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2502.10689
Self-Explaining Hypergraph Neural Networks for Diagnosis Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI
The burgeoning volume of electronic health records (EHRs) has enabled deep learning models to excel in predictive healthcare. However, for high-stakes applications such as diagnosis prediction, model interpretability remains paramount. Existing deep learning diagnosis prediction models with intrinsic interpretability often assign attention weights to every past diagnosis or hospital visit, providing explanations lacking flexibility and succinctness. In this paper, we introduce SHy, a self-explaining hypergraph neural network model, designed to offer personalized, concise and faithful explanations that allow for interventions from clinical experts. By modeling each patient as a unique hypergraph and employing a message-passing mechanism, SHy captures higher-order disease interactions and extracts distinct temporal phenotypes as personalized explanations. It also addresses the incompleteness of the EHR data by accounting for essential false negatives in the original diagnosis record. A qualitative case study and extensive quantitative evaluations on two real-world EHR datasets demonstrate the superior predictive performance and interpretability of SHy over existing state-of-the-art models.
2502.10691
Controlling Neural Collapse Enhances Out-of-Distribution Detection and Transfer Learning
cs.LG
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and OOD generalization are widely studied in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), yet their relationship remains poorly understood. We empirically show that the degree of Neural Collapse (NC) in a network layer is inversely related with these objectives: stronger NC improves OOD detection but degrades generalization, while weaker NC enhances generalization at the cost of detection. This trade-off suggests that a single feature space cannot simultaneously achieve both tasks. To address this, we develop a theoretical framework linking NC to OOD detection and generalization. We show that entropy regularization mitigates NC to improve generalization, while a fixed Simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) projector enforces NC for better detection. Based on these insights, we propose a method to control NC at different DNN layers. In experiments, our method excels at both tasks across OOD datasets and DNN architectures.
2502.10693
Extremely Large Full Duplex MIMO for Simultaneous Downlink Communications and Monostatic Sensing at Sub-THz Frequencies
cs.IT cs.ET math.IT
The in-band Full Duplex (FD) technology is lately gaining attention as an enabler for the emerging paradigm of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), which envisions seamless integration of sensing mechanisms for unconnected entities into next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we present an FD Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system with extremely large antenna arrays at its transceiver module, which is optimized, considering two emerging analog beamforming architectures, for simultaneous DownLink (DL) communications and monostatic-type sensing intended at the sub-THz frequencies, with the latter operation relying on received reflections of the transmitted information-bearing signals. A novel optimization framework for the joint design of the analog and digital transmit beamforming, analog receive combining, and the digital canceler for the self-interference signal is devised with the objective to maximize the achievable DL rate, while meeting a predefined threshold for the position error bound for the unknown three-dimensional parameters of a passive target. Capitalizing on the distinctive features of the beamforming architectures with fully-connected networks of phase shifters and partially-connected arrays of metamaterials, two ISAC designs are presented. Our simulation results showcase the superiority of both proposed designs over state-of-the-art schemes, highlighting the role of various system parameters in the trade-off between the communication and sensing functionalities.
2502.10694
Simulations of Common Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Algorithms for Image Classification
cs.LG cs.AI
Traditional machine learning assumes that training and test sets are derived from the same distribution; however, this assumption does not always hold in practical applications. This distribution disparity can lead to severe performance drops when the trained model is used in new data sets. Domain adaptation (DA) is a machine learning technique that aims to address this problem by reducing the differences between domains. This paper presents simulation-based algorithms of recent DA techniques, mainly related to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labels are available only in the source domain. Our study compares these techniques with public data sets and diverse characteristics, highlighting their respective strengths and drawbacks. For example, Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based DA (SSRT) achieved the highest accuracy (91.6\%) in the office-31 data set during our simulations, however, the accuracy dropped to 72.4\% in the Office-Home data set when using limited batch sizes. In addition to improving the reader's comprehension of recent techniques in DA, our study also highlights challenges and upcoming directions for research in this domain. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/Domain_Adaptation.
2502.10697
The Lee weight distributions of several classes of linear codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4$
cs.IT math.IT
Let $\mathbb{Z}_4$ denote the ring of integers modulo $4$. The Galois ring GR$(4,m)$, which consists of $4^m$ elements, represents the Galois extension of degree $m$ over $\mathbb{Z}_4$. The constructions of codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4$ have garnered significant interest in recent years. In this paper, building upon previous research, we utilize the defining-set approach to construct several classes of linear codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4$ by effectively using the properties of the trace function from GR$(4,m)$ to $\mathbb{Z}_4$. As a result, we have been able to obtain new linear codes over $\mathbb{Z}_4$ with good parameters and determine their Lee weight distributions. Upon comparison with the existing database of $\mathbb{Z}_4$ codes, our construction can yield novel linear codes, as well as linear codes that possess the best known minimum Lee distance.
2502.10698
Superpose Singular Features for Model Merging
cs.LG cs.AI
Model merging is a critical technique for combining the capabilities of multiple fine-tuned models without requiring additional training. While existing methods treat parameters as vectors, they overlook the intrinsic structure of linear transformation matrices - the core components that comprise the majority of model parameters. These matrices are fundamental to neural networks, mapping input representations to output features through linear combinations. Motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, we introduce task matrix and propose to Superpose Features from Task Matrix (SFTM), a novel approach that superposes features from individual task models into a merged model. SFTM employs singular value decomposition to identify feature bases of linear transformation matrices and solves a linear system to optimally combine them while preserving input-output mappings from individual task models. Extensive experiments on vision transformers and language models demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior performance and enhanced out-of-distribution generalization.
2502.10699
Exploring Synaptic Resonance in Large Language Models: A Novel Approach to Contextual Memory Integration
cs.CL cs.AI cs.NE
Contextual memory integration remains a high challenge in the development of language models, particularly in tasks that require maintaining coherence over extended sequences. Traditional approaches, such as self-attention mechanisms and memory-augmented architectures, often prioritize short-term dependencies, leading to fragmentation and inconsistency in long-range contextual understanding. Inspired by principles of synaptic plasticity observed in biological neural systems, a novel mechanism, Synaptic Resonance, is introduced to dynamically reinforce relevant memory pathways during training and inference. Unlike static memory representations, this mechanism continuously adjusts synaptic weight matrices based on contextual relevance, allowing for improved information retention without excessive computational overhead. Evaluations conducted on an open-source language model demonstrate reductions in perplexity, enhancements in contextual coherence, and increased robustness against input noise, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement-driven memory modulation. Comparative analysis against baseline models further reveals that the proposed approach achieves higher memory retention efficiency while maintaining computational feasibility. The architectural modifications integrate seamlessly into existing transformer-based frameworks, ensuring stable convergence and efficient inference without sacrificing scalability. Applications benefiting from improved long-term contextual consistency, such as dialogue systems and document summarization, stand to gain from this approach. Empirical findings suggest that dynamically reinforced memory pathways offer a promising alternative to conventional memory mechanisms, addressing longstanding limitations in extended sequence modeling.
2502.10701
Unpacking the Layers: Exploring Self-Disclosure Norms, Engagement Dynamics, and Privacy Implications
cs.SI cs.HC
This paper characterizes the self-disclosure behavior of Reddit users across 11 different types of self-disclosure. We find that at least half of the users share some type of disclosure in at least 10% of their posts, with half of these posts having more than one type of disclosure. We show that different types of self-disclosure are likely to receive varying levels of engagement. For instance, a Sexual Orientation disclosure garners more comments than other self-disclosures. We also explore confounding factors that affect future self-disclosure. We show that users who receive interactions from (self-disclosure) specific subreddit members are more likely to disclose in the future. We also show that privacy risks due to self-disclosure extend beyond Reddit users themselves to include their close contacts, such as family and friends, as their information is also revealed. We develop a browser plugin for end-users to flag self-disclosure in their content.
2502.10703
Artificial intelligence-enabled detection and assessment of Parkinson's disease using multimodal data: A survey
cs.LG cs.SD
The rapid emergence of highly adaptable and reusable artificial intelligence (AI) models is set to revolutionize the medical field, particularly in the diagnosis and management of Parkinson's disease (PD). Currently, there are no effective biomarkers for diagnosing PD, assessing its severity, or tracking its progression. Numerous AI algorithms are now being used for PD diagnosis and treatment, capable of performing various classification tasks based on multimodal and heterogeneous disease symptom data, such as gait, hand movements, and speech patterns of PD patients. They provide expressive feedback, including predicting the potential likelihood of PD, assessing the severity of individual or multiple symptoms, aiding in early detection, and evaluating rehabilitation and treatment effectiveness, thereby demonstrating advanced medical diagnostic capabilities. Therefore, this work provides a surveyed compilation of recent works regarding PD detection and assessment through biometric symptom recognition with a focus on machine learning and deep learning approaches, emphasizing their benefits, and exposing their weaknesses, and their impact in opening up newer research avenues. Additionally, it also presents categorized and characterized descriptions of the datasets, approaches, and architectures employed to tackle associated constraints. Furthermore, the paper explores the potential opportunities and challenges presented by data-driven AI technologies in the diagnosis of PD.
2502.10704
Occlusion-aware Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration via Unsupervised Neural Deformation Correntropy
cs.CV cs.AI
Non-rigid alignment of point clouds is crucial for scene understanding, reconstruction, and various computer vision and robotics tasks. Recent advancements in implicit deformation networks for non-rigid registration have significantly reduced the reliance on large amounts of annotated training data. However, existing state-of-the-art methods still face challenges in handling occlusion scenarios. To address this issue, this paper introduces an innovative unsupervised method called Occlusion-Aware Registration (OAR) for non-rigidly aligning point clouds. The key innovation of our method lies in the utilization of the adaptive correntropy function as a localized similarity measure, enabling us to treat individual points distinctly. In contrast to previous approaches that solely minimize overall deviations between two shapes, we combine unsupervised implicit neural representations with the maximum correntropy criterion to optimize the deformation of unoccluded regions. This effectively avoids collapsed, tearing, and other physically implausible results. Moreover, we present a theoretical analysis and establish the relationship between the maximum correntropy criterion and the commonly used Chamfer distance, highlighting that the correntropy-induced metric can be served as a more universal measure for point cloud analysis. Additionally, we introduce locally linear reconstruction to ensure that regions lacking correspondences between shapes still undergo physically natural deformations. Our method achieves superior or competitive performance compared to existing approaches, particularly when dealing with occluded geometries. We also demonstrate the versatility of our method in challenging tasks such as large deformations, shape interpolation, and shape completion under occlusion disturbances.
2502.10705
CoPEFT: Fast Adaptation Framework for Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
cs.AI
Multi-agent collaborative perception is expected to significantly improve perception performance by overcoming the limitations of single-agent perception through exchanging complementary information. However, training a robust collaborative perception model requires collecting sufficient training data that covers all possible collaboration scenarios, which is impractical due to intolerable deployment costs. Hence, the trained model is not robust against new traffic scenarios with inconsistent data distribution and fundamentally restricts its real-world applicability. Further, existing methods, such as domain adaptation, have mitigated this issue by exposing the deployment data during the training stage but incur a high training cost, which is infeasible for resource-constrained agents. In this paper, we propose a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning-based lightweight framework, CoPEFT, for fast adapting a trained collaborative perception model to new deployment environments under low-cost conditions. CoPEFT develops a Collaboration Adapter and Agent Prompt to perform macro-level and micro-level adaptations separately. Specifically, the Collaboration Adapter utilizes the inherent knowledge from training data and limited deployment data to adapt the feature map to new data distribution. The Agent Prompt further enhances the Collaboration Adapter by inserting fine-grained contextual information about the environment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CoPEFT surpasses existing methods with less than 1\% trainable parameters, proving the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.
2502.10706
Raising the Bar in Graph OOD Generalization: Invariant Learning Beyond Explicit Environment Modeling
cs.LG cs.AI
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization has emerged as a critical challenge in graph learning, as real-world graph data often exhibit diverse and shifting environments that traditional models fail to generalize across. A promising solution to address this issue is graph invariant learning (GIL), which aims to learn invariant representations by disentangling label-correlated invariant subgraphs from environment-specific subgraphs. However, existing GIL methods face two major challenges: (1) the difficulty of capturing and modeling diverse environments in graph data, and (2) the semantic cliff, where invariant subgraphs from different classes are difficult to distinguish, leading to poor class separability and increased misclassifications. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel method termed Multi-Prototype Hyperspherical Invariant Learning (MPHIL), which introduces two key innovations: (1) hyperspherical invariant representation extraction, enabling robust and highly discriminative hyperspherical invariant feature extraction, and (2) multi-prototype hyperspherical classification, which employs class prototypes as intermediate variables to eliminate the need for explicit environment modeling in GIL and mitigate the semantic cliff issue. Derived from the theoretical framework of GIL, we introduce two novel objective functions: the invariant prototype matching loss to ensure samples are matched to the correct class prototypes, and the prototype separation loss to increase the distinction between prototypes of different classes in the hyperspherical space. Extensive experiments on 11 OOD generalization benchmark datasets demonstrate that MPHIL achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods across graph data from various domains and with different distribution shifts.
2502.10707
Reading Your Heart: Learning ECG Words and Sentences via Pre-training ECG Language Model
cs.LG cs.AI
Electrocardiogram (ECG) is essential for the clinical diagnosis of arrhythmias and other heart diseases, but deep learning methods based on ECG often face limitations due to the need for high-quality annotations. Although previous ECG self-supervised learning (eSSL) methods have made significant progress in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they typically treat ECG signals as ordinary time-series data, segmenting the signals using fixed-size and fixed-step time windows, which often ignore the form and rhythm characteristics and latent semantic relationships in ECG signals. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective on ECG signals, treating heartbeats as words and rhythms as sentences. Based on this perspective, we first designed the QRS-Tokenizer, which generates semantically meaningful ECG sentences from the raw ECG signals. Building on these, we then propose HeartLang, a novel self-supervised learning framework for ECG language processing, learning general representations at form and rhythm levels. Additionally, we construct the largest heartbeat-based ECG vocabulary to date, which will further advance the development of ECG language processing. We evaluated HeartLang across six public ECG datasets, where it demonstrated robust competitiveness against other eSSL methods. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/HeartLang.
2502.10708
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various tasks such as natural language understanding, text summarization, and machine translation. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge, such as healthcare, chemistry, or legal analysis. To address this, researchers have explored diverse methods to enhance LLMs by integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of these methods, which we categorize into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. Each approach offers unique mechanisms to equip LLMs with domain expertise, balancing trade-offs between flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. We discuss how these methods enable LLMs to tackle specialized tasks, compare their advantages and disadvantages, evaluate domain-specific LLMs against general LLMs, and highlight the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. For those interested in delving deeper into this area, we also summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source at: https://github.com/abilliyb/Knowledge_Injection_Survey_Papers, dedicated to documenting research in the field of specialized LLM.
2502.10709
An Empirical Analysis of Uncertainty in Large Language Model Evaluations
cs.CL cs.AI
As LLM-as-a-Judge emerges as a new paradigm for assessing large language models (LLMs), concerns have been raised regarding the alignment, bias, and stability of LLM evaluators. While substantial work has focused on alignment and bias, little research has concentrated on the stability of LLM evaluators. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments involving 9 widely used LLM evaluators across 2 different evaluation settings to investigate the uncertainty in model-based LLM evaluations. We pinpoint that LLM evaluators exhibit varying uncertainty based on model families and sizes. With careful comparative analyses, we find that employing special prompting strategies, whether during inference or post-training, can alleviate evaluation uncertainty to some extent. By utilizing uncertainty to enhance LLM's reliability and detection capability in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data, we further fine-tune an uncertainty-aware LLM evaluator named ConfiLM using a human-annotated fine-tuning set and assess ConfiLM's OOD evaluation ability on a manually designed test set sourced from the 2024 Olympics. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating uncertainty as additional information during the fine-tuning phase can largely improve the model's evaluation performance in OOD scenarios. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/hasakiXie123/LLM-Evaluator-Uncertainty.
2502.10712
FuncGenFoil: Airfoil Generation and Editing Model in Function Space
cs.LG cs.AI
Aircraft manufacturing is the jewel in the crown of industry, among which generating high-fidelity airfoil geometries with controllable and editable representations remains a fundamental challenge. While existing deep-learning-based methods rely on predefined parametric function families, e.g., B\'ezier curves and discrete point-based representations, they suffer from inherent trade-offs between expressiveness and resolution flexibility. To tackle this challenge, we introduce FuncGenFoil, a novel function-space generative model that directly learns functional airfoil geometries. Our method inherits both the advantages of arbitrary resolution sampling and the smoothness of parametric functions, as well as the strong expressiveness of discrete point-based functions. Empirical evaluations on the AFBench dataset demonstrate that FuncGenFoil improves upon state-of-the-art methods in airfoil generation by achieving a relative -74.4 label error reduction and +23.2 diversity increase on the AF-200K dataset. Our results highlight the advantages of function-space modeling for aerodynamic shape optimization, offering a powerful and flexible framework for high-fidelity airfoil design. Our code will be released.
2502.10713
Improving action segmentation via explicit similarity measurement
cs.CV
Existing supervised action segmentation methods depend on the quality of frame-wise classification using attention mechanisms or temporal convolutions to capture temporal dependencies. Even boundary detection-based methods primarily depend on the accuracy of an initial frame-wise classification, which can overlook precise identification of segments and boundaries in case of low-quality prediction. To address this problem, this paper proposes ASESM (Action Segmentation via Explicit Similarity Measurement) to enhance the segmentation accuracy by incorporating explicit similarity evaluation across frames and predictions. Our supervised learning architecture uses frame-level multi-resolution features as input to multiple Transformer encoders. The resulting multiple frame-wise predictions are used for similarity voting to obtain high quality initial prediction. We apply a newly proposed boundary correction algorithm that operates based on feature similarity between consecutive frames to adjust the boundary locations iteratively through the learning process. The corrected prediction is then further refined through multiple stages of temporal convolutions. As post-processing, we optionally apply boundary correction again followed by a segment smoothing method that removes outlier classes within segments using similarity measurement between consecutive predictions. Additionally, we propose a fully unsupervised boundary detection-correction algorithm that identifies segment boundaries based solely on feature similarity without any training. Experiments on 50Salads, GTEA, and Breakfast datasets show the effectiveness of both the supervised and unsupervised algorithms. Code and models are made available on Github.
2502.10714
Disentangle Nighttime Lens Flares: Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal
cs.CV
Lens flares arise from light reflection and refraction within sensor arrays, whose diverse types include glow, veiling glare, reflective flare and so on. Existing methods are specialized for one specific type only, and overlook the simultaneous occurrence of multiple typed lens flares, which is common in the real-world, e.g. coexistence of glow and displacement reflections from the same light source. These co-occurring lens flares cannot be effectively resolved by the simple combination of individual flare removal methods, since these coexisting flares originates from the same light source and are generated simultaneously within the same sensor array, exhibit a complex interdependence rather than simple additive relation. To model this interdependent flare relationship, our Nighttime Lens Flare Formation model is the first attempt to learn the intrinsic physical relationship between flares on the imaging plane. Building on this physical model, we introduce a solution to this joint flare removal task named Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal Network (SGLFR-Net), which is self-supervised without pre-training. Specifically, the nighttime glow is detangled in PSF Rendering Network(PSFR-Net) based on PSF Rendering Prior, while the reflective flare is modelled in Texture Prior Based Reflection Flare Removal Network (TPRR-Net). Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both joint and individual glare removal tasks.
2502.10716
Why Domain Generalization Fail? A View of Necessity and Sufficiency
cs.LG stat.ML
Despite a strong theoretical foundation, empirical experiments reveal that existing domain generalization (DG) algorithms often fail to consistently outperform the ERM baseline. We argue that this issue arises because most DG studies focus on establishing theoretical guarantees for generalization under unrealistic assumptions, such as the availability of sufficient, diverse (or even infinite) domains or access to target domain knowledge. As a result, the extent to which domain generalization is achievable in scenarios with limited domains remains largely unexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining generalization through the lens of the conditions necessary for its existence and learnability. Specifically, we systematically establish a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for generalization. Our analysis highlights that existing DG methods primarily act as regularization mechanisms focused on satisfying sufficient conditions, while often neglecting necessary ones. However, sufficient conditions cannot be verified in settings with limited training domains. In such cases, regularization targeting sufficient conditions aims to maximize the likelihood of generalization, whereas regularization targeting necessary conditions ensures its existence. Using this analysis, we reveal the shortcomings of existing DG algorithms by showing that, while they promote sufficient conditions, they inadvertently violate necessary conditions. To validate our theoretical insights, we propose a practical method that promotes the sufficient condition while maintaining the necessary conditions through a novel subspace representation alignment strategy. This approach highlights the advantages of preserving the necessary conditions on well-established DG benchmarks.
2502.10718
Hyperdimensional Intelligent Sensing for Efficient Real-Time Audio Processing on Extreme Edge
cs.SD cs.AI eess.AS
The escalating challenges of managing vast sensor-generated data, particularly in audio applications, necessitate innovative solutions. Current systems face significant computational and storage demands, especially in real-time applications like gunshot detection systems (GSDS), and the proliferation of edge sensors exacerbates these issues. This paper proposes a groundbreaking approach with a near-sensor model tailored for intelligent audio-sensing frameworks. Utilizing a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) module, convolutional neural network (CNN) layers, and HyperDimensional Computing (HDC), our model excels in low-energy, rapid inference, and online learning. It is highly adaptable for efficient ASIC design implementation, offering superior energy efficiency compared to conventional embedded CPUs or GPUs, and is compatible with the trend of shrinking microphone sensor sizes. Comprehensive evaluations at both software and hardware levels underscore the model's efficacy. Software assessments through detailed ROC curve analysis revealed a delicate balance between energy conservation and quality loss, achieving up to 82.1% energy savings with only 1.39% quality loss. Hardware evaluations highlight the model's commendable energy efficiency when implemented via ASIC design, especially with the Google Edge TPU, showcasing its superiority over prevalent embedded CPUs and GPUs.
2502.10720
NPSim: Nighttime Photorealistic Simulation From Daytime Images With Monocular Inverse Rendering and Ray Tracing
cs.CV cs.GR
Semantic segmentation is an important task for autonomous driving. A powerful autonomous driving system should be capable of handling images under all conditions, including nighttime. Generating accurate and diverse nighttime semantic segmentation datasets is crucial for enhancing the performance of computer vision algorithms in low-light conditions. In this thesis, we introduce a novel approach named NPSim, which enables the simulation of realistic nighttime images from real daytime counterparts with monocular inverse rendering and ray tracing. NPSim comprises two key components: mesh reconstruction and relighting. The mesh reconstruction component generates an accurate representation of the scene structure by combining geometric information extracted from the input RGB image and semantic information from its corresponding semantic labels. The relighting component integrates real-world nighttime light sources and material characteristics to simulate the complex interplay of light and object surfaces under low-light conditions. The scope of this thesis mainly focuses on the implementation and evaluation of the mesh reconstruction component. Through experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the mesh reconstruction component in producing high-quality scene meshes and their generality across different autonomous driving datasets. We also propose a detailed experiment plan for evaluating the entire pipeline, including both quantitative metrics in training state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised semantic segmentation approaches and human perceptual studies, aiming to indicate the capability of our approach to generate realistic nighttime images and the value of our dataset in steering future progress in the field.
2502.10721
A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: A Channel Strategy Perspective
cs.LG
Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) plays a crucial role across diverse fields, ranging from economic, energy, to traffic. In recent years, deep learning has demonstrated outstanding performance in MTSF tasks. In MTSF, modeling the correlations among different channels is critical, as leveraging information from other related channels can significantly improve the prediction accuracy of a specific channel. This study systematically reviews the channel modeling strategies for time series and proposes a taxonomy organized into three hierarchical levels: the strategy perspective, the mechanism perspective, and the characteristic perspective. On this basis, we provide a structured analysis of these methods and conduct an in-depth examination of the advantages and limitations of different channel strategies. Finally, we summarize and discuss some future research directions to provide useful research guidance. Moreover, we maintain an up-to-date Github repository (https://github.com/decisionintelligence/CS4TS) which includes all the papers discussed in the survey.
2502.10723
A Mathematics Framework of Artificial Shifted Population Risk and Its Further Understanding Related to Consistency Regularization
cs.LG cs.AI
Data augmentation is an important technique in training deep neural networks as it enhances their ability to generalize and remain robust. While data augmentation is commonly used to expand the sample size and act as a consistency regularization term, there is a lack of research on the relationship between them. To address this gap, this paper introduces a more comprehensive mathematical framework for data augmentation. Through this framework, we establish that the expected risk of the shifted population is the sum of the original population risk and a gap term, which can be interpreted as a consistency regularization term. The paper also provides a theoretical understanding of this gap, highlighting its negative effects on the early stages of training. We also propose a method to mitigate these effects. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments using same data augmentation techniques and computing resources under several scenarios, including standard training, out-of-distribution, and imbalanced classification. The results demonstrate that our methods surpass compared methods under all scenarios in terms of generalization ability and convergence stability. We provide our code implementation at the following link: https://github.com/ydlsfhll/ASPR.
2502.10724
Semantics-aware Test-time Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation
cs.CV
This work highlights a semantics misalignment in 3D human pose estimation. For the task of test-time adaptation, the misalignment manifests as overly smoothed and unguided predictions. The smoothing settles predictions towards some average pose. Furthermore, when there are occlusions or truncations, the adaptation becomes fully unguided. To this end, we pioneer the integration of a semantics-aware motion prior for the test-time adaptation of 3D pose estimation. We leverage video understanding and a well-structured motion-text space to adapt the model motion prediction to adhere to video semantics during test time. Additionally, we incorporate a missing 2D pose completion based on the motion-text similarity. The pose completion strengthens the motion prior's guidance for occlusions and truncations. Our method significantly improves state-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation TTA techniques, with more than 12% decrease in PA-MPJPE on 3DPW and 3DHP.
2502.10725
PropNet: a White-Box and Human-Like Network for Sentence Representation
cs.CL cs.AI
Transformer-based embedding methods have dominated the field of sentence representation in recent years. Although they have achieved remarkable performance on NLP missions, such as semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, their black-box nature and large-data-driven training style have raised concerns, including issues related to bias, trust, and safety. Many efforts have been made to improve the interpretability of embedding models, but these problems have not been fundamentally resolved. To achieve inherent interpretability, we propose a purely white-box and human-like sentence representation network, PropNet. Inspired by findings from cognitive science, PropNet constructs a hierarchical network based on the propositions contained in a sentence. While experiments indicate that PropNet has a significant gap compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) embedding models in STS tasks, case studies reveal substantial room for improvement. Additionally, PropNet enables us to analyze and understand the human cognitive processes underlying STS benchmarks.
2502.10728
Construction A Lattice Design Based on the Truncated Union Bound
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers $n= 128$ dimensional construction A lattice design, using binary codes with known minimum Hamming distance and codeword multiplicity, the number of minimum weight codeword. A truncated theta series of the lattice is explicitly given to obtain the truncated union bound to estimate the word error rate under maximum likelihood decoding. The best component code is selected by minimizing the required volume-to-noise ratio (VNR) for a target word error rate $P_e$. The estimate becomes accurate for $P_e \leq 10^{-4}$, and design examples are given with the best extended BCH codes and polar codes for $P_e= 10^{-4}$ to $10^{-8}$. A lower error rate is achieved compared to that by the classic balanced distance rule and the equal error probability rule. The $(128, 106, 8)$ EBCH code gives the best-known $n=128$ construction A lattice at $P_e= 10^{-5}$.
2502.10729
VarGes: Improving Variation in Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation via StyleCLIPS
cs.CV
Generating expressive and diverse human gestures from audio is crucial in fields like human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and animation. Though existing methods have achieved remarkable performance, they often exhibit limitations due to constrained dataset diversity and the restricted amount of information derived from audio inputs. To address these challenges, we present VarGes, a novel variation-driven framework designed to enhance co-speech gesture generation by integrating visual stylistic cues while maintaining naturalness. Our approach begins with the Variation-Enhanced Feature Extraction (VEFE) module, which seamlessly incorporates \textcolor{blue}{style-reference} video data into a 3D human pose estimation network to extract StyleCLIPS, thereby enriching the input with stylistic information. Subsequently, we employ the Variation-Compensation Style Encoder (VCSE), a transformer-style encoder equipped with an additive attention mechanism pooling layer, to robustly encode diverse StyleCLIPS representations and effectively manage stylistic variations. Finally, the Variation-Driven Gesture Predictor (VDGP) module fuses MFCC audio features with StyleCLIPS encodings via cross-attention, injecting this fused data into a cross-conditional autoregressive model to modulate 3D human gesture generation based on audio input and stylistic clues. The efficacy of our approach is validated on benchmark datasets, where it outperforms existing methods in terms of gesture diversity and naturalness. The code and video results will be made publicly available upon acceptance:https://github.com/mookerr/VarGES/ .
2502.10732
Rule-Bottleneck Reinforcement Learning: Joint Explanation and Decision Optimization for Resource Allocation with Language Agents
cs.LG cs.AI
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is remarkably effective in addressing sequential resource allocation problems in domains such as healthcare, public policy, and resource management. However, deep RL policies often lack transparency and adaptability, challenging their deployment alongside human decision-makers. In contrast, Language Agents, powered by large language models (LLMs), provide human-understandable reasoning but may struggle with effective decision making. To bridge this gap, we propose Rule-Bottleneck Reinforcement Learning (RBRL), a novel framework that jointly optimizes decision and explanations. At each step, RBRL generates candidate rules with an LLM, selects among them using an attention-based RL policy, and determines the environment action with an explanation via chain-of-thought reasoning. The RL rule selection is optimized using the environment rewards and an explainability metric judged by the LLM. Evaluations in real-world scenarios highlight RBRL's competitive performance with deep RL and efficiency gains over LLM fine-tuning. A survey further confirms the enhanced quality of its explanations.
2502.10734
Motion planning for highly-dynamic unconditioned reflexes based on chained Signed Distance Functions
cs.RO
The unconditioned reflex (e.g., protective reflex), which is the innate reaction of the organism and usually performed through the spinal cord rather than the brain, can enable organisms to escape harms from environments. In this paper, we propose an online, highly-dynamic motion planning algorithm to endow manipulators the highly-dynamic unconditioned reflexes to humans and/or environments. Our method is based on a chained version of Signed Distance Functions (SDFs), which can be pre-computed and stored. Our proposed algorithm is divided into two stages. In the offline stage, we create 3 groups of local SDFs to store the geometric information of the manipulator and its working environment. In the online stage, the pre-computed local SDFs are chained together according the configuration of the manipulator, to provide global geometric information about the environment. While the point clouds of the dynamic objects serve as query points to look up these local SDFs for quickly generating escape velocity. Then we propose a modified geometric Jacobian matrix and use the Jacobian-pseudo-inverse method to generate real-time reflex behaviors to avoid the static and dynamic obstacles in the environment. The benefits of our method are validated in both static and dynamic scenarios. In the static scenario, our method identifies the path solutions with lower time consumption and shorter trajectory length compared to existing solutions. In the dynamic scenario, our method can reliably pursue the dynamic target point, avoid dynamic obstacles, and react to these obstacles within 1ms, which surpasses the unconditioned reflex reaction time of humans.
2502.10735
OPTISHEAR: Towards Efficient and Adaptive Pruning of Large Language Models via Evolutionary Optimization
cs.CL
Post-training pruning has emerged as a crucial optimization technique as large language models (LLMs) continue to grow rapidly. However, the significant variations in weight distributions across different LLMs make fixed pruning strategies inadequate for multiple models. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{\textsc{OptiShear}}, an efficient evolutionary optimization framework for adaptive LLM pruning. Our framework features two key innovations: an effective search space built on our Meta pruning metric to handle diverse weight distributions, and a model-wise reconstruction error for rapid evaluation during search trials. We employ Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III) to optimize both pruning metrics and layerwise sparsity ratios. Through extensive evaluation on LLaMA-1/2/3 and Mistral models (7B-70B) across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our adaptive pruning metrics consistently outperform existing methods. Additionally, our discovered layerwise sparsity ratios enhance the effectiveness of other pruning metrics. The framework exhibits strong cross-task and cross-model generalizability, providing a cost-effective solution for model compression.
2502.10739
BASE-SQL: A powerful open source Text-To-SQL baseline approach
cs.CL
The conversion of natural language into SQL language for querying databases (Text-to-SQL) has broad application prospects and has attracted widespread attention. At present, the mainstream Text-to-SQL methods are mainly divided into in-context learning (ICL) based methods and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) based methods. ICL-based methods can achieve relatively good results thanks to the use of the most advanced closed-source models. However, in real-world application scenarios, factors such as data privacy, SQL generation efficiency and cost need to be considered. SFT-based methods have certain advantages. At present, methods based on fine-tuning of open source models lack easy-to-implement and effective (cost-effective) baseline methods. We propose a pipeline-based method using open source model fine-tuning, referred to as BASE-SQL, which includes four components: Schema Linking, Candidate SQL Generate, SQL Revision and SQL Merge Revision. Experimental results show that BASE-SQL uses the open source model Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, and achieves an accuracy of 67.47% on the BIRD development set and 88.9% on the Spider test set, which is significantly better than other methods using open source models, and even exceeds several methods using the GPT-4o closed-source model. At the same time, BASE-SQL is easy to implement and highly efficient (on average, only five calls to the large language model are required to generate SQL once). The code will be open sourced at https://github.com/CycloneBoy/base_sql.
2502.10742
The Philosophical Foundations of Growing AI Like A Child
cs.AI
Despite excelling in high-level reasoning, current language models lack robustness in real-world scenarios and perform poorly on fundamental problem-solving tasks that are intuitive to humans. This paper argues that both challenges stem from a core discrepancy between human and machine cognitive development. While both systems rely on increasing representational power, the absence of core knowledge-foundational cognitive structures in humans-prevents language models from developing robust, generalizable abilities, where complex skills are grounded in simpler ones within their respective domains. It explores empirical evidence of core knowledge in humans, analyzes why language models fail to acquire it, and argues that this limitation is not an inherent architectural constraint. Finally, it outlines a workable proposal for systematically integrating core knowledge into future multi-modal language models through the large-scale generation of synthetic training data using a cognitive prototyping strategy.
2502.10743
1bit-Merging: Dynamic Quantized Merging for Large Language Models
cs.CL
Recent advances in large language models have led to specialized models excelling in specific domains, creating a need for efficient model merging techniques. While traditional merging approaches combine parameters into a single static model, they often compromise task-specific performance. However, task-specific routing methods maintain accuracy but introduce substantial storage overhead. We present \texttt{1bit}-Merging, a novel framework that integrates task-specific routing with 1-bit quantized task vectors to balance performance and storage efficiency. Our approach leverages the observation that different task-specific models store knowledge in distinct layers-chat models primarily in attention layers and math/code models in MLP layers-enabling targeted compression strategies. Through extensive experiments with LLaMA2 and Mistral model families across chat, mathematical reasoning, and code generation tasks, we demonstrate that \texttt{1bit}-Merging achieves comparable or superior performance to existing methods while significantly reducing storage requirements. Our framework offers a practical solution for combining specialized models while maintaining their individual strengths and addressing the storage challenges of current approaches.
2502.10749
LoRE-Merging: Exploring Low-Rank Estimation For Large Language Model Merging
cs.CL cs.AI
While most current approaches rely on further training techniques, such as fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, to enhance model capacities, model merging stands out for its ability of improving models without requiring any additional training. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without the need for access to the base model, named \textsc{LoRE-Merging}. Our approach is motivated by the observation that task vectors from fine-tuned models frequently exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values, making low-rank estimations less prone to interference. We implement the method by formulating the merging problem as an optimization problem. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating interference and preserving task-specific information, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art performance in model merging techniques.
2502.10750
Human-Centric Community Detection in Hybrid Metaverse Networks with Integrated AI Entities
cs.SI cs.AI
Community detection is a cornerstone problem in social network analysis (SNA), aimed at identifying cohesive communities with minimal external links. However, the rise of generative AI and Metaverse introduce complexities by creating hybrid human-AI social networks (denoted by HASNs), where traditional methods fall short, especially in human-centric settings. This paper introduces a novel community detection problem in HASNs (denoted by MetaCD), which seeks to enhance human connectivity within communities while reducing the presence of AI nodes. Effective processing of MetaCD poses challenges due to the delicate trade-off between excluding certain AI nodes and maintaining community structure. To address this, we propose CUSA, an innovative framework incorporating AI-aware clustering techniques that navigate this trade-off by selectively retaining AI nodes that contribute to community integrity. Furthermore, given the scarcity of real-world HASNs, we devise four strategies for synthesizing these networks under various hypothetical scenarios. Empirical evaluations on real social networks, reconfigured as HASNs, demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach compared to traditional non-deep learning and graph neural network (GNN)-based methods.
2502.10760
Why is prompting hard? Understanding prompts on binary sequence predictors
cs.CL cs.LG stat.ML
Large language models (LLMs) can be prompted to do many tasks, but finding good prompts is not always easy, nor is understanding some performant prompts. We explore these issues by viewing prompting as conditioning a near-optimal sequence predictor (LLM) pretrained on diverse data sources. Through numerous prompt search experiments, we show that the unintuitive patterns in optimal prompts can be better understood given the pretraining distribution, which is often unavailable in practice. Moreover, even using exhaustive search, reliably identifying optimal prompts from practical neural predictors can be difficult. Further, we demonstrate that common prompting methods, such as using intuitive prompts or samples from the targeted task, are in fact suboptimal. Thus, this work takes an initial step towards understanding the difficulties in finding and understanding optimal prompts from a statistical and empirical perspective.
2502.10761
A Whole-Body Disturbance Rejection Control Framework for Dynamic Motions in Legged Robots
cs.RO
This letter presents a control framework for legged robots that enables self-perception and resistance to external disturbances and model uncertainties. First, a novel disturbance estimator is proposed, integrating adaptive control and extended state observers (ESO) to estimate external disturbances and model uncertainties. This estimator is embedded within the whole-body control framework to compensate for disturbances in the legged system. Second, a comprehensive whole-body disturbance rejection control framework (WB-DRC) is introduced, accounting for the robot's full-body dynamics. Compared to previous whole-body control frameworks, WB-DRC effectively handles external disturbances and model uncertainties, with the potential to adapt to complex terrain. Third, simulations of both biped and quadruped robots are conducted in the Gazebo simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of WB-DRC. Finally, extensive experimental trials on the quadruped robot validate the robustness and stability of the robot system using WB-DRC under various disturbance conditions.
2502.10762
Bone Soups: A Seek-and-Soup Model Merging Approach for Controllable Multi-Objective Generation
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
User information needs are often highly diverse and varied. A key challenge in current research is how to achieve controllable multi-objective generation while enabling rapid adaptation to accommodate diverse user demands during test time. Existing solutions, such as Rewarded Soup, focus on merging language models individually tuned on single objectives. While easy to implement and widely used, these approaches face limitations in achieving optimal performance due to their disregard for the impacts of competing objectives on model tuning. To address this issue, we propose Bone Soup, a novel model merging approach that first seeks a series of backbone models by considering the impacts of multiple objectives and then makes the soup (i.e., merge the backbone models). Specifically, Bone Soup begins by training multiple backbone models for different objectives using multi-objective reinforcement learning. Each backbone model is guided by a combination of backbone reward signals. To ensure that these models are optimal for the Pareto front, the backbone rewards are crafted by combining standard reward functions into basis vectors, which can then be modified through a rule-based construction method. Bone Soup leverages a symmetric circulant matrix mapping to generate the merging coefficients, which are used to merge the backbone models according to user preferences. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Bone Soup exhibits strong controllability and Pareto optimality in controllable multi-objective generation, providing a more effective and efficient approach to addressing diverse user needs at test time.
2502.10764
Learning to Explain Air Traffic Situation
cs.LG
Understanding how air traffic controllers construct a mental 'picture' of complex air traffic situations is crucial but remains a challenge due to the inherently intricate, high-dimensional interactions between aircraft, pilots, and controllers. Previous work on modeling the strategies of air traffic controllers and their mental image of traffic situations often centers on specific air traffic control tasks or pairwise interactions between aircraft, neglecting to capture the comprehensive dynamics of an air traffic situation. To address this issue, we propose a machine learning-based framework for explaining air traffic situations. Specifically, we employ a Transformer-based multi-agent trajectory model that encapsulates both the spatio-temporal movement of aircraft and social interaction between them. By deriving attention scores from the model, we can quantify the influence of individual aircraft on overall traffic dynamics. This provides explainable insights into how air traffic controllers perceive and understand the traffic situation. Trained on real-world air traffic surveillance data collected from the terminal airspace around Incheon International Airport in South Korea, our framework effectively explicates air traffic situations. This could potentially support and enhance the decision-making and situational awareness of air traffic controllers.
2502.10768
Evaluating improvements on using Large Language Models (LLMs) for property extraction in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG)
cs.IR cs.AI cs.CL
Current research highlights the great potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for constructing Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs). One particularly complex step in this process is relation extraction, aimed at identifying suitable properties to describe the content of research. This study builds directly on previous research of three Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) team members who assessed the readiness of LLMs such as GPT-3.5, Llama 2, and Mistral for property extraction in scientific literature. Given the moderate performance observed, the previous work concluded that fine-tuning is needed to improve these models' alignment with scientific tasks and their emulation of human expertise. Expanding on this prior experiment, this study evaluates the impact of advanced prompt engineering techniques and demonstrates that these techniques can highly significantly enhance the results. Additionally, this study extends the property extraction process to include property matching to existing ORKG properties, which are retrieved via the API. The evaluation reveals that results generated through advanced prompt engineering achieve a higher proportion of matches with ORKG properties, further emphasizing the enhanced alignment achieved. Moreover, this lays the groundwork for addressing challenges such as the inconsistency of ORKG properties, an issue highlighted in prior studies. By assigning unique URIs and using standardized terminology, this work increases the consistency of the properties, fulfilling a crucial aspect of Linked Data and FAIR principles - core commitments of ORKG. This, in turn, significantly enhances the applicability of ORKG content for subsequent tasks such as comparisons of research publications. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for future improvements in the overall property extraction process.
2502.10776
A Distillation-based Future-aware Graph Neural Network for Stock Trend Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI q-fin.PM
Stock trend prediction involves forecasting the future price movements by analyzing historical data and various market indicators. With the advancement of machine learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively employed in stock prediction due to their powerful capability to capture spatiotemporal dependencies of stocks. However, despite the efforts of various GNN stock predictors to enhance predictive performance, the improvements remain limited, as they focus solely on analyzing historical spatiotemporal dependencies, overlooking the correlation between historical and future patterns. In this study, we propose a novel distillation-based future-aware GNN framework (DishFT-GNN) for stock trend prediction. Specifically, DishFT-GNN trains a teacher model and a student model, iteratively. The teacher model learns to capture the correlation between distribution shifts of historical and future data, which is then utilized as intermediate supervision to guide the student model to learn future-aware spatiotemporal embeddings for accurate prediction. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we verify the state-of-the-art performance of DishFT-GNN.
2502.10777
Fast Transmission Control Adaptation for URLLC via Channel Knowledge Map and Meta-Learning
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers methods for delivering ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) to enable mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) services in wireless environments with unknown channel distribution. The methods rely upon the historical channel gain samples of a few locations in a target area. We formulate a non-trivial transmission control adaptation problem across the target area under the URLLC constraints. Then we propose two solutions to solve this problem. The first is a power scaling scheme in conjunction with the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm with the help of the channel knowledge map (CKM) without retraining, where the CKM employs the spatial correlation of the channel characteristics from the historical channel gain samples. The second solution is model agnostic meta-learning (MAML) based metareinforcement learning algorithm that is trained from the known channel gain samples following distinct channel distributions and can quickly adapt to the new environment within a few steps of gradient update. Simulation results indicate that the DRL-based algorithm can effectively meet the reliability requirement of URLLC under various quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. Then the adaptation capabilities of the power scaling scheme and meta-reinforcement learning algorithm are also validated.
2502.10784
Preconditioned Inexact Stochastic ADMM for Deep Model
cs.LG
The recent advancement of foundation models (FMs) has brought about a paradigm shift, revolutionizing various sectors worldwide. The popular optimizers used to train these models are stochastic gradient descent-based algorithms, which face inherent limitations, such as slow convergence and stringent assumptions for convergence. In particular, data heterogeneity arising from distributed settings poses significant challenges to their theoretical and numerical performance. This paper develops an algorithm, PISA ({P}reconditioned {I}nexact {S}tochastic {A}lternating Direction Method of Multipliers), which enables scalable parallel computing and supports various second-moment schemes. Grounded in rigorous theoretical guarantees, the algorithm converges under the sole assumption of Lipschitz continuity of the gradient, thereby removing the need for other conditions commonly imposed by stochastic methods. This capability enables PISA to tackle the challenge of data heterogeneity effectively. Comprehensive experimental evaluations for training or fine-tuning diverse FMs, including vision models, large language models, reinforcement learning models, generative adversarial networks, and recurrent neural networks, demonstrate its superior numerical performance compared to various state-of-the-art optimizers.
2502.10785
REGNav: Room Expert Guided Image-Goal Navigation
cs.CV
Image-goal navigation aims to steer an agent towards the goal location specified by an image. Most prior methods tackle this task by learning a navigation policy, which extracts visual features of goal and observation images, compares their similarity and predicts actions. However, if the agent is in a different room from the goal image, it's extremely challenging to identify their similarity and infer the likely goal location, which may result in the agent wandering around. Intuitively, when humans carry out this task, they may roughly compare the current observation with the goal image, having an approximate concept of whether they are in the same room before executing the actions. Inspired by this intuition, we try to imitate human behaviour and propose a Room Expert Guided Image-Goal Navigation model (REGNav) to equip the agent with the ability to analyze whether goal and observation images are taken in the same room. Specifically, we first pre-train a room expert with an unsupervised learning technique on the self-collected unlabelled room images. The expert can extract the hidden room style information of goal and observation images and predict their relationship about whether they belong to the same room. In addition, two different fusion approaches are explored to efficiently guide the agent navigation with the room relation knowledge. Extensive experiments show that our REGNav surpasses prior state-of-the-art works on three popular benchmarks.
2502.10786
Epidemic-guided deep learning for spatiotemporal forecasting of Tuberculosis outbreak
cs.LG q-bio.QM stat.ML
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a formidable global health challenge, driven by complex spatiotemporal transmission dynamics and influenced by factors such as population mobility and behavioral changes. We propose an Epidemic-Guided Deep Learning (EGDL) approach that fuses mechanistic epidemiological principles with advanced deep learning techniques to enhance early warning systems and intervention strategies for TB outbreaks. Our framework is built upon a networked Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model augmented with a saturated incidence rate and graph Laplacian diffusion, capturing both long-term transmission dynamics and region-specific population mobility patterns. Compartmental model parameters are rigorously estimated using Bayesian inference via the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. Theoretical analysis leveraging the comparison principle and Green's formula establishes global stability properties of the disease-free and endemic equilibria. Building on these epidemiological insights, we design two forecasting architectures, EGDL-Parallel and EGDL-Series, that integrate the mechanistic outputs of the networked SIR model within deep neural networks. This integration mitigates the overfitting risks commonly encountered in data-driven methods and filters out noise inherent in surveillance data, resulting in reliable forecasts of real-world epidemic trends. Experiments conducted on TB incidence data from 47 prefectures in Japan demonstrate that our approach delivers robust and accurate predictions across multiple time horizons (short to medium-term forecasts). Additionally, incorporating uncertainty quantification through conformal prediction enhances the model's practical utility for guiding targeted public health interventions.
2502.10789
ReReLRP -- Remembering and Recognizing Tasks with LRP
cs.LG
Deep neural networks have revolutionized numerous research fields and applications. Despite their widespread success, a fundamental limitation known as catastrophic forgetting remains, where models fail to retain their ability to perform previously learned tasks after being trained on new ones. This limitation is particularly acute in certain continual learning scenarios, where models must integrate the knowledge from new domains with their existing capabilities. Traditional approaches to mitigate this problem typically rely on memory replay mechanisms, storing either original data samples, prototypes, or activation patterns. Although effective, these methods often introduce significant computational overhead, raise privacy concerns, and require the use of dedicated architectures. In this work we present ReReLRP (Remembering and Recognizing with LRP), a novel solution that leverages Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to preserve information across tasks. Our contribution provides increased privacy of existing replay-free methods while additionally offering built-in explainability, flexibility of model architecture and deployment, and a new mechanism to increase memory storage efficiency. We validate our approach on a wide variety of datasets, demonstrating results comparable with a well-known replay-based method in selected scenarios.
2502.10790
Which Features are Best for Successor Features?
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
In reinforcement learning, universal successor features (SFs) are a way to provide zero-shot adaptation to new tasks at test time: they provide optimal policies for all downstream reward functions lying in the linear span of a set of base features. But it is unclear what constitutes a good set of base features, that could be useful for a wide set of downstream tasks beyond their linear span. Laplacian eigenfunctions (the eigenfunctions of $\Delta+\Delta^\ast$ with $\Delta$ the Laplacian operator of some reference policy and $\Delta^\ast$ that of the time-reversed dynamics) have been argued to play a role, and offer good empirical performance. Here, for the first time, we identify the optimal base features based on an objective criterion of downstream performance, in a non-tautological way without assuming the downstream tasks are linear in the features. We do this for three generic classes of downstream tasks: reaching a random goal state, dense random Gaussian rewards, and random ``scattered'' sparse rewards. The features yielding optimal expected downstream performance turn out to be the \emph{same} for these three task families. They do not coincide with Laplacian eigenfunctions in general, though they can be expressed from $\Delta$: in the simplest case (deterministic environment and decay factor $\gamma$ close to $1$), they are the eigenfunctions of $\Delta^{-1}+(\Delta^{-1})^\ast$. We obtain these results under an assumption of large behavior cloning regularization with respect to a reference policy, a setting often used for offline RL. Along the way, we get new insights into KL-regularized\option{natural} policy gradient, and into the lack of SF information in the norm of Bellman gaps.
2502.10792
Tackling the Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Loss Directly
cs.LG
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance on a series of downstream tasks. Yet they cannot be trained directly for that objective, unless the distribution of downstream tasks is known. Existing approaches either use other learning criteria [BBQ+ 18, TRO23, TO21, HDB+ 19], or explicitly set a prior on downstream tasks, such as reward functions given by a random neural network [FPAL24]. Here we prove that the zero-shot RL loss can be optimized directly, for a range of non-informative priors such as white noise rewards, temporally smooth rewards, ``scattered'' sparse rewards, or a combination of those. Thus, it is possible to learn the optimal zero-shot features algorithmically, for a wide mixture of priors. Surprisingly, the white noise prior leads to an objective almost identical to the one in VISR [HDB+19], via a different approach. This shows that some seemingly arbitrary choices in VISR, such as Von Mises--Fisher distributions, do maximize downstream performance. This also suggests more efficient ways to tackle the VISR objective. Finally, we discuss some consequences and limitations of the zero-shot RL objective, such as its tendency to produce narrow optimal features if only using Gaussian dense reward priors.
2502.10793
Dynamic Influence Tracker: Measuring Time-Varying Sample Influence During Training
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG
Existing methods for measuring training sample influence on models only provide static, overall measurements, overlooking how sample influence changes during training. We propose Dynamic Influence Tracker (DIT), which captures the time-varying sample influence across arbitrary time windows during training. DIT offers three key insights: 1) Samples show different time-varying influence patterns, with some samples important in the early training stage while others become important later. 2) Sample influences show a weak correlation between early and late stages, demonstrating that the model undergoes distinct learning phases with shifting priorities. 3) Analyzing influence during the convergence period provides more efficient and accurate detection of corrupted samples than full-training analysis. Supported by theoretical guarantees without assuming loss convexity or model convergence, DIT significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 0.99 correlation with ground truth and above 98\% accuracy in detecting corrupted samples in complex architectures.
2502.10794
Distraction is All You Need for Multimodal Large Language Model Jailbreaking
cs.CV
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) bridge the gap between visual and textual data, enabling a range of advanced applications. However, complex internal interactions among visual elements and their alignment with text can introduce vulnerabilities, which may be exploited to bypass safety mechanisms. To address this, we analyze the relationship between image content and task and find that the complexity of subimages, rather than their content, is key. Building on this insight, we propose the Distraction Hypothesis, followed by a novel framework called Contrasting Subimage Distraction Jailbreaking (CS-DJ), to achieve jailbreaking by disrupting MLLMs alignment through multi-level distraction strategies. CS-DJ consists of two components: structured distraction, achieved through query decomposition that induces a distributional shift by fragmenting harmful prompts into sub-queries, and visual-enhanced distraction, realized by constructing contrasting subimages to disrupt the interactions among visual elements within the model. This dual strategy disperses the model's attention, reducing its ability to detect and mitigate harmful content. Extensive experiments across five representative scenarios and four popular closed-source MLLMs, including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4V, and Gemini-1.5-Flash, demonstrate that CS-DJ achieves average success rates of 52.40% for the attack success rate and 74.10% for the ensemble attack success rate. These results reveal the potential of distraction-based approaches to exploit and bypass MLLMs' defenses, offering new insights for attack strategies.
2502.10801
FaceSwapGuard: Safeguarding Facial Privacy from DeepFake Threats through Identity Obfuscation
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CV
DeepFakes pose a significant threat to our society. One representative DeepFake application is face-swapping, which replaces the identity in a facial image with that of a victim. Although existing methods partially mitigate these risks by degrading the quality of swapped images, they often fail to disrupt the identity transformation effectively. To fill this gap, we propose FaceSwapGuard (FSG), a novel black-box defense mechanism against deepfake face-swapping threats. Specifically, FSG introduces imperceptible perturbations to a user's facial image, disrupting the features extracted by identity encoders. When shared online, these perturbed images mislead face-swapping techniques, causing them to generate facial images with identities significantly different from the original user. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FSG against multiple face-swapping techniques, reducing the face match rate from 90\% (without defense) to below 10\%. Both qualitative and quantitative studies further confirm its ability to confuse human perception, highlighting its practical utility. Additionally, we investigate key factors that may influence FSG and evaluate its robustness against various adaptive adversaries.
2502.10802
CoCoEvo: Co-Evolution of Programs and Test Cases to Enhance Code Generation
cs.SE cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in automated code generation. However, existing approaches often rely heavily on pre-defined test cases, which become impractical in scenarios where such cases are unavailable. While prior works explore filtering techniques between programs and test cases, they overlook the refinement of test cases. To address this limitation, we introduce CoCoEvo, a novel LLM-based co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves programs and test cases. CoCoEvo eliminates the dependency on pre-defined test cases by generating both programs and test cases directly from natural language problem descriptions and function headers. The framework employs specialized evolutionary operators, including LLM-based crossover and mutation operators for program evolution, along with a test case generation operator for test case evolution. Additionally, we propose optimization strategies such as a crossover rate scheduler to balance exploration and convergence, and a multi-objective optimization method for test case selection. Experimental results on multiple state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that CoCoEvo surpasses existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in automated code generation and testing. These results underscore the potential of co-evolutionary techniques in advancing the field of automated programming.
2502.10803
PDA: Generalizable Detection of AI-Generated Images via Post-hoc Distribution Alignment
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CV
The rapid advancement of generative models has led to the proliferation of highly realistic AI-generated images, posing significant challenges for detection methods to generalize across diverse and evolving generative techniques. Existing approaches often fail to adapt to unknown models without costly retraining, limiting their practicability. To fill this gap, we propose Post-hoc Distribution Alignment (PDA), a novel approach for the generalizable detection for AI-generated images. The key idea is to use the known generative model to regenerate undifferentiated test images. This process aligns the distributions of the re-generated real images with the known fake images, enabling effective distinction from unknown fake images. PDA employs a two-step detection framework: 1) evaluating whether a test image aligns with the known fake distribution based on deep k-nearest neighbor (KNN) distance, and 2) re-generating test images using known generative models to create pseudo-fake images for further classification. This alignment strategy allows PDA to effectively detect fake images without relying on unseen data or requiring retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PDA, achieving 96.73\% average accuracy across six state-of-the-art generative models, including GANs, diffusion models, and text-to-image models, and improving by 16.07\% over the best baseline. Through t-SNE visualizations and KNN distance analysis, we provide insights into PDA's effectiveness in separating real and fake images. Our work provides a flexible and effective solution for real-world fake image detection, advancing the generalization ability of detection systems.
2502.10807
HybriDNA: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba2 Long-Range DNA Language Model
cs.LG cs.AI q-bio.GN
Advances in natural language processing and large language models have sparked growing interest in modeling DNA, often referred to as the "language of life". However, DNA modeling poses unique challenges. First, it requires the ability to process ultra-long DNA sequences while preserving single-nucleotide resolution, as individual nucleotides play a critical role in DNA function. Second, success in this domain requires excelling at both generative and understanding tasks: generative tasks hold potential for therapeutic and industrial applications, while understanding tasks provide crucial insights into biological mechanisms and diseases. To address these challenges, we propose HybriDNA, a decoder-only DNA language model that incorporates a hybrid Transformer-Mamba2 architecture, seamlessly integrating the strengths of attention mechanisms with selective state-space models. This hybrid design enables HybriDNA to efficiently process DNA sequences up to 131kb in length with single-nucleotide resolution. HybriDNA achieves state-of-the-art performance across 33 DNA understanding datasets curated from the BEND, GUE, and LRB benchmarks, and demonstrates exceptional capability in generating synthetic cis-regulatory elements (CREs) with desired properties. Furthermore, we show that HybriDNA adheres to expected scaling laws, with performance improving consistently as the model scales from 300M to 3B and 7B parameters. These findings underscore HybriDNA's versatility and its potential to advance DNA research and applications, paving the way for innovations in understanding and engineering the "language of life".
2502.10810
SVBench: A Benchmark with Temporal Multi-Turn Dialogues for Streaming Video Understanding
cs.CV
Despite the significant advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on established benchmarks, there remains a notable gap in suitable evaluation regarding their applicability in the emerging domain of long-context streaming video understanding. Current benchmarks for video understanding typically emphasize isolated single-instance text inputs and fail to evaluate the capacity to sustain temporal reasoning throughout the entire duration of video streams. To address these limitations, we introduce SVBench, a pioneering benchmark with temporal multi-turn question-answering chains specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of streaming video understanding of current LVLMs. We design a semi-automated annotation pipeline to obtain 49,979 Question-Answer (QA) pairs of 1,353 streaming videos, which includes generating QA chains that represent a series of consecutive multi-turn dialogues over video segments and constructing temporal linkages between successive QA chains. Our experimental results, obtained from 14 models in dialogue and streaming evaluations, reveal that while the closed-source GPT-4o outperforms others, most open-source LVLMs struggle with long-context streaming video understanding. We also construct a StreamingChat model, which significantly outperforms open-source LVLMs on our SVBench and achieves comparable performance on diverse vision-language benchmarks. We expect SVBench to advance the research of streaming video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current LVLMs. Our benchmark and model can be accessed at https://yzy-bupt.github.io/SVBench.
2502.10812
ResiComp: Loss-Resilient Image Compression via Dual-Functional Masked Visual Token Modeling
eess.IV cs.IT math.IT
Recent advancements in neural image codecs (NICs) are of significant compression performance, but limited attention has been paid to their error resilience. These resulting NICs tend to be sensitive to packet losses, which are prevalent in real-time communications. In this paper, we investigate how to elevate the resilience ability of NICs to combat packet losses. We propose ResiComp, a pioneering neural image compression framework with feature-domain packet loss concealment (PLC). Motivated by the inherent consistency between generation and compression, we advocate merging the tasks of entropy modeling and PLC into a unified framework focused on latent space context modeling. To this end, we take inspiration from the impressive generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly the recent advances of masked visual token modeling (MVTM). During training, we integrate MVTM to mirror the effects of packet loss, enabling a dual-functional Transformer to restore the masked latents by predicting their missing values and conditional probability mass functions. Our ResiComp jointly optimizes compression efficiency and loss resilience. Moreover, ResiComp provides flexible coding modes, allowing for explicitly adjusting the efficiency-resilience trade-off in response to varying Internet or wireless network conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ResiComp can significantly enhance the NIC's resilience against packet losses, while exhibits a worthy trade-off between compression efficiency and packet loss resilience.
2502.10813
Transformer-Driven Modeling of Variable Frequency Features for Classifying Student Engagement in Online Learning
cs.CV
The COVID-19 pandemic and the internet's availability have recently boosted online learning. However, monitoring engagement in online learning is a difficult task for teachers. In this context, timely automatic student engagement classification can help teachers in making adaptive adjustments to meet students' needs. This paper proposes EngageFormer, a transformer based architecture with sequence pooling using video modality for engagement classification. The proposed architecture computes three views from the input video and processes them in parallel using transformer encoders; the global encoder then processes the representation from each encoder, and finally, multi layer perceptron (MLP) predicts the engagement level. A learning centered affective state dataset is curated from existing open source databases. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 63.9%, 56.73%, 99.16%, 65.67%, and 74.89% on Dataset for Affective States in E-Environments (DAiSEE), Bahcesehir University Multimodal Affective Database-1 (BAUM-1), Yawning Detection Dataset (YawDD), University of Texas at Arlington Real-Life Drowsiness Dataset (UTA-RLDD), and curated learning-centered affective state dataset respectively. The achieved results on the BAUM-1, DAiSEE, and YawDD datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, indicating the superiority of the proposed model in accurately classifying affective states on these datasets. Additionally, the results obtained on the UTA-RLDD dataset, which involves two-class classification, serve as a baseline for future research. These results provide a foundation for further investigations and serve as a point of reference for future works to compare and improve upon.
2502.10816
BalanceBenchmark: A Survey for Imbalanced Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Multimodal learning has gained attention for its capacity to integrate information from different modalities. However, it is often hindered by the multimodal imbalance problem, where certain modality dominates while others remain underutilized. Although recent studies have proposed various methods to alleviate this problem, they lack comprehensive and fair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically categorize various mainstream multimodal imbalance algorithms into four groups based on the strategies they employ to mitigate imbalance. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, we introduce BalanceBenchmark, a benchmark including multiple widely used multidimensional datasets and evaluation metrics from three perspectives: performance, imbalance degree, and complexity. To ensure fair comparisons, we have developed a modular and extensible toolkit that standardizes the experimental workflow across different methods. Based on the experiments using BalanceBenchmark, we have identified several key insights into the characteristics and advantages of different method groups in terms of performance, balance degree and computational complexity. We expect such analysis could inspire more efficient approaches to address the imbalance problem in the future, as well as foundation models. The code of the toolkit is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BalanceBenchmark.
2502.10818
On Vanishing Gradients, Over-Smoothing, and Over-Squashing in GNNs: Bridging Recurrent and Graph Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are models that leverage the graph structure to transmit information between nodes, typically through the message-passing operation. While widely successful, this approach is well known to suffer from the over-smoothing and over-squashing phenomena, which result in representational collapse as the number of layers increases and insensitivity to the information contained at distant and poorly connected nodes, respectively. In this paper, we present a unified view of these problems through the lens of vanishing gradients, using ideas from linear control theory for our analysis. We propose an interpretation of GNNs as recurrent models and empirically demonstrate that a simple state-space formulation of a GNN effectively alleviates over-smoothing and over-squashing at no extra trainable parameter cost. Further, we show theoretically and empirically that (i) GNNs are by design prone to extreme gradient vanishing even after a few layers; (ii) Over-smoothing is directly related to the mechanism causing vanishing gradients; (iii) Over-squashing is most easily alleviated by a combination of graph rewiring and vanishing gradient mitigation. We believe our work will help bridge the gap between the recurrent and graph neural network literature and will unlock the design of new deep and performant GNNs.
2502.10819
Sensing With Communication Signals: From Information Theory to Signal Processing
cs.IT math.IT
The Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) paradigm is anticipated to be a cornerstone of the upcoming 6G networks. In order to optimize the use of wireless resources, 6G ISAC systems need to harness the communication data payload signals, which are inherently random, for both sensing and communication (S&C) purposes. This tutorial paper provides a comprehensive technical overview of the fundamental theory and signal processing methodologies for ISAC transmission with random communication signals. We begin by introducing the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) between S&C from an information-theoretic perspective, emphasizing the need for specialized signal processing techniques tailored to random ISAC signals. Building on this foundation, we review the core signal models and processing pipelines for communication-centric ISAC systems, and analyze the average squared auto-correlation function (ACF) of random ISAC signals, which serves as a fundamental performance metric for multi-target ranging tasks. Drawing insights from these theoretical results, we outline the design principles for the three key components of communication-centric ISAC systems: modulation schemes, constellation design, and pulse shaping filters. The goal is to either enhance sensing performance without compromising communication efficiency or to establish a scalable tradeoff between the two. We then extend our analysis from a single-antenna ISAC system to its multi-antenna counterpart, discussing recent advancements in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) precoding techniques specifically designed for random ISAC signals. We conclude by highlighting several open challenges and future research directions in the field of sensing with communication signals.
2502.10822
NeuroAMP: A Novel End-to-end General Purpose Deep Neural Amplifier for Personalized Hearing Aids
eess.AS cs.AI cs.SD
The prevalence of hearing aids is increasing. However, optimizing the amplification processes of hearing aids remains challenging due to the complexity of integrating multiple modular components in traditional methods. To address this challenge, we present NeuroAMP, a novel deep neural network designed for end-to-end, personalized amplification in hearing aids. NeuroAMP leverages both spectral features and the listener's audiogram as inputs, and we investigate four architectures: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), and Transformer. We also introduce Denoising NeuroAMP, an extension that integrates noise reduction along with amplification capabilities for improved performance in real-world scenarios. To enhance generalization, a comprehensive data augmentation strategy was employed during training on diverse speech (TIMIT and TMHINT) and music (Cadenza Challenge MUSIC) datasets. Evaluation using the Hearing Aid Speech Perception Index (HASPI), Hearing Aid Speech Quality Index (HASQI), and Hearing Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI) demonstrates that the Transformer architecture within NeuroAMP achieves the best performance, with SRCC scores of 0.9927 (HASQI) and 0.9905 (HASPI) on TIMIT, and 0.9738 (HAAQI) on the Cadenza Challenge MUSIC dataset. Notably, our data augmentation strategy maintains high performance on unseen datasets (e.g., VCTK, MUSDB18-HQ). Furthermore, Denoising NeuroAMP outperforms both the conventional NAL-R+WDRC approach and a two-stage baseline on the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, achieving a 10% improvement in both HASPI (0.90) and HASQI (0.59) scores. These results highlight the potential of NeuroAMP and Denoising NeuroAMP to deliver notable improvements in personalized hearing aid amplification.
2502.10825
MITRE ATT&CK Applications in Cybersecurity and The Way Forward
cs.CR cs.AI
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a widely adopted tool for enhancing cybersecurity, supporting threat intelligence, incident response, attack modeling, and vulnerability prioritization. This paper synthesizes research on its application across these domains by analyzing 417 peer-reviewed publications. We identify commonly used adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and examine the integration of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) with ATT&CK to improve threat detection and response. Additionally, we explore the interoperability of ATT&CK with other frameworks, such as the Cyber Kill Chain, NIST guidelines, and STRIDE, highlighting its versatility. The paper further evaluates the framework from multiple perspectives, including its effectiveness, validation methods, and sector-specific challenges, particularly in industrial control systems (ICS) and healthcare. We conclude by discussing current limitations and proposing future research directions to enhance the applicability of ATT&CK in dynamic cybersecurity environments.
2502.10826
Improved Offline Contextual Bandits with Second-Order Bounds: Betting and Freezing
cs.LG cs.IT math.IT stat.ML
We consider the off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a novel off-policy selection method that leverages a new betting-based confidence bound applied to an inverse propensity weight sequence. Our theoretical analysis reveals that our method achieves a significantly better, variance-adaptive guarantee upon prior art. Second, we propose a novel and generic condition on the optimization objective for off-policy learning that strikes a difference balance in bias and variance. One special case that we call freezing tends to induce small variance, which is preferred in small-data regimes. Our analysis shows that they match the best existing guarantee. In our empirical study, our selection method outperforms existing methods, and freezing exhibits improved performance in small-sample regimes.
2502.10827
E-3DGS: Event-Based Novel View Rendering of Large-Scale Scenes Using 3D Gaussian Splatting
cs.CV cs.GR
Novel view synthesis techniques predominantly utilize RGB cameras, inheriting their limitations such as the need for sufficient lighting, susceptibility to motion blur, and restricted dynamic range. In contrast, event cameras are significantly more resilient to these limitations but have been less explored in this domain, particularly in large-scale settings. Current methodologies primarily focus on front-facing or object-oriented (360-degree view) scenarios. For the first time, we introduce 3D Gaussians for event-based novel view synthesis. Our method reconstructs large and unbounded scenes with high visual quality. We contribute the first real and synthetic event datasets tailored for this setting. Our method demonstrates superior novel view synthesis and consistently outperforms the baseline EventNeRF by a margin of 11-25% in PSNR (dB) while being orders of magnitude faster in reconstruction and rendering.
2502.10828
The Vendiscope: An Algorithmic Microscope For Data Collections
cs.LG cond-mat.mtrl-sci cs.AI q-bio.QM
The evolution of microscopy, beginning with its invention in the late 16th century, has continuously enhanced our ability to explore and understand the microscopic world, enabling increasingly detailed observations of structures and phenomena. In parallel, the rise of data-driven science has underscored the need for sophisticated methods to explore and understand the composition of complex data collections. This paper introduces the Vendiscope, the first algorithmic microscope designed to extend traditional microscopy to computational analysis. The Vendiscope leverages the Vendi scores -- a family of differentiable diversity metrics rooted in ecology and quantum mechanics -- and assigns weights to data points based on their contribution to the overall diversity of the collection. These weights enable high-resolution data analysis at scale. We demonstrate this across biology, materials science, and machine learning (ML). We analyzed the $250$ million protein sequences in the protein universe, discovering that over $200$ million are near-duplicates and that AlphaFold fails on proteins with Gene Ontology (GO) functions that contribute most to diversity. Applying the Vendiscope to the Materials Project database led to similar findings: more than $85\%$ of the crystals with formation energy data are near-duplicates and ML models perform poorly on materials that enhance diversity. Additionally, the Vendiscope can be used to study phenomena such as memorization in generative models. We used the Vendiscope to identify memorized training samples from $13$ different generative models and found that the best-performing ones often memorize the training samples that contribute least to diversity. Our findings demonstrate that the Vendiscope can serve as a powerful tool for data-driven science.
2502.10833
Order-agnostic Identifier for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation
cs.IR
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative recommendation has attracted significant research interest, where item tokenization is a critical step. It involves assigning item identifiers for LLMs to encode user history and generate the next item. Existing approaches leverage either token-sequence identifiers, representing items as discrete token sequences, or single-token identifiers, using ID or semantic embeddings. Token-sequence identifiers face issues such as the local optima problem in beam search and low generation efficiency due to step-by-step generation. In contrast, single-token identifiers fail to capture rich semantics or encode Collaborative Filtering (CF) information, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose two fundamental principles for item identifier design: 1) integrating both CF and semantic information to fully capture multi-dimensional item information, and 2) designing order-agnostic identifiers without token dependency, mitigating the local optima issue and achieving simultaneous generation for generation efficiency. Accordingly, we introduce a novel set identifier paradigm for LLM-based generative recommendation, representing each item as a set of order-agnostic tokens. To implement this paradigm, we propose SETRec, which leverages CF and semantic tokenizers to obtain order-agnostic multi-dimensional tokens. To eliminate token dependency, SETRec uses a sparse attention mask for user history encoding and a query-guided generation mechanism for simultaneous token generation. We instantiate SETRec on T5 and Qwen (from 1.5B to 7B). Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness under various scenarios (e.g., full ranking, warm- and cold-start ranking, and various item popularity groups). Moreover, results validate SETRec's superior efficiency and show promising scalability on cold-start items as model sizes increase.
2502.10834
Prosocial Media
cs.CY cs.SI
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
2502.10835
Back Attention: Understanding and Enhancing Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models
cs.CL
We investigate how large language models perform latent multi-hop reasoning in prompts like "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's mother's spouse is". To analyze this process, we introduce logit flow, an interpretability method that traces how logits propagate across layers and positions toward the final prediction. Using logit flow, we identify four distinct stages in single-hop knowledge prediction: (A) entity subject enrichment, (B) entity attribute extraction, (C) relation subject enrichment, and (D) relation attribute extraction. Extending this analysis to multi-hop reasoning, we find that failures often stem from the relation attribute extraction stage, where conflicting logits reduce prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose back attention, a novel mechanism that enables lower layers to leverage higher-layer hidden states from different positions during attention computation. With back attention, a 1-layer transformer achieves the performance of a 2-layer transformer. Applied to four LLMs, back attention improves accuracy on five reasoning datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing latent multi-hop reasoning ability.
2502.10838
Generalizable speech deepfake detection via meta-learned LoRA
eess.AS cs.LG cs.SD
Generalizable deepfake detection can be formulated as a detection problem where labels (bonafide and fake) are fixed but distributional drift affects the deepfake set. We can always train our detector with one-selected attacks and bonafide data, but an attacker can generate new attacks by just retraining his generator with a different seed. One reasonable approach is to simply pool all different attack types available in training time. Our proposed approach is to utilize meta-learning in combination with LoRA adapters to learn the structure in the training data that is common to all attack types.
2502.10841
SkyReels-A1: Expressive Portrait Animation in Video Diffusion Transformers
cs.CV
We present SkyReels-A1, a simple yet effective framework built upon video diffusion Transformer to facilitate portrait image animation. Existing methodologies still encounter issues, including identity distortion, background instability, and unrealistic facial dynamics, particularly in head-only animation scenarios. Besides, extending to accommodate diverse body proportions usually leads to visual inconsistencies or unnatural articulations. To address these challenges, SkyReels-A1 capitalizes on the strong generative capabilities of video DiT, enhancing facial motion transfer precision, identity retention, and temporal coherence. The system incorporates an expression-aware conditioning module that enables seamless video synthesis driven by expression-guided landmark inputs. Integrating the facial image-text alignment module strengthens the fusion of facial attributes with motion trajectories, reinforcing identity preservation. Additionally, SkyReels-A1 incorporates a multi-stage training paradigm to incrementally refine the correlation between expressions and motion while ensuring stable identity reproduction. Extensive empirical evaluations highlight the model's ability to produce visually coherent and compositionally diverse results, making it highly applicable to domains such as virtual avatars, remote communication, and digital media generation.
2502.10842
Mobile Robotic Multi-View Photometric Stereo
cs.CV cs.RO
Multi-View Photometric Stereo (MVPS) is a popular method for fine-detailed 3D acquisition of an object from images. Despite its outstanding results on diverse material objects, a typical MVPS experimental setup requires a well-calibrated light source and a monocular camera installed on an immovable base. This restricts the use of MVPS on a movable platform, limiting us from taking MVPS benefits in 3D acquisition for mobile robotics applications. To this end, we introduce a new mobile robotic system for MVPS. While the proposed system brings advantages, it introduces additional algorithmic challenges. Addressing them, in this paper, we further propose an incremental approach for mobile robotic MVPS. Our approach leverages a supervised learning setup to predict per-view surface normal, object depth, and per-pixel uncertainty in model-predicted results. A refined depth map per view is obtained by solving an MVPS-driven optimization problem proposed in this paper. Later, we fuse the refined depth map while tracking the camera pose w.r.t the reference frame to recover globally consistent object 3D geometry. Experimental results show the advantages of our robotic system and algorithm, featuring the local high-frequency surface detail recovery with globally consistent object shape. Our work is beyond any MVPS system yet presented, providing encouraging results on objects with unknown reflectance properties using fewer frames without a tiring calibration and installation process, enabling computationally efficient robotic automation approach to photogrammetry. The proposed approach is nearly 100 times computationally faster than the state-of-the-art MVPS methods such as [1, 2] while maintaining the similar results when tested on subjects taken from the benchmark DiLiGenT MV dataset [3].
2502.10843
LEAPS: A discrete neural sampler via locally equivariant networks
cs.LG stat.CO stat.ML
We propose LEAPS, an algorithm to sample from discrete distributions known up to normalization by learning a rate matrix of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). LEAPS can be seen as a continuous-time formulation of annealed importance sampling and sequential Monte Carlo methods, extended so that the variance of the importance weights is offset by the inclusion of the CTMC. To derive these importance weights, we introduce a set of Radon-Nikodym derivatives of CTMCs over their path measures. Because the computation of these weights is intractable with standard neural network parameterizations of rate matrices, we devise a new compact representation for rate matrices via what we call locally equivariant functions. To parameterize them, we introduce a family of locally equivariant multilayer perceptrons, attention layers, and convolutional networks, and provide an approach to make deep networks that preserve the local equivariance. This property allows us to propose a scalable training algorithm for the rate matrix such that the variance of the importance weights associated to the CTMC are minimal. We demonstrate the efficacy of LEAPS on problems in statistical physics.
2502.10848
Implicit Neural Representations of Molecular Vector-Valued Functions
cs.LG q-bio.QM
Molecules have various computational representations, including numerical descriptors, strings, graphs, point clouds, and surfaces. Each representation method enables the application of various machine learning methodologies from linear regression to graph neural networks paired with large language models. To complement existing representations, we introduce the representation of molecules through vector-valued functions, or $n$-dimensional vector fields, that are parameterized by neural networks, which we denote molecular neural fields. Unlike surface representations, molecular neural fields capture external features and the hydrophobic core of macromolecules such as proteins. Compared to discrete graph or point representations, molecular neural fields are compact, resolution independent and inherently suited for interpolation in spatial and temporal dimensions. These properties inherited by molecular neural fields lend themselves to tasks including the generation of molecules based on their desired shape, structure, and composition, and the resolution-independent interpolation between molecular conformations in space and time. Here, we provide a framework and proofs-of-concept for molecular neural fields, namely, the parametrization and superresolution reconstruction of a protein-ligand complex using an auto-decoder architecture and the embedding of molecular volumes in latent space using an auto-encoder architecture.
2502.10851
To Bin or not to Bin: Alternative Representations of Mass Spectra
cs.LG physics.chem-ph q-bio.QM
Mass spectrometry, especially so-called tandem mass spectrometry, is commonly used to assess the chemical diversity of samples. The resulting mass fragmentation spectra are representations of molecules of which the structure may have not been determined. This poses the challenge of experimentally determining or computationally predicting molecular structures from mass spectra. An alternative option is to predict molecular properties or molecular similarity directly from spectra. Various methodologies have been proposed to embed mass spectra for further use in machine learning tasks. However, these methodologies require preprocessing of the spectra, which often includes binning or sub-sampling peaks with the main reasoning of creating uniform vector sizes and removing noise. Here, we investigate two alternatives to the binning of mass spectra before down-stream machine learning tasks, namely, set-based and graph-based representations. Comparing the two proposed representations to train a set transformer and a graph neural network on a regression task, respectively, we show that they both perform substantially better than a multilayer perceptron trained on binned data.
2502.10852
Multilingual Encoder Knows more than You Realize: Shared Weights Pretraining for Extremely Low-Resource Languages
cs.CL cs.AI
While multilingual language models like XLM-R have advanced multilingualism in NLP, they still perform poorly in extremely low-resource languages. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that modern LLMs such as LLaMA and Qwen support far fewer languages than XLM-R, making text generation models non-existent for many languages in the world. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages. By reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder, our framework allows the model to leverage the learned semantic space of the encoder, enabling efficient learning and effective generalization in low-resource languages. Applying this framework to four Chinese minority languages, we present XLM-SWCM, and demonstrate its superior performance on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger models.
2502.10853
Sparse learning with concave regularization: relaxation of the irrepresentable condition
math.OC cs.SY eess.SY
Learning sparse models from data is an important task in all those frameworks where relevant information should be identified within a large dataset. This can be achieved by formulating and solving suitable sparsity promoting optimization problems. As to linear regression models, Lasso is the most popular convex approach, based on an $\ell_1$-norm regularization. In contrast, in this paper, we analyse a concave regularized approach, and we prove that it relaxes the irrepresentable condition, which is sufficient and essentially necessary for Lasso to select the right significant parameters. In practice, this has the benefit of reducing the number of necessary measurements with respect to Lasso. Since the proposed problem is non-convex, we also discuss different algorithms to solve it, and we illustrate the obtained enhancement via numerical experiments.
2502.10855
Towards Effective Extraction and Evaluation of Factual Claims
cs.CL
A common strategy for fact-checking long-form content generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is extracting simple claims that can be verified independently. Since inaccurate or incomplete claims compromise fact-checking results, ensuring claim quality is critical. However, the lack of a standardized evaluation framework impedes assessment and comparison of claim extraction methods. To address this gap, we propose a framework for evaluating claim extraction in the context of fact-checking along with automated, scalable, and replicable methods for applying this framework, including novel approaches for measuring coverage and decontextualization. We also introduce Claimify, an LLM-based claim extraction method, and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods under our evaluation framework. A key feature of Claimify is its ability to handle ambiguity and extract claims only when there is high confidence in the correct interpretation of the source text.
2502.10857
Divergent Thoughts toward One Goal: LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration System for Electronic Design Automation
cs.CL
Recently, with the development of tool-calling capabilities in large language models (LLMs), these models have demonstrated significant potential for automating electronic design automation (EDA) flows by interacting with EDA tool APIs via EDA scripts. However, considering the limited understanding of EDA tools, LLMs face challenges in practical scenarios where diverse interfaces of EDA tools exist across different platforms. Additionally, EDA flow automation often involves intricate, long-chain tool-calling processes, increasing the likelihood of errors in intermediate steps. Any errors will lead to the instability and failure of EDA flow automation. To address these challenges, we introduce EDAid, a multi-agent collaboration system where multiple agents harboring divergent thoughts converge towards a common goal, ensuring reliable and successful EDA flow automation. Specifically, each agent is controlled by ChipLlama models, which are expert LLMs fine-tuned for EDA flow automation. Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our ChipLlama models and validate the effectiveness of our EDAid in the automation of complex EDA flows, showcasing superior performance compared to single-agent systems.
2502.10858
Is Depth All You Need? An Exploration of Iterative Reasoning in LLMs
cs.AI cs.CL
Deep iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to tackle complex tasks by progressively activating relevant pre-trained knowledge. However, it faces challenges in ensuring continual improvement and determining a stopping criterion. In this paper, we investigate whether the relevant knowledge that contributes directly to solving the given question can be activated from the initial reasoning path, thus circumventing the need for iterative refinement. Our experiments reveal that increasing the diversity of initial reasoning paths can achieve comparable or superior performance, a concept we term \textit{breadth reasoning}. However, existing breadth reasoning approaches, such as self-consistency, offer limited diversity. To address this limitation, we propose a simple yet effective method that enhances reasoning breadth by integrating contextual exploration with reduced sampling randomness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms deep iterative reasoning. Our code is provided in https://github.com/zongqianwu/breadth.
2502.10862
Accelerated co-design of robots through morphological pretraining
cs.RO
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance of each design. Here we show that a universal, morphology-agnostic controller can be rapidly and directly obtained by gradient-based optimization through differentiable simulation. This process of morphological pretraining allows the designer to explore non-differentiable changes to a robot's physical layout (e.g. adding, removing and recombining discrete body parts) and immediately determine which revisions are beneficial and which are deleterious using the pretrained model. We term this process "zero-shot evolution" and compare it with the simultaneous co-optimization of a universal controller alongside an evolving design population. We find the latter results in diversity collapse, a previously unknown pathology whereby the population -- and thus the controller's training data -- converges to similar designs that are easier to steer with a shared universal controller. We show that zero-shot evolution with a pretrained controller quickly yields a diversity of highly performant designs, and by fine-tuning the pretrained controller on the current population throughout evolution, diversity is not only preserved but significantly increased as superior performance is achieved.
2502.10864
Recursions for quadratic rotation symmetric functions weights
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
A Boolean function in $n$ variables is rotation symmetric (RS) if it is invariant under powers of $\rho(x_1, \ldots, x_n) = (x_2, \ldots, x_n, x_1)$. An RS function is called monomial rotation symmetric (MRS) if it is generated by applying powers of $\rho$ to a single monomial. The author showed in $2017$ that for any RS function $f_n$ in $n$ variables, the sequence of Hamming weights $wt(f_n)$ for all values of $n$ satisfies a linear recurrence with associated recursion polynomial given by the minimal polynomial of a {\em rules matrix}. Examples showed that the usual formula for the weights $wt(f_n)$ in terms of powers of the roots of the minimal polynomial always has simple coefficients. The conjecture that this is always true is the Easy Coefficients Conjecture (ECC). The present paper proves the ECC if the rules matrix satisfies a certain condition. Major applications include an enormous decrease in the amount of computation that is needed to determine the values of $wt(f_n)$ for a quadratic RS function $f_n$ if either $n$ or the order of the recursion for the weights is large, and a simpler way to determine the Dickson form of $f_n.$ The ECC also enables rapid computation of generating functions which give the values of $wt(f_n)$ as coefficients in a power series.
2502.10867
A Tutorial on LLM Reasoning: Relevant Methods behind ChatGPT o1
cs.AI cs.CL
OpenAI o1 has shown that applying reinforcement learning to integrate reasoning steps directly during inference can significantly improve a model's reasoning capabilities. This result is exciting as the field transitions from the conventional autoregressive method of generating answers to a more deliberate approach that models the slow-thinking process through step-by-step reasoning training. Reinforcement learning plays a key role in both the model's training and decoding processes. In this article, we present a comprehensive formulation of reasoning problems and investigate the use of both model-based and model-free approaches to better support this slow-thinking framework.
2502.10868
NitiBench: A Comprehensive Studies of LLM Frameworks Capabilities for Thai Legal Question Answering
cs.CL
The application of large language models (LLMs) in the legal domain holds significant potential for information retrieval and question answering, yet Thai legal QA systems face challenges due to a lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks and the complexity of Thai legal structures. This paper introduces NitiBench, a benchmark comprising two datasets: the NitiBench-CCL, covering general Thai financial law, and the NitiBench-Tax, which includes real-world tax law cases requiring advanced legal reasoning. We evaluate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context LLM-based approaches to address three key research questions: the impact of domain-specific components like section-based chunking and cross-referencing, the comparative performance of different retrievers and LLMs, and the viability of long-context LLMs as an alternative to RAG. Our results show that section-based chunking significantly improves retrieval and end-to-end performance, current retrievers struggle with complex queries, and long-context LLMs still underperform RAG-based systems in Thai legal QA. To support fair evaluation, we propose tailored multi-label retrieval metrics and the use of an LLM-as-judge for coverage and contradiction detection method. These findings highlight the limitations of current Thai legal NLP solutions and provide a foundation for future research in the field. We also open-sourced our codes and dataset to available publicly.
2502.10870
Hybrid high-order methods for elasto-acoustic wave propagation in the time domain
math.NA cs.CE cs.NA
We devise a Hybrid High-Order (HHO) method for the coupling between the acoustic and elastic wave equations in the time domain. A first-order formulation in time is considered. The HHO method can use equal-order and mixed-order settings, as well as O(1)- and O(1/h)-stabilizations. An energy-error estimate is established in the time-continuous case. A numerical spectral analysis is performed, showing that O(1)-stabilization is required to avoid excessive CFL limitations for explicit time discretizations. Moreover, the spectral radius of the stiffness matrix is fairly independent of the geometry of the mesh cells. For analytical solutions on general meshes, optimal convergence rates of order (k+1) are shown in both equal- and mixed-order settings using O(1)-stabilization, whereas order (k+2) is achieved in the mixed-order setting using O(1/h)-stabilization. Test cases with a Ricker wavelet as an initial condition showcase the relevance of the proposed method for the simulation of elasto-acoustic wave propagation across media with contrasted material properties.
2502.10871
The Representation and Recall of Interwoven Structured Knowledge in LLMs: A Geometric and Layered Analysis
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
This study investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent and recall multi-associated attributes across transformer layers. We show that intermediate layers encode factual knowledge by superimposing related attributes in overlapping spaces, along with effective recall even when attributes are not explicitly prompted. In contrast, later layers refine linguistic patterns and progressively separate attribute representations, optimizing task-specific outputs while appropriately narrowing attribute recall. We identify diverse encoding patterns including, for the first time, the observation of 3D spiral structures when exploring information related to the periodic table of elements. Our findings reveal a dynamic transition in attribute representations across layers, contributing to mechanistic interpretability and providing insights for understanding how LLMs handle complex, interrelated knowledge.
2502.10874
Indexing Join Inputs for Fast Queries and Maintenance
cs.DB
In database systems, joins are often expensive despite many years of research producing numerous join algorithms. Precomputed and materialized join views deliver the best query performance, whereas traditional indexes, used as pre-sorted inputs for merge joins, permit very efficient maintenance. Neither traditional indexes nor materialized join views require blocking phases, in contrast to query-time sorting and transient indexes, e.g., hash tables in hash joins, that impose high memory requirements and possibly spill to temporary storage. Here, we introduce a hybrid of traditional indexing and materialized join views. The *merged index* can be implemented with traditional b-trees, permits high-bandwidth maintenance using log-structured merge-forests, supports all join types (inner joins, all outer joins, all semi joins), and enables non-blocking query processing. Experiments across a wide range of scenarios confirm its query performance comparable to materialized join views and maintenance efficiency comparable to traditional indexes.
2502.10875
A Geometric Approach to Personalized Recommendation with Set-Theoretic Constraints Using Box Embeddings
cs.IR cs.AI cs.LG
Personalized item recommendation typically suffers from data sparsity, which is most often addressed by learning vector representations of users and items via low-rank matrix factorization. While this effectively densifies the matrix by assuming users and movies can be represented by linearly dependent latent features, it does not capture more complicated interactions. For example, vector representations struggle with set-theoretic relationships, such as negation and intersection, e.g. recommending a movie that is "comedy and action, but not romance". In this work, we formulate the problem of personalized item recommendation as matrix completion where rows are set-theoretically dependent. To capture this set-theoretic dependence we represent each user and attribute by a hyper-rectangle or box (i.e. a Cartesian product of intervals). Box embeddings can intuitively be understood as trainable Venn diagrams, and thus not only inherently represent similarity (via the Jaccard index), but also naturally and faithfully support arbitrary set-theoretic relationships. Queries involving set-theoretic constraints can be efficiently computed directly on the embedding space by performing geometric operations on the representations. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of box embeddings over vector-based neural methods on both simple and complex item recommendation queries by up to 30 \% overall.
2502.10876
Super Resolution image reconstructs via total variation-based image deconvolution: a majorization-minimization approach
cs.CV
This work aims to reconstruct image sequences with Total Variation regularity in super-resolution. We consider, in particular, images of scenes for which the point-to-point image transformation is a plane projective transformation. We first describe the super-resolution image's imaging observation model, an interpolation and Fusion estimator, and Projection on Convex Sets. We explain motion and compute the optical flow of a sequence of images using the Horn-Shunck algorithm to estimate motion. We then propose a Total Variation regulazer via a Majorization-Minimization approach to obtain a suitable result. Super Resolution restoration from motion measurements is also discussed. Finally, the simulation's part demonstrates the power of the proposed methodology. As expected, this model does not give real-time results, as seen in the numerical experiments section, but it is the cornerstone for future approaches. Finally, the simulation's part demonstrates the power of the proposed methodology. As expected, this model does not give real-time results, as seen in the numerical experiments section, but it is the cornerstone for future approaches.
2502.10878
Broadcast Channel Cooperative Gain: An Operational Interpretation of Partial Information Decomposition
cs.IT cs.AI cs.LG math.IT
Partial information decomposition has recently found applications in biological signal processing and machine learning. Despite its impacts, the decomposition was introduced through an informal and heuristic route, and its exact operational meaning is unclear. In this work, we fill this gap by connecting partial information decomposition to the capacity of the broadcast channel, which has been well-studied in the information theory literature. We show that the synergistic information in the decomposition can be rigorously interpreted as the cooperative gain, or a lower bound of this gain, on the corresponding broadcast channel. This interpretation can help practitioners to better explain and expand the applications of the partial information decomposition technique.
2502.10881
CiteCheck: Towards Accurate Citation Faithfulness Detection
cs.CL
Citation faithfulness detection is critical for enhancing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, yet large-scale Chinese datasets for this task are scarce. Existing methods face prohibitive costs due to the need for manually annotated negative samples. To address this, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese dataset CiteCheck for citation faithfulness detection, constructed via a cost-effective approach using two-stage manual annotation. This method balances positive and negative samples while significantly reducing annotation expenses. CiteCheck comprises training and test splits. Experiments demonstrate that: (1) the test samples are highly challenging, with even state-of-the-art LLMs failing to achieve high accuracy; and (2) training data augmented with LLM-generated negative samples enables smaller models to attain strong performance using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. CiteCheck provides a robust foundation for advancing citation faithfulness detection in Chinese RAG systems. The dataset is publicly available to facilitate research.
2502.10883
Learning Identifiable Structures Helps Avoid Bias in DNN-based Supervised Causal Learning
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ME
Causal discovery is a structured prediction task that aims to predict causal relations among variables based on their data samples. Supervised Causal Learning (SCL) is an emerging paradigm in this field. Existing Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods commonly adopt the "Node-Edge approach", in which the model first computes an embedding vector for each variable-node, then uses these variable-wise representations to concurrently and independently predict for each directed causal-edge. In this paper, we first show that this architecture has some systematic bias that cannot be mitigated regardless of model size and data size. We then propose SiCL, a DNN-based SCL method that predicts a skeleton matrix together with a v-tensor (a third-order tensor representing the v-structures). According to the Markov Equivalence Class (MEC) theory, both the skeleton and the v-structures are identifiable causal structures under the canonical MEC setting, so predictions about skeleton and v-structures do not suffer from the identifiability limit in causal discovery, thus SiCL can avoid the systematic bias in Node-Edge architecture, and enable consistent estimators for causal discovery. Moreover, SiCL is also equipped with a specially designed pairwise encoder module with a unidirectional attention layer to model both internal and external relationships of pairs of nodes. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that SiCL significantly outperforms other DNN-based SCL approaches.
2502.10886
MET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models
cs.CL
Entity tracking is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding, requiring models to maintain coherent representations of entities. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using two structured domains, Chess and the Shell Game, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based tracking and that this performance gap stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet substantial limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal scenarios. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.
2502.10887
RemInD: Remembering Anatomical Variations for Interpretable Domain Adaptive Medical Image Segmentation
cs.CV
This work presents a novel Bayesian framework for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in medical image segmentation. While prior works have explored this clinically significant task using various strategies of domain alignment, they often lack an explicit and explainable mechanism to ensure that target image features capture meaningful structural information. Besides, these methods are prone to the curse of dimensionality, inevitably leading to challenges in interpretability and computational efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose RemInD, a framework inspired by human adaptation. RemInD learns a domain-agnostic latent manifold, characterized by several anchors, to memorize anatomical variations. By mapping images onto this manifold as weighted anchor averages, our approach ensures realistic and reliable predictions. This design mirrors how humans develop representative components to understand images and then retrieve component combinations from memory to guide segmentation. Notably, model prediction is determined by two explainable factors: a low-dimensional anchor weight vector, and a spatial deformation. This design facilitates computationally efficient and geometry-adherent adaptation by aligning weight vectors between domains on a probability simplex. Experiments on two public datasets, encompassing cardiac and abdominal imaging, demonstrate the superiority of RemInD, which achieves state-of-the-art performance using a single alignment approach, outperforming existing methods that often rely on multiple complex alignment strategies.
2502.10889
Nonlinear Feedback Linearization and LQG/LTR Control: A Comparative Study for a Single-Machine Infinite-Bus System
eess.SY cs.SY math.OC
This paper presents a comparative study of three advanced control strategies for a single-machine infinite-bus (SMIB) system: the nonlinear feedback linearizing controller (NFLC), the integral-NFLC (INFLC), and the linear-quadratic-Gaussian/loop transfer recovery (LQG/LTR) control. The NFLC and INFLC techniques use exact feedback linearization to precisely cancel the SMIB system nonlinearities, enabling the use of decentralized, linear, and optimal controllers for the decoupled generator and turbine-governor systems while remaining unaffected by the SMIB system's internal dynamics and operating conditions. In contrast, the LQG/LTR approach employs an enhanced Kalman filter, designed using the LTR procedure and a detailed frequency-domain loop-shaping analysis, to achieve a reasonable trade-off between optimal performance, noise/disturbance rejection, robustness recovery, and stability margins for the SMIB system. We provide a control synthesis framework for constructing practical, verifiable, scalable, and resilient linear and nonlinear controllers for SMIB and multi-machine power systems by utilizing a high-fidelity plant model for validation, a reduced-order control-design model, and the correlations between the two models' control inputs. Rigorous simulations and comparative analysis of the proposed controllers and a full-state linear-quadratic regulator show the benefits, constraints, and trade-offs of each controller in terms of transient response, steady-state error, robustness, rotor angle stability, frequency control, and voltage regulation under different operating conditions. Ultimately, this study aims to guide the selection of appropriate control strategies for large-scale power systems, enhancing the overall resilience and reliability of the electric grid.
2502.10894
Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Athletic Loco-Manipulation
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Achieving athletic loco-manipulation on robots requires moving beyond traditional tracking rewards - which simply guide the robot along a reference trajectory - to task rewards that drive truly dynamic, goal-oriented behaviors. Commands such as "throw the ball as far as you can" or "lift the weight as quickly as possible" compel the robot to exhibit the agility and power inherent in athletic performance. However, training solely with task rewards introduces two major challenges: these rewards are prone to exploitation (reward hacking), and the exploration process can lack sufficient direction. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage training pipeline. First, we introduce the Unsupervised Actuator Net (UAN), which leverages real-world data to bridge the sim-to-real gap for complex actuation mechanisms without requiring access to torque sensing. UAN mitigates reward hacking by ensuring that the learned behaviors remain robust and transferable. Second, we use a pre-training and fine-tuning strategy that leverages reference trajectories as initial hints to guide exploration. With these innovations, our robot athlete learns to lift, throw, and drag with remarkable fidelity from simulation to reality.
2502.10896
Developing Conversational Speech Systems for Robots to Detect Speech Biomarkers of Cognition in People Living with Dementia
cs.CL
This study presents the development and testing of a conversational speech system designed for robots to detect speech biomarkers indicative of cognitive impairments in people living with dementia (PLwD). The system integrates a backend Python WebSocket server and a central core module with a large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for dementia to process user input and generate robotic conversation responses in real-time in less than 1.5 seconds. The frontend user interface, a Progressive Web App (PWA), displays information and biomarker score graphs on a smartphone in real-time to human users (PLwD, caregivers, clinicians). Six speech biomarkers based on the existing literature - Altered Grammar, Pragmatic Impairments, Anomia, Disrupted Turn-Taking, Slurred Pronunciation, and Prosody Changes - were developed for the robot conversation system using two datasets, one that included conversations of PLwD with a human clinician (DementiaBank dataset) and one that included conversations of PLwD with a robot (Indiana dataset). We also created a composite speech biomarker that combined all six individual biomarkers into a single score. The speech system's performance was first evaluated on the DementiaBank dataset showing moderate correlation with MMSE scores, with the composite biomarker score outperforming individual biomarkers. Analysis of the Indiana dataset revealed higher and more variable biomarker scores, suggesting potential differences due to study populations (e.g. severity of dementia) and the conversational scenario (human-robot conversations are different from human-human). The findings underscore the need for further research on the impact of conversational scenarios on speech biomarkers and the potential clinical applications of robotic speech systems.
2502.10899
Breaking Down the Hierarchy: A New Approach to Leukemia Classification
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
The complexities inherent to leukemia, multifaceted cancer affecting white blood cells, pose considerable diagnostic and treatment challenges, primarily due to reliance on laborious morphological analyses and expert judgment that are susceptible to errors. Addressing these challenges, this study presents a refined, comprehensive strategy leveraging advanced deep-learning techniques for the classification of leukemia subtypes. We commence by developing a hierarchical label taxonomy, paving the way for differentiating between various subtypes of leukemia. The research further introduces a novel hierarchical approach inspired by clinical procedures capable of accurately classifying diverse types of leukemia alongside reactive and healthy cells. An integral part of this study involves a meticulous examination of the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) as classifiers. The proposed method exhibits an impressive success rate, achieving approximately 90\% accuracy across all leukemia subtypes, as substantiated by our experimental results. A visual representation of the experimental findings is provided to enhance the model's explainability and aid in understanding the classification process.
2502.10906
PCGRLLM: Large Language Model-Driven Reward Design for Procedural Content Generation Reinforcement Learning
cs.AI
Reward design plays a pivotal role in the training of game AIs, requiring substantial domain-specific knowledge and human effort. In recent years, several studies have explored reward generation for training game agents and controlling robots using large language models (LLMs). In the content generation literature, there has been early work on generating reward functions for reinforcement learning agent generators. This work introduces PCGRLLM, an extended architecture based on earlier work, which employs a feedback mechanism and several reasoning-based prompt engineering techniques. We evaluate the proposed method on a story-to-reward generation task in a two-dimensional environment using two state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating the generalizability of our approach. Our experiments provide insightful evaluations that demonstrate the capabilities of LLMs essential for content generation tasks. The results highlight significant performance improvements of 415% and 40% respectively, depending on the zero-shot capabilities of the language model. Our work demonstrates the potential to reduce human dependency in game AI development, while supporting and enhancing creative processes.
2502.10907
Local Multiple Traces Formulation for Heterogeneous Electromagnetic Scattering: Implementation and Preconditioning
cs.CE
We consider the three-dimensional time-harmonic electromagnetic (EM) wave scattering transmission problem involving heterogeneous scatterers. The fields are approximated using the local multiple traces formulation (MTF), originally introduced for acoustic scattering. This scheme assigns independent boundary unknowns to each subdomain and weakly enforces Calder\'on identities along with interface transmission conditions. As a result, the MTF effectively handles shared points or edges among multiple subdomains, while supporting various preconditioning and parallelization strategies. Nevertheless, implementing standard solvers presents significant challenges, particularly in managing the degrees of freedom associated with subdomains and their interfaces. To address these difficulties, we propose a novel framework that suitably defines approximation spaces and enables the efficient exchange of normal vectors across subdomain boundaries. This framework leverages the skeleton mesh, representing the union of all interfaces, as the computational backbone, and constitutes the first scalable implementation of the EM MTF. Furthermore, we conduct several numerical experiments, exploring the effects of increasing subdomains and block On-Surface-Raditation-Condition (OSRC) preconditioning, to validate our approach and provide insights for future developments.
2502.10908
Automatic Quality Assessment of First Trimester Crown-Rump-Length Ultrasound Images
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Fetal gestational age (GA) is vital clinical information that is estimated during pregnancy in order to assess fetal growth. This is usually performed by measuring the crown-rump-length (CRL) on an ultrasound image in the Dating scan which is then correlated with fetal age and growth trajectory. A major issue when performing the CRL measurement is ensuring that the image is acquired at the correct view, otherwise it could be misleading. Although clinical guidelines specify the criteria for the correct CRL view, sonographers may not regularly adhere to such rules. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based solution that is able to verify the adherence of a CRL image to clinical guidelines in order to assess image quality and facilitate accurate estimation of GA. We first segment out important fetal structures then use the localized structures to perform a clinically-guided mapping that verifies the adherence of criteria. The segmentation method combines the benefits of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Vision Transformer (ViT) to segment fetal structures in ultrasound images and localize important fetal landmarks. For segmentation purposes, we compare our proposed work with UNet and show that our CNN/ViT-based method outperforms an optimized version of UNet. Furthermore, we compare the output of the mapping with classification CNNs when assessing the clinical criteria and the overall acceptability of CRL images. We show that the proposed mapping is not only explainable but also more accurate than the best performing classification CNNs.