Deep Learning
IndEgo: A Dataset of Industrial Scenarios and Collaborative Work for Egocentric Assistants
Chavan, Vivek, Imgrund, Yasmina, Dao, Tung, Bai, Sanwantri, Wang, Bosong, Lu, Ze, Heimann, Oliver, Krรผger, Jรถrg
We introduce IndEgo, a multimodal egocentric and exocentric dataset addressing common industrial tasks, including assembly/disassembly, logistics and organisation, inspection and repair, woodworking, and others. The dataset contains 3,460 egocentric recordings (approximately 197 hours), along with 1,092 exocentric recordings (approximately 97 hours). A key focus of the dataset is collaborative work, where two workers jointly perform cognitively and physically intensive tasks. The egocentric recordings include rich multimodal data and added context via eye gaze, narration, sound, motion, and others. We provide detailed annotations (actions, summaries, mistake annotations, narrations), metadata, processed outputs (eye gaze, hand pose, semi-dense point cloud), and benchmarks on procedural and non-procedural task understanding, Mistake Detection, and reasoning-based Question Answering. Baseline evaluations for Mistake Detection, Question Answering and collaborative task understanding show that the dataset presents a challenge for the state-of-the-art multimodal models. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/FraunhoferIPK/IndEgo
FISCAL: Financial Synthetic Claim-document Augmented Learning for Efficient Fact-Checking
Sharma, Rishab, Saberi, Iman, Alipour, Elham, Wu, Jie JW, Fard, Fatemeh
Financial applications of large language models (LLMs) require factual reliability and computational efficiency, yet current systems often hallucinate details and depend on prohibitively large models. We propose FISCAL (Financial Synthetic Claim-Document Augmented Learning), a modular framework for generating synthetic data tailored to financial fact-checking. Using FISCAL, we generate a dataset called FISCAL-data and use it to train MiniCheck-FISCAL, a lightweight verifier for numerical financial claims. MiniCheck-FISCAL outperforms its baseline, surpasses GPT-3.5 Turbo and other open-source peers of similar size, and approaches the accuracy of much larger systems (20x), such as Mixtral-8x22B and Command R+. On external datasets FinDVer and Fin-Fact, it rivals GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 while outperforming Gemini-1.5 Flash. These results show that domain-specific synthetic data, combined with efficient fine-tuning, enables compact models to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, robustness, and scalability for practical financial AI. The dataset and scripts are available in the project repository (link provided in the paper).
HeaRT: A Hierarchical Circuit Reasoning Tree-Based Agentic Framework for AMS Design Optimization
Poddar, Souradip, Ho, Chia-Tung, Wei, Ziming, Cao, Weidong, Ren, Haoxing, Pan, David Z.
Conventional AI-driven AMS design automation algorithms remain constrained by their reliance on high-quality datasets to capture underlying circuit behavior, coupled with poor transferability across architectures, and a lack of adaptive mechanisms. This work proposes HeaRT, a foundational reasoning engine for automation loops and a first step toward intelligent, adaptive, human-style design optimization. HeaRT consistently demonstrates reasoning accuracy >97% and Pass@1 performance >98% across our 40-circuit benchmark repository, even as circuit complexity increases, while operating at <0.5x real-time token budget of SOTA baselines. Our experiments show that HeaRT yields >3x faster convergence in both sizing and topology design adaptation tasks across diverse optimization approaches, while preserving prior design intent.
Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use
Awadallah, Ahmed, Lara, Yash, Magazine, Raghav, Mozannar, Hussein, Nambi, Akshay, Pandya, Yash, Rajeswaran, Aravind, Rosset, Corby, Taymanov, Alexey, Vineet, Vibhav, Whitehead, Spencer, Zhao, Andrew
Progress in computer use agents (CUAs) has been constrained by the absence of large and high-quality datasets that capture how humans interact with a computer. While LLMs have thrived on abundant textual data, no comparable corpus exists for CUA trajectories. To address these gaps, we introduce FaraGen, a novel synthetic data generation system for multi-step web tasks. FaraGen can propose diverse tasks from frequently used websites, generate multiple solution attempts, and filter successful trajectories using multiple verifiers. It achieves high throughput, yield, and diversity for multi-step web tasks, producing verified trajectories at approximately $1 each. We use this data to train Fara-7B, a native CUA model that perceives the computer using only screenshots, executes actions via predicted coordinates, and is small enough to run on-device. We find that Fara-7B outperforms other CUA models of comparable size on benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and WebTailBench -- our novel benchmark that better captures under-represented web tasks in pre-existing benchmarks. Furthermore, Fara-7B is competitive with much larger frontier models, illustrating key benefits of scalable data generation systems in advancing small efficient agentic models. We are making Fara-7B open-weight on Microsoft Foundry and HuggingFace, and we are releasing WebTailBench.
Structured Noise Modeling for Enhanced Time-Series Forecasting
Time-series forecasting remains difficult in real-world settings because temporal patterns operate at multiple scales, from broad contextual trends to fast, fine-grained fluctuations that drive critical decisions. Existing neural models often struggle to represent these interacting dynamics, leading to unstable predictions and reduced reliability in downstream applications. This work introduces a forecast-blur-denoise framework that improves temporal fidelity through structured noise modeling. The approach incorporates a learnable Gaussian Process module that generates smooth, correlated perturbations, encouraging the forecasting backbone to capture long-range structure while a dedicated refinement model restores high-resolution temporal detail. Training the components jointly enables natural competence division and avoids the artifacts commonly produced by isotropic corruption methods. Experiments across electricity, traffic, and solar datasets show consistent gains in multi-horizon accuracy and stability. The modular design also allows the blur-denoise layer to operate as a lightweight enhancement for pretrained models, supporting efficient adaptation in limited-data scenarios. By strengthening the reliability and interpretability of fine-scale temporal predictions, this framework contributes to more trustworthy AI systems used in forecasting-driven decision support across energy, infrastructure, and other time-critical domains.
Accuracy and Efficiency Trade-Offs in LLM-Based Malware Detection and Explanation: A Comparative Study of Parameter Tuning vs. Full Fine-Tuning
Gravereaux, Stephen C., Islam, Sheikh Rabiul
Abstract--This study examines whether Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can approximate the performance of fully fine-tuned models in generating human-interpretable decisions and explanations for malware classification. Achieving trustworthy malware detection, particularly when LLMs are involved, remains a significant challenge. We developed an evaluation framework using Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE), and Semantic Similarity Metrics to benchmark explanation quality across five LoRA configurations and a fully fine-tuned baseline. Results indicate that full fine-tuning achieves the highest overall scores, with BLEU and ROUGE improvements of up to 10% over LoRA variants. However, mid-range LoRA models deliver competitive performance--exceeding full fine-tuning on two metrics--while reducing model size by approximately 81% and training time by over 80% on a LoRA model with 15.5% trainable parameters. These findings demonstrate that LoRA offers a practical balance of interpretability and resource efficiency, enabling deployment in resource-constrained environments without sacrificing explanation quality. By providing feature-driven natural language explanations for malware classifications, this approach enhances transparency, analyst confidence, and operational scalability in malware detection systems. Modern AI-based malware detection systems often lack trustworthiness, particularly when LLMs are involved, limiting analysts' ability to validate automated decisions and improve detection strategies.
Synthetic Data: AI's New Weapon Against Android Malware
Nogueira, Angelo Gaspar Diniz, Paim, Kayua Oleques, Braganรงa, Hendrio, Mansilha, Rodrigo Brandรฃo, Kreutz, Diego
The ever-increasing number of Android devices and the accelerated evolution of malware, reaching over 35 million samples by 2024, highlight the critical importance of effective detection methods. Attackers are now using Artificial Intelligence to create sophisticated malware variations that can easily evade traditional detection techniques. Although machine learning has shown promise in malware classification, its success relies heavily on the availability of up-to-date, high-quality datasets. The scarcity and high cost of obtaining and labeling real malware samples presents significant challenges in developing robust detection models. In this paper, we propose MalSynGen, a Malware Synthetic Data Generation methodology that uses a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to generate synthetic tabular data. This data preserves the statistical properties of real-world data and improves the performance of Android malware classifiers. We evaluated the effectiveness of this approach using various datasets and metrics that assess the fidelity of the generated data, its utility in classification, and the computational efficiency of the process. Our experiments demonstrate that MalSynGen can generalize across different datasets, providing a viable solution to address the issues of obsolescence and low quality data in malware detection. With approximately 3 billion Android devices in operation worldwide [1], the mobile cybersecurity landscape faces formidable challenges. In 2024 alone, Kaspersky reported over 33.3 million cyberattacks targeting smartphone users globally, encompassing diverse forms of malware and unwanted software [2]. Adding to this problem, attackers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rapidly generate new malware variants by exploiting patterns learned from existing malware [3].
Efficient Multi-Hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs via LLM Planning and Embedding-Guided Search
Abstract--Multi-hop question answering over knowledge graphs remains computationally challenging due to the combinatorial explosion of possible reasoning paths. Recent approaches rely on expensive Large Language Model (LLM) inference for both entity linking and path ranking, limiting their practical deployment. Additionally, LLM-generated answers often lack verifiable grounding in structured knowledge. We present two complementary hybrid algorithms that address both efficiency and verifiability: (1) LLM-Guided Planning that uses a single LLM call to predict relation sequences executed via breadth-first search, achieving near-perfect accuracy (micro-F1 > 0.90) while ensuring all answers are grounded in the knowledge graph, and (2) Embedding-Guided Neural Search that eliminates LLM calls entirely by fusing text and graph embeddings through a lightweight 6.7M-parameter edge scorer, achieving over 100 speedup with competitive accuracy. Through knowledge distillation, we compress planning capability into a 4B-parameter model that matches large-model performance at zero API cost. Evaluation on MetaQA demonstrates that grounded reasoning consistently outperforms ungrounded generation, with structured planning proving more transferable than direct answer generation. Our results show that verifiable multi-hop reasoning does not require massive models at inference time, but rather the right architectural inductive biases combining symbolic structure with learned representations. Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as powerful structures for representing domain-specific, structured information that supports verifiable, multi-hop reasoning. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) trained on vast web-scale corpora have achieved impressive fluency and generalization across a wide range of tasks.
Robot-Powered Data Flywheels: Deploying Robots in the Wild for Continual Data Collection and Foundation Model Adaptation
Grannen, Jennifer, Pan, Michelle, Llontop, Kenneth, Ho, Cherie, Zolotas, Mark, Bohg, Jeannette, Sadigh, Dorsa
Foundation models (FM) have unlocked powerful zero-shot capabilities in vision and language, yet their reliance on internet pretraining data leaves them brittle in unstructured, real-world settings. The messy, real-world data encountered during deployment (e.g. occluded or multilingual text) remains massively underrepresented in existing corpora. Robots, as embodied agents, are uniquely positioned to close this gap: they can act in physical environments to collect large-scale, real-world data that enriches FM training with precisely the examples current models lack. We introduce the Robot-Powered Data Flywheel, a framework that transforms robots from FM consumers into data generators. By deploying robots equipped with FMs in the wild, we enable a virtuous cycle: robots perform useful tasks while collecting real-world data that improves both domain-specific adaptation and domain-adjacent generalization. We instantiate this framework with Scanford, a mobile manipulator deployed in the East Asia Library for 2 weeks. Scanford autonomously scans shelves, identifies books using a vision-language model (VLM), and leverages the library catalog to label images without human annotation. This deployment both aids librarians and produces a dataset to finetune the underlying VLM, improving performance on the domain-specific in-the-wild library setting and on domain-adjacent multilingual OCR benchmarks. Using data collected from 2103 shelves, Scanford improves VLM performance on book identification from 32.0% to 71.8% and boosts domain-adjacent multilingual OCR from 24.8% to 46.6% (English) and 30.8% to 38.0% (Chinese), while saving an ~18.7 hrs of human time. These results highlight how robot-powered data flywheels can both reduce human effort in real deployments and unlock new pathways for continually adapting FMs to the messiness of reality. More details are at: https://scanford-robot.github.io