pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Visualization Tasks for Unlabelled Graphs
Authors: Matt I. B. Oddo, Ryan Smith, Stephen Kobourov, Tamara Munzner
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

We investigate tasks that can be accomplished with unlabelled graphs, where nodes do not have persistent or semantically meaningful labels. New techniques to visualize these graphs have been proposed, but more understanding of unlabelled graph tasks is required before they can be adequately evaluated. Some tasks apply to both labelled and unlabelled graphs, but many do not translate between these contexts. We propose a taxonomy of unlabelled graph abstract tasks, organized according to the Scope of the data at play, the Action intended by the user, and the Target data under consideration. We show the descriptive power of this task abstraction by connecting to concrete examples from previous frameworks, and connect these abstractions to real-world problems. To showcase the evaluative power of the taxonomy, we perform a preliminary assessment of 6 visualizations for each task. For each combination of task and visual encoding, we consider the effort required from viewers, the likelihood of task success, and how both factors vary between small-scale and large-scale graphs.
Personalizing Exposure Therapy via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Athar Mahmoudi-Nejad, Matthew Guzdial, Pierre Boulanger
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Personalized therapy, in which a therapeutic practice is adapted to an individual patient, can lead to improved health outcomes. Typically, this is accomplished by relying on a therapist's training and intuition along with feedback from a patient. However, this requires the therapist to become an expert on any technological components, such as in the case of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET). While there exist approaches to automatically adapt therapeutic content to a patient, they generally rely on hand-authored, pre-defined rules, which may not generalize to all individuals. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically adapt therapeutic content to patients based on physiological measures. We implement our approach in the context of virtual reality arachnophobia exposure therapy, and rely on experience-driven procedural content generation via reinforcement learning (EDPCGRL) to generate virtual spiders to match an individual patient. Through a human subject study, we demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms a more common rules-based method, highlighting its potential for enhancing personalized therapeutic interventions.
Transformation of audio embeddings into interpretable, concept-based representations
Authors: Alice Zhang, Edison Thomaz, Lie Lu
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Advancements in audio neural networks have established state-of-the-art results on downstream audio tasks. However, the black-box structure of these models makes it difficult to interpret the information encoded in their internal audio representations. In this work, we explore the semantic interpretability of audio embeddings extracted from these neural networks by leveraging CLAP, a contrastive learning model that brings audio and text into a shared embedding space. We implement a post-hoc method to transform CLAP embeddings into concept-based, sparse representations with semantic interpretability. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that the concept-based representations outperform or match the performance of original audio embeddings on downstream tasks while providing interpretability. Additionally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning the concept-based representations can further improve their performance on downstream tasks. Lastly, we publish three audio-specific vocabularies for concept-based interpretability of audio embeddings.
Contextual Embedding-based Clustering to Identify Topics for Healthcare Service Improvement
Authors: K M Sajjadul Islam, Ravi Teja Karri, Srujan Vegesna, Jiawei Wu, Praveen Madiraju
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Understanding patient feedback is crucial for improving healthcare services, yet analyzing unlabeled short-text feedback presents significant challenges due to limited data and domain-specific nuances. Traditional supervised learning approaches require extensive labeled datasets, making unsupervised methods more viable for uncovering meaningful insights from patient feedback. This study explores unsupervised methods to extract meaningful topics from 439 survey responses collected from a healthcare system in Wisconsin, USA. A keyword-based filtering approach was applied to isolate complaint-related feedback using a domain-specific lexicon. To delve deeper and analyze dominant topics in feedback, we explored traditional topic modeling methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (GSDMM), alongside BERTopic, an advanced neural embedding-based clustering approach. To improve coherence and interpretability where data are scarce and consist of short-texts, we propose kBERT, an integration of BERT embeddings with k-means clustering. Model performance was assessed using coherence scores (Cv ) for topic interpretability and average Inverted Rank-Biased Overlap (IRBOavg) for topic diversity. Results indicate that kBERT achieves the highest coherence (Cv = 0.53) and distinct topic separation (IRBOavg = 1.00), outperforming all other models in short-text healthcare feedback analysis. Our findings emphasize the importance of embedding-based techniques for topic identification and highlight the need for context-aware models in healthcare analytics.
A Baseline for Self-state Identification and Classification in Mental Health Data: CLPsych 2025 Task
Authors: Laerdon Kim
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Binary Classification, Chunking, Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

We present a baseline for the CLPsych 2025 A.1 task: classifying self-states in mental health data taken from Reddit. We use few-shot learning with a 4-bit quantized Gemma 2 9B model and a data preprocessing step which first identifies relevant sentences indicating self-state evidence, and then performs a binary classification to determine whether the sentence is evidence of an adaptive or maladaptive self-state. This system outperforms our other method which relies on an LLM to highlight spans of variable length independently. We attribute the performance of our model to the benefits of this sentence chunking step for two reasons: partitioning posts into sentences 1) broadly matches the granularity at which self-states were human-annotated and 2) simplifies the task for our language model to a binary classification problem. Our system places third out of fourteen systems submitted for Task A.1, achieving a test-time recall of 0.579.
Calliope: An Online Generative Music System for Symbolic Multi-Track Composition
Authors: Renaud Bougueng Tchemeube, Jeff Ens, Philippe Pasquier
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, there has been a rapid increase in its application towards creative domains, including music. There exist many systems built that apply machine learning approaches to the problem of computer-assisted music composition (CAC). Calliope is a web application that assists users in performing a variety of multi-track composition tasks in the symbolic domain. The user can upload (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) MIDI files, visualize and edit MIDI tracks, and generate partial (via bar in-filling) or complete multi-track content using the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM). Generation of new MIDI excerpts can be done in batch and can be combined with active playback listening for an enhanced assisted-composition workflow. The user can export generated MIDI materials or directly stream MIDI playback from the system to their favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). We present a demonstration of the system, its features, generative parameters and describe the co-creative workflows that it affords.
Apollo: An Interactive Environment for Generating Symbolic Musical Phrases using Corpus-based Style Imitation
Authors: Renaud Bougueng Tchemeube, Jeff Ens, Philippe Pasquier
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm

With the recent developments in machine intelligence and web technologies, new generative music systems are being explored for assisted composition using machine learning techniques on the web. Such systems are built for various tasks such as melodic, harmonic or rhythm generation, music interpolation, continuation and style imitation. In this paper, we introduce Apollo, an interactive music application for generating symbolic phrases of conventional western music using corpus-based style imitation techniques. In addition to enabling the construction and management of symbolic musical corpora, the system makes it possible for music artists and researchers to generate new musical phrases in the style of the proposed corpus. The system is available as a desktop application. The generated symbolic music materials, encoded in the MIDI format, can be exported or streamed for various purposes including using them as seed material for musical projects. We present the system design, implementation details, discuss and conclude with future work for the system.
CAOTE: KV Caching through Attention Output Error based Token Eviction
Authors: Raghavv Goel, Junyoung Park, Mukul Gagrani, Dalton Jones, Matthew Morse, Harper Langston, Mingu Lee, Chris Lott
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

While long context support of large language models has extended their abilities, it also incurs challenges in memory and compute which becomes crucial bottlenecks in resource-restricted devices. Token eviction, a widely adopted post-training methodology designed to alleviate the bottlenecks by evicting less important tokens from the cache, typically uses attention scores as proxy metrics for token importance. However, one major limitation of attention score as a token-wise importance metrics is that it lacks the information about contribution of tokens to the attention output. In this paper, we propose a simple eviction criterion based on the contribution of cached tokens to attention outputs. Our method, CAOTE, optimizes for eviction error due to token eviction, by seamlessly integrating attention scores and value vectors. This is the first method which uses value vector information on top of attention-based eviction scores. Additionally, CAOTE can act as a meta-heuristic method with flexible usage with any token eviction method. We show that CAOTE, when combined with the state-of-the-art attention score-based methods, always improves accuracies on the downstream task, indicating the importance of leveraging information from values during token eviction process.
Prioritizing Security Practice Adoption: Empirical Insights on Software Security Outcomes in the npm Ecosystem
Authors: Nusrat Zahan, Laurie Williams
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Practitioners often struggle with the overwhelming number of security practices outlined in cybersecurity frameworks for risk mitigation. Given the limited budget, time, and resources, practitioners want to prioritize the adoption of security practices based on empirical evidence. The goal of this study is to assist practitioners and policymakers in making informed decisions on which security practices to adopt by evaluating the relationship between software security practices and security outcome metrics. The study investigated the relationship between security practice adoption and security outcomes. We selected the OpenSSF Scorecard metrics to automatically measure the adoption of security practices in npm GitHub repositories. We also explored security outcome metrics, such as the number of open vulnerabilities (Vul_Count), mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities in dependencies, and mean time to update (MTTU) dependencies. We conducted regression and causal analysis using 12 Scorecard metrics and their aggregated Scorecard score (computed by aggregating individual security practice scores) as predictors and Vul_Count, MTTR, and MTTU as target variables. Our findings show that higher aggregated Scorecard scores are associated with fewer Vul_Count and shorter MTTU, also supported by causal analysis. However, while the regression model suggests shorter MTTR, causal analysis indicates project characteristics likely influence MTTR direction. Segment analysis shows that larger, newer repositories with more contributors, dependencies, and downloads have shorter MTTR. Among individual security practices, Code Review, Maintained status, Pinned Dependencies, and Branch Protection show strong associations with security outcomes; the directionality of these associations varies across security outcomes.
Large Language Bayes
Authors: Justin Domke
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Probabilistic Programming, Variational Inference

Many domain experts do not have the time or training to write formal Bayesian models. This paper takes an informal problem description as input, and combines a large language model and a probabilistic programming language to create a joint distribution over formal models, latent variables, and data. A posterior over latent variables follows by conditioning on observed data and integrating over formal models. This presents a challenging inference problem. We suggest an inference recipe that amounts to generating many formal models from the large language model, performing approximate inference on each, and then doing a weighted average. This is justified an analyzed as a combination of self-normalized importance sampling, MCMC, and variational inference. We show that this produces sensible predictions without the need to specify a formal model.
Knitting Robots: A Deep Learning Approach for Reverse-Engineering Fabric Patterns
Authors: Haoliang Sheng, Songpu Cai, Xingyu Zheng, Meng Cheng Lau
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Knitting, a cornerstone of textile manufacturing, is uniquely challenging to automate, particularly in terms of converting fabric designs into precise, machine-readable instructions. This research bridges the gap between textile production and robotic automation by proposing a novel deep learning-based pipeline for reverse knitting to integrate vision-based robotic systems into textile manufacturing. The pipeline employs a two-stage architecture, enabling robots to first identify front labels before inferring complete labels, ensuring accurate, scalable pattern generation. By incorporating diverse yarn structures, including single-yarn (sj) and multi-yarn (mj) patterns, this study demonstrates how our system can adapt to varying material complexities. Critical challenges in robotic textile manipulation, such as label imbalance, underrepresented stitch types, and the need for fine-grained control, are addressed by leveraging specialized deep-learning architectures. This work establishes a foundation for fully automated robotic knitting systems, enabling customizable, flexible production processes that integrate perception, planning, and actuation, thereby advancing textile manufacturing through intelligent robotic automation.
Predicting fermionic densities using a Projected Quantum Kernel method
Authors: Francesco Perciavalle, Francesco Plastina, Michele Pisarra, Nicola Lo Gullo
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

We use a support vector regressor based on a projected quantum kernel method to predict the density structure of 1D fermionic systems of interest in quantum chemistry and quantum matter. The kernel is built on with the observables of a quantum reservoir implementable with interacting Rydberg atoms. Training and test data of the fermionic system are generated using a Density Functional Theory approach. We test the performance of the method for several Hamiltonian parameters, finding a general common behavior of the error as a function of measurement time. At sufficiently large measurement times, we find that the method outperforms the classical linear kernel method and can be competitive with the radial basis function method.
First and Second Order Approximations to Stochastic Gradient Descent Methods with Momentum Terms
Authors: Eric Lu
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due to empirical information rather than rigorous proof. While the dynamics of gradient descent methods can be studied through continuous approximations, existing works only cover scenarios with constant learning rates or SGD without momentum terms. We present approximation results under weak assumptions for SGD that allow learning rates and momentum parameters to vary with respect to time.
Deep Learning on Graphs for Mobile Network Topology Generation
Authors: Felix Nannesson Meli, Johan Tell, Shirwan Piroti, Tahar Zanouda, Elias Jarlebring
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Graph Neural Network

Mobile networks consist of interconnected radio nodes strategically positioned across various geographical regions to provide connectivity services. The set of relations between these radio nodes, referred to as the \emph{mobile network topology}, is vital in the construction of the networking infrastructure. Typically, the connections between radio nodes and their associated cells are defined by software features that establish mobility relations (referred to as \emph{edges} in this paper) within the mobile network graph through heuristic methods. Although these approaches are efficient, they encounter significant limitations, particularly since edges can only be established prior to the installation of physical hardware. In this work, we use graph-based deep learning methods to determine mobility relations (edges), trained on radio node configuration data and reliable mobility relations set by Automatic Neighbor Relations (ANR) in stable networks. This paper focuses on measuring the accuracy and precision of different graph-based deep learning approaches applied to real-world mobile networks. We evaluated two deep learning models. Our comprehensive experiments on Telecom datasets obtained from operational Telecom Networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the graph neural network (GNN) model and multilayer perceptron. Our evaluation showed that considering graph structure improves results, which motivates the use of GNNs. Additionally, we investigated the use of heuristics to reduce the training time based on the distance between radio nodes to eliminate irrelevant cases. Our investigation showed that the use of these heuristics improved precision and accuracy considerably.
QuatE-D: A Distance-Based Quaternion Model for Knowledge Graph Embedding
Authors: Hamideh-Sadat Fazael-Ardakani, Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods aim to represent entities and relations in a continuous space while preserving their structural and semantic properties. Quaternion-based KGEs have demonstrated strong potential in capturing complex relational patterns. In this work, we propose QuatE-D, a novel quaternion-based model that employs a distance-based scoring function instead of traditional inner-product approaches. By leveraging Euclidean distance, QuatE-D enhances interpretability and provides a more flexible representation of relational structures. Experimental results demonstrate that QuatE-D achieves competitive performance while maintaining an efficient parameterization, particularly excelling in Mean Rank reduction. These findings highlight the effectiveness of distance-based scoring in quaternion embeddings, offering a promising direction for knowledge graph completion.
When Machine Learning Meets Importance Sampling: A More Efficient Rare Event Estimation Approach
Authors: Ruoning Zhao, Xinyun Chen
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be inefficient, due to the exploding variance of the path-dependent likelihood functions. To mitigate this, we introduce a new importance sampling approach that utilizes a marginal likelihood ratio on the stationary distribution, effectively avoiding the issue of excessive variance. In addition, we design a machine learning algorithm to estimate this marginal likelihood ratio using importance sampling data. Numerical experiments indicate that our algorithm outperforms the classic importance sampling methods.
Association between nutritional factors, inflammatory biomarkers and cancer types: an analysis of NHANES data using machine learning
Authors: Yuqing Liu, Meng Zhao, Guanlan Hu, Yuchen Zhang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Nutrition

Background. Diet and inflammation are critical factors influencing cancer risk. However, the combined impact of nutritional status and inflammatory biomarkers on cancer status and type, using machine learning (ML), remains underexplored. Objectives. This study investigates the association between nutritional factors, inflammatory biomarkers, and cancer status, and whether these relationships differ across cancer types using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. Methods. We analyzed 24 macro- and micronutrients, C-reactive protein (CRP), and the advanced lung cancer inflammation index (ALI) in 26,409 NHANES participants (2,120 with cancer). Multivariable logistic regression assessed associations with cancer prevalence. We also examined whether these features differed across the five most common cancer types. To evaluate predictive value, we applied three ML models - Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost - on the full feature set. Results. The cohort's mean age was 49.1 years; 34.7% were obese. Comorbidities such as anemia and liver conditions, along with nutritional factors like protein and several vitamins, were key predictors of cancer status. Among the models, Random Forest performed best, achieving an accuracy of 0.72. Conclusions. Higher-quality nutritional intake and lower levels of inflammation may offer protective effects against cancer. These findings highlight the potential of combining nutritional and inflammatory markers with ML to inform cancer prevention strategies.
Enhancing Stroke Diagnosis in the Brain Using a Weighted Deep Learning Approach
Authors: Yao Zhiwan, Reza Zarrab, Jean Dubois
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

A brain stroke occurs when blood flow to a part of the brain is disrupted, leading to cell death. Traditional stroke diagnosis methods, such as CT scans and MRIs, are costly and time-consuming. This study proposes a weighted voting ensemble (WVE) machine learning model that combines predictions from classifiers like random forest, Deep Learning, and histogram-based gradient boosting to predict strokes more effectively. The model achieved 94.91% accuracy on a private dataset, enabling early risk assessment and prevention. Future research could explore optimization techniques to further enhance accuracy.