hosts a variety of tumors, including rare benign and malignant types, which pose diagnostic and treatment challenges due to their infrequency and proximity to vital structures. Estimating tumor volume is difficult due to their irregular shapes, and manual segmentation is time-consuming. Automatic segmentation using U-Net and its variants, incorporating Vision Transformer (ViT) elements, has shown promising results but struggles with high computational demands. To address this, architectures like the Mamba State Space Model (SSM) and Extended Long-Short Term Memory (xLSTM) offer efficient solutions by handling long-range dependencies with lower resource consumption. This study evaluates U-Net enhancements, including CNN, ViT, Mamba, and xLSTM, on a new in-house CT dataset and a public organ segmentation dataset. The proposed ViLU-Net model integrates Vi-blocks for improved segmentation. Results highlight xLSTM's efficiency in the U-Net framework. The code is publicly accessible on GitHub.
2502.00315
MonoDINO-DETR: Depth-Enhanced Monocular 3D Object Detection Using a Vision Foundation Model
cs.CV
This paper proposes novel methods to enhance the performance of monocular 3D object detection models by leveraging the generalized feature extraction capabilities of a vision foundation model. Unlike traditional CNN-based approaches, which often suffer from inaccurate depth estimation and rely on multi-stage object detection pipelines, this study employs a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based foundation model as the backbone, which excels at capturing global features for depth estimation. It integrates a detection transformer (DETR) architecture to improve both depth estimation and object detection performance in a one-stage manner. Specifically, a hierarchical feature fusion block is introduced to extract richer visual features from the foundation model, further enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Depth estimation accuracy is further improved by incorporating a relative depth estimation model trained on large-scale data and fine-tuning it through transfer learning. Additionally, the use of queries in the transformer's decoder, which consider reference points and the dimensions of 2D bounding boxes, enhances recognition performance. The proposed model outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the KITTI 3D benchmark and a custom dataset collected from high-elevation racing environments. Code is available at https://github.com/JihyeokKim/MonoDINO-DETR.
2502.00317
DIST: Efficient k-Clique Listing via Induced Subgraph Trie
cs.DB
Listing k-cliques plays a fundamental role in various data mining tasks, such as community detection and mining of cohesive substructures. Existing algorithms for the k-clique listing problem are built upon a general framework, which finds k-cliques by recursively finding (k-1)-cliques within subgraphs induced by the out-neighbors of each vertex. However, this framework has inherent inefficiency of finding smaller cliques within certain subgraphs repeatedly. In this paper, we propose an algorithm DIST for the k-clique listing problem. In contrast to existing works, the main idea in our approach is to compute each clique in the given graph only once and store it into a data structure called Induced Subgraph Trie, which allows us to retrieve the cliques efficiently. Furthermore, we propose a method to prune search space based on a novel concept called soft embedding of an l-tree, which further improves the running time. We show the superiority of our approach in terms of time and space usage through comprehensive experiments conducted on real-world networks; DIST outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by up to two orders of magnitude in both single-threaded and parallel experiments.
2502.00318
Sub-Sequential Physics-Informed Learning with State Space Model
cs.LG cs.NA math.NA
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a kind of deep-learning-based numerical solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs). Existing PINNs often suffer from failure modes of being unable to propagate patterns of initial conditions. We discover that these failure modes are caused by the simplicity bias of neural networks and the mismatch between PDE's continuity and PINN's discrete sampling. We reveal that the State Space Model (SSM) can be a continuous-discrete articulation allowing initial condition propagation, and that simplicity bias can be eliminated by aligning a sequence of moderate granularity. Accordingly, we propose PINNMamba, a novel framework that introduces sub-sequence modeling with SSM. Experimental results show that PINNMamba can reduce errors by up to 86.3\% compared with state-of-the-art architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/miniHuiHui/PINNMamba.
2502.00319
Physics-Inspired Distributed Radio Map Estimation
cs.LG cs.DC eess.SP
To gain panoramic awareness of spectrum coverage in complex wireless environments, data-driven learning approaches have recently been introduced for radio map estimation (RME). While existing deep learning based methods conduct RME given spectrum measurements gathered from dispersed sensors in the region of interest, they rely on centralized data at a fusion center, which however raises critical concerns on data privacy leakages and high communication overloads. Federated learning (FL) enhance data security and communication efficiency in RME by allowing multiple clients to collaborate in model training without directly sharing local data. However, the performance of the FL-based RME can be hindered by the problem of task heterogeneity across clients due to their unavailable or inaccurate landscaping information. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired distributed RME solution in the absence of landscaping information. The main idea is to develop a novel distributed RME framework empowered by leveraging the domain knowledge of radio propagation models, and by designing a new distributed learning approach that splits the entire RME model into two modules. A global autoencoder module is shared among clients to capture the common pathloss influence on radio propagation pattern, while a client-specific autoencoder module focuses on learning the individual features produced by local shadowing effects from the unique building distributions in local environment. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms the benchmarks in achieving higher performance.
2502.00320
$k$-SVD with Gradient Descent
cs.LG math.OC
We show that a gradient-descent with a simple, universal rule for step-size selection provably finds $k$-SVD, i.e., the $k\geq 1$ largest singular values and corresponding vectors, of any matrix, despite nonconvexity. There has been substantial progress towards this in the past few years where existing results are able to establish such guarantees for the \emph{exact-parameterized} and \emph{over-parameterized} settings, with choice of oracle-provided step size. But guarantees for generic setting with a step size selection that does not require oracle-provided information has remained a challenge. We overcome this challenge and establish that gradient descent with an appealingly simple adaptive step size (akin to preconditioning) and random initialization enjoys global linear convergence for generic setting. Our convergence analysis reveals that the gradient method has an attracting region, and within this attracting region, the method behaves like Heron's method (a.k.a. the Babylonian method). Empirically, we validate the theoretical results. The emergence of modern compute infrastructure for iterative optimization coupled with this work is likely to provide means to solve $k$-SVD for very large matrices.
2502.00321
MIM: Multi-modal Content Interest Modeling Paradigm for User Behavior Modeling
cs.IR cs.AI
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in recommendation systems, online searches, and advertising platforms, where accurately capturing users' real interests in content is essential for performance. However, existing methods heavily rely on ID embeddings, which fail to reflect users' true preferences for content such as images and titles. This limitation becomes particularly evident in cold-start and long-tail scenarios, where traditional approaches struggle to deliver effective results. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multi-modal Content Interest Modeling paradigm (MIM), which consists of three key stages: Pre-training, Content-Interest-Aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (C-SFT), and Content-Interest-Aware UBM (CiUBM). The pre-training stage adapts foundational models to domain-specific data, enabling the extraction of high-quality multi-modal embeddings. The C-SFT stage bridges the semantic gap between content and user interests by leveraging user behavior signals to guide the alignment of embeddings with user preferences. Finally, the CiUBM stage integrates multi-modal embeddings and ID-based collaborative filtering signals into a unified framework. Comprehensive offline experiments and online A/B tests conducted on the Taobao, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of MIM method. The method has been successfully deployed online, achieving a significant increase of +14.14% in CTR and +4.12% in RPM, showcasing its industrial applicability and substantial impact on platform performance. To promote further research, we have publicly released the code and dataset at https://pan.quark.cn/s/8fc8ec3e74f3.
2502.00322
MODS: Moderating a Mixture of Document Speakers to Summarize Debatable Queries in Document Collections
cs.CL cs.IR
Query-focused summarization (QFS) gives a summary of documents to answer a query. Past QFS work assumes queries have one answer, ignoring debatable ones (Is law school worth it?). We introduce Debatable QFS (DQFS), a task to create summaries that answer debatable queries via documents with opposing perspectives; summaries must comprehensively cover all sources and balance perspectives, favoring no side. These goals elude LLM QFS systems, which: 1) lack structured content plans, failing to guide LLMs to write balanced summaries, and 2) use the same query to retrieve contexts across documents, failing to cover all perspectives specific to each document's content. To overcome this, we design MODS, a multi-LLM framework mirroring human panel discussions. MODS treats documents as individual Speaker LLMs and has a Moderator LLM that picks speakers to respond to tailored queries for planned topics. Speakers use tailored queries to retrieve relevant contexts from their documents and supply perspectives, which are tracked in a rich outline, yielding a content plan to guide the final summary. Experiments on ConflictingQA with controversial web queries and DebateQFS, our new dataset of debate queries from Debatepedia, show MODS beats SOTA by 38-59% in topic paragraph coverage and balance, based on new citation metrics. Users also find MODS's summaries to be readable and more balanced.
2502.00329
CoddLLM: Empowering Large Language Models for Data Analytics
cs.DB cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize data analytics by simplifying tasks such as data discovery and SQL query synthesis through natural language interactions. This work serves as a pivotal first step toward the development of foundation models explicitly designed for data analytics applications. To propel this vision forward, we unveil a new data recipe for post-training LLMs, enhancing their comprehension of data management and empowering them to tackle complex real-world analytics tasks. Specifically, our innovative approach includes a scalable synthetic data generation method that enables the creation of a broad spectrum of topics centered on data representation and manipulation. Furthermore, we introduce two new tasks that seamlessly bridge tables and text. We show that such tasks can enhance models' understanding of schema creation and the nuanced translation between natural language and tabular data. Leveraging this data recipe, we post-train a new foundation model, named CoddLLM, based on Mistral-NeMo-12B. To assess the language understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs in the realm of data analytics, we contribute AnalyticsMMLU, a benchmark containing thousands of multiple-choice questions on databases, data analysis, and machine learning. Our focus on data discovery, has resulted in the contribution of three comprehensive benchmarks that address both database and data lake scenarios. CoddLLM not only excels in performance but also sets a new standard, achieving the highest average accuracy across eight datasets. It outperforms GPT-3.5-Turbo on AnalyticsMMLU, exceeding GPT-4o by 12.1% in table selection and showing an average improvement of 24.9% in Text-to-SQL compared to the base model.
2502.00330
From Few to Many: Self-Improving Many-Shot Reasoners Through Iterative Optimization and Generation
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Recent advances in long-context large language models (LLMs) have led to the emerging paradigm of many-shot in-context learning (ICL), where it is observed that scaling many more demonstrating examples beyond the conventional few-shot setup in the context can lead to performance benefits. However, despite its promise, it is unclear what aspects dominate the benefits and whether simply scaling to more examples is the most effective way of improving many-shot ICL. In this work, we first provide an analysis of the factors driving many-shot ICL, and we find that 1) many-shot performance can still be attributed to often a few disproportionately influential examples and 2) identifying such influential examples ("optimize") and using them as demonstrations to regenerate new examples ("generate") can lead to further improvements. Inspired by the findings, we propose BRIDGE, an algorithm that alternates between the optimize step with Bayesian optimization to discover the influential sets of examples and the generate step to reuse this set to expand the reasoning paths of the examples back to the many-shot regime automatically. On Gemini, Claude, and Mistral LLMs of different sizes, we show that BRIDGE to significant improvements across a diverse set of tasks, including symbolic reasoning, numerical reasoning, and code generation.
2502.00333
BiMaCoSR: Binary One-Step Diffusion Model Leveraging Flexible Matrix Compression for Real Super-Resolution
cs.CV
While super-resolution (SR) methods based on diffusion models (DM) have demonstrated inspiring performance, their deployment is impeded due to the heavy request of memory and computation. Recent researchers apply two kinds of methods to compress or fasten the DM. One is to compress the DM into 1-bit, aka binarization, alleviating the storage and computation pressure. The other distills the multi-step DM into only one step, significantly speeding up inference process. Nonetheless, it remains impossible to deploy DM to resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose BiMaCoSR, which combines binarization and one-step distillation to obtain extreme compression and acceleration. To prevent the catastrophic collapse of the model caused by binarization, we proposed sparse matrix branch (SMB) and low rank matrix branch (LRMB). Both auxiliary branches pass the full-precision (FP) information but in different ways. SMB absorbs the extreme values and its output is high rank, carrying abundant FP information. Whereas, the design of LRMB is inspired by LoRA and is initialized with the top r SVD components, outputting low rank representation. The computation and storage overhead of our proposed branches can be safely ignored. Comprehensive comparison experiments are conducted to exhibit BiMaCoSR outperforms current state-of-the-art binarization methods and gains competitive performance compared with FP one-step model. BiMaCoSR achieves a 23.8x compression ratio and a 27.4x speedup ratio compared to FP counterpart. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/BiMaCoSR.
2502.00334
UGPhysics: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Undergraduate Physics Reasoning with Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics. However, the domain of physics reasoning presents unique challenges that have received significantly less attention. Existing benchmarks often fall short in evaluating LLMs' abilities on the breadth and depth of undergraduate-level physics, underscoring the need for a comprehensive evaluation. To fill this gap, we introduce UGPhysics, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate UnderGraduate-level Physics (UGPhysics) reasoning with LLMs. UGPhysics includes 5,520 undergraduate-level physics problems in both English and Chinese, covering 13 subjects with seven different answer types and four distinct physics reasoning skills, all rigorously screened for data leakage. Additionally, we develop a Model-Assistant Rule-based Judgment (MARJ) pipeline specifically tailored for assessing answer correctness of physics problems, ensuring accurate evaluation. Our evaluation of 31 leading LLMs shows that the highest overall accuracy, 49.8% (achieved by OpenAI-o1-mini), emphasizes the necessity for models with stronger physics reasoning skills, beyond math abilities. We hope UGPhysics, along with MARJ, will drive future advancements in AI for physics reasoning. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/YangLabHKUST/UGPhysics .
2502.00336
Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves
cs.LG stat.ML
We derive asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of denoising score matching (DSM) in generative diffusion models. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional standard Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Furthermore, our work sheds light on the conditions enhancing either generalization or memorization. Consistent with prior empirical observations, our findings indicate that the model complexity ($p$) and the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during DSM significantly influence generalization and memorization behaviors.
2502.00338
OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting
cs.LG physics.ao-ph
Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, and water resource management. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning methods have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework based on graph neural networks (GNNs). By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive information propagation mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions (e.g., typhoons), significantly improving forecast accuracy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.
2502.00339
Challenges and Innovations in LLM-Powered Fake News Detection: A Synthesis of Approaches and Future Directions
cs.CL cs.CY
The pervasiveness of the dissemination of fake news through social media platforms poses critical risks to the trust of the general public, societal stability, and democratic institutions. This challenge calls for novel methodologies in detection, which can keep pace with the dynamic and multi-modal nature of misinformation. Recent works include powering the detection using large language model advances in multimodal frameworks, methodologies using graphs, and adversarial training in the literature of fake news. Based on the different approaches which can bring success, some key highlights will be underlined: enhanced LLM-improves accuracy through more advanced semantics and cross-modality fusion for robust detections. The review further identifies critical gaps in adaptability to dynamic social media trends, real-time, and cross-platform detection capabilities, as well as the ethical challenges thrown up by the misuse of LLMs. Future directions underline the development of style-agnostic models, cross-lingual detection frameworks, and robust policies with a view to mitigating LLM-driven misinformation. This synthesis thus lays a concrete foundation for those researchers and practitioners committed to reinforcing fake news detection systems with complications that keep on growing in the digital landscape.
2502.00340
Enhancing Token Filtering Efficiency in Large Language Model Training with Collider
cs.LG cs.CL cs.DC
Token filtering has been proposed to enhance utility of large language models (LLMs) by eliminating inconsequential tokens during training. While using fewer tokens should reduce computational workloads, existing studies have not succeeded in achieving higher efficiency. This is primarily due to the insufficient sparsity caused by filtering tokens only in the output layers, as well as inefficient sparse GEMM (General Matrix Multiplication), even when having sufficient sparsity. This paper presents Collider, a system unleashing the full efficiency of token filtering in LLM training. At its core, Collider filters activations of inconsequential tokens across all layers to maintain sparsity. Additionally, it features an automatic workflow that transforms sparse GEMM into dimension-reduced dense GEMM for optimized efficiency. Evaluations on three LLMs-TinyLlama-1.1B, Qwen2.5-1.5B, and Phi1.5-1.4B-demonstrate that Collider reduces backpropagation time by up to 35.1% and end-to-end training time by up to 22.0% when filtering 40% of tokens. Utility assessments of training TinyLlama on 15B tokens indicate that Collider sustains the utility advancements of token filtering by relatively improving model utility by 16.3% comparing to regular training, and reduces training time from 4.7 days to 3.5 days using 8 GPUs. Collider is designed for easy integration into existing LLM training frameworks, allowing systems already using token filtering to accelerate training with just one line of code.
2502.00342
Embodied Intelligence for 3D Understanding: A Survey on 3D Scene Question Answering
cs.CV
3D Scene Question Answering (3D SQA) represents an interdisciplinary task that integrates 3D visual perception and natural language processing, empowering intelligent agents to comprehend and interact with complex 3D environments. Recent advances in large multimodal modelling have driven the creation of diverse datasets and spurred the development of instruction-tuning and zero-shot methods for 3D SQA. However, this rapid progress introduces challenges, particularly in achieving unified analysis and comparison across datasets and baselines. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of 3D SQA, systematically reviewing datasets, methodologies, and evaluation metrics while highlighting critical challenges and future opportunities in dataset standardization, multimodal fusion, and task design.
2502.00343
A Novel Approach to Translate Structural Aggregation Queries to MapReduce Code
cs.DB cs.DC
Data management applications are growing and require more attention, especially in the "big data" era. Thus, supporting such applications with novel and efficient algorithms that achieve higher performance is critical. Array database management systems are one way to support these applications by dealing with data represented in n-dimensional data structures. For instance, software like SciDB and RasDaMan can be powerful tools to achieve the required performance on large-scale problems with multidimensional data. Like their relational counterparts, these management systems support specific array query languages as the user interface. As a popular programming model, MapReduce allows large-scale data analysis, facilitates query processing, and is used as a DB engine. Nevertheless, one major obstacle is the low productivity of developing MapReduce applications. Unlike high-level declarative languages such as SQL, MapReduce jobs are written in a low-level descriptive language, often requiring massive programming efforts and complicated debugging processes. This work presents a system that supports translating array queries expressed in the Array Query Language (AQL) in SciDB into MapReduce jobs. We focus on translating some unique structural aggregations, including circular, grid, hierarchical, and sliding aggregations. Unlike traditional aggregations in relational DBs, these structural aggregations are designed explicitly for array manipulation. Thus, our work can be considered an array-view counterpart of existing SQL to MapReduce translators like HiveQL and YSmart. Our translator supports structural aggregations over arrays to meet various array manipulations. The translator can also help user-defined aggregation functions with minimal user effort. We show that our translator can generate optimized MapReduce code, which performs better than the short handwritten code by up to 10.84x.
2502.00344
FinchGPT: a Transformer based language model for birdsong analysis
cs.CL
The long-range dependencies among the tokens, which originate from hierarchical structures, are a defining hallmark of human language. However, whether similar dependencies exist within the sequential vocalization of non-human animals remains a topic of investigation. Transformer architectures, known for their ability to model long-range dependencies among tokens, provide a powerful tool for investigating this phenomenon. In this study, we employed the Transformer architecture to analyze the songs of Bengalese finch (Lonchura striata domestica), which are characterized by their highly variable and complex syllable sequences. To this end, we developed FinchGPT, a Transformer-based model trained on a textualized corpus of birdsongs, which outperformed other architecture models in this domain. Attention weight analysis revealed that FinchGPT effectively captures long-range dependencies within syllables sequences. Furthermore, reverse engineering approaches demonstrated the impact of computational and biological manipulations on its performance: restricting FinchGPT's attention span and disrupting birdsong syntax through the ablation of specific brain nuclei markedly influenced the model's outputs. Our study highlights the transformative potential of large language models (LLMs) in deciphering the complexities of animal vocalizations, offering a novel framework for exploring the structural properties of non-human communication systems while shedding light on the computational distinctions between biological brains and artificial neural networks.
2502.00345
The Composite Task Challenge for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.MA
The significant role of division of labor (DOL) in promoting cooperation is widely recognized in real-world applications.Many cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have incorporated the concept of DOL to improve cooperation among agents.However, the tasks used in existing testbeds typically correspond to tasks where DOL is often not a necessary feature for achieving optimal policies.Additionally, the full utilize of DOL concept in MARL methods remains unrealized due to the absence of appropriate tasks.To enhance the generality and applicability of MARL methods in real-world scenarios, there is a necessary to develop tasks that demand multi-agent DOL and cooperation.In this paper, we propose a series of tasks designed to meet these requirements, drawing on real-world rules as the guidance for their design.We guarantee that DOL and cooperation are necessary condition for completing tasks and introduce three factors to expand the diversity of proposed tasks to cover more realistic situations.We evaluate 10 cooperative MARL methods on the proposed tasks.The results indicate that all baselines perform poorly on these tasks.To further validate the solvability of these tasks, we also propose simplified variants of proposed tasks.Experimental results show that baselines are able to handle these simplified variants, providing evidence of the solvability of the proposed tasks.The source files is available at https://github.com/Yurui-Li/CTC.
2502.00346
Actor Critic with Experience Replay-based automatic treatment planning for prostate cancer intensity modulated radiotherapy
cs.LG cs.AI physics.med-ph
Background: Real-time treatment planning in IMRT is challenging due to complex beam interactions. AI has improved automation, but existing models require large, high-quality datasets and lack universal applicability. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) offers a promising alternative by mimicking human trial-and-error planning. Purpose: Develop a stochastic policy-based DRL agent for automatic treatment planning with efficient training, broad applicability, and robustness against adversarial attacks using Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). Methods: Using the Actor-Critic with Experience Replay (ACER) architecture, the agent tunes treatment planning parameters (TPPs) in inverse planning. Training is based on prostate cancer IMRT cases, using dose-volume histograms (DVHs) as input. The model is trained on a single patient case, validated on two independent cases, and tested on 300+ plans across three datasets. Plan quality is assessed using ProKnow scores, and robustness is tested against adversarial attacks. Results: Despite training on a single case, the model generalizes well. Before ACER-based planning, the mean plan score was 6.20$\pm$1.84; after, 93.09% of cases achieved a perfect score of 9, with a mean of 8.93$\pm$0.27. The agent effectively prioritizes optimal TPP tuning and remains robust against adversarial attacks. Conclusions: The ACER-based DRL agent enables efficient, high-quality treatment planning in prostate cancer IMRT, demonstrating strong generalizability and robustness.
2502.00348
Personalized Denoising Implicit Feedback for Robust Recommender System
cs.IR
While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.
2502.00350
OrcaLoca: An LLM Agent Framework for Software Issue Localization
cs.SE cs.AI
Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM) agents are revolutionizing Autonomous Software Engineering (ASE), enabling automated coding, problem fixes, and feature improvements. However, localization -- precisely identifying software problems by navigating to relevant code sections -- remains a significant challenge. Current approaches often yield suboptimal results due to a lack of effective integration between LLM agents and precise code search mechanisms. This paper introduces OrcaLoca, an LLM agent framework that improves accuracy for software issue localization by integrating priority-based scheduling for LLM-guided action, action decomposition with relevance scoring, and distance-aware context pruning. Experimental results demonstrate that OrcaLoca becomes the new open-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) in function match rate (65.33%) on SWE-bench Lite. It also improves the final resolved rate of an open-source framework by 6.33 percentage points through its patch generation integration.
2502.00351
Multi-Order Hyperbolic Graph Convolution and Aggregated Attention for Social Event Detection
cs.SI cs.AI
Social event detection (SED) is a task focused on identifying specific real-world events and has broad applications across various domains. It is integral to many mobile applications with social features, including major platforms like Twitter, Weibo, and Facebook. By enabling the analysis of social events, SED provides valuable insights for businesses to understand consumer preferences and supports public services in handling emergencies and disaster management. Due to the hierarchical structure of event detection data, traditional approaches in Euclidean space often fall short in capturing the complexity of such relationships. While existing methods in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces have shown promising results, they tend to overlook multi-order relationships between events. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel framework, Multi-Order Hyperbolic Graph Convolution with Aggregated Attention (MOHGCAA), designed to enhance the performance of SED. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements under both supervised and unsupervised settings. To further validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework, we conducted extensive evaluations across multiple datasets, confirming its superiority in tackling common challenges in social event detection.
2502.00352
A Differentiated Reward Method for Reinforcement Learning based Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Decision-Making Algorithms
cs.AI cs.MA cs.RO
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a differentiated reward method based on steady-state transition systems, which incorporates state transition gradient information into the reward design by analyzing traffic flow characteristics, aiming to optimize action selection and policy learning in multi-vehicle cooperative decision-making. The performance of the proposed method is validated in RL algorithms such as MAPPO, MADQN, and QMIX under varying autonomous vehicle penetration. The results show that the differentiated reward method significantly accelerates training convergence and outperforms centering reward and others in terms of traffic efficiency, safety, and action rationality. Additionally, the method demonstrates strong scalability and environmental adaptability, providing a novel approach for multi-agent cooperative decision-making in complex traffic scenarios.
2502.00354
PM-MOE: Mixture of Experts on Private Model Parameters for Personalized Federated Learning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CR
Federated learning (FL) has gained widespread attention for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning capabilities. Due to significant statistical heterogeneity, traditional FL struggles to generalize a shared model across diverse data domains. Personalized federated learning addresses this issue by dividing the model into a globally shared part and a locally private part, with the local model correcting representation biases introduced by the global model. Nevertheless, locally converged parameters more accurately capture domain-specific knowledge, and current methods overlook the potential benefits of these parameters. To address these limitations, we propose PM-MoE architecture. This architecture integrates a mixture of personalized modules and an energy-based personalized modules denoising, enabling each client to select beneficial personalized parameters from other clients. We applied the PM-MoE architecture to nine recent model-split-based personalized federated learning algorithms, achieving performance improvements with minimal additional training. Extensive experiments on six widely adopted datasets and two heterogeneity settings validate the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/dannis97500/PM-MOE}.
2502.00355
Sampling in High-Dimensions using Stochastic Interpolants and Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations
cs.LG stat.ML
We present a class of diffusion-based algorithms to draw samples from high-dimensional probability distributions given their unnormalized densities. Ideally, our methods can transport samples from a Gaussian distribution to a specified target distribution in finite time. Our approach relies on the stochastic interpolants framework to define a time-indexed collection of probability densities that bridge a Gaussian distribution to the target distribution. Subsequently, we derive a diffusion process that obeys the aforementioned probability density at each time instant. Obtaining such a diffusion process involves solving certain Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDEs. We solve these PDEs using the theory of forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDE) together with machine learning-based methods. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively draw samples from distributions that conventional methods struggle to handle.
2502.00358
Do Audio-Visual Segmentation Models Truly Segment Sounding Objects?
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG cs.MM eess.AS
Unlike traditional visual segmentation, audio-visual segmentation (AVS) requires the model not only to identify and segment objects but also to determine whether they are sound sources. Recent AVS approaches, leveraging transformer architectures and powerful foundation models like SAM, have achieved impressive performance on standard benchmarks. Yet, an important question remains: Do these models genuinely integrate audio-visual cues to segment sounding objects? In this paper, we systematically investigate this issue in the context of robust AVS. Our study reveals a fundamental bias in current methods: they tend to generate segmentation masks based predominantly on visual salience, irrespective of the audio context. This bias results in unreliable predictions when sounds are absent or irrelevant. To address this challenge, we introduce AVSBench-Robust, a comprehensive benchmark incorporating diverse negative audio scenarios including silence, ambient noise, and off-screen sounds. We also propose a simple yet effective approach combining balanced training with negative samples and classifier-guided similarity learning. Our extensive experiments show that state-of-theart AVS methods consistently fail under negative audio conditions, demonstrating the prevalence of visual bias. In contrast, our approach achieves remarkable improvements in both standard metrics and robustness measures, maintaining near-perfect false positive rates while preserving highquality segmentation performance.
2502.00359
Exploring Representation-Aligned Latent Space for Better Generation
cs.LG
Generative models serve as powerful tools for modeling the real world, with mainstream diffusion models, particularly those based on the latent diffusion model paradigm, achieving remarkable progress across various tasks, such as image and video synthesis. Latent diffusion models are typically trained using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), interacting with VAE latents rather than the real samples. While this generative paradigm speeds up training and inference, the quality of the generated outputs is limited by the latents' quality. Traditional VAE latents are often seen as spatial compression in pixel space and lack explicit semantic representations, which are essential for modeling the real world. In this paper, we introduce ReaLS (Representation-Aligned Latent Space), which integrates semantic priors to improve generation performance. Extensive experiments show that fundamental DiT and SiT trained on ReaLS can achieve a 15% improvement in FID metric. Furthermore, the enhanced semantic latent space enables more perceptual downstream tasks, such as segmentation and depth estimation.
2502.00360
Shape from Semantics: 3D Shape Generation from Multi-View Semantics
cs.CV cs.GR
We propose ``Shape from Semantics'', which is able to create 3D models whose geometry and appearance match given semantics when observed from different views. Traditional ``Shape from X'' tasks usually use visual input (e.g., RGB images or depth maps) to reconstruct geometry, imposing strict constraints that limit creative explorations. As applications, works like Shadow Art and Wire Art often struggle to grasp the embedded semantics of their design through direct observation and rely heavily on specific setups for proper display. To address these limitations, our framework uses semantics as input, greatly expanding the design space to create objects that integrate multiple semantic elements and are easily discernible by observers. Considering that this task requires a rich imagination, we adopt various generative models and structure-to-detail pipelines. Specifically, we adopt multi-semantics Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to distill 3D geometry and appearance from 2D diffusion models, ensuring that the initial shape is consistent with the semantic input. We then use image restoration and video generation models to add more details as supervision. Finally, we introduce neural signed distance field (SDF) representation to achieve detailed shape reconstruction. Our framework generates meshes with complex details, well-structured geometry, coherent textures, and smooth transitions, resulting in visually appealing and eye-catching designs. Project page: https://shapefromsemantics.github.io
2502.00361
Soft Diffusion Actor-Critic: Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Policy
cs.LG
Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the vanilla diffusion training procedure requires samples from target distribution, which is impossible in online RL since we cannot sample from the optimal policy, making training diffusion policies highly non-trivial in online RL. Backpropagating policy gradient through the diffusion process incurs huge computational costs and instability, thus being expensive and impractical. To enable efficient diffusion policy training for online RL, we propose Soft Diffusion Actor-Critic (SDAC), exploiting the viewpoint of diffusion models as noise-perturbed energy-based models. The proposed SDAC relies solely on the state-action value function as the energy functions to train diffusion policies, bypassing sampling from the optimal policy while maintaining lightweight computations. We conducted comprehensive comparisons on MuJoCo benchmarks. The empirical results show that SDAC outperforms all recent diffusion-policy online RLs on most tasks, and improves more than 120% over soft actor-critic on complex locomotion tasks such as Humanoid and Ant.
2502.00362
Left-Deep Join Order Selection with Higher-Order Unconstrained Binary Optimization on Quantum Computers
quant-ph cs.DB
Join order optimization is among the most crucial query optimization problems, and its central position is also evident in the new research field where quantum computing is applied to database optimization and data management. In the field, join order optimization is the most studied database problem, usually tackled with a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization model, which is solved with various meta-heuristics such as quantum annealing, quantum approximate optimization algorithm, or variational quantum eigensolver. In this work, we continue developing quantum computing techniques for join order optimization by presenting three novel quantum optimization algorithms. These algorithms are based on a higher-order unconstrained binary optimization model, which is a generalization of the quadratic model and has not previously been applied to database problems. Theoretically, these optimization problems naturally map to universal quantum computers and quantum annealers. Compared to previous research, two of our algorithms are the first quantum algorithms to precisely model the join order cost function. We prove theoretical bounds by showing that these two methods encode the same plans as the dynamic programming algorithm without cross-products, which provides the optimal result up to cross-products. The third algorithm reaches at least as good plans as the greedy algorithm without cross-products. These results set an important theoretical connection between the classical and quantum algorithms for join order selection, which has not been studied in the previous research. To demonstrate our algorithms' practical usability, we have conducted an experimental evaluation on thousands of clique, cycle, star, tree, and chain query graphs using quantum and classical solvers.
2502.00363
Machine Learning Models for Reinforced Concrete Pipes Condition Prediction: The State-of-the-Art Using Artificial Neural Networks and Multiple Linear Regression in a Wisconsin Case Study
cs.LG cond-mat.mtrl-sci
The aging sewer infrastructure in the U.S., covering 2.1 million kilometers, encounters increasing structural issues, resulting in around 75,000 yearly sanitary sewer overflows that present serious economic, environmental, and public health hazards. Conventional inspection techniques and deterministic models do not account for the unpredictable nature of sewer decline, whereas probabilistic methods depend on extensive historical data, which is frequently lacking or incomplete. This research intends to enhance predictive accuracy for the condition of sewer pipelines through machine learning models artificial neural networks (ANNs) and multiple linear regression (MLR) by integrating factors such as pipe age, material, diameter, environmental influences, and PACP ratings. ANNs utilized ReLU activation functions and Adam optimization, whereas MLR applied regularization to address multicollinearity, with both models assessed through metrics like RMSE, MAE, and R2. The findings indicated that ANNs surpassed MLR, attaining an R2 of 0.9066 compared to MLRs 0.8474, successfully modeling nonlinear relationships while preserving generalization. MLR, on the other hand, offered enhanced interpretability by pinpointing significant predictors such as residual buildup. As a result, pipeline degradation is driven by pipe length, age, and pipe diameter as key predictors, while depth, soil type, and segment show minimal influence in this analysis. Future studies ought to prioritize hybrid models that merge the accuracy of ANNs with the interpretability of MLR, incorporating advanced methods such as SHAP analysis and transfer learning to improve scalability in managing infrastructure and promoting environmental sustainability.
2502.00365
What should an AI assessor optimise for?
cs.LG cs.AI
An AI assessor is an external, ideally indepen-dent system that predicts an indicator, e.g., a loss value, of another AI system. Assessors can lever-age information from the test results of many other AI systems and have the flexibility of be-ing trained on any loss function or scoring rule: from squared error to toxicity metrics. Here we address the question: is it always optimal to train the assessor for the target metric? Or could it be better to train for a different metric and then map predictions back to the target metric? Us-ing twenty regression and classification problems with tabular data, we experimentally explore this question for, respectively, regression losses and classification scores with monotonic and non-monotonic mappings and find that, contrary to intuition, optimising for more informative met-rics is not generally better. Surprisingly, some monotonic transformations are promising. For example, the logistic loss is useful for minimis-ing absolute or quadratic errors in regression, and the logarithmic score helps maximise quadratic or spherical scores in classification.
2502.00366
Prostate-Specific Foundation Models for Enhanced Detection of Clinically Significant Cancer
eess.IV cs.CV
Accurate prostate cancer diagnosis remains challenging. Even when using MRI, radiologists exhibit low specificity and significant inter-observer variability, leading to potential delays or inaccuracies in identifying clinically significant cancers. This leads to numerous unnecessary biopsies and risks of missing clinically significant cancers. Here we present prostate vision contrastive network (ProViCNet), prostate organ-specific vision foundation models for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Trans-Rectal Ultrasound imaging (TRUS) for comprehensive cancer detection. ProViCNet was trained and validated using 4,401 patients across six institutions, as a prostate cancer detection model on radiology images relying on patch-level contrastive learning guided by biopsy confirmed radiologist annotations. ProViCNet demonstrated consistent performance across multiple internal and external validation cohorts with area under the receiver operating curve values ranging from 0.875 to 0.966, significantly outperforming radiologists in the reader study (0.907 versus 0.805, p<0.001) for mpMRI, while achieving 0.670 to 0.740 for TRUS. We also integrated ProViCNet with standard PSA to develop a virtual screening test, and we showed that we can maintain the high sensitivity for detecting clinically significant cancers while more than doubling specificity from 15% to 38% (p<0.001), thereby substantially reducing unnecessary biopsies. These findings highlight that ProViCNet's potential for enhancing prostate cancer diagnosis accuracy and reduce unnecessary biopsies, thereby optimizing diagnostic pathways.
2502.00372
NAVER: A Neuro-Symbolic Compositional Automaton for Visual Grounding with Explicit Logic Reasoning
cs.CV
Visual Grounding (VG) tasks, such as referring expression detection and segmentation tasks are important for linking visual entities to context, especially in complex reasoning tasks that require detailed query interpretation. This paper explores VG beyond basic perception, highlighting challenges for methods that require reasoning like human cognition. Recent advances in large language methods (LLMs) and Vision-Language methods (VLMs) have improved abilities for visual comprehension, contextual understanding, and reasoning. These methods are mainly split into end-to-end and compositional methods, with the latter offering more flexibility. Compositional approaches that integrate LLMs and foundation models show promising performance but still struggle with complex reasoning with language-based logical representations. To address these limitations, we propose NAVER, a compositional visual grounding method that integrates explicit probabilistic logic reasoning within a finite-state automaton, equipped with a self-correcting mechanism. This design improves robustness and interpretability in inference through explicit logic reasoning. Our results show that NAVER achieves SoTA performance comparing to recent end-to-end and compositional baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ControlNet/NAVER .
2502.00373
Generalized Lie Symmetries in Physics-Informed Neural Operators
cs.LG physics.comp-ph
Physics-informed neural operators (PINOs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). Recent research has demonstrated that incorporating Lie point symmetry information can significantly enhance the training efficiency of PINOs, primarily through techniques like data, architecture, and loss augmentation. In this work, we focus on the latter, highlighting that point symmetries oftentimes result in no training signal, limiting their effectiveness in many problems. To address this, we propose a novel loss augmentation strategy that leverages evolutionary representatives of point symmetries, a specific class of generalized symmetries of the underlying PDE. These generalized symmetries provide a richer set of generators compared to standard symmetries, leading to a more informative training signal. We demonstrate that leveraging evolutionary representatives enhances the performance of neural operators, resulting in improved data efficiency and accuracy during training.
2502.00374
A Unit-based System and Dataset for Expressive Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation
cs.CL cs.CV cs.MM cs.SD eess.AS
Current research in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) primarily concentrates on translation accuracy and speech naturalness, often overlooking key elements like paralinguistic information, which is essential for conveying emotions and attitudes in communication. To address this, our research introduces a novel, carefully curated multilingual dataset from various movie audio tracks. Each dataset pair is precisely matched for paralinguistic information and duration. We enhance this by integrating multiple prosody transfer techniques, aiming for translations that are accurate, natural-sounding, and rich in paralinguistic details. Our experimental results confirm that our model retains more paralinguistic information from the source speech while maintaining high standards of translation accuracy and naturalness.
2502.00375
Scalable Framework for Classifying AI-Generated Content Across Modalities
cs.CV
The rapid growth of generative AI technologies has heightened the importance of effectively distinguishing between human and AI-generated content, as well as classifying outputs from diverse generative models. This paper presents a scalable framework that integrates perceptual hashing, similarity measurement, and pseudo-labeling to address these challenges. Our method enables the incorporation of new generative models without retraining, ensuring adaptability and robustness in dynamic scenarios. Comprehensive evaluations on the Defactify4 dataset demonstrate competitive performance in text and image classification tasks, achieving high accuracy across both distinguishing human and AI-generated content and classifying among generative methods. These results highlight the framework's potential for real-world applications as generative AI continues to evolve. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/ffyyytt/defactify4.
2502.00376
SSRepL-ADHD: Adaptive Complex Representation Learning Framework for ADHD Detection from Visual Attention Tasks
cs.LG cs.HC eess.SP
Self Supervised Representation Learning (SSRepL) can capture meaningful and robust representations of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) data and have the potential to improve the model's performance on also downstream different types of Neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) detection. In this paper, a novel SSRepL and Transfer Learning (TL)-based framework that incorporates a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) model is proposed to detect children with potential symptoms of ADHD. This model uses Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals extracted during visual attention tasks to accurately detect ADHD by preprocessing EEG signal quality through normalization, filtering, and data balancing. For the experimental analysis, we use three different models: 1) SSRepL and TL-based LSTM-GRU model named as SSRepL-ADHD, which integrates LSTM and GRU layers to capture temporal dependencies in the data, 2) lightweight SSRepL-based DNN model (LSSRepL-DNN), and 3) Random Forest (RF). In the study, these models are thoroughly evaluated using well-known performance metrics (i.e., accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score). The results show that the proposed SSRepL-ADHD model achieves the maximum accuracy of 81.11% while admitting the difficulties associated with dataset imbalance and feature selection.
2502.00377
When End-to-End is Overkill: Rethinking Cascaded Speech-to-Text Translation
cs.CL cs.AI cs.MM cs.SD eess.AS
Though end-to-end speech-to-text translation has been a great success, we argue that the cascaded speech-to-text translation model still has its place, which is usually criticized for the error propagation between automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) models. In this paper, we explore the benefits of incorporating multiple candidates from ASR and self-supervised speech features into MT. Our analysis reveals that the primary cause of cascading errors stems from the increased divergence between similar samples in the speech domain when mapped to the text domain. By including multiple candidates and self-supervised speech features, our approach allows the machine translation model to choose the right words and ensure precise translation using various speech samples. This strategy minimizes error spread and takes advantage of large ASR and MT datasets, along with pre-trained ASR/MT models, while addressing associated issues.
2502.00379
Latent Action Learning Requires Supervision in the Presence of Distractors
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Recently, latent action learning, pioneered by Latent Action Policies (LAPO), have shown remarkable pre-training efficiency on observation-only data, offering potential for leveraging vast amounts of video available on the web for embodied AI. However, prior work has focused on distractor-free data, where changes between observations are primarily explained by ground-truth actions. Unfortunately, real-world videos contain action-correlated distractors that may hinder latent action learning. Using Distracting Control Suite (DCS) we empirically investigate the effect of distractors on latent action learning and demonstrate that LAPO struggle in such scenario. We propose LAOM, a simple LAPO modification that improves the quality of latent actions by 8x, as measured by linear probing. Importantly, we show that providing supervision with ground-truth actions, as few as 2.5% of the full dataset, during latent action learning improves downstream performance by 4.2x on average. Our findings suggest that integrating supervision during Latent Action Models (LAM) training is critical in the presence of distractors, challenging the conventional pipeline of first learning LAM and only then decoding from latent to ground-truth actions.
2502.00380
CoHiRF: A Scalable and Interpretable Clustering Framework for High-Dimensional Data
cs.LG stat.ML
Clustering high-dimensional data poses significant challenges due to the curse of dimensionality, scalability issues, and the presence of noisy and irrelevant features. We propose Consensus Hierarchical Random Feature (CoHiRF), a novel clustering method designed to address these challenges effectively. CoHiRF leverages random feature selection to mitigate noise and dimensionality effects, repeatedly applies K-Means clustering in reduced feature spaces, and combines results through a unanimous consensus criterion. This iterative approach constructs a cluster assignment matrix, where each row records the cluster assignments of a sample across repetitions, enabling the identification of stable clusters by comparing identical rows. Clusters are organized hierarchically, enabling the interpretation of the hierarchy to gain insights into the dataset. CoHiRF is computationally efficient with a running time comparable to K-Means, scalable to massive datasets, and exhibits robust performance against state-of-the-art methods such as SC-SRGF, HDBSCAN, and OPTICS. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets confirm the method's ability to reveal meaningful patterns while maintaining scalability, making it a powerful tool for high-dimensional data analysis.
2502.00382
Masked Generative Nested Transformers with Decode Time Scaling
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Recent advances in visual generation have made significant strides in producing content of exceptional quality. However, most methods suffer from a fundamental problem - a bottleneck of inference computational efficiency. Most of these algorithms involve multiple passes over a transformer model to generate tokens or denoise inputs. However, the model size is kept consistent throughout all iterations, which makes it computationally expensive. In this work, we aim to address this issue primarily through two key ideas - (a) not all parts of the generation process need equal compute, and we design a decode time model scaling schedule to utilize compute effectively, and (b) we can cache and reuse some of the computation. Combining these two ideas leads to using smaller models to process more tokens while large models process fewer tokens. These different-sized models do not increase the parameter size, as they share parameters. We rigorously experiment with ImageNet256$\times$256 , UCF101, and Kinetics600 to showcase the efficacy of the proposed method for image/video generation and frame prediction. Our experiments show that with almost $3\times$ less compute than baseline, our model obtains competitive performance.
2502.00384
It's Not Just a Phase: On Investigating Phase Transitions in Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis
cs.CR cs.LG
Side-channel analysis (SCA) represents a realistic threat where the attacker can observe unintentional information to obtain secret data. Evaluation labs also use the same SCA techniques in the security certification process. The results in the last decade have shown that machine learning, especially deep learning, is an extremely powerful SCA approach, allowing the breaking of protected devices while achieving optimal attack performance. Unfortunately, deep learning operates as a black-box, making it less useful for security evaluators who must understand how attacks work to prevent them in the future. This work demonstrates that mechanistic interpretability can effectively scale to realistic scenarios where relevant information is sparse and well-defined interchange interventions to the input are impossible due to side-channel protections. Concretely, we reverse engineer the features the network learns during phase transitions, eventually retrieving secret masks, allowing us to move from black-box to white-box evaluation.
2502.00385
The Impact of Persona-based Political Perspectives on Hateful Content Detection
cs.CL cs.AI
While pretraining language models with politically diverse content has been shown to improve downstream task fairness, such approaches require significant computational resources often inaccessible to many researchers and organizations. Recent work has established that persona-based prompting can introduce political diversity in model outputs without additional training. However, it remains unclear whether such prompting strategies can achieve results comparable to political pretraining for downstream tasks. We investigate this question using persona-based prompting strategies in multimodal hate-speech detection tasks, specifically focusing on hate speech in memes. Our analysis reveals that when mapping personas onto a political compass and measuring persona agreement, inherent political positioning has surprisingly little correlation with classification decisions. Notably, this lack of correlation persists even when personas are explicitly injected with stronger ideological descriptors. Our findings suggest that while LLMs can exhibit political biases in their responses to direct political questions, these biases may have less impact on practical classification tasks than previously assumed. This raises important questions about the necessity of computationally expensive political pretraining for achieving fair performance in downstream tasks.
2502.00386
Efficient Adaptive Label Refinement for Label Noise Learning
cs.CV
Deep neural networks are highly susceptible to overfitting noisy labels, which leads to degraded performance. Existing methods address this issue by employing manually defined criteria, aiming to achieve optimal partitioning in each iteration to avoid fitting noisy labels while thoroughly learning clean samples. However, this often results in overly complex and difficult-to-train models. To address this issue, we decouple the tasks of avoiding fitting incorrect labels and thoroughly learning clean samples and propose a simple yet highly applicable method called Adaptive Label Refinement (ALR). First, inspired by label refurbishment techniques, we update the original hard labels to soft labels using the model's predictions to reduce the risk of fitting incorrect labels. Then, by introducing the entropy loss, we gradually `harden' the high-confidence soft labels, guiding the model to better learn from clean samples. This approach is simple and efficient, requiring no prior knowledge of noise or auxiliary datasets, making it more accessible compared to existing methods. We validate ALR's effectiveness through experiments on benchmark datasets with artificial label noise (CIFAR-10/100) and real-world datasets with inherent noise (ANIMAL-10N, Clothing1M, WebVision). The results show that ALR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
2502.00392
RefDrone: A Challenging Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension in Drone Scenes
cs.CV
Drones have become prevalent robotic platforms with diverse applications, showing significant potential in Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI). Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) enables drones to locate objects based on natural language expressions, a crucial capability for Embodied AI. Despite advances in REC for ground-level scenes, aerial views introduce unique challenges including varying viewpoints, occlusions and scale variations. To address this gap, we introduce RefDrone, a REC benchmark for drone scenes. RefDrone reveals three key challenges in REC: 1) multi-scale and small-scale target detection; 2) multi-target and no-target samples; 3) complex environment with rich contextual expressions. To efficiently construct this dataset, we develop RDAgent (referring drone annotation framework with multi-agent system), a semi-automated annotation tool for REC tasks. RDAgent ensures high-quality contextual expressions and reduces annotation cost. Furthermore, we propose Number GroundingDINO (NGDINO), a novel method designed to handle multi-target and no-target cases. NGDINO explicitly learns and utilizes the number of objects referred to in the expression. Comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art REC methods demonstrate that NGDINO achieves superior performance on both the proposed RefDrone and the existing gRefCOCO datasets. The dataset and code will be publicly at https://github.com/sunzc-sunny/refdrone.
2502.00395
FlexCloud: Direct, Modular Georeferencing and Drift-Correction of Point Cloud Maps
cs.RO cs.CV
Current software stacks for real-world applications of autonomous driving leverage map information to ensure reliable localization, path planning, and motion prediction. An important field of research is the generation of point cloud maps, referring to the topic of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). As most recent developments do not include global position data, the resulting point cloud maps suffer from internal distortion and missing georeferencing, preventing their use for map-based localization approaches. Therefore, we propose FlexCloud for an automatic georeferencing of point cloud maps created from SLAM. Our approach is designed to work modularly with different SLAM methods, utilizing only the generated local point cloud map and its odometry. Using the corresponding GNSS positions enables direct georeferencing without additional control points. By leveraging a 3D rubber-sheet transformation, we can correct distortions within the map caused by long-term drift while maintaining its structure. Our approach enables the creation of consistent, globally referenced point cloud maps from data collected by a mobile mapping system (MMS). The source code of our work is available at https://github.com/TUMFTM/FlexCloud.
2502.00396
Dexterous Cable Manipulation: Taxonomy, Multi-Fingered Hand Design, and Long-Horizon Manipulation
cs.RO
Existing research that addressed cable manipulation relied on two-fingered grippers, which make it difficult to perform similar cable manipulation tasks that humans perform. However, unlike dexterous manipulation of rigid objects, the development of dexterous cable manipulation skills in robotics remains underexplored due to the unique challenges posed by a cable's deformability and inherent uncertainty. In addition, using a dexterous hand introduces specific difficulties in tasks, such as cable grasping, pulling, and in-hand bending, for which no dedicated task definitions, benchmarks, or evaluation metrics exist. Furthermore, we observed that most existing dexterous hands are designed with structures identical to humans', typically featuring only one thumb, which often limits their effectiveness during dexterous cable manipulation. Lastly, existing non-task-specific methods did not have enough generalization ability to solve these cable manipulation tasks or are unsuitable due to the designed hardware. We have three contributions in real-world dexterous cable manipulation in the following steps: (1) We first defined and organized a set of dexterous cable manipulation tasks into a comprehensive taxonomy, covering most short-horizon action primitives and long-horizon tasks for one-handed cable manipulation. This taxonomy revealed that coordination between the thumb and the index finger is critical for cable manipulation, which decomposes long-horizon tasks into simpler primitives. (2) We designed a novel five-fingered hand with 25 degrees of freedom (DoF), featuring two symmetric thumb-index configurations and a rotatable joint on each fingertip, which enables dexterous cable manipulation. (3) We developed a demonstration collection pipeline for this non-anthropomorphic hand, which is difficult to operate by previous motion capture methods.
2502.00397
Minimalistic Video Saliency Prediction via Efficient Decoder & Spatio Temporal Action Cues
cs.CV
This paper introduces ViNet-S, a 36MB model based on the ViNet architecture with a U-Net design, featuring a lightweight decoder that significantly reduces model size and parameters without compromising performance. Additionally, ViNet-A (148MB) incorporates spatio-temporal action localization (STAL) features, differing from traditional video saliency models that use action classification backbones. Our studies show that an ensemble of ViNet-S and ViNet-A, by averaging predicted saliency maps, achieves state-of-the-art performance on three visual-only and six audio-visual saliency datasets, outperforming transformer-based models in both parameter efficiency and real-time performance, with ViNet-S reaching over 1000fps.
2502.00401
Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Can integrating spectral and curvature signals unlock new potential in graph representation learning? Non-Euclidean geometries, particularly Riemannian manifolds such as hyperbolic (negative curvature) and spherical (positive curvature), offer powerful inductive biases for embedding complex graph structures like scale-free, hierarchical, and cyclic patterns. Meanwhile, spectral filtering excels at processing signal variations across graphs, making it effective in homophilic and heterophilic settings. Leveraging both can significantly enhance the learned representations. To this end, we propose Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks (CUSP) - the first graph representation learning paradigm that unifies both CUrvature (geometric) and SPectral insights. CUSP is a mixed-curvature spectral GNN that learns spectral filters to optimize node embeddings in products of constant-curvature manifolds (hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean). Specifically, CUSP introduces three novel components: (a) Cusp Laplacian, an extension of the traditional graph Laplacian based on Ollivier-Ricci curvature, designed to capture the curvature signals better; (b) Cusp Filtering, which employs multiple Riemannian graph filters to obtain cues from various bands in the eigenspectrum; and (c) Cusp Pooling, a hierarchical attention mechanism combined with a curvature-based positional encoding to assess the relative importance of differently curved substructures in our graph. Empirical evaluation across eight homophilic and heterophilic datasets demonstrates the superiority of CUSP in node classification and link prediction tasks, with a gain of up to 5.3% over state-of-the-art models.
2502.00402
Enhancing Highway Safety: Accident Detection on the A9 Test Stretch Using Roadside Sensors
cs.CV
Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29, resulting in about 1.19 million deaths each year. To reduce these fatalities, it is essential to address human errors like speeding, drunk driving, and distractions. Additionally, faster accident detection and quicker medical response can help save lives. We propose an accident detection framework that combines a rule-based approach with a learning-based one. We introduce a dataset of real-world highway accidents featuring high-speed crash sequences. It includes 294,924 labeled 2D boxes, 93,012 labeled 3D boxes, and track IDs across 48,144 frames captured at 10 Hz using four roadside cameras and LiDAR sensors. The dataset covers ten object classes and is released in the OpenLABEL format. Our experiments and analysis demonstrate the reliability of our method.
2502.00404
Exploring Linear Attention Alternative for Single Image Super-Resolution
cs.CV eess.IV
Deep learning-based single-image super-resolution (SISR) technology focuses on enhancing low-resolution (LR) images into high-resolution (HR) ones. Although significant progress has been made, challenges remain in computational complexity and quality, particularly in remote sensing image processing. To address these issues, we propose our Omni-Scale RWKV Super-Resolution (OmniRWKVSR) model which presents a novel approach that combines the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) architecture with feature extraction techniques such as Visual RWKV Spatial Mixing (VRSM) and Visual RWKV Channel Mixing (VRCM), aiming to overcome the limitations of existing methods and achieve superior SISR performance. This work has proved able to provide effective solutions for high-quality image reconstruction. Under the 4x Super-Resolution tasks, compared to the MambaIR model, we achieved an average improvement of 0.26% in PSNR and 0.16% in SSIM.
2502.00406
ALU: Agentic LLM Unlearning
cs.AI cs.CL
Information removal or suppression in large language models (LLMs) is a desired functionality, useful in AI regulation, legal compliance, safety, and privacy. LLM unlearning methods aim to remove information on demand from LLMs. Current LLM unlearning methods struggle to balance the unlearning efficacy and utility due to the competing nature of these objectives. Keeping the unlearning process computationally feasible without assuming access to the model weights is an overlooked area. We present the first agentic LLM unlearning (ALU) method, a multi-agent, retrain-free, model-agnostic approach to LLM unlearning that achieves effective unlearning while preserving the utility. Our ALU framework unlearns by involving multiple LLM agents, each designed for a specific step in the unlearning process, without the need to update model weights for any of the agents in the framework. Users can easily request any set of unlearning instances in any sequence, and ALU seamlessly adapts in real time. This is facilitated without requiring any changes in the underlying LLM model. Through extensive experiments on established benchmarks (TOFU, WMDP, WPU) and jailbreaking techniques (many shot, target masking, other languages), we demonstrate that ALU consistently stands out as the most robust LLM unlearning framework among current state-of-the-art methods while incurring a low constant-time cost. We further highlight ALU's superior performance compared to existing methods when evaluated at scale. Specifically, ALU is assessed on up to 1000 unlearning targets, exceeding the evaluation scope of all previously proposed LLM unlearning methods.
2502.00407
Causal Abstraction Learning based on the Semantic Embedding Principle
cs.LG cs.AI
Structural causal models (SCMs) allow us to investigate complex systems at multiple levels of resolution. The causal abstraction (CA) framework formalizes the mapping between high- and low-level SCMs. We address CA learning in a challenging and realistic setting, where SCMs are inaccessible, interventional data is unavailable, and sample data is misaligned. A key principle of our framework is $\textit{semantic embedding}$, formalized as the high-level distribution lying on a subspace of the low-level one. This principle naturally links linear CA to the geometry of the $\textit{Stiefel manifold}$. We present a category-theoretic approach to SCMs that enables the learning of a CA by finding a morphism between the low- and high-level probability measures, adhering to the semantic embedding principle. Consequently, we formulate a general CA learning problem. As an application, we solve the latter problem for linear CA; considering Gaussian measures and the Kullback-Leibler divergence as an objective. Given the nonconvexity of the learning task, we develop three algorithms building upon existing paradigms for Riemannian optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed methods succeed on both synthetic and real-world brain data with different degrees of prior information about the structure of CA.
2502.00408
Segment Anything for Histopathology
eess.IV cs.CV
Nucleus segmentation is an important analysis task in digital pathology. However, methods for automatic segmentation often struggle with new data from a different distribution, requiring users to manually annotate nuclei and retrain data-specific models. Vision foundation models (VFMs), such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), offer a more robust alternative for automatic and interactive segmentation. Despite their success in natural images, a foundation model for nucleus segmentation in histopathology is still missing. Initial efforts to adapt SAM have shown some success, but did not yet introduce a comprehensive model for diverse segmentation tasks. To close this gap, we introduce PathoSAM, a VFM for nucleus segmentation, based on training SAM on a diverse dataset. Our extensive experiments show that it is the new state-of-the-art model for automatic and interactive nucleus instance segmentation in histopathology. We also demonstrate how it can be adapted for other segmentation tasks, including semantic nucleus segmentation. For this task, we show that it yields results better than popular methods, while not yet beating the state-of-the-art, CellViT. Our models are open-source and compatible with popular tools for data annotation. We also provide scripts for whole-slide image segmentation. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/computational-cell-analytics/patho-sam.
2502.00409
Doing More with Less -- Implementing Routing Strategies in Large Language Model-Based Systems: An Extended Survey
cs.AI cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (e.g. GPT-4) trained on very large multi-topic corpora can perform well in a variety of tasks. They require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.
2502.00412
TROI: Cross-Subject Pretraining with Sparse Voxel Selection for Enhanced fMRI Visual Decoding
cs.CV
fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) visual decoding involves decoding the original image from brain signals elicited by visual stimuli. This often relies on manually labeled ROIs (Regions of Interest) to select brain voxels. However, these ROIs can contain redundant information and noise, reducing decoding performance. Additionally, the lack of automated ROI labeling methods hinders the practical application of fMRI visual decoding technology, especially for new subjects. This work presents TROI (Trainable Region of Interest), a novel two-stage, data-driven ROI labeling method for cross-subject fMRI decoding tasks, particularly when subject samples are limited. TROI leverages labeled ROIs in the dataset to pretrain an image decoding backbone on a cross-subject dataset, enabling efficient optimization of the input layer for new subjects without retraining the entire model from scratch. In the first stage, we introduce a voxel selection method that combines sparse mask training and low-pass filtering to quickly generate the voxel mask and determine input layer dimensions. In the second stage, we apply a learning rate rewinding strategy to fine-tune the input layer for downstream tasks. Experimental results on the same small sample dataset as the baseline method for brain visual retrieval and reconstruction tasks show that our voxel selection method surpasses the state-of-the-art method MindEye2 with an annotated ROI mask.
2502.00413
Predictive modeling and anomaly detection in large-scale web portals through the CAWAL framework
cs.LG cs.IR
This study presents an approach that uses session and page view data collected through the CAWAL framework, enriched through specialized processes, for advanced predictive modeling and anomaly detection in web usage mining (WUM) applications. Traditional WUM methods often rely on web server logs, which limit data diversity and quality. Integrating application logs with web analytics, the CAWAL framework creates comprehensive session and page view datasets, providing a more detailed view of user interactions and effectively addressing these limitations. This integration enhances data diversity and quality while eliminating the preprocessing stage required in conventional WUM, leading to greater process efficiency. The enriched datasets, created by cross-integrating session and page view data, were applied to advanced machine learning models, such as Gradient Boosting and Random Forest, which are known for their effectiveness in capturing complex patterns and modeling non-linear relationships. These models achieved over 92% accuracy in predicting user behavior and significantly improved anomaly detection capabilities. The results show that this approach offers detailed insights into user behavior and system performance metrics, making it a reliable solution for improving large-scale web portals' efficiency, reliability, and scalability.
2502.00414
Social media polarization during conflict: Insights from an ideological stance dataset on Israel-Palestine Reddit comments
cs.CL
In politically sensitive scenarios like wars, social media serves as a platform for polarized discourse and expressions of strong ideological stances. While prior studies have explored ideological stance detection in general contexts, limited attention has been given to conflict-specific settings. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 9,969 Reddit comments related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, collected between October 2023 and August 2024. The comments were categorized into three stance classes: Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestine, and Neutral. Various approaches, including machine learning, pre-trained language models, neural networks, and prompt engineering strategies for open source large language models (LLMs), were employed to classify these stances. Performance was assessed using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Among the tested methods, the Scoring and Reflective Re-read prompt in Mixtral 8x7B demonstrated the highest performance across all metrics. This study provides comparative insights into the effectiveness of different models for detecting ideological stances in highly polarized social media contexts. The dataset used in this research is publicly available for further exploration and validation.
2502.00415
MarketSenseAI 2.0: Enhancing Stock Analysis through LLM Agents
q-fin.CP cs.AI cs.CL cs.MA q-fin.PM
MarketSenseAI is a novel framework for holistic stock analysis which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to process financial news, historical prices, company fundamentals and the macroeconomic environment to support decision making in stock analysis and selection. In this paper, we present the latest advancements on MarketSenseAI, driven by rapid technological expansion in LLMs. Through a novel architecture combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM agents, the framework processes SEC filings and earnings calls, while enriching macroeconomic analysis through systematic processing of diverse institutional reports. We demonstrate a significant improvement in fundamental analysis accuracy over the previous version. Empirical evaluation on S\&P 100 stocks over two years (2023-2024) shows MarketSenseAI achieving cumulative returns of 125.9% compared to the index return of 73.5%, while maintaining comparable risk profiles. Further validation on S\&P 500 stocks during 2024 demonstrates the framework's scalability, delivering a 33.8% higher Sortino ratio than the market. This work marks a significant advancement in applying LLM technology to financial analysis, offering insights into the robustness of LLM-driven investment strategies.
2502.00416
GO-GAN: Geometry Optimization Generative Adversarial Network for Achieving Optimized Structures with Targeted Physical Properties
cs.CE
This paper presents GO-GAN, a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture for geometry optimization (GO), specifically to generate structures based on user-specified input parameters. The architecture for GO-GAN proposed here combines a \texttt{Pix2Pix} GAN with a new input mechanism, involving a dynamic batch gradient descent-based training loop that leverages dataset symmetries. The model, implemented here using \texttt{TensorFlow} and \texttt{Keras}, is trained using input images representing scalar physical properties generated by a custom MatLab code. After training, GO-GAN rapidly generates optimized geometries from input images representing scalar inputs of the physical properties. Results demonstrate GO-GAN's ability to produce acceptable designs with desirable variations. These variations are followed by the influence of discriminators during training and are of practical significance in ensuring adherence to specifications while enabling creative exploration of the design space.
2502.00418
Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Segment Anything Model
cs.CV
Segmentation is an important analysis task for biomedical images, enabling the study of individual organelles, cells or organs. Deep learning has massively improved segmentation methods, but challenges remain in generalization to new conditions, requiring costly data annotation. Vision foundation models, such as Segment Anything Model (SAM), address this issue through broad segmentation capabilities. However, these models still require finetuning on annotated data, although with less annotations, to achieve optimal results for new conditions. As a downside, they require more computational resources. This makes parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) relevant for their application. We contribute the first comprehensive study of PEFT for SAM applied to biomedical segmentation by evaluating 9 PEFT methods on diverse datasets. We also provide an implementation of QLoRA for vision transformers and a new approach for resource-efficient finetuning of SAM. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/computational-cell-analytics/peft-sam.
2502.00421
Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language
cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS
We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range of speakers and phonetic variations. It consists of 100 hours of real-world audio recordings paired with transcriptions, covering read speech in both clean and noisy environments. This dataset addresses the critical need for ASR resources for the Oromo language which is underrepresented. To show its applicability for the ASR task, we conducted experiments using the Conformer model, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.32% with hybrid CTC and AED loss and WER of 18.74% with pure CTC loss. Additionally, fine-tuning the Whisper model resulted in a significantly improved WER of 10.82%. These results establish baselines for Oromo ASR, highlighting both the challenges and the potential for improving ASR performance in Oromo. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/turinaf/sagalee and we encourage its use for further research and development in Oromo speech processing.
2502.00423
Stochastic Linear Bandits with Latent Heterogeneity
cs.LG stat.ME stat.ML
This paper addresses the critical challenge of latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individual responses to business actions vary due to unobserved characteristics. While existing approaches in data-driven decision-making have focused on observable heterogeneity through contextual features, they fall short when heterogeneity stems from unobservable factors such as lifestyle preferences and personal experiences. We propose a novel latent heterogeneous bandit framework that explicitly models this unobserved heterogeneity in customer responses, with promotion targeting as our primary example. Our methodology introduces an innovative algorithm that simultaneously learns latent group memberships and group-specific reward functions. Through theoretical analysis and empirical validation using data from a mobile commerce platform, we establish high-probability bounds for parameter estimation, convergence rates for group classification, and comprehensive regret bounds. Notably, our theoretical analysis reveals two distinct types of regret measures: a ``strong regret'' against an oracle with perfect knowledge of customer memberships, which remains non-sub-linear due to inherent classification uncertainty, and a ``regular regret'' against an oracle aware only of deterministic components, for which our algorithm achieves a sub-linear rate that is minimax optimal in horizon length and dimension. We further demonstrate that existing bandit algorithms ignoring latent heterogeneity incur constant average regret that accumulates linearly over time. Our framework provides practitioners with new tools for decision-making under latent heterogeneity and extends to various business applications, including personalized pricing, resource allocation, and inventory management.
2502.00425
MQuant: Unleashing the Inference Potential of Multimodal Large Language Models via Full Static Quantization
cs.CV cs.AI
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical deployment and application.While quantization is an effective way to reduce model size and inference latency, its application to MLLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose MQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework designed to tackle the unique challenges of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Conventional quantization often struggles with MLLMs because of (a) high inference latency from large visual token counts, (b) distributional disparities between visual and textual tokens, and (c) extreme outliers introduced by Hadamard-based transformations. To address these issues, MQuant introduces: Modality-Specific Static Quantization (MSQ), assigning distinct static scales for visual vs. textual tokens; Attention-Invariant Flexible Switching (AIFS), reordering tokens to preserve casual attention while eliminating expensive token-wise scale computations; Rotation Magnitude Suppression (RMS), mitigating weight outliers arising from online Hadamard rotations. On five mainstream MLLMs (including Qwen-VL, MiniCPM-V, CogVLM2), MQuant under W4A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 30%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ baselines. Our MQuant effectively bridges the gap for efficient and accurate MLLMs inference in resource-constrained devices. Code will be released.
2502.00426
TEST-V: TEst-time Support-set Tuning for Zero-shot Video Classification
cs.CV
Recently, adapting Vision Language Models (VLMs) to zero-shot visual classification by tuning class embedding with a few prompts (Test-time Prompt Tuning, TPT) or replacing class names with generated visual samples (support-set) has shown promising results. However, TPT cannot avoid the semantic gap between modalities while the support-set cannot be tuned. To this end, we draw on each other's strengths and propose a novel framework namely TEst-time Support-set Tuning for zero-shot Video Classification (TEST-V). It first dilates the support-set with multiple prompts (Multi-prompting Support-set Dilation, MSD) and then erodes the support-set via learnable weights to mine key cues dynamically (Temporal-aware Support-set Erosion, TSE). Specifically, i) MSD expands the support samples for each class based on multiple prompts enquired from LLMs to enrich the diversity of the support-set. ii) TSE tunes the support-set with factorized learnable weights according to the temporal prediction consistency in a self-supervised manner to dig pivotal supporting cues for each class. $\textbf{TEST-V}$ achieves state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks and has good interpretability for the support-set dilation and erosion.
2502.00429
How Do Model Export Formats Impact the Development of ML-Enabled Systems? A Case Study on Model Integration
cs.SE cs.LG
Machine learning (ML) models are often integrated into ML-enabled systems to provide software functionality that would otherwise be impossible. This integration requires the selection of an appropriate ML model export format, for which many options are available. These formats are crucial for ensuring a seamless integration, and choosing a suboptimal one can negatively impact system development. However, little evidence is available to guide practitioners during the export format selection. We therefore evaluated various model export formats regarding their impact on the development of ML-enabled systems from an integration perspective. Based on the results of a preliminary questionnaire survey (n=17), we designed an extensive embedded case study with two ML-enabled systems in three versions with different technologies. We then analyzed the effect of five popular export formats, namely ONNX, Pickle, TensorFlow's SavedModel, PyTorch's TorchScript, and Joblib. In total, we studied 30 units of analysis (2 systems x 3 tech stacks x 5 formats) and collected data via structured field notes. The holistic qualitative analysis of the results indicated that ONNX offered the most efficient integration and portability across most cases. SavedModel and TorchScript were very convenient to use in Python-based systems, but otherwise required workarounds (TorchScript more than SavedModel). SavedModel also allowed the easy incorporation of preprocessing logic into a single file, which made it scalable for complex deep learning use cases. Pickle and Joblib were the most challenging to integrate, even in Python-based systems. Regarding technical support, all model export formats had strong technical documentation and strong community support across platforms such as Stack Overflow and Reddit. Practitioners can use our findings to inform the selection of ML export formats suited to their context.
2502.00432
Community Membership Hiding via Gradient-based Optimization
cs.SI
We tackle the problem of \emph{community membership hiding}, which involves strategically altering a network's structure to obscure a target node's membership in a specific community identified by a detection algorithm. We reformulate the original discrete counterfactual graph objective as a differentiable constrained optimization task. To solve this, we propose \method{}, a gradient-based method that modifies the network's structure within the feasible bounds for an individual target node, effectively concealing its membership. Experimental results across multiple datasets and community detection algorithms show that our approach surpasses existing baselines, offering a better balance between accuracy and computational efficiency.
2502.00433
CAT Pruning: Cluster-Aware Token Pruning For Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
cs.CV
Diffusion models have revolutionized generative tasks, especially in the domain of text-to-image synthesis; however, their iterative denoising process demands substantial computational resources. In this paper, we present a novel acceleration strategy that integrates token-level pruning with caching techniques to tackle this computational challenge. By employing noise relative magnitude, we identify significant token changes across denoising iterations. Additionally, we enhance token selection by incorporating spatial clustering and ensuring distributional balance. Our experiments demonstrate reveal a 50%-60% reduction in computational costs while preserving the performance of the model, thereby markedly increasing the efficiency of diffusion models. The code is available at https://github.com/ada-cheng/CAT-Pruning
2502.00434
Compilation and Fast Model Counting beyond CNF
cs.CC cs.AI cs.LO
Circuits in deterministic decomposable negation normal form (d-DNNF) are representations of Boolean functions that enable linear-time model counting. This paper strengthens our theoretical knowledge of what classes of functions can be efficiently transformed, or compiled, into d-DNNF. Our main contribution is the fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) compilation of conjunctions of specific constraints parameterized by incidence treewidth. This subsumes the known result for CNF. The constraints in question are all functions representable by constant-width ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) for all variable orderings. For instance, this includes parity constraints and cardinality constraints with constant threshold. The running time of the FPT compilation is singly exponential in the incidence treewidth but hides large constants in the exponent. To balance that, we give a more efficient FPT algorithm for model counting that applies to a sub-family of the constraints and does not require compilation.
2502.00435
SatMamba: Development of Foundation Models for Remote Sensing Imagery Using State Space Models
cs.CV
Foundation models refer to deep learning models pretrained on large unlabeled datasets through self-supervised algorithms. In the Earth science and remote sensing communities, there is growing interest in transforming the use of Earth observation data, including satellite and aerial imagery, through foundation models. Various foundation models have been developed for remote sensing, such as those for multispectral, high-resolution, and hyperspectral images, and have demonstrated superior performance on various downstream tasks compared to traditional supervised models. These models are evolving rapidly, with capabilities to handle multispectral, multitemporal, and multisensor data. Most studies use masked autoencoders in combination with Vision Transformers (ViTs) as the backbone for pretraining. While the models showed promising performance, ViTs face challenges, such as quadratic computational scaling with input length, which may limit performance on multiband and multitemporal data with long sequences. This research aims to address these challenges by proposing SatMamba, a new pretraining framework that combines masked autoencoders with State Space Model, offering linear computational scaling. Experiments on high-resolution imagery across various downstream tasks show promising results, paving the way for more efficient foundation models and unlocking the full potential of Earth observation data. The source code is available in https://github.com/mdchuc/HRSFM.
2502.00436
Secure Data Reconstruction: A Direct Data-Driven Approach
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper addresses the problem of secure data reconstruction for unknown systems, where data collected from the system are susceptible to malicious manipulation. We aim to recover the real trajectory without prior knowledge of the system model. To achieve this, a behavioral language is used to represent the system, describing it using input/output trajectories instead of state-space models. We consider two attack scenarios. In the first scenario, up to $k$ entries of the collected data are malicious. On the other hand, the second scenario assumes that at most $k$ channels from sensors or actuators can be compromised, implying that any data collected from these channels might be falsified. For both scenarios, we formulate the trajectory recovery problem as an optimization problem and introduce sufficient conditions to ensure successful recovery of the true data. Since finding exact solutions to these problems can be computationally inefficient, we further approximate them using an $\ell_1$-norm and group Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). We demonstrate that under certain conditions, these approximation problems also find the true trajectory while maintaining low computation complexity. Finally, we extend the proposed algorithms to noisy data. By reconstructing the secure trajectory, this work serves as a safeguard mechanism for subsequent data-driven control methods.
2502.00439
UniAttn: Reducing Inference Costs via Softmax Unification for Post-Training LLMs
cs.CL
Post-training is essential for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to real-world applications. Deploying post-trained models faces significant challenges due to substantial memory overhead and noticeable inference latency. Existing work has identified significant redundancies in LLMs and proposed efficient architectures, namely intra-layer KV sharing and cross-layer KV sharing. However, intra-layer KV sharing still results in high inference costs, while cross-layer KV sharing leads to significant performance degradation. As a result, both methods remain suboptimal for post-training pre-trained LLMs. In this paper, we identify that the \texttt{Softmax} operation is a primary bottleneck for LLM inference and discover that it is actually highly redundant during post-training. We propose Softmax \textbf{Uni}fication in \textbf{Att}e\textbf{n}tion (\textbf{UniAttn}), a novel post-training method that unifies Softmax activations across transformer blocks to reduce LLM inference costs. Additionally, UniAttn adopts a linear projection to compensate for the errors induced by Softmax unification. Experiments show that UniAttn matches the performance of standard post-training while significantly reducing inference costs, outperforming existing efficient architectures during post-training. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Bostoncake/UniAttn}.
2502.00443
Model-Free Predictive Control: Introductory Algebraic Calculations, and a Comparison with HEOL and ANNs
eess.SY cs.AI cs.SY
Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular control engineering practice, but requires a sound knowledge of the model. Model-free predictive control (MFPC), a burning issue today, also related to reinforcement learning (RL) in AI, is reformulated here via a linear differential equation with constant coefficients, thanks to a new perspective on optimal control combined with recent advances in the field of model-free control. It is replacing Dynamic Programming, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, and Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. The computing burden is low. The implementation is straightforward. Two nonlinear examples, a chemical reactor and a two tank system, are illustrating our approach. A comparison with the HEOL setting, where some expertise of the process model is needed, shows only a slight superiority of the later. A recent identification of the two tank system via a complex ANN architecture might indicate that a full modeling and the corresponding machine learning mechanism are not always necessary neither in control, nor, more generally, in AI.
2502.00448
HERA: Improving Long Document Summarization using Large Language Models with Context Packaging and Reordering
cs.CL
Despite the rapid growth of context length of large language models (LLMs) , LLMs still perform poorly in long document summarization. An important reason for this is that relevant information about an event is scattered throughout long documents, and the messy narrative order impairs the accurate understanding and utilization of LLMs for long documents. To address these issues, we propose a novel summary generation framework, called HERA. Specifically, we first segment a long document by its semantic structure and retrieve text segments about the same event, and finally reorder them to form the input context. We evaluate our approach on two long document summarization datasets. The experimental results show that HERA outperforms foundation models in ROUGE, BERTScore and faithfulness metrics, while HERA does not require additional fine-tuning and resources.
2502.00451
Towards Privacy-aware Mental Health AI Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities
cs.CL cs.AI
Mental illness is a widespread and debilitating condition with substantial societal and personal costs. Traditional diagnostic and treatment approaches, such as self-reported questionnaires and psychotherapy sessions, often impose significant burdens on both patients and clinicians, limiting accessibility and efficiency. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in Natural Language Processing and multimodal techniques, hold great potential for recognizing and addressing conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, privacy concerns, including the risk of sensitive data leakage from datasets and trained models, remain a critical barrier to deploying these AI systems in real-world clinical settings. These challenges are amplified in multimodal methods, where personal identifiers such as voice and facial data can be misused. This paper presents a critical and comprehensive study of the privacy challenges associated with developing and deploying AI models for mental health. We further prescribe potential solutions, including data anonymization, synthetic data generation, and privacy-preserving model training, to strengthen privacy safeguards in practical applications. Additionally, we discuss evaluation frameworks to assess the privacy-utility trade-offs in these approaches. By addressing these challenges, our work aims to advance the development of reliable, privacy-aware AI tools to support clinical decision-making and improve mental health outcomes.
2502.00455
Line Balancing in the Modern Garment Industry
cs.RO
This article presents applied research on line balancing within the modern garment industry, focusing on the significant impact of intelligent hanger systems and hanger lines on the stitching process, by Lean Methodology for garment modernization. It explores the application of line balancing in the modern garment industry, focusing on the significant impact of intelligent hanger systems and hanger lines on the stitching process. It aligns with Lean Methodology principles for garment modernization. Without the implementation of line balancing technology, the garment manufacturing process using hanger systems cannot improve output rates. The case study demonstrates that implementing intelligent line balancing in a straightforward practical setup facilitates lean practices combined with a digitalization system and automaton. This approach illustrates how to enhance output and reduce accumulated work in progress.
2502.00456
Explorations of the Softmax Space: Knowing When the Neural Network Doesn't Know...
cs.LG cs.CV
Ensuring the reliability and safety of automated decision-making is crucial. This paper proposes a new approach for measuring the reliability of predictions in machine learning models. We analyze how the outputs of a trained neural network change using clustering to measure distances between outputs and class centroids. We propose this distance as a metric to evaluate the confidence of predictions. We assign each prediction to a cluster with centroid representing the mean softmax output for all correct predictions of a given class. We then define a safety threshold for a class as the smallest distance from an incorrect prediction to the given class centroid. We evaluate the approach on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets using a Convolutional Neural Network and a Vision Transformer, respectively. The results show that our approach is consistent across these data sets and network models, and indicate that the proposed metric can offer an efficient way of determining when automated predictions are acceptable and when they should be deferred to human operators.
2502.00459
AudioGenX: Explainability on Text-to-Audio Generative Models
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG eess.AS
Text-to-audio generation models (TAG) have achieved significant advances in generating audio conditioned on text descriptions. However, a critical challenge lies in the lack of transparency regarding how each textual input impacts the generated audio. To address this issue, we introduce AudioGenX, an Explainable AI (XAI) method that provides explanations for text-to-audio generation models by highlighting the importance of input tokens. AudioGenX optimizes an Explainer by leveraging factual and counterfactual objective functions to provide faithful explanations at the audio token level. This method offers a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between text inputs and audio outputs, enhancing both the explainability and trustworthiness of TAG models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AudioGenX in producing faithful explanations, benchmarked against existing methods using novel evaluation metrics specifically designed for audio generation tasks.
2502.00461
On Multiquantum Bits, Segre Embeddings and Coxeter Chambers
quant-ph cs.IT math.AG math.IT math.NT
This work explores the interplay between quantum information theory, algebraic geometry, and number theory, with a particular focus on multiqubit systems, their entanglement structure, and their classification via geometric embeddings. The Segre embedding, a fundamental construction in algebraic geometry, provides an algebraic framework to distinguish separable and entangled states, encoding quantum correlations in projective geometry. We develop a systematic study of qubit moduli spaces, illustrating the geometric structure of entanglement through hypercube constructions and Coxeter chamber decompositions. We establish a bijection between the Segre embeddings of tensor products of projective spaces and binary words of length $n-1$, structured as an $(n-1)$-dimensional hypercube, where adjacency corresponds to a single Segre operation. This reveals a combinatorial structure underlying the hierarchy of embeddings, with direct implications for quantum error correction schemes. The symmetry of the Segre variety under the Coxeter group of type $A$ allows us to analyze quantum states and errors through the lens of reflection groups, viewing separable states as lying in distinct Coxeter chambers on a Segre variety. The transitive action of the permutation group on these chambers provides a natural method for tracking errors in quantum states and potentially reversing them. Beyond foundational aspects, we highlight relations between Segre varieties and Dixon elliptic curves, drawing connections between entanglement and number theory.
2502.00462
MambaGlue: Fast and Robust Local Feature Matching With Mamba
cs.CV cs.RO
In recent years, robust matching methods using deep learning-based approaches have been actively studied and improved in computer vision tasks. However, there remains a persistent demand for both robust and fast matching techniques. To address this, we propose a novel Mamba-based local feature matching approach, called MambaGlue, where Mamba is an emerging state-of-the-art architecture rapidly gaining recognition for its superior speed in both training and inference, and promising performance compared with Transformer architectures. In particular, we propose two modules: a) MambaAttention mixer to simultaneously and selectively understand the local and global context through the Mamba-based self-attention structure and b) deep confidence score regressor, which is a multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based architecture that evaluates a score indicating how confidently matching predictions correspond to the ground-truth correspondences. Consequently, our MambaGlue achieves a balance between robustness and efficiency in real-world applications. As verified on various public datasets, we demonstrate that our MambaGlue yields a substantial performance improvement over baseline approaches while maintaining fast inference speed. Our code will be available on https://github.com/url-kaist/MambaGlue
2502.00463
Efficient Over-parameterized Matrix Sensing from Noisy Measurements via Alternating Preconditioned Gradient Descent
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
We consider the noisy matrix sensing problem in the over-parameterization setting, where the estimated rank $r$ is larger than the true rank $r_\star$. Specifically, our main objective is to recover a matrix $ X_\star \in \mathbb{R}^{n_1 \times n_2} $ with rank $ r_\star $ from noisy measurements using an over-parameterized factorized form $ LR^\top $, where $ L \in \mathbb{R}^{n_1 \times r}, \, R \in \mathbb{R}^{n_2 \times r} $ and $ \min\{n_1, n_2\} \ge r > r_\star $, with the true rank $ r_\star $ being unknown. Recently, preconditioning methods have been proposed to accelerate the convergence of matrix sensing problem compared to vanilla gradient descent, incorporating preconditioning terms $ (L^\top L + \lambda I)^{-1} $ and $ (R^\top R + \lambda I)^{-1} $ into the original gradient. However, these methods require careful tuning of the damping parameter $\lambda$ and are sensitive to initial points and step size. To address these limitations, we propose the alternating preconditioned gradient descent (APGD) algorithm, which alternately updates the two factor matrices, eliminating the need for the damping parameter and enabling faster convergence with larger step sizes. We theoretically prove that APGD achieves near-optimal error convergence at a linear rate, starting from arbitrary random initializations. Through extensive experiments, we validate our theoretical results and demonstrate that APGD outperforms other methods, achieving the fastest convergence rate. Notably, both our theoretical analysis and experimental results illustrate that APGD does not rely on the initialization procedure, making it more practical and versatile.
2502.00464
Evaluation of End-to-End Continuous Spanish Lipreading in Different Data Conditions
cs.CV
Visual speech recognition remains an open research problem where different challenges must be considered by dispensing with the auditory sense, such as visual ambiguities, the inter-personal variability among speakers, and the complex modeling of silence. Nonetheless, recent remarkable results have been achieved in the field thanks to the availability of large-scale databases and the use of powerful attention mechanisms. Besides, multiple languages apart from English are nowadays a focus of interest. This paper presents noticeable advances in automatic continuous lipreading for Spanish. First, an end-to-end system based on the hybrid CTC/Attention architecture is presented. Experiments are conducted on two corpora of disparate nature, reaching state-of-the-art results that significantly improve the best performance obtained to date for both databases. In addition, a thorough ablation study is carried out, where it is studied how the different components that form the architecture influence the quality of speech recognition. Then, a rigorous error analysis is carried out to investigate the different factors that could affect the learning of the automatic system. Finally, a new Spanish lipreading benchmark is consolidated. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/david-gimeno/evaluating-end2end-spanish-lipreading.
2502.00465
Enhance Learning Efficiency of Oblique Decision Tree via Feature Concatenation
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Oblique Decision Tree (ODT) separates the feature space by linear projections, as opposed to the conventional Decision Tree (DT) that forces axis-parallel splits. ODT has been proven to have a stronger representation ability than DT, as it provides a way to create shallower tree structures while still approximating complex decision boundaries. However, its learning efficiency is still insufficient, since the linear projections cannot be transmitted to the child nodes, resulting in a waste of model parameters. In this work, we propose an enhanced ODT method with Feature Concatenation (\texttt{FC-ODT}), which enables in-model feature transformation to transmit the projections along the decision paths. Theoretically, we prove that our method enjoys a faster consistency rate w.r.t. the tree depth, indicating that our method possesses a significant advantage in generalization performance, especially for shallow trees. Experiments show that \texttt{FC-ODT} can outperform the other state-of-the-art decision trees with a limited tree depth.
2502.00466
Enhancing Memory and Imagination Consistency in Diffusion-based World Models via Linear-Time Sequence Modeling
cs.LG
World models are crucial for enabling agents to simulate and plan within environments, yet existing approaches struggle with long-term dependencies and inconsistent predictions. We introduce EDELINE, a novel framework that integrates diffusion models with linear-time state space modelsto enhance memory retention and temporal consistency. EDELINE employs a recurrent embedding module based on Mamba SSMs for processing unbounded sequences, a unified architecture for joint reward and termination prediction, and dynamic loss harmonization to balance multi-task learning. Our results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate EDELINE's superiority and robustness over prior baselines in long-horizon tasks.
2502.00470
Distributed Primal-Dual Algorithms: Unification, Connections, and Insights
math.OC cs.LG stat.ML
We study primal-dual algorithms for general empirical risk minimization problems in distributed settings, focusing on two prominent classes of algorithms. The first class is the communication-efficient distributed dual coordinate ascent (CoCoA), derived from the coordinate ascent method for solving the dual problem. The second class is the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), including consensus ADMM, linearized ADMM, and proximal ADMM. We demonstrate that both classes of algorithms can be transformed into a unified update form that involves only primal and dual variables. This discovery reveals key connections between the two classes of algorithms: CoCoA can be interpreted as a special case of proximal ADMM for solving the dual problem, while consensus ADMM is closely related to a proximal ADMM algorithm. This discovery provides the insight that by adjusting the augmented Lagrangian parameter, we can easily enable the ADMM variants to outperform the CoCoA variants. We further explore linearized versions of ADMM and analyze the effects of tuning parameters on these ADMM variants in the distributed setting. Our theoretical findings are supported by extensive simulation studies and real-world data analysis.