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arXiv subjects

Leszek Rutkowski

Publications and source records attributed to Leszek Rutkowski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

FU-Mamba: A Frequency-Enhanced Dynamic Scanning Framework for Oralscan Image Segmentation

Oralscan image segmentation is essential for computer-aided diagnosis and treatment planning in digital dentistry. However, existing visual state space models (SSMs) often rely on manually designed scanning orders to flatten image patches into sequences, which disrupts the semantic spatial continuity and hinders coherent feature extraction from key foreground regions. Moreover, elements such as inconsistent lighting, reflective surfaces, and noise during data acquisition disrupt the frequency distribution by diminishing high-frequency details while enhancing low-frequency components, consequently hindering the accurate localization of boundaries. In response to these challenges, we introduce FU-Mamba, an innovative framework that incorporates dynamic scanning and frequency domain enhancement within the SSM architecture. Specifically, the Dynamic Mamba Block (DMB) adaptively learns sampling offsets via a trainable offset prediction network and performs flexible bilinear interpolation, enabling content-aware scanning that preserves spatial coherence. Furthermore, a frequency domain enhancement block balances spectral components through wavelet-guided decomposition and spectrum pooling, improving robustness under adverse imaging conditions. Experimental findings indicate that FU-Mamba attains a notable enhancement in segmentation accuracy, evidenced by a 1.1% increase in the mean intersection over union (mIoU) metric when evaluated on the dental segmentation dataset. Project page: https://byte2bite.github.io/FU-Mamba/

cs.CV

DSFNet: Learning Dual-Domain Spectral Operators for Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting in Urban Transportation Systems

Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting (MoSTF) extends traditional spatio-temporal forecasting by incorporating diverse traffic modalities. Despite significant recent strides in spatio-temporal modeling, existing approaches often fail to explicitly model the coupling relationships between different modality variables. Accurate MoSTF is challenging, as it requires modeling (1) temporal dynamic heterogeneity under exogenous influences and (2) heterogeneous spatial dependencies alongside complex cross-variable couplings. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Domain Spectral Filtering Network (DSFNet). Our framework employs dual-domain spectral filtering to capture heterogeneous spatial patterns and explicitly model the relationships between variables. Unlike graph-based message passing or dense attention over node-modality pairs, DSFNet factorizes space-modality interactions into feature-domain and spatial-domain spectral operators, enabling scalable modeling of nonlocal dependencies and cross-modality couplings. Furthermore, we introduce an external gating mechanism to adaptively regulate temporal dynamics under external influences. We validate our method through extensive experiments on five representative real-world traffic datasets. Compared with the second-best baselines, DSFNet reduces MAE by 3.21%-10.16% across these datasets. The results demonstrate that DSFNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy while exhibiting efficiency and robustness.

cs.LG

Factorize to Generalize: Retrieval-Guided Invariant-Dynamic Decomposition for Time Series Forecasting

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently achieved strong zero-shot forecasting performance through large-scale pretraining and retrieval-augmented prediction. However, our empirical analysis reveals a non-trivial limitation of retrieval-based forecasting: retrieval tends to induce more oscillatory predictions, improving performance on highly fluctuating series while degrading accuracy on smoother, trend-dominated ones. This suggests that retrieved information may be fused into prediction without explicitly distinguishing stable temporal structure from instance-specific variations, which can reduce robustness under distribution shifts. We propose a Retrieval-guided Invariant-Dynamic DEcomposition framework for time series forecasting. Rather than using retrieval as auxiliary predictive context, we leverage retrieved sequences as implicit samples from related environments to guide representation decomposition. Specifically, we first construct a retrieval-aware representation via attention-based aggregation, and then introduce a retrieval-guided routing mechanism to decompose it into an invariant component capturing stable shared structure and a dynamic component modeling context-dependent variations. These two components are forecast separately and fused for final prediction, enabling the model to preserve transferable patterns while remaining adaptive to evolving dynamics. We further design training objectives that encourage invariant learning and disentanglement, and provide theoretical insight showing that retrieval aggregation reduces variance and approximates invariant representation learning without explicit environment supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves robustness under distribution shifts and outperforms existing TSFMs and retrieval-based baselines in zero-shot forecasting settings.

cs.LG

Better, Faster: Harnessing Self-Improvement in Large Reasoning Models

Self-improvement training enables the large reasoning models (LRMs) to improve themselves by self-generating reasoning trajectories as training data without external supervision. However, we find that this method often falls short in complex reasoning tasks and even leads to model collapse. Through a series of preliminary analyses, we reveal two problems: (1) data imbalance, where most training samples are simple, but the challenging yet crucial samples are scarce; (2) overthinking, where many undesired samples with redundant reasoning steps are used for self-training. To this end, we propose HSIR, which effectively Harnesses Self-Improvement in large Reasoning models via two simple-yet-effective approaches. Specifically, HSIR introduces a verify-then-exit sampling strategy to mitigate data imbalance by efficiently collecting more accurate solutions for difficult queries, and designs an Intrinsic Diversity score to quantify overthinking and filter out the undesired solutions. We apply HSIR to various post-training paradigms, among which we further propose H-GRPO, an enhanced GRPO algorithm that leverages the intrinsic diversity as an external reward to encourage concise and diverse reasoning via reinforcement learning. Extensive results show that HSIR not only effectively enhances the reasoning performance, i.e., bringing up to +10.9% average performance gains, but also significantly improves the reasoning efficiency by reducing up to 42.4% relative inference overhead.

cs.CL

Distillation Traps and Guards: A Calibration Knob for LLM Distillability

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher-student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher's distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher-student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.

cs.LG

SVGS: Single-View to 3D Object Editing via Gaussian Splatting

Text-driven 3D scene editing has attracted considerable interest due to its convenience and user-friendliness. However, methods that rely on implicit 3D representations, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), while effective in rendering complex scenes, are hindered by slow processing speeds and limited control over specific regions of the scene. Moreover, existing approaches, including Instruct-NeRF2NeRF and GaussianEditor, which utilize multi-view editing strategies, frequently produce inconsistent results across different views when executing text instructions. This inconsistency can adversely affect the overall performance of the model, complicating the task of balancing the consistency of editing results with editing efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method termed Single-View to 3D Object Editing via Gaussian Splatting (SVGS), which is a single-view text-driven editing technique based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, in response to text instructions, we introduce a single-view editing strategy grounded in multi-view diffusion models, which reconstructs 3D scenes by leveraging only those views that yield consistent editing results. Additionally, we employ sparse 3D Gaussian Splatting as the 3D representation, which significantly enhances editing efficiency. We conducted a comparative analysis of SVGS against existing baseline methods across various scene settings, and the results indicate that SVGS outperforms its counterparts in both editing capability and processing speed, representing a significant advancement in 3D editing technology. For further details, please visit our project page at: https://amateurc.github.io/svgs.github.io.

cs.CV

Alternating Gradient Flow Utility: A Unified Metric for Structural Pruning and Dynamic Routing in Deep Networks

Efficient deep learning traditionally relies on static heuristics like weight magnitude or activation awareness (e.g., Wanda, RIA). While successful in unstructured settings, we observe a critical limitation when applying these metrics to the structural pruning of deep vision networks. These contemporary metrics suffer from a magnitude bias, failing to preserve critical functional pathways. To overcome this, we propose a decoupled kinetic paradigm inspired by Alternating Gradient Flow (AGF), utilizing an absolute feature-space Taylor expansion to accurately capture the network's structural "kinetic utility". First, we uncover a topological phase transition at extreme sparsity, where AGF successfully preserves baseline functionality and exhibits topological implicit regularization, avoiding the collapse seen in models trained from scratch. Second, transitioning to architectures without strict structural priors, we reveal a phenomenon of Sparsity Bottleneck in Vision Transformers (ViTs). Through a gradient-magnitude decoupling analysis, we discover that dynamic signals suffer from signal compression in converged models, rendering them suboptimal for real-time routing. Finally, driven by these empirical constraints, we design a hybrid routing framework that decouples AGF-guided offline structural search from online execution via zero-cost physical priors. We validate our paradigm on large-scale benchmarks: under a 75% compression stress test on ImageNet-1K, AGF effectively avoids the structural collapse where traditional metrics aggressively fall below random sampling. Furthermore, when systematically deployed for dynamic inference on ImageNet-100, our hybrid approach achieves Pareto-optimal efficiency. It reduces the usage of the heavy expert by approximately 50% (achieving an estimated overall cost of 0.92$\times$) without sacrificing the full-model accuracy.

cs.CV

Resource-constrained Amazons chess decision framework integrating large language models and graph attention

Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly through the development of intelligent game-playing systems, providing rigorous testbeds for decision-making, strategic planning, and adaptive learning. However, resource-constrained environments pose critical challenges, as conventional deep learning methods heavily rely on extensive datasets and computational resources. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid framework for the Game of the Amazons, which explores the paradigm of weak-to-strong generalization by integrating the structural reasoning of graph-based learning with the generative capabilities of large language models. Specifically, we leverage a Graph Attention Autoencoder to inform a multi-step Monte Carlo Tree Search, utilize a Stochastic Graph Genetic Algorithm to optimize evaluation signals, and harness GPT-4o-mini to generate synthetic training data. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on expert demonstrations, our framework learns from noisy and imperfect supervision. We demonstrate that the Graph Attention mechanism effectively functions as a structural filter, denoising the LLM's outputs. Experiments on a 10$\times$10 Amazons board show that our hybrid approach not only achieves a 15\%--56\% improvement in decision accuracy over baselines but also significantly outperforms its teacher model (GPT-4o-mini), achieving a competitive win rate of 45.0\% at N=30 nodes and a decisive 66.5\% at only N=50 nodes. These results verify the feasibility of evolving specialized, high-performance game AI from general-purpose foundation models under stringent computational constraints.

cs.AI

DM-CFO: A Diffusion Model for Compositional 3D Tooth Generation with Collision-Free Optimization

The automatic design of a 3D tooth model plays a crucial role in dental digitization. However, current approaches face challenges in compositional 3D tooth generation because both the layouts and shapes of missing teeth need to be optimized.In addition, collision conflicts are often omitted in 3D Gaussian-based compositional 3D generation, where objects may intersect with each other due to the absence of explicit geometric information on the object surfaces. Motivated by graph generation through diffusion models and collision detection using 3D Gaussians, we propose an approach named DM-CFO for compositional tooth generation, where the layout of missing teeth is progressively restored during the denoising phase under both text and graph constraints. Then, the Gaussian parameters of each layout-guided tooth and the entire jaw are alternately updated using score distillation sampling (SDS). Furthermore, a regularization term based on the distances between the 3D Gaussians of neighboring teeth and the anchor tooth is introduced to penalize tooth intersections. Experimental results on three tooth-design datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the multiview consistency and realism of the generated teeth compared with existing methods. Project page: https://amateurc.github.io/CF-3DTeeth/.

cs.CV

Disentangled Representation Learning via Flow Matching

Disentangled representation learning aims to capture the underlying explanatory factors of observed data, enabling a principled understanding of the data-generating process. Recent advances in generative modeling have introduced new paradigms for learning such representations. However, existing diffusion-based methods encourage factor independence via inductive biases, yet frequently lack strong semantic alignment. In this work, we propose a flow matching-based framework for disentangled representation learning, which casts disentanglement as learning factor-conditioned flows in a compact latent space. To enforce explicit semantic alignment, we introduce a non-overlap (orthogonality) regularizer that suppresses cross-factor interference and reduces information leakage between factors. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over representative baselines, yielding higher disentanglement scores as well as improved controllability and sample fidelity.

cs.LG

Rethinking the Role of Dynamic Sparse Training for Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning

Scaling neural networks has driven breakthrough advances in machine learning, yet this paradigm fails in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), where larger models often degrade performance due to unique optimization pathologies such as plasticity loss. While recent works show that dynamically adapting network topology during training can mitigate these issues, existing studies have three critical limitations: (1) applying uniform dynamic training strategies across all modules despite encoder, critic, and actor following distinct learning paradigms, (2) focusing evaluation on basic architectures without clarifying the relative importance and interaction between dynamic training and architectural improvements, and (3) lacking systematic comparison between different dynamic approaches including sparse-to-sparse, dense-to-sparse, and sparse-to-dense. Through comprehensive investigation across modules and architectures, we reveal that dynamic sparse training strategies provide module-specific benefits that complement the primary scalability foundation established by architectural improvements. We finally distill these insights into Module-Specific Training (MST), a practical framework that further exploits the benefits of architectural improvements and demonstrates substantial scalability gains across diverse RL algorithms without algorithmic modifications.

cs.LG

MAPO: Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization

Recent advances in reinforcement learning for foundation models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have significantly improved the performance of foundation models on reasoning tasks. Notably, the advantage function serves as a central mechanism in GRPO for ranking the trajectory importance. However, existing explorations encounter both advantage reversion and advantage mirror problems, which hinder the reasonable advantage allocation across different query samples. In this work, we propose an easy but effective GRPO strategy, Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization (MAPO). We reveal that the trajectory appears with different certainty and propose the advantage percent deviation for samples with high-certainty trajectories. Furthermore, we dynamically reweight the advantage function for samples with varying trajectory certainty, thereby adaptively configuring the advantage function to account for sample-specific characteristics. Comparison with related state-of-the-art methods, along with ablation studies on different advantage variants, validates the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.AI

Sequential, Parallel and Consecutive Hybrid Evolutionary-Swarm Optimization Metaheuristics

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it explores hybrid evolutionary-swarm metaheuristics that combine the features of PSO and GA in a sequential, parallel and consecutive manner in comparison with their standard basic form: Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization. The algorithms were tested on a set of benchmark functions, including Ackley, Griewank, Levy, Michalewicz, Rastrigin, Schwefel, and Shifted Rotated Weierstrass, across multiple dimensions. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid approaches achieve superior convergence and consistency, especially in higher-dimensional search spaces. The second goal of this paper is to introduce a novel consecutive hybrid PSO-GA evolutionary algorithm that ensures continuity between PSO and GA steps through explicit information transfer mechanisms, specifically by modifying GA's variation operators to inherit velocity and personal best information.

cs.NE

SRD: Reinforcement-Learned Semantic Perturbation for Backdoor Defense in VLMs

Visual language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in image captioning tasks, yet recent studies have found they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Attackers can inject undetectable perturbations into the data during inference, triggering abnormal behavior and generating malicious captions. These attacks are particularly challenging to detect and defend against due to the stealthiness and cross-modal propagation of the trigger signals. In this paper, we identify two key vulnerabilities by analyzing existing attack patterns: (1) the model exhibits abnormal attention concentration on certain regions of the input image, and (2) backdoor attacks often induce semantic drift and sentence incoherence. Based on these insights, we propose Semantic Reward Defense (SRD), a reinforcement learning framework that mitigates backdoor behavior without requiring any prior knowledge of trigger patterns. SRD learns to apply discrete perturbations to sensitive contextual regions of image inputs via a deep Q-network policy, aiming to confuse attention and disrupt the activation of malicious paths. To guide policy optimization, we design a reward signal named semantic fidelity score, which jointly assesses the semantic consistency and linguistic fluency of the generated captions, encouraging the agent to achieve a robust yet faithful output. SRD offers a trigger-agnostic, policy-interpretable defense paradigm that effectively mitigates local (TrojVLM) and global (Shadowcast) backdoor attacks, reducing ASR to 3.6% and 5.6% respectively, with less than 15% average CIDEr drop on the clean inputs. Our codes can be found at https://github.com/Ciconey/SRD.git.

cs.CV

Global Nash Equilibrium in Non-convex Multi-player Game: Theory and Algorithms

Wide machine learning tasks can be formulated as non-convex multi-player games, where Nash equilibrium (NE) is an acceptable solution to all players, since no one can benefit from changing its strategy unilaterally. Attributed to the non-convexity, obtaining the existence condition of global NE is challenging, let alone designing theoretically guaranteed realization algorithms. This paper takes conjugate transformation to the formulation of non-convex multi-player games, and casts the complementary problem into a variational inequality (VI) problem with a continuous pseudo-gradient mapping. We then prove the existence condition of global NE: the solution to the VI problem satisfies a duality relation. Based on this VI formulation, we design a conjugate-based ordinary differential equation (ODE) to approach global NE, which is proved to have an exponential convergence rate. To make the dynamics more implementable, we further derive a discretized algorithm. We apply our algorithm to two typical scenarios: multi-player generalized monotone game and multi-player potential game. In the two settings, we prove that the step-size setting is required to be $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ and $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt k)$ to yield the convergence rates of $\mathcal{O}(1/ k)$ and $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt k)$, respectively. Extensive experiments in robust neural network training and sensor localization are in full agreement with our theory.

cs.GT

Applying Autonomous Hybrid Agent-based Computing to Difficult Optimization Problems

Evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMASs) are very good at dealing with difficult, multi-dimensional problems, their efficacy was proven theoretically based on analysis of the relevant Markov-Chain based model. Now the research continues on introducing autonomous hybridization into EMAS. This paper focuses on a proposed hybrid version of the EMAS, and covers selection and introduction of a number of hybrid operators and defining rules for starting the hybrid steps of the main algorithm. Those hybrid steps leverage existing, well-known and proven to be efficient metaheuristics, and integrate their results into the main algorithm. The discussed modifications are evaluated based on a number of difficult continuous-optimization benchmarks.

cs.NE

Spatial-Temporal-Fusion BNN: Variational Bayesian Feature Layer

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have become a principal approach to alleviate overconfident predictions in deep learning, but they often suffer from scaling issues due to a large number of distribution parameters. In this paper, we discover that the first layer of a deep network possesses multiple disparate optima when solely retrained. This indicates a large posterior variance when the first layer is altered by a Bayesian layer, which motivates us to design a spatial-temporal-fusion BNN (STF-BNN) for efficiently scaling BNNs to large models: (1) first normally train a neural network from scratch to realize fast training; and (2) the first layer is converted to Bayesian and inferred by employing stochastic variational inference, while other layers are fixed. Compared to vanilla BNNs, our approach can greatly reduce the training time and the number of parameters, which contributes to scale BNNs efficiently. We further provide theoretical guarantees on the generalizability and the capability of mitigating overconfidence of STF-BNN. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that STF-BNN (1) achieves the state-of-the-art performance on prediction and uncertainty quantification; (2) significantly improves adversarial robustness and privacy preservation; and (3) considerably reduces training time and memory costs.

cs.LG

A new approach to descriptors generation for image retrieval by analyzing activations of deep neural network layers

In this paper, we consider the problem of descriptors construction for the task of content-based image retrieval using deep neural networks. The idea of neural codes, based on fully connected layers activations, is extended by incorporating the information contained in convolutional layers. It is known that the total number of neurons in the convolutional part of the network is large and the majority of them have little influence on the final classification decision. Therefore, in the paper we propose a novel algorithm that allows us to extract the most significant neuron activations and utilize this information to construct effective descriptors. The descriptors consisting of values taken from both the fully connected and convolutional layers perfectly represent the whole image content. The images retrieved using these descriptors match semantically very well to the query image, and also they are similar in other secondary image characteristics, like background, textures or color distribution. These features of the proposed descriptors are verified experimentally based on the IMAGENET1M dataset using the VGG16 neural network.

cs.CV