pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Direct Advantage Regression: Aligning LLMs with Online AI Reward
Authors: Li He, He Zhao, Stephen Wan, Dadong Wang, Lina Yao, Tongliang Liu
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Online AI Feedback (OAIF) presents a promising alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) by utilizing online AI preference in aligning language models (LLMs). However, the straightforward replacement of humans with AI deprives LLMs from learning more fine-grained AI supervision beyond binary signals. In this paper, we propose Direct Advantage Regression (DAR), a simple alignment algorithm using online AI reward to optimize policy improvement through weighted supervised fine-tuning. As an RL-free approach, DAR maintains theoretical consistency with online RLHF pipelines while significantly reducing implementation complexity and improving learning efficiency. Our empirical results underscore that AI reward is a better form of AI supervision consistently achieving higher human-AI agreement as opposed to AI preference. Additionally, evaluations using GPT-4-Turbo and MT-bench show that DAR outperforms both OAIF and online RLHF baselines.
A Physics-guided Multimodal Transformer Path to Weather and Climate Sciences
Authors: Jing Han, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xiaomeng Huang, Yongyun Hu, Wenjun Xu, DaCheng Tao, Ping Zhang
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00

With the rapid development of machine learning in recent years, many problems in meteorology can now be addressed using AI models. In particular, data-driven algorithms have significantly improved accuracy compared to traditional methods. Meteorological data is often transformed into 2D images or 3D videos, which are then fed into AI models for learning. Additionally, these models often incorporate physical signals, such as temperature, pressure, and wind speed, to further enhance accuracy and interpretability. In this paper, we review several representative AI + Weather/Climate algorithms and propose a new paradigm where observational data from different perspectives, each with distinct physical meanings, are treated as multimodal data and integrated via transformers. Furthermore, key weather and climate knowledge can be incorporated through regularization techniques to further strengthen the model's capabilities. This new paradigm is versatile and can address a variety of tasks, offering strong generalizability. We also discuss future directions for improving model accuracy and interpretability.
Adaptation Method for Misinformation Identification
Authors: Yangping Chen, Weijie Shi, Mengze Li, Yue Cui, Hao Chen, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Fake News Detection, Misinformation

Multimodal fake news detection plays a crucial role in combating online misinformation. Unfortunately, effective detection methods rely on annotated labels and encounter significant performance degradation when domain shifts exist between training (source) and test (target) data. To address the problems, we propose ADOSE, an Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) framework for multimodal fake news detection which actively annotates a small subset of target samples to improve detection performance. To identify various deceptive patterns in cross-domain settings, we design multiple expert classifiers to learn dependencies across different modalities. These classifiers specifically target the distinct deception patterns exhibited in fake news, where two unimodal classifiers capture knowledge errors within individual modalities while one cross-modal classifier identifies semantic inconsistencies between text and images. To reduce annotation costs from the target domain, we propose a least-disagree uncertainty selector with a diversity calculator for selecting the most informative samples. The selector leverages prediction disagreement before and after perturbations by multiple classifiers as an indicator of uncertain samples, whose deceptive patterns deviate most from source domains. It further incorporates diversity scores derived from multi-view features to ensure the chosen samples achieve maximal coverage of target domain features. The extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that ADOSE outperforms existing ADA methods by 2.72\% $\sim$ 14.02\%, indicating the superiority of our model.
Breaking the Diffraction Barrier for Passive Sources: Parameter-Decoupled Superresolution Assisted by Physics-Informed Machine Learning
Authors: Abdelali Sajia, Bilal Benzimoun, Pawan Khatiwada, Guogan Zhao, Xiao-Feng Qian
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Physics-informed machine learning

We present a parameter-decoupled superresolution framework for estimating sub-wavelength separations of passive two-point sources without requiring prior knowledge or control of the source. Our theoretical foundation circumvents the need to estimate multiple challenging parameters such as partial coherence, brightness imbalance, random relative phase, and photon statistics. A physics-informed machine learning (ML) model (trained with a standard desktop workstation), synergistically integrating this theory, further addresses practical imperfections including background noise, photon loss, and centroid/orientation misalignment. The integrated parameter-decoupling superresolution method achieves resolution 14 and more times below the diffraction limit (corresponding to ~ 13.5 nm in optical microscopy) on experimentally generated realistic images with >82% fidelity, performance rivaling state-of-the-art techniques for actively controllable sources. Critically, our method's robustness against source parameter variability and source-independent noises enables potential applications in realistic scenarios where source control is infeasible, such as astrophysical imaging, live-cell microscopy, and quantum metrology. This work bridges a critical gap between theoretical superresolution limits and practical implementations for passive systems.
SConU: Selective Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Wang, Qingni Wang, Yue Zhang, Tianlong Chen, Xiaofeng Zhu, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Question Answering

As large language models are increasingly utilized in real-world applications, guarantees of task-specific metrics are essential for their reliable deployment. Previous studies have introduced various criteria of conformal uncertainty grounded in split conformal prediction, which offer user-specified correctness coverage. However, existing frameworks often fail to identify uncertainty data outliers that violate the exchangeability assumption, leading to unbounded miscoverage rates and unactionable prediction sets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach termed Selective Conformal Uncertainty (SConU), which, for the first time, implements significance tests, by developing two conformal p-values that are instrumental in determining whether a given sample deviates from the uncertainty distribution of the calibration set at a specific manageable risk level. Our approach not only facilitates rigorous management of miscoverage rates across both single-domain and interdisciplinary contexts, but also enhances the efficiency of predictions. Furthermore, we comprehensively analyze the components of the conformal procedures, aiming to approximate conditional coverage, particularly in high-stakes question-answering tasks.
Locate 3D: Real-World Object Localization via Self-Supervised Learning in 3D
Authors: Sergio Arnaud, Paul McVay, Ada Martin, Arjun Majumdar, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Phillip Thomas, Ruslan Partsey, Daniel Dugas, Abha Gejji, Alexander Sax, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Mikael Henaff, Ayush Jain, Ang Cao, Ishita Prasad, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Michael Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aravind Rajeswaran, Franziska Meier
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object Localization, Self-Supervised Learning

We present LOCATE 3D, a model for localizing objects in 3D scenes from referring expressions like "the small coffee table between the sofa and the lamp." LOCATE 3D sets a new state-of-the-art on standard referential grounding benchmarks and showcases robust generalization capabilities. Notably, LOCATE 3D operates directly on sensor observation streams (posed RGB-D frames), enabling real-world deployment on robots and AR devices. Key to our approach is 3D-JEPA, a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applicable to sensor point clouds. It takes as input a 3D pointcloud featurized using 2D foundation models (CLIP, DINO). Subsequently, masked prediction in latent space is employed as a pretext task to aid the self-supervised learning of contextualized pointcloud features. Once trained, the 3D-JEPA encoder is finetuned alongside a language-conditioned decoder to jointly predict 3D masks and bounding boxes. Additionally, we introduce LOCATE 3D DATASET, a new dataset for 3D referential grounding, spanning multiple capture setups with over 130K annotations. This enables a systematic study of generalization capabilities as well as a stronger model.
Walk the Talk? Measuring the Faithfulness of Large Language Model Explanations
Authors: Katie Matton, Robert Osazuwa Ness, John Guttag, Emre Kiciman
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Medical Question Answering, Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating plausible explanations of how they arrived at an answer to a question. However, these explanations can misrepresent the model's "reasoning" process, i.e., they can be unfaithful. This, in turn, can lead to over-trust and misuse. We introduce a new approach for measuring the faithfulness of LLM explanations. First, we provide a rigorous definition of faithfulness. Since LLM explanations mimic human explanations, they often reference high-level concepts in the input question that purportedly influenced the model. We define faithfulness in terms of the difference between the set of concepts that LLM explanations imply are influential and the set that truly are. Second, we present a novel method for estimating faithfulness that is based on: (1) using an auxiliary LLM to modify the values of concepts within model inputs to create realistic counterfactuals, and (2) using a Bayesian hierarchical model to quantify the causal effects of concepts at both the example- and dataset-level. Our experiments show that our method can be used to quantify and discover interpretable patterns of unfaithfulness. On a social bias task, we uncover cases where LLM explanations hide the influence of social bias. On a medical question answering task, we uncover cases where LLM explanations provide misleading claims about which pieces of evidence influenced the model's decisions.
HF4Rec: Human-Like Feedback-Driven Optimization Framework for Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Jiakai Tang, Jingsen Zhang, Zihang Tian, Xueyang Feng, Lei Wang, Xu Chen
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Recommendation, Logical Reasoning

Recent advancements in explainable recommendation have greatly bolstered user experience by elucidating the decision-making rationale. However, the existing methods actually fail to provide effective feedback signals for potentially better or worse generated explanations due to their reliance on traditional supervised learning paradigms in sparse interaction data. To address these issues, we propose a novel human-like feedback-driven optimization framework. This framework employs a dynamic interactive optimization mechanism for achieving human-centered explainable requirements without incurring high labor costs. Specifically, we propose to utilize large language models (LLMs) as human simulators to predict human-like feedback for guiding the learning process. To enable the LLMs to deeply understand the task essence and meet user's diverse personalized requirements, we introduce a human-induced customized reward scoring method, which helps stimulate the language understanding and logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Furthermore, considering the potential conflicts between different perspectives of explanation quality, we introduce a principled Pareto optimization that transforms the multi-perspective quality enhancement task into a multi-objective optimization problem for improving explanation performance. At last, to achieve efficient model training, we design an off-policy optimization pipeline. By incorporating a replay buffer and addressing the data distribution biases, we can effectively improve data utilization and enhance model generality. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
ThyroidEffi 1.0: A Cost-Effective System for High-Performance Multi-Class Thyroid Carcinoma Classification
Authors: Hai Pham-Ngoc, De Nguyen-Van, Dung Vu-Tien, Phuong Le-Hong
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Diagnostic, image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-class Classification

Background: Automated classification of thyroid fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) images faces challenges in limited data, inter-observer variability, and computational cost. Efficient, interpretable models are crucial for clinical support. Objective: To develop and externally validate a deep learning system for the multi-class classification of thyroid FNAB images into three key categories that directly guide post-biopsy treatment decisions in Vietnam: benign (B2), suspicious for malignancy (B5), and malignant (B6), while achieving high diagnostic accuracy with low computational overhead. Methods: Our framework features: (1) YOLOv10-based cell cluster detection for informative sub-region extraction and noise reduction; (2) a curriculum learning-inspired protocol sequencing localized crops to full images for multi-scale feature capture; (3) adaptive lightweight EfficientNetB0 (4 millions parameters) selection balancing performance and efficiency; and (4) a Transformer-inspired module for multi-scale, multi-region analysis. External validation used 1,015 independent FNAB images. Results: ThyroidEffi Basic achieved a macro F1 of 89.19\% and AUCs of 0.98 (B2), 0.95 (B5), and 0.96 (B6) on the internal test set. External validation yielded AUCs of 0.9495 (B2), 0.7436 (B5), and 0.8396 (B6). ThyroidEffi Premium improved macro F1 to 89.77\%. Grad-CAM highlighted key diagnostic regions, confirming interpretability. The system processed 1000 cases in 30 seconds, demonstrating feasibility on widely accessible hardware like a 12-core CPU. Conclusions: This work demonstrates that high-accuracy, interpretable thyroid FNAB image classification is achievable with minimal computational demands.
Personalized News Recommendation with Multi-granularity Candidate-aware User Modeling
Authors: Qiang Li, Xinze Lin, Shenghao Lv, Faliang Huang, Xiangju Li
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, News Recommendation

Matching candidate news with user interests is crucial for personalized news recommendations. Most existing methods can represent a user's reading interests through a single profile based on clicked news, which may not fully capture the diversity of user interests. Although some approaches incorporate candidate news or topic information, they remain insufficient because they neglect the multi-granularity relatedness between candidate news and user interests. To address this, this study proposed a multi-granularity candidate-aware user modeling framework that integrated user interest features across various levels of granularity. It consisted of two main components: candidate news encoding and user modeling. A news textual information extractor and a knowledge-enhanced entity information extractor can capture candidate news features, and word-level, entity-level, and news-level candidate-aware mechanisms can provide a comprehensive representation of user interests. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed model could significantly outperform baseline models.
TALES: Text Adventure Learning Environment Suite
Authors: Christopher Zhang Cui, Xingdi Yuan, Zhang Xiao, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Reasoning is an essential skill to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with the world. As tasks become more complex, they demand increasingly sophisticated and diverse reasoning capabilities for sequential decision-making, requiring structured reasoning over the context history to determine the next best action. We introduce TALES, a diverse collection of synthetic and human-written text-adventure games designed to challenge and evaluate diverse reasoning capabilities. We present results over a range of LLMs, open- and closed-weights, performing a qualitative analysis on the top performing models. Despite an impressive showing on synthetic games, even the top LLM-driven agents fail to achieve 15% on games designed for human enjoyment. Code and visualization of the experiments can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/tales.
Large Language Model Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization for Hyperparameter Tuning for Deep Learning Models
Authors: Saad Hameed, Basheer Qolomany, Samir Brahim Belhaouari, Mohamed Abdallah, Junaid Qadir, Ala Al-Fuqaha
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Material Classification, regression, Time Series Regression

Determining the ideal architecture for deep learning models, such as the number of layers and neurons, is a difficult and resource-intensive process that frequently relies on human tuning or computationally costly optimization approaches. While Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been individually applied in optimization and deep learning, their combined use for enhancing convergence in numerical optimization tasks remains underexplored. Our work addresses this gap by integrating LLMs into PSO to reduce model evaluations and improve convergence for deep learning hyperparameter tuning. The proposed LLM-enhanced PSO method addresses the difficulties of efficiency and convergence by using LLMs (particularly ChatGPT-3.5 and Llama3) to improve PSO performance, allowing for faster achievement of target objectives. Our method speeds up search space exploration by substituting underperforming particle placements with best suggestions offered by LLMs. Comprehensive experiments across three scenarios -- (1) optimizing the Rastrigin function, (2) using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for time series regression, and (3) using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for material classification -- show that the method significantly improves convergence rates and lowers computational costs. Depending on the application, computational complexity is lowered by 20% to 60% compared to traditional PSO methods. Llama3 achieved a 20% to 40% reduction in model calls for regression tasks, whereas ChatGPT-3.5 reduced model calls by 60% for both regression and classification tasks, all while preserving accuracy and error rates. This groundbreaking methodology offers a very efficient and effective solution for optimizing deep learning models, leading to substantial computational performance improvements across a wide range of applications.
Exploring Language Patterns of Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation and Their Impact on Visual Diversity
Authors: Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini, Eva Cetinic
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Following the initial excitement, Text-to-Image (TTI) models are now being examined more critically. While much of the discourse has focused on biases and stereotypes embedded in large-scale training datasets, the sociotechnical dynamics of user interactions with these models remain underexplored. This study examines the linguistic and semantic choices users make when crafting prompts and how these choices influence the diversity of generated outputs. Analyzing over six million prompts from the Civiverse dataset on the CivitAI platform across seven months, we categorize users into three groups based on their levels of linguistic experimentation: consistent repeaters, occasional repeaters, and non-repeaters. Our findings reveal that as user participation grows over time, prompt language becomes increasingly homogenized through the adoption of popular community tags and descriptors, with repeated prompts comprising 40-50% of submissions. At the same time, semantic similarity and topic preferences remain relatively stable, emphasizing common subjects and surface aesthetics. Using Vendi scores to quantify visual diversity, we demonstrate a clear correlation between lexical similarity in prompts and the visual similarity of generated images, showing that linguistic repetition reinforces less diverse representations. These findings highlight the significant role of user-driven factors in shaping AI-generated imagery, beyond inherent model biases, and underscore the need for tools and practices that encourage greater linguistic and thematic experimentation within TTI systems to foster more inclusive and diverse AI-generated content.
Bayesian Principles Improve Prompt Learning In Vision-Language Models
Authors: Mingyu Kim, Jongwoo Ko, Mijung Park
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Prompt learning is a popular fine-tuning method for vision-language models due to its efficiency. It requires a small number of additional learnable parameters while significantly enhancing performance on target tasks. However, most existing methods suffer from overfitting to fine-tuning data, yielding poor generalizability. To address this, we propose a new training objective function based on a Bayesian learning principle to balance adaptability and generalizability. We derive a prior over the logits, where the mean function is parameterized by the pre-trained model, while the posterior corresponds to the fine-tuned model. This objective establishes a balance by allowing the fine-tuned model to adapt to downstream tasks while remaining close to the pre-trained model.
CodeCrash: Stress Testing LLM Reasoning under Structural and Semantic Perturbations
Authors: Man Ho Lam, Chaozheng Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Michael R. Lyu
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in code-related tasks, yet their robustness in code comprehension and reasoning remains insufficiently explored. We present CodeCrash, a comprehensive stress-testing benchmark comprising 1,279 questions from two established datasets, CruxEval and LiveCodeBench, designed to evaluate model reasoning reliability under non-standard coding environments. We systematically evaluate 17 LLMs across input and output prediction tasks using direct and Chain-of-Thought prompting approaches, revealing that LLMs are particularly vulnerable to disorganized code and overly reliant on natural language cues: aggregated structural perturbations result in over 14 percentage points (pp) of degradation, while textual perturbations cause a performance drop of over 11 pp. Moreover, self-reflective mechanisms in state-of-the-art reasoning models significantly increase token usage by 2-3 times, reduce output confidence, and even lead to catastrophic reasoning failures when faced with targeted perturbations -- for instance, QwQ-32B generates over 12,000 redundant tokens under reasoning-level perturbations. CodeCrash provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating robustness in code understanding, guiding future research toward more reliable and resilient LLMs in code reasoning. The benchmark code, perturbed datasets, and full leaderboard are publicly available at https://cuhk-arise.github.io/CodeCrash/ .