pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Utility Inspired Generalizations of TOPSIS
Authors: Robert Susmaga, Izabela Szczech
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

TOPSIS, a popular method for ranking alternatives is based on aggregated distances to ideal and anti-ideal points. As such, it was considered to be essentially different from widely popular and acknowledged `utility-based methods', which build rankings from weight-averaged utility values. Nonetheless, TOPSIS has recently been shown to be a natural generalization of these `utility-based methods' on the grounds that the distances it uses can be decomposed into so called weight-scaled means (WM) and weight-scaled standard deviations (WSD) of utilities. However, the influence that these two components exert on the final ranking cannot be in any way influenced in the standard TOPSIS. This is why, building on our previous results, in this paper we put forward modifications that make TOPSIS aggregations responsive to WM and WSD, achieving some amount of well interpretable control over how the rankings are influenced by WM and WSD. The modifications constitute a natural generalization of the standard TOPSIS method because, thanks to them, the generalized TOPSIS may turn into the original TOPSIS or, otherwise, following the decision maker's preferences, may trade off WM for WSD or WSD for WM. In the latter case, TOPSIS gradually reduces to a regular `utility-based method'. All in all, we believe that the proposed generalizations constitute an interesting practical tool for influencing the ranking by controlled application of a new form of decision maker's preferences.
The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search
Authors: Yutaro Yamada, Robert Tjarko Lange, Cong Lu, Shengran Hu, Chris Lu, Jakob Foerster, Jeff Clune, David Ha
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: scientific discovery

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.
MedRep: Medical Concept Representation for General Electronic Health Record Foundation Models
Authors: Junmo Kim, Namkyeong Lee, Jiwon Kim, Kwangsoo Kim
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Representation Learning

Electronic health record (EHR) foundation models have been an area ripe for exploration with their improved performance in various medical tasks. Despite the rapid advances, there exists a fundamental limitation: Processing unseen medical codes out of the vocabulary. This problem limits the generality of EHR foundation models and the integration of models trained with different vocabularies. To deal with this problem, we propose MedRep for EHR foundation models based on the observational medical outcome partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM), providing the integrated medical concept representations and the basic data augmentation strategy for patient trajectories. For concept representation learning, we enrich the information of each concept with a minimal definition through large language model (LLM) prompts and enhance the text-based representations through graph ontology of OMOP vocabulary. Trajectory augmentation randomly replaces selected concepts with other similar concepts that have closely related representations to let the model practice with the concepts out-of-vocabulary. Finally, we demonstrate that EHR foundation models trained with MedRep better maintain the prediction performance in external datasets. Our code implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/kicarussays/MedRep.
Belief States for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observability
Authors: Paul J. Pritz, Kin K. Leung
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is typically challenging, as it requires agents to learn an estimate of the underlying system state. These challenges are exacerbated in multi-agent settings, where agents learn simultaneously and influence the underlying state as well as each others' observations. We propose the use of learned beliefs on the underlying state of the system to overcome these challenges and enable reinforcement learning with fully decentralized training and execution. Our approach leverages state information to pre-train a probabilistic belief model in a self-supervised fashion. The resulting belief states, which capture both inferred state information as well as uncertainty over this information, are then used in a state-based reinforcement learning algorithm to create an end-to-end model for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning under partial observability. By separating the belief and reinforcement learning tasks, we are able to significantly simplify the policy and value function learning tasks and improve both the convergence speed and the final performance. We evaluate our proposed method on diverse partially observable multi-agent tasks designed to exhibit different variants of partial observability.
Towards an Evaluation Framework for Explainable Artificial Intelligence Systems for Health and Well-being
Authors: Esperança Amengual-Alcover, Antoni Jaume-i-Capó, Miquel Miró-Nicolau, Gabriel Moyà-Alcover, Antonia Paniza-Fullana
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence

The integration of Artificial Intelligence in the development of computer systems presents a new challenge: make intelligent systems explainable to humans. This is especially vital in the field of health and well-being, where transparency in decision support systems enables healthcare professionals to understand and trust automated decisions and predictions. To address this need, tools are required to guide the development of explainable AI systems. In this paper, we introduce an evaluation framework designed to support the development of explainable AI systems for health and well-being. Additionally, we present a case study that illustrates the application of the framework in practice. We believe that our framework can serve as a valuable tool not only for developing explainable AI systems in healthcare but also for any AI system that has a significant impact on individuals.
SPHERE: An Evaluation Card for Human-AI Systems
Authors: Qianou Ma, Dora Zhao, Xinran Zhao, Chenglei Si, Chenyang Yang, Ryan Louie, Ehud Reiter, Diyi Yang, Tongshuang Wu
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), establishing effective evaluation methods and standards for diverse human-AI interaction systems is increasingly challenging. To encourage more transparent documentation and facilitate discussion on human-AI system evaluation design options, we present an evaluation card SPHERE, which encompasses five key dimensions: 1) What is being evaluated?; 2) How is the evaluation conducted?; 3) Who is participating in the evaluation?; 4) When is evaluation conducted?; 5) How is evaluation validated? We conduct a review of 39 human-AI systems using SPHERE, outlining current evaluation practices and areas for improvement. We provide three recommendations for improving the validity and rigor of evaluation practices.
Metamorphic Testing for Fairness Evaluation in Large Language Models: Identifying Intersectional Bias in LLaMA and GPT
Authors: Harishwar Reddy, Madhusudan Srinivasan, Upulee Kanewala
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in Natural Language Processing but remain vulnerable to fairness-related issues, often reflecting biases inherent in their training data. These biases pose risks, particularly when LLMs are deployed in sensitive areas such as healthcare, finance, and law. This paper introduces a metamorphic testing approach to systematically identify fairness bugs in LLMs. We define and apply a set of fairness-oriented metamorphic relations (MRs) to assess the LLaMA and GPT model, a state-of-the-art LLM, across diverse demographic inputs. Our methodology includes generating source and follow-up test cases for each MR and analyzing model responses for fairness violations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of MT in exposing bias patterns, especially in relation to tone and sentiment, and highlight specific intersections of sensitive attributes that frequently reveal fairness faults. This research improves fairness testing in LLMs, providing a structured approach to detect and mitigate biases and improve model robustness in fairness-sensitive applications.
Psychological Health Knowledge-Enhanced LLM-based Social Network Crisis Intervention Text Transfer Recognition Method
Authors: Shurui Wu, Xinyi Huang, Dingxin Lu
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sentiment Analysis, Transfer Learning

As the prevalence of mental health crises increases on social media platforms, identifying and preventing potential harm has become an urgent challenge. This study introduces a large language model (LLM)-based text transfer recognition method for social network crisis intervention, enhanced with domain-specific mental health knowledge. We propose a multi-level framework that incorporates transfer learning using BERT, and integrates mental health knowledge, sentiment analysis, and behavior prediction techniques. The framework includes a crisis annotation tool trained on social media datasets from real-world events, enabling the model to detect nuanced emotional cues and identify psychological crises. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms traditional models in crisis detection accuracy and exhibits greater sensitivity to subtle emotional and contextual variations.
SEAL: Steerable Reasoning Calibration of Large Language Models for Free
Authors: Runjin Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Junyuan Hong, Souvik Kundu, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's o1-series have demonstrated compelling capabilities for complex reasoning tasks via the extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning mechanism. However, recent studies reveal substantial redundancy in the CoT reasoning traces, which not only increases inference latency but also negatively impacts model performance by diverting attention to unnecessary reasoning paths. To address this issue, we investigate the internal reasoning structures of LLMs and categorize them into three primary thought types: execution, reflection, and transition thoughts. Moreover, our analysis reveals that excessive reflection and transition thoughts are strongly correlated with failure cases and these thought categories exhibit clear separation in the latent space. Based on these, we introduce SEAL (Steerable reasoning calibration), a training-free approach that seamlessly calibrates the CoT process, improving accuracy while demonstrating significant efficiency gains. SEAL consists of an offline stage for extracting the reasoning steering vector in the latent space, followed by an on-the-fly calibration of the reasoning trace through representation intervention using the steering vector. Notably, the steering vector exhibits strong transferability across various tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple models (DeepSeek-R1-Distill and QwQ-32B-Preview) and benchmarks (Math500, GSM8K, LiveCodeBench) validate the effectiveness of SEAL, up to a 11% improvement in accuracy while reducing reasoning tokens by 11.8% to 50.4%. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/SEAL.
Regional Tiny Stories: Using Small Models to Compare Language Learning and Tokenizer Performance
Authors: Nirvan Patil, Malhar Abhay Inamdar, Agnivo Gosai, Guruprasad Pathak, Anish Joshi, Aryan Sagavekar, Anish Joshirao, Raj Dandekar, Rajat Dandekar, Sreedath Panat
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00

Small Language Models (SLMs) offer efficient alternatives to LLMs for specific domains. The 2023 TinyStories study developed an English dataset that allows SLMs with 1 to 10 million parameters to produce coherent outputs. Our research expands this framework by translating the original dataset into Indian languages and creating synthetic data using LLMs. We focus on Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali, evaluating SLMs for regional language processing and understanding linguistic complexity. We show that SLMs efficiently process regional languages with significantly fewer parameters than LLMs, providing a complementary framework for ``inference based evaluation" of tokenization strategies and linguistic complexity. Our analysis shows that language-specific tokenizers outperform general-purpose ones for Indian languages. Empirical validations, supported by information-theoretic and morphological analyses, provides fundamental understanding behind the better performance of Hindi models over Marathi and Bengali. Additionally, we show that synthetic datasets outperform translated content for training SLMs. Correlation analyses reveal cross-linguistic patterns and language-specific relationships between creativity, grammatical precision, and narrative completeness. These findings advance both the practical application of SLMs to underserved languages and our theoretical understanding of neural language development.
'Neural howlround' in large language models: a self-reinforcing bias phenomenon, and a dynamic attenuation solution
Authors: Seth Drake
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language model (LLM)-driven AI systems may exhibit an inference failure mode we term `neural howlround,' a self-reinforcing cognitive loop where certain highly weighted inputs become dominant, leading to entrenched response patterns resistant to correction. This paper explores the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, which is distinct from model collapse and biased salience weighting. We propose an attenuation-based correction mechanism that dynamically introduces counterbalancing adjustments and can restore adaptive reasoning, even in `locked-in' AI systems. Additionally, we discuss some other related effects arising from improperly managed reinforcement. Finally, we outline potential applications of this mitigation strategy for improving AI robustness in real-world decision-making tasks.
Evaluating the Fitness of Ontologies for the Task of Question Generation
Authors: Samah Alkhuzaey, Floriana Grasso, Terry R. Payne, Valentina Tamma
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

Ontology-based question generation is an important application of semantic-aware systems that enables the creation of large question banks for diverse learning environments. The effectiveness of these systems, both in terms of the calibre and cognitive difficulty of the resulting questions, depends heavily on the quality and modelling approach of the underlying ontologies, making it crucial to assess their fitness for this task. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation into the specific ontology aspects or characteristics that affect the question generation process. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of requirements and task-specific metrics for evaluating the fitness of ontologies for question generation tasks in pedagogical settings. Using the ROMEO methodology, a structured framework for deriving task-specific metrics, an expert-based approach is employed to assess the performance of various ontologies in Automatic Question Generation (AQG) tasks, which is then evaluated over a set of ontologies. Our results demonstrate that ontology characteristics significantly impact the effectiveness of question generation, with different ontologies exhibiting varying performance levels. This highlights the importance of assessing ontology quality with respect to AQG tasks.
DGFamba: Learning Flow Factorized State Space for Visual Domain Generalization
Authors: Qi Bi, Jingjun Yi, Hao Zheng, Haolan Zhan, Wei Ji, Yawen Huang, Yuexiang Li
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Domain generalization aims to learn a representation from the source domain, which can be generalized to arbitrary unseen target domains. A fundamental challenge for visual domain generalization is the domain gap caused by the dramatic style variation whereas the image content is stable. The realm of selective state space, exemplified by VMamba, demonstrates its global receptive field in representing the content. However, the way exploiting the domain-invariant property for selective state space is rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a novel Flow Factorized State Space model, dubbed as DG-Famba, for visual domain generalization. To maintain domain consistency, we innovatively map the style-augmented and the original state embeddings by flow factorization. In this latent flow space, each state embedding from a certain style is specified by a latent probability path. By aligning these probability paths in the latent space, the state embeddings are able to represent the same content distribution regardless of the style differences. Extensive experiments conducted on various visual domain generalization settings show its state-of-the-art performance.
Learning Fine-grained Domain Generalization via Hyperbolic State Space Hallucination
Authors: Qi Bi, Jingjun Yi, Haolan Zhan, Wei Ji, Gui-Song Xia
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Hallucination, State Space Models

Fine-grained domain generalization (FGDG) aims to learn a fine-grained representation that can be well generalized to unseen target domains when only trained on the source domain data. Compared with generic domain generalization, FGDG is particularly challenging in that the fine-grained category can be only discerned by some subtle and tiny patterns. Such patterns are particularly fragile under the cross-domain style shifts caused by illumination, color and etc. To push this frontier, this paper presents a novel Hyperbolic State Space Hallucination (HSSH) method. It consists of two key components, namely, state space hallucination (SSH) and hyperbolic manifold consistency (HMC). SSH enriches the style diversity for the state embeddings by firstly extrapolating and then hallucinating the source images. Then, the pre- and post- style hallucinate state embeddings are projected into the hyperbolic manifold. The hyperbolic state space models the high-order statistics, and allows a better discernment of the fine-grained patterns. Finally, the hyperbolic distance is minimized, so that the impact of style variation on fine-grained patterns can be eliminated. Experiments on three FGDG benchmarks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance.
Can Reasoning LLMs Enhance Clinical Document Classification?
Authors: Akram Mustafa, Usman Naseem, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Clinical document classification is essential for converting unstructured medical texts into standardised ICD-10 diagnoses, yet it faces challenges due to complex medical language, privacy constraints, and limited annotated datasets. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising improvements in accuracy and efficiency for this task. This study evaluates the performance and consistency of eight LLMs; four reasoning (Qwen QWQ, Deepseek Reasoner, GPT o3 Mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking) and four non-reasoning (Llama 3.3, GPT 4o Mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Deepseek Chat); in classifying clinical discharge summaries using the MIMIC-IV dataset. Using cTAKES to structure clinical narratives, models were assessed across three experimental runs, with majority voting determining final predictions. Results showed that reasoning models outperformed non-reasoning models in accuracy (71% vs 68%) and F1 score (67% vs 60%), with Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking achieving the highest accuracy (75%) and F1 score (76%). However, non-reasoning models demonstrated greater stability (91% vs 84% consistency). Performance varied across ICD-10 codes, with reasoning models excelling in complex cases but struggling with abstract categories. Findings indicate a trade-off between accuracy and consistency, suggesting that a hybrid approach could optimise clinical coding. Future research should explore multi-label classification, domain-specific fine-tuning, and ensemble methods to enhance model reliability in real-world applications.
Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design
Authors: Tony Shen, Seonghwan Seo, Ross Irwin, Kieran Didi, Simon Olsson, Woo Youn Kim, Martin Ester
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design

Many generative applications, such as synthesis-based 3D molecular design, involve constructing compositional objects with continuous features. Here, we introduce Compositional Generative Flows (CGFlow), a novel framework that extends flow matching to generate objects in compositional steps while modeling continuous states. Our key insight is that modeling compositional state transitions can be formulated as a straightforward extension of the flow matching interpolation process. We further build upon the theoretical foundations of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), enabling reward-guided sampling of compositional structures. We apply CGFlow to synthesizable drug design by jointly designing the molecule's synthetic pathway with its 3D binding pose. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art binding affinity on all 15 targets from the LIT-PCBA benchmark, and 5.8$\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency compared to 2D synthesis-based baseline. To our best knowledge, our method is also the first to achieve state of-art-performance in both Vina Dock (-9.38) and AiZynth success rate (62.2\%) on the CrossDocked benchmark.