pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Activating Associative Disease-Aware Vision Token Memory for LLM-Based X-ray Report Generation
Authors: Xiao Wang, Fuling Wang, Haowen Wang, Bo Jiang, Chuanfu Li, YaoWei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Medical Report Generation

X-ray image based medical report generation achieves significant progress in recent years with the help of the large language model, however, these models have not fully exploited the effective information in visual image regions, resulting in reports that are linguistically sound but insufficient in describing key diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel associative memory-enhanced X-ray report generation model that effectively mimics the process of professional doctors writing medical reports. It considers both the mining of global and local visual information and associates historical report information to better complete the writing of the current report. Specifically, given an X-ray image, we first utilize a classification model along with its activation maps to accomplish the mining of visual regions highly associated with diseases and the learning of disease query tokens. Then, we employ a visual Hopfield network to establish memory associations for disease-related tokens, and a report Hopfield network to retrieve report memory information. This process facilitates the generation of high-quality reports based on a large language model and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets, including the IU X-ray, MIMIC-CXR, and Chexpert Plus. The source code of this work is released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/Medical_Image_Analysis}.
Optimization Learning
Authors: Pascal Van Hentenryck
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00

This article introduces the concept of optimization learning, a methodology to design optimization proxies that learn the input/output mapping of parametric optimization problems. These optimization proxies are trustworthy by design: they compute feasible solutions to the underlying optimization problems, provide quality guarantees on the returned solutions, and scale to large instances. Optimization proxies are differentiable programs that combine traditional deep learning technology with repair or completion layers to produce feasible solutions. The article shows that optimization proxies can be trained end-to-end in a self-supervised way. It presents methodologies to provide performance guarantees and to scale optimization proxies to large-scale optimization problems. The potential of optimization proxies is highlighted through applications in power systems and, in particular, real-time risk assessment and security-constrained optimal power flow.
SALT: Sales Autocompletion Linked Business Tables Dataset
Authors: Tassilo Klein, Clemens Biehl, Margarida Costa, Andre Sres, Jonas Kolk, Johannes Hoffart
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: ERP, Representation Learning

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.
BoundingDocs: a Unified Dataset for Document Question Answering with Spatial Annotations
Authors: Simone Giovannini, Fabio Coppini, Andrea Gemelli, Simone Marinai
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Document AI, document understanding, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Position, Question Answering

We present a unified dataset for document Question-Answering (QA), which is obtained combining several public datasets related to Document AI and visually rich document understanding (VRDU). Our main contribution is twofold: on the one hand we reformulate existing Document AI tasks, such as Information Extraction (IE), into a Question-Answering task, making it a suitable resource for training and evaluating Large Language Models; on the other hand, we release the OCR of all the documents and include the exact position of the answer to be found in the document image as a bounding box. Using this dataset, we explore the impact of different prompting techniques (that might include bounding box information) on the performance of open-weight models, identifying the most effective approaches for document comprehension.
Enhanced Importance Sampling through Latent Space Exploration in Normalizing Flows
Authors: Liam A. Kruse, Alexandros E. Tzikas, Harrison Delecki, Mansur M. Arief, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Racing, Collision Avoidance

Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows for more efficient estimation of rare events or tails of distributions. However, importance sampling can fail when the proposal distribution does not effectively cover the target distribution. In this work, we propose a method for more efficient sampling by updating the proposal distribution in the latent space of a normalizing flow. Normalizing flows learn an invertible mapping from a target distribution to a simpler latent distribution. The latent space can be more easily explored during the search for a proposal distribution, and samples from the proposal distribution are recovered in the space of the target distribution via the invertible mapping. We empirically validate our methodology on simulated robotics applications such as autonomous racing and aircraft ground collision avoidance.
Over-the-Air Fair Federated Learning via Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Shayan Mohajer Hamidi, Ali Bereyhi, Saba Asaad, H. Vincent Poor
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

In federated learning (FL), heterogeneity among the local dataset distributions of clients can result in unsatisfactory performance for some, leading to an unfair model. To address this challenge, we propose an over-the-air fair federated learning algorithm (OTA-FFL), which leverages over-the-air computation to train fair FL models. By formulating FL as a multi-objective minimization problem, we introduce a modified Chebyshev approach to compute adaptive weighting coefficients for gradient aggregation in each communication round. To enable efficient aggregation over the multiple access channel, we derive analytical solutions for the optimal transmit scalars at the clients and the de-noising scalar at the parameter server. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OTA-FFL in achieving fairness and robust performance compared to existing methods.
Existential Crisis: A Social Robot's Reason for Being
Authors: Dora Medgyesy, Joella Galas, Julian van Pol, Rustam Eynaliyev, Thijs Vollebregt
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Text

As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using LLMs and speech to text technology, we designed a within-subject study to compare two conditions: a personality-driven robot and a purely task-oriented, personality-neutral robot. Twelve participants, recruited from Socially Intelligent Robotics course at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, interacted with a robot Nao tasked with asking them a set of medical questions under both conditions. After completing both interactions, the participants completed a user experience questionnaire measuring their emotional states and robot perception using standardized questionnaires from the SRI and Psychology literature.
License Plate Images Generation with Diffusion Models
Authors: Mariia Shpir, Nadiya Shvai, Amir Nakib
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: License Plate Recognition, Synthetic Data Generation, Video Generation

Despite the evident practical importance of license plate recognition (LPR), corresponding research is limited by the volume of publicly available datasets due to privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To address this challenge, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising approach. In this paper, we propose to synthesize realistic license plates (LPs) using diffusion models, inspired by recent advances in image and video generation. In our experiments a diffusion model was successfully trained on a Ukrainian LP dataset, and 1000 synthetic images were generated for detailed analysis. Through manual classification and annotation of the generated images, we performed a thorough study of the model output, such as success rate, character distributions, and type of failures. Our contributions include experimental validation of the efficacy of diffusion models for LP synthesis, along with insights into the characteristics of the generated data. Furthermore, we have prepared a synthetic dataset consisting of 10,000 LP images, publicly available at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13342102. Conducted experiments empirically confirm the usefulness of synthetic data for the LPR task. Despite the initial performance gap between the model trained with real and synthetic data, the expansion of the training data set with pseudolabeled synthetic data leads to an improvement in LPR accuracy by 3% compared to baseline.
Advanced Machine Learning Techniques for Social Support Detection on Social Media
Authors: Olga Kolesnikova, Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Ameeta Agrawal, Raul Monroy, Grigori Sidorov
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

The widespread use of social media highlights the need to understand its impact, particularly the role of online social support. This study uses a dataset focused on online social support, which includes binary and multiclass classifications of social support content on social media. The classification of social support is divided into three tasks. The first task focuses on distinguishing between supportive and non-supportive. The second task aims to identify whether the support is directed toward an individual or a group. The third task categorizes the specific type of social support, grouping it into categories such as Nation, LGBTQ, Black people, Women, Religion, and Other (if it does not fit into the previously mentioned categories). To address data imbalances in these tasks, we employed K-means clustering for balancing the dataset and compared the results with the original unbalanced data. Using advanced machine learning techniques, including transformers and zero-shot learning approaches with GPT3, GPT4, and GPT4-o, we predict social support levels in various contexts. The effectiveness of the dataset is evaluated using baseline models across different learning approaches, with transformer-based methods demonstrating superior performance. Additionally, we achieved a 0.4\% increase in the macro F1 score for the second task and a 0.7\% increase for the third task, compared to previous work utilizing traditional machine learning with psycholinguistic and unigram-based TF-IDF values.
FTA-FTL: A Fine-Tuned Aggregation Federated Transfer Learning Scheme for Lithology Microscopic Image Classification
Authors: Keyvan RahimiZadeh, Ahmad Taheri, Jan Baumbach, Esmael Makarian, Abbas Dehghani, Bahman Ravaei, Bahman Javadi, Amin Beheshti
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Specificity, Transfer Learning

Lithology discrimination is a crucial activity in characterizing oil reservoirs, and processing lithology microscopic images is an essential technique for investigating fossils and minerals and geological assessment of shale oil exploration. In this way, Deep Learning (DL) technique is a powerful approach for building robust classifier models. However, there is still a considerable challenge to collect and produce a large dataset. Transfer-learning and data augmentation techniques have emerged as popular approaches to tackle this problem. Furthermore, due to different reasons, especially data privacy, individuals, organizations, and industry companies often are not willing to share their sensitive data and information. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to train a highly accurate central model across multiple decentralized edge servers without transferring sensitive data, preserving sensitive data, and enhancing security. This study involves two phases; the first phase is to conduct Lithology microscopic image classification on a small dataset using transfer learning. In doing so, various pre-trained DL model architectures are comprehensively compared for the classification task. In the second phase, we formulated the classification task to a Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) scheme and proposed a Fine-Tuned Aggregation strategy for Federated Learning (FTA-FTL). In order to perform a comprehensive experimental study, several metrics such as accuracy, f1 score, precision, specificity, sensitivity (recall), and confusion matrix are taken into account. The results are in excellent agreement and confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme, and show that the proposed FTA-FTL algorithm is capable enough to achieve approximately the same results obtained by the centralized implementation for Lithology microscopic images classification task.
Analyzing Bias in Swiss Federal Supreme Court Judgments Using Facebook's Holistic Bias Dataset: Implications for Language Model Training
Authors: Sabine Wehnert, Muhammet Ertas, Ernesto William De Luca
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is vital for computers to process and respond accurately to human language. However, biases in training data can introduce unfairness, especially in predicting legal judgment. This study focuses on analyzing biases within the Swiss Judgment Prediction Dataset (SJP-Dataset). Our aim is to ensure unbiased factual descriptions essential for fair decision making by NLP models in legal contexts. We analyze the dataset using social bias descriptors from the Holistic Bias dataset and employ advanced NLP techniques, including attention visualization, to explore the impact of dispreferred descriptors on model predictions. The study identifies biases and examines their influence on model behavior. Challenges include dataset imbalance and token limits affecting model performance.
Rethinking Byzantine Robustness in Federated Recommendation from Sparse Aggregation Perspective
Authors: Zhongjian Zhang, Mengmei Zhang, Xiao Wang, Lingjuan Lyu, Bo Yan, Junping Du, Chuan Shi
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Recommendation Systems

To preserve user privacy in recommender systems, federated recommendation (FR) based on federated learning (FL) emerges, keeping the personal data on the local client and updating a model collaboratively. Unlike FL, FR has a unique sparse aggregation mechanism, where the embedding of each item is updated by only partial clients, instead of full clients in a dense aggregation of general FL. Recently, as an essential principle of FL, model security has received increasing attention, especially for Byzantine attacks, where malicious clients can send arbitrary updates. The problem of exploring the Byzantine robustness of FR is particularly critical since in the domains applying FR, e.g., e-commerce, malicious clients can be injected easily by registering new accounts. However, existing Byzantine works neglect the unique sparse aggregation of FR, making them unsuitable for our problem. Thus, we make the first effort to investigate Byzantine attacks on FR from the perspective of sparse aggregation, which is non-trivial: it is not clear how to define Byzantine robustness under sparse aggregations and design Byzantine attacks under limited knowledge/capability. In this paper, we reformulate the Byzantine robustness under sparse aggregation by defining the aggregation for a single item as the smallest execution unit. Then we propose a family of effective attack strategies, named Spattack, which exploit the vulnerability in sparse aggregation and are categorized along the adversary's knowledge and capability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Spattack can effectively prevent convergence and even break down defenses under a few malicious clients, raising alarms for securing FR systems.
A Soft Sensor Method with Uncertainty-Awareness and Self-Explanation Based on Large Language Models Enhanced by Domain Knowledge Retrieval
Authors: Shuo Tong, Han Liu, Runyuan Guo, Wenqing Wang, Xueqiong Tian, Lingyun Wei, Lin Zhang, Huayong Wu, Ding Liu, Youmin Zhang
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Sensor Modeling, Uncertainty Quantification, Variable Selection

Data-driven soft sensors are crucial in predicting key performance indicators in industrial systems. However, current methods predominantly rely on the supervised learning paradigms of parameter updating, which inherently faces challenges such as high development costs, poor robustness, training instability, and lack of interpretability. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various domains, notably through In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables high-performance task execution with minimal input-label demonstrations and no prior training. This paper aims to replace supervised learning with the emerging ICL paradigm for soft sensor modeling to address existing challenges and explore new avenues for advancement. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework called the Few-shot Uncertainty-aware and self-Explaining Soft Sensor (LLM-FUESS), which includes the Zero-shot Auxiliary Variable Selector (LLM-ZAVS) and the Uncertainty-aware Few-shot Soft Sensor (LLM-UFSS). The LLM-ZAVS retrieves from the Industrial Knowledge Vector Storage to enhance LLMs' domain-specific knowledge, enabling zero-shot auxiliary variable selection. In the LLM-UFSS, we utilize text-based context demonstrations of structured data to prompt LLMs to execute ICL for predicting and propose a context sample retrieval augmentation strategy to improve performance. Additionally, we explored LLMs' AIGC and probabilistic characteristics to propose self-explanation and uncertainty quantification methods for constructing a trustworthy soft sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieved state-of-the-art predictive performance, strong robustness, and flexibility, effectively mitigates training instability found in traditional methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to establish soft sensor utilizing LLMs.
Multi-Modal One-Shot Federated Ensemble Learning for Medical Data with Vision Large Language Model
Authors: Naibo Wang, Yuchen Deng, Shichen Fan, Jianwei Yin, See-Kiong Ng
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Ensemble Learning, Federated Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Medical Image Analysis

Federated learning (FL) has attracted considerable interest in the medical domain due to its capacity to facilitate collaborative model training while maintaining data privacy. However, conventional FL methods typically necessitate multiple communication rounds, leading to significant communication overhead and delays, especially in environments with limited bandwidth. One-shot federated learning addresses these issues by conducting model training and aggregation in a single communication round, thereby reducing communication costs while preserving privacy. Among these, one-shot federated ensemble learning combines independently trained client models using ensemble techniques such as voting, further boosting performance in non-IID data scenarios. On the other hand, existing machine learning methods in healthcare predominantly use unimodal data (e.g., medical images or textual reports), which restricts their diagnostic accuracy and comprehensiveness. Therefore, the integration of multi-modal data is proposed to address these shortcomings. In this paper, we introduce FedMME, an innovative one-shot multi-modal federated ensemble learning framework that utilizes multi-modal data for medical image analysis. Specifically, FedMME capitalizes on vision large language models to produce textual reports from medical images, employs a BERT model to extract textual features from these reports, and amalgamates these features with visual features to improve diagnostic accuracy. Experimental results show that our method demonstrated superior performance compared to existing one-shot federated learning methods in healthcare scenarios across four datasets with various data distributions. For instance, it surpasses existing one-shot federated learning approaches by more than 17.5% in accuracy on the RSNA dataset when applying a Dirichlet distribution with ($\alpha$ = 0.3).
A Decision-Based Heterogenous Graph Attention Network for Multi-Class Fake News Detection
Authors: Batool Lakzaei, Mostafa Haghir Chehreghani, Alireza Bagheri
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Fake News Detection, Graph Attention

A promising tool for addressing fake news detection is Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, most existing GNN-based methods rely on binary classification, categorizing news as either real or fake. Additionally, traditional GNN models use a static neighborhood for each node, making them susceptible to issues like over-squashing. In this paper, we introduce a novel model named Decision-based Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (DHGAT) for fake news detection in a semi-supervised setting. DHGAT effectively addresses the limitations of traditional GNNs by dynamically optimizing and selecting the neighborhood type for each node in every layer. It represents news data as a heterogeneous graph where nodes (news items) are connected by various types of edges. The architecture of DHGAT consists of a decision network that determines the optimal neighborhood type and a representation network that updates node embeddings based on this selection. As a result, each node learns an optimal and task-specific computational graph, enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of the fake news detection process. We evaluate DHGAT on the LIAR dataset, a large and challenging dataset for multi-class fake news detection, which includes news items categorized into six classes. Our results demonstrate that DHGAT outperforms existing methods, improving accuracy by approximately 4% and showing robustness with limited labeled data.