pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ATR-Bench: A Federated Learning Benchmark for Adaptation, Trust, and Reasoning
Authors: Tajamul Ashraf, Mohammed Mohsen Peerzada, Moloud Abdar, Yutong Xie, Yuyin Zhou, Xiaofeng Liu, Iqra Altaf Gillani, Janibul Bashir
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy across decentralized participants. As FL adoption grows, numerous techniques have been proposed to tackle its practical challenges. However, the lack of standardized evaluation across key dimensions hampers systematic progress and fair comparison of FL methods. In this work, we introduce ATR-Bench, a unified framework for analyzing federated learning through three foundational dimensions: Adaptation, Trust, and Reasoning. We provide an in-depth examination of the conceptual foundations, task formulations, and open research challenges associated with each theme. We have extensively benchmarked representative methods and datasets for adaptation to heterogeneous clients and trustworthiness in adversarial or unreliable environments. Due to the lack of reliable metrics and models for reasoning in FL, we only provide literature-driven insights for this dimension. ATR-Bench lays the groundwork for a systematic and holistic evaluation of federated learning with real-world relevance. We will make our complete codebase publicly accessible and a curated repository that continuously tracks new developments and research in the FL literature.
Redefining Clustered Federated Learning for System Identification: The Path of ClusterCraft
Authors: Ertuğrul Keçeci, Müjde Güzelkaya, Tufan Kumbasar
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning

This paper addresses the System Identification (SYSID) problem within the framework of federated learning. We introduce a novel algorithm, Incremental Clustering-based federated learning method for SYSID (IC-SYSID), designed to tackle SYSID challenges across multiple data sources without prior knowledge. IC-SYSID utilizes an incremental clustering method, ClusterCraft (CC), to eliminate the dependency on the prior knowledge of the dataset. CC starts with a single cluster model and assigns similar local workers to the same clusters by dynamically increasing the number of clusters. To reduce the number of clusters generated by CC, we introduce ClusterMerge, where similar cluster models are merged. We also introduce enhanced ClusterCraft to reduce the generation of similar cluster models during the training. Moreover, IC-SYSID addresses cluster model instability by integrating a regularization term into the loss function and initializing cluster models with scaled Glorot initialization. It also utilizes a mini-batch deep learning approach to manage large SYSID datasets during local training. Through the experiments conducted on a real-world representing SYSID problem, where a fleet of vehicles collaboratively learns vehicle dynamics, we show that IC-SYSID achieves a high SYSID performance while preventing the learning of unstable clusters.
GCAL: Adapting Graph Models to Evolving Domain Shifts
Authors: Ziyue Qiao, Qianyi Cai, Hao Dong, Jiawei Gu, Pengyang Wang, Meng Xiao, Xiao Luo, Hui Xiong
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Domain Adaptation, GRAPH DOMAIN ADAPTATION, Graph Generation

This paper addresses the challenge of graph domain adaptation on evolving, multiple out-of-distribution (OOD) graphs. Conventional graph domain adaptation methods are confined to single-step adaptation, making them ineffective in handling continuous domain shifts and prone to catastrophic forgetting. This paper introduces the Graph Continual Adaptive Learning (GCAL) method, designed to enhance model sustainability and adaptability across various graph domains. GCAL employs a bilevel optimization strategy. The "adapt" phase uses an information maximization approach to fine-tune the model with new graph domains while re-adapting past memories to mitigate forgetting. Concurrently, the "generate memory" phase, guided by a theoretical lower bound derived from information bottleneck theory, involves a variational memory graph generation module to condense original graphs into memories. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that GCAL substantially outperforms existing methods in terms of adaptability and knowledge retention.
A Multi-Step Comparative Framework for Anomaly Detection in IoT Data Streams
Authors: Mohammed Al-Qudah, Fadi AlMahamid
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, feature selection

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced critical security challenges, underscoring the need for accurate anomaly detection. Although numerous studies have proposed machine learning (ML) methods for this purpose, limited research systematically examines how different preprocessing steps--normalization, transformation, and feature selection--interact with distinct model architectures. To address this gap, this paper presents a multi-step evaluation framework assessing the combined impact of preprocessing choices on three ML algorithms: RNN-LSTM, autoencoder neural networks (ANN), and Gradient Boosting (GBoosting). Experiments on the IoTID20 dataset shows that GBoosting consistently delivers superior accuracy across preprocessing configurations, while RNN-LSTM shows notable gains with z-score normalization and autoencoders excel in recall, making them well-suited for unsupervised scenarios. By offering a structured analysis of preprocessing decisions and their interplay with various ML techniques, the proposed framework provides actionable guidance to enhance anomaly detection performance in IoT environments.
Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model
Authors: Can Chen, David Heurtel-Depeiges, Robert M. Vernon, Christopher James Langmead, Yoshua Bengio, Quentin Fournier
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Protein Language Model

Protein language models (pLMs) pre-trained on vast protein sequence databases excel at various downstream tasks but lack the structural knowledge essential for many biological applications. To address this, we integrate structural insights from pre-trained protein graph neural networks (pGNNs) into pLMs through a latent-level contrastive learning task. This task aligns residue representations from pLMs with those from pGNNs across multiple proteins, enriching pLMs with inter-protein structural knowledge. Additionally, we incorporate a physical-level task that infuses intra-protein structural knowledge by optimizing pLMs to predict structural tokens. The proposed dual-task framework effectively incorporates both inter-protein and intra-protein structural knowledge into pLMs. Given the variability in the quality of protein structures in PDB, we further introduce a residue loss selection module, which uses a small model trained on high-quality structures to select reliable yet challenging residue losses for the pLM to learn. Applying our structure alignment method to the state-of-the-art ESM2 and AMPLIFY results in notable performance gains across a wide range of tasks, including a 12.7% increase in ESM2 contact prediction. The data, code, and resulting SaESM2 and SaAMPLIFY models will be released on Hugging Face.
Unsupervised Prompting for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Peyman Baghershahi, Sourav Medya
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Prompt tuning methods for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become popular to address the semantic gap between pre-training and fine-tuning steps. However, existing GNN prompting methods rely on labeled data and involve lightweight fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Meanwhile, in-context learning methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance with no parameter updating and no or minimal labeled data. Inspired by these approaches, in this work, we first introduce a challenging problem setup to evaluate GNN prompting methods. This setup encourages a prompting function to enhance a pre-trained GNN's generalization to a target dataset under covariate shift without updating the GNN's parameters and with no labeled data. Next, we propose a fully unsupervised prompting method based on consistency regularization through pseudo-labeling. We use two regularization techniques to align the prompted graphs' distribution with the original data and reduce biased predictions. Through extensive experiments under our problem setting, we demonstrate that our unsupervised approach outperforms the state-of-the-art prompting methods that have access to labels.
Scalable and Interpretable Contextual Bandits: A Literature Review and Retail Offer Prototype
Authors: Nikola Tankovic, Robert Sajina
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Large Language Model, Multi-Armed Bandits, Thompson Sampling, Transfer Learning

This paper presents a concise review of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) methods and introduces an experimental framework for scalable, interpretable offer selection, addressing the challenge of fast-changing offers. The approach models context at the product category level, allowing offers to span multiple categories and enabling knowledge transfer across similar offers. This improves learning efficiency and generalization in dynamic environments. The framework extends standard CMAB methodology to support multi-category contexts, and achieves scalability through efficient feature engineering and modular design. Advanced features such as MPG (Member Purchase Gap) and MF (Matrix Factorization) capture nuanced user-offer interactions, with implementation in Python for practical deployment. A key contribution is interpretability at scale: logistic regression models yield transparent weight vectors, accessible via a large language model (LLM) interface for real-time, user-level tracking and explanation of evolving preferences. This enables the generation of detailed member profiles and identification of behavioral patterns, supporting personalized offer optimization and enhancing trust in automated decisions. By situating our prototype alongside established paradigms like Generalized Linear Models and Thompson Sampling, we demonstrate its value for both research and real-world CMAB applications.
Risk-Averse Reinforcement Learning with Itakura-Saito Loss
Authors: Igor Udovichenko, Olivier Croissant, Anita Toleutaeva, Evgeny Burnaev, Alexander Korotin
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Risk-averse reinforcement learning finds application in various high-stakes fields. Unlike classical reinforcement learning, which aims to maximize expected returns, risk-averse agents choose policies that minimize risk, occasionally sacrificing expected value. These preferences can be framed through utility theory. We focus on the specific case of the exponential utility function, where we can derive the Bellman equations and employ various reinforcement learning algorithms with few modifications. However, these methods suffer from numerical instability due to the need for exponent computation throughout the process. To address this, we introduce a numerically stable and mathematically sound loss function based on the Itakura-Saito divergence for learning state-value and action-value functions. We evaluate our proposed loss function against established alternatives, both theoretically and empirically. In the experimental section, we explore multiple financial scenarios, some with known analytical solutions, and show that our loss function outperforms the alternatives.
LLaDA-V: Large Language Diffusion Models with Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Zebin You, Shen Nie, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Hu, Jun Zhou, Zhiwu Lu, Ji-Rong Wen, Chongxuan Li
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model

In this work, we introduce LLaDA-V, a purely diffusion-based Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that integrates visual instruction tuning with masked diffusion models, representing a departure from the autoregressive paradigms dominant in current multimodal approaches. Built upon LLaDA, a representative large language diffusion model, LLaDA-V incorporates a vision encoder and MLP connector that projects visual features into the language embedding space, enabling effective multimodal alignment. Our empirical investigation reveals several intriguing results: First, LLaDA-V demonstrates promising multimodal performance despite its language model being weaker on purely textual tasks than counterparts like LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B. When trained on the same instruction data, LLaDA-V is highly competitive to LLaMA3-V across multimodal tasks with better data scalability. It also narrows the performance gap to Qwen2-VL, suggesting the effectiveness of its architecture for multimodal tasks. Second, LLaDA-V achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal understanding compared to existing hybrid autoregressive-diffusion and purely diffusion-based MLLMs. Our findings suggest that large language diffusion models show promise in multimodal contexts and warrant further investigation in future research. Project page and codes: https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-V-demo/.
SPAR: Self-supervised Placement-Aware Representation Learning for Multi-Node IoT Systems
Authors: Yizhuo Chen, Tianchen Wang, You Lyu, Yanlan Hu, Jinyang Li, Tomoyoshi Kimura, Hongjue Zhao, Yigong Hu, Denizhan Kara, Tarek Abdelzaher
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, Representation Learning

This work develops the underpinnings of self-supervised placement-aware representation learning given spatially-distributed (multi-view and multimodal) sensor observations, motivated by the need to represent external environmental state in multi-sensor IoT systems in a manner that correctly distills spatial phenomena from the distributed multi-vantage observations. The objective of sensing in IoT systems is, in general, to collectively represent an externally observed environment given multiple vantage points from which sensory observations occur. Pretraining of models that help interpret sensor data must therefore encode the relation between signals observed by sensors and the observers' vantage points in order to attain a representation that encodes the observed spatial phenomena in a manner informed by the specific placement of the measuring instruments, while allowing arbitrary placement. The work significantly advances self-supervised model pretraining from IoT signals beyond current solutions that often overlook the distinctive spatial nature of IoT data. Our framework explicitly learns the dependencies between measurements and geometric observer layouts and structural characteristics, guided by a core design principle: the duality between signals and observer positions. We further provide theoretical analyses from the perspectives of information theory and occlusion-invariant representation learning to offer insight into the rationale behind our design. Experiments on three real-world datasets--covering vehicle monitoring, human activity recognition, and earthquake localization--demonstrate the superior generalizability and robustness of our method across diverse modalities, sensor placements, application-level inference tasks, and spatial scales.
MixAT: Combining Continuous and Discrete Adversarial Training for LLMs
Authors: Csaba Dékány, Stefan Balauca, Robin Staab, Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Martin Vechev
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00

Despite recent efforts in Large Language Models (LLMs) safety and alignment, current adversarial attacks on frontier LLMs are still able to force harmful generations consistently. Although adversarial training has been widely studied and shown to significantly improve the robustness of traditional machine learning models, its strengths and weaknesses in the context of LLMs are less understood. Specifically, while existing discrete adversarial attacks are effective at producing harmful content, training LLMs with concrete adversarial prompts is often computationally expensive, leading to reliance on continuous relaxations. As these relaxations do not correspond to discrete input tokens, such latent training methods often leave models vulnerable to a diverse set of discrete attacks. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing MixAT, a novel method that combines stronger discrete and faster continuous attacks during training. We rigorously evaluate MixAT across a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art attacks, proposing the At Least One Attack Success Rate (ALO-ASR) metric to capture the worst-case vulnerability of models. We show MixAT achieves substantially better robustness (ALO-ASR < 20%) compared to prior defenses (ALO-ASR > 50%), while maintaining a runtime comparable to methods based on continuous relaxations. We further analyze MixAT in realistic deployment settings, exploring how chat templates, quantization, low-rank adapters, and temperature affect both adversarial training and evaluation, revealing additional blind spots in current methodologies. Our results demonstrate that MixAT's discrete-continuous defense offers a principled and superior robustness-accuracy tradeoff with minimal computational overhead, highlighting its promise for building safer LLMs. We provide our code and models at https://github.com/insait-institute/MixAT.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Contemporary ML-Based Solvers for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Shengyu Feng, Weiwei Sun, Shanda Li, Ameet Talwalkar, Yiming Yang
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Machine learning (ML) has demonstrated considerable potential in supporting model design and optimization for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. However, much of the progress to date has been evaluated on small-scale, synthetic datasets, raising concerns about the practical effectiveness of ML-based solvers in real-world, large-scale CO scenarios. Additionally, many existing CO benchmarks lack sufficient training data, limiting their utility for evaluating data-driven approaches. To address these limitations, we introduce FrontierCO, a comprehensive benchmark that covers eight canonical CO problem types and evaluates 16 representative ML-based solvers--including graph neural networks and large language model (LLM) agents. FrontierCO features challenging instances drawn from industrial applications and frontier CO research, offering both realistic problem difficulty and abundant training data. Our empirical results provide critical insights into the strengths and limitations of current ML methods, helping to guide more robust and practically relevant advances at the intersection of machine learning and combinatorial optimization. Our data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CO-Bench/FrontierCO.
A Unified Framework for Simultaneous Parameter and Function Discovery in Differential Equations
Authors: Shalev Manor, Mohammad Kohandel
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00

Inverse problems involving differential equations often require identifying unknown parameters or functions from data. Existing approaches, such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), Universal Differential Equations (UDEs) and Universal Physics-Informed Neural Networks (UPINNs), are effective at isolating either parameters or functions but can face challenges when applied simultaneously due to solution non-uniqueness. In this work, we introduce a framework that addresses these limitations by establishing conditions under which unique solutions can be guaranteed. To illustrate, we apply it to examples from biological systems and ecological dynamics, demonstrating accurate and interpretable results. Our approach significantly enhances the potential of machine learning techniques in modeling complex systems in science and engineering.
When Are Concepts Erased From Diffusion Models?
Authors: Kevin Lu, Nicky Kriplani, Rohit Gandikota, Minh Pham, David Bau, Chinmay Hegde, Niv Cohen
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00

Concept erasure, the ability to selectively prevent a model from generating specific concepts, has attracted growing interest, with various approaches emerging to address the challenge. However, it remains unclear how thoroughly these methods erase the target concept. We begin by proposing two conceptual models for the erasure mechanism in diffusion models: (i) reducing the likelihood of generating the target concept, and (ii) interfering with the model's internal guidance mechanisms. To thoroughly assess whether a concept has been truly erased from the model, we introduce a suite of independent evaluations. Our evaluation framework includes adversarial attacks, novel probing techniques, and analysis of the model's alternative generations in place of the erased concept. Our results shed light on the tension between minimizing side effects and maintaining robustness to adversarial prompts. Broadly, our work underlines the importance of comprehensive evaluation for erasure in diffusion models.
MambaStyle: Efficient StyleGAN Inversion for Real Image Editing with State-Space Models
Authors: Jhon Lopez, Carlos Hinojosa, Henry Arguello, Bernard Ghanem
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, State Space Models

The task of inverting real images into StyleGAN's latent space to manipulate their attributes has been extensively studied. However, existing GAN inversion methods struggle to balance high reconstruction quality, effective editability, and computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce MambaStyle, an efficient single-stage encoder-based approach for GAN inversion and editing that leverages vision state-space models (VSSMs) to address these challenges. Specifically, our approach integrates VSSMs within the proposed architecture, enabling high-quality image inversion and flexible editing with significantly fewer parameters and reduced computational complexity compared to state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments show that MambaStyle achieves a superior balance among inversion accuracy, editing quality, and computational efficiency. Notably, our method achieves superior inversion and editing results with reduced model complexity and faster inference, making it suitable for real-time applications.