pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TinyverseGP: Towards a Modular Cross-domain Benchmarking Framework for Genetic Programming
Authors: Roman Kalkreuth, Fabricio Olivetti de França, Julian Dierkes, Marie Anastacio, Anja Jankovic, Zdenek Vasicek, Holger Hoos
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Program Synthesis, Symbolic Regression

Over the years, genetic programming (GP) has evolved, with many proposed variations, especially in how they represent a solution. Being essentially a program synthesis algorithm, it is capable of tackling multiple problem domains. Current benchmarking initiatives are fragmented, as the different representations are not compared with each other and their performance is not measured across the different domains. In this work, we propose a unified framework, dubbed TinyverseGP (inspired by tinyGP), which provides support to multiple representations and problem domains, including symbolic regression, logic synthesis and policy search.
Progressive Rock Music Classification
Authors: Arpan Nagar, Joseph Bensabat, Jokent Gaza, Moinak Dey
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, Dimensionality Reduction, Genre classification, Information Retrieval, Music Classification, Music Information Retrieval

This study investigates the classification of progressive rock music, a genre characterized by complex compositions and diverse instrumentation, distinct from other musical styles. Addressing this Music Information Retrieval (MIR) task, we extracted comprehensive audio features, including spectrograms, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), chromagrams, and beat positions from song snippets using the Librosa library. A winner-take-all voting strategy was employed to aggregate snippet-level predictions into final song classifications. We conducted a comparative analysis of various machine learning techniques. Ensemble methods, encompassing Bagging (Random Forest, ExtraTrees, Bagging Classifier) and Boosting (XGBoost, Gradient Boosting), were explored, utilizing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction to manage computational constraints with high-dimensional feature sets. Additionally, deep learning approaches were investigated, including the development of custom 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1D CNN) architectures (named "Zuck" and "Satya") featuring specific layer configurations, normalization, and activation functions. Furthermore, we fine-tuned a state-of-the-art Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) model, leveraging its attention-based mechanisms for audio classification. Performance evaluation on validation and test sets revealed varying effectiveness across models, with ensemble methods like Extra Trees achieving test accuracies up to 76.38%. This research provides insights into the application and relative performance of diverse machine learning paradigms for the nuanced task of progressive rock genre classification.
Hearing Anywhere in Any Environment
Authors: Xiulong Liu, Anurag Kumar, Paul Calamia, Sebastia V. Amengual, Calvin Murdock, Ishwarya Ananthabhotla, Philip Robinson, Eli Shlizerman, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Ruohan Gao
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Mixed Reality, Room Impulse Response (RIR)

In mixed reality applications, a realistic acoustic experience in spatial environments is as crucial as the visual experience for achieving true immersion. Despite recent advances in neural approaches for Room Impulse Response (RIR) estimation, most existing methods are limited to the single environment on which they are trained, lacking the ability to generalize to new rooms with different geometries and surface materials. We aim to develop a unified model capable of reconstructing the spatial acoustic experience of any environment with minimum additional measurements. To this end, we present xRIR, a framework for cross-room RIR prediction. The core of our generalizable approach lies in combining a geometric feature extractor, which captures spatial context from panorama depth images, with a RIR encoder that extracts detailed acoustic features from only a few reference RIR samples. To evaluate our method, we introduce ACOUSTICROOMS, a new dataset featuring high-fidelity simulation of over 300,000 RIRs from 260 rooms. Experiments show that our method strongly outperforms a series of baselines. Furthermore, we successfully perform sim-to-real transfer by evaluating our model on four real-world environments, demonstrating the generalizability of our approach and the realism of our dataset.
AutoStyle-TTS: Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Automatic Style Matching Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Authors: Dan Luo, Chengyuan Ma, Weiqin Li, Jun Wang, Wei Chen, Zhiyong Wu
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

With the advancement of speech synthesis technology, users have higher expectations for the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized speech. But previous research ignores the importance of prompt selection. This study proposes a text-to-speech (TTS) framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, which can dynamically adjust the speech style according to the text content to achieve more natural and vivid communication effects. We have constructed a speech style knowledge database containing high-quality speech samples in various contexts and developed a style matching scheme. This scheme uses embeddings, extracted by Llama, PER-LLM-Embedder,and Moka, to match with samples in the knowledge database, selecting the most appropriate speech style for synthesis. Furthermore, our empirical research validates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our demo can be viewed at: https://thuhcsi.github.io/icme2025-AutoStyle-TTS
Separate to Collaborate: Dual-Stream Diffusion Model for Coordinated Piano Hand Motion Synthesis
Authors: Zihao Liu, Mingwen Ou, Zunnan Xu, Jiaqi Huang, Haonan Han, Ronghui Li, Xiu Li
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Motion Synthesis

Automating the synthesis of coordinated bimanual piano performances poses significant challenges, particularly in capturing the intricate choreography between the hands while preserving their distinct kinematic signatures. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream neural framework designed to generate synchronized hand gestures for piano playing from audio input, addressing the critical challenge of modeling both hand independence and coordination. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (i) a decoupled diffusion-based generation framework that independently models each hand's motion via dual-noise initialization, sampling distinct latent noise for each while leveraging a shared positional condition, and (ii) a Hand-Coordinated Asymmetric Attention (HCAA) mechanism suppresses symmetric (common-mode) noise to highlight asymmetric hand-specific features, while adaptively enhancing inter-hand coordination during denoising. The system operates hierarchically: it first predicts 3D hand positions from audio features and then generates joint angles through position-aware diffusion models, where parallel denoising streams interact via HCAA. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics.
FSSUAVL: A Discriminative Framework using Vision Models for Federated Self-Supervised Audio and Image Understanding
Authors: Yasar Abbas Ur Rehman, Kin Wai Lau, Yuyang Xie, Ma Lan, Jiajun Shen
Date: 2025-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Federated Learning

Recent studies have demonstrated that vision models can effectively learn multimodal audio-image representations when paired. However, the challenge of enabling deep models to learn representations from unpaired modalities remains unresolved. This issue is especially pertinent in scenarios like Federated Learning (FL), where data is often decentralized, heterogeneous, and lacks a reliable guarantee of paired data. Previous attempts tackled this issue through the use of auxiliary pretrained encoders or generative models on local clients, which invariably raise computational cost with increasing number modalities. Unlike these approaches, in this paper, we aim to address the task of unpaired audio and image recognition using \texttt{FSSUAVL}, a single deep model pretrained in FL with self-supervised contrastive learning (SSL). Instead of aligning the audio and image modalities, \texttt{FSSUAVL} jointly discriminates them by projecting them into a common embedding space using contrastive SSL. This extends the utility of \texttt{FSSUAVL} to paired and unpaired audio and image recognition tasks. Our experiments with CNN and ViT demonstrate that \texttt{FSSUAVL} significantly improves performance across various image- and audio-based downstream tasks compared to using separate deep models for each modality. Additionally, \texttt{FSSUAVL}'s capacity to learn multimodal feature representations allows for integrating auxiliary information, if available, to enhance recognition accuracy.
DiTSE: High-Fidelity Generative Speech Enhancement via Latent Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Heitor R. Guimarães, Jiaqi Su, Rithesh Kumar, Tiago H. Falk, Zeyu Jin
Date: 2025-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Speech Enhancement

Real-world speech recordings suffer from degradations such as background noise and reverberation. Speech enhancement aims to mitigate these issues by generating clean high-fidelity signals. While recent generative approaches for speech enhancement have shown promising results, they still face two major challenges: (1) content hallucination, where plausible phonemes generated differ from the original utterance; and (2) inconsistency, failing to preserve speaker's identity and paralinguistic features from the input speech. In this work, we introduce DiTSE (Diffusion Transformer for Speech Enhancement), which addresses quality issues of degraded speech in full bandwidth. Our approach employs a latent diffusion transformer model together with robust conditioning features, effectively addressing these challenges while remaining computationally efficient. Experimental results from both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that DiTSE achieves state-of-the-art audio quality that, for the first time, matches real studio-quality audio from the DAPS dataset. Furthermore, DiTSE significantly improves the preservation of speaker identity and content fidelity, reducing hallucinations across datasets compared to state-of-the-art enhancers. Audio samples are available at: http://hguimaraes.me/DiTSE
AMNet: An Acoustic Model Network for Enhanced Mandarin Speech Synthesis
Authors: Yubing Cao, Yinfeng Yu, Yongming Li, Liejun Wang
Date: 2025-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

This paper presents AMNet, an Acoustic Model Network designed to improve the performance of Mandarin speech synthesis by incorporating phrase structure annotation and local convolution modules. AMNet builds upon the FastSpeech 2 architecture while addressing the challenge of local context modeling, which is crucial for capturing intricate speech features such as pauses, stress, and intonation. By embedding a phrase structure parser into the model and introducing a local convolution module, AMNet enhances the model's sensitivity to local information. Additionally, AMNet decouples tonal characteristics from phonemes, providing explicit guidance for tone modeling, which improves tone accuracy and pronunciation. Experimental results demonstrate that AMNet outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective evaluations. The proposed model achieves superior Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), lower Mel Cepstral Distortion (MCD), and improved fundamental frequency fitting $F0 (R^2)$, confirming its ability to generate high-quality, natural, and expressive Mandarin speech.
Spatial Audio Processing with Large Language Model on Wearable Devices
Authors: Ayushi Mishra, Yang Bai, Priyadarshan Narayanasamy, Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Integrating spatial context into large language models (LLMs) has the potential to revolutionize human-computer interaction, particularly in wearable devices. In this work, we present a novel system architecture that incorporates spatial speech understanding into LLMs, enabling contextually aware and adaptive applications for wearable technologies. Our approach leverages microstructure-based spatial sensing to extract precise Direction of Arrival (DoA) information using a monaural microphone. To address the lack of existing dataset for microstructure-assisted speech recordings, we synthetically create a dataset called OmniTalk by using the LibriSpeech dataset. This spatial information is fused with linguistic embeddings from OpenAI's Whisper model, allowing each modality to learn complementary contextual representations. The fused embeddings are aligned with the input space of LLaMA-3.2 3B model and fine-tuned with lightweight adaptation technique LoRA to optimize for on-device processing. SING supports spatially-aware automatic speech recognition (ASR), achieving a mean error of $25.72^\circ$-a substantial improvement compared to the 88.52$^\circ$ median error in existing work-with a word error rate (WER) of 5.3. SING also supports soundscaping, for example, inference how many people were talking and their directions, with up to 5 people and a median DoA error of 16$^\circ$. Our system demonstrates superior performance in spatial speech understanding while addressing the challenges of power efficiency, privacy, and hardware constraints, paving the way for advanced applications in augmented reality, accessibility, and immersive experiences.
Code Reborn AI-Driven Legacy Systems Modernization from COBOL to Java
Authors: Gopichand Bandarupalli
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00

This study investigates AI-driven modernization of legacy COBOL code into Java, addressing a critical challenge in aging software systems. Leveraging the Legacy COBOL 2024 Corpus -- 50,000 COBOL files from public and enterprise sources -- Java parses the code, AI suggests upgrades, and React visualizes gains. Achieving 93% accuracy, complexity drops 35% (from 18 to 11.7) and coupling 33% (from 8 to 5.4), surpassing manual efforts (75%) and rule-based tools (82%). The approach offers a scalable path to rejuvenate COBOL systems, vital for industries like banking and insurance.
TD-Suite: All Batteries Included Framework for Technical Debt Classification
Authors: Karthik Shivashankar, Antonio Martini
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Binary Classification, Management, Natural Language Understanding

Recognizing that technical debt is a persistent and significant challenge requiring sophisticated management tools, TD-Suite offers a comprehensive software framework specifically engineered to automate the complex task of its classification within software projects. It leverages the advanced natural language understanding of state-of-the-art transformer models to analyze textual artifacts, such as developer discussions in issue reports, where subtle indicators of debt often lie hidden. TD-Suite provides a seamless end-to-end pipeline, managing everything from initial data ingestion and rigorous preprocessing to model training, thorough evaluation, and final inference. This allows it to support both straightforward binary classification (debt or no debt) and more valuable, identifying specific categories like code, design, or documentation debt, thus enabling more targeted management strategies. To ensure the generated models are robust and perform reliably on real-world, often imbalanced, datasets, TD-Suite incorporates critical training methodologies: k-fold cross-validation assesses generalization capability, early stopping mechanisms prevent overfitting to the training data, and class weighting strategies effectively address skewed data distributions. Beyond core functionality, and acknowledging the growing importance of sustainability, the framework integrates tracking and reporting of carbon emissions associated with the computationally intensive model training process. It also features a user-friendly Gradio web interface in a Docker container setup, simplifying model interaction, evaluation, and inference.
Scalability and Maintainability Challenges and Solutions in Machine Learning: Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Karthik Shivashankar, Ghadi S. Al Hajj, Antonio Martini
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

This systematic literature review examines the critical challenges and solutions related to scalability and maintainability in Machine Learning (ML) systems. As ML applications become increasingly complex and widespread across industries, the need to balance system scalability with long-term maintainability has emerged as a significant concern. This review synthesizes current research and practices addressing these dual challenges across the entire ML life-cycle, from data engineering to model deployment in production. We analyzed 124 papers to identify and categorize 41 maintainability challenges and 13 scalability challenges, along with their corresponding solutions. Our findings reveal intricate inter dependencies between scalability and maintainability, where improvements in one often impact the other. The review is structured around six primary research questions, examining maintainability and scalability challenges in data engineering, model engineering, and ML system development. We explore how these challenges manifest differently across various stages of the ML life-cycle. This comprehensive overview offers valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners in the field of ML systems. It aims to guide future research directions, inform best practices, and contribute to the development of more robust, efficient, and sustainable ML applications across various domains.
QualiTagger: Automating software quality detection in issue trackers
Authors: Karthik Shivashankar, Rafael Capilla, Maren Maritsdatter Kruke, Mili Orucevic, Antonio Martini
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: TAG, valid

A systems quality is a major concern for development teams when it evolve. Understanding the effects of a loss of quality in the codebase is crucial to avoid side effects like the appearance of technical debt. Although the identification of these qualities in software requirements described in natural language has been investigated, most of the results are often not applicable in practice, and rely on having been validated on small datasets and limited amount of projects. For many years, machine learning (ML) techniques have been proved as a valid technique to identify and tag terms described in natural language. In order to advance previous works, in this research we use cutting edge models like Transformers, together with a vast dataset mined and curated from GitHub, to identify what text is usually associated with different quality properties. We also study the distribution of such qualities in issue trackers from openly accessible software repositories, and we evaluate our approach both with students from a software engineering course and with its application to recognize security labels in industry.
AI-Driven Code Refactoring: Using Graph Neural Networks to Enhance Software Maintainability
Authors: Gopichand Bandarupalli
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00

This study explores Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as a transformative tool for code refactoring, using abstract syntax trees (ASTs) to boost software maintainability. It analyzes a dataset of 2 million snippets from CodeSearchNet and a custom 75000-file GitHub Python corpus, comparing GNNs against rule-based SonarQube and decision trees. Metrics include cyclomatic complexity (target below 10), coupling (target below 5), and refactoring precision. GNNs achieve 92% accuracy, reducing complexity by 35% and coupling by 33%, outperforming SonarQube (78%, 16%) and decision trees (85%, 25%). Preprocessing fixed 60% of syntax errors. Bar graphs, tables, and AST visuals clarify results. This offers a scalable AI-driven path to cleaner codebases, which is crucial for software engineering.
The Code Barrier: What LLMs Actually Understand?
Authors: Serge Lionel Nikiema, Jordan Samhi, Abdoul Kader Kaboré, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic understanding beyond simple token recognition remains unclear. This research uses code obfuscation as a structured testing framework to evaluate LLMs' semantic understanding capabilities. We methodically apply controlled obfuscation changes to source code and measure comprehension through two complementary tasks: generating accurate descriptions of obfuscated code and performing deobfuscation, a skill with important implications for reverse engineering applications. Our testing approach includes 13 cutting-edge models, covering both code-specialized (e.g., StarCoder2) and general-purpose (e.g., GPT-4o) architectures, evaluated on a benchmark created from CodeNet and consisting of filtered 250 Java programming problems and their solutions. Findings show a statistically significant performance decline as obfuscation complexity increases, with unexpected resilience shown by general-purpose models compared to their code-focused counterparts. While some models successfully identify obfuscation techniques, their ability to reconstruct the underlying program logic remains constrained, suggesting limitations in their semantic representation mechanisms. This research introduces a new evaluation approach for assessing code comprehension in language models and establishes empirical baselines for advancing research in security-critical code analysis applications such as reverse engineering and adversarial code analysis.
Automated Testing of COBOL to Java Transformation
Authors: Sandeep Hans, Atul Kumar, Toshikai Yasue, Kouichi Ono, Saravanan Krishnan, Devika Sondhi, Fumiko Satoh, Gerald Mitchell, Sachin Kumar, Diptikalyan Saha
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) based Generative AI techniques have made it feasible to translate enterprise-level code from legacy languages such as COBOL to modern languages such as Java or Python. While the results of LLM-based automatic transformation are encouraging, the resulting code cannot be trusted to correctly translate the original code, making manual validation of translated Java code from COBOL a necessary but time-consuming and labor-intensive process. In this paper, we share our experience of developing a testing framework for IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Z (WCA4Z) [5], an industrial tool designed for COBOL to Java translation. The framework automates the process of testing the functional equivalence of the translated Java code against the original COBOL programs in an industry context. Our framework uses symbolic execution to generate unit tests for COBOL, mocking external calls and transforming them into JUnit tests to validate semantic equivalence with translated Java. The results not only help identify and repair any detected discrepancies but also provide feedback to improve the AI model.