pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Image as an IMU: Estimating Camera Motion from a Single Motion-Blurred Image
Authors: Jerred Chen, Ronald Clark
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Motion Estimation, Pose Estimation

In many robotics and VR/AR applications, fast camera motions cause a high level of motion blur, causing existing camera pose estimation methods to fail. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages motion blur as a rich cue for motion estimation rather than treating it as an unwanted artifact. Our approach works by predicting a dense motion flow field and a monocular depth map directly from a single motion-blurred image. We then recover the instantaneous camera velocity by solving a linear least squares problem under the small motion assumption. In essence, our method produces an IMU-like measurement that robustly captures fast and aggressive camera movements. To train our model, we construct a large-scale dataset with realistic synthetic motion blur derived from ScanNet++v2 and further refine our model by training end-to-end on real data using our fully differentiable pipeline. Extensive evaluations on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art angular and translational velocity estimates, outperforming current methods like MASt3R and COLMAP.
NdLinear Is All You Need for Representation Learning
Authors: Alex Reneau, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Zhongfang Zhuang, Ting-Chun Liu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Representation Learning

Many high-impact machine learning tasks involve multi-dimensional data (e.g., images, volumetric medical scans, multivariate time-series). Yet, most neural architectures flatten inputs, discarding critical cross-dimension information. We introduce NdLinear, a novel linear transformation that preserves these structures without extra overhead. By operating separately along each dimension, NdLinear captures dependencies that standard fully connected layers overlook. Extensive experiments across convolutional, recurrent, and transformer-based networks show significant improvements in representational power and parameter efficiency. Crucially, NdLinear serves as a foundational building block for large-scale foundation models by operating on any unimodal or multimodal data in its native form. This removes the need for flattening or modality-specific preprocessing. Ndlinear rethinks core architectural priorities beyond attention, enabling more expressive, context-aware models at scale. We propose NdLinear as a drop-in replacement for standard linear layers -- marking an important step toward next-generation neural architectures.
UniCon: Unidirectional Information Flow for Effective Control of Large-Scale Diffusion Models
Authors: Fanghua Yu, Jinjin Gu, JinFan Hu, Zheyuan Li, Chao Dong
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

We introduce UniCon, a novel architecture designed to enhance control and efficiency in training adapters for large-scale diffusion models. Unlike existing methods that rely on bidirectional interaction between the diffusion model and control adapter, UniCon implements a unidirectional flow from the diffusion network to the adapter, allowing the adapter alone to generate the final output. UniCon reduces computational demands by eliminating the need for the diffusion model to compute and store gradients during adapter training. Our results indicate that UniCon reduces GPU memory usage by one-third and increases training speed by 2.3 times, while maintaining the same adapter parameter size. Additionally, without requiring extra computational resources, UniCon enables the training of adapters with double the parameter volume of existing ControlNets. In a series of image conditional generation tasks, UniCon has demonstrated precise responsiveness to control inputs and exceptional generation capabilities.
MSCA-Net:Multi-Scale Context Aggregation Network for Infrared Small Target Detection
Authors: Xiaojin Lu, Taoran Yue, Jiaxi Cai, Shibing Chu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00

Detecting infrared small targets in complex backgrounds remains a challenging task because of the low contrast and high noise levels inherent in infrared images. These factors often lead to the loss of crucial details during feature extraction. Moreover, existing detection methods have limitations in adequately integrating global and local information, which constrains the efficiency and accuracy of infrared small target detection. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel network architecture named MSCA-Net, which integrates three key components: Multi-Scale Enhanced Detection Attention mechanism(MSEDA), Positional Convolutional Block Attention Module (PCBAM), and Channel Aggregation Block (CAB). Specifically, MSEDA employs a multi-scale feature fusion attention mechanism to adaptively aggregate information across different scales, enriching feature representation. PCBAM captures the correlation between global and local features through a correlation matrix-based strategy, enabling deep feature interaction. Moreover, CAB redistributes input feature channels, facilitating the efficient transmission of beneficial features and further enhancing the model detection capability in complex backgrounds. The experimental results demonstrate that MSCA-Net achieves outstanding small target detection performance in complex backgrounds. Specifically, it attains mIoU scores of 78.43\%, 94.56\%, and 67.08\% on the NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRTSD-1K datasets, respectively, underscoring its effectiveness and strong potential for real-world applications.
Generative adversarial framework to calibrate excursion set models for the 3D morphology of all-solid-state battery cathodes
Authors: Orkun Furat, Sabrina Weber, Johannes Schubert, René Rekers, Maximilian Luczak, Erik Glatt, Andreas Wiegmann, Jürgen Janek, Anja Bielefeld, Volker Schmidt
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All

This paper presents a computational method for generating virtual 3D morphologies of functional materials using low-parametric stochastic geometry models, i.e., digital twins, calibrated with 2D microscopy images. These digital twins allow systematic parameter variations to simulate various morphologies, that can be deployed for virtual materials testing by means of spatially resolved numerical simulations of macroscopic properties. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained popularity for calibrating models to generate realistic 3D morphologies. However, GANs often comprise of numerous uninterpretable parameters make systematic variation of morphologies for virtual materials testing challenging. In contrast, low-parametric stochastic geometry models (e.g., based on Gaussian random fields) enable targeted variation but may struggle to mimic complex morphologies. Combining GANs with advanced stochastic geometry models (e.g., excursion sets of more general random fields) addresses these limitations, allowing model calibration solely from 2D image data. This approach is demonstrated by generating a digital twin of all-solid-state battery (ASSB) cathodes. Since the digital twins are parametric, they support systematic exploration of structural scenarios and their macroscopic properties. The proposed method facilitates simulation studies for optimizing 3D morphologies, benefiting not only ASSB cathodes but also other materials with similar structures.
Modifying Large Language Model Post-Training for Diverse Creative Writing
Authors: John Joon Young Chung, Vishakh Padmakumar, Melissa Roemmele, Yuqian Sun, Max Kreminski
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, valid

As creative writing tasks do not have singular correct answers, large language models (LLMs) trained to perform these tasks should be able to generate diverse valid outputs. However, LLM post-training often focuses on improving generation quality but neglects to facilitate output diversity. Hence, in creative writing generation, we investigate post-training approaches to promote both output diversity and quality. Our core idea is to include deviation -- the degree of difference between a training sample and all other samples with the same prompt -- in the training objective to facilitate learning from rare high-quality instances. By adopting our approach to direct preference optimization (DPO) and odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we demonstrate that we can promote the output diversity of trained models while minimally decreasing quality. Our best model with 8B parameters could achieve on-par diversity as a human-created dataset while having output quality similar to the best instruction-tuned models we examined, GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1. We further validate our approaches with a human evaluation, an ablation, and a comparison to an existing diversification approach, DivPO.
A Digital Machine Learning Algorithm Simulating Spiking Neural Network CoLaNET
Authors: Mikhail Kiselev
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00

During last several years, our research team worked on development of a spiking neural network (SNN) architecture, which could be used in the wide range of supervised learning classification tasks. It should work under the condition, that all participating signals (the classified object description, correct class label and SNN decision) should have spiking nature. As a result, the CoLaNET (columnar layered network) SNN architecture was invented. The distinctive feature of this architecture is a combination of prototypical network structures corresponding to different classes and significantly distinctive instances of one class (=columns) and functionally differing populations of neurons inside columns (=layers). The other distinctive feature is a novel combination of anti-Hebbian and dopamine-modulated plasticity. While CoLaNET is relatively simple, it includes several hyperparameters. Their choice for particular classification tasks is not trivial. Besides that, specific features of the data classified (e.g. classification of separate pictures like in MNIST dataset vs. classifying objects in a continuous video stream) require certain modifications of CoLaNET structure. To solve these problems, the deep mathematical exploration of CoLaNET should be carried out. However, SNNs, being stochastic discrete systems, are usually very hard for exact mathematical analysis. To make it easier, I developed a continuous numeric (non-spiking) machine learning algorithm which approximates CoLaNET behavior with satisfactory accuracy. It is described in the paper. At present, it is being studied by exact analytic methods. We hope that the results of this study could be applied to direct calculation of CoLaNET hyperparameters and optimization of its structure.
PP-DocLayout: A Unified Document Layout Detection Model to Accelerate Large-Scale Data Construction
Authors: Ting Sun, Cheng Cui, Yuning Du, Yi Liu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Document Layout Analysis, GPU

Document layout analysis is a critical preprocessing step in document intelligence, enabling the detection and localization of structural elements such as titles, text blocks, tables, and formulas. Despite its importance, existing layout detection models face significant challenges in generalizing across diverse document types, handling complex layouts, and achieving real-time performance for large-scale data processing. To address these limitations, we present PP-DocLayout, which achieves high precision and efficiency in recognizing 23 types of layout regions across diverse document formats. To meet different needs, we offer three models of varying scales. PP-DocLayout-L is a high-precision model based on the RT-DETR-L detector, achieving 90.4% mAP@0.5 and an end-to-end inference time of 13.4 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-M is a balanced model, offering 75.2% mAP@0.5 with an inference time of 12.7 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-S is a high-efficiency model designed for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications, with an inference time of 8.1 ms per page on a T4 GPU and 14.5 ms on a CPU. This work not only advances the state of the art in document layout analysis but also provides a robust solution for constructing high-quality training data, enabling advancements in document intelligence and multimodal AI systems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleX .
Efficient Intent-Based Filtering for Multi-Party Conversations Using Knowledge Distillation from LLMs
Authors: Reem Gody, Mohamed Abdelghaffar, Mohammed Jabreel, Ahmed Tawfik
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: intent-classification, Intent Classification, Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in conversational AI, enabling open-domain responses in chat-bots, as well as advanced processing of conversations like summarization, intent classification, and insights generation. However, these models are resource-intensive, demanding substantial memory and computational power. To address this, we propose a cost-effective solution that filters conversational snippets of interest for LLM processing, tailored to the target downstream application, rather than processing every snippet. In this work, we introduce an innovative approach that leverages knowledge distillation from LLMs to develop an intent-based filter for multi-party conversations, optimized for compute power constrained environments. Our method combines different strategies to create a diverse multi-party conversational dataset, that is annotated with the target intents and is then used to fine-tune the MobileBERT model for multi-label intent classification. This model achieves a balance between efficiency and performance, effectively filtering conversation snippets based on their intents. By passing only the relevant snippets to the LLM for further processing, our approach significantly reduces overall operational costs depending on the intents and the data distribution as demonstrated in our experiments.
Exploring a Principled Framework for Deep Subspace Clustering
Authors: Xianghan Meng, Zhiyuan Huang, wei he, Xianbiao Qi, Rong Xiao, Chun-Guang Li
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Learning Representations 2025 1
Tasks: Clustering

Subspace clustering is a classical unsupervised learning task, built on a basic assumption that high-dimensional data can be approximated by a union of subspaces (UoS). Nevertheless, the real-world data are often deviating from the UoS assumption. To address this challenge, state-of-the-art deep subspace clustering algorithms attempt to jointly learn UoS representations and self-expressive coefficients. However, the general framework of the existing algorithms suffers from a catastrophic feature collapse and lacks a theoretical guarantee to learn desired UoS representation. In this paper, we present a Principled fRamewOrk for Deep Subspace Clustering (PRO-DSC), which is designed to learn structured representations and self-expressive coefficients in a unified manner. Specifically, in PRO-DSC, we incorporate an effective regularization on the learned representations into the self-expressive model, prove that the regularized self-expressive model is able to prevent feature space collapse, and demonstrate that the learned optimal representations under certain condition lie on a union of orthogonal subspaces. Moreover, we provide a scalable and efficient approach to implement our PRO-DSC and conduct extensive experiments to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed deep subspace clustering approach. The code is available at https://github.com/mengxianghan123/PRO-DSC.
HyperNVD: Accelerating Neural Video Decomposition via Hypernetworks
Authors: Maria Pilligua, Danna Xue, Javier Vazquez-Corral
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Video Editing

Decomposing a video into a layer-based representation is crucial for easy video editing for the creative industries, as it enables independent editing of specific layers. Existing video-layer decomposition models rely on implicit neural representations (INRs) trained independently for each video, making the process time-consuming when applied to new videos. Noticing this limitation, we propose a meta-learning strategy to learn a generic video decomposition model to speed up the training on new videos. Our model is based on a hypernetwork architecture which, given a video-encoder embedding, generates the parameters for a compact INR-based neural video decomposition model. Our strategy mitigates the problem of single-video overfitting and, importantly, shortens the convergence of video decomposition on new, unseen videos. Our code is available at: https://hypernvd.github.io/
Revisiting End-To-End Sparse Autoencoder Training: A Short Finetune Is All You Need
Authors: Adam Karvonen
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model activations with SAE reconstructions. Typically, SAEs are trained solely on mean squared error (MSE) when reconstructing precomputed, shuffled activations. Recent work introduced training SAEs directly with a combination of KL divergence and MSE ("end-to-end" SAEs), significantly improving reconstruction accuracy at the cost of substantially increased computation, which has limited their widespread adoption. We propose a brief KL+MSE fine-tuning step applied only to the final 25M training tokens (just a few percent of typical training budgets) that achieves comparable improvements, reducing the cross-entropy loss gap by 20-50%, while incurring minimal additional computational cost. We further find that multiple fine-tuning methods (KL fine-tuning, LoRA adapters, linear adapters) yield similar, non-additive cross-entropy improvements, suggesting a common, easily correctable error source in MSE-trained SAEs. We demonstrate a straightforward method for effectively transferring hyperparameters and sparsity penalties between training phases despite scale differences between KL and MSE losses. While both ReLU and TopK SAEs see significant cross-entropy loss improvements, evaluations on supervised SAEBench metrics yield mixed results, with improvements on some metrics and decreases on others, depending on both the SAE architecture and downstream task. Nonetheless, our method may offer meaningful improvements in interpretability applications such as circuit analysis with minor additional cost.
Physical Plausibility-aware Trajectory Prediction via Locomotion Embodiment
Authors: Hiromu Taketsugu, Takeru Oba, Takahiro Maeda, Shohei Nobuhara, Norimichi Ukita
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Humans can predict future human trajectories even from momentary observations by using human pose-related cues. However, previous Human Trajectory Prediction (HTP) methods leverage the pose cues implicitly, resulting in implausible predictions. To address this, we propose Locomotion Embodiment, a framework that explicitly evaluates the physical plausibility of the predicted trajectory by locomotion generation under the laws of physics. While the plausibility of locomotion is learned with an indifferentiable physics simulator, it is replaced by our differentiable Locomotion Value function to train an HTP network in a data-driven manner. In particular, our proposed Embodied Locomotion loss is beneficial for efficiently training a stochastic HTP network using multiple heads. Furthermore, the Locomotion Value filter is proposed to filter out implausible trajectories at inference. Experiments demonstrate that our method enhances even the state-of-the-art HTP methods across diverse datasets and problem settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ImIntheMiddle/EmLoco.
A Thorough Assessment of the Non-IID Data Impact in Federated Learning
Authors: Daniel M. Jimenez-Gutierrez, Mehrdad Hassanzadeh, Aris Anagnostopoulos, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Andrea Vitaletti
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning (ML) model training among decentralized clients' information, ensuring data privacy. The decentralized nature of FL deals with non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. This open problem has notable consequences, such as decreased model performance and more significant convergence times. Despite its importance, experimental studies systematically addressing all types of data heterogeneity (a.k.a. non-IIDness) remain scarce. We aim to fill this gap by assessing and quantifying the non-IID effect through a thorough empirical analysis. We use the Hellinger Distance (HD) to measure differences in distribution among clients. Our study benchmarks four state-of-the-art strategies for handling non-IID data, including label, feature, quantity, and spatiotemporal skewness, under realistic and controlled conditions. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the spatiotemporal skew effect in FL. Our findings highlight the significant impact of label and spatiotemporal skew non-IID types on FL model performance, with notable performance drops occurring at specific HD thresholds. Additionally, the FL performance is heavily affected mainly when the non-IIDness is extreme. Thus, we provide recommendations for FL research to tackle data heterogeneity effectively. Our work represents the most extensive examination of non-IIDness in FL, offering a robust foundation for future research.
Defending Against Gradient Inversion Attacks for Biomedical Images via Learnable Data Perturbation
Authors: Shiyi Jiang, Farshad Firouzi, Krishnendu Chakrabarty
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

The increasing need for sharing healthcare data and collaborating on clinical research has raised privacy concerns. Health information leakage due to malicious attacks can lead to serious problems such as misdiagnoses and patient identification issues. Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) and privacy-enhancing technologies, particularly federated learning (FL), have emerged in recent years as innovative solutions to balance privacy protection with data utility; however, they also suffer from inherent privacy vulnerabilities. Gradient inversion attacks constitute major threats to data sharing in federated learning. Researchers have proposed many defenses against gradient inversion attacks. However, current defense methods for healthcare data lack generalizability, i.e., existing solutions may not be applicable to data from a broader range of populations. In addition, most existing defense methods are tested using non-healthcare data, which raises concerns about their applicability to real-world healthcare systems. In this study, we present a defense against gradient inversion attacks in federated learning. We achieve this using latent data perturbation and minimax optimization, utilizing both general and medical image datasets. Our method is compared to two baselines, and the results show that our approach can outperform the baselines with a reduction of 12.5% in the attacker's accuracy in classifying reconstructed images. The proposed method also yields an increase of over 12.4% in Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the original and reconstructed images at the same level of model utility of around 90% client classification accuracy. The results suggest the potential of a generalizable defense for healthcare data.