Deep Learning
RoParQ: Paraphrase-Aware Alignment of Large Language Models Towards Robustness to Paraphrased Questions
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit inconsistent behavior when answering paraphrased questions, suggesting a reliance on surface-level patterns rather than true semantic understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce RoParQ, a benchmark specifically constructed to evaluate cross-paraphrase consistency in closed-book multiple-choice QA. This benchmark is derived from standard datasets by generating paraphrases via proprietary models and selectively retaining examples that elicit inconsistent confidence from a judge model. We further propose XParaCon, a novel evaluation metric that quantifies a model's robustness by measuring the standard deviation of accuracies across question variants. Additionally, we implement a reasoning-based, paraphrase-aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) strategy designed to align models toward semantic invariance. Our experiments demonstrate that this targeted alignment significantly enhances robustness. Notably, fine-tuned lightweight models achieved consistency levels comparable to much larger pre-trained models. These results highlight the efficacy of our approach in mitigating superficial memorization and fostering more robust, reliable LLMs.
MMA: A Momentum Mamba Architecture for Human Activity Recognition with Inertial Sensors
Nguyen, Thai-Khanh, Vo, Uyen, Nguyen, Tan M., Vo, Thieu N., Le, Trung-Hieu, Pham, Cuong
Human activity recognition (HAR) from inertial sensors is essential for ubiquitous computing, mobile health, and ambient intelligence. Conventional deep models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and transformers have advanced HAR but remain limited by vanishing or exloding gradients, high computational cost, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Structured state-space models (SSMs) like Mamba address these challenges with linear complexity and effective temporal modeling, yet they are restricted to first-order dynamics without stable longterm memory mechanisms. We introduce Momentum Mamba, a momentum-augmented SSM that incorporates second-order dynamics to improve stability of information flow across time steps, robustness, and long-sequence modeling. Two extensions further expand its capacity: Complex Momentum Mamba for frequency-selective memory scaling. Experiments on multiple HAR benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over vanilla Mamba and Transformer baselines in accuracy, robustness, and convergence speed. With only moderate increases in training cost, momentum-augmented SSMs offer a favorable accuracy-efficiency balance, establishing them as a scalable paradigm for HAR and a promising principal framework for broader sequence modeling applications.
Bangla Sign Language Translation: Dataset Creation Challenges, Benchmarking and Prospects
Rubaiyeat, Husne Ara, Mahmud, Hasan, Hasan, Md Kamrul
Bangla Sign Language Translation (BdSLT) has been severely constrained so far as the language itself is very low resource. Standard sentence level dataset creation for BdSLT is of immense importance for developing AI based assistive tools for deaf and hard of hearing people of Bangla speaking community. In this paper, we present a dataset, IsharaKhobor , and two subset of it for enabling research. We also present the challenges towards developing the dataset and present some way forward by benchmarking with landmark based raw and RQE embedding. We do some ablation on vocabulary restriction and canonicalization of the same within the dataset, which resulted in two more datasets, IsharaKhobor_small and IsharaKhobor_canonical_small. The dataset is publicly available at: www.kaggle.com/datasets/hasanssl/isharakhobor [1].
Pessimistic Verification for Open Ended Math Questions
Huang, Yanxing, Tang, Zihan, Lin, Zejin, Li, Peng, Liu, Yang
The key limitation of the verification performance lies in the ability of error detection. With this intuition we designed several variants of pessimistic verification, which are simple workflows that could significantly improve the verification of open-ended math questions. In pessimistic verification we construct multiple parallel verifications for the same proof, and the proof is deemed incorrect if any one of them reports an error. This simple technique significantly improves the performance across many math verification benchmarks without incurring substantial computational resources. Its token efficiency even surpassed extended long-CoT in test-time scaling. Our case studies further indicate that the majority of false negatives in stronger models are actually caused by annotation errors in the original dataset, so our method's performance is in fact underestimated. Self-verification for mathematical problems can effectively improve the reliability and performance of language model outputs, and it also plays a critical role in enabling long-horizon mathematical tasks. We believe that research on pessimistic verification will help enhance the mathematical capabilities of language models across a wide range of tasks.
Mechanistic Interpretability for Transformer-based Time Series Classification
Kalnฤre, Matฤซss, Kitharidis, Sofoklis, Bรคck, Thomas, van Stein, Niki
Transformer-based models have become state-of-the-art tools in various machine learning tasks, including time series classification, yet their complexity makes understanding their internal decision-making challenging. Existing explainability methods often focus on input-output attributions, leaving the internal mechanisms largely opaque. This paper addresses this gap by adapting various Mechanistic Interpretability techniques; activation patching, attention saliency, and sparse autoen-coders, from NLP to transformer architectures designed explicitly for time series classification. We systematically probe the internal causal roles of individual attention heads and timesteps, revealing causal structures within these models. Through experimentation on a benchmark time series dataset, we construct causal graphs illustrating how information propagates internally, highlighting key attention heads and temporal positions driving correct classifications. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential of sparse autoencoders for uncovering interpretable latent features. Our findings provide both methodological contributions to transformer interpretability and novel insights into the functional mechanics underlying transformer performance in time series classification tasks.
IntAttention: A Fully Integer Attention Pipeline for Efficient Edge Inference
Zhong, Wanli, Feng, Haibo, Zhou, Zirui, Peng, Hanyang, Yu, Shiqi
Deploying Transformer models on edge devices is limited by latency and energy budgets. While INT8 quantization effectively accelerates the primary matrix multiplications, it exposes the softmax as the dominant bottleneck. This stage incurs a costly dequantize-softmax-requantize detour, which can account for up to 65% of total attention latency and disrupts the end-to-end integer dataflow critical for edge hardware efficiency. To address this limitation, we present IntAttention, the first fully integer, plug-and-play attention pipeline without retraining. At the core of our approach lies IndexSoftmax, a hardware-friendly operator that replaces floating-point exponentials entirely within the integer domain. IntAttention integrates sparsity-aware clipping, a 32-entry lookup-table approximation, and direct integer normalization, thereby eliminating all datatype conversion overhead. We evaluate IntAttention and demonstrate consistent and substantial gains. Our method achieves up to 3.7x speedup and 61% energy reduction over FP16 baselines and 2.0x faster than conventional INT8 attention pipelines on Armv8 CPUs. These gains are achieved with high-fidelity accuracy comparable to baselines across diverse language and vision models, enabling practical and efficient Transformer inference on commodity edge devices. Code will be released in later version of this work.
Lost in Time? A Meta-Learning Framework for Time-Shift-Tolerant Physiological Signal Transformation
Hong, Qian, Bian, Cheng, Zhou, Xiao, Li, Xiaoyu, Li, Yelei, Zeng, Zijing
Translating non-invasive signals such as photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG) into clinically meaningful signals like arterial blood pressure (ABP) is vital for continuous, low-cost healthcare monitoring. However, temporal misalignment in multimodal signal transformation impairs transformation accuracy, especially in capturing critical features like ABP peaks. Conventional synchronization methods often rely on strong similarity assumptions or manual tuning, while existing Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) approaches are ineffective under time-shifted supervision, either discarding excessive data or failing to correct label shifts. To address this challenge, we propose ShiftSyncNet, a meta-learning-based bi-level optimization framework that automatically mitigates performance degradation due to time misalignment. It comprises a transformation network (TransNet) and a time-shift correction network (SyncNet), where SyncNet learns time offsets between training pairs and applies Fourier phase shifts to align supervision signals. Experiments on one real-world industrial dataset and two public datasets show that ShiftSyncNet outperforms strong baselines by 9.4%, 6.0%, and 12.8%, respectively. The results highlight its effectiveness in correcting time shifts, improving label quality, and enhancing transformation accuracy across diverse misalignment scenarios, pointing toward a unified direction for addressing temporal inconsistencies in multimodal physiological transformation.
Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer
Lee, Dong-Jae, Hur, Jiwan, Choi, Jaehyun, Yu, Jaemyung, Kim, Junmo
Vision Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks, yet their quadratic computational complexity concerning token length remains a significant challenge. To address this, token reduction methods have been widely explored. However, existing approaches often overlook the frequency characteristics of self-attention, such as rank collapsing and over-smoothing phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a frequency-aware token reduction strategy that improves computational efficiency while preserving performance by mitigating rank collapsing. Our method partitions tokens into high-frequency tokens and low-frequency tokens. high-frequency tokens are selectively preserved, while low-frequency tokens are aggregated into a compact direct current token to retain essential low-frequency components. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy while reducing computational overhead and mitigating rank collapsing and over smoothing. Furthermore, we analyze the previous methods, shedding light on their implicit frequency characteristics and limitations.
Going with the Speed of Sound: Pushing Neural Surrogates into Highly-turbulent Transonic Regimes
Paischer, Fabian, Cotteleer, Leo, Dreze, Yann, Kurle, Richard, Rubini, Dylan, Bleeker, Maurits, Kronlachner, Tobias, Brandstetter, Johannes
The widespread use of neural surrogates in automotive aerodynamics, enabled by datasets such as DrivAerML and DrivAerNet++, has primarily focused on bluff-body flows with large wakes. Extending these methods to aerospace, particularly in the transonic regime, remains challenging due to the high level of non-linearity of compressible flows and 3D effects such as wingtip vortices. Existing aerospace datasets predominantly focus on 2D airfoils, neglecting these critical 3D phenomena. To address this gap, we present a new dataset of CFD simulations for 3D wings in the transonic regime. The dataset comprises volumetric and surface-level fields for around $30,000$ samples with unique geometry and inflow conditions. This allows computation of lift and drag coefficients, providing a foundation for data-driven aerodynamic optimization of the drag-lift Pareto front. We evaluate several state-of-the-art neural surrogates on our dataset, including Transolver and AB-UPT, focusing on their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization over geometry and inflow variations. AB-UPT demonstrates strong performance for transonic flowfields and reproduces physically consistent drag-lift Pareto fronts even for unseen wing configurations. Our results demonstrate that AB-UPT can approximate drag-lift Pareto fronts for unseen geometries, highlighting its potential as an efficient and effective tool for rapid aerodynamic design exploration. To facilitate future research, we open-source our dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EmmiAI/Emmi-Wing.
Hierarchical Ranking Neural Network for Long Document Readability Assessment
Zheng, Yurui, Chen, Yijun, Zhang, Shaohong
Readability assessment aims to evaluate the reading di ffi culty of a text. In recent years, while deep learning technol - ogy has been gradually applied to readability assessment, m ost approaches fail to consider either the length of the text or the ordinal relationship of readability labels. This pap er proposes a bidirectional readability assessment mechan ism that captures contextual information to identify regions w ith rich semantic information in the text, thereby predicti ng the readability level of individual sentences. These sente nce-level labels are then used to assist in predicting the ov erall readability level of the document. Additionally, a pairwis e sorting algorithm is introduced to model the ordinal relationship between readability levels through label subtrac tion. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive p erformance and outperforms other baseline models. Introduction Automatic Text Readability (ARA) research originated in th e early 20th century, aiming to evaluate text reading di ffi culty and assist educators in recommending appropriate rea ding materials for learners [ 1 ]. Readability assessment approaches are generally classified into three paradig ms: human evaluation, co-selection-based analysis, and content-based analysis. Human evaluation involves expert annotation or reader surveys; co-selection methods leverage user interaction data such as reading time or choices [ 2 ]; and content-based approaches infer readability using linguistic, syntactic, or semantic features extracted fro m the text itself. Early studies predominantly relied on experts' subjective evaluations and simple statistical feat ures, such as sentence length and word complexity.