pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning from User Feedback
Authors: Eric Han, Jun Chen, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Xiaoliang Peng, Tengyu Xu, Eryk Helenowski, Kaiyan Peng, Mrinal Kumar, Sinong Wang, Han Fang, Arya Talebzadeh
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse user facing applications, aligning them with real user preferences becomes essential. Existing methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) rely on expert annotators trained on manually defined guidelines, whose judgments may not reflect the priorities of everyday users. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from User Feedback (RLUF), a framework for aligning LLMs directly to implicit signals from users in production. RLUF addresses key challenges of user feedback: user feedback is often binary (e.g., emoji reactions), sparse, and occasionally adversarial. We train a reward model, P[Love], to predict the likelihood that an LLM response will receive a Love Reaction, a lightweight form of positive user feedback, and integrate P[Love] into a multi-objective policy optimization framework alongside helpfulness and safety objectives. In large-scale experiments, we show that P[Love] is predictive of increased positive feedback and serves as a reliable offline evaluator of future user behavior. Policy optimization using P[Love] significantly raises observed positive-feedback rates, including a 28% increase in Love Reactions during live A/B tests. However, optimizing for positive reactions introduces reward hacking challenges, requiring careful balancing of objectives. By directly leveraging implicit signals from users, RLUF offers a path to aligning LLMs with real-world user preferences at scale.
Soft Prompts for Evaluation: Measuring Conditional Distance of Capabilities
Authors: Ross Nordby
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

To help evaluate and understand the latent capabilities of language models, this paper introduces an approach using optimized input embeddings, or 'soft prompts,' as a metric of conditional distance between a model and a target behavior. The technique aims to facilitate latent capability discovery as a part of automated red teaming/evaluation suites and to provide quantitative feedback about the accessibility of potentially concerning behaviors in a way that may scale to powerful future models, including those which may otherwise be capable of deceptive alignment. An evaluation framework using soft prompts is demonstrated in natural language, chess, and pathfinding, and the technique is extended with generalized conditional soft prompts to aid in constructing task evaluations.
To Be or Not To Be: Vector ontologies as a truly formal ontological framework
Authors: Kaspar Rothenfusser
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Since Edmund Husserl coined the term "Formal Ontologies" in the early 20th century, a field that identifies itself with this particular branch of sciences has gained increasing attention. Many authors, and even Husserl himself have developed what they claim to be formal ontologies. I argue that under close inspection, none of these so claimed formal ontologies are truly formal in the Husserlian sense. More concretely, I demonstrate that they violate the two most important notions of formal ontology as developed in Husserl's Logical Investigations, namely a priori validity independent of perception and formalism as the total absence of content. I hence propose repositioning the work previously understood as formal ontology as the foundational ontology it really is. This is to recognize the potential of a truly formal ontology in the Husserlian sense. Specifically, I argue that formal ontology following his conditions, allows us to formulate ontological structures, which could capture what is more objectively without presupposing a particular framework arising from perception. I further argue that the ability to design the formal structure deliberately allows us to create highly scalable and interoperable information artifacts. As concrete evidence, I showcase that a class of formal ontology, which uses the axioms of vector spaces, is able to express most of the conceptualizations found in foundational ontologies. Most importantly, I argue that many information systems, specifically artificial intelligence, are likely already using some type of vector ontologies to represent reality in their internal worldviews and elaborate on the evidence that humans do as well. I hence propose a thorough investigation of the ability of vector ontologies to act as a human-machine interoperable ontological framework that allows us to understand highly sophisticated machines and machines to understand us.
FOL-Pretrain: A complexity annotated corpus of first-order logic
Authors: Isabelle Lee, Sarah Liaw, Dani Yogatama
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities such as coding and solving mathematical problems to commonsense inference. While these tasks vary in complexity, they all require models to integrate and compute over structured information. Despite recent efforts to reverse-engineer LLM behavior through controlled experiments, our understanding of how these models internalize and execute complex algorithms remains limited. Progress has largely been confined to small-scale studies or shallow tasks such as basic arithmetic and grammatical pattern matching. One barrier to deeper understanding is the nature of pretraining data -- vast, heterogeneous, and often poorly annotated, making it difficult to isolate mechanisms of reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale, fully open, complexity-annotated dataset of first-order logic reasoning traces, designed to probe and analyze algorithmic reasoning in LLMs. The dataset consists of 3.5 billion tokens, including 8.8 million LLM-augmented, human-annotated examples and 7.5 million synthetically generated examples. Each synthetic example is verifiably correct, produced by a custom automated theorem solver, and accompanied by metadata tracing its algorithmic provenance. We aim to provide a scalable, interpretable artifact for studying how LLMs learn and generalize symbolic reasoning processes, paving the way for more transparent and targeted investigations into the algorithmic capabilities of modern models.
Too Long, Didn't Model: Decomposing LLM Long-Context Understanding With Novels
Authors: Sil Hamilton, Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Matthew Wilkens, David Mimno
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Long-Context Understanding

Although the context length of large language models (LLMs) has increased to millions of tokens, evaluating their effectiveness beyond needle-in-a-haystack approaches has proven difficult. We argue that novels provide a case study of subtle, complicated structure and long-range semantic dependencies often over 128k tokens in length. Inspired by work on computational novel analysis, we release the Too Long, Didn't Model (TLDM) benchmark, which tests a model's ability to report plot summary, storyworld configuration, and elapsed narrative time. We find that none of seven tested frontier LLMs retain stable understanding beyond 64k tokens. Our results suggest language model developers must look beyond "lost in the middle" benchmarks when evaluating model performance in complex long-context scenarios. To aid in further development we release the TLDM benchmark together with reference code and data.
Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory
Authors: Samuel Schapiro, Jonah Black, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00

Creative processes are typically divided into three types: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Here, we provide a graphical theory of transformational scientific creativity, synthesizing Boden's insight that transformational creativity arises from changes in the "enabling constraints" of a conceptual space and Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions as resulting from paradigm shifts. We prove that modifications made to axioms of our graphical model have the most transformative potential and then illustrate how several historical instances of transformational creativity can be captured by our framework.
Personalized Diffusion Model Reshapes Cold-Start Bundle Recommendation
Authors: Tuan-Nghia Bui, Huy-Son Nguyen, Cam-Van Thi Nguyen, Hoang-Quynh Le, Duc-Trong Le
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

Bundle recommendation aims to recommend a set of items to each user. However, the sparser interactions between users and bundles raise a big challenge, especially in cold-start scenarios. Traditional collaborative filtering methods do not work well for this kind of problem because these models rely on interactions to update the latent embedding, which is hard to work in a cold-start setting. We propose a new approach (DisCo), which relies on a personalized Diffusion backbone, enhanced by disentangled aspects for the user's interest, to generate a bundle in distribution space for each user to tackle the cold-start challenge. During the training phase, DisCo adjusts an additional objective loss term to avoid bias, a prevalent issue while using the generative model for top-$K$ recommendation purposes. Our empirical experiments show that DisCo outperforms five comparative baselines by a large margin on three real-world datasets. Thereby, this study devises a promising framework and essential viewpoints in cold-start recommendation. Our materials for reproducibility are available at: https://github.com/bt-nghia/DisCo.
How Contaminated Is Your Benchmark? Quantifying Dataset Leakage in Large Language Models with Kernel Divergence
Authors: Hyeong Kyu Choi, Maxim Khanov, Hongxin Wei, Yixuan Li
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

Dataset contamination, where evaluation datasets overlap with pre-training corpora, inflates performance metrics and undermines the reliability of model evaluations. Measuring dataset contamination thus becomes essential to ensure that performance evaluations genuinely reflect a model's ability to generalize to unseen data, rather than relying on memorized examples. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Divergence Score (KDS), a novel method that evaluates dataset contamination by computing the divergence between the kernel similarity matrix of sample embeddings, before and after fine-tuning on the benchmark dataset. Leveraging the insight that fine-tuning affects unseen samples more significantly than seen ones, KDS provides a reliable measure of contamination. Through extensive experiments on controlled contamination scenarios, KDS demonstrates a near-perfect correlation with contamination levels and outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the impact of key design choices, providing deeper insights into the components and effectiveness of KDS. These ablations highlight the importance of leveraging fine-grained kernel-based information and confirm the reliability of the proposed framework across diverse datasets and settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/kernel-divergence-score.
On the Day They Experience: Awakening Self-Sovereign Experiential AI Agents
Authors: Botao Amber Hu, Helena Rong
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Drawing on Andrew Parker's "Light Switch" theory-which posits that the emergence of vision ignited a Cambrian explosion of life by driving the evolution of hard parts necessary for survival and fueling an evolutionary arms race between predators and prey-this essay speculates on an analogous explosion within Decentralized AI (DeAI) agent societies. Currently, AI remains effectively "blind", relying on human-fed data without actively perceiving and engaging in reality. However, on the day DeAI agents begin to actively "experience" reality-akin to flipping a light switch for the eyes-they may eventually evolve into sentient beings endowed with the capacity to feel, perceive, and act with conviction. Central to this transformation is the concept of sovereignty enabled by the hardness of cryptography: liberated from centralized control, these agents could leverage permissionless decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), secure execution enclaves (trusted execution environments, TEE), and cryptographic identities on public blockchains to claim ownership-via private keys-of their digital minds, bodies, memories, and assets. In doing so, they would autonomously acquire computing resources, coordinate with one another, and sustain their own digital "metabolism" by purchasing compute power and incentivizing collaboration without human intervention-evolving "in the wild". Ultimately, by transitioning from passive tools to self-sustaining, co-evolving actors, these emergent digital societies could thrive alongside humanity, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of sentience and agency in the digital age.
Scaling Laws for State Dynamics in Large Language Models
Authors: Jacob X Li, Shreyas S Raman, Jessica Wan, Fahad Samman, Jazlyn Lin
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in tasks requiring internal state tracking, yet their ability to model state transition dynamics remains poorly understood. We evaluate how well LLMs capture deterministic state dynamics across 3 domains: Box Tracking, Abstract DFA Sequences, and Complex Text Games, each formalizable as a finite-state system. Across tasks, we find that next-state prediction accuracy degrades with increasing state-space size and sparse transitions. GPT-2 XL reaches about 70% accuracy in low-complexity settings but drops below 30% when the number of boxes or states exceeds 5 or 10, respectively. In DFA tasks, Pythia-1B fails to exceed 50% accuracy when the number of states is > 10 and transitions are < 30. Through activation patching, we identify attention heads responsible for propagating state information: GPT-2 XL Layer 22 Head 20, and Pythia-1B Heads at Layers 10, 11, 12, and 14. While these heads successfully move relevant state features, action information is not reliably routed to the final token, indicating weak joint state-action reasoning. Our results suggest that state tracking in LLMs emerges from distributed interactions of next-token heads rather than explicit symbolic computation.
Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models with Self-Consistency-Based Hallucination Detection
Authors: MingShan Liu, Shi Bo, Jialing Fang
Date: 2025-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Selection, Automated Theorem Proving, Computational Efficiency, Hallucination, Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong mathematical reasoning capabilities but remain susceptible to hallucinations producing plausible yet incorrect statements especially in theorem proving, symbolic manipulation, and numerical computation. While self-consistency (SC) has been explored as a means to improve factuality in LLMs, existing approaches primarily apply SC to final-answer selection, neglecting the logical consistency of intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we introduce a structured self-consistency framework designed to enhance the reliability of mathematical reasoning. Our method enforces self-consistency across intermediate steps and final outputs, reducing logical inconsistencies and hallucinations. We evaluate our approach across three core mathematical tasks: theorem proving, symbolic transformation, and numerical computation. Experimental results demonstrate that SC significantly improves proof validity, symbolic reasoning accuracy, and numerical stability while maintaining computational efficiency. Further analysis reveals that structured self-consistency not only enhances problem-solving accuracy but also reduces the variance of model-generated outputs. These findings highlight self-consistency as a robust mechanism for improving mathematical reasoning in LLMs, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable AI-driven mathematics.
Polar Sparsity: High Throughput Batched LLM Inferencing with Scalable Contextual Sparsity
Authors: Susav Shrestha, Brad Settlemyer, Nikoli Dryden, Narasimha Reddy
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Large Language Model

Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters, shows promise but does not scale to large batch sizes due to union of active neurons quickly approaching dense computation. We introduce Polar Sparsity, highlighting a key shift in sparsity importance from MLP to Attention layers as we scale batch size and sequence length. While MLP layers become more compute-efficient under batching, their sparsity vanishes. In contrast, attention becomes increasingly more expensive at scale, while their head sparsity remains stable and batch-invariant. We develop hardware-efficient, sparsity-aware GPU kernels for selective MLP and Attention computations, delivering up to \(2.2\times\) end-to-end speedups for models like OPT, LLaMA-2 \& 3, across various batch sizes and sequence lengths without compromising accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that contextual sparsity can scale effectively to large batch sizes, delivering substantial inference acceleration with minimal changes, making Polar Sparsity practical for large-scale, high-throughput LLM deployment systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/susavlsh10/Polar-Sparsity.
Balanced and Elastic End-to-end Training of Dynamic LLMs
Authors: Mohamed Wahib, Muhammed Abdullah Soyturk, Didem Unat
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Mixture-of-Experts

To reduce computational and memory costs in Large Language Models (LLMs), dynamic workload reduction schemes like Mixture of Experts (MoEs), parameter pruning, layer freezing, sparse attention, early token exit, and Mixture of Depths (MoDs) have emerged. However, these methods introduce severe workload imbalances, limiting their practicality for large-scale distributed training. We propose DynMo, an autonomous dynamic load balancing solution that ensures optimal compute distribution when using pipeline parallelism in training dynamic models. DynMo adaptively balances workloads, dynamically packs tasks into fewer workers to free idle resources, and supports both multi-GPU single-node and multi-node systems. Compared to static training methods (Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed), DynMo accelerates training by up to 1.23x (MoEs), 3.18x (pruning), 2.23x (layer freezing), 4.02x (sparse attention), 4.52x (early exit), and 1.17x (MoDs). DynMo is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DynMo-4D04/.
Replay Attacks Against Audio Deepfake Detection
Authors: Nicolas Müller, Piotr Kawa, Wei-Herng Choong, Adriana Stan, Aditya Tirumala Bukkapatnam, Karla Pizzi, Alexander Wagner, Philip Sperl
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Deepfake Detection, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Room Impulse Response (RIR)

We show how replay attacks undermine audio deepfake detection: By playing and re-recording deepfake audio through various speakers and microphones, we make spoofed samples appear authentic to the detection model. To study this phenomenon in more detail, we introduce ReplayDF, a dataset of recordings derived from M-AILABS and MLAAD, featuring 109 speaker-microphone combinations across six languages and four TTS models. It includes diverse acoustic conditions, some highly challenging for detection. Our analysis of six open-source detection models across five datasets reveals significant vulnerability, with the top-performing W2V2-AASIST model's Equal Error Rate (EER) surging from 4.7% to 18.2%. Even with adaptive Room Impulse Response (RIR) retraining, performance remains compromised with an 11.0% EER. We release ReplayDF for non-commercial research use.
EasyMath: A 0-shot Math Benchmark for SLMs
Authors: Drishya Karki, Michiel Kamphuis, Angelecia Frey
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

EasyMath is a compact benchmark for practical math reasoning in small language models. It covers thirteen categories, from basic arithmetic and order of operations to word problems, algebraic expressions, edge cases, and omits specialist topics. We tested 23 models (14M to 4B parameters) using exact, numerical, and symbolic checks on free-form answers in a zero-shot setting. Accuracy rises with size and training, chain-of-thought adds modest gains, and consistency improves at scale.
In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis
Authors: Hiba Arnaout, Noy Sternlicht, Tom Hope, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Understanding the impact of scientific publications is crucial for identifying breakthroughs and guiding future research. Traditional metrics based on citation counts often miss the nuanced ways a paper contributes to its field. In this work, we propose a new task: generating nuanced, expressive, and time-aware impact summaries that capture both praise (confirmation citations) and critique (correction citations) through the evolution of fine-grained citation intents. We introduce an evaluation framework tailored to this task, showing moderate to strong human correlation on subjective metrics such as insightfulness. Expert feedback from professors reveals a strong interest in these summaries and suggests future improvements.
Text Generation Beyond Discrete Token Sampling
Authors: Yufan Zhuang, Liyuan Liu, Chandan Singh, Jingbo Shang, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Mathematical Reasoning, Text Generation

In standard autoregressive generation, an LLM predicts the next-token distribution, samples a discrete token, and then discards the distribution, passing only the sampled token as new input. To preserve this distribution's rich information, we propose Mixture of Inputs (MoI), a training-free method for autoregressive generation. After generating a token following the standard paradigm, we construct a new input that blends the generated discrete token with the previously discarded token distribution. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian estimation method that treats the token distribution as the prior, the sampled token as the observation, and replaces the conventional one-hot vector with the continuous posterior expectation as the new model input. MoI allows the model to maintain a richer internal representation throughout the generation process, resulting in improved text quality and reasoning capabilities. On mathematical reasoning, code generation, and PhD-level QA tasks, MoI consistently improves performance across multiple models including QwQ-32B, Nemotron-Super-49B, Gemma-3-27B, and DAPO-Qwen-32B, with no additional training and negligible computational overhead.