pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Degree-Based Logical Adjacency Checking (DBLAC): A Novel Heuristic for Vertex Coloring
Authors: Prashant Verma
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Degree Based Logical Adjacency Checking (DBLAC). An efficient coloring of graphs with unique logical AND operations. The logical AND operation shows more effective color assignment and fewer number of induced colors in the case of common edges between vertices. In this work, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of DBLAC's time and space complexity. It furthermore shows its effectiveness through prolonged experiments on standard benchmark graphs. We compare it with existing algorithms, namely DSATUR and Recursive Largest First (RLF). Second, we show how DBLAC achieves competitive results with respect to both the number of colors used and runtime performance.
Adaptive PII Mitigation Framework for Large Language Models
Authors: Shubhi Asthana, Ruchi Mahindru, Bing Zhang, Jorge Sanz
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces growing challenges from evolving data protection laws and enforcement practices worldwide. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA impose strict compliance requirements on Machine Learning (ML) models, especially concerning personal data use. These laws grant individuals rights such as data correction and deletion, complicating the training and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) that rely on extensive datasets. Public data availability does not guarantee its lawful use for ML, amplifying these challenges. This paper introduces an adaptive system for mitigating risk of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) in LLMs. It dynamically aligns with diverse regulatory frameworks and integrates seamlessly into Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) systems. The system uses advanced NLP techniques, context-aware analysis, and policy-driven masking to ensure regulatory compliance. Benchmarks highlight the system's effectiveness, with an F1 score of 0.95 for Passport Numbers, outperforming tools like Microsoft Presidio (0.33) and Amazon Comprehend (0.54). In human evaluations, the system achieved an average user trust score of 4.6/5, with participants acknowledging its accuracy and transparency. Observations demonstrate stricter anonymization under GDPR compared to CCPA, which permits pseudonymization and user opt-outs. These results validate the system as a scalable and robust solution for enterprise privacy compliance.
Deploying Privacy Guardrails for LLMs: A Comparative Analysis of Real-World Applications
Authors: Shubhi Asthana, Bing Zhang, Ruchi Mahindru, Chad Deluca, Anna Lisa Gentile, Sandeep Gopisetty
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized AI applications but poses significant challenges in safeguarding user privacy. Ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA while addressing nuanced privacy risks requires robust and scalable frameworks. This paper presents a detailed study of OneShield Privacy Guard, a framework designed to mitigate privacy risks in user inputs and LLM outputs across enterprise and open-source settings. We analyze two real-world deployments:(1) a multilingual privacy-preserving system integrated with Data and Model Factory, focusing on enterprise-scale data governance; and (2) PR Insights, an open-source repository emphasizing automated triaging and community-driven refinements. In Deployment 1, OneShield achieved a 0.95 F1 score in detecting sensitive entities like dates, names, and phone numbers across 26 languages, outperforming state-of-the-art tool such as StarPII and Presidio by up to 12\%. Deployment 2, with an average F1 score of 0.86, reduced manual effort by over 300 hours in three months, accurately flagging 8.25\% of 1,256 pull requests for privacy risks with enhanced context sensitivity. These results demonstrate OneShield's adaptability and efficacy in diverse environments, offering actionable insights for context-aware entity recognition, automated compliance, and ethical AI adoption. This work advances privacy-preserving frameworks, supporting user trust and compliance across operational contexts.
Enhancing Retrosynthesis with Conformer: A Template-Free Method
Authors: Jiaxi Zhuang, Qian Zhang, Ying Qian
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrosynthesis

Retrosynthesis plays a crucial role in the fields of organic synthesis and drug development, where the goal is to identify suitable reactants that can yield a target product molecule. Although existing methods have achieved notable success, they typically overlook the 3D conformational details and internal spatial organization of molecules. This oversight makes it challenging to predict reactants that conform to genuine chemical principles, particularly when dealing with complex molecular structures, such as polycyclic and heteroaromatic compounds. In response to this challenge, we introduce a novel transformer-based, template-free approach that incorporates 3D conformer data and spatial information. Our approach includes an Atom-align Fusion module that integrates 3D positional data at the input stage, ensuring correct alignment between atom tokens and their respective 3D coordinates. Additionally, we propose a Distance-weighted Attention mechanism that refines the self-attention process, constricting the model s focus to relevant atom pairs in 3D space. Extensive experiments on the USPTO-50K dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms previous template-free methods, setting a new benchmark for the field. A case study further highlights our method s ability to predict reasonable and accurate reactants.
Owls are wise and foxes are unfaithful: Uncovering animal stereotypes in vision-language models
Authors: Tabinda Aman, Mohammad Nadeem, Shahab Saquib Sohail, Mohammad Anas, Erik Cambria
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Animal stereotypes are deeply embedded in human culture and language. They often shape our perceptions and expectations of various species. Our study investigates how animal stereotypes manifest in vision-language models during the task of image generation. Through targeted prompts, we explore whether DALL-E perpetuates stereotypical representations of animals, such as "owls as wise," "foxes as unfaithful," etc. Our findings reveal significant stereotyped instances where the model consistently generates images aligned with cultural biases. The current work is the first of its kind to examine animal stereotyping in vision-language models systematically and to highlight a critical yet underexplored dimension of bias in AI-generated visual content.
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation
Authors: Dongsheng Zhu, Weixian Shi, Zhengliang Shi, Zhaochun Ren, Shuaiqiang Wang, Lingyong Yan, Dawei Yin
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Task Planning

Although current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, performing complex real-world tasks still requires tool learning. Mainstream methods, such as CoT/ReAct, rely on step-by-step tool invocation to interact with external environments, but they are limited in perceptual scope and lack adequate task-planning capability. To address these limitations, other studies introduce the first Search-based Decision Tree (DFSDT), which still suffers from the high computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a novel parallel tool invocation paradigm, DTA-Llama (Divide-Then-Aggregate Llama). First, we transform traditional tree-based tool search paths into Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, generating a high-quality parallel tool invocation dataset. The DTA-Llama is then trained on the dataset to learn to iteratively divide the current task into several parallel tool invocation sub-tasks and aggregate the invocation results to decide the next actions. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient inference framework inspired by the Process/Threads mechanism when applying the DTA-Llama to practical tasks. Experimental results show that our approach substantially enhances task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. Llama2-7B, using our method, is comparable to the official parallel function calling method of GPT-3.5. The relevant code, dataset, and model weights are available at https://corn0205.github.io/
Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection
Authors: Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Misinformation, Mixture-of-Experts

The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations, eroding trust, exacerbating inequality, and amplifying harmful narratives. Detecting fake news in multimodal contexts -- where deceptive content combines text and images -- is particularly challenging due to the nuanced interplay between modalities. Existing multimodal fake news detection methods often emphasize cross-modal consistency but ignore the complex interactions between text and visual elements, which may complement, contradict, or independently influence the predicted veracity of a post. To address these challenges, we present Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection (MIMoE-FND), a novel hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to enhance multimodal fake news detection by explicitly modeling modality interactions through an interaction gating mechanism. Our approach models modality interactions by evaluating two key aspects of modality interactions: unimodal prediction agreement and semantic alignment. The hierarchical structure of MIMoE-FND allows for distinct learning pathways tailored to different fusion scenarios, adapting to the unique characteristics of each modality interaction. By tailoring fusion strategies to diverse modality interaction scenarios, MIMoE-FND provides a more robust and nuanced approach to multimodal fake news detection. We evaluate our approach on three real-world benchmarks spanning two languages, demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. By enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of fake news detection, MIMoE-FND offers a promising tool to mitigate the spread of misinformation, with the potential to better safeguard vulnerable communities against its harmful effects.
SCFCRC: Simultaneously Counteract Feature Camouflage and Relation Camouflage for Fraud Detection
Authors: Xiaocheng Zhang, Zhuangzhuang Ye, Guoping Zhao, Jianing Wang, Xiaohong Su
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fraud Detection, Mixture-of-Experts, Relation

In fraud detection, fraudsters often interact with many benign users, camouflaging their features or relations to hide themselves. Most existing work concentrates solely on either feature camouflage or relation camouflage, or decoupling feature learning and relation learning to avoid the two camouflage from affecting each other. However, this inadvertently neglects the valuable information derived from features or relations, which could mutually enhance their adversarial camouflage strategies. In response to this gap, we propose SCFCRC, a Transformer-based fraud detector that Simultaneously Counteract Feature Camouflage and Relation Camouflage. SCFCRC consists of two components: Feature Camouflage Filter and Relation Camouflage Refiner. The feature camouflage filter utilizes pseudo labels generated through label propagation to train the filter and uses contrastive learning that combines instance-wise and prototype-wise to improve the quality of features. The relation camouflage refiner uses Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) network to disassemble the multi-relations graph into multiple substructures and divide and conquer them to mitigate the degradation of detection performance caused by relation camouflage. Furthermore, we introduce a regularization method for MoE to enhance the robustness of the model. Extensive experiments on two fraud detection benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Fuel Efficiency Analysis of the Public Transportation System Based on the Gaussian Mixture Model Clustering
Authors: Zhipeng Ma, Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen, Zheng Ma
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Public transportation is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting the need to improve bus fuel efficiency. Clustering algorithms assist in analyzing fuel efficiency by grouping data into clusters, but irrelevant features may complicate the analysis and choosing the optimal number of clusters remains a challenging task. Therefore, this paper employs the Gaussian mixture models to cluster the solo fuel-efficiency dataset. Moreover, an integration method that combines the Silhouette index, Calinski-Harabasz index, and Davies-Bouldin index is developed to select the optimal cluster numbers. A dataset with 4006 bus trips in North Jutland, Denmark is utilized as the case study. Trips are first split into three groups, then one group is divided further, resulting in four categories: extreme, normal, low, and extremely low fuel efficiency. A preliminary study using visualization analysis is conducted to investigate how driving behaviors and route conditions affect fuel efficiency. The results indicate that both individual driving habits and route characteristics have a significant influence on fuel efficiency.
SplitQuant: Layer Splitting for Low-Bit Neural Network Quantization
Authors: Jaewoo Song, Fangzhen Lin
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Quantization for deep neural networks (DNNs) is the process of mapping the parameter values of DNNs from original data types to other data types of lower precision to reduce model sizes and make inference faster. Quantization often maps different original values to a single quantized value because the range of the original values is larger than the range of the quantized values. This leads to the degradation of the accuracy of the quantized DNNs. Outliers are a main cause of the degradation of quantization resolution because they enlarge the range of original values. To solve the problem, the percentile method is often used to clip outliers. However, clipping the outliers has another problem of removing the important and strong signals in the DNNs. This paper proposes SplitQuant to keep the outliers and improve the quantization resolution at the same time. SplitQuant narrows down the range of the original values and mitigates the effect of outliers by splitting each quantizable layer into three mathematically equivalent layers and applies different scaling factors. Especially, weights and biases are clustered into lower, middle and upper clusters for optimized split. By preprocessing DNNs with SplitQuant, quantization algorithms can achieve better results. SplitQuant was applied on two BERT-Tiny models and improved the accuracy of INT2 quantization by 3.3%p and 2.1%p, achieving accuracies comparable to those of the original FP32 models.
SafePowerGraph-HIL: Real-Time HIL Validation of Heterogeneous GNNs for Bridging Sim-to-Real Gap in Power Grids
Authors: Aoxiang Ma, Salah Ghamizi, Jun Cao, Pedro Rodriguez
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, State Estimation

As machine learning (ML) techniques gain prominence in power system research, validating these methods' effectiveness under real-world conditions requires real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations. HIL simulation platforms enable the integration of computational models with physical devices, allowing rigorous testing across diverse scenarios critical to system resilience and reliability. In this study, we develop a SafePowerGraph-HIL framework that utilizes HIL simulations on the IEEE 9-bus system, modeled in Hypersim, to generate high-fidelity data, which is then transmitted in real-time via SCADA to an AWS cloud database before being input into a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) model designed for power system state estimation and dynamic analysis. By leveraging Hypersim's capabilities, we simulate complex grid interactions, providing a robust dataset that captures critical parameters for HGNN training. The trained HGNN is subsequently validated using newly generated data under varied system conditions, demonstrating accuracy and robustness in predicting power system states. The results underscore the potential of integrating HIL with advanced neural network architectures to enhance the real-time operational capabilities of power systems. This approach represents a significant advancement toward the development of intelligent, adaptive control strategies that support the robustness and resilience of evolving power grids.
Multi-stage intermediate fusion for multimodal learning to classify non-small cell lung cancer subtypes from CT and PET
Authors: Fatih Aksu, Fabrizia Gelardi, Arturo Chiti, Paolo Soda
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Accurate classification of histological subtypes of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is essential in the era of precision medicine, yet current invasive techniques are not always feasible and may lead to clinical complications. This study presents a multi-stage intermediate fusion approach to classify NSCLC subtypes from CT and PET images. Our method integrates the two modalities at different stages of feature extraction, using voxel-wise fusion to exploit complementary information across varying abstraction levels while preserving spatial correlations. We compare our method against unimodal approaches using only CT or PET images to demonstrate the benefits of modality fusion, and further benchmark it against early and late fusion techniques to highlight the advantages of intermediate fusion during feature extraction. Additionally, we compare our model with the only existing intermediate fusion method for histological subtype classification using PET/CT images. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all alternatives across key metrics, with an accuracy and AUC equal to 0.724 and 0.681, respectively. This non-invasive approach has the potential to significantly improve diagnostic accuracy, facilitate more informed treatment decisions, and advance personalized care in lung cancer management.
Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning for Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Shanmin Wang, Chengguang Liu, Qingshan Liu
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) identifies individuals' sentiment states in videos by integrating visual, audio, and text modalities. Despite progress in existing methods, the inherent modality heterogeneity limits the effective capture of interactive sentiment features across modalities. In this paper, by introducing a Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning (MMCL) framework, we facilitate cross-modal interactions and capture enhanced and complementary features from modality-common and modality-specific representations, respectively. Specifically, we design a parameter-free decoupling module and separate uni-modality into modality-common and modality-specific components through semantics assessment of cross-modal elements. For modality-specific representations, inspired by the act-reward mechanism in reinforcement learning, we design policy models to adaptively mine complementary sentiment features under the guidance of a joint reward. For modality-common representations, intra-modal attention is employed to highlight crucial components, playing enhanced roles among modalities. Experimental results, including superiority evaluations on four databases, effectiveness verification of each module, and assessment of complementary features, demonstrate that MMCL successfully learns collaborative features across modalities and significantly improves performance. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/MMCL.
FREYR: A Framework for Recognizing and Executing Your Requests
Authors: Roberto Gallotta, Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Large language models excel as conversational agents, but their capabilities can be further extended through tool usage, i.e.: executable code, to enhance response accuracy or address specialized domains. Current approaches to enable tool usage often rely on model-specific prompting or fine-tuning a model for function-calling instructions. Both approaches have notable limitations, including reduced adaptability to unseen tools and high resource requirements. This paper introduces FREYR, a streamlined framework that modularizes the tool usage process into separate steps. Through this decomposition, we show that FREYR achieves superior performance compared to conventional tool usage methods. We evaluate FREYR on a set of real-world test cases specific for video game design and compare it against traditional tool usage as provided by the Ollama API.
CroMe: Multimodal Fake News Detection using Cross-Modal Tri-Transformer and Metric Learning
Authors: Eunjee Choi, Junhyun Ahn, XinYu Piao, Jong-Kook Kim
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Metric Learning

Multimodal Fake News Detection has received increasing attention recently. Existing methods rely on independently encoded unimodal data and overlook the advantages of capturing intra-modality relationships and integrating inter-modal similarities using advanced techniques. To address these issues, Cross-Modal Tri-Transformer and Metric Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (CroMe) is proposed. CroMe utilizes Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models (BLIP2) as encoders to capture detailed text, image and combined image-text representations. The metric learning module employs a proxy anchor method to capture intra-modality relationships while the feature fusion module uses a Cross-Modal and Tri-Transformer for effective integration. The final fake news detector processes the fused features through a classifier to predict the authenticity of the content. Experiments on datasets show that CroMe excels in multimodal fake news detection.
Consolidating TinyML Lifecycle with Large Language Models: Reality, Illusion, or Opportunity?
Authors: Guanghan Wu, Sasu Tarkoma, Roberto Morabito
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Model Optimization

The evolving requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) applications are driving an increasing shift toward bringing intelligence to the edge, enabling real-time insights and decision-making within resource-constrained environments. Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has emerged as a key enabler of this evolution, facilitating the deployment of ML models on devices such as microcontrollers and embedded systems. However, the complexity of managing the TinyML lifecycle, including stages such as data processing, model optimization and conversion, and device deployment, presents significant challenges and often requires substantial human intervention. Motivated by these challenges, we began exploring whether Large Language Models (LLMs) could help automate and streamline the TinyML lifecycle. We developed a framework that leverages the natural language processing (NLP) and code generation capabilities of LLMs to reduce development time and lower the barriers to entry for TinyML deployment. Through a case study involving a computer vision classification model, we demonstrate the framework's ability to automate key stages of the TinyML lifecycle. Our findings suggest that LLM-powered automation holds potential for improving the lifecycle development process and adapting to diverse requirements. However, while this approach shows promise, there remain obstacles and limitations, particularly in achieving fully automated solutions. This paper sheds light on both the challenges and opportunities of integrating LLMs into TinyML workflows, providing insights into the path forward for efficient, AI-assisted embedded system development.