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2502.14372
Discovering highly efficient low-weight quantum error-correcting codes with reinforcement learning
quant-ph cs.AI cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
The realization of scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing is expected to hinge on quantum error-correcting codes. In the quest for more efficient quantum fault tolerance, a critical code parameter is the weight of measurements that extract information about errors to enable error correction: as higher measurement weights require higher implementation costs and introduce more errors, it is important in code design to optimize measurement weight. This underlies the surging interest in quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, the study of which has primarily focused on the asymptotic (large-code-limit) properties. In this work, we introduce a versatile and computationally efficient approach to stabilizer code weight reduction based on reinforcement learning (RL), which produces new low-weight codes that substantially outperform the state of the art in practically relevant parameter regimes, extending significantly beyond previously accessible small distances. For example, our approach demonstrates savings in physical qubit overhead compared to existing results by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude for weight 6 codes and brings the overhead into a feasible range for near-future experiments. We also investigate the interplay between code parameters using our RL framework, offering new insights into the potential efficiency and power of practically viable coding strategies. Overall, our results demonstrate how RL can effectively advance the crucial yet challenging problem of quantum code discovery and thereby facilitate a faster path to the practical implementation of fault-tolerant quantum technologies.
2502.14373
CrossVTON: Mimicking the Logic Reasoning on Cross-category Virtual Try-on guided by Tri-zone Priors
cs.CV
Despite remarkable progress in image-based virtual try-on systems, generating realistic and robust fitting images for cross-category virtual try-on remains a challenging task. The primary difficulty arises from the absence of human-like reasoning, which involves addressing size mismatches between garments and models while recognizing and leveraging the distinct functionalities of various regions within the model images. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from human cognitive processes and disentangle the complex reasoning required for cross-category try-on into a structured framework. This framework systematically decomposes the model image into three distinct regions: try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones. Each zone plays a specific role in accommodating the garment and facilitating realistic synthesis. To endow the model with robust reasoning capabilities for cross-category scenarios, we propose an iterative data constructor. This constructor encompasses diverse scenarios, including intra-category try-on, any-to-dress transformations (replacing any garment category with a dress), and dress-to-any transformations (replacing a dress with another garment category). Utilizing the generated dataset, we introduce a tri-zone priors generator that intelligently predicts the try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones by analyzing how the input garment is expected to align with the model image. Guided by these tri-zone priors, our proposed method, CrossVTON, achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Notably, it demonstrates superior capability in handling cross-category virtual try-on, meeting the complex demands of real-world applications.
2502.14375
VFL-RPS: Relevant Participant Selection in Vertical Federated Learning
cs.LG
Federated Learning (FL) allows collaboration between different parties, while ensuring that the data across these parties is not shared. However, not every collaboration is helpful in terms of the resulting model performance. Therefore, it is an important challenge to select the correct participants in a collaboration. As it currently stands, most of the efforts in participant selection in the literature have focused on Horizontal Federated Learning (HFL), which assumes that all features are the same across all participants, disregarding the possibility of different features across participants which is captured in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL). To close this gap in the literature, we propose a novel method VFL-RPS for participant selection in VFL, as a pre-training step. We have tested our method on several data sets performing both regression and classification tasks, showing that our method leads to comparable results as using all data by only selecting a few participants. In addition, we show that our method outperforms existing methods for participant selection in VFL.
2502.14376
A Similarity Paradigm Through Textual Regularization Without Forgetting
cs.CL cs.CV
Prompt learning has emerged as a promising method for adapting pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) to a range of downstream tasks. While optimizing the context can be effective for improving performance on specific tasks, it can often lead to poor generalization performance on unseen classes or datasets sampled from different distributions. It may be attributed to the fact that textual prompts tend to overfit downstream data distributions, leading to the forgetting of generalized knowledge derived from hand-crafted prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Similarity Paradigm with Textual Regularization (SPTR) for prompt learning without forgetting. SPTR is a two-pronged design based on hand-crafted prompts that is an inseparable framework. 1) To avoid forgetting general textual knowledge, we introduce the optimal transport as a textual regularization to finely ensure approximation with hand-crafted features and tuning textual features. 2) In order to continuously unleash the general ability of multiple hand-crafted prompts, we propose a similarity paradigm for natural alignment score and adversarial alignment score to improve model robustness for generalization. Both modules share a common objective in addressing generalization issues, aiming to maximize the generalization capability derived from multiple hand-crafted prompts. Four representative tasks (i.e., non-generalization few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset generalization, domain generalization) across 11 datasets demonstrate that SPTR outperforms existing prompt learning methods.
2502.14377
RelaCtrl: Relevance-Guided Efficient Control for Diffusion Transformers
cs.CV
The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing text-to-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the "ControlNet Relevance Score"-i.e., the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta. More examples are available at https://relactrl.github.io/RelaCtrl/.
2502.14378
Extremal Self-Dual Codes and Linear Complementary Dual Codes from Double Circulant Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper explores extremal self-dual double circulant (DC) codes and linear complementary dual (LCD) codes of arbitrary length over the Galois field $\mathbb F_2$. We establish the sufficient and necessary conditions for DC codes and bordered DC codes to be self-dual and identify the conditions for self-dual DC codes of length up to 44 to be extremal or non-extremal. Additionally, The self-duality and extremality between DC codes and bordered DC codes are also examined. Finally, sufficient conditions for bordered DC codes to be LCD codes over $\mathbb F_2$ under Euclidean inner product are presented.
2502.14379
Achieving adaptivity and optimality for multi-armed bandits using Exponential-Kullback Leiblier Maillard Sampling
cs.LG cs.DS
We study the problem of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) with reward distributions belonging to a One-Parameter Exponential Distribution (OPED) family. In the literature, several criteria have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such algorithms, including Asymptotic Optimality (A.O.), Minimax Optimality (M.O.), Sub-UCB, and variance-adaptive worst-case regret bound. Thompson Sampling (TS)-based and Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)-based algorithms have been employed to achieve some of these criteria. However, none of these algorithms simultaneously satisfy all the aforementioned criteria. In this paper, we design an algorithm, Exponential Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling (abbrev. \expklms), that can achieve multiple optimality criteria simultaneously, including A.O., M.O. with a logarithmic factor, Sub-UCB, and variance-adaptive worst-case regret bound.
2502.14380
Affinity and Diversity: A Unified Metric for Demonstration Selection via Internal Representations
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
The performance of In-Context Learning (ICL) is highly sensitive to the selected demonstrations. Existing approaches to demonstration selection optimize different objectives, yielding inconsistent results. To address this, we propose a unified metric--affinity and diversity--that leverages ICL model's internal representations. Our experiments show that both affinity and diversity strongly correlate with test accuracies, indicating their effectiveness for demonstration selection. Moreover, we show that our proposed metrics align well with various previous works to unify the inconsistency.
2502.14381
dtaianomaly: A Python library for time series anomaly detection
cs.LG cs.DB
dtaianomaly is an open-source Python library for time series anomaly detection, designed to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world applications. Our goal is to (1) accelerate the development of novel state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques through simple extensibility; (2) offer functionality for large-scale experimental validation; and thereby (3) bring cutting-edge research to business and industry through a standardized API, similar to scikit-learn to lower the entry barrier for both new and experienced users. Besides these key features, dtaianomaly offers (1) a broad range of built-in anomaly detectors, (2) support for time series preprocessing, (3) tools for visual analysis, (4) confidence prediction of anomaly scores, (5) runtime and memory profiling, (6) comprehensive documentation, and (7) cross-platform unit testing. The source code of dtaianomaly, documentation, code examples and installation guides are publicly available at https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/dtaianomaly.
2502.14382
S*: Test Time Scaling for Code Generation
cs.LG cs.AI
Increasing test-time compute for LLMs shows promise across domains but remains underexplored in code generation, despite extensive study in math. In this paper, we propose S*, the first hybrid test-time scaling framework that substantially improves the coverage and selection accuracy of generated code. S* extends the existing parallel scaling paradigm with sequential scaling to push performance boundaries. It further leverages a novel selection mechanism that adaptively generates distinguishing inputs for pairwise comparison, combined with execution-grounded information to robustly identify correct solutions. We evaluate across 12 Large Language Models and Large Reasoning Model and show: (1) S* consistently improves performance across model families and sizes, enabling a 3B model to outperform GPT-4o-mini; (2) S* enables non-reasoning models to surpass reasoning models - GPT-4o-mini with S* outperforms o1-preview by 3.7% on LiveCodeBench; (3) S* further boosts state-of-the-art reasoning models - DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B with S* achieves 85.7% on LiveCodeBench, approaching o1 (high) at 88.5%. Code will be available under https://github.com/NovaSky-AI/SkyThought.
2502.14383
Rumor Detection by Multi-task Suffix Learning based on Time-series Dual Sentiments
cs.CL
The widespread dissemination of rumors on social media has a significant impact on people's lives, potentially leading to public panic and fear. Rumors often evoke specific sentiments, resonating with readers and prompting sharing. To effectively detect and track rumors, it is essential to observe the fine-grained sentiments of both source and response message pairs as the rumor evolves over time. However, current rumor detection methods fail to account for this aspect. In this paper, we propose MSuf, the first multi-task suffix learning framework for rumor detection and tracking using time series dual (coupled) sentiments. MSuf includes three modules: (1) an LLM to extract sentiment intensity features and sort them chronologically; (2) a module that fuses the sorted sentiment features with their source text word embeddings to obtain an aligned embedding; (3) two hard prompts are combined with the aligned vector to perform rumor detection and sentiment analysis using one frozen LLM. MSuf effectively enhances the performance of LLMs for rumor detection with only minimal parameter fine-tuning. Evaluating MSuf on four rumor detection benchmarks, we find significant improvements compared to other emotion-based methods.
2502.14385
Tradutor: Building a Variety Specific Translation Model
cs.CL
Language models have become foundational to many widely used systems. However, these seemingly advantageous models are double-edged swords. While they excel in tasks related to resource-rich languages like English, they often lose the fine nuances of language forms, dialects, and varieties that are inherent to languages spoken in multiple regions of the world. Languages like European Portuguese are neglected in favor of their more popular counterpart, Brazilian Portuguese, leading to suboptimal performance in various linguistic tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the first open-source translation model specifically tailored for European Portuguese, along with a novel dataset specifically designed for this task. Results from automatic evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our best model surpasses existing open-source translation systems for Portuguese and approaches the performance of industry-leading closed-source systems for European Portuguese. By making our dataset, models, and code publicly available, we aim to support and encourage further research, fostering advancements in the representation of underrepresented language varieties.
2502.14387
MPPI-DBaS: Safe Trajectory Optimization with Adaptive Exploration
eess.SY cs.SY
In trajectory optimization, Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that generates optimal inputs by efficiently simulating numerous trajectories. In practice, however, MPPI often struggles to guarantee safety assurance and balance efficient sampling in open spaces with the need for more extensive exploration under tight constraints. To address this challenge, we incorporate discrete barrier states (DBaS) into MPPI and propose a novel MPPI-DBaS algorithm that ensures system safety and enables adaptive exploration across diverse scenarios. We evaluate our method in simulation experiments where the vehicle navigates through closely placed obstacles. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms standard MPPI, achieving a higher success rate and lower tracking errors.
2502.14389
Leveraging Small LLMs for Argument Mining in Education: Argument Component Identification, Classification, and Assessment
cs.CL cs.HC
Argument mining algorithms analyze the argumentative structure of essays, making them a valuable tool for enhancing education by providing targeted feedback on the students' argumentation skills. While current methods often use encoder or encoder-decoder deep learning architectures, decoder-only models remain largely unexplored, offering a promising research direction. This paper proposes leveraging open-source, small Large Language Models (LLMs) for argument mining through few-shot prompting and fine-tuning. These models' small size and open-source nature ensure accessibility, privacy, and computational efficiency, enabling schools and educators to adopt and deploy them locally. Specifically, we perform three tasks: segmentation of student essays into arguments, classification of the arguments by type, and assessment of their quality. We empirically evaluate the models on the Feedback Prize - Predicting Effective Arguments dataset of grade 6-12 students essays and demonstrate how fine-tuned small LLMs outperform baseline methods in segmenting the essays and determining the argument types while few-shot prompting yields comparable performance to that of the baselines in assessing quality. This work highlights the educational potential of small, open-source LLMs to provide real-time, personalized feedback, enhancing independent learning and writing skills while ensuring low computational cost and privacy.
2502.14394
Enhancing Portuguese Variety Identification with Cross-Domain Approaches
cs.CL
Recent advances in natural language processing have raised expectations for generative models to produce coherent text across diverse language varieties. In the particular case of the Portuguese language, the predominance of Brazilian Portuguese corpora online introduces linguistic biases in these models, limiting their applicability outside of Brazil. To address this gap and promote the creation of European Portuguese resources, we developed a cross-domain language variety identifier (LVI) to discriminate between European and Brazilian Portuguese. Motivated by the findings of our literature review, we compiled the PtBrVarId corpus, a cross-domain LVI dataset, and study the effectiveness of transformer-based LVI classifiers for cross-domain scenarios. Although this research focuses on two Portuguese varieties, our contribution can be extended to other varieties and languages. We open source the code, corpus, and models to foster further research in this task.
2502.14397
PhotoDoodle: Learning Artistic Image Editing from Few-Shot Pairwise Data
cs.CV
We introduce PhotoDoodle, a novel image editing framework designed to facilitate photo doodling by enabling artists to overlay decorative elements onto photographs. Photo doodling is challenging because the inserted elements must appear seamlessly integrated with the background, requiring realistic blending, perspective alignment, and contextual coherence. Additionally, the background must be preserved without distortion, and the artist's unique style must be captured efficiently from limited training data. These requirements are not addressed by previous methods that primarily focus on global style transfer or regional inpainting. The proposed method, PhotoDoodle, employs a two-stage training strategy. Initially, we train a general-purpose image editing model, OmniEditor, using large-scale data. Subsequently, we fine-tune this model with EditLoRA using a small, artist-curated dataset of before-and-after image pairs to capture distinct editing styles and techniques. To enhance consistency in the generated results, we introduce a positional encoding reuse mechanism. Additionally, we release a PhotoDoodle dataset featuring six high-quality styles. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advanced performance and robustness of our method in customized image editing, opening new possibilities for artistic creation.
2502.14400
HPS: Hard Preference Sampling for Human Preference Alignment
cs.AI
Aligning Large Language Model (LLM) responses with human preferences is vital for building safe and controllable AI systems. While preference optimization methods based on Plackett-Luce (PL) and Bradley-Terry (BT) models have shown promise, they face challenges such as poor handling of harmful content, inefficient use of dispreferred responses, and, specifically for PL, high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose Hard Preference Sampling (HPS), a novel framework for robust and efficient human preference alignment. HPS introduces a training loss that prioritizes the most preferred response while rejecting all dispreferred and harmful ones. It emphasizes "hard" dispreferred responses--those closely resembling preferred ones--to enhance the model's rejection capabilities. By leveraging a single-sample Monte Carlo sampling strategy, HPS reduces computational overhead while maintaining alignment quality. Theoretically, HPS improves sample efficiency over existing PL methods and maximizes the reward margin between preferred and dispreferred responses, ensuring clearer distinctions. Experiments on HH-RLHF and PKU-Safety datasets validate HPS's effectiveness, achieving comparable BLEU and reward scores while greatly improving reward margins and thus reducing harmful content generation.
2502.14401
MedFuncta: Modality-Agnostic Representations Based on Efficient Neural Fields
eess.IV cs.CV
Recent research in medical image analysis with deep learning almost exclusively focuses on grid- or voxel-based data representations. We challenge this common choice by introducing MedFuncta, a modality-agnostic continuous data representation based on neural fields. We demonstrate how to scale neural fields from single instances to large datasets by exploiting redundancy in medical signals and by applying an efficient meta-learning approach with a context reduction scheme. We further address the spectral bias in commonly used SIREN activations, by introducing an $\omega_0$-schedule, improving reconstruction quality and convergence speed. We validate our proposed approach on a large variety of medical signals of different dimensions and modalities (1D: ECG; 2D: Chest X-ray, Retinal OCT, Fundus Camera, Dermatoscope, Colon Histopathology, Cell Microscopy; 3D: Brain MRI, Lung CT) and successfully demonstrate that we can solve relevant downstream tasks on these representations. We additionally release a large-scale dataset of > 550k annotated neural fields to promote research in this direction.
2502.14403
A Macro- and Micro-Hierarchical Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Fake News Detection
cs.SI cs.CL cs.LG
Cross-domain fake news detection aims to mitigate domain shift and improve detection performance by transferring knowledge across domains. Existing approaches transfer knowledge based on news content and user engagements from a source domain to a target domain. However, these approaches face two main limitations, hindering effective knowledge transfer and optimal fake news detection performance. Firstly, from a micro perspective, they neglect the negative impact of veracity-irrelevant features in news content when transferring domain-shared features across domains. Secondly, from a macro perspective, existing approaches ignore the relationship between user engagement and news content, which reveals shared behaviors of common users across domains and can facilitate more effective knowledge transfer. To address these limitations, we propose a novel macro- and micro- hierarchical transfer learning framework (MMHT) for cross-domain fake news detection. Firstly, we propose a micro-hierarchical disentangling module to disentangle veracity-relevant and veracity-irrelevant features from news content in the source domain for improving fake news detection performance in the target domain. Secondly, we propose a macro-hierarchical transfer learning module to generate engagement features based on common users' shared behaviors in different domains for improving effectiveness of knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.
2502.14409
Unstructured Evidence Attribution for Long Context Query Focused Summarization
cs.CL cs.IR
Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating coherent summaries from very long contexts given a user query. Extracting and properly citing evidence spans could help improve the transparency and reliability of these summaries. At the same time, LLMs suffer from positional biases in terms of which information they understand and attend to, which could affect evidence citation. Whereas previous work has focused on evidence citation with predefined levels of granularity (e.g. sentence, paragraph, document, etc.), we propose the task of long-context query focused summarization with unstructured evidence citation. We show how existing systems struggle to generate and properly cite unstructured evidence from their context, and that evidence tends to be "lost-in-the-middle". To help mitigate this, we create the Summaries with Unstructured Evidence Text dataset (SUnsET), a synthetic dataset generated using a novel domain-agnostic pipeline which can be used as supervision to adapt LLMs to this task. We demonstrate across 5 LLMs of different sizes and 4 datasets with varying document types and lengths that LLMs adapted with SUnsET data generate more relevant and factually consistent evidence than their base models, extract evidence from more diverse locations in their context, and can generate more relevant and consistent summaries.
2502.14412
Evaluating Precise Geolocation Inference Capabilities of Vision Language Models
cs.CV cs.CR cs.LG
The prevalence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) raises important questions about privacy in an era where visual information is increasingly available. While foundation VLMs demonstrate broad knowledge and learned capabilities, we specifically investigate their ability to infer geographic location from previously unseen image data. This paper introduces a benchmark dataset collected from Google Street View that represents its global distribution of coverage. Foundation models are evaluated on single-image geolocation inference, with many achieving median distance errors of <300 km. We further evaluate VLM "agents" with access to supplemental tools, observing up to a 30.6% decrease in distance error. Our findings establish that modern foundation VLMs can act as powerful image geolocation tools, without being specifically trained for this task. When coupled with increasing accessibility of these models, our findings have greater implications for online privacy. We discuss these risks, as well as future work in this area.
2502.14413
Towards Efficient Automatic Self-Pruning of Large Language Models
cs.LG
Despite exceptional capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still face deployment challenges due to their enormous size. Post-training structured pruning is a promising solution that prunes LLMs without the need for retraining, reducing computational overhead, and it is hardware-deployment friendly. However, the training-free nature of post-training structured pruning leads to significant performance degradation. We argue that the key to mitigating this issue lies in accurately determining the pruning rate for each layer. Meanwhile, we find that LLMs may have prior knowledge about their own redundancy. Based on this insight, we introduce $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ an end-to-end automatic self-pruning framework for LLMs, which efficiently search layer-wise pruning rates. Specifically, $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ leverages LLMs to autonomously execute the entire evolutionary search process to search for pruning rate configurations. In this process, LLMs are used to generate populations, select parent solutions from the current population, and perform crossover and mutation operations to produce offspring solutions. In this way, LLMs automatically generate and evaluate a large number of candidate solutions, effectively converging to find the pruning rate configurations with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$'s better performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ prunes LLaMA-2-70B to 49B level with only 0.80$\%$ drop in accuracy across seven commonsense reasoning tasks, achieving a 1.39$\times$ speedup on NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU. Further pruning to 35B level resulted in only a 3.80$\%$ decrease in accuracy while obtaining a 1.70$\times$ speedup.
2502.14416
Reliable Explainability of Deep Learning Spatial-Spectral Classifiers for Improved Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
eess.IV cs.AI cs.LG
Integrating hyperspectral imagery (HSI) with deep neural networks (DNNs) can strengthen the accuracy of intelligent vision systems by combining spectral and spatial information, which is useful for tasks like semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. To advance research in such safety-critical systems, determining the precise contribution of spectral information to complex DNNs' output is needed. To address this, several saliency methods, such as class activation maps (CAM), have been proposed primarily for image classification. However, recent studies have raised concerns regarding their reliability. In this paper, we address their limitations and propose an alternative approach by leveraging the data provided by activations and weights from relevant DNN layers to better capture the relationship between input features and predictions. The study aims to assess the superior performance of HSI compared to 3-channel and single-channel DNNs. We also address the influence of spectral signature normalization for enhancing DNN robustness in real-world driving conditions.
2502.14418
Role of the Pretraining and the Adaptation data sizes for low-resource real-time MRI video segmentation
eess.AS cs.CV eess.SP
Real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI) is frequently used in speech production studies as it provides a complete view of the vocal tract during articulation. This study investigates the effectiveness of rtMRI in analyzing vocal tract movements by employing the SegNet and UNet models for Air-Tissue Boundary (ATB)segmentation tasks. We conducted pretraining of a few base models using increasing numbers of subjects and videos, to assess performance on two datasets. First, consisting of unseen subjects with unseen videos from the same data source, achieving 0.33% and 0.91% (Pixel-wise Classification Accuracy (PCA) and Dice Coefficient respectively) better than its matched condition. Second, comprising unseen videos from a new data source, where we obtained an accuracy of 99.63% and 98.09% (PCA and Dice Coefficient respectively) of its matched condition performance. Here, matched condition performance refers to the performance of a model trained only on the test subjects which was set as a benchmark for the other models. Our findings highlight the significance of fine-tuning and adapting models with limited data. Notably, we demonstrated that effective model adaptation can be achieved with as few as 15 rtMRI frames from any new dataset.
2502.14420
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model
cs.RO cs.CV cs.LG
Humans possess a unified cognitive ability to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. Why can't large language models replicate this holistic understanding? Through a systematic analysis of existing training paradigms in vision-language-action models (VLA), we identify two key challenges: spurious forgetting, where robot training overwrites crucial visual-text alignments, and task interference, where competing control and understanding tasks degrade performance when trained jointly. To overcome these limitations, we propose ChatVLA, a novel framework featuring Phased Alignment Training, which incrementally integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery, and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. ChatVLA demonstrates competitive performance on visual question-answering datasets and significantly surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a six times higher performance on MMMU and scores 47.2% on MMStar with a more parameter-efficient design than ECoT. Furthermore, ChatVLA demonstrates superior performance on 25 real-world robot manipulation tasks compared to existing VLA methods like OpenVLA. Our findings highlight the potential of our unified framework for achieving both robust multimodal understanding and effective robot control.
2502.14422
Towards Routing and Edge Computing in Satellite-Terrestrial Networks: A Column Generation Approach
eess.SY cs.SY
Edge computing that enables satellites to process raw data locally is expected to bring further timeliness and flexibility to satellite-terrestrial networks (STNs). In this letter, In this letter, we propose a three-layer edge computing protocol, where raw data collected by satellites can be processed locally, or transmitted to other satellites or the ground station via multi-hop routing for further processing. The overall computing capacity of the proposed framework is maximized by determining the offloading strategy and route formation, subject to channel capacity and hop constraints. Given that the problem scale grows exponentially with the number of satellites and maximum-allowed hops, the column generation approach is employed to obtain the global optimal solution by activating only a subset of variables. Numerical investigations reveal that the proposed three-layer computing protocol improves the computing capacity by 40\%, compared to the single-layer configuration.
2502.14424
Distribution Matching for Self-Supervised Transfer Learning
stat.ML cs.AI cs.LG stat.ME
In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised transfer learning method called Distribution Matching (DM), which drives the representation distribution toward a predefined reference distribution while preserving augmentation invariance. The design of DM results in a learned representation space that is intuitively structured and offers easily interpretable hyperparameters. Experimental results across multiple real-world datasets and evaluation metrics demonstrate that DM performs competitively on target classification tasks compared to existing self-supervised transfer learning methods. Additionally, we provide robust theoretical guarantees for DM, including a population theorem and an end-to-end sample theorem. The population theorem bridges the gap between the self-supervised learning task and target classification accuracy, while the sample theorem shows that, even with a limited number of samples from the target domain, DM can deliver exceptional classification performance, provided the unlabeled sample size is sufficiently large.
2502.14425
A Survey on Data Contamination for Large Language Models
cs.CL
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in various areas, such as text generation and code synthesis. However, the reliability of performance evaluation has come under scrutiny due to data contamination-the unintended overlap between training and test datasets. This overlap has the potential to artificially inflate model performance, as LLMs are typically trained on extensive datasets scraped from publicly available sources. These datasets often inadvertently overlap with the benchmarks used for evaluation, leading to an overestimation of the models' true generalization capabilities. In this paper, we first examine the definition and impacts of data contamination. Secondly, we review methods for contamination-free evaluation, focusing on three strategies: data updating-based methods, data rewriting-based methods, and prevention-based methods. Specifically, we highlight dynamic benchmarks and LLM-driven evaluation methods. Finally, we categorize contamination detecting methods based on model information dependency: white-Box, gray-Box, and black-Box detection approaches. Our survey highlights the requirements for more rigorous evaluation protocols and proposes future directions for addressing data contamination challenges.
2502.14427
Token-Level Density-Based Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Eliciting Truthfulness of Large Language Models
cs.CL
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a prominent approach for eliciting truthful answers from large language models (LLMs). To date, information-based and consistency-based UQ have been the dominant UQ methods for text generation via LLMs. Density-based methods, despite being very effective for UQ in text classification with encoder-based models, have not been very successful with generative LLMs. In this work, we adapt Mahalanobis Distance (MD) - a well-established UQ technique in classification tasks - for text generation and introduce a new supervised UQ method. Our method extracts token embeddings from multiple layers of LLMs, computes MD scores for each token, and uses linear regression trained on these features to provide robust uncertainty scores. Through extensive experiments on eleven datasets, we demonstrate that our approach substantially improves over existing UQ methods, providing accurate and computationally efficient uncertainty scores for both sequence-level selective generation and claim-level fact-checking tasks. Our method also exhibits strong generalization to out-of-domain data, making it suitable for a wide range of LLM-based applications.
2502.14429
Early-Exit and Instant Confidence Translation Quality Estimation
cs.CL
Quality estimation is omnipresent in machine translation, for both evaluation and generation. Unfortunately, quality estimation models are often opaque and computationally expensive, making them impractical to be part of large-scale pipelines. In this work, we tackle two connected challenges: (1) reducing the cost of quality estimation at scale, and (2) developing an inexpensive uncertainty estimation method for quality estimation. To address the latter, we introduce Instant Confidence COMET, an uncertainty-aware quality estimation model that matches the performance of previous approaches at a fraction of their costs. We extend this to Early-Exit COMET, a quality estimation model that can compute quality scores and associated confidences already at early model layers, allowing us to early-exit computations and reduce evaluation costs. We also apply our model to machine translation reranking. We combine Early-Exit COMET with an upper confidence bound bandit algorithm to find the best candidate from a large pool without having to run the full evaluation model on all candidates. In both cases (evaluation and reranking) our methods reduce the required compute by 50% with very little degradation in performance.
2502.14430
Cardiac Evidence Backtracking for Eating Behavior Monitoring using Collocative Electrocardiogram Imagining
cs.LG cs.CE
Eating monitoring has remained an open challenge in medical research for years due to the lack of non-invasive sensors for continuous monitoring and the reliable methods for automatic behavior detection. In this paper, we present a pilot study using the wearable 24-hour ECG for sensing and tailoring the sophisticated deep learning for ad-hoc and interpretable detection. This is accomplished using a collocative learning framework in which 1) we construct collocative tensors as pseudo-images from 1D ECG signals to improve the feasibility of 2D image-based deep models; 2) we formulate the cardiac logic of analyzing the ECG data in a comparative way as periodic attention regulators so as to guide the deep inference to collect evidence in a human comprehensible manner; and 3) we improve the interpretability of the framework by enabling the backtracking of evidence with a set of methods designed for Class Activation Mapping (CAM) decoding and decision tree/forest generation. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been validated on the largest ECG dataset of eating behavior with superior performance over conventional models, and its capacity of cardiac evidence mining has also been verified through the consistency of the evidence it backtracked and that of the previous medical studies.
2502.14432
Port-Hamiltonian Neural Networks with Output Error Noise Models
cs.LG
Hamiltonian neural networks (HNNs) represent a promising class of physics-informed deep learning methods that utilize Hamiltonian theory as foundational knowledge within neural networks. However, their direct application to engineering systems is often challenged by practical issues, including the presence of external inputs, dissipation, and noisy measurements. This paper introduces a novel framework that enhances the capabilities of HNNs to address these real-life factors. We integrate port-Hamiltonian theory into the neural network structure, allowing for the inclusion of external inputs and dissipation, while mitigating the impact of measurement noise through an output-error (OE) model structure. The resulting output error port-Hamiltonian neural networks (OE-pHNNs) can be adapted to tackle modeling complex engineering systems with noisy measurements. Furthermore, we propose the identification of OE-pHNNs based on the subspace encoder approach (SUBNET), which efficiently approximates the complete simulation loss using subsections of the data and uses an encoder function to predict initial states. By integrating SUBNET with OE-pHNNs, we achieve consistent models of complex engineering systems under noisy measurements. In addition, we perform a consistency analysis to ensure the reliability of the proposed data-driven model learning method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on system identification benchmarks, showing its potential as a powerful tool for modeling dynamic systems in real-world applications.
2502.14433
Daily Land Surface Temperature Reconstruction in Landsat Cross-Track Areas Using Deep Ensemble Learning With Uncertainty Quantification
cs.CV
Many real-world applications rely on land surface temperature (LST) data at high spatiotemporal resolution. In complex urban areas, LST exhibits significant variations, fluctuating dramatically within and across city blocks. Landsat provides high spatial resolution data at 100 meters but is limited by long revisit time, with cloud cover further disrupting data collection. Here, we propose DELAG, a deep ensemble learning method that integrates annual temperature cycles and Gaussian processes, to reconstruct Landsat LST in complex urban areas. Leveraging the cross-track characteristics and dual-satellite operation of Landsat since 2021, we further enhance data availability to 4 scenes every 16 days. We select New York City, London and Hong Kong from three different continents as study areas. Experiments show that DELAG successfully reconstructed LST in the three cities under clear-sky (RMSE = 0.73-0.96 K) and heavily-cloudy (RMSE = 0.84-1.62 K) situations, superior to existing methods. Additionally, DELAG can quantify uncertainty that enhances LST reconstruction reliability. We further tested the reconstructed LST to estimate near-surface air temperature, achieving results (RMSE = 1.48-2.11 K) comparable to those derived from clear-sky LST (RMSE = 1.63-2.02 K). The results demonstrate the successful reconstruction through DELAG and highlight the broader applications of LST reconstruction for estimating accurate air temperature. Our study thus provides a novel and practical method for Landsat LST reconstruction, particularly suited for complex urban areas within Landsat cross-track areas, taking one step toward addressing complex climate events at high spatiotemporal resolution.
2502.14437
Natural Language Generation
cs.CL
This book provides a broad overview of Natural Language Generation (NLG), including technology, user requirements, evaluation, and real-world applications. The focus is on concepts and insights which hopefully will remain relevant for many years, not on the latest LLM innovations. It draws on decades of work by the author and others on NLG. The book has the following chapters: Introduction to NLG; Rule-Based NLG; Machine Learning and Neural NLG; Requirements; Evaluation; Safety, Maintenance, and Testing; and Applications. All chapters include examples and anecdotes from the author's personal experiences, and end with a Further Reading section. The book should be especially useful to people working on applied NLG, including NLG researchers, people in other fields who want to use NLG, and commercial developers. It will not however be useful to people who want to understand the latest LLM technology. There is a companion site with more information at https://ehudreiter.com/book/
2502.14442
Stochastic Resonance Improves the Detection of Low Contrast Images in Deep Learning Models
cs.CV cs.AI
Stochastic resonance describes the utility of noise in improving the detectability of weak signals in certain types of systems. It has been observed widely in natural and engineered settings, but its utility in image classification with rate-based neural networks has not been studied extensively. In this analysis a simple LSTM recurrent neural network is trained for digit recognition and classification. During the test phase, image contrast is reduced to a point where the model fails to recognize the presence of a stimulus. Controlled noise is added to partially recover classification performance. The results indicate the presence of stochastic resonance in rate-based recurrent neural networks.
2502.14444
An Enhancement of Jiang, Z., et al.s Compression-Based Classification Algorithm Applied to News Article Categorization
cs.CL
This study enhances Jiang et al.'s compression-based classification algorithm by addressing its limitations in detecting semantic similarities between text documents. The proposed improvements focus on unigram extraction and optimized concatenation, eliminating reliance on entire document compression. By compressing extracted unigrams, the algorithm mitigates sliding window limitations inherent to gzip, improving compression efficiency and similarity detection. The optimized concatenation strategy replaces direct concatenation with the union of unigrams, reducing redundancy and enhancing the accuracy of Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) calculations. Experimental results across datasets of varying sizes and complexities demonstrate an average accuracy improvement of 5.73%, with gains of up to 11% on datasets containing longer documents. Notably, these improvements are more pronounced in datasets with high-label diversity and complex text structures. The methodology achieves these results while maintaining computational efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. This study provides a robust, scalable solution for text classification, emphasizing lightweight preprocessing techniques to achieve efficient compression, which in turn enables more accurate classification.
2502.14445
PredictaBoard: Benchmarking LLM Score Predictability
cs.CL cs.AI stat.ML
Despite possessing impressive skills, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail unpredictably, demonstrating inconsistent success in even basic common sense reasoning tasks. This unpredictability poses a significant challenge to ensuring their safe deployment, as identifying and operating within a reliable "safe zone" is essential for mitigating risks. To address this, we present PredictaBoard, a novel collaborative benchmarking framework designed to evaluate the ability of score predictors (referred to as assessors) to anticipate LLM errors on specific task instances (i.e., prompts) from existing datasets. PredictaBoard evaluates pairs of LLMs and assessors by considering the rejection rate at different tolerance errors. As such, PredictaBoard stimulates research into developing better assessors and making LLMs more predictable, not only with a higher average performance. We conduct illustrative experiments using baseline assessors and state-of-the-art LLMs. PredictaBoard highlights the critical need to evaluate predictability alongside performance, paving the way for safer AI systems where errors are not only minimised but also anticipated and effectively mitigated. Code for our benchmark can be found at https://github.com/Kinds-of-Intelligence-CFI/PredictaBoard
2502.14451
Optimal word order for non-causal text generation with Large Language Models: the Spanish case
cs.CL
Natural Language Generation (NLG) popularity has increased owing to the progress in Large Language Models (LLMs), with zero-shot inference capabilities. However, most neural systems utilize decoder-only causal (unidirectional) transformer models, which are effective for English but may reduce the richness of languages with less strict word order, subject omission, or different relative clause attachment preferences. This is the first work that analytically addresses optimal text generation order for non-causal language models. We present a novel Viterbi algorithm-based methodology for maximum likelihood word order estimation. We analyze the non-causal most-likelihood order probability for NLG in Spanish and, then, the probability of generating the same phrases with Spanish causal NLG. This comparative analysis reveals that causal NLG prefers English-like SVO structures. We also analyze the relationship between optimal generation order and causal left-to-right generation order using Spearman's rank correlation. Our results demonstrate that the ideal order predicted by the maximum likelihood estimator is not closely related to the causal order and may be influenced by the syntactic structure of the target sentence.
2502.14454
Exploiting Deblurring Networks for Radiance Fields
cs.CV
In this paper, we propose DeepDeblurRF, a novel radiance field deblurring approach that can synthesize high-quality novel views from blurred training views with significantly reduced training time. DeepDeblurRF leverages deep neural network (DNN)-based deblurring modules to enjoy their deblurring performance and computational efficiency. To effectively combine DNN-based deblurring and radiance field construction, we propose a novel radiance field (RF)-guided deblurring and an iterative framework that performs RF-guided deblurring and radiance field construction in an alternating manner. Moreover, DeepDeblurRF is compatible with various scene representations, such as voxel grids and 3D Gaussians, expanding its applicability. We also present BlurRF-Synth, the first large-scale synthetic dataset for training radiance field deblurring frameworks. We conduct extensive experiments on both camera motion blur and defocus blur, demonstrating that DeepDeblurRF achieves state-of-the-art novel-view synthesis quality with significantly reduced training time.
2502.14455
An Efficient Ground-aerial Transportation System for Pest Control Enabled by AI-based Autonomous Nano-UAVs
cs.RO cs.AI
Efficient crop production requires early detection of pest outbreaks and timely treatments; we consider a solution based on a fleet of multiple autonomous miniaturized unmanned aerial vehicles (nano-UAVs) to visually detect pests and a single slower heavy vehicle that visits the detected outbreaks to deliver treatments. To cope with the extreme limitations aboard nano-UAVs, e.g., low-resolution sensors and sub-100 mW computational power budget, we design, fine-tune, and optimize a tiny image-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for pest detection. Despite the small size of our CNN (i.e., 0.58 GOps/inference), on our dataset, it scores a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.79 in detecting harmful bugs, i.e., 14% lower mAP but 32x fewer operations than the best-performing CNN in the literature. Our CNN runs in real-time at 6.8 frame/s, requiring 33 mW on a GWT GAP9 System-on-Chip aboard a Crazyflie nano-UAV. Then, to cope with in-field unexpected obstacles, we leverage a global+local path planner based on the A* algorithm. The global path planner determines the best route for the nano-UAV to sweep the entire area, while the local one runs up to 50 Hz aboard our nano-UAV and prevents collision by adjusting the short-distance path. Finally, we demonstrate with in-simulator experiments that once a 25 nano-UAVs fleet has combed a 200x200 m vineyard, collected information can be used to plan the best path for the tractor, visiting all and only required hotspots. In this scenario, our efficient transportation system, compared to a traditional single-ground vehicle performing both inspection and treatment, can save up to 20 h working time.
2502.14456
Narrative-Driven Travel Planning: Geoculturally-Grounded Script Generation with Evolutionary Itinerary Optimization
cs.AI
To enhance tourists' experiences and immersion, this paper proposes a narrative-driven travel planning framework called NarrativeGuide, which generates a geoculturally-grounded narrative script for travelers, offering a novel, role-playing experience for their journey. In the initial stage, NarrativeGuide constructs a knowledge graph for attractions within a city, then configures the worldview, character setting, and exposition based on the knowledge graph. Using this foundation, the knowledge graph is combined to generate an independent scene unit for each attraction. During the itinerary planning stage, NarrativeGuide models narrative-driven travel planning as an optimization problem, utilizing a genetic algorithm (GA) to refine the itinerary. Before evaluating the candidate itinerary, transition scripts are generated for each pair of adjacent attractions, which, along with the scene units, form a complete script. The weighted sum of script coherence, travel time, and attraction scores is then used as the fitness value to update the candidate solution set. Experimental results across four cities, i.e., Nanjing and Yangzhou in China, Paris in France, and Berlin in Germany, demonstrate significant improvements in narrative coherence and cultural fit, alongside a notable reduction in travel time and an increase in the quality of visited attractions. Our study highlights that incorporating external evolutionary optimization effectively addresses the limitations of large language models in travel planning.Our codes are available at https://github.com/Evan01225/Narrative-Driven-Travel-Planning.
2502.14457
Watch Less, Feel More: Sim-to-Real RL for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation via Motion Adaptation and Impedance Control
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Articulated object manipulation poses a unique challenge compared to rigid object manipulation as the object itself represents a dynamic environment. In this work, we present a novel RL-based pipeline equipped with variable impedance control and motion adaptation leveraging observation history for generalizable articulated object manipulation, focusing on smooth and dexterous motion during zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. To mitigate the sim-to-real gap, our pipeline diminishes reliance on vision by not leveraging the vision data feature (RGBD/pointcloud) directly as policy input but rather extracting useful low-dimensional data first via off-the-shelf modules. Additionally, we experience less sim-to-real gap by inferring object motion and its intrinsic properties via observation history as well as utilizing impedance control both in the simulation and in the real world. Furthermore, we develop a well-designed training setting with great randomization and a specialized reward system (task-aware and motion-aware) that enables multi-staged, end-to-end manipulation without heuristic motion planning. To the best of our knowledge, our policy is the first to report 84\% success rate in the real world via extensive experiments with various unseen objects.
2502.14458
Llamba: Scaling Distilled Recurrent Models for Efficient Language Processing
cs.LG cs.AI
We introduce Llamba, a family of efficient recurrent language models distilled from Llama-3.x into the Mamba architecture. The series includes Llamba-1B, Llamba-3B, and Llamba-8B, which achieve higher inference throughput and handle significantly larger batch sizes than Transformer-based models while maintaining comparable benchmark performance. Furthermore, Llamba demonstrates the effectiveness of cross-architecture distillation using MOHAWK (Bick et al., 2024), achieving these results with less than 0.1% of the training data typically used for models of similar size. To take full advantage of their efficiency, we provide an optimized implementation of Llamba for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and edge platforms, offering a practical and memory-efficient alternative to Transformers. Overall, Llamba improves the tradeoff between speed, memory efficiency, and performance, making high-quality language models more accessible.
2502.14462
Single-image Reflectance and Transmittance Estimation from Any Flatbed Scanner
cs.GR cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG
Flatbed scanners have emerged as promising devices for high-resolution, single-image material capture. However, existing approaches assume very specific conditions, such as uniform diffuse illumination, which are only available in certain high-end devices, hindering their scalability and cost. In contrast, in this work, we introduce a method inspired by intrinsic image decomposition, which accurately removes both shading and specularity, effectively allowing captures with any flatbed scanner. Further, we extend previous work on single-image material reflectance capture with the estimation of opacity and transmittance, critical components of full material appearance (SVBSDF), improving the results for any material captured with a flatbed scanner, at a very high resolution and accuracy
2502.14467
Provable Quantum Algorithm Advantage for Gaussian Process Quadrature
stat.CO cs.LG quant-ph
The aim of this paper is to develop novel quantum algorithms for Gaussian process quadrature methods. Gaussian process quadratures are numerical integration methods where Gaussian processes are used as functional priors for the integrands to capture the uncertainty arising from the sparse function evaluations. Quantum computers have emerged as potential replacements for classical computers, offering exponential reductions in the computational complexity of machine learning tasks. In this paper, we combine Gaussian process quadratures and quantum computing by proposing a quantum low-rank Gaussian process quadrature method based on a Hilbert space approximation of the Gaussian process kernel and enhancing the quadrature using a quantum circuit. The method combines the quantum phase estimation algorithm with the quantum principal component analysis technique to extract information up to a desired rank. Then, Hadamard and SWAP tests are implemented to find the expected value and variance that determines the quadrature. We use numerical simulations of a quantum computer to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical complexity analysis that shows a polynomial advantage over classical Gaussian process quadrature methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cagalvisf/Quantum_HSGPQ.
2502.14469
Enhancing Smart Environments with Context-Aware Chatbots using Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI cs.SI
This work presents a novel architecture for context-aware interactions within smart environments, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance user experiences. Our system integrates user location data obtained through UWB tags and sensor-equipped smart homes with real-time human activity recognition (HAR) to provide a comprehensive understanding of user context. This contextual information is then fed to an LLM-powered chatbot, enabling it to generate personalised interactions and recommendations based on the user's current activity and environment. This approach moves beyond traditional static chatbot interactions by dynamically adapting to the user's real-time situation. A case study conducted from a real-world dataset demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed architecture, showcasing its potential to create more intuitive and helpful interactions within smart homes. The results highlight the significant benefits of integrating LLM with real-time activity and location data to deliver personalised and contextually relevant user experiences.
2502.14471
Integrating Extra Modality Helps Segmentor Find Camouflaged Objects Well
cs.CV
Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) remains a challenging problem due to the subtle visual differences between camouflaged objects and backgrounds. Owing to the exceedingly limited visual cues available from visible spectrum, previous RGB single-modality approaches often struggle to achieve satisfactory results, prompting the exploration of multimodal data to enhance detection accuracy. In this work, we present UniCOS, a novel framework that effectively leverages diverse data modalities to improve segmentation performance. UniCOS comprises two key components: a multimodal segmentor, UniSEG, and a cross-modal knowledge learning module, UniLearner. UniSEG employs a state space fusion mechanism to integrate cross-modal features within a unified state space, enhancing contextual understanding and improving robustness to integration of heterogeneous data. Additionally, it includes a fusion-feedback mechanism that facilitate feature extraction. UniLearner exploits multimodal data unrelated to the COS task to improve the segmentation ability of the COS models by generating pseudo-modal content and cross-modal semantic associations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSEG outperforms existing Multimodal COS (MCOS) segmentors, regardless of whether real or pseudo-multimodal COS data is available. Moreover, in scenarios where multimodal COS data is unavailable but multimodal non-COS data is accessible, UniLearner effectively exploits these data to enhance segmentation performance. Our code will be made publicly available on \href{https://github.com/cnyvfang/UniCOS}{GitHub}.
2502.14476
Argument-Based Comparative Question Answering Evaluation Benchmark
cs.CL
In this paper, we aim to solve the problems standing in the way of automatic comparative question answering. To this end, we propose an evaluation framework to assess the quality of comparative question answering summaries. We formulate 15 criteria for assessing comparative answers created using manual annotation and annotation from 6 large language models and two comparative question asnwering datasets. We perform our tests using several LLMs and manual annotation under different settings and demonstrate the constituency of both evaluations. Our results demonstrate that the Llama-3 70B Instruct model demonstrates the best results for summary evaluation, while GPT-4 is the best for answering comparative questions. All used data, code, and evaluation results are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cqa-evaluation-benchmark-4561/README.md}}.
2502.14477
Unshackling Context Length: An Efficient Selective Attention Approach through Query-Key Compression
cs.CL
Handling long-context sequences efficiently remains a significant challenge in large language models (LLMs). Existing methods for token selection in sequence extrapolation either employ a permanent eviction strategy or select tokens by chunk, which may lead to the loss of critical information. We propose Efficient Selective Attention (ESA), a novel approach that extends context length by efficiently selecting the most critical tokens at the token level to compute attention. ESA reduces the computational complexity of token selection by compressing query and key vectors into lower-dimensional representations. We evaluate ESA on long sequence benchmarks with maximum lengths up to 256k using open-source LLMs with context lengths of 8k and 32k. ESA outperforms other selective attention methods, especially in tasks requiring the retrieval of multiple pieces of information, achieving comparable performance to full-attention extrapolation methods across various tasks, with superior results in certain tasks.
2502.14482
NLoRA: Nystr\"om-Initiated Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
cs.CL
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting large language models (LLMs), with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) being the most popular approach. However, LoRA suffers from slow convergence, and some recent LoRA variants, such as PiSSA, primarily rely on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization, leading to expensive computation. To mitigate these problems, we use the Nystr\"om method, which follows a three-matrix manipulation. We first introduce StructuredLoRA (SLoRA), which investigates adding a small intermediate matrix between the low-rank matrices A and B. Secondly, we propose Nystr\"omLoRA (NLoRA), which leverages Nystr\"om-based initialization for SLoRA to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, we propose IntermediateTune (IntTune), which explores fine-tuning exclusively on the intermediate matrix of NLoRA to further boost LLM efficiency. We evaluate our methods on five natural language generation (NLG) tasks and eight natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. On GSM8K, SLoRA and NLoRA achieve accuracies of 56.48% and 57.70%, surpassing LoRA by 33.52% and 36.41%, with only 3.67 million additional trainable parameters. IntTune improves average NLG performance over LoRA by 7.45% while using only 1.25% of its parameters. These results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model performance with minimal parameter overhead.
2502.14486
How Jailbreak Defenses Work and Ensemble? A Mechanistic Investigation
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CL
Jailbreak attacks, where harmful prompts bypass generative models' built-in safety, raise serious concerns about model vulnerability. While many defense methods have been proposed, the trade-offs between safety and helpfulness, and their application to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), are not well understood. This paper systematically examines jailbreak defenses by reframing the standard generation task as a binary classification problem to assess model refusal tendencies for both harmful and benign queries. We identify two key defense mechanisms: safety shift, which increases refusal rates across all queries, and harmfulness discrimination, which improves the model's ability to distinguish between harmful and benign inputs. Using these mechanisms, we develop two ensemble defense strategies-inter-mechanism ensembles and intra-mechanism ensembles-to balance safety and helpfulness. Experiments on the MM-SafetyBench and MOSSBench datasets with LLaVA-1.5 models show that these strategies effectively improve model safety or optimize the trade-off between safety and helpfulness.
2502.14487
Temporal Misalignment and Probabilistic Neurons
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a more energy-efficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) by mimicking biological neural principles, establishing them as a promising approach to mitigate the increasing energy demands of large-scale neural models. However, fully harnessing the capabilities of SNNs remains challenging due to their discrete signal processing and temporal dynamics. ANN-SNN conversion has emerged as a practical approach, enabling SNNs to achieve competitive performance on complex machine learning tasks. In this work, we identify a phenomenon in the ANN-SNN conversion framework, termed temporal misalignment, in which random spike rearrangement across SNN layers leads to performance improvements. Based on this observation, we introduce biologically plausible two-phase probabilistic (TPP) spiking neurons, further enhancing the conversion process. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method both theoretically and empirically through comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, CIFAR10-DVS, and ImageNet across a variety of architectures, achieving state-of-the-art results.
2502.14491
Statistical Scenario Modelling and Lookalike Distributions for Multi-Variate AI Risk
cs.AI
Evaluating AI safety requires statistically rigorous methods and risk metrics for understanding how the use of AI affects aggregated risk. However, much AI safety literature focuses upon risks arising from AI models in isolation, lacking consideration of how modular use of AI affects risk distribution of workflow components or overall risk metrics. There is also a lack of statistical grounding enabling sensitisation of risk models in the presence of absence of AI to estimate causal contributions of AI. This is in part due to the dearth of AI impact data upon which to fit distributions. In this work, we address these gaps in two ways. First, we demonstrate how scenario modelling (grounded in established statistical techniques such as Markov chains, copulas and Monte Carlo simulation) can be used to model AI risk holistically. Second, we show how lookalike distributions from phenomena analogous to AI can be used to estimate AI impacts in the absence of directly observable data. We demonstrate the utility of our methods for benchmarking cumulative AI risk via risk analysis of a logistic scenario simulations.
2502.14493
CrossFuse: Learning Infrared and Visible Image Fusion by Cross-Sensor Top-K Vision Alignment and Beyond
cs.CV cs.LG
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is increasingly applied in critical fields such as video surveillance and autonomous driving systems. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based fusion methods. However, these models frequently encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) scenes in real-world applications, which severely impact their performance and reliability. Therefore, addressing the challenge of OOD data is crucial for the safe deployment of these models in open-world environments. Unlike existing research, our focus is on the challenges posed by OOD data in real-world applications and on enhancing the robustness and generalization of models. In this paper, we propose an infrared-visible fusion framework based on Multi-View Augmentation. For external data augmentation, Top-k Selective Vision Alignment is employed to mitigate distribution shifts between datasets by performing RGB-wise transformations on visible images. This strategy effectively introduces augmented samples, enhancing the adaptability of the model to complex real-world scenarios. Additionally, for internal data augmentation, self-supervised learning is established using Weak-Aggressive Augmentation. This enables the model to learn more robust and general feature representations during the fusion process, thereby improving robustness and generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance and robustness across various conditions and environments. Our approach significantly enhances the reliability and stability of IVIF tasks in practical applications.
2502.14494
StructFlowBench: A Structured Flow Benchmark for Multi-turn Instruction Following
cs.CL
Multi-turn instruction following capability constitutes a core competency of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. Existing evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on fine-grained constraint satisfaction and domain-specific capability assessment, yet overlook the crucial structural dependency between dialogue turns that distinguishes multi-turn from single-turn interactions. This structural dependency not only reflects user intent but also establishes a second dimension for instruction following evaluation beyond constraint satisfaction. To address this gap, we propose StructFlowBench, a multi-turn instruction following benchmark with structural flow modeling. The benchmark innovatively defines a structural flow framework comprising six fundamental inter-turn relationships, which not only introduces novel structural constraints for model evaluation but also serves as generation parameters for creating customized dialogue flows tailored to specific scenarios. Adopting established LLM-based automatic evaluation methodologies, we conduct systematic evaluations of 13 leading open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results reveal significant deficiencies in current models' comprehension of multi-turn dialogue structures. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/StructFlowBench}.
2502.14495
Nearshore Underwater Target Detection Meets UAV-borne Hyperspectral Remote Sensing: A Novel Hybrid-level Contrastive Learning Framework and Benchmark Dataset
cs.CV
UAV-borne hyperspectral remote sensing has emerged as a promising approach for underwater target detection (UTD). However, its effectiveness is hindered by spectral distortions in nearshore environments, which compromise the accuracy of traditional hyperspectral UTD (HUTD) methods that rely on bathymetric model. These distortions lead to significant uncertainty in target and background spectra, challenging the detection process. To address this, we propose the Hyperspectral Underwater Contrastive Learning Network (HUCLNet), a novel framework that integrates contrastive learning with a self-paced learning paradigm for robust HUTD in nearshore regions. HUCLNet extracts discriminative features from distorted hyperspectral data through contrastive learning, while the self-paced learning strategy selectively prioritizes the most informative samples. Additionally, a reliability-guided clustering strategy enhances the robustness of learned representations.To evaluate the method effectiveness, we conduct a novel nearshore HUTD benchmark dataset, ATR2-HUTD, covering three diverse scenarios with varying water types and turbidity, and target types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HUCLNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/qjh1996/HUTD
2502.14496
Enhancing Language Multi-Agent Learning with Multi-Agent Credit Re-Assignment for Interactive Environment Generalization
cs.CL
LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.
2502.14497
Stories that (are) Move(d by) Markets: A Causal Exploration of Market Shocks and Semantic Shifts across Different Partisan Groups
cs.CL cs.CE econ.GN q-fin.EC
Macroeconomic fluctuations and the narratives that shape them form a mutually reinforcing cycle: public discourse can spur behavioural changes leading to economic shifts, which then result in changes in the stories that propagate. We show that shifts in semantic embedding space can be causally linked to financial market shocks -- deviations from the expected market behaviour. Furthermore, we show how partisanship can influence the predictive power of text for market fluctuations and shape reactions to those same shocks. We also provide some evidence that text-based signals are particularly salient during unexpected events such as COVID-19, highlighting the value of language data as an exogenous variable in economic forecasting. Our findings underscore the bidirectional relationship between news outlets and market shocks, offering a novel empirical approach to studying their effect on each other.
2502.14499
MLGym: A New Framework and Benchmark for Advancing AI Research Agents
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
We introduce Meta MLGym and MLGym-Bench, a new framework and benchmark for evaluating and developing LLM agents on AI research tasks. This is the first Gym environment for machine learning (ML) tasks, enabling research on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for training such agents. MLGym-bench consists of 13 diverse and open-ended AI research tasks from diverse domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and game theory. Solving these tasks requires real-world AI research skills such as generating new ideas and hypotheses, creating and processing data, implementing ML methods, training models, running experiments, analyzing the results, and iterating through this process to improve on a given task. We evaluate a number of frontier large language models (LLMs) on our benchmarks such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Llama-3.1 405B, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Our MLGym framework makes it easy to add new tasks, integrate and evaluate models or agents, generate synthetic data at scale, as well as develop new learning algorithms for training agents on AI research tasks. We find that current frontier models can improve on the given baselines, usually by finding better hyperparameters, but do not generate novel hypotheses, algorithms, architectures, or substantial improvements. We open-source our framework and benchmark to facilitate future research in advancing the AI research capabilities of LLM agents.
2502.14501
Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment
cs.CL
The assessment of argument quality depends on well-established logical, rhetorical, and dialectical properties that are unavoidably subjective: multiple valid assessments may exist, there is no unequivocal ground truth. This aligns with recent paths in machine learning, which embrace the co-existence of different perspectives. However, this potential remains largely unexplored in NLP research on argument quality. One crucial reason seems to be the yet unexplored availability of suitable datasets. We fill this gap by conducting a systematic review of argument quality datasets. We assign them to a multi-layered categorization targeting two aspects: (a) What has been annotated: we collect the quality dimensions covered in datasets and consolidate them in an overarching taxonomy, increasing dataset comparability and interoperability. (b) Who annotated: we survey what information is given about annotators, enabling perspectivist research and grounding our recommendations for future actions. To this end, we discuss datasets suitable for developing perspectivist models (i.e., those containing individual, non-aggregated annotations), and we showcase the importance of a controlled selection of annotators in a pilot study.
2502.14502
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack into a LoRA Adapter without Harming LLM?
cs.CL
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on many tasks is greatly limited by the knowledge learned during pre-training and stored in the model's parameters. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular and efficient training technique for updating or domain-specific adaptation of LLMs. In this study, we investigate how new facts can be incorporated into the LLM using LoRA without compromising the previously learned knowledge. We fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-instruct using LoRA with varying amounts of new knowledge. Our experiments have shown that the best results are obtained when the training data contains a mixture of known and new facts. However, this approach is still potentially harmful because the model's performance on external question-answering benchmarks declines after such fine-tuning. When the training data is biased towards certain entities, the model tends to regress to few overrepresented answers. In addition, we found that the model becomes more confident and refuses to provide an answer in only few cases. These findings highlight the potential pitfalls of LoRA-based LLM updates and underscore the importance of training data composition and tuning parameters to balance new knowledge integration and general model capabilities.
2502.14503
LXLv2: Enhanced LiDAR Excluded Lean 3D Object Detection with Fusion of 4D Radar and Camera
cs.CV
As the previous state-of-the-art 4D radar-camera fusion-based 3D object detection method, LXL utilizes the predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids to assist the sampling-based image view transformation. However, the depth prediction lacks accuracy and consistency, and the concatenation-based fusion in LXL impedes the model robustness. In this work, we propose LXLv2, where modifications are made to overcome the limitations and improve the performance. Specifically, considering the position error in radar measurements, we devise a one-to-many depth supervision strategy via radar points, where the radar cross section (RCS) value is further exploited to adjust the supervision area for object-level depth consistency. Additionally, a channel and spatial attention-based fusion module named CSAFusion is introduced to improve feature adaptiveness. Experimental results on the View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the proposed LXLv2 can outperform LXL in detection accuracy, inference speed and robustness, demonstrating the effectiveness of the model.
2502.14504
PLPHP: Per-Layer Per-Head Vision Token Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models
cs.CV cs.AI
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of multimodal tasks. However, their inference efficiency is constrained by the large number of visual tokens processed during decoding. To address this challenge, we propose Per-Layer Per-Head Vision Token Pruning (PLPHP), a two-level fine-grained pruning method including Layer-Level Retention Rate Allocation and Head-Level Vision Token Pruning. Motivated by the Vision Token Re-attention phenomenon across decoder layers, we dynamically adjust token retention rates layer by layer. Layers that exhibit stronger attention to visual information preserve more vision tokens, while layers with lower vision attention are aggressively pruned. Furthermore, PLPHP applies pruning at the attention head level, enabling different heads within the same layer to independently retain critical context. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PLPHP delivers an 18% faster decoding speed and reduces the Key-Value Cache (KV Cache) size by over 50%, all at the cost of 0.46% average performance drop, while also achieving notable performance improvements in multi-image tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of fine-grained token pruning and contribute to advancing the efficiency and scalability of LVLMs. Our source code will be made publicly available.
2502.14507
Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases
cs.CL
This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt LLMs to mimic L2 English learners with specific L1s (e.g., Japanese, Thai, Urdu) across seven languages, comparing their outputs to real L2 learner data. Our analysis examines L1-driven linguistic biases, such as reference word usage and avoidance behaviors, using information-theoretic and distributional density measures. Results show that modern LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5, LLAMA3.3, DeepseekV3, GPT-4o) replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human L2 data, with distinct influences from various languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin significantly affect tense agreement, and Urdu influences noun-verb collocations). Our results reveal the potential of LLMs for L2 dialogue generation and evaluation for future educational applications.
2502.14509
MultiSlav: Using Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer to Combat the Curse of Multilinguality
cs.CL
Does multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) lead to The Curse of the Multlinguality or provides the Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer within a language family? In this study, we explore multiple approaches for extending the available data-regime in NMT and we prove cross-lingual benefits even in 0-shot translation regime for low-resource languages. With this paper, we provide state-of-the-art open-source NMT models for translating between selected Slavic languages. We released our models on the HuggingFace Hub (https://hf.co/collections/allegro/multislav-6793d6b6419e5963e759a683) under the CC BY 4.0 license. Slavic language family comprises morphologically rich Central and Eastern European languages. Although counting hundreds of millions of native speakers, Slavic Neural Machine Translation is under-studied in our opinion. Recently, most NMT research focuses either on: high-resource languages like English, Spanish, and German - in WMT23 General Translation Task 7 out of 8 task directions are from or to English; massively multilingual models covering multiple language groups; or evaluation techniques.
2502.14514
A Mobile Robotic Approach to Autonomous Surface Scanning in Legal Medicine
cs.RO cs.CV cs.SY eess.SY
Purpose: Comprehensive legal medicine documentation includes both an internal but also an external examination of the corpse. Typically, this documentation is conducted manually during conventional autopsy. A systematic digital documentation would be desirable, especially for the external examination of wounds, which is becoming more relevant for legal medicine analysis. For this purpose, RGB surface scanning has been introduced. While a manual full surface scan using a handheld camera is timeconsuming and operator dependent, floor or ceiling mounted robotic systems require substantial space and a dedicated room. Hence, we consider whether a mobile robotic system can be used for external documentation. Methods: We develop a mobile robotic system that enables full-body RGB-D surface scanning. Our work includes a detailed configuration space analysis to identify the environmental parameters that need to be considered to successfully perform a surface scan. We validate our findings through an experimental study in the lab and demonstrate the system's application in a legal medicine environment. Results: Our configuration space analysis shows that a good trade-off between coverage and time is reached with three robot base positions, leading to a coverage of 94.96 %. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the system in accurately capturing body surface geometry with an average surface coverage of 96.90 +- 3.16 % and 92.45 +- 1.43 % for a body phantom and actual corpses, respectively. Conclusion: This work demonstrates the potential of a mobile robotic system to automate RGB-D surface scanning in legal medicine, complementing the use of post-mortem CT scans for inner documentation. Our results indicate that the proposed system can contribute to more efficient and autonomous legal medicine documentation, reducing the need for manual intervention.
2502.14520
Learning Temporal 3D Semantic Scene Completion via Optical Flow Guidance
cs.CV
3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) provides comprehensive scene geometry and semantics for autonomous driving perception, which is crucial for enabling accurate and reliable decision-making. However, existing SSC methods are limited to capturing sparse information from the current frame or naively stacking multi-frame temporal features, thereby failing to acquire effective scene context. These approaches ignore critical motion dynamics and struggle to achieve temporal consistency. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel temporal SSC method FlowScene: Learning Temporal 3D Semantic Scene Completion via Optical Flow Guidance. By leveraging optical flow, FlowScene can integrate motion, different viewpoints, occlusions, and other contextual cues, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of 3D scene completion. Specifically, our framework introduces two key components: (1) a Flow-Guided Temporal Aggregation module that aligns and aggregates temporal features using optical flow, capturing motion-aware context and deformable structures; and (2) an Occlusion-Guided Voxel Refinement module that injects occlusion masks and temporally aggregated features into 3D voxel space, adaptively refining voxel representations for explicit geometric modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowScene achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 benchmarks.
2502.14522
Investigating the Generalizability of ECG Noise Detection Across Diverse Data Sources and Noise Types
cs.LG
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are essential for monitoring cardiac health, allowing clinicians to analyze heart rate variability (HRV), detect abnormal rhythms, and diagnose cardiovascular diseases. However, ECG signals, especially those from wearable devices, are often affected by noise artifacts caused by motion, muscle activity, or device-related interference. These artifacts distort R-peaks and the characteristic QRS complex, making HRV analysis unreliable and increasing the risk of misdiagnosis. Despite this, the few existing studies on ECG noise detection have primarily focused on a single dataset, limiting the understanding of how well noise detection models generalize across different datasets. In this paper, we investigate the generalizability of noise detection in ECG using a novel HRV-based approach through cross-dataset experiments on four datasets. Our results show that machine learning achieves an average accuracy of over 90\% and an AUPRC of more than 0.9. These findings suggest that regardless of the ECG data source or the type of noise, the proposed method maintains high accuracy even on unseen datasets, demonstrating the feasibility of generalizability.
2502.14523
Generative adversarial networks vs large language models: a comparative study on synthetic tabular data generation
cs.LG cs.CL
We propose a new framework for zero-shot generation of synthetic tabular data. Using the large language model (LLM) GPT-4o and plain-language prompting, we demonstrate the ability to generate high-fidelity tabular data without task-specific fine-tuning or access to real-world data (RWD) for pre-training. To benchmark GPT-4o, we compared the fidelity and privacy of LLM-generated synthetic data against data generated with the conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN), across three open-access datasets: Iris, Fish Measurements, and Real Estate Valuation. Despite the zero-shot approach, GPT-4o outperformed CTGAN in preserving means, 95% confidence intervals, bivariate correlations, and data privacy of RWD, even at amplified sample sizes. Notably, correlations between parameters were consistently preserved with appropriate direction and strength. However, refinement is necessary to better retain distributional characteristics. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs in tabular data synthesis, offering an accessible alternative to generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders.
2502.14525
Small Graph Is All You Need: DeepStateGNN for Scalable Traffic Forecasting
cs.LG cs.AI
We propose a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, named DeepStateGNN, for analyzing traffic data, demonstrating its efficacy in two critical tasks: forecasting and reconstruction. Unlike typical GNN methods that treat each traffic sensor as an individual graph node, DeepStateGNN clusters sensors into higher-level graph nodes, dubbed Deep State Nodes, based on various similarity criteria, resulting in a fixed number of nodes in a Deep State graph. The term "Deep State" nodes is a play on words, referencing hidden networks of power that, like these nodes, secretly govern traffic independently of visible sensors. These Deep State Nodes are defined by several similarity factors, including spatial proximity (e.g., sensors located nearby in the road network), functional similarity (e.g., sensors on similar types of freeways), and behavioral similarity under specific conditions (e.g., traffic behavior during rain). This clustering approach allows for dynamic and adaptive node grouping, as sensors can belong to multiple clusters and clusters may evolve over time. Our experimental results show that DeepStateGNN offers superior scalability and faster training, while also delivering more accurate results than competitors. It effectively handles large-scale sensor networks, outperforming other methods in both traffic forecasting and reconstruction accuracy.
2502.14527
Inter-turbine Modelling of Wind-Farm Power using Multi-task Learning
cs.LG
Because of the global need to increase power production from renewable energy resources, developments in the online monitoring of the associated infrastructure is of interest to reduce operation and maintenance costs. However, challenges exist for data-driven approaches to this problem, such as incomplete or limited histories of labelled damage-state data, operational and environmental variability, or the desire for the quantification of uncertainty to support risk management. This work first introduces a probabilistic regression model for predicting wind-turbine power, which adjusts for wake effects learnt from data. Spatial correlations in the learned model parameters for different tasks (turbines) are then leveraged in a hierarchical Bayesian model (an approach to multi-task learning) to develop a "metamodel", which can be used to make power-predictions which adjust for turbine location - including on previously unobserved turbines not included in the training data. The results show that the metamodel is able to outperform a series of benchmark models, and demonstrates a novel strategy for making efficient use of data for inference in populations of structures, in particular where correlations exist in the variable(s) of interest (such as those from wind-turbine wake-effects).
2502.14529
CORBA: Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MASs) have demonstrated remarkable real-world capabilities, effectively collaborating to complete complex tasks. While these systems are designed with safety mechanisms, such as rejecting harmful instructions through alignment, their security remains largely unexplored. This gap leaves LLM-MASs vulnerable to targeted disruptions. In this paper, we introduce Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks (Corba), a novel and simple yet highly effective attack that disrupts interactions between agents within an LLM-MAS. Corba leverages two key properties: its contagious nature allows it to propagate across arbitrary network topologies, while its recursive property enables sustained depletion of computational resources. Notably, these blocking attacks often involve seemingly benign instructions, making them particularly challenging to mitigate using conventional alignment methods. We evaluate Corba on two widely-used LLM-MASs, namely, AutoGen and Camel across various topologies and commercial models. Additionally, we conduct more extensive experiments in open-ended interactive LLM-MASs, demonstrating the effectiveness of Corba in complex topology structures and open-source models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhrli324/Corba.
2502.14536
Preordering: A hybrid of correlation clustering and partial ordering
cs.LG
We discuss the preordering problem, a joint relaxation of the correlation clustering problem and the partial ordering problem. We show that preordering remains NP-hard even for values in $\{-1,0,1\}$. We introduce a linear-time $4$-approximation algorithm and a local search technique. For an integer linear program formulation, we establish a class of non-canonical facets of the associated preorder polytope. By solving a non-canonical linear program relaxation, we obtain non-trivial upper bounds on the objective value. We provide implementations of the algorithms we define, apply these to published social networks and compare the output and efficiency qualitatively and quantitatively.
2502.14538
LoRA-GGPO: Mitigating Double Descent in LoRA Fine-Tuning via Gradient-Guided Perturbation Optimization
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing, but their full fine-tuning remains resource-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), have emerged as a practical solution by approximating parameter updates with low-rank matrices. However, LoRA often exhibits a "double descent" phenomenon during fine-tuning, where model performance degrades due to overfitting and limited expressiveness caused by low-rank constraints. To address this issue, we propose LoRA-GGPO (Gradient-Guided Perturbation Optimization), a novel method that leverages gradient and weight norms to generate targeted perturbations. By optimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape, LoRA-GGPO guides the model toward flatter minima, mitigating the double descent problem and improving generalization. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks demonstrate that LoRA-GGPO outperforms LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants. Furthermore, extended experiments specifically designed to analyze the double descent phenomenon confirm that LoRA-GGPO effectively alleviates this issue, producing more robust and generalizable models. Our work provides a robust and efficient solution for fine-tuning LLMs, with broad applicability in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/llm172/LoRA-GGPO.
2502.14541
LLM-based User Profile Management for Recommender System
cs.CL
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in recommender systems by enabling zero-shot recommendation without conventional training. Despite their potential, most existing works rely solely on users' purchase histories, leaving significant room for improvement by incorporating user-generated textual data, such as reviews and product descriptions. Addressing this gap, we propose PURE, a novel LLM-based recommendation framework that builds and maintains evolving user profiles by systematically extracting and summarizing key information from user reviews. PURE consists of three core components: a Review Extractor for identifying user preferences and key product features, a Profile Updater for refining and updating user profiles, and a Recommender for generating personalized recommendations using the most current profile. To evaluate PURE, we introduce a continuous sequential recommendation task that reflects real-world scenarios by adding reviews over time and updating predictions incrementally. Our experimental results on Amazon datasets demonstrate that PURE outperforms existing LLM-based methods, effectively leveraging long-term user information while managing token limitations.
2502.14544
Generalization Error of $f$-Divergence Stabilized Algorithms via Duality
stat.ML cs.LG
The solution to empirical risk minimization with $f$-divergence regularization (ERM-$f$DR) is extended to constrained optimization problems, establishing conditions for equivalence between the solution and constraints. A dual formulation of ERM-$f$DR is introduced, providing a computationally efficient method to derive the normalization function of the ERM-$f$DR solution. This dual approach leverages the Legendre-Fenchel transform and the implicit function theorem, enabling explicit characterizations of the generalization error for general algorithms under mild conditions, and another for ERM-$f$DR solutions.
2502.14545
An Entropic Metric for Measuring Calibration of Machine Learning Models
cs.LG
Understanding the confidence with which a machine learning model classifies an input datum is an important, and perhaps under-investigated, concept. In this paper, we propose a new calibration metric, the Entropic Calibration Difference (ECD). Based on existing research in the field of state estimation, specifically target tracking (TT), we show how ECD may be applied to binary classification machine learning models. We describe the relative importance of under- and over-confidence and how they are not conflated in the TT literature. Indeed, our metric distinguishes under- from over-confidence. We consider this important given that algorithms that are under-confident are likely to be 'safer' than algorithms that are over-confident, albeit at the expense of also being over-cautious and so statistically inefficient. We demonstrate how this new metric performs on real and simulated data and compare with other metrics for machine learning model probability calibration, including the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and its signed counterpart, the Expected Signed Calibration Error (ESCE).
2502.14546
Position: Graph Learning Will Lose Relevance Due To Poor Benchmarks
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE
While machine learning on graphs has demonstrated promise in drug design and molecular property prediction, significant benchmarking challenges hinder its further progress and relevance. Current benchmarking practices often lack focus on transformative, real-world applications, favoring narrow domains like two-dimensional molecular graphs over broader, impactful areas such as combinatorial optimization, relational databases, or chip design. Additionally, many benchmark datasets poorly represent the underlying data, leading to inadequate abstractions and misaligned use cases. Fragmented evaluations and an excessive focus on accuracy further exacerbate these issues, incentivizing overfitting rather than fostering generalizable insights. These limitations have prevented the development of truly useful graph foundation models. This position paper calls for a paradigm shift toward more meaningful benchmarks, rigorous evaluation protocols, and stronger collaboration with domain experts to drive impactful and reliable advances in graph learning research, unlocking the potential of graph learning.
2502.14553
Multiscale Byte Language Models -- A Hierarchical Architecture for Causal Million-Length Sequence Modeling
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Bytes form the basis of the digital world and thus are a promising building block for multimodal foundation models. Recently, Byte Language Models (BLMs) have emerged to overcome tokenization, yet the excessive length of bytestreams requires new architectural paradigms. Therefore, we present the Multiscale Byte Language Model (MBLM), a model-agnostic hierarchical decoder stack that allows training with context windows of $5$M bytes on single GPU in full model precision. We thoroughly examine MBLM's performance with Transformer and Mamba blocks on both unimodal and multimodal tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that hybrid architectures are efficient in handling extremely long byte sequences during training while achieving near-linear generational efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first evaluation of BLMs on visual Q\&A tasks and find that, despite serializing images and the absence of an encoder, a MBLM with pure next token prediction can match custom CNN-LSTM architectures with designated classification heads. We show that MBLMs exhibit strong adaptability in integrating diverse data representations, including pixel and image filestream bytes, underlining their potential toward omnimodal foundation models. Source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ai4sd/multiscale-byte-lm
2502.14558
FUIA: Model Inversion Attack against Federated Unlearning
cs.CR cs.AI
With the introduction of regulations related to the ``right to be forgotten", federated learning (FL) is facing new privacy compliance challenges. To address these challenges, researchers have proposed federated unlearning (FU). However, existing FU research has primarily focused on improving the efficiency of unlearning, with less attention paid to the potential privacy vulnerabilities inherent in these methods. To address this gap, we draw inspiration from gradient inversion attacks in FL and propose the federated unlearning inversion attack (FUIA). The FUIA is specifically designed for the three types of FU (sample unlearning, client unlearning, and class unlearning), aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of the privacy leakage risks associated with FU. In FUIA, the server acts as an honest-but-curious attacker, recording and exploiting the model differences before and after unlearning to expose the features and labels of forgotten data. FUIA significantly leaks the privacy of forgotten data and can target all types of FU. This attack contradicts the goal of FU to eliminate specific data influence, instead exploiting its vulnerabilities to recover forgotten data and expose its privacy flaws. Extensive experimental results show that FUIA can effectively reveal the private information of forgotten data. To mitigate this privacy leakage, we also explore two potential defense methods, although these come at the cost of reduced unlearning effectiveness and the usability of the unlearned model.
2502.14560
Less is More: Improving LLM Alignment via Preference Data Selection
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. While prior work mainly extends DPO from the aspect of the objective function, we instead improve DPO from the largely overlooked but critical aspect of data selection. Specifically, we address the issue of parameter shrinkage caused by noisy data by proposing a novel margin-maximization principle for dataset curation in DPO training. To accurately estimate margins for data selection, we propose a dual-margin guided approach that considers both external reward margins and implicit DPO reward margins. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces computational cost dramatically while improving performance. Remarkably, by using just 10\% of the Ultrafeedback dataset, our approach achieves 3\% to 8\% improvements across various Llama and Mistral series models on the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark. Furthermore, our approach seamlessly extends to iterative DPO, yielding a roughly 3\% improvement with 25\% online data, while further reducing training time. These results highlight the potential of data selection strategies for advancing preference optimization.
2502.14561
Can LLMs Predict Citation Intent? An Experimental Analysis of In-context Learning and Fine-tuning on Open LLMs
cs.CL cs.DL
This work investigates the ability of open Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict citation intent through in-context learning and fine-tuning. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on pre-trained models like SciBERT, which require extensive domain-specific pretraining and specialized architectures, we demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs can be adapted to this task with minimal task-specific data. We evaluate twelve model variations across five prominent open LLM families using zero, one, few, and many-shot prompting to assess performance across scenarios. Our experimental study identifies the top-performing model through extensive experimentation of in-context learning-related parameters, which we fine-tune to further enhance task performance. The results highlight the strengths and limitations of LLMs in recognizing citation intents, providing valuable insights for model selection and prompt engineering. Additionally, we make our end-to-end evaluation framework and models openly available for future use.
2502.14563
Plan-over-Graph: Towards Parallelable LLM Agent Schedule
cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in reasoning for task planning. However, challenges remain under-explored for parallel schedules. This paper introduces a novel paradigm, plan-over-graph, in which the model first decomposes a real-life textual task into executable subtasks and constructs an abstract task graph. The model then understands this task graph as input and generates a plan for parallel execution. To enhance the planning capability of complex, scalable graphs, we design an automated and controllable pipeline to generate synthetic graphs and propose a two-stage training scheme. Experimental results show that our plan-over-graph method significantly improves task performance on both API-based LLMs and trainable open-sourced LLMs. By normalizing complex tasks as graphs, our method naturally supports parallel execution, demonstrating global efficiency. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/Plan-over-Graph.
2502.14565
ReVISE: Learning to Refine at Test-Time via Intrinsic Self-Verification
cs.LG cs.CL
Self-awareness, i.e., the ability to assess and correct one's own generation, is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, making its replication in large language models (LLMs) an important yet challenging task. Previous works tackle this by employing extensive reinforcement learning or rather relying on large external verifiers. In this work, we propose Refine via Intrinsic Self-Verification (ReVISE), an efficient and effective framework that enables LLMs to self-correct their outputs through self-verification. The core idea of ReVISE is to enable LLMs to verify their reasoning processes and continually rethink reasoning trajectories based on its verification. We introduce a structured curriculum based upon online preference learning to implement this efficiently. Specifically, as ReVISE involves two challenging tasks (i.e., self-verification and reasoning correction), we tackle each task sequentially using curriculum learning, collecting both failed and successful reasoning paths to construct preference pairs for efficient training. During inference, our approach enjoys natural test-time scaling by integrating self-verification and correction capabilities, further enhanced by our proposed confidence-aware decoding mechanism. Our experiments on various reasoning tasks demonstrate that ReVISE achieves efficient self-correction and significantly improves reasoning performance.
2502.14571
Predicting Filter Medium Performances in Chamber Filter Presses with Digital Twins Using Neural Network Technologies
cs.LG cs.CE
Efficient solid-liquid separation is crucial in industries like mining, but traditional chamber filter presses depend heavily on manual monitoring, leading to inefficiencies, downtime, and resource wastage. This paper introduces a machine learning-powered digital twin framework to improve operational flexibility and predictive control. A key challenge addressed is the degradation of the filter medium due to repeated cycles and clogging, which reduces filtration efficiency. To solve this, a neural network-based predictive model was developed to forecast operational parameters, such as pressure and flow rates, under various conditions. This predictive capability allows for optimized filtration cycles, reduced downtime, and improved process efficiency. Additionally, the model predicts the filter mediums lifespan, aiding in maintenance planning and resource sustainability. The digital twin framework enables seamless data exchange between filter press sensors and the predictive model, ensuring continuous updates to the training data and enhancing accuracy over time. Two neural network architectures, feedforward and recurrent, were evaluated. The recurrent neural network outperformed the feedforward model, demonstrating superior generalization. It achieved a relative $L^2$-norm error of $5\%$ for pressure and $9.3\%$ for flow rate prediction on partially known data. For completely unknown data, the relative errors were $18.4\%$ and $15.4\%$, respectively. Qualitative analysis showed strong alignment between predicted and measured data, with deviations within a confidence band of $8.2\%$ for pressure and $4.8\%$ for flow rate predictions. This work contributes an accurate predictive model, a new approach to predicting filter medium cycle impacts, and a real-time interface for model updates, ensuring adaptability to changing operational conditions.
2502.14572
Factor Graph-based Interpretable Neural Networks
cs.LG cs.AI
Comprehensible neural network explanations are foundations for a better understanding of decisions, especially when the input data are infused with malicious perturbations. Existing solutions generally mitigate the impact of perturbations through adversarial training, yet they fail to generate comprehensible explanations under unknown perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose AGAIN, a fActor GrAph-based Interpretable neural Network, which is capable of generating comprehensible explanations under unknown perturbations. Instead of retraining like previous solutions, the proposed AGAIN directly integrates logical rules by which logical errors in explanations are identified and rectified during inference. Specifically, we construct the factor graph to express logical rules between explanations and categories. By treating logical rules as exogenous knowledge, AGAIN can identify incomprehensible explanations that violate real-world logic. Furthermore, we propose an interactive intervention switch strategy rectifying explanations based on the logical guidance from the factor graph without learning perturbations, which overcomes the inherent limitation of adversarial training-based methods in defending only against known perturbations. Additionally, we theoretically demonstrate the effectiveness of employing factor graph by proving that the comprehensibility of explanations is strongly correlated with factor graph. Extensive experiments are conducted on three datasets and experimental results illustrate the superior performance of AGAIN compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
2502.14573
Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Robust to Reflective Surface Leveraged by Triplet Mining
cs.CV cs.LG
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SSMDE) aims to predict the dense depth map of a monocular image, by learning depth from RGB image sequences, eliminating the need for ground-truth depth labels. Although this approach simplifies data acquisition compared to supervised methods, it struggles with reflective surfaces, as they violate the assumptions of Lambertian reflectance, leading to inaccurate training on such surfaces. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel training strategy for an SSMDE by leveraging triplet mining to pinpoint reflective regions at the pixel level, guided by the camera geometry between different viewpoints. The proposed reflection-aware triplet mining loss specifically penalizes the inappropriate photometric error minimization on the localized reflective regions while preserving depth accuracy in non-reflective areas. We also incorporate a reflection-aware knowledge distillation method that enables a student model to selectively learn the pixel-level knowledge from reflective and non-reflective regions. This results in robust depth estimation across areas. Evaluation results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method effectively enhances depth quality on reflective surfaces and outperforms state-of-the-art SSMDE baselines.
2502.14574
Real-world Troublemaker: A Novel Track Testing Framework for Automated Driving Systems in Safety-critical Interaction Scenarios
cs.RO cs.ET
Track testing plays a critical role in the safety evaluation of autonomous driving systems (ADS), as it provides real-world object targets and a safety-controllable interaction environment. However, existing track testing scenarios are often pre-fixed and limited, primarily due to the inflexibility of object target control methods and the lack of intelligent interactive behaviors. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel track testing framework, Real-world Troublemaker, which can generate adversarial object target motion trajectories and facilitate intelligent interactions with the vehicle under test (VUT), creating a more realistic and dynamic testing environment. To enable flexible motion trajectories, cloud-controlled technology is utilized to remotely and dynamically control object targets to create a realistic traffic environment. To achieve intelligent interactions, an interactive concrete scenario generation method is introduced within a game-theoretic structure. The proposed framework has been successfully implemented at the Tongji University Intelligent Connected Vehicle Evaluation Base. Field test results demonstrate that Troublemaker can perform dynamic interactive testing of ADS accurately and effectively. Compared to traditional track testing methods, Troublemaker improves scenario reproduction accuracy by 65.2\%, increases the diversity of target vehicle interaction strategies by approximately 9.2 times, and enhances exposure frequency of safety-critical scenarios by 3.5 times in unprotected left-turn scenarios.
2502.14581
A Statistical Case Against Empirical Human-AI Alignment
cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG stat.OT
Empirical human-AI alignment aims to make AI systems act in line with observed human behavior. While noble in its goals, we argue that empirical alignment can inadvertently introduce statistical biases that warrant caution. This position paper thus advocates against naive empirical alignment, offering prescriptive alignment and a posteriori empirical alignment as alternatives. We substantiate our principled argument by tangible examples like human-centric decoding of language models.
2502.14583
A Theory for Conditional Generative Modeling on Multiple Data Sources
cs.LG cs.AI
The success of large generative models has driven a paradigm shift, leveraging massive multi-source data to enhance model capabilities. However, the interaction among these sources remains theoretically underexplored. This paper takes the first step toward a rigorous analysis of multi-source training in conditional generative modeling, where each condition represents a distinct data source. Specifically, we establish a general distribution estimation error bound in average total variation distance for conditional maximum likelihood estimation based on the bracketing number. Our result shows that when source distributions share certain similarities and the model is expressive enough, multi-source training guarantees a sharper bound than single-source training. We further instantiate the general theory on conditional Gaussian estimation and deep generative models including autoregressive and flexible energy-based models, by characterizing their bracketing numbers. The results highlight that the number of sources and similarity among source distributions improve the advantage of multi-source training. Simulations and real-world experiments validate our theory. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/ML-GSAI/Multi-Source-GM}.
2502.14584
Vision Foundation Models in Medical Image Analysis: Advances and Challenges
eess.IV cs.CV
The rapid development of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), particularly Vision Transformers (ViT) and Segment Anything Model (SAM), has sparked significant advances in the field of medical image analysis. These models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies and achieving high generalization in segmentation tasks. However, adapting these large models to medical image analysis presents several challenges, including domain differences between medical and natural images, the need for efficient model adaptation strategies, and the limitations of small-scale medical datasets. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art research on the adaptation of VFMs to medical image segmentation, focusing on the challenges of domain adaptation, model compression, and federated learning. We discuss the latest developments in adapter-based improvements, knowledge distillation techniques, and multi-scale contextual feature modeling, and propose future directions to overcome these bottlenecks. Our analysis highlights the potential of VFMs, along with emerging methodologies such as federated learning and model compression, to revolutionize medical image analysis and enhance clinical applications. The goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive overview of current approaches and suggest key areas for future research that can drive the next wave of innovation in medical image segmentation.
2502.14585
A Stackelberg Game Approach for Signal Temporal Logic Control Synthesis with Uncontrollable Agents
eess.SY cs.SY
In this paper, we investigate the control synthesis problem for Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications in the presence of uncontrollable agents. Existing works mainly address this problem in a robust control setting by assuming the uncontrollable agents are adversarial and accounting for the worst-case scenario. While this approach ensures safety, it can be overly conservative in scenarios where uncontrollable agents have their own objectives that are not entirely opposed to the system's goals. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a new framework for STL control synthesis within the Stackelberg game setting. Specifically, we assume that the system controller, acting as the leader, first commits to a plan, after which the uncontrollable agents, acting as followers, take a best response based on the committed plan and their own objectives. Our goal is to synthesize a control sequence for the leader such that, for any rational followers producing a best response, the leader's STL task is guaranteed to be satisfied. We present an effective solution to this problem by transforming it into a single-stage optimization problem and leveraging counter-example guided synthesis techniques. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is sound and identify conditions under which it is optimal. Simulation results are also provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
2502.14586
Moshi Moshi? A Model Selection Hijacking Adversarial Attack
cs.LG cs.CR
Model selection is a fundamental task in Machine Learning~(ML), focusing on selecting the most suitable model from a pool of candidates by evaluating their performance on specific metrics. This process ensures optimal performance, computational efficiency, and adaptability to diverse tasks and environments. Despite its critical role, its security from the perspective of adversarial ML remains unexplored. This risk is heightened in the Machine-Learning-as-a-Service model, where users delegate the training phase and the model selection process to third-party providers, supplying data and training strategies. Therefore, attacks on model selection could harm both the user and the provider, undermining model performance and driving up operational costs. In this work, we present MOSHI (MOdel Selection HIjacking adversarial attack), the first adversarial attack specifically targeting model selection. Our novel approach manipulates model selection data to favor the adversary, even without prior knowledge of the system. Utilizing a framework based on Variational Auto Encoders, we provide evidence that an attacker can induce inefficiencies in ML deployment. We test our attack on diverse computer vision and speech recognition benchmark tasks and different settings, obtaining an average attack success rate of 75.42%. In particular, our attack causes an average 88.30% decrease in generalization capabilities, an 83.33% increase in latency, and an increase of up to 105.85% in energy consumption. These results highlight the significant vulnerabilities in model selection processes and their potential impact on real-world applications.
2502.14589
Explicit adaptive time stepping for the Cahn-Hilliard equation by exponential Krylov subspace and Chebyshev polynomial methods
math.NA cs.CE cs.NA physics.comp-ph
The Cahn-Hilliard equation has been widely employed within various mathematical models in physics, chemistry and engineering. Explicit stabilized time stepping methods can be attractive for time integration of the Cahn-Hilliard equation, especially on parallel and hybrid supercomputers. In this paper, we propose an exponential time integration method for the Cahn-Hilliard equation and describe its efficient Krylov subspace based implementation. We compare the method to a Chebyshev polynomial local iteration modified (LIM) time stepping scheme. Both methods are explicit (i.e., do not involve linear system solution) and tested with both constant and adaptively chosen time steps.
2502.14591
Data-driven Control of T-Product-based Dynamical Systems
eess.SY cs.SY
Data-driven control is a powerful tool that enables the design and implementation of control strategies directly from data without explicitly identifying the underlying system dynamics. While various data-driven control techniques, such as stabilization, linear quadratic regulation, and model predictive control, have been extensively developed, these methods are not inherently suited for multi-linear dynamical systems, where the states are represented as higher-order tensors. In this article, we propose a novel framework for data-driven control of T-product-based dynamical systems (TPDSs), where the system evolution is governed by the T-product between a third-order dynamic tensor and a third-order state tensor. In particular, we offer necessary and sufficient conditions to determine the data informativity for system identification, stabilization by state feedback, and T-product quadratic regulation of TPDSs with detailed complexity analyses. Finally, we validate our framework through numerical examples.
2502.14597
Multi-Class Imbalanced Learning with Support Vector Machines via Differential Evolution
cs.LG cs.NE
Support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful machine learning algorithm to handle classification tasks. However, the classical SVM is developed for binary problems with the assumption of balanced datasets. Obviously, the multi-class imbalanced classification problems are more complex. In this paper, we propose an improved SVM via Differential Evolution (i-SVM-DE) method to deal with it. An improved SVM (i-SVM) model is proposed to handle the data imbalance by combining cost sensitive technique and separation margin modification in the constraints, which formalize a parameter optimization problem. By using one-versus-one (OVO) scheme, a multi-class problem is decomposed into a number of binary subproblems. A large optimization problem is formalized through concatenating the parameters in the binary subproblems. To find the optimal model effectively and learn the support vectors for each class simultaneously, an improved differential evolution (DE) algorithm is applied to solve this large optimization problem. Instead of the validation set, we propose the fitness functions to evaluate the learned model and obtain the optimal parameters in the search process of DE. A series of experiments are carried out to verify the benefits of our proposed method. The results indicate that i-SVM-DE is statistically superior by comparing with the other baseline methods.
2502.14604
Noisy Test-Time Adaptation in Vision-Language Models
cs.LG
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address distribution shifts between source and target data by relying solely on target data during testing. In open-world scenarios, models often encounter noisy samples, i.e., samples outside the in-distribution (ID) label space. Leveraging the zero-shot capability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), this paper introduces Zero-Shot Noisy TTA (ZS-NTTA), focusing on adapting the model to target data with noisy samples during test-time in a zero-shot manner. We find existing TTA methods underperform under ZS-NTTA, often lagging behind even the frozen model. We conduct comprehensive experiments to analyze this phenomenon, revealing that the negative impact of unfiltered noisy data outweighs the benefits of clean data during model updating. Also, adapting a classifier for ID classification and noise detection hampers both sub-tasks. Built on this, we propose a framework that decouples the classifier and detector, focusing on developing an individual detector while keeping the classifier frozen. Technically, we introduce the Adaptive Noise Detector (AdaND), which utilizes the frozen model's outputs as pseudo-labels to train a noise detector. To handle clean data streams, we further inject Gaussian noise during adaptation, preventing the detector from misclassifying clean samples as noisy. Beyond the ZS-NTTA, AdaND can also improve the zero-shot out-of-distribution (ZS-OOD) detection ability of VLMs. Experiments show that AdaND outperforms in both ZS-NTTA and ZS-OOD detection. On ImageNet, AdaND achieves a notable improvement of $8.32\%$ in harmonic mean accuracy ($\text{Acc}_\text{H}$) for ZS-NTTA and $9.40\%$ in FPR95 for ZS-OOD detection, compared to SOTA methods. Importantly, AdaND is computationally efficient and comparable to the model-frozen method. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/ZS-NTTA.
2502.14613
Behavioral Analysis of Information Salience in Large Language Models
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we introduce an explainable framework to systematically derive and investigate information salience in LLMs through their summarization behavior. Using length-controlled summarization as a behavioral probe into the content selection process, and tracing the answerability of Questions Under Discussion throughout, we derive a proxy for how models prioritize information. Our experiments on 13 models across four datasets reveal that LLMs have a nuanced, hierarchical notion of salience, generally consistent across model families and sizes. While models show highly consistent behavior and hence salience patterns, this notion of salience cannot be accessed through introspection, and only weakly correlates with human perceptions of information salience.
2502.14614
FIND: Fine-grained Information Density Guided Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Disease Diagnosis
cs.CL
Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), which integrate external knowledge into LLMs, have shown remarkable performance in various medical domains, including clinical diagnosis. However, existing RAG methods struggle to effectively assess task difficulty to make retrieval decisions, thereby failing to meet the clinical requirements for balancing efficiency and accuracy. So in this paper, we propose FIND (\textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{In}formation \textbf{D}ensity Guided Adaptive RAG), a novel framework that improves the reliability of RAG in disease diagnosis scenarios. FIND incorporates a fine-grained adaptive control module to determine whether retrieval is necessary based on the information density of the input. By optimizing the retrieval process and implementing a knowledge filtering module, FIND ensures that the retrieval is better suited to clinical scenarios. Experiments on three Chinese electronic medical record datasets demonstrate that FIND significantly outperforms various baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness in clinical diagnosis tasks.
2502.14616
Monocular Depth Estimation and Segmentation for Transparent Object with Iterative Semantic and Geometric Fusion
cs.CV
Transparent object perception is indispensable for numerous robotic tasks. However, accurately segmenting and estimating the depth of transparent objects remain challenging due to complex optical properties. Existing methods primarily delve into only one task using extra inputs or specialized sensors, neglecting the valuable interactions among tasks and the subsequent refinement process, leading to suboptimal and blurry predictions. To address these issues, we propose a monocular framework, which is the first to excel in both segmentation and depth estimation of transparent objects, with only a single-image input. Specifically, we devise a novel semantic and geometric fusion module, effectively integrating the multi-scale information between tasks. In addition, drawing inspiration from human perception of objects, we further incorporate an iterative strategy, which progressively refines initial features for clearer results. Experiments on two challenging synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our model surpasses state-of-the-art monocular, stereo, and multi-view methods by a large margin of about 38.8%-46.2% with only a single RGB input. Codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/L-J-Yuan/MODEST.