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 Deep Learning


MF-LPR$^2$: Multi-Frame License Plate Image Restoration and Recognition using Optical Flow

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

License plate recognition (LPR) is important for traffic law enforcement, crime investigation, and surveillance. However, license plate areas in dash cam images often suffer from low resolution, motion blur, and glare, which make accurate recognition challenging. Existing generative models that rely on pretrained priors cannot reliably restore such poor-quality images, frequently introducing severe artifacts and distortions. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-frame license plate restoration and recognition framework, MF-LPR$^2$, which addresses ambiguities in poor-quality images by aligning and aggregating neighboring frames instead of relying on pretrained knowledge. To achieve accurate frame alignment, we employ a state-of-the-art optical flow estimator in conjunction with carefully designed algorithms that detect and correct erroneous optical flow estimations by leveraging the spatio-temporal consistency inherent in license plate image sequences. Our approach enhances both image quality and recognition accuracy while preserving the evidential content of the input images. In addition, we constructed a novel Realistic LPR (RLPR) dataset to evaluate MF-LPR$^2$. The RLPR dataset contains 200 pairs of low-quality license plate image sequences and high-quality pseudo ground-truth images, reflecting the complexities of real-world scenarios. In experiments, MF-LPR$^2$ outperformed eight recent restoration models in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS by significant margins. In recognition, MF-LPR$^2$ achieved an accuracy of 86.44%, outperforming both the best single-frame LPR (14.04%) and the multi-frame LPR (82.55%) among the eleven baseline models. The results of ablation studies confirm that our filtering and refinement algorithms significantly contribute to these improvements.


Synthetic Adaptive Guided Embeddings (SAGE): A Novel Knowledge Distillation Method

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Model distillation enables the transfer of knowledge from large-scale models to compact student models, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments. However, conventional distillation approaches often suffer from computational overhead and limited generalization. We propose a novel adaptive distillation framework that dynamically augments training data in regions of high student model loss. Using UMAP-based dimensionality reduction and nearest neighbor sampling, our method identifies underperforming regions in the embedding space and generates targeted synthetic examples to guide student learning. To further improve efficiency, we introduce a lightweight teacher-student interface that bypasses the teacher's input layer, enabling direct distillation on vectorized representations. Experiments across standard NLP benchmarks demonstrate that our 66M-parameter student model consistently matches or surpasses established baselines, achieving 91.2% on QNLI and 92.3% on SST-2, while training with fewer epochs. These results highlight the promise of loss-aware data augmentation and vectorized distillation for efficient and effective model compression.


HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Open-ended AI agents need to be able to learn efficiently goals of increasing complexity, abstraction and heterogeneity over their lifetime. Beyond sampling efficiently their own goals, autotelic agents specifically need to be able to keep the growing complexity of goals under control, limiting the associated growth in sample and computational complexity. To adress this challenge, recent approaches have leveraged hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and language, capitalizing on its compositional and combinatorial generalization capabilities to acquire temporally extended reusable behaviours. Existing approaches use expert defined spaces of subgoals over which they instantiate a hierarchy, and often assume pre-trained associated low-level policies. Such designs are inadequate in open-ended scenarios, where goal spaces naturally diversify across a broad spectrum of difficulties. We introduce HERAKLES, a framework that enables a two-level hierarchical autotelic agent to continuously compile mastered goals into the low-level policy, executed by a small, fast neural network, dynamically expanding the set of subgoals available to the high-level policy. We train a Large Language Model (LLM) to serve as the high-level controller, exploiting its strengths in goal decomposition and generalization to operate effectively over this evolving subgoal space. We evaluate HERAKLES in the open-ended Crafter environment and show that it scales effectively with goal complexity, improves sample efficiency through skill compilation, and enables the agent to adapt robustly to novel challenges over time.


Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

They inject conditioning signals at the start of the training process and require retraining a new model from scratch whenever the constraint changes. However, real-world applications often involve multiple constraints across different modalities, and additional constraints may emerge over the course of a study. This raises a challenge: how to extend a pre-trained diffusion model not only to support cross-modality constraints but also to incorporate new ones without retraining. To tackle this problem, we propose the Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model (CMCM-DLM), demonstrated by two distinct cross modalities: molecular structure and chemical properties. Our approach builds upon a pre-trained diffusion model, incorporating two trainable modules, the Structure Control Module (SCM) and the Property Control Module (PCM), and operates in two distinct phases during the generation process. In Phase I, we employs the SCM to inject structural constraints during the early diffusion steps, effectively anchoring the molecular backbone. Phase II builds on this by further introducing PCM to guide the later stages of inference to refine the generated molecules, ensuring their chemical properties match the specified targets. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the efficiency and adaptability of our approach, highlighting CMCM-DLM's significant advancement in molecular generation for drug discovery applications.


CaTE Data Curation for Trustworthy AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This report provides practical guidance to teams designing or developing AI-enabled systems for how to promote trustworthiness during the data curation phase of development. In this report, the authors first define data, the data curation phase, and trustworthiness. We then describe a series of steps that the development team, especially data scientists, can take to build a trustworthy AI-enabled system. We enumerate the sequence of core steps and trace parallel paths where alternatives exist. The descriptions of these steps include strengths, weaknesses, preconditions, outcomes, and relevant open-source software tool implementations. In total, this report is a synthesis of data curation tools and approaches from relevant academic literature, and our goal is to equip readers with a diverse yet coherent set of practices for improving AI trustworthiness.


The Digital Sous Chef -- A Comparative Study on Fine-Tuning Language Models for Recipe Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We established a rigorous benchmark for text-based recipe generation, a fundamental task in natural language generation. We present a comprehensive comparative study contrasting a fine-tuned GPT -2 large (774M) model against the GPT -2 small (124M) model and traditional LSTM/RNN baselines on the 5-cuisine corpus from RecipeDB. Our key contribution is a targeted tokenization strategy that augments the vocabulary with 23 common fraction tokens and custom structural markers. This approach addresses a critical limitation of generic tokenizers by preserving essential recipe structures and precise numerical quantities, thereby enhancing domain specificity. Performance is evaluated using a comprehensive suite of seven automatic metrics spanning fluency (BLEU-4, METEOR), coherence (ROUGE-L), semantic relevance (BERTScore), and diversity. Our experiments show that the large transformer-based approach yields a > 20% relative improvement in BERTScore (F1) (0.92 vs 0.72) over the best recurrent baseline, while reducing perplexity by 69.8%. We conclude with a discussion of remaining challenges, particularly regarding factual accuracy, and outline how this foundational study paves the way for integrating real-world constraints and multi-modal inputs in advanced recipe generation research.


ELATE: Evolutionary Language model for Automated Time-series Engineering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Time-series prediction involves forecasting future values using machine learning models. Feature engineering, whereby existing features are transformed to make new ones, is critical for enhancing model performance, but is often manual and time-intensive. Existing automation attempts rely on exhaustive enumeration, which can be computationally costly and lacks domain-specific insights. We introduce ELATE (Evolutionary Language model for Automated Time-series Engineering), which leverages a language model within an evolutionary framework to automate feature engineering for time-series data. ELATE employs time-series statistical measures and feature importance metrics to guide and prune features, while the language model proposes new, contextually relevant feature transformations. Our experiments demonstrate that ELATE improves forecasting accuracy by an average of 8.4% across various domains.


OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Local life service is a vital scenario in Kuaishou App, where video recommendation is intrinsically linked with store's location information. Thus, recommendation in our scenario is challenging because we should take into account user's interest and real-time location at the same time. In the face of such complex scenarios, end-to-end generative recommendation has emerged as a new paradigm, such as OneRec in the short video scenario, OneSug in the search scenario, and EGA in the advertising scenario. However, in local life service, an end-to-end generative recommendation model has not yet been developed as there are some key challenges to be solved. The first challenge is how to make full use of geographic information. The second challenge is how to balance multiple objectives, including user interests, the distance between user and stores, and some other business objectives. To address the challenges, we propose OneLoc. Specifically, we leverage geographic information from different perspectives: (1) geo-aware semantic ID incorporates both video and geographic information for tokenization, (2) geo-aware self-attention in the encoder leverages both video location similarity and user's real-time location, and (3) neighbor-aware prompt captures rich context information surrounding users for generation. To balance multiple objectives, we use reinforcement learning and propose two reward functions, i.e., geographic reward and GMV reward. With the above design, OneLoc achieves outstanding offline and online performance. In fact, OneLoc has been deployed in local life service of Kuaishou App. It serves 400 million active users daily, achieving 21.016% and 17.891% improvements in terms of gross merchandise value (GMV) and orders numbers.


LeanGeo: Formalizing Competitional Geometry problems in Lean

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Geometry problems are a crucial testbed for AI reasoning capabilities. Most existing geometry solving systems cannot express problems within a unified framework, thus are difficult to integrate with other mathematical fields. Besides, since most geometric proofs rely on intuitive diagrams, verifying geometry problems is particularly challenging. To address these gaps, we introduce LeanGeo, a unified formal system for formalizing and solving competition-level geometry problems within the Lean 4 theorem prover. LeanGeo features a comprehensive library of high-level geometric theorems with Lean's founda-tional logic, enabling rigorous proof verification and seamless integration with Mathlib. We also present LeanGeo-Bench, a formal geometry benchmark in LeanGeo, comprising problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and other advanced sources. Our evaluation demonstrates the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art Large Language Models on this benchmark, highlighting the need for further advancements in automated geometric reasoning. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, particularly in automated theorem proving (Bibel, 2013). Formal theorem proving is a crucial domain for ensuring the correctness of hard-to-verify proofs within theorem proving. Lean 4 (Moura & Ullrich, 2021), as a prominent proof assistant, provides a solid foundation for algebra and number theory through its extensive Mathlib library (mathlib community, 2020). It has been widely used in the formal verification of theorems within LLMs. However, Euclidean geometry, an essential component of mathematical reasoning and a frequent focus of competitions, remains relatively underexplored in Lean 4 community, Mathlib and automated theorem provers.


Clinical semantics for lung cancer prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Background: Existing clinical prediction models often represent patient data using features that ignore the semantic relationships between clinical concepts. This study integrates domain-specific semantic information by mapping the SNOMED medical term hierarchy into a low-dimensional hyperbolic space using Poincaré embeddings, with the aim of improving lung cancer onset prediction. Methods: Using a retrospective cohort from the Optum EHR dataset, we derived a clinical knowledge graph from the SNOMED taxonomy and generated Poincaré embeddings via Riemannian stochastic gradient descent. These embeddings were then incorporated into two deep learning architectures, a ResNet and a Transformer model. Models were evaluated for discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) and calibration (average absolute difference between observed and predicted probabilities) performance. Results: Incorporating pre-trained Poincaré embeddings resulted in modest and consistent improvements in discrimination performance compared to baseline models using randomly initialized Euclidean embeddings. ResNet models, particularly those using a 10-dimensional Poincaré embedding, showed enhanced calibration, whereas Transformer models maintained stable calibration across configurations. Discussion: Embedding clinical knowledge graphs into hyperbolic space and integrating these representations into deep learning models can improve lung cancer onset prediction by preserving the hierarchical structure of clinical terminologies used for prediction. This approach demonstrates a feasible method for combining data-driven feature extraction with established clinical knowledge.