Conventional operating system scheduling algorithms are largely content-ignorant, making decisions based on factors such as latency or fairness without considering the actual intents or semantics of processes. Consequently, these algorithms often do not prioritize tasks that require urgent attention or carry higher importance, such as in emergency management scenarios. However, recent advances in language models enable semantic analysis of processes, allowing for more intelligent and context-aware scheduling decisions. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic scheduling in scheduling of requests from large language models (LLM), where the semantics of the process guide the scheduling priorities. We present a novel scheduling algorithm with optimal time complexity, designed to minimize the overall waiting time in LLM-based prompt scheduling. To illustrate its effectiveness, we present a medical emergency management application, underscoring the potential benefits of semantic scheduling for critical, time-sensitive tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Wenyueh/latency_optimization_with_priority_constraints.
In this paper, we study a novel latency minimization problem in wireless federated learning (FL) across multi-hop networks. The system comprises multiple routes, each integrating leaf and relay nodes for FL model training. We explore a personalized learning and adaptive aggregation-aware FL (PAFL) framework that effectively addresses data heterogeneity across participating nodes by harmonizing individual and collective learning objectives. We formulate an optimization problem aimed at minimizing system latency through the joint optimization of leaf and relay nodes, as well as relay routing indicator. We also incorporate an additional energy harvesting scheme for the relay nodes to help with their relay tasks. This formulation presents a computationally demanding challenge, and thus we develop a simple yet efficient algorithm based on block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques. Simulation results illustrate the efficacy of our proposed joint optimization approach for leaf and relay nodes with relay routing indicator. We observe significant latency savings in the wireless multi-hop PAFL system, with reductions of up to 69.37% compared to schemes optimizing only one node type, traditional greedy algorithm, and scheme without relay routing indicator.
Computing eigenvalues of very large matrices is a critical task in many machine learning applications, including the evaluation of log-determinants, the trace of matrix functions, and other important metrics. As datasets continue to grow in scale, the corresponding covariance and kernel matrices become increasingly large, often reaching magnitudes that make their direct formation impractical or impossible. Existing techniques typically rely on matrix-vector products, which can provide efficient approximations, if the matrix spectrum behaves well. However, in settings like distributed learning, or when the matrix is defined only indirectly, access to the full data set can be restricted to only very small sub-matrices of the original matrix. In these cases, the matrix of nominal interest is not even available as an implicit operator, meaning that even matrix-vector products may not be available. In such settings, the matrix is "impalpable," in the sense that we have access to only masked snapshots of it. We draw on principles from free probability theory to introduce a novel method of "free decompression" to estimate the spectrum of such matrices. Our method can be used to extrapolate from the empirical spectral densities of small submatrices to infer the eigenspectrum of extremely large (impalpable) matrices (that we cannot form or even evaluate with full matrix-vector products). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a series of examples, comparing its performance against known limiting distributions from random matrix theory in synthetic settings, as well as applying it to submatrices of real-world datasets, matching them with their full empirical eigenspectra.
This paper addresses two main objectives. Firstly, we demonstrate the impressive performance of the LLaVA-NeXT-interleave on 22 datasets across three different tasks: Multi-Image Reasoning, Documents and Knowledge-Based Understanding and Interactive Multi-Modal Communication. Secondly, we add the Dense Channel Integration (DCI) connector to the LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave and compare its performance against the standard model. We find that the standard model achieves the highest overall accuracy, excelling in vision-heavy tasks like VISION, NLVR2, and Fashion200K. Meanwhile, the DCI-enhanced version shows particular strength on datasets requiring deeper semantic coherence or structured change understanding such as MIT-States_PropertyCoherence and SlideVQA. Our results highlight the potential of combining powerful foundation models with plug-and-play techniques for Interleave tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/dinhvietcuong1996/icme25-inova.
Deep autoencoders have become a fundamental tool in various machine learning applications, ranging from dimensionality reduction and reduced order modeling of partial differential equations to anomaly detection and neural machine translation. Despite their empirical success, a solid theoretical foundation for their expressiveness remains elusive, particularly when compared to classical projection-based techniques. In this work, we aim to take a step forward in this direction by presenting a comprehensive analysis of what we refer to as symmetric autoencoders, a broad class of deep learning architectures ubiquitous in the literature. Specifically, we introduce a formal distinction between different classes of symmetric architectures, analyzing their strengths and limitations from a mathematical perspective. For instance, we show that the reconstruction error of symmetric autoencoders with orthonormality constraints can be understood by leveraging the well-renowned Eckart-Young-Schmidt (EYS) theorem. As a byproduct of our analysis, we end up developing the EYS initialization strategy for symmetric autoencoders, which is based on an iterated application of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To validate our findings, we conduct a series of numerical experiments where we benchmark our proposal against conventional deep autoencoders, discussing the importance of model design and initialization.
For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular approach for robots to acquire new skills, but most LfD methods suffer from imperfections in human demonstrations. Prior work typically treats these suboptimalities as random noise. In this paper we study non-optimal behaviors in non-expert demonstrations and show that they are systematic, forming what we call demonstration sidetracks. Using a public space study with 40 participants performing a long-horizon robot task, we recreated the setup in simulation and annotated all demonstrations. We identify four types of sidetracks (Exploration, Mistake, Alignment, Pause) and one control pattern (one-dimension control). Sidetracks appear frequently across participants, and their temporal and spatial distribution is tied to task context. We also find that users' control patterns depend on the control interface. These insights point to the need for better models of suboptimal demonstrations to improve LfD algorithms and bridge the gap between lab training and real-world deployment. All demonstrations, infrastructure, and annotations are available at https://github.com/AABL-Lab/Human-Demonstration-Sidetracks.
Clinical communication skills are critical in medical education, and practicing and assessing clinical communication skills on a scale is challenging. Although LLM-powered clinical scenario simulations have shown promise in enhancing medical students' clinical practice, providing automated and scalable clinical evaluation that follows nuanced physician judgment is difficult. This paper combines fuzzy logic and Large Language Model (LLM) and proposes LLM-as-a-Fuzzy-Judge to address the challenge of aligning the automated evaluation of medical students' clinical skills with subjective physicians' preferences. LLM-as-a-Fuzzy-Judge is an approach that LLM is fine-tuned to evaluate medical students' utterances within student-AI patient conversation scripts based on human annotations from four fuzzy sets, including Professionalism, Medical Relevance, Ethical Behavior, and Contextual Distraction. The methodology of this paper started from data collection from the LLM-powered medical education system, data annotation based on multidimensional fuzzy sets, followed by prompt engineering and the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of the pre-trained LLMs using these human annotations. The results show that the LLM-as-a-Fuzzy-Judge achieves over 80\% accuracy, with major criteria items over 90\%, effectively leveraging fuzzy logic and LLM as a solution to deliver interpretable, human-aligned assessment. This work suggests the viability of leveraging fuzzy logic and LLM to align with human preferences, advances automated evaluation in medical education, and supports more robust assessment and judgment practices. The GitHub repository of this work is available at https://github.com/2sigmaEdTech/LLMAsAJudge
The expanding Lean 4 ecosystem poses challenges for navigating its vast libraries. This paper introduces LeanExplore, a search engine for Lean 4 declarations. LeanExplore enables users to semantically search for statements, both formally and informally, across select Lean 4 packages (including Batteries, Init, Lean, Mathlib, PhysLean, and Std). This search capability is powered by a hybrid ranking strategy, integrating scores from a multi-source semantic embedding model (capturing conceptual meaning from formal Lean code, docstrings, AI-generated informal translations, and declaration titles), BM25+ for keyword-based lexical relevance, and a PageRank-based score reflecting declaration importance and interconnectedness. The search engine is accessible via a dedicated website (https://www.leanexplore.com/) and a Python API (https://github.com/justincasher/lean-explore). Furthermore, the database can be downloaded, allowing users to self-host the service. LeanExplore integrates easily with LLMs via the model context protocol (MCP), enabling users to chat with an AI assistant about Lean declarations or utilize the search engine for building theorem-proving agents. This work details LeanExplore's architecture, data processing, functionalities, and its potential to enhance Lean 4 workflows and AI-driven mathematical research
Tokenization is used almost universally by modern language models, enabling efficient text representation using multi-byte or multi-character tokens. However, prior work has shown that tokenization can introduce distortion into the model's generations. For example, users are often advised not to end their prompts with a space because it prevents the model from including the space as part of the next token. This Prompt Boundary Problem (PBP) also arises in languages such as Chinese and in code generation, where tokens often do not line up with syntactic boundaries. Additionally mismatching tokenizers often hinder model composition and interoperability. For example, it is not possible to directly ensemble models with different tokenizers due to their mismatching vocabularies. To address these issues, we present an inference-time method to convert any autoregressive LM with a BPE tokenizer into a character-level or byte-level LM, without changing its generative distribution at the text level. Our method efficient solves the PBP and is also able to unify the vocabularies of language models with different tokenizers, allowing one to ensemble LMs with different tokenizers at inference time as well as transfer the post-training from one model to another using proxy-tuning. We demonstrate in experiments that the ensemble and proxy-tuned models outperform their constituents on downstream evals.
Recently, Video-Language Models (VideoLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, offering significant potential for flexible and powerful video query systems. These models typically rely on Vision Transformers (ViTs), which process video frames individually to extract visual embeddings. However, generating embeddings for large-scale videos requires ViT inferencing across numerous frames, posing a major hurdle to real-world deployment and necessitating solutions for integration into scalable video data management systems. This paper introduces D\'ej\`a Vu, a video-language query engine that accelerates ViT-based VideoLMs by reusing computations across consecutive frames. At its core is ReuseViT, a modified ViT model specifically designed for VideoLM tasks, which learns to detect inter-frame reuse opportunities, striking an effective balance between accuracy and reuse. Although ReuseViT significantly reduces computation, these savings do not directly translate into performance gains on GPUs. To overcome this, D\'ej\`a Vu integrates memory-compute joint compaction techniques that convert the FLOP savings into tangible performance gains. Evaluations on three VideoLM tasks show that D\'ej\`a Vu accelerates embedding generation by up to a 2.64x within a 2% error bound, dramatically enhancing the practicality of VideoLMs for large-scale video analytics.
Sketches have shown high accuracy in multi-way join cardinality estimation, a critical problem in cost-based query optimization. Accurately estimating the cardinality of a join operation -- analogous to its computational cost -- allows the optimization of query execution costs in relational database systems. However, although sketches have shown high efficacy in query optimization, they are typically constructed specifically for predefined selections in queries that are assumed to be given a priori, hindering their applicability to new queries. As a more general solution, we propose for Sum-Product Networks to dynamically approximate sketches on-the-fly. Sum-Product Networks can decompose and model multivariate distributions, such as relations, as linear combinations of multiple univariate distributions. By representing these univariate distributions as sketches, Sum-Product Networks can combine them element-wise to efficiently approximate the sketch of any query selection. These approximate sketches can then be applied to join cardinality estimation. In particular, we implement the Fast-AGMS and Bound Sketch methods, which have successfully been used in prior work, despite their costly construction. By accurately approximating them instead, our work provides a practical alternative to apply these sketches to query optimization.
The job shop scheduling problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem relevant to manufacturing and timetabling. Traditional approaches use priority dispatching rules based on simple heuristics. Recent work has attempted to replace these with deep learning models, particularly graph neural networks (GNNs), that learn to assign priorities from data. However, training such models requires customizing numerous factors: graph representation, node features, action space, and reward functions. The lack of modular libraries for experimentation makes this research time-consuming. This work introduces JobShopLib, a modular library that allows customizing these factors and creating new components with its reinforcement learning environment. We trained several dispatchers through imitation learning to demonstrate the environment's utility. One model outperformed various graph-based dispatchers using only individual operation features, highlighting the importance of feature customization. Our GNN model achieved near state-of-the-art results on large-scale problems. These results suggest significant room for improvement in developing such models. JobShopLib provides the necessary tools for future experimentation.
Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated remarkable novel view synthesis performance at high rendering frame rates. Optimization-based inverse rendering within complex capture scenarios remains however a challenging problem. A particular case is modelling complex surface light interactions for highly reflective scenes, which results in intricate high frequency specular radiance components. We hypothesize that such challenging settings can benefit from increased representation power. We hence propose a method that tackles this issue through a geometrically and physically grounded Gaussian Splatting borne radiance field, where normals and material properties are spatially variable in the primitive's local space. Using per-primitive texture maps for this purpose, we also propose to harness the GPU hardware to accelerate rendering at test time via unified material texture atlas.
Data visualization generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising results but often produces suboptimal visualizations that require human intervention for improvement. In this work, we introduce VIS-Shepherd, a specialized Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based critic to evaluate and provide feedback for LLM-generated data visualizations. At the core of our approach is a framework to construct a high-quality visualization critique dataset, where we collect human-created visualization instances, synthesize corresponding LLM-generated instances, and construct high-quality critiques. We conduct both model-based automatic evaluation and human preference studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Our experiments show that even small (7B parameters) open-source MLLM models achieve substantial performance gains by leveraging our high-quality visualization critique dataset, reaching levels comparable to much larger open-source or even proprietary models. Our work demonstrates significant potential for MLLM-based automated visualization critique and indicates promising directions for enhancing LLM-based data visualization generation. Our project page: https://github.com/bopan3/VIS-Shepherd.
Triangle counting is a fundamental and widely studied problem on static graphs, and recently on temporal graphs, where edges carry information on the timings of the associated events. Streaming processing and resource efficiency are crucial requirements for counting triangles in modern massive temporal graphs, with millions of nodes and up to billions of temporal edges. However, current exact and approximate algorithms are unable to handle large-scale temporal graphs. To fill such a gap, we introduce STEP, a scalable and efficient algorithm to approximate temporal triangle counts from a stream of temporal edges. STEP combines predictions to the number of triangles a temporal edge is involved in, with a simple sampling strategy, leading to scalability, efficiency, and accurate approximation of all eight temporal triangle types simultaneously. We analytically prove that, by using a sublinear amount of memory, STEP obtains unbiased and very accurate estimates. In fact, even noisy predictions can significantly reduce the variance of STEP's estimates. Our extensive experiments on massive temporal graphs with up to billions of edges demonstrate that STEP outputs high-quality estimates and is more efficient than state-of-the-art methods.
Data discovery and table unionability in particular became key tasks in modern Data Science. However, the human perspective for these tasks is still under-explored. Thus, this research investigates the human behavior in determining table unionability within data discovery. We have designed an experimental survey and conducted a comprehensive analysis, in which we assess human decision-making for table unionability. We use the observations from the analysis to develop a machine learning framework to boost the (raw) performance of humans. Furthermore, we perform a preliminary study on how LLM performance is compared to humans indicating that it is typically better to consider a combination of both. We believe that this work lays the foundations for developing future Human-in-the-Loop systems for efficient data discovery.
The long horizon forecasting (LHF) problem has come up in the time series literature for over the last 35 years or so. This review covers aspects of LHF in this period and how deep learning has incorporated variants of trend, seasonality, fourier and wavelet transforms, misspecification bias reduction and bandpass filters while contributing using convolutions, residual connections, sparsity reduction, strided convolutions, attention masks, SSMs, normalization methods, low-rank approximations and gating mechanisms. We highlight time series decomposition techniques, input data preprocessing and dataset windowing schemes that improve performance. Multi-layer perceptron models, recurrent neural network hybrids, self-attention models that improve and/or address the performances of the LHF problem are described, with an emphasis on the feature space construction. Ablation studies are conducted over the ETTm2 dataset in the multivariate and univariate high useful load (HUFL) forecasting contexts, evaluated over the last 4 months of the dataset. The heatmaps of MSE averages per time step over test set series in the horizon show that there is a steady increase in the error proportionate to its length except with xLSTM and Triformer models and motivate LHF as an error propagation problem. The trained models are available here: https://bit.ly/LHFModelZoo
Event-based eye tracking holds significant promise for fine-grained cognitive state inference, offering high temporal resolution and robustness to motion artifacts, critical features for decoding subtle mental states such as attention, confusion, or fatigue. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic, inference-time refinement framework designed to enhance the output of existing event-based gaze estimation models without modifying their architecture or requiring retraining. Our method comprises two key post-processing modules: (i) Motion-Aware Median Filtering, which suppresses blink-induced spikes while preserving natural gaze dynamics, and (ii) Optical Flow-Based Local Refinement, which aligns gaze predictions with cumulative event motion to reduce spatial jitter and temporal discontinuities. To complement traditional spatial accuracy metrics, we propose a novel Jitter Metric that captures the temporal smoothness of predicted gaze trajectories based on velocity regularity and local signal complexity. Together, these contributions significantly improve the consistency of event-based gaze signals, making them better suited for downstream tasks such as micro-expression analysis and mind-state decoding. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple baseline models on controlled datasets, laying the groundwork for future integration with multimodal affect recognition systems in real-world environments.
Surface electromyography (sEMG) at the wrists could enable natural, keyboard-free text entry, yet the state-of-the-art emg2qwerty baseline still misrecognizes $51.8\%$ of characters in the zero-shot setting on unseen users and $7.0\%$ after user-specific fine-tuning. We trace many of these errors to mismatched cross-user signal statistics, fragile reliance on high-order feature dependencies, and the absence of architectural inductive biases aligned with the bilateral nature of typing. To address these issues, we introduce three simple modifications: (i) Rolling Time Normalization, which adaptively aligns input distributions across users; (ii) Aggressive Channel Masking, which encourages reliance on low-order feature combinations more likely to generalize across users; and (iii) a Split-and-Share encoder that processes each hand independently with weight-shared streams to reflect the bilateral symmetry of the neuromuscular system. Combined with a five-fold reduction in spectral resolution ($33\!\rightarrow\!6$ frequency bands), these components yield a compact Split-and-Share model, SplashNet-mini, which uses only $\tfrac14$ the parameters and $0.6\times$ the FLOPs of the baseline while reducing character-error rate (CER) to $36.4\%$ zero-shot and $5.9\%$ after fine-tuning. An upscaled variant, SplashNet ($\tfrac12$ the parameters, $1.15\times$ the FLOPs of the baseline), further lowers error to $35.7\%$ and $5.5\%$, representing relative improvements of $31\%$ and $21\%$ in the zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, respectively. SplashNet therefore establishes a new state of the art without requiring additional data.