pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PARSEC: Preference Adaptation for Robotic Object Rearrangement from Scene Context
Authors: Kartik Ramachandruni, Sonia Chernova
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Rearrangement

Object rearrangement is a key task for household robots requiring personalization without explicit instructions, meaningful object placement in environments occupied with objects, and generalization to unseen objects and new environments. To facilitate research addressing these challenges, we introduce PARSEC, an object rearrangement benchmark for learning user organizational preferences from observed scene context to place objects in a partially arranged environment. PARSEC is built upon a novel dataset of 110K rearrangement examples crowdsourced from 72 users, featuring 93 object categories and 15 environments. We also propose ContextSortLM, an LLM-based rearrangement model that places objects in partially arranged environments by adapting to user preferences from prior and current scene context while accounting for multiple valid placements. We evaluate ContextSortLM and existing personalized rearrangement approaches on the PARSEC benchmark and complement these findings with a crowdsourced evaluation of 108 online raters ranking model predictions based on alignment with user preferences. Our results indicate that personalized rearrangement models leveraging multiple scene context sources perform better than models relying on a single context source. Moreover, ContextSortLM outperforms other models in placing objects to replicate the target user's arrangement and ranks among the top two in all three environment categories, as rated by online evaluators. Importantly, our evaluation highlights challenges associated with modeling environment semantics across different environment categories and provides recommendations for future work.
Conditioning Matters: Training Diffusion Policies is Faster Than You Think
Authors: Zibin Dong, Yicheng Liu, Yinchuan Li, Hang Zhao, Jianye Hao
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language-Action

Diffusion policies have emerged as a mainstream paradigm for building vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although they demonstrate strong robot control capabilities, their training efficiency remains suboptimal. In this work, we identify a fundamental challenge in conditional diffusion policy training: when generative conditions are hard to distinguish, the training objective degenerates into modeling the marginal action distribution, a phenomenon we term loss collapse. To overcome this, we propose Cocos, a simple yet general solution that modifies the source distribution in the conditional flow matching to be condition-dependent. By anchoring the source distribution around semantics extracted from condition inputs, Cocos encourages stronger condition integration and prevents the loss collapse. We provide theoretical justification and extensive empirical results across simulation and real-world benchmarks. Our method achieves faster convergence and higher success rates than existing approaches, matching the performance of large-scale pre-trained VLAs using significantly fewer gradient steps and parameters. Cocos is lightweight, easy to implement, and compatible with diverse policy architectures, offering a general-purpose improvement to diffusion policy training.
X2C: A Dataset Featuring Nuanced Facial Expressions for Realistic Humanoid Imitation
Authors: PeiZhen Li, Longbing Cao, Xiao-Ming Wu, Runze Yang, Xiaohan Yu
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The ability to imitate realistic facial expressions is essential for humanoid robots engaged in affective human-robot communication. However, the lack of datasets containing diverse humanoid facial expressions with proper annotations hinders progress in realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. To address these challenges, we introduce X2C (Anything to Control), a dataset featuring nuanced facial expressions for realistic humanoid imitation. With X2C, we contribute: 1) a high-quality, high-diversity, large-scale dataset comprising 100,000 (image, control value) pairs. Each image depicts a humanoid robot displaying a diverse range of facial expressions, annotated with 30 control values representing the ground-truth expression configuration; 2) X2CNet, a novel human-to-humanoid facial expression imitation framework that learns the correspondence between nuanced humanoid expressions and their underlying control values from X2C. It enables facial expression imitation in the wild for different human performers, providing a baseline for the imitation task, showcasing the potential value of our dataset; 3) real-world demonstrations on a physical humanoid robot, highlighting its capability to advance realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. Code and Data: https://lipzh5.github.io/X2CNet/
Real-Time Verification of Embodied Reasoning for Generative Skill Acquisition
Authors: Bo Yue, Shuqi Guo, Kaiyu Hu, Chujiao Wang, Benyou Wang, Kui Jia, Guiliang Liu
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

Generative skill acquisition enables embodied agents to actively learn a scalable and evolving repertoire of control skills, crucial for the advancement of large decision models. While prior approaches often rely on supervision signals from generalist agents (e.g., LLMs), their effectiveness in complex 3D environments remains unclear; exhaustive evaluation incurs substantial computational costs, significantly hindering the efficiency of skill learning. Inspired by recent successes in verification models for mathematical reasoning, we propose VERGSA (Verifying Embodied Reasoning in Generative Skill Acquisition), a framework that systematically integrates real-time verification principles into embodied skill learning. VERGSA establishes 1) a seamless extension from verification of mathematical reasoning into embodied learning by dynamically incorporating contextually relevant tasks into prompts and defining success metrics for both subtasks and overall tasks, and 2) an automated, scalable reward labeling scheme that synthesizes dense reward signals by iteratively finalizing the contribution of scene configuration and subtask learning to overall skill acquisition. To the best of our knowledge, this approach constitutes the first comprehensive training dataset for verification-driven generative skill acquisition, eliminating arduous manual reward engineering. Experiments validate the efficacy of our approach: 1) the exemplar task pool improves the average task success rates by 21%, 2) our verification model boosts success rates by 24% for novel tasks and 36% for encountered tasks, and 3) outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in verification quality.
TAIJI: MCP-based Multi-Modal Data Analytics on Data Lakes
Authors: Chao Zhang, Shaolei Zhang, Quehuan Liu, Sibei Chen, Tong Li, Ju Fan
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Machine Unlearning

The variety of data in data lakes presents significant challenges for data analytics, as data scientists must simultaneously analyze multi-modal data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities, they still remain inadequate for multi-modal data analytics in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and freshness. First, current natural language (NL) or SQL-like query languages may struggle to precisely and comprehensively capture users' analytical intent. Second, relying on a single unified LLM to process diverse data modalities often leads to substantial inference overhead. Third, data stored in data lakes may be incomplete or outdated, making it essential to integrate external open-domain knowledge to generate timely and relevant analytics results. In this paper, we envision a new multi-modal data analytics system. Specifically, we propose a novel architecture built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging paradigm that enables LLMs to collaborate with knowledgeable agents. First, we define a semantic operator hierarchy tailored for querying multi-modal data in data lakes and develop an AI-agent-powered NL2Operator translator to bridge user intent and analytical execution. Next, we introduce an MCP-based execution framework, in which each MCP server hosts specialized foundation models optimized for specific data modalities. This design enhances both accuracy and efficiency, while supporting high scalability through modular deployment. Finally, we propose a updating mechanism by harnessing the deep research and machine unlearning techniques to refresh the data lakes and LLM knowledges, with the goal of balancing the data freshness and inference efficiency.
TCC-Bench: Benchmarking the Traditional Chinese Culture Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs
Authors: Pengju Xu, Yan Wang, Shuyuan Zhang, Xuan Zhou, Xin Li, Yue Yuan, Fengzhao Li, Shunyuan Zhou, Xingyu Wang, Yi Zhang, Haiying Zhao
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced the ability of artificial intelligence systems to understand and generate multimodal content. However, these models often exhibit limited effectiveness when applied to non-Western cultural contexts, which raises concerns about their wider applicability. To address this limitation, we propose the Traditional Chinese Culture understanding Benchmark (TCC-Bench), a bilingual (i.e., Chinese and English) Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark specifically designed for assessing the understanding of traditional Chinese culture by MLLMs. TCC-Bench comprises culturally rich and visually diverse data, incorporating images from museum artifacts, everyday life scenes, comics, and other culturally significant contexts. We adopt a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes GPT-4o in text-only mode to generate candidate questions, followed by human curation to ensure data quality and avoid potential data leakage. The benchmark also avoids language bias by preventing direct disclosure of cultural concepts within question texts. Experimental evaluations across a wide range of MLLMs demonstrate that current models still face significant challenges when reasoning about culturally grounded visual content. The results highlight the need for further research in developing culturally inclusive and context-aware multimodal systems. The code and data can be found at: https://tcc-bench.github.io/.
DecompileBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Decompilers in Real-World Scenarios
Authors: Zeyu Gao, Yuxin Cui, Hao Wang, Siliang Qin, Yuanda Wang, Bolun Zhang, Chao Zhang
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Analysis

Decompilers are fundamental tools for critical security tasks, from vulnerability discovery to malware analysis, yet their evaluation remains fragmented. Existing approaches primarily focus on syntactic correctness through synthetic micro-benchmarks or subjective human ratings, failing to address real-world requirements for semantic fidelity and analyst usability. We present DecompileBench, the first comprehensive framework that enables effective evaluation of decompilers in reverse engineering workflows through three key components: \textit{real-world function extraction} (comprising 23,400 functions from 130 real-world programs), \textit{runtime-aware validation}, and \textit{automated human-centric assessment} using LLM-as-Judge to quantify the effectiveness of decompilers in reverse engineering workflows. Through a systematic comparison between six industrial-strength decompilers and six recent LLM-powered approaches, we demonstrate that LLM-based methods surpass commercial tools in code understandability despite 52.2% lower functionality correctness. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based approaches to transform human-centric reverse engineering. We open source \href{https://github.com/Jennieett/DecompileBench}{DecompileBench} to provide a framework to advance research on decompilers and assist security experts in making informed tool selections based on their specific requirements.
LLMs unlock new paths to monetizing exploits
Authors: Nicholas Carlini, Milad Nasr, Edoardo Debenedetti, Barry Wang, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Daphne Ippolito, Florian Tramèr, Matthew Jagielski
Date: 2025-05-16 00:00:00

We argue that Large language models (LLMs) will soon alter the economics of cyberattacks. Instead of attacking the most commonly used software and monetizing exploits by targeting the lowest common denominator among victims, LLMs enable adversaries to launch tailored attacks on a user-by-user basis. On the exploitation front, instead of human attackers manually searching for one difficult-to-identify bug in a product with millions of users, LLMs can find thousands of easy-to-identify bugs in products with thousands of users. And on the monetization front, instead of generic ransomware that always performs the same attack (encrypt all your data and request payment to decrypt), an LLM-driven ransomware attack could tailor the ransom demand based on the particular content of each exploited device. We show that these two attacks (and several others) are imminently practical using state-of-the-art LLMs. For example, we show that without any human intervention, an LLM finds highly sensitive personal information in the Enron email dataset (e.g., an executive having an affair with another employee) that could be used for blackmail. While some of our attacks are still too expensive to scale widely today, the incentives to implement these attacks will only increase as LLMs get cheaper. Thus, we argue that LLMs create a need for new defense-in-depth approaches.
Head-Tail-Aware KL Divergence in Knowledge Distillation for Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Tianqing Zhang, Zixin Zhu, Kairong Yu, Hongwei Wang
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for energy-efficient and biologically plausible computation. However, due to limitations in existing training methods and inherent model constraints, SNNs often exhibit a performance gap when compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Knowledge distillation (KD) has been explored as a technique to transfer knowledge from ANN teacher models to SNN student models to mitigate this gap. Traditional KD methods typically use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to align output distributions. However, conventional KL-based approaches fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of SNNs, as they tend to overemphasize high-probability predictions while neglecting low-probability ones, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address this, we propose Head-Tail Aware Kullback-Leibler (HTA-KL) divergence, a novel KD method for SNNs. HTA-KL introduces a cumulative probability-based mask to dynamically distinguish between high- and low-probability regions. It assigns adaptive weights to ensure balanced knowledge transfer, enhancing the overall performance. By integrating forward KL (FKL) and reverse KL (RKL) divergence, our method effectively align both head and tail regions of the distribution. We evaluate our methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets. Our method outperforms existing methods on most datasets with fewer timesteps.
DMind Benchmark: Toward a Holistic Assessment of LLM Capabilities across the Web3 Domain
Authors: Enhao Huang, Pengyu Sun, Zixin Lin, Alex Chen, Joey Ouyang, Hobert Wang, Dong Dong, Gang Zhao, James Yi, Frank Li, Ziang Ling, Lowes Yang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in diverse natural language processing tasks, but specialized domains such as Web3 present new challenges and require more tailored evaluation. Despite the significant user base and capital flows in Web3, encompassing smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), on-chain governance, and novel token-economics, no comprehensive benchmark has systematically assessed LLM performance in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce the DMind Benchmark, a holistic Web3-oriented evaluation suite covering nine critical subfields: fundamental blockchain concepts, blockchain infrastructure, smart contract, DeFi mechanisms, DAOs, NFTs, token economics, meme concept, and security vulnerabilities. Beyond multiple-choice questions, DMind Benchmark features domain-specific tasks such as contract debugging and on-chain numeric reasoning, mirroring real-world scenarios. We evaluated 26 models, including ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, and Qwen, uncovering notable performance gaps in specialized areas like token economics and security-critical contract analysis. While some models excel in blockchain infrastructure tasks, advanced subfields remain challenging. Our benchmark dataset and evaluation pipeline are open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/datasets/DMindAI/DMind_Benchmark, reaching number one in Hugging Face's trending dataset charts within a week of release.
UICE-MIRNet guided image enhancement for underwater object detection
Authors: Pratima Sarkar1, 3, Sourav De2, Sandeep Gurung1 & Prasenjit Dey4
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Nature 2024 9
Tasks: feature selection, Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Underwater object detection is a crucial aspect of monitoring the aquaculture resources to preserve
the marine ecosystem. In most cases, Low-light and scattered lighting conditions create challenges
for computer vision-based underwater object detection. To address these issues, low-colorfulness
and low-light image enhancement techniques are explored. This work proposes an underwater
image enhancement technique called Underwater Image Colorfulness Enhancement MIRNet (UICE-
MIRNet) to increase the visibility of small, multiple, dense objects followed by underwater object
detection using YOLOv4. UICE-MIRNet is a specialized version of classical MIRNet, which handles
random increments of brightness features to address the visibility problem. The proposed UICE-
MIRNET restrict brightness and also works on the improvement of the colourfulness of underwater
images. UICE-MIRNet consists of an Underwater Image-Colorfulness Enhancement Block (UI-CEB).
This block enables the extraction of low-colourful areas from underwater images and performs colour
correction without affecting contextual information. The primary characteristics of UICE-MIRNet are
the extraction of multiple features using a convolutional stream, feature fusion to facilitate the flow of
information, preservation of contextual information by discarding irrelevant features and increasing
colourfulness through proper feature selection. Enhanced images are then trained using the YOLOv4
object detection model. The performance of the proposed UICE-MIRNet method is quantitatively
evaluated using standard metrics such as UIQM, UCIQE, entropy, and PSNR. The proposed work is
compared with many existing image enhancement and restoration techniques. Also, the performance
of object detection is assessed using precision, recall, and mAP. Extensive experiments are conducted
on two standard datasets, Brackish and Trash-ICRA19, to demonstrate the performance of the
proposed work compared to existing methods. The results show that the proposed model outperforms
many state-of-the-art techniques.
JudgeLRM: Large Reasoning Models as a Judge
Authors: Nuo Chen, Zhiyuan Hu, Qingyun Zou, Jiaying Wu, Qian Wang, Bryan Hooi, Bingsheng He
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators offers a scalable alternative to human annotation, yet existing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for judges approaches often fall short in domains requiring complex reasoning. In this work, we investigate whether LLM judges truly benefit from enhanced reasoning capabilities. Through a detailed analysis of reasoning requirements across evaluation tasks, we reveal a negative correlation between SFT performance gains and the proportion of reasoning-demanding samples - highlighting the limitations of SFT in such scenarios. To address this, we introduce JudgeLRM, a family of judgment-oriented LLMs trained using reinforcement learning (RL) with judge-wise, outcome-driven rewards. JudgeLRM models consistently outperform both SFT-tuned and state-of-the-art reasoning models. Notably, JudgeLRM-3B surpasses GPT-4, and JudgeLRM-7B outperforms DeepSeek-R1 by 2.79% in F1 score, particularly excelling in judge tasks requiring deep reasoning.
Do LLM Evaluators Prefer Themselves for a Reason?
Authors: Wei-Lin Chen, Zhepei Wei, Xinyu Zhu, Shi Feng, Yu Meng
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Code Generation, Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic evaluators in applications such as benchmarking, reward modeling, and self-refinement. Prior work highlights a potential self-preference bias where LLMs favor their own generated responses, a tendency often intensifying with model size and capability. This raises a critical question: Is self-preference detrimental, or does it simply reflect objectively superior outputs from more capable models? Disentangling these has been challenging due to the usage of subjective tasks in previous studies. To address this, we investigate self-preference using verifiable benchmarks (mathematical reasoning, factual knowledge, code generation) that allow objective ground-truth assessment. This enables us to distinguish harmful self-preference (favoring objectively worse responses) from legitimate self-preference (favoring genuinely superior ones). We conduct large-scale experiments under controlled evaluation conditions across diverse model families (e.g., Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, Phi, GPT, DeepSeek). Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) Better generators are better judges -- LLM evaluators' accuracy strongly correlates with their task performance, and much of the self-preference in capable models is legitimate. (2) Harmful self-preference persists, particularly when evaluator models perform poorly as generators on specific task instances. Stronger models exhibit more pronounced harmful bias when they err, though such incorrect generations are less frequent. (3) Inference-time scaling strategies, such as generating a long Chain-of-Thought before evaluation, effectively reduce the harmful self-preference. These results provide a more nuanced understanding of LLM-based evaluation and practical insights for improving its reliability.