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2502.03119
Comparison of the Cox proportional hazards model and Random Survival Forest algorithm for predicting patient-specific survival probabilities in clinical trial data
stat.ML cs.LG
The Cox proportional hazards model is often used for model development in data from randomized controlled trials (RCT) with time-to-event outcomes. Random survival forests (RSF) is a machine-learning algorithm known for its high predictive performance. We conduct a comprehensive neutral comparison study to compare the predictive performance of Cox regression and RSF in real-world as well as simulated data. Performance is compared using multiple performance measures according to recommendations for the comparison of prognostic prediction models. We found that while the RSF usually outperforms the Cox model when using the $C$ index, Cox model predictions may be better calibrated. With respect to overall performance, the Cox model often exceeds the RSF in nonproportional hazards settings, while otherwise the RSF typically performs better especially for smaller sample sizes. Overall performance of the RSF is more affected by higher censoring rates, while overall performance of the Cox model suffers more from smaller sample sizes.
2502.03120
At the Mahakumbh, Faith Met Tragedy: Computational Analysis of Stampede Patterns Using Machine Learning and NLP
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CY cs.SI
This study employs machine learning, historical analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) to examine recurring lethal stampedes at Indias mass religious gatherings, focusing on the 2025 Mahakumbh tragedy in Prayagraj (48+ deaths) and its 1954 predecessor (700+ casualties). Through computational modeling of crowd dynamics and administrative records, it investigates how systemic vulnerabilities contribute to these disasters. Temporal trend analysis identifies persistent choke points, with narrow riverbank access routes linked to 92% of past stampede sites and lethal crowd densities (eight or more persons per square meter) recurring during spiritually significant moments like Mauni Amavasya. NLP analysis of seven decades of inquiry reports reveals cyclical administrative failures, where VIP route prioritization diverted safety resources in both 1954 and 2025, exacerbating fatalities. Statistical modeling demonstrates how ritual urgency overrides risk perception, leading to panic propagation patterns that mirror historical incidents. Findings support the Institutional Amnesia Theory, highlighting how disaster responses remain reactionary rather than preventive. By correlating archival patterns with computational crowd behavior analysis, this study frames stampedes as a collision of infrastructure limitations, socio spiritual urgency, and governance inertia, challenging disaster discourse to address how spiritual economies normalize preventable mortality.
2502.03122
HiLo: Learning Whole-Body Human-like Locomotion with Motion Tracking Controller
cs.RO
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising method to develop humanoid robot locomotion controllers. Despite the robust and stable locomotion demonstrated by previous RL controllers, their behavior often lacks the natural and agile motion patterns necessary for human-centric scenarios. In this work, we propose HiLo (human-like locomotion with motion tracking), an effective framework designed to learn RL policies that perform human-like locomotion. The primary challenges of human-like locomotion are complex reward engineering and domain randomization. HiLo overcomes these issues by developing an RL-based motion tracking controller and simple domain randomization through random force injection and action delay. Within the framework of HiLo, the whole-body control problem can be decomposed into two components: One part is solved using an open-loop control method, while the residual part is addressed with RL policies. A distributional value function is also implemented to stabilize the training process by improving the estimation of cumulative rewards under perturbed dynamics. Our experiments demonstrate that the motion tracking controller trained using HiLo can perform natural and agile human-like locomotion while exhibiting resilience to external disturbances in real-world systems. Furthermore, we show that the motion patterns of humanoid robots can be adapted through the residual mechanism without fine-tuning, allowing quick adjustments to task requirements.
2502.03123
Disentanglement in Difference: Directly Learning Semantically Disentangled Representations by Maximizing Inter-Factor Differences
cs.LG cs.AI
In this study, Disentanglement in Difference(DiD) is proposed to address the inherent inconsistency between the statistical independence of latent variables and the goal of semantic disentanglement in disentanglement representation learning. Conventional disentanglement methods achieve disentanglement representation by improving statistical independence among latent variables. However, the statistical independence of latent variables does not necessarily imply that they are semantically unrelated, thus, improving statistical independence does not always enhance disentanglement performance. To address the above issue, DiD is proposed to directly learn semantic differences rather than the statistical independence of latent variables. In the DiD, a Difference Encoder is designed to measure the semantic differences; a contrastive loss function is established to facilitate inter-dimensional comparison. Both of them allow the model to directly differentiate and disentangle distinct semantic factors, thereby resolving the inconsistency between statistical independence and semantic disentanglement. Experimental results on the dSprites and 3DShapes datasets demonstrate that the proposed DiD outperforms existing mainstream methods across various disentanglement metrics.
2502.03124
Levelised Cost of Demand Response: Estimating the Cost-Competitiveness of Flexible Demand
eess.SY cs.SY
To make well-informed investment decisions, energy system stakeholders require reliable cost frameworks for demand response (DR) and storage technologies. While the levelised cost of storage (LCOS) permits comprehensive cost comparisons between different storage technologies, no generic cost measure for the comparison of different DR schemes exists. This paper introduces the levelised cost of demand response (LCODR) which is an analogous measure to the LCOS but crucially differs from it by considering consumer reward payments. Additionally, the value factor from cost estimations of variable renewable energy is adapted to account for the variable availability of DR. The LCODRs for four direct load control (DLC) schemes and twelve storage applications are estimated and contrasted against LCOS literature values for the most competitive storage technologies. The DLC schemes are vehicle-to-grid, smart charging, smart heat pumps, and heat pumps with thermal storage. The results show that only heat pumps with thermal storage consistently outcompete storage technologies with EV-based DR schemes being competitive for some applications. The results and the underlying methodology offer a tool for energy system stakeholders to assess the competitiveness of DR schemes even with limited user data.
2502.03125
Double Distillation Network for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
cs.MA cs.LG
Multi-agent reinforcement learning typically employs a centralized training-decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to alleviate the non-stationarity in environment. However, the partial observability during execution may lead to cumulative gap errors gathered by agents, impairing the training of effective collaborative policies. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the Double Distillation Network (DDN), which incorporates two distillation modules aimed at enhancing robust coordination and facilitating the collaboration process under constrained information. The external distillation module uses a global guiding network and a local policy network, employing distillation to reconcile the gap between global training and local execution. In addition, the internal distillation module introduces intrinsic rewards, drawn from state information, to enhance the exploration capabilities of agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDN significantly improves performance across multiple scenarios.
2502.03128
Metis: A Foundation Speech Generation Model with Masked Generative Pre-training
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG eess.AS eess.SP
We introduce Metis, a foundation model for unified speech generation. Unlike previous task-specific or multi-task models, Metis follows a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. It is pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled speech data using masked generative modeling and then fine-tuned to adapt to diverse speech generation tasks. Specifically, 1) Metis utilizes two discrete speech representations: SSL tokens derived from speech self-supervised learning (SSL) features, and acoustic tokens directly quantized from waveforms. 2) Metis performs masked generative pre-training on SSL tokens, utilizing 300K hours of diverse speech data, without any additional condition. 3) Through fine-tuning with task-specific conditions, Metis achieves efficient adaptation to various speech generation tasks while supporting multimodal input, even when using limited data and trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that Metis can serve as a foundation model for unified speech generation: Metis outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific or multi-task systems across five speech generation tasks, including zero-shot text-to-speech, voice conversion, target speaker extraction, speech enhancement, and lip-to-speech, even with fewer than 20M trainable parameters or 300 times less training data. Audio samples are are available at https://metis-demo.github.io/.
2502.03129
Teaching Large Language Models Number-Focused Headline Generation With Key Element Rationales
cs.CL cs.LG
Number-focused headline generation is a summarization task requiring both high textual quality and precise numerical accuracy, which poses a unique challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing studies in the literature focus only on either textual quality or numerical reasoning and thus are inadequate to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel chain-of-thought framework for using rationales comprising key elements of the Topic, Entities, and Numerical reasoning (TEN) in news articles to enhance the capability for LLMs to generate topic-aligned high-quality texts with precise numerical accuracy. Specifically, a teacher LLM is employed to generate TEN rationales as supervision data, which are then used to teach and fine-tune a student LLM. Our approach teaches the student LLM automatic generation of rationales with enhanced capability for numerical reasoning and topic-aligned numerical headline generation. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both textual quality and numerical accuracy.
2502.03132
SPARK: A Modular Benchmark for Humanoid Robot Safety
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
This paper introduces the Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit (SPARK), a comprehensive benchmark designed to ensure safety in humanoid autonomy and teleoperation. Humanoid robots pose significant safety risks due to their physical capabilities of interacting with complex environments. The physical structures of humanoid robots further add complexity to the design of general safety solutions. To facilitate the safe deployment of complex robot systems, SPARK can be used as a toolbox that comes with state-of-the-art safe control algorithms in a modular and composable robot control framework. Users can easily configure safety criteria and sensitivity levels to optimize the balance between safety and performance. To accelerate humanoid safety research and development, SPARK provides a simulation benchmark that compares safety approaches in a variety of environments, tasks, and robot models. Furthermore, SPARK allows quick deployment of synthesized safe controllers on real robots. For hardware deployment, SPARK supports Apple Vision Pro (AVP) or a Motion Capture System as external sensors, while also offering interfaces for seamless integration with alternative hardware setups. This paper demonstrates SPARK's capability with both simulation experiments and case studies with a Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Leveraging these advantages of SPARK, users and researchers can significantly improve the safety of their humanoid systems as well as accelerate relevant research. The open-source code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/spark.
2502.03134
Gotham Dataset 2025: A Reproducible Large-Scale IoT Network Dataset for Intrusion Detection and Security Research
cs.CR cs.AI
In this paper, a dataset of IoT network traffic is presented. Our dataset was generated by utilising the Gotham testbed, an emulated large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) network designed to provide a realistic and heterogeneous environment for network security research. The testbed includes 78 emulated IoT devices operating on various protocols, including MQTT, CoAP, and RTSP. Network traffic was captured in Packet Capture (PCAP) format using tcpdump, and both benign and malicious traffic were recorded. Malicious traffic was generated through scripted attacks, covering a variety of attack types, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Telnet Brute Force, Network Scanning, CoAP Amplification, and various stages of Command and Control (C&C) communication. The data were subsequently processed in Python for feature extraction using the Tshark tool, and the resulting data was converted to Comma Separated Values (CSV) format and labelled. The data repository includes the raw network traffic in PCAP format and the processed labelled data in CSV format. Our dataset was collected in a distributed manner, where network traffic was captured separately for each IoT device at the interface between the IoT gateway and the device. Our dataset was collected in a distributed manner, where network traffic was separately captured for each IoT device at the interface between the IoT gateway and the device. With its diverse traffic patterns and attack scenarios, this dataset provides a valuable resource for developing Intrusion Detection Systems and security mechanisms tailored to complex, large-scale IoT environments. The dataset is publicly available at Zenodo.
2502.03135
Underwater Soft Fin Flapping Motion with Deep Neural Network Based Surrogate Model
cs.RO cs.LG
This study presents a novel framework for precise force control of fin-actuated underwater robots by integrating a deep neural network (DNN)-based surrogate model with reinforcement learning (RL). To address the complex interactions with the underwater environment and the high experimental costs, a DNN surrogate model acts as a simulator for enabling efficient training for the RL agent. Additionally, grid-switching control is applied to select optimized models for specific force reference ranges, improving control accuracy and stability. Experimental results show that the RL agent, trained in the surrogate simulation, generates complex thrust motions and achieves precise control of a real soft fin actuator. This approach provides an efficient control solution for fin-actuated robots in challenging underwater environments.
2502.03139
Fast Sampling of Cosmological Initial Conditions with Gaussian Neural Posterior Estimation
astro-ph.CO astro-ph.IM cs.LG
Knowledge of the primordial matter density field from which the large-scale structure of the Universe emerged over cosmic time is of fundamental importance for cosmology. However, reconstructing these cosmological initial conditions from late-time observations is a notoriously difficult task, which requires advanced cosmological simulators and sophisticated statistical methods to explore a multi-million-dimensional parameter space. We show how simulation-based inference (SBI) can be used to tackle this problem and to obtain data-constrained realisations of the primordial dark matter density field in a simulation-efficient way with general non-differentiable simulators. Our method is applicable to full high-resolution dark matter $N$-body simulations and is based on modelling the posterior distribution of the constrained initial conditions to be Gaussian with a diagonal covariance matrix in Fourier space. As a result, we can generate thousands of posterior samples within seconds on a single GPU, orders of magnitude faster than existing methods, paving the way for sequential SBI for cosmological fields. Furthermore, we perform an analytical fit of the estimated dependence of the covariance on the wavenumber, effectively transforming any point-estimator of initial conditions into a fast sampler. We test the validity of our obtained samples by comparing them to the true values with summary statistics and performing a Bayesian consistency test.
2502.03143
Machine Learning-Driven Student Performance Prediction for Enhancing Tiered Instruction
cs.LG cs.CY
Student performance prediction is one of the most important subjects in educational data mining. As a modern technology, machine learning offers powerful capabilities in feature extraction and data modeling, providing essential support for diverse application scenarios, as evidenced by recent studies confirming its effectiveness in educational data mining. However, despite extensive prediction experiments, machine learning methods have not been effectively integrated into practical teaching strategies, hindering their application in modern education. In addition, massive features as input variables for machine learning algorithms often leads to information redundancy, which can negatively impact prediction accuracy. Therefore, how to effectively use machine learning methods to predict student performance and integrate the prediction results with actual teaching scenarios is a worthy research subject. To this end, this study integrates the results of machine learning-based student performance prediction with tiered instruction, aiming to enhance student outcomes in target course, which is significant for the application of educational data mining in contemporary teaching scenarios. Specifically, we collect original educational data and perform feature selection to reduce information redundancy. Then, the performance of five representative machine learning methods is analyzed and discussed with Random Forest showing the best performance. Furthermore, based on the results of the classification of students, tiered instruction is applied accordingly, and different teaching objectives and contents are set for all levels of students. The comparison of teaching outcomes between the control and experimental classes, along with the analysis of questionnaire results, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
2502.03144
Group Trip Planning Query Problem with Multimodal Journey
cs.MA cs.DB cs.DS
In Group Trip Planning (GTP) Query Problem, we are given a city road network where a number of Points of Interest (PoI) have been marked with their respective categories (e.g., Cafeteria, Park, Movie Theater, etc.). A group of agents want to visit one PoI from every category from their respective starting location and once finished, they want to reach their respective destinations. This problem asks which PoI from every category should be chosen so that the aggregated travel cost of the group is minimized. This problem has been studied extensively in the last decade, and several solution approaches have been proposed. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing studies have considered the different modalities of the journey, which makes the problem more practical. To bridge this gap, we introduce and study the GTP Query Problem with Multimodal Journey in this paper. Along with the other inputs of the GTP Query Problem, we are also given the different modalities of the journey that are available and their respective cost. Now, the problem is not only to select the PoIs from respective categories but also to select the modality of the journey. For this problem, we have proposed an efficient solution approach, which has been analyzed to understand their time and space requirements. A large number of experiments have been conducted using real-life datasets and the results have been reported. From the results, we observe that the PoIs and modality of journey recommended by the proposed solution approach lead to much less time and cost than the baseline methods.
2502.03146
Symmetry-Aware Bayesian Flow Networks for Crystal Generation
cs.LG cond-mat.mtrl-sci
The discovery of new crystalline materials is essential to scientific and technological progress. However, traditional trial-and-error approaches are inefficient due to the vast search space. Recent advancements in machine learning have enabled generative models to predict new stable materials by incorporating structural symmetries and to condition the generation on desired properties. In this work, we introduce SymmBFN, a novel symmetry-aware Bayesian Flow Network (BFN) for crystalline material generation that accurately reproduces the distribution of space groups found in experimentally observed crystals. SymmBFN substantially improves efficiency, generating stable structures at least 50 times faster than the next-best method. Furthermore, we demonstrate its capability for property-conditioned generation, enabling the design of materials with tailored properties. Our findings establish BFNs as an effective tool for accelerating the discovery of crystalline materials.
2502.03147
Scalable In-Context Learning on Tabular Data via Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), when customized with post-training on tabular data, can acquire general tabular in-context learning (TabICL) capabilities. These models are able to transfer effectively across diverse data schemas and different task domains. However, existing LLM-based TabICL approaches are constrained to few-shot scenarios due to the sequence length limitations of LLMs, as tabular instances represented in plain text consume substantial tokens. To address this limitation and enable scalable TabICL for any data size, we propose retrieval-augmented LLMs tailored to tabular data. Our approach incorporates a customized retrieval module, combined with retrieval-guided instruction-tuning for LLMs. This enables LLMs to effectively leverage larger datasets, achieving significantly improved performance across 69 widely recognized datasets and demonstrating promising scaling behavior. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art tabular models reveal that, while LLM-based TabICL still lags behind well-tuned numeric models in overall performance, it uncovers powerful algorithms under limited contexts, enhances ensemble diversity, and excels on specific datasets. These unique properties underscore the potential of language as a universal and accessible interface for scalable tabular data learning.
2502.03148
Abnormal Mutations: Evolution Strategies Don't Require Gaussianity
cs.NE
The mutation process in evolution strategies has been interlinked with the normal distribution since its inception. Many lines of reasoning have been given for this strong dependency, ranging from maximum entropy arguments to the need for isotropy. However, some theoretical results suggest that other distributions might lead to similar local convergence properties. This paper empirically shows that a wide range of evolutionary strategies, from the (1+1)-ES to CMA-ES, show comparable optimization performance when using a mutation distribution other than the standard Gaussian. Replacing it with, e.g., uniformly distributed mutations, does not deteriorate the performance of ES, when using the default adaptation mechanism for the strategy parameters. We observe that these results hold not only for the sphere model but also for a wider range of benchmark problems.
2502.03159
PICBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Photonic Integrated Circuits Design
cs.LG cs.AR
While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in automating various tasks in digital chip design, the field of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs)-a promising solution to advanced chip designs-remains relatively unexplored in this context. The design of PICs is time-consuming and prone to errors due to the extensive and repetitive nature of code involved in photonic chip design. In this paper, we introduce PICBench, the first benchmarking and evaluation framework specifically designed to automate PIC design generation using LLMs, where the generated output takes the form of a netlist. Our benchmark consists of dozens of meticulously crafted PIC design problems, spanning from fundamental device designs to more complex circuit-level designs. It automatically evaluates both the syntax and functionality of generated PIC designs by comparing simulation outputs with expert-written solutions, leveraging an open-source simulator. We evaluate a range of existing LLMs, while also conducting comparative tests on various prompt engineering techniques to enhance LLM performance in automated PIC design. The results reveal the challenges and potential of LLMs in the PIC design domain, offering insights into the key areas that require further research and development to optimize automation in this field. Our benchmark and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/PICDA/PICBench.
2502.03162
Low-Complexity Cram\'er-Rao Lower Bound and Sum Rate Optimization in ISAC Systems
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
While Cram\'er-Rao lower bound is an important metric in sensing functions in integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) designs, its optimization usually involves a computationally expensive solution such as semidefinite relaxation. In this paper, we aim to develop a low-complexity yet efficient algorithm for CRLB optimization. We focus on a beamforming design that maximizes the weighted sum between the communications sum rate and the sensing CRLB, subject to a transmit power constraint. Given the non-convexity of this problem, we propose a novel method that combines successive convex approximation (SCA) with a shifted generalized power iteration (SGPI) approach, termed SCA-SGPI. The SCA technique is utilized to approximate the non-convex objective function with convex surrogates, while the SGPI efficiently solves the resulting quadratic subproblems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SCA-SGPI algorithm not only achieves superior tradeoff performance compared to existing method but also significantly reduces computational time, making it a promising solution for practical ISAC applications.
2502.03163
Signature Reconstruction from Randomized Signatures
math.CA cs.LG math.PR stat.ML
Controlled ordinary differential equations driven by continuous bounded variation curves can be considered a continuous time analogue of recurrent neural networks for the construction of expressive features of the input curves. We ask up to which extent well known signature features of such curves can be reconstructed from controlled ordinary differential equations with (untrained) random vector fields. The answer turns out to be algebraically involved, but essentially the number of signature features, which can be reconstructed from the non-linear flow of the controlled ordinary differential equation, is exponential in its hidden dimension, when the vector fields are chosen to be neural with depth two. Moreover, we characterize a general linear independence condition on arbitrary vector fields, under which the signature features up to some fixed order can always be reconstructed. Algebraically speaking this complements in a quantitative manner several well known results from the theory of Lie algebras of vector fields and puts them in a context of machine learning.
2502.03183
MaxInfo: A Training-Free Key-Frame Selection Method Using Maximum Volume for Enhanced Video Understanding
cs.CV cs.LG
Modern Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) often rely on uniform frame sampling for video understanding, but this approach frequently fails to capture critical information due to frame redundancy and variations in video content. We propose MaxInfo, a training-free method based on the maximum volume principle, which selects and retains the most representative frames from the input video. By maximizing the geometric volume formed by selected embeddings, MaxInfo ensures that the chosen frames cover the most informative regions of the embedding space, effectively reducing redundancy while preserving diversity. This method enhances the quality of input representations and improves long video comprehension performance across benchmarks. For instance, MaxInfo achieves a 3.28% improvement on LongVideoBench and a 6.4% improvement on EgoSchema for LLaVA-Video-7B. It also achieves a 3.47% improvement for LLaVA-Video-72B. The approach is simple to implement and works with existing VLLMs without the need for additional training, making it a practical and effective alternative to traditional uniform sampling methods.
2502.03188
Euska\~nolDS: A Naturally Sourced Corpus for Basque-Spanish Code-Switching
cs.CL cs.AI
Code-switching (CS) remains a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), mainly due a lack of relevant data. In the context of the contact between the Basque and Spanish languages in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, CS frequently occurs in both formal and informal spontaneous interactions. However, resources to analyse this phenomenon and support the development and evaluation of models capable of understanding and generating code-switched language for this language pair are almost non-existent. We introduce a first approach to develop a naturally sourced corpus for Basque-Spanish code-switching. Our methodology consists of identifying CS texts from previously available corpora using language identification models, which are then manually validated to obtain a reliable subset of CS instances. We present the properties of our corpus and make it available under the name Euska\~nolDS.
2502.03198
SimSort: A Powerful Framework for Spike Sorting by Large-Scale Electrophysiology Simulation
q-bio.NC cs.LG
Spike sorting is an essential process in neural recording, which identifies and separates electrical signals from individual neurons recorded by electrodes in the brain, enabling researchers to study how specific neurons communicate and process information. Although there exist a number of spike sorting methods which have contributed to significant neuroscientific breakthroughs, many are heuristically designed, making it challenging to verify their correctness due to the difficulty of obtaining ground truth labels from real-world neural recordings. In this work, we explore a data-driven, deep learning-based approach. We begin by creating a large-scale dataset through electrophysiology simulations using biologically realistic computational models. We then present \textbf{SimSort}, a pretraining framework for spike sorting. Remarkably, when trained on our simulated dataset, SimSort demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to real-world spike sorting tasks, significantly outperforming existing methods. Our findings underscore the potential of data-driven techniques to enhance the reliability and scalability of spike sorting in experimental neuroscience.
2502.03199
Improve Decoding Factuality by Token-wise Cross Layer Entropy of Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Despite their impressive capacities, Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with the hallucination issue of generating inaccurate or fabricated content even when they possess correct knowledge. In this paper, we extend the exploration of the correlation between hidden-state prediction changes and output factuality into a deeper, token-wise level. Based on the insights , we propose cross-layer Entropy eNhanced Decoding (END), a decoding method that mitigates hallucinations without requiring extra training. END leverages inner probability changes across layers to individually quantify the factual knowledge required for each candidate token, and adjusts the final predicting distribution to prioritize tokens with higher factuality. Experiments on both hallucination and QA benchmarks demonstrate that END significantly enhances the truthfulness and informativeness of generated content while maintaining robust QA accuracy. Moreover, our work provides a deeper perspective on understanding the correlations between inherent knowledge and output factuality.
2502.03200
CORTEX: A Cost-Sensitive Rule and Tree Extraction Method
cs.AI cs.LG
Tree-based and rule-based machine learning models play pivotal roles in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) due to their unique ability to provide explanations in the form of tree or rule sets that are easily understandable and interpretable, making them essential for applications in which trust in model decisions is necessary. These transparent models are typically used in surrogate modeling, a post-hoc XAI approach for explaining the logic of black-box models, enabling users to comprehend and trust complex predictive systems while maintaining competitive performance. This study proposes the Cost-Sensitive Rule and Tree Extraction (CORTEX) method, a novel rule-based XAI algorithm grounded in the multi-class cost-sensitive decision tree (CSDT) method. The original version of the CSDT is extended to classification problems with more than two classes by inducing the concept of an n-dimensional class-dependent cost matrix. The performance of CORTEX as a rule-extractor XAI method is compared to other post-hoc tree and rule extraction methods across several datasets with different numbers of classes. Several quantitative evaluation metrics are employed to assess the explainability of generated rule sets. Our findings demonstrate that CORTEX is competitive with other tree-based methods and can be superior to other rule-based methods across different datasets. The extracted rule sets suggest the advantages of using the CORTEX method over other methods by producing smaller rule sets with shorter rules on average across datasets with a diverse number of classes. Overall, the results underscore the potential of CORTEX as a powerful XAI tool for scenarios that require the generation of clear, human-understandable rules while maintaining good predictive performance.
2502.03201
SpaceGNN: Multi-Space Graph Neural Network for Node Anomaly Detection with Extremely Limited Labels
cs.LG
Node Anomaly Detection (NAD) has gained significant attention in the deep learning community due to its diverse applications in real-world scenarios. Existing NAD methods primarily embed graphs within a single Euclidean space, while overlooking the potential of non-Euclidean spaces. Besides, to address the prevalent issue of limited supervision in real NAD tasks, previous methods tend to leverage synthetic data to collect auxiliary information, which is not an effective solution as shown in our experiments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel SpaceGNN model designed for NAD tasks with extremely limited labels. Specifically, we provide deeper insights into a task-relevant framework by empirically analyzing the benefits of different spaces for node representations, based on which, we design a Learnable Space Projection function that effectively encodes nodes into suitable spaces. Besides, we introduce the concept of weighted homogeneity, which we empirically and theoretically validate as an effective coefficient during information propagation. This concept inspires the design of the Distance Aware Propagation module. Furthermore, we propose the Multiple Space Ensemble module, which extracts comprehensive information for NAD under conditions of extremely limited supervision. Our findings indicate that this module is more beneficial than data augmentation techniques for NAD. Extensive experiments conducted on 9 real datasets confirm the superiority of SpaceGNN, which outperforms the best rival by an average of 8.55% in AUC and 4.31% in F1 scores. Our code is available at https://github.com/xydong127/SpaceGNN.
2502.03202
Low-cost analog signal chain for transmit-receive circuits of passive induction-based resonators
eess.SP cs.SY eess.SY
Passive wireless sensors are crucial in modern medical and industrial settings to monitor procedures and conditions. We demonstrate a circuit to inductively excite passive resonators and to conduct their decaying signal response to a low noise amplifier. Two design variations of a generic transmit-receive signal chain are proposed, measured, and described in detail for the purpose of facilitating replication. Instrumentation and design aim to be scalable for multi-channel array configurations, using either off-the-shelf class-D audio amplifiers or a custom full H-bridge. Measurements are conducted on miniature magneto-mechanical resonators in the ultra low frequency range to enable sensing and tracking applications of such devices in different environments.
2502.03206
A Unified and General Humanoid Whole-Body Controller for Fine-Grained Locomotion
cs.RO cs.AI
Locomotion is a fundamental skill for humanoid robots. However, most existing works made locomotion a single, tedious, unextendable, and passive movement. This limits the kinematic capabilities of humanoid robots. In contrast, humans possess versatile athletic abilities-running, jumping, hopping, and finely adjusting walking parameters such as frequency, and foot height. In this paper, we investigate solutions to bring such versatility into humanoid locomotion and thereby propose HUGWBC: a unified and general humanoid whole-body controller for fine-grained locomotion. By designing a general command space in the aspect of tasks and behaviors, along with advanced techniques like symmetrical loss and intervention training for learning a whole-body humanoid controlling policy in simulation, HugWBC enables real-world humanoid robots to produce various natural gaits, including walking (running), jumping, standing, and hopping, with customizable parameters such as frequency, foot swing height, further combined with different body height, waist rotation, and body pitch, all in one single policy. Beyond locomotion, HUGWBC also supports real-time interventions from external upper-body controllers like teleoperation, enabling loco-manipulation while maintaining precise control under any locomotive behavior. Our experiments validate the high tracking accuracy and robustness of HUGWBC with/without upper-body intervention for all commands, and we further provide an in-depth analysis of how the various commands affect humanoid movement and offer insights into the relationships between these commands. To our knowledge, HugWBC is the first humanoid whole-body controller that supports such fine-grained locomotion behaviors with high robustness and flexibility.
2502.03207
MotionAgent: Fine-grained Controllable Video Generation via Motion Field Agent
cs.CV cs.GR
We propose MotionAgent, enabling fine-grained motion control for text-guided image-to-video generation. The key technique is the motion field agent that converts motion information in text prompts into explicit motion fields, providing flexible and precise motion guidance. Specifically, the agent extracts the object movement and camera motion described in the text and converts them into object trajectories and camera extrinsics, respectively. An analytical optical flow composition module integrates these motion representations in 3D space and projects them into a unified optical flow. An optical flow adapter takes the flow to control the base image-to-video diffusion model for generating fine-grained controlled videos. The significant improvement in the Video-Text Camera Motion metrics on VBench indicates that our method achieves precise control over camera motion. We construct a subset of VBench to evaluate the alignment of motion information in the text and the generated video, outperforming other advanced models on motion generation accuracy.
2502.03210
From Kernels to Features: A Multi-Scale Adaptive Theory of Feature Learning
cond-mat.dis-nn cs.LG stat.ML
Theoretically describing feature learning in neural networks is crucial for understanding their expressive power and inductive biases, motivating various approaches. Some approaches describe network behavior after training through a simple change in kernel scale from initialization, resulting in a generalization power comparable to a Gaussian process. Conversely, in other approaches training results in the adaptation of the kernel to the data, involving complex directional changes to the kernel. While these approaches capture different facets of network behavior, their relationship and respective strengths across scaling regimes remains an open question. This work presents a theoretical framework of multi-scale adaptive feature learning bridging these approaches. Using methods from statistical mechanics, we derive analytical expressions for network output statistics which are valid across scaling regimes and in the continuum between them. A systematic expansion of the network's probability distribution reveals that mean-field scaling requires only a saddle-point approximation, while standard scaling necessitates additional correction terms. Remarkably, we find across regimes that kernel adaptation can be reduced to an effective kernel rescaling when predicting the mean network output of a linear network. However, even in this case, the multi-scale adaptive approach captures directional feature learning effects, providing richer insights than what could be recovered from a rescaling of the kernel alone.
2502.03214
iVISPAR -- An Interactive Visual-Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for VLMs
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CV
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are known to struggle with spatial reasoning and visual alignment. To help overcome these limitations, we introduce iVISPAR, an interactive multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs acting as agents. iVISPAR is based on a variant of the sliding tile puzzle-a classic problem that demands logical planning, spatial awareness, and multi-step reasoning. The benchmark supports visual 2D, 3D, and text-based input modalities, enabling comprehensive assessments of VLMs' planning and reasoning skills. We evaluate a broad suite of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source VLMs, comparing their performance while also providing optimal path solutions and a human baseline to assess the task's complexity and feasibility for humans. Results indicate that while some VLMs perform well on simple spatial tasks, they encounter difficulties with more complex configurations and problem properties. Notably, while VLMs generally perform better in 2D vision compared to 3D or text-based representations, they consistently fall short of human performance, illustrating the persistent challenge of visual alignment. This highlights critical gaps in current VLM capabilities, highlighting their limitations in achieving human-level cognition.
2502.03218
Data Dams: A Novel Framework for Regulating and Managing Data Flow in Large-Scale Systems
cs.IR cs.DB cs.DC
In the era of big data, managing dynamic data flows efficiently is crucial as traditional storage models struggle with real-time regulation and risk overflow. This paper introduces Data Dams, a novel framework designed to optimize data inflow, storage, and outflow by dynamically adjusting flow rates to prevent congestion while maximizing resource utilization. Inspired by physical dam mechanisms, the framework employs intelligent sluice controls and predictive analytics to regulate data flow based on system conditions such as bandwidth availability, processing capacity, and security constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the Data Dam significantly reduces average storage levels (371.68 vs. 426.27 units) and increases total outflow (7999.99 vs. 7748.76 units) compared to static baseline models. By ensuring stable and adaptive outflow rates under fluctuating data loads, this approach enhances system efficiency, mitigates overflow risks, and outperforms existing static flow control strategies. The proposed framework presents a scalable solution for dynamic data management in large-scale distributed systems, paving the way for more resilient and efficient real-time processing architectures.
2502.03220
Mitigating Language Bias in Cross-Lingual Job Retrieval: A Recruitment Platform Perspective
cs.CL
Understanding the textual components of resumes and job postings is critical for improving job-matching accuracy and optimizing job search systems in online recruitment platforms. However, existing works primarily focus on analyzing individual components within this information, requiring multiple specialized tools to analyze each aspect. Such disjointed methods could potentially hinder overall generalizability in recruitment-related text processing. Therefore, we propose a unified sentence encoder that utilized multi-task dual-encoder framework for jointly learning multiple component into the unified sentence encoder. The results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art models, despite its smaller model size. Moreover, we propose a novel metric, Language Bias Kullback-Leibler Divergence (LBKL), to evaluate language bias in the encoder, demonstrating significant bias reduction and superior cross-lingual performance.
2502.03221
Information Theoretic Analysis of PUF-Based Tamper Protection
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) enable physical tamper protection for high-assurance devices without needing a continuous power supply that is active over the entire lifetime of the device. Several methods for PUF-based tamper protection have been proposed together with practical quantization and error correction schemes. In this work we take a step back from the implementation to analyze theoretical properties and limits. We apply zero leakage output quantization to existing quantization schemes and minimize the reconstruction error probability under zero leakage. We apply wiretap coding within a helper data algorithm to enable a reliable key reconstruction for the legitimate user while guaranteeing a selectable reconstruction complexity for an attacker, analogously to the security level for a cryptographic algorithm for the attacker models considered in this work. We present lower bounds on the achievable key rates depending on the attacker's capabilities in the asymptotic and finite blocklength regime to give fundamental security guarantees even if the attacker gets partial information about the PUF response and the helper data. Furthermore, we present converse bounds on the number of PUF cells. Our results show for example that for a practical scenario one needs at least 459 PUF cells using 3 bit quantization to achieve a security level of 128 bit.
2502.03227
Adversarial Dependence Minimization
cs.LG
Many machine learning techniques rely on minimizing the covariance between output feature dimensions to extract minimally redundant representations from data. However, these methods do not eliminate all dependencies/redundancies, as linearly uncorrelated variables can still exhibit nonlinear relationships. This work provides a differentiable and scalable algorithm for dependence minimization that goes beyond linear pairwise decorrelation. Our method employs an adversarial game where small networks identify dependencies among feature dimensions, while the encoder exploits this information to reduce dependencies. We provide empirical evidence of the algorithm's convergence and demonstrate its utility in three applications: extending PCA to nonlinear decorrelation, improving the generalization of image classification methods, and preventing dimensional collapse in self-supervised representation learning.
2502.03228
GARAD-SLAM: 3D GAussian splatting for Real-time Anti Dynamic SLAM
cs.RO cs.CV
The 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based SLAM system has garnered widespread attention due to its excellent performance in real-time high-fidelity rendering. However, in real-world environments with dynamic objects, existing 3DGS-based SLAM systems often face mapping errors and tracking drift issues. To address these problems, we propose GARAD-SLAM, a real-time 3DGS-based SLAM system tailored for dynamic scenes. In terms of tracking, unlike traditional methods, we directly perform dynamic segmentation on Gaussians and map them back to the front-end to obtain dynamic point labels through a Gaussian pyramid network, achieving precise dynamic removal and robust tracking. For mapping, we impose rendering penalties on dynamically labeled Gaussians, which are updated through the network, to avoid irreversible erroneous removal caused by simple pruning. Our results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is competitive in tracking compared to baseline methods, generating fewer artifacts and higher-quality reconstructions in rendering.
2502.03229
A Unified Framework for Semi-Supervised Image Segmentation and Registration
cs.CV
Semi-supervised learning, which leverages both annotated and unannotated data, is an efficient approach for medical image segmentation, where obtaining annotations for the whole dataset is time-consuming and costly. Traditional semi-supervised methods primarily focus on extracting features and learning data distributions from unannotated data to enhance model training. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach incorporating an image registration model to generate pseudo-labels for the unannotated data, producing more geometrically correct pseudo-labels to improve the model training. Our method was evaluated on a 2D brain data set, showing excellent performance even using only 1\% of the annotated data. The results show that our approach outperforms conventional semi-supervised segmentation methods (e.g. teacher-student model), particularly in a low percentage of annotation scenario. GitHub: https://github.com/ruizhe-l/UniSegReg.
2502.03230
Efficient Vision Language Model Fine-tuning for Text-based Person Anomaly Search
cs.CV cs.MM
This paper presents the HFUT-LMC team's solution to the WWW 2025 challenge on Text-based Person Anomaly Search (TPAS). The primary objective of this challenge is to accurately identify pedestrians exhibiting either normal or abnormal behavior within a large library of pedestrian images. Unlike traditional video analysis tasks, TPAS significantly emphasizes understanding and interpreting the subtle relationships between text descriptions and visual data. The complexity of this task lies in the model's need to not only match individuals to text descriptions in massive image datasets but also accurately differentiate between search results when faced with similar descriptions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Similarity Coverage Analysis (SCA) strategy to address the recognition difficulty caused by similar text descriptions. This strategy effectively enhances the model's capacity to manage subtle differences, thus improving both the accuracy and reliability of the search. Our proposed solution demonstrated excellent performance in this challenge.
2502.03231
The Other Side of the Coin: Unveiling the Downsides of Model Aggregation in Federated Learning from a Layer-peeled Perspective
cs.LG cs.AI
In federated learning (FL), model aggregation is a critical step by which multiple clients share their knowledge with one another. However, it is also widely recognized that the aggregated model, when sent back to each client, performs poorly on local data until after several rounds of local training. This temporary performance drop can potentially slow down the convergence of the FL model. Most research in FL regards this performance drop as an inherent cost of knowledge sharing among clients and does not give it special attention. While some studies directly focus on designing techniques to alleviate the issue, an in-depth investigation of the reasons behind this performance drop has yet to be conducted.To address this gap, we conduct a layer-peeled analysis of model aggregation across various datasets and model architectures. Our findings reveal that the performance drop can be attributed to two major consequences of the aggregation process: (1) it disrupts feature variability suppression in deep neural networks (DNNs), and (2) it weakens the coupling between features and subsequent parameters.Based on these findings, we propose several simple yet effective strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of model aggregation while still enjoying the benefit it brings. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to conduct a layer-peeled analysis of model aggregation, potentially paving the way for the development of more effective FL algorithms.
2502.03232
JAMMit! Monolithic 3D-Printing of a Bead Jamming Soft Pneumatic Arm
cs.RO
3D-printed bellow soft pneumatic arms are widely adopted for their flexible design, ease of fabrication, and large deformation capabilities. However, their low stiffness limits their real-world applications. Although several methods exist to enhance the stiffness of soft actuators, many involve complex manufacturing processes not in line with modern goals of monolithic and automated additive manufacturing. With its simplicity, bead-jamming represents a simple and effective solution to these challenges. This work introduces a method for monolithic printing of a bellow soft pneumatic arm, integrating a tendon-driven central spine of bowl-shaped beads. We experimentally characterized the arm's range of motion in both unjammed and jammed states, as well as its stiffness under various actuation and jamming conditions. As a result, we provide an optimal jamming policy as a trade-off between preserving the range of motion and maximizing stiffness. The proposed design was further demonstrated in a switch-toggling task, showing its potential for practical applications.
2502.03236
Pioneer: Physics-informed Riemannian Graph ODE for Entropy-increasing Dynamics
cs.LG
Dynamic interacting system modeling is important for understanding and simulating real world systems. The system is typically described as a graph, where multiple objects dynamically interact with each other and evolve over time. In recent years, graph Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) receive increasing research attentions. While achieving encouraging results, existing solutions prioritize the traditional Euclidean space, and neglect the intrinsic geometry of the system and physics laws, e.g., the principle of entropy increasing. The limitations above motivate us to rethink the system dynamics from a fresh perspective of Riemannian geometry, and pose a more realistic problem of physics-informed dynamic system modeling, considering the underlying geometry and physics law for the first time. In this paper, we present a novel physics-informed Riemannian graph ODE for a wide range of entropy-increasing dynamic systems (termed as Pioneer). In particular, we formulate a differential system on the Riemannian manifold, where a manifold-valued graph ODE is governed by the proposed constrained Ricci flow, and a manifold preserving Gyro-transform aware of system geometry. Theoretically, we report the provable entropy non-decreasing of our formulation, obeying the physics laws. Empirical results show the superiority of Pioneer on real datasets.
2502.03238
Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis with Relation-aware Representation Learning and Iterative Classifier Calibration
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG cs.MM
Recently computer-aided diagnosis has demonstrated promising performance, effectively alleviating the workload of clinicians. However, the inherent sample imbalance among different diseases leads algorithms biased to the majority categories, leading to poor performance for rare categories. Existing works formulated this challenge as a long-tailed problem and attempted to tackle it by decoupling the feature representation and classification. Yet, due to the imbalanced distribution and limited samples from tail classes, these works are prone to biased representation learning and insufficient classifier calibration. To tackle these problems, we propose a new Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis (LMD) framework for balanced medical image classification on long-tailed datasets. In the initial stage, we develop a Relation-aware Representation Learning (RRL) scheme to boost the representation ability by encouraging the encoder to capture intrinsic semantic features through different data augmentations. In the subsequent stage, we propose an Iterative Classifier Calibration (ICC) scheme to calibrate the classifier iteratively. This is achieved by generating a large number of balanced virtual features and fine-tuning the encoder using an Expectation-Maximization manner. The proposed ICC compensates for minority categories to facilitate unbiased classifier optimization while maintaining the diagnostic knowledge in majority classes. Comprehensive experiments on three public long-tailed medical datasets demonstrate that our LMD framework significantly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/peterlipan/LMD.
2502.03244
Analysis of Value Iteration Through Absolute Probability Sequences
cs.LG
Value Iteration is a widely used algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While previous studies have extensively analyzed its convergence properties, they primarily focus on convergence with respect to the infinity norm. In this work, we use absolute probability sequences to develop a new line of analysis and examine the algorithm's convergence in terms of the $L^2$ norm, offering a new perspective on its behavior and performance.
2502.03245
Calibrated Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time-series using Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.SY eess.SP eess.SY
This paper investigates unsupervised anomaly detection in multivariate time-series data using reinforcement learning (RL) in the latent space of an autoencoder. A significant challenge is the limited availability of anomalous data, often leading to misclassifying anomalies as normal events, thus raising false negatives. RL can help overcome this limitation by promoting exploration and balancing exploitation during training, effectively preventing overfitting. Wavelet analysis is also utilized to enhance anomaly detection, enabling time-series data decomposition into both time and frequency domains. This approach captures anomalies at multiple resolutions, with wavelet coefficients extracted to detect both sudden and subtle shifts in the data, thereby refining the anomaly detection process. We calibrate the decision boundary by generating synthetic anomalies and embedding a supervised framework within the model. This supervised element aids the unsupervised learning process by fine-tuning the decision boundary and increasing the model's capacity to distinguish between normal and anomalous patterns effectively.
2502.03251
RiemannGFM: Learning a Graph Foundation Model from Riemannian Geometry
cs.LG
The foundation model has heralded a new era in artificial intelligence, pretraining a single model to offer cross-domain transferability on different datasets. Graph neural networks excel at learning graph data, the omnipresent non-Euclidean structure, but often lack the generalization capacity. Hence, graph foundation model is drawing increasing attention, and recent efforts have been made to leverage Large Language Models. On the one hand, existing studies primarily focus on text-attributed graphs, while a wider range of real graphs do not contain fruitful textual attributes. On the other hand, the sequential graph description tailored for the Large Language Model neglects the structural complexity, which is a predominant characteristic of the graph. Such limitations motivate an important question: Can we go beyond Large Language Models, and pretrain a universal model to learn the structural knowledge for any graph? The answer in the language or vision domain is a shared vocabulary. We observe the fact that there also exist shared substructures underlying graph domain, and thereby open a new opportunity of graph foundation model with structural vocabulary. The key innovation is the discovery of a simple yet effective structural vocabulary of trees and cycles, and we explore its inherent connection to Riemannian geometry. Herein, we present a universal pretraining model, RiemannGFM. Concretely, we first construct a novel product bundle to incorporate the diverse geometries of the vocabulary. Then, on this constructed space, we stack Riemannian layers where the structural vocabulary, regardless of specific graph, is learned in Riemannian manifold offering cross-domain transferability. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of RiemannGFM on a diversity of real graphs.
2502.03252
A scale of conceptual orality and literacy: Automatic text categorization in the tradition of "N\"ahe und Distanz"
cs.CL
Koch and Oesterreicher's model of "N\"ahe und Distanz" (N\"ahe = immediacy, conceptual orality; Distanz = distance, conceptual literacy) is constantly used in German linguistics. However, there is no statistical foundation for use in corpus linguistic analyzes, while it is increasingly moving into empirical corpus linguistics. Theoretically, it is stipulated, among other things, that written texts can be rated on a scale of conceptual orality and literacy by linguistic features. This article establishes such a scale based on PCA and combines it with automatic analysis. Two corpora of New High German serve as examples. When evaluating established features, a central finding is that features of conceptual orality and literacy must be distinguished in order to rank texts in a differentiated manner. The scale is also discussed with a view to its use in corpus compilation and as a guide for analyzes in larger corpora. With a theory-driven starting point and as a "tailored" dimension, the approach compared to Biber's Dimension 1 is particularly suitable for these supporting, controlling tasks.
2502.03253
How do Humans and Language Models Reason About Creativity? A Comparative Analysis
cs.CL
Creativity assessment in science and engineering is increasingly based on both human and AI judgment, but the cognitive processes and biases behind these evaluations remain poorly understood. We conducted two experiments examining how including example solutions with ratings impact creativity evaluation, using a finegrained annotation protocol where raters were tasked with explaining their originality scores and rating for the facets of remoteness (whether the response is "far" from everyday ideas), uncommonness (whether the response is rare), and cleverness. In Study 1, we analyzed creativity ratings from 72 experts with formal science or engineering training, comparing those who received example solutions with ratings (example) to those who did not (no example). Computational text analysis revealed that, compared to experts with examples, no-example experts used more comparative language (e.g., "better/worse") and emphasized solution uncommonness, suggesting they may have relied more on memory retrieval for comparisons. In Study 2, parallel analyses with state-of-the-art LLMs revealed that models prioritized uncommonness and remoteness of ideas when rating originality, suggesting an evaluative process rooted around the semantic similarity of ideas. In the example condition, while LLM accuracy in predicting the true originality scores improved, the correlations of remoteness, uncommonness, and cleverness with originality also increased substantially - to upwards of 0.99 - suggesting a homogenization in the LLMs evaluation of the individual facets. These findings highlight important implications for how humans and AI reason about creativity and suggest diverging preferences for what different populations prioritize when rating.
2502.03257
Efficient extraction of medication information from clinical notes: an evaluation in two languages
cs.CL cs.IR
Objective: To evaluate the accuracy, computational cost and portability of a new Natural Language Processing (NLP) method for extracting medication information from clinical narratives. Materials and Methods: We propose an original transformer-based architecture for the extraction of entities and their relations pertaining to patients' medication regimen. First, we used this approach to train and evaluate a model on French clinical notes, using a newly annotated corpus from H\^opitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg. Second, the portability of the approach was assessed by conducting an evaluation on clinical documents in English from the 2018 n2c2 shared task. Information extraction accuracy and computational cost were assessed by comparison with an available method using transformers. Results: The proposed architecture achieves on the task of relation extraction itself performance that are competitive with the state-of-the-art on both French and English (F-measures 0.82 and 0.96 vs 0.81 and 0.95), but reduce the computational cost by 10. End-to-end (Named Entity recognition and Relation Extraction) F1 performance is 0.69 and 0.82 for French and English corpus. Discussion: While an existing system developed for English notes was deployed in a French hospital setting with reasonable effort, we found that an alternative architecture offered end-to-end drug information extraction with comparable extraction performance and lower computational impact for both French and English clinical text processing, respectively. Conclusion: The proposed architecture can be used to extract medication information from clinical text with high performance and low computational cost and consequently suits with usually limited hospital IT resources
2502.03261
CARROT: A Cost Aware Rate Optimal Router
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NI math.ST stat.TH
With the rapid growth in the number of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a recent interest in LLM routing, or directing queries to the cheapest LLM that can deliver a suitable response. Following this line of work, we introduce CARROT, a Cost AwaRe Rate Optimal rouTer that can select models based on any desired trade-off between performance and cost. Given a query, CARROT selects a model based on estimates of models' cost and performance. Its simplicity lends CARROT computational efficiency, while our theoretical analysis demonstrates minimax rate-optimality in its routing performance. Alongside CARROT, we also introduce the Smart Price-aware Routing (SPROUT) dataset to facilitate routing on a wide spectrum of queries with the latest state-of-the-art LLMs. Using SPROUT and prior benchmarks such as Routerbench and open-LLM-leaderboard-v2 we empirically validate CARROT's performance against several alternative routers.
2502.03263
Model Reference-Based Control with Guaranteed Predefined Performance for Uncertain Strict-Feedback Systems
eess.SY cs.SY
To address the complexities posed by time- and state-varying uncertainties and the computation of analytic derivatives in strict-feedback form (SFF) systems, this study introduces a novel model reference-based control (MRBC) framework which applies locally to each subsystem (SS), to ensure output tracking performance within the specified transient and steady-state response criteria. This framework includes 1) novel homogeneous adaptive estimators (HAEs) designed to match the uncertain nonlinear SFF system to a reference model, enabling easier analysis and control design at the $SS$ level, and 2) model-based homogeneous adaptive controllers enhanced by logarithmic barrier Lyapunov functions (HAC-BLFs), intended to control the reference model provided by HAEs in each SS, while ensuring the prescribed tracking responses under control amplitude saturation. The inherently robust MRBC achieves uniformly exponential stability using a generic stability connector term, which addresses dynamic interactions between the adjacent SSs. The parameter sensitivities of HAEs and HAC-BLFs in the MRBC framework are analyzed, focusing on the system's robustness and responsiveness. The proposed MRBC framework is experimentally validated through several scenarios involving an electromechanical linear actuator system with an uncertain SFF, subjected loading disturbance forces challenging 0-95% of its capacity.
2502.03264
General Time-series Model for Universal Knowledge Representation of Multivariate Time-Series data
cs.LG
Universal knowledge representation is a central problem for multivariate time series(MTS) foundation models and yet remains open. This paper investigates this problem from the first principle and it makes four folds of contributions. First, a new empirical finding is revealed: time series with different time granularities (or corresponding frequency resolutions) exhibit distinct joint distributions in the frequency domain. This implies a crucial aspect of learning universal knowledge, one that has been overlooked by previous studies. Second, a novel Fourier knowledge attention mechanism is proposed to enable learning time granularity-aware representations from both the temporal and frequency domains. Third, an autoregressive blank infilling pre-training framework is incorporated to time series analysis for the first time, leading to a generative tasks agnostic pre-training strategy. To this end, we develop the General Time-series Model (GTM), a unified MTS foundation model that addresses the limitation of contemporary time series models, which often require token, pre-training, or model-level customizations for downstream tasks adaption. Fourth, extensive experiments show that GTM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across all generative tasks, including long-term forecasting, anomaly detection, and imputation.
2502.03266
ZISVFM: Zero-Shot Object Instance Segmentation in Indoor Robotic Environments with Vision Foundation Models
cs.CV cs.RO
Service robots operating in unstructured environments must effectively recognize and segment unknown objects to enhance their functionality. Traditional supervised learningbased segmentation techniques require extensive annotated datasets, which are impractical for the diversity of objects encountered in real-world scenarios. Unseen Object Instance Segmentation (UOIS) methods aim to address this by training models on synthetic data to generalize to novel objects, but they often suffer from the simulation-to-reality gap. This paper proposes a novel approach (ZISVFM) for solving UOIS by leveraging the powerful zero-shot capability of the segment anything model (SAM) and explicit visual representations from a selfsupervised vision transformer (ViT). The proposed framework operates in three stages: (1) generating object-agnostic mask proposals from colorized depth images using SAM, (2) refining these proposals using attention-based features from the selfsupervised ViT to filter non-object masks, and (3) applying K-Medoids clustering to generate point prompts that guide SAM towards precise object segmentation. Experimental validation on two benchmark datasets and a self-collected dataset demonstrates the superior performance of ZISVFM in complex environments, including hierarchical settings such as cabinets, drawers, and handheld objects. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Yinmlmaoliang/zisvfm.
2502.03270
When Pre-trained Visual Representations Fall Short: Limitations in Visuo-Motor Robot Learning
cs.RO cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG
The integration of pre-trained visual representations (PVRs) into visuo-motor robot learning has emerged as a promising alternative to training visual encoders from scratch. However, PVRs face critical challenges in the context of policy learning, including temporal entanglement and an inability to generalise even in the presence of minor scene perturbations. These limitations hinder performance in tasks requiring temporal awareness and robustness to scene changes. This work identifies these shortcomings and proposes solutions to address them. First, we augment PVR features with temporal perception and a sense of task completion, effectively disentangling them in time. Second, we introduce a module that learns to selectively attend to task-relevant local features, enhancing robustness when evaluated on out-of-distribution scenes. Our experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements, particularly in PVRs trained with masking objectives, and validate the effectiveness of our enhancements in addressing PVR-specific limitations.
2502.03272
Deep Learning Pipeline for Fully Automated Myocardial Infarct Segmentation from Clinical Cardiac MR Scans
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV
Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning-based method that allows to perform myocardial infarct segmentation in a fully-automated way. Materials and Methods: For this retrospective study, a cascaded framework of two and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), specialized on identifying ischemic myocardial scars on late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, was trained on an in-house training dataset consisting of 144 examinations. On a separate test dataset from the same institution, including images from 152 examinations obtained between 2021 and 2023, a quantitative comparison between artificial intelligence (AI)-based segmentations and manual segmentations was performed. Further, qualitative assessment of segmentation accuracy was evaluated for both human and AI-generated contours by two CMR experts in a blinded experiment. Results: Excellent agreement could be found between manually and automatically calculated infarct volumes ($\rho_c$ = 0.9). The qualitative evaluation showed that compared to human-based measurements, the experts rated the AI-based segmentations to better represent the actual extent of infarction significantly (p < 0.001) more often (33.4% AI, 25.1% human, 41.5% equal). On the contrary, for segmentation of microvascular obstruction (MVO), manual measurements were still preferred (11.3% AI, 55.6% human, 33.1% equal). Conclusion: This fully-automated segmentation pipeline enables CMR infarct size to be calculated in a very short time and without requiring any pre-processing of the input images while matching the segmentation quality of trained human observers. In a blinded experiment, experts preferred automated infarct segmentations more often than manual segmentations, paving the way for a potential clinical application.
2502.03274
A Scalable Approach to Probabilistic Neuro-Symbolic Verification
cs.AI
Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (NeSy AI) has emerged as a promising direction for integrating neural learning with symbolic reasoning. In the probabilistic variant of such systems, a neural network first extracts a set of symbols from sub-symbolic input, which are then used by a symbolic component to reason in a probabilistic manner towards answering a query. In this work, we address the problem of formally verifying the robustness of such NeSy probabilistic reasoning systems, therefore paving the way for their safe deployment in critical domains. We analyze the complexity of solving this problem exactly, and show that it is $\mathrm{NP}^{\# \mathrm{P}}$-hard. To overcome this issue, we propose the first approach for approximate, relaxation-based verification of probabilistic NeSy systems. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed method scales exponentially better than solver-based solutions and apply our technique to a real-world autonomous driving dataset, where we verify a safety property under large input dimensionalities and network sizes.
2502.03275
Token Assorted: Mixing Latent and Text Tokens for Improved Language Model Reasoning
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG cs.LO
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words support textual coherence rather than core reasoning information, and processing these inputs consumes substantial computation resources. In this work, we propose a hybrid representation of the reasoning process, where we partially abstract away the initial reasoning steps using latent discrete tokens generated by VQ-VAE, significantly reducing the length of reasoning traces. We explore the use of latent trace abstractions in two scenarios: 1) training the model from scratch for the Keys-Finding Maze problem, 2) fine-tuning LLMs on this hybrid data with an extended vocabulary including unseen latent tokens, for both logical and mathematical reasoning problems. To facilitate effective learning, we introduce a simple training procedure that randomly mixes latent and text tokens, which enables fast adaptation to new latent tokens. Our approach consistently outperforms the baselines methods in various benchmarks.
2502.03278
Fault-Tolerant Control for System Availability and Continuous Operation in Heavy-Duty Wheeled Mobile Robots
eess.SY cs.SY
When the control system in a heavy-duty wheeled mobile robot (HD-WMR) malfunctions, deviations from ideal motion occur, significantly heightening the risks of off-road instability and costly damage. To meet the demands for safety, reliability, and controllability in HD-WMRs, the control system must tolerate faults to a certain extent, ensuring continuous operation. To this end, this paper introduces a model-free hierarchical control with fault accommodation (MFHCA) framework designed to address sensor and actuator faults in hydraulically powered HD-WMRs with independently controlled wheels. To begin, a novel mathematical representation of the motion dynamics of HD-WMRs, incorporating both sensor and actuator fault modes, is investigated. Subsequently, the MFHCA framework is proposed to manage all wheels under various fault modes, ensuring that each wheel tracks the reference driving velocities and steering angles, which are inverse kinematically mapped from the angular and linear velocities commanded in the HD-WMR's base frame. To do so, this framework generates appropriate power efforts in independently valve-regulated wheels to accommodate the adaptively isolated faults, thereby ensuring exponential stability. The experimental analysis of a 6,500-kg hydraulic-powered HD-WMR under various fault modes and rough terrains demonstrates the validity of the MFHCA framework.
2502.03283
SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs
cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Recent advancements have highlighted that Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations when solving complex reasoning problems, leading to erroneous results. To tackle this issue, researchers incorporate Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs. However, existing methods face two limitations: 1) they typically assume that all answers to the questions are contained in KGs, neglecting the incompleteness issue of KGs, and 2) they treat the KG as a static repository and overlook the implicit logical reasoning structures inherent in KGs. In this paper, we introduce SymAgent, an innovative neural-symbolic agent framework that achieves collaborative augmentation between KGs and LLMs. We conceptualize KGs as dynamic environments and transform complex reasoning tasks into a multi-step interactive process, enabling KGs to participate deeply in the reasoning process. SymAgent consists of two modules: Agent-Planner and Agent-Executor. The Agent-Planner leverages LLM's inductive reasoning capability to extract symbolic rules from KGs, guiding efficient question decomposition. The Agent-Executor autonomously invokes predefined action tools to integrate information from KGs and external documents, addressing the issues of KG incompleteness. Furthermore, we design a self-learning framework comprising online exploration and offline iterative policy updating phases, enabling the agent to automatically synthesize reasoning trajectories and improve performance. Experimental results demonstrate that SymAgent with weak LLM backbones (i.e., 7B series) yields better or comparable performance compared to various strong baselines. Further analysis reveals that our agent can identify missing triples, facilitating automatic KG updates.
2502.03285
Deep Learning-based Event Data Coding: A Joint Spatiotemporal and Polarity Solution
cs.CV eess.IV
Neuromorphic vision sensors, commonly referred to as event cameras, have recently gained relevance for applications requiring high-speed, high dynamic range and low-latency data acquisition. Unlike traditional frame-based cameras that capture 2D images, event cameras generate a massive number of pixel-level events, composed by spatiotemporal and polarity information, with very high temporal resolution, thus demanding highly efficient coding solutions. Existing solutions focus on lossless coding of event data, assuming that no distortion is acceptable for the target use cases, mostly including computer vision tasks. One promising coding approach exploits the similarity between event data and point clouds, thus allowing to use current point cloud coding solutions to code event data, typically adopting a two-point clouds representation, one for each event polarity. This paper proposes a novel lossy Deep Learning-based Joint Event data Coding (DL-JEC) solution adopting a single-point cloud representation, thus enabling to exploit the correlation between the spatiotemporal and polarity event information. DL-JEC can achieve significant compression performance gains when compared with relevant conventional and DL-based state-of-the-art event data coding solutions. Moreover, it is shown that it is possible to use lossy event data coding with its reduced rate regarding lossless coding without compromising the target computer vision task performance, notably for event classification. The use of novel adaptive voxel binarization strategies, adapted to the target task, further enables DL-JEC to reach a superior performance.
2502.03286
Conditional Prediction by Simulation for Automated Driving
cs.RO cs.CV
Modular automated driving systems commonly handle prediction and planning as sequential, separate tasks, thereby prohibiting cooperative maneuvers. To enable cooperative planning, this work introduces a prediction model that models the conditional dependencies between trajectories. For this, predictions are generated by a microscopic traffic simulation, with the individual traffic participants being controlled by a realistic behavior model trained via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning. By assuming various candidate trajectories for the automated vehicle, we generate predictions conditioned on each of them. Furthermore, our approach allows the candidate trajectories to adapt dynamically during the prediction rollout. Several example scenarios are available at https://conditionalpredictionbysimulation.github.io/.
2502.03287
STEMS: Spatial-Temporal Mapping Tool For Spiking Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.AI cs.AR cs.DC
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising bio-inspired third-generation neural networks. Recent research has trained deep SNN models with accuracy on par with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Although the event-driven and sparse nature of SNNs show potential for more energy efficient computation than ANNs, SNN neurons have internal states which evolve over time. Keeping track of SNN states can significantly increase data movement and storage requirements, potentially losing its advantages with respect to ANNs. This paper investigates the energy effects of having neuron states, and how it is influenced by the chosen mapping to realistic hardware architectures with advanced memory hierarchies. Therefore, we develop STEMS, a mapping design space exploration tool for SNNs. STEMS models SNN's stateful behavior and explores intra-layer and inter-layer mapping optimizations to minimize data movement, considering both spatial and temporal SNN dimensions. Using STEMS, we show up to 12x reduction in off-chip data movement and 5x reduction in energy (on top of intra-layer optimizations), on two event-based vision SNN benchmarks. Finally, neuron states may not be needed for all SNN layers. By optimizing neuron states for one of our benchmarks, we show 20x reduction in neuron states and 1.4x better performance without accuracy loss.
2502.03292
ALPET: Active Few-shot Learning for Citation Worthiness Detection in Low-Resource Wikipedia Languages
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Citation Worthiness Detection (CWD) consists in determining which sentences, within an article or collection, should be backed up with a citation to validate the information it provides. This study, introduces ALPET, a framework combining Active Learning (AL) and Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), to enhance CWD for languages with limited data resources. Applied to Catalan, Basque, and Albanian Wikipedia datasets, ALPET outperforms the existing CCW baseline while reducing the amount of labeled data in some cases above 80\%. ALPET's performance plateaus after 300 labeled samples, showing it suitability for low-resource scenarios where large, labeled datasets are not common. While specific active learning query strategies, like those employing K-Means clustering, can offer advantages, their effectiveness is not universal and often yields marginal gains over random sampling, particularly with smaller datasets. This suggests that random sampling, despite its simplicity, remains a strong baseline for CWD in constraint resource environments. Overall, ALPET's ability to achieve high performance with fewer labeled samples makes it a promising tool for enhancing the verifiability of online content in low-resource language settings.
2502.03297
IRIS: An Immersive Robot Interaction System
cs.RO cs.LG
This paper introduces IRIS, an immersive Robot Interaction System leveraging Extended Reality (XR), designed for robot data collection and interaction across multiple simulators, benchmarks, and real-world scenarios. While existing XR-based data collection systems provide efficient and intuitive solutions for large-scale data collection, they are often challenging to reproduce and reuse. This limitation arises because current systems are highly tailored to simulator-specific use cases and environments. IRIS is a novel, easily extendable framework that already supports multiple simulators, benchmarks, and even headsets. Furthermore, IRIS is able to include additional information from real-world sensors, such as point clouds captured through depth cameras. A unified scene specification is generated directly from simulators or real-world sensors and transmitted to XR headsets, creating identical scenes in XR. This specification allows IRIS to support any of the objects, assets, and robots provided by the simulators. In addition, IRIS introduces shared spatial anchors and a robust communication protocol that links simulations between multiple XR headsets. This feature enables multiple XR headsets to share a synchronized scene, facilitating collaborative and multi-user data collection. IRIS can be deployed on any device that supports the Unity Framework, encompassing the vast majority of commercially available headsets. In this work, IRIS was deployed and tested on the Meta Quest 3 and the HoloLens 2. IRIS showcased its versatility across a wide range of real-world and simulated scenarios, using current popular robot simulators such as MuJoCo, IsaacSim, CoppeliaSim, and Genesis. In addition, a user study evaluates IRIS on a data collection task for the LIBERO benchmark. The study shows that IRIS significantly outperforms the baseline in both objective and subjective metrics.
2502.03298
MeDiSumQA: Patient-Oriented Question-Answer Generation from Discharge Letters
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
While increasing patients' access to medical documents improves medical care, this benefit is limited by varying health literacy levels and complex medical terminology. Large language models (LLMs) offer solutions by simplifying medical information. However, evaluating LLMs for safe and patient-friendly text generation is difficult due to the lack of standardized evaluation resources. To fill this gap, we developed MeDiSumQA. MeDiSumQA is a dataset created from MIMIC-IV discharge summaries through an automated pipeline combining LLM-based question-answer generation with manual quality checks. We use this dataset to evaluate various LLMs on patient-oriented question-answering. Our findings reveal that general-purpose LLMs frequently surpass biomedical-adapted models, while automated metrics correlate with human judgment. By releasing MeDiSumQA on PhysioNet, we aim to advance the development of LLMs to enhance patient understanding and ultimately improve care outcomes.
2502.03302
MAP Image Recovery with Guarantees using Locally Convex Multi-Scale Energy (LC-MUSE) Model
cs.LG cs.CV eess.IV
We propose a multi-scale deep energy model that is strongly convex in the local neighbourhood around the data manifold to represent its probability density, with application in inverse problems. In particular, we represent the negative log-prior as a multi-scale energy model parameterized by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We restrict the gradient of the CNN to be locally monotone, which constrains the model as a Locally Convex Multi-Scale Energy (LC-MuSE). We use the learned energy model in image-based inverse problems, where the formulation offers several desirable properties: i) uniqueness of the solution, ii) convergence guarantees to a minimum of the inverse problem, and iii) robustness to input perturbations. In the context of parallel Magnetic Resonance (MR) image reconstruction, we show that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art convex regularizers, while the performance is comparable to plug-and-play regularizers and end-to-end trained methods.
2502.03304
Harmony in Divergence: Towards Fast, Accurate, and Memory-efficient Zeroth-order LLM Fine-tuning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising memory-efficient training paradigm, avoiding backward passes and relying solely on forward passes for gradient estimation, making it attractive for resource-constrained scenarios. However, ZO method lags far behind FO method in both convergence speed and accuracy. To bridge the gap, we introduce a novel layer-wise divergence analysis that uncovers the distinct update pattern of FO and ZO optimization. Aiming to resemble the learning capacity of FO method from the findings, we propose \textbf{Di}vergence-driven \textbf{Z}eroth-\textbf{O}rder (\textbf{DiZO}) optimization. DiZO conducts divergence-driven layer adaptation by incorporating projections to ZO updates, generating diverse-magnitude updates precisely scaled to layer-wise individual optimization needs. Our results demonstrate that DiZO significantly reduces the needed iterations for convergence without sacrificing throughput, cutting training GPU hours by up to 48\% on various datasets. Moreover, DiZO consistently outperforms the representative ZO baselines in fine-tuning RoBERTa-large, OPT-series, and Llama-series on downstream tasks and, in some cases, even surpasses memory-intensive FO fine-tuning.
2502.03307
Intent Alignment between Interaction and Language Spaces for Recommendation
cs.IR
Intent-based recommender systems have garnered significant attention for uncovering latent fine-grained preferences. Intents, as underlying factors of interactions, are crucial for improving recommendation interpretability. Most methods define intents as learnable parameters updated alongside interactions. However, existing frameworks often overlook textual information (e.g., user reviews, item descriptions), which is crucial for alleviating the sparsity of interaction intents. Exploring these multimodal intents, especially the inherent differences in representation spaces, poses two key challenges: i) How to align multimodal intents and effectively mitigate noise issues; ii) How to extract and match latent key intents across modalities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic framework, Intent Representation Learning with Large Language Model (IRLLRec), which leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct multimodal intents and enhance recommendations. Specifically, IRLLRec employs a dual-tower architecture to learn multimodal intent representations. Next, we propose pairwise and translation alignment to eliminate inter-modal differences and enhance robustness against noisy input features. Finally, to better match textual and interaction-based intents, we employ momentum distillation to perform teacher-student learning on fused intent representations. Empirical evaluations on three datasets show that our IRLLRec framework outperforms baselines.
2502.03317
Contact-Aware Motion Planning Among Movable Objects
cs.RO
Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where contact is inevitable or intentional. To address these issues, we propose a novel contact-aware motion planning (CAMP) paradigm for robotic systems. Our approach incorporates contact between robots and movable objects as complementarity constraints in optimization-based trajectory planning. By leveraging augmented Lagrangian methods (ALMs), we efficiently solve the optimization problem with complementarity constraints, producing spatial-temporal optimal trajectories of the robots. Simulations demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art method, our proposed CAMP method expands the reachable space of mobile robots, resulting in a significant improvement in the success rate of two types of fundamental tasks: navigation among movable objects (NAMO) and rearrangement of movable objects (RAMO). Real-world experiments show that the trajectories generated by our proposed method are feasible and quickly deployed in different tasks.
2502.03321
Simplifying Formal Proof-Generating Models with ChatGPT and Basic Searching Techniques
cs.LO cs.AI
The challenge of formal proof generation has a rich history, but with modern techniques, we may finally be at the stage of making actual progress in real-life mathematical problems. This paper explores the integration of ChatGPT and basic searching techniques to simplify generating formal proofs, with a particular focus on the miniF2F dataset. We demonstrate how combining a large language model like ChatGPT with a formal language such as Lean, which has the added advantage of being verifiable, enhances the efficiency and accessibility of formal proof generation. Despite its simplicity, our best-performing Lean-based model surpasses all known benchmarks with a 31.15% pass rate. We extend our experiments to include other datasets and employ alternative language models, showcasing our models' comparable performance in diverse settings and allowing for a more nuanced analysis of our results. Our findings offer insights into AI-assisted formal proof generation, suggesting a promising direction for future research in formal mathematical proof.
2502.03322
An efficient end-to-end computational framework for the generation of ECG calibrated volumetric models of human atrial electrophysiology
math.NA cs.CE cs.NA q-bio.TO
Computational models of atrial electrophysiology (EP) are increasingly utilized for applications such as the development of advanced mapping systems, personalized clinical therapy planning, and the generation of virtual cohorts and digital twins. These models have the potential to establish robust causal links between simulated in silico behaviors and observed human atrial EP, enabling safer, cost-effective, and comprehensive exploration of atrial dynamics. However, current state-of-the-art approaches lack the fidelity and scalability required for regulatory-grade applications, particularly in creating high-quality virtual cohorts or patient-specific digital twins. Challenges include anatomically accurate model generation, calibration to sparse and uncertain clinical data, and computational efficiency within a streamlined workflow. This study addresses these limitations by introducing novel methodologies integrated into an automated end-to-end workflow for generating high-fidelity digital twin snapshots and virtual cohorts of atrial EP. These innovations include: (i) automated multi-scale generation of volumetric biatrial models with detailed anatomical structures and fiber architecture; (ii) a robust method for defining space-varying atrial parameter fields; (iii) a parametric approach for modeling inter-atrial conduction pathways; and (iv) an efficient forward EP model for high-fidelity electrocardiogram computation. We evaluated this workflow on a cohort of 50 atrial fibrillation patients, producing high-quality meshes suitable for reaction-eikonal and reaction-diffusion models and demonstrating the ability to simulate atrial ECGs under parametrically controlled conditions. These advancements represent a critical step toward scalable, precise, and clinically applicable digital twin models and virtual cohorts, enabling enhanced patient-specific predictions and therapeutic planning.
2502.03323
Out-of-Distribution Detection using Synthetic Data Generation
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Distinguishing in- and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is crucial for reliable deployment of classification systems. However, OOD data is typically unavailable or difficult to collect, posing a significant challenge for accurate OOD detection. In this work, we present a method that harnesses the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create high-quality synthetic OOD proxies, eliminating the dependency on any external OOD data source. We study the efficacy of our method on classical text classification tasks such as toxicity detection and sentiment classification as well as classification tasks arising in LLM development and deployment, such as training a reward model for RLHF and detecting misaligned generations. Extensive experiments on nine InD-OOD dataset pairs and various model sizes show that our approach dramatically lowers false positive rates (achieving a perfect zero in some cases) while maintaining high accuracy on in-distribution tasks, outperforming baseline methods by a significant margin.
2502.03325
ECM: A Unified Electronic Circuit Model for Explaining the Emergence of In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Model
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant successes across various applications, where the most noticeable is to a series of emerging capabilities, particularly in the areas of In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). To better understand and control model performance, many studies have begun investigating the underlying causes of these phenomena and their impact on task outcomes. However, existing explanatory frameworks predominantly focus on isolating and explaining ICL and CoT independently, leading to an incomplete understanding of their combined influence on model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Electronic Circuit Model (ECM), which provides a foundation for developing scalable, learnable policies and improving the management of AI-generated content. Specifically, ECM conceptualizes model behavior as an electronic circuit: ICL is represented as semantic magnetic field to providing an additional voltage following Faraday's Law, while CoT is modeled as series resistors to constrain the model output performance following Ohm's Law. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECM effectively predicts and explains LLM performance across a variety of prompting strategies. Furthermore, we apply ECM to advanced reasoning strategy optimization on a series of tasks, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving competitive performance that surpasses nearly 80% of top human competitors.
2502.03327
Is In-Context Universality Enough? MLPs are Also Universal In-Context
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NA cs.NE math.NA math.PR
The success of transformers is often linked to their ability to perform in-context learning. Recent work shows that transformers are universal in context, capable of approximating any real-valued continuous function of a context (a probability measure over $\mathcal{X}\subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$) and a query $x\in \mathcal{X}$. This raises the question: Does in-context universality explain their advantage over classical models? We answer this in the negative by proving that MLPs with trainable activation functions are also universal in-context. This suggests the transformer's success is likely due to other factors like inductive bias or training stability.
2502.03330
Controllable GUI Exploration
cs.HC cs.AI cs.CV cs.GR
During the early stages of interface design, designers need to produce multiple sketches to explore a design space. Design tools often fail to support this critical stage, because they insist on specifying more details than necessary. Although recent advances in generative AI have raised hopes of solving this issue, in practice they fail because expressing loose ideas in a prompt is impractical. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-based approach to the low-effort generation of interface sketches. It breaks new ground by allowing flexible control of the generation process via three types of inputs: A) prompts, B) wireframes, and C) visual flows. The designer can provide any combination of these as input at any level of detail, and will get a diverse gallery of low-fidelity solutions in response. The unique benefit is that large design spaces can be explored rapidly with very little effort in input-specification. We present qualitative results for various combinations of input specifications. Additionally, we demonstrate that our model aligns more accurately with these specifications than other models.
2502.03332
A Mixture-Based Framework for Guiding Diffusion Models
stat.ML cs.LG
Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time compute and thereby eliminating the need to retrain task-specific models on the same dataset. To approximate the posterior of a Bayesian inverse problem, a diffusion model samples from a sequence of intermediate posterior distributions, each with an intractable likelihood function. This work proposes a novel mixture approximation of these intermediate distributions. Since direct gradient-based sampling of these mixtures is infeasible due to intractable terms, we propose a practical method based on Gibbs sampling. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on image inverse problems, utilizing both pixel- and latent-space diffusion priors, as well as on source separation with an audio diffusion model. The code is available at https://www.github.com/badr-moufad/mgdm
2502.03333
RadVLM: A Multitask Conversational Vision-Language Model for Radiology
cs.CV cs.AI
The widespread use of chest X-rays (CXRs), coupled with a shortage of radiologists, has driven growing interest in automated CXR analysis and AI-assisted reporting. While existing vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in specific tasks such as report generation or abnormality detection, they often lack support for interactive diagnostic capabilities. In this work we present RadVLM, a compact, multitask conversational foundation model designed for CXR interpretation. To this end, we curate a large-scale instruction dataset comprising over 1 million image-instruction pairs containing both single-turn tasks -- such as report generation, abnormality classification, and visual grounding -- and multi-turn, multi-task conversational interactions. After fine-tuning RadVLM on this instruction dataset, we evaluate it across different tasks along with re-implemented baseline VLMs. Our results show that RadVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in conversational capabilities and visual grounding while remaining competitive in other radiology tasks. Ablation studies further highlight the benefit of joint training across multiple tasks, particularly for scenarios with limited annotated data. Together, these findings highlight the potential of RadVLM as a clinically relevant AI assistant, providing structured CXR interpretation and conversational capabilities to support more effective and accessible diagnostic workflows.
2502.03335
Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Rate-Reward Trade-off in Markov Decision Processes
cs.IT math.IT
The impact of communication on decision-making systems has been extensively studied under the assumption of dedicated communication channels. We instead consider communicating through actions, where the message is embedded into the actions of an agent which interacts with the environment in a Markov decision process (MDP) framework. We conceptualize the MDP environment as a finite-state channel (FSC), where the actions of the agent serve as the channel input, while the states of the MDP observed by another agent (i.e., receiver) serve as the channel output. Here, we treat the environment as a communication channel over which the agent communicates through its actions, while at the same time, trying to maximize its reward. We first characterize the optimal information theoretic trade-off between the average reward and the rate of reliable communication in the infinite-horizon regime. Then, we propose a novel framework to design a joint control/coding policy, termed \textit{Act2Comm}, which seamlessly embeds messages into actions. From a communication perspective, \textit{Act2Comm} functions as a learning-based channel coding scheme for non-differentiable FSCs under input-output constraints. From a control standpoint, \textit{Act2Comm} learns an MDP policy that incorporates communication capabilities, though at the cost of some control performance. Overall, \textit{Act2Comm} effectively balances the dual objectives of control and communication in this environment. Experimental results validate \textit{Act2Comm}'s capability to enable reliable communication while maintaining a certain level of control performance.
2502.03338
Optimal PMU Placement for Kalman Filtering of DAE Power System Models
eess.SY cs.SY
Optimal sensor placement is essential for minimizing costs and ensuring accurate state estimation in power systems. This paper introduces a novel method for optimal sensor placement for dynamic state estimation of power systems modeled by differential-algebraic equations. The method identifies optimal sensor locations by minimizing the steady-state covariance matrix of the Kalman filter, thus minimizing the error of joint differential and algebraic state estimation. The problem is reformulated as a mixed-integer semidefinite program and effectively solved using off-the-shelf numerical solvers. Numerical results demonstrate the merits of the proposed approach by benchmarking its performance in phasor measurement unit placement in comparison to greedy algorithms.
2502.03340
Interaction-Aware Gaussian Weighting for Clustered Federated Learning
cs.LG
Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a decentralized paradigm to train models while preserving privacy. However, conventional FL struggles with data heterogeneity and class imbalance, which degrade model performance. Clustered FL balances personalization and decentralized training by grouping clients with analogous data distributions, enabling improved accuracy while adhering to privacy constraints. This approach effectively mitigates the adverse impact of heterogeneity in FL. In this work, we propose a novel clustered FL method, FedGWC (Federated Gaussian Weighting Clustering), which groups clients based on their data distribution, allowing training of a more robust and personalized model on the identified clusters. FedGWC identifies homogeneous clusters by transforming individual empirical losses to model client interactions with a Gaussian reward mechanism. Additionally, we introduce the Wasserstein Adjusted Score, a new clustering metric for FL to evaluate cluster cohesion with respect to the individual class distribution. Our experiments on benchmark datasets show that FedGWC outperforms existing FL algorithms in cluster quality and classification accuracy, validating the efficacy of our approach.
2502.03341
Adaptive Variational Inference in Probabilistic Graphical Models: Beyond Bethe, Tree-Reweighted, and Convex Free Energies
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
Variational inference in probabilistic graphical models aims to approximate fundamental quantities such as marginal distributions and the partition function. Popular approaches are the Bethe approximation, tree-reweighted, and other types of convex free energies. These approximations are efficient but can fail if the model is complex and highly interactive. In this work, we analyze two classes of approximations that include the above methods as special cases: first, if the model parameters are changed; and second, if the entropy approximation is changed. We discuss benefits and drawbacks of either approach, and deduce from this analysis how a free energy approximation should ideally be constructed. Based on our observations, we propose approximations that automatically adapt to a given model and demonstrate their effectiveness for a range of difficult problems.
2502.03346
Implicit Communication in Human-Robot Collaborative Transport
cs.RO
We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination between two heterogeneous agents, who have very different sensing, actuation, and reasoning capabilities. Our key insight is that the two agents can coordinate fluently by encoding subtle, communicative signals into actions that affect the state of the transported object. To this end, we design an inference mechanism that probabilistically maps observations of joint actions executed by the two agents to a set of joint strategies of workspace traversal. Based on this mechanism, we define a cost representing the human's uncertainty over the unfolding traversal strategy and introduce it into a model predictive controller that balances between uncertainty minimization and efficiency maximization. We deploy our framework on a mobile manipulator (Hello Robot Stretch) and evaluate it in a within-subjects lab study (N=24). We show that our framework enables greater team performance and empowers the robot to be perceived as a significantly more fluent and competent partner compared to baselines lacking a communicative mechanism.
2502.03347
DiversityOne: A Multi-Country Smartphone Sensor Dataset for Everyday Life Behavior Modeling
cs.CY cs.SI
Understanding everyday life behavior of young adults through personal devices, e.g., smartphones and smartwatches, is key for various applications, from enhancing the user experience in mobile apps to enabling appropriate interventions in digital health apps. Towards this goal, previous studies have relied on datasets combining passive sensor data with human-provided annotations or self-reports. However, many existing datasets are limited in scope, often focusing on specific countries primarily in the Global North, involving a small number of participants, or using a limited range of pre-processed sensors. These limitations restrict the ability to capture cross-country variations of human behavior, including the possibility of studying model generalization, and robustness. To address this gap, we introduce DiversityOne, a dataset which spans eight countries (China, Denmark, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, Paraguay, and the United Kingdom) and includes data from 782 college students over four weeks. DiversityOne contains data from 26 smartphone sensor modalities and 350K+ self-reports. As of today, it is one of the largest and most diverse publicly available datasets, while featuring extensive demographic and psychosocial survey data. DiversityOne opens the possibility of studying important research problems in ubiquitous computing, particularly in domain adaptation and generalization across countries, all research areas so far largely underexplored because of the lack of adequate datasets.
2502.03349
Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play
cs.LG cs.AI cs.RO
Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic driving emerges entirely from self-play in simulation at unprecedented scale -- 1.6~billion~km of driving. This is enabled by Gigaflow, a batched simulator that can synthesize and train on 42 years of subjective driving experience per hour on a single 8-GPU node. The resulting policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on three independent autonomous driving benchmarks. The policy outperforms the prior state of the art when tested on recorded real-world scenarios, amidst human drivers, without ever seeing human data during training. The policy is realistic when assessed against human references and achieves unprecedented robustness, averaging 17.5 years of continuous driving between incidents in simulation.
2502.03350
Optimal Task Order for Continual Learning of Multiple Tasks
stat.ML cs.LG
Continual learning of multiple tasks remains a major challenge for neural networks. Here, we investigate how task order influences continual learning and propose a strategy for optimizing it. Leveraging a linear teacher-student model with latent factors, we derive an analytical expression relating task similarity and ordering to learning performance. Our analysis reveals two principles that hold under a wide parameter range: (1) tasks should be arranged from the least representative to the most typical, and (2) adjacent tasks should be dissimilar. We validate these rules on both synthetic data and real-world image classification datasets (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100), demonstrating consistent performance improvements in both multilayer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks. Our work thus presents a generalizable framework for task-order optimization in task-incremental continual learning.
2502.03356
Inverse Mixed Strategy Games with Generative Trajectory Models
cs.RO
Game-theoretic models are effective tools for modeling multi-agent interactions, especially when robots need to coordinate with humans. However, applying these models requires inferring their specifications from observed behaviors -- a challenging task known as the inverse game problem. Existing inverse game approaches often struggle to account for behavioral uncertainty and measurement noise, and leverage both offline and online data. To address these limitations, we propose an inverse game method that integrates a generative trajectory model into a differentiable mixed-strategy game framework. By representing the mixed strategy with a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), our method can infer high-dimensional, multi-modal behavior distributions from noisy measurements while adapting in real-time to new observations. We extensively evaluate our method in a simulated navigation benchmark, where the observations are generated by an unknown game model. Despite the model mismatch, our method can infer Nash-optimal actions comparable to those of the ground-truth model and the oracle inverse game baseline, even in the presence of uncertain agent objectives and noisy measurements.
2502.03358
Minerva: A Programmable Memory Test Benchmark for Language Models
cs.CL
How effectively can LLM-based AI assistants utilize their memory (context) to perform various tasks? Traditional data benchmarks, which are often manually crafted, suffer from several limitations: they are static, susceptible to overfitting, difficult to interpret, and lack actionable insights--failing to pinpoint the specific capabilities a model lacks when it does not pass a test. In this paper, we present a framework for automatically generating a comprehensive set of tests to evaluate models' abilities to use their memory effectively. Our framework extends the range of capability tests beyond the commonly explored (passkey, key-value, needle in the haystack) search, a dominant focus in the literature. Specifically, we evaluate models on atomic tasks such as searching, recalling, editing, matching, comparing information in context memory, and performing basic operations when inputs are structured into distinct blocks, simulating real-world data. Additionally, we design composite tests to investigate the models' ability to maintain state while operating on memory. Our benchmark enables an interpretable, detailed assessment of memory capabilities of LLMs.
2502.03359
GHOST: Gaussian Hypothesis Open-Set Technique
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Evaluations of large-scale recognition methods typically focus on overall performance. While this approach is common, it often fails to provide insights into performance across individual classes, which can lead to fairness issues and misrepresentation. Addressing these gaps is crucial for accurately assessing how well methods handle novel or unseen classes and ensuring a fair evaluation. To address fairness in Open-Set Recognition (OSR), we demonstrate that per-class performance can vary dramatically. We introduce Gaussian Hypothesis Open Set Technique (GHOST), a novel hyperparameter-free algorithm that models deep features using class-wise multivariate Gaussian distributions with diagonal covariance matrices. We apply Z-score normalization to logits to mitigate the impact of feature magnitudes that deviate from the model's expectations, thereby reducing the likelihood of the network assigning a high score to an unknown sample. We evaluate GHOST across multiple ImageNet-1K pre-trained deep networks and test it with four different unknown datasets. Using standard metrics such as AUOSCR, AUROC and FPR95, we achieve statistically significant improvements, advancing the state-of-the-art in large-scale OSR. Source code is provided online.
2502.03360
A Beam's Eye View to Fluence Maps 3D Network for Ultra Fast VMAT Radiotherapy Planning
eess.IV cs.AI physics.med-ph
Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) revolutionizes cancer treatment by precisely delivering radiation while sparing healthy tissues. Fluence maps generation, crucial in VMAT planning, traditionally involves complex and iterative, and thus time consuming processes. These fluence maps are subsequently leveraged for leaf-sequence. The deep-learning approach presented in this article aims to expedite this by directly predicting fluence maps from patient data. We developed a 3D network which we trained in a supervised way using a combination of L1 and L2 losses, and RT plans generated by Eclipse and from the REQUITE dataset, taking the RT dose map as input and the fluence maps computed from the corresponding RT plans as target. Our network predicts jointly the 180 fluence maps corresponding to the 180 control points (CP) of single arc VMAT plans. In order to help the network, we pre-process the input dose by computing the projections of the 3D dose map to the beam's eye view (BEV) of the 180 CPs, in the same coordinate system as the fluence maps. We generated over 2000 VMAT plans using Eclipse to scale up the dataset size. Additionally, we evaluated various network architectures and analyzed the impact of increasing the dataset size. We are measuring the performance in the 2D fluence maps domain using image metrics (PSNR, SSIM), as well as in the 3D dose domain using the dose-volume histogram (DVH) on a validation dataset. The network inference, which does not include the data loading and processing, is less than 20ms. Using our proposed 3D network architecture as well as increasing the dataset size using Eclipse improved the fluence map reconstruction performance by approximately 8 dB in PSNR compared to a U-Net architecture trained on the original REQUITE dataset. The resulting DVHs are very close to the one of the input target dose.
2502.03364
Scaling laws in wearable human activity recognition
cs.LG
Many deep architectures and self-supervised pre-training techniques have been proposed for human activity recognition (HAR) from wearable multimodal sensors. Scaling laws have the potential to help move towards more principled design by linking model capacity with pre-training data volume. Yet, scaling laws have not been established for HAR to the same extent as in language and vision. By conducting an exhaustive grid search on both amount of pre-training data and Transformer architectures, we establish the first known scaling laws for HAR. We show that pre-training loss scales with a power law relationship to amount of data and parameter count and that increasing the number of users in a dataset results in a steeper improvement in performance than increasing data per user, indicating that diversity of pre-training data is important, which contrasts to some previously reported findings in self-supervised HAR. We show that these scaling laws translate to downstream performance improvements on three HAR benchmark datasets of postures, modes of locomotion and activities of daily living: UCI HAR and WISDM Phone and WISDM Watch. Finally, we suggest some previously published works should be revisited in light of these scaling laws with more adequate model capacities.
2502.03365
A Match Made in Heaven? Matching Test Cases and Vulnerabilities With the VUTECO Approach
cs.SE cs.CR cs.LG
Software vulnerabilities are commonly detected via static analysis, penetration testing, and fuzzing. They can also be found by running unit tests - so-called vulnerability-witnessing tests - that stimulate the security-sensitive behavior with crafted inputs. Developing such tests is difficult and time-consuming; thus, automated data-driven approaches could help developers intercept vulnerabilities earlier. However, training and validating such approaches require a lot of data, which is currently scarce. This paper introduces VUTECO, a deep learning-based approach for collecting instances of vulnerability-witnessing tests from Java repositories. VUTECO carries out two tasks: (1) the "Finding" task to determine whether a test case is security-related, and (2) the "Matching" task to relate a test case to the exact vulnerability it is witnessing. VUTECO successfully addresses the Finding task, achieving perfect precision and 0.83 F0.5 score on validated test cases in VUL4J and returning 102 out of 145 (70%) correct security-related test cases from 244 open-source Java projects. Despite showing sufficiently good performance for the Matching task - i.e., 0.86 precision and 0.68 F0.5 score - VUTECO failed to retrieve any valid match in the wild. Nevertheless, we observed that in almost all of the matches, the test case was still security-related despite being matched to the wrong vulnerability. In the end, VUTECO can help find vulnerability-witnessing tests, though the matching with the right vulnerability is yet to be solved; the findings obtained lay the stepping stone for future research on the matter.
2502.03366
Rethinking Approximate Gaussian Inference in Classification
cs.LG stat.ML
In classification tasks, softmax functions are ubiquitously used as output activations to produce predictive probabilities. Such outputs only capture aleatoric uncertainty. To capture epistemic uncertainty, approximate Gaussian inference methods have been proposed, which output Gaussian distributions over the logit space. Predictives are then obtained as the expectations of the Gaussian distributions pushed forward through the softmax. However, such softmax Gaussian integrals cannot be solved analytically, and Monte Carlo (MC) approximations can be costly and noisy. We propose a simple change in the learning objective which allows the exact computation of predictives and enjoys improved training dynamics, with no runtime or memory overhead. This framework is compatible with a family of output activation functions that includes the softmax, as well as element-wise normCDF and sigmoid. Moreover, it allows for approximating the Gaussian pushforwards with Dirichlet distributions by analytic moment matching. We evaluate our approach combined with several approximate Gaussian inference methods (Laplace, HET, SNGP) on large- and small-scale datasets (ImageNet, CIFAR-10), demonstrating improved uncertainty quantification capabilities compared to softmax MC sampling. Code is available at https://github.com/bmucsanyi/probit.
2502.03367
SyMANTIC: An Efficient Symbolic Regression Method for Interpretable and Parsimonious Model Discovery in Science and Beyond
cs.LG
Symbolic regression (SR) is an emerging branch of machine learning focused on discovering simple and interpretable mathematical expressions from data. Although a wide-variety of SR methods have been developed, they often face challenges such as high computational cost, poor scalability with respect to the number of input dimensions, fragility to noise, and an inability to balance accuracy and complexity. This work introduces SyMANTIC, a novel SR algorithm that addresses these challenges. SyMANTIC efficiently identifies (potentially several) low-dimensional descriptors from a large set of candidates (from $\sim 10^5$ to $\sim 10^{10}$ or more) through a unique combination of mutual information-based feature selection, adaptive feature expansion, and recursively applied $\ell_0$-based sparse regression. In addition, it employs an information-theoretic measure to produce an approximate set of Pareto-optimal equations, each offering the best-found accuracy for a given complexity. Furthermore, our open-source implementation of SyMANTIC, built on the PyTorch ecosystem, facilitates easy installation and GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SyMANTIC across a range of problems, including synthetic examples, scientific benchmarks, real-world material property predictions, and chaotic dynamical system identification from small datasets. Extensive comparisons show that SyMANTIC uncovers similar or more accurate models at a fraction of the cost of existing SR methods.
2502.03368
PalimpChat: Declarative and Interactive AI analytics
cs.AI cs.DB cs.IR
Thanks to the advances in generative architectures and large language models, data scientists can now code pipelines of machine-learning operations to process large collections of unstructured data. Recent progress has seen the rise of declarative AI frameworks (e.g., Palimpzest, Lotus, and DocETL) to build optimized and increasingly complex pipelines, but these systems often remain accessible only to expert programmers. In this demonstration, we present PalimpChat, a chat-based interface to Palimpzest that bridges this gap by letting users create and run sophisticated AI pipelines through natural language alone. By integrating Archytas, a ReAct-based reasoning agent, and Palimpzest's suite of relational and LLM-based operators, PalimpChat provides a practical illustration of how a chat interface can make declarative AI frameworks truly accessible to non-experts. Our demo system is publicly available online. At SIGMOD'25, participants can explore three real-world scenarios--scientific discovery, legal discovery, and real estate search--or apply PalimpChat to their own datasets. In this paper, we focus on how PalimpChat, supported by the Palimpzest optimizer, simplifies complex AI workflows such as extracting and analyzing biomedical data.
2502.03369
Learning from Active Human Involvement through Proxy Value Propagation
cs.AI cs.RO
Learning from active human involvement enables the human subject to actively intervene and demonstrate to the AI agent during training. The interaction and corrective feedback from human brings safety and AI alignment to the learning process. In this work, we propose a new reward-free active human involvement method called Proxy Value Propagation for policy optimization. Our key insight is that a proxy value function can be designed to express human intents, wherein state-action pairs in the human demonstration are labeled with high values, while those agents' actions that are intervened receive low values. Through the TD-learning framework, labeled values of demonstrated state-action pairs are further propagated to other unlabeled data generated from agents' exploration. The proxy value function thus induces a policy that faithfully emulates human behaviors. Human-in-the-loop experiments show the generality and efficiency of our method. With minimal modification to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, our method can learn to solve continuous and discrete control tasks with various human control devices, including the challenging task of driving in Grand Theft Auto V. Demo video and code are available at: https://metadriverse.github.io/pvp
2502.03370
Deep Learning-Based Approach for Identification of Potato Leaf Diseases Using Wrapper Feature Selection and Feature Concatenation
cs.CV cs.LG
The potato is a widely grown crop in many regions of the world. In recent decades, potato farming has gained incredible traction in the world. Potatoes are susceptible to several illnesses that stunt their development. This plant seems to have significant leaf disease. Early Blight and Late Blight are two prevalent leaf diseases that affect potato plants. The early detection of these diseases would be beneficial for enhancing the yield of this crop. The ideal solution is to use image processing to identify and analyze these disorders. Here, we present an autonomous method based on image processing and machine learning to detect late blight disease affecting potato leaves. The proposed method comprises four different phases: (1) Histogram Equalization is used to improve the quality of the input image; (2) feature extraction is performed using a Deep CNN model, then these extracted features are concatenated; (3) feature selection is performed using wrapper-based feature selection; (4) classification is performed using an SVM classifier and its variants. This proposed method achieves the highest accuracy of 99% using SVM by selecting 550 features.
2502.03373
Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs
cs.CL cs.LG
Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for developing these capabilities, yet the conditions under which long CoTs emerge remain unclear, and RL training requires careful design choices. In this study, we systematically investigate the mechanics of long CoT reasoning, identifying the key factors that enable models to generate long CoT trajectories. Through extensive supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and RL experiments, we present four main findings: (1) While SFT is not strictly necessary, it simplifies training and improves efficiency; (2) Reasoning capabilities tend to emerge with increased training compute, but their development is not guaranteed, making reward shaping crucial for stabilizing CoT length growth; (3) Scaling verifiable reward signals is critical for RL. We find that leveraging noisy, web-extracted solutions with filtering mechanisms shows strong potential, particularly for out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks such as STEM reasoning; and (4) Core abilities like error correction are inherently present in base models, but incentivizing these skills effectively for complex tasks via RL demands significant compute, and measuring their emergence requires a nuanced approach. These insights provide practical guidance for optimizing training strategies to enhance long CoT reasoning in LLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/eddycmu/demystify-long-cot.
2502.03375
Interactive Visualization Recommendation with Hier-SUCB
cs.IR
Visualization recommendation aims to enable rapid visual analysis of massive datasets. In real-world scenarios, it is essential to quickly gather and comprehend user preferences to cover users from diverse backgrounds, including varying skill levels and analytical tasks. Previous approaches to personalized visualization recommendations are non-interactive and rely on initial user data for new users. As a result, these models cannot effectively explore options or adapt to real-time feedback. To address this limitation, we propose an interactive personalized visualization recommendation (PVisRec) system that learns on user feedback from previous interactions. For more interactive and accurate recommendations, we propose Hier-SUCB, a contextual combinatorial semi-bandit in the PVisRec setting. Theoretically, we show an improved overall regret bound with the same rank of time but an improved rank of action space. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of Hier-SUCB through extensive experiments where it is comparable to offline methods and outperforms other bandit algorithms in the setting of visualization recommendation.
2502.03376
Ethical Considerations for the Military Use of Artificial Intelligence in Visual Reconnaissance
cs.CY cs.CV
This white paper underscores the critical importance of responsibly deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in military contexts, emphasizing a commitment to ethical and legal standards. The evolving role of AI in the military goes beyond mere technical applications, necessitating a framework grounded in ethical principles. The discussion within the paper delves into ethical AI principles, particularly focusing on the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) guidelines. Noteworthy considerations encompass transparency, justice, non-maleficence, and responsibility. Importantly, the paper extends its examination to military-specific ethical considerations, drawing insights from the Just War theory and principles established by prominent entities. In addition to the identified principles, the paper introduces further ethical considerations specifically tailored for military AI applications. These include traceability, proportionality, governability, responsibility, and reliability. The application of these ethical principles is discussed on the basis of three use cases in the domains of sea, air, and land. Methods of automated sensor data analysis, eXplainable AI (XAI), and intuitive user experience are utilized to specify the use cases close to real-world scenarios. This comprehensive approach to ethical considerations in military AI reflects a commitment to aligning technological advancements with established ethical frameworks. It recognizes the need for a balance between leveraging AI's potential benefits in military operations while upholding moral and legal standards. The inclusion of these ethical principles serves as a foundation for responsible and accountable use of AI in the complex and dynamic landscape of military scenarios.
2502.03377
Energy-Efficient Flying LoRa Gateways: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
cs.NI cs.LG
With the rapid development of next-generation Internet of Things (NG-IoT) networks, the increasing number of connected devices has led to a surge in power consumption. This rise in energy demand poses significant challenges to resource availability and raises sustainability concerns for large-scale IoT deployments. Efficient energy utilization in communication networks, particularly for power-constrained IoT devices, has thus become a critical area of research. In this paper, we deployed flying LoRa gateways (GWs) mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collect data from LoRa end devices (EDs) and transmit it to a central server. Our primary objective is to maximize the global system energy efficiency (EE) of wireless LoRa networks by joint optimization of transmission power (TP), spreading factor (SF), bandwidth (W), and ED association. To solve this challenging problem, we model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where each flying LoRa GW acts as a learning agent using a cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach under centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE). Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method, based on the multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) algorithm, significantly improves the global system EE and surpasses the conventional MARL schemes.
2502.03381
Integrating automatic speech recognition into remote healthcare interpreting: A pilot study of its impact on interpreting quality
cs.CL
This paper reports on the results from a pilot study investigating the impact of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology on interpreting quality in remote healthcare interpreting settings. Employing a within-subjects experiment design with four randomised conditions, this study utilises scripted medical consultations to simulate dialogue interpreting tasks. It involves four trainee interpreters with a language combination of Chinese and English. It also gathers participants' experience and perceptions of ASR support through cued retrospective reports and semi-structured interviews. Preliminary data suggest that the availability of ASR, specifically the access to full ASR transcripts and to ChatGPT-generated summaries based on ASR, effectively improved interpreting quality. Varying types of ASR output had different impacts on the distribution of interpreting error types. Participants reported similar interactive experiences with the technology, expressing their preference for full ASR transcripts. This pilot study shows encouraging results of applying ASR to dialogue-based healthcare interpreting and offers insights into the optimal ways to present ASR output to enhance interpreter experience and performance. However, it should be emphasised that the main purpose of this study was to validate the methodology and that further research with a larger sample size is necessary to confirm these findings.