pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Context Tuning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Enhancing Multi-Turn Planning and Tool Adaptation
Authors: Jubin Abhishek Soni, Amit Anand, Rajesh Kumar Pandey, Aniket Abhishek Soni
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) by grounding their outputs in external tools and knowledge sources. However, existing RAG systems are typically constrained to static, single-turn interactions with fixed toolsets, making them ill-suited for dynamic domains such as healthcare and smart homes, where user intent, available tools, and contextual factors evolve over time. We present Dynamic Context Tuning (DCT), a lightweight framework that extends RAG to support multi-turn dialogue and evolving tool environments without requiring retraining. DCT integrates an attention-based context cache to track relevant past information, LoRA-based retrieval to dynamically select domain-specific tools, and efficient context compression to maintain inputs within LLM context limits. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DCT improves plan accuracy by 14% and reduces hallucinations by 37%, while matching GPT-4 performance at significantly lower cost. Furthermore, DCT generalizes to previously unseen tools, enabling scalable and adaptable AI assistants across a wide range of dynamic environments.
Improving Question Embeddings with Cognitiv Representation Optimization for Knowledge Tracing
Authors: Lixiang Xu, Xianwei Ding, Xin Yuan, Zhanlong Wang, Lu Bai, Enhong Chen, Philip S. Yu, Yuanyan Tang
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Tracing

The Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to track changes in students' knowledge status and predict their future answers based on their historical answer records. Current research on KT modeling focuses on predicting student' future performance based on existing, unupdated records of student learning interactions. However, these approaches ignore the distractors (such as slipping and guessing) in the answering process and overlook that static cognitive representations are temporary and limited. Most of them assume that there are no distractors in the answering process and that the record representations fully represent the students' level of understanding and proficiency in knowledge. In this case, it may lead to many insynergy and incoordination issue in the original records. Therefore we propose a Cognitive Representation Optimization for Knowledge Tracing (CRO-KT) model, which utilizes a dynamic programming algorithm to optimize structure of cognitive representations. This ensures that the structure matches the students' cognitive patterns in terms of the difficulty of the exercises. Furthermore, we use the co-optimization algorithm to optimize the cognitive representations of the sub-target exercises in terms of the overall situation of exercises responses by considering all the exercises with co-relationships as a single goal. Meanwhile, the CRO-KT model fuses the learned relational embeddings from the bipartite graph with the optimized record representations in a weighted manner, enhancing the expression of students' cognition. Finally, experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets respectively to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cognitive representation optimization model.
MaskPro: Linear-Space Probabilistic Learning for Strict (N:M)-Sparsity on Large Language Models
Authors: Yan Sun, Qixin Zhang, Zhiyuan Yu, Xikun Zhang, Li Shen, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has made inference efficiency a primary bottleneck in the practical deployment. To address this, semi-structured sparsity offers a promising solution by strategically retaining $N$ elements out of every $M$ weights, thereby enabling hardware-friendly acceleration and reduced memory. However, existing (N:M)-compatible approaches typically fall into two categories: rule-based layerwise greedy search, which suffers from considerable errors, and gradient-driven combinatorial learning, which incurs prohibitive training costs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel linear-space probabilistic framework named MaskPro, which aims to learn a prior categorical distribution for every $M$ consecutive weights and subsequently leverages this distribution to generate the (N:M)-sparsity throughout an $N$-way sampling without replacement. Furthermore, to mitigate the training instability induced by the high variance of policy gradients in the super large combinatorial space, we propose a novel update method by introducing a moving average tracker of loss residuals instead of vanilla loss. Finally, we conduct comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to validate the superior performance of MaskPro, as well as its excellent scalability in memory efficiency and exceptional robustness to data samples. Our code is available at https://github.com/woodenchild95/Maskpro.git.
BeyondRPC: A Contrastive and Augmentation-Driven Framework for Robust Point Cloud Understanding
Authors: Oddy Virgantara Putra, Hanugra Aulia Sidharta, Diah Risqiwati, Moch. Iskandar Riansyah, Yuni Yamasari
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Journal of Intelligent Engineering and Systems 2025 6
Tasks: Point Cloud Classification, Representation Learning

Robust perception of 3D point clouds remains a significant challenge in real-world environments where sensor data is often corrupted. While recent models and augmentation strategies have improved robustness individually, their isolated use still limits performance under severe distortions. In this work, we introduce BeyondRPC, a contrastive and augmentation-driven framework for robust point cloud classification. Our approach combines AdaCrossNet for adaptive cross-modal contrastive pretraining with WOLFMix-based fine-tuning to improve generalization under corruption. Specifically, AdaCrossNet employs a dynamic weighting mechanism to balance intra- and cross-modal learning, while WOLFMix integrates both deformation-based and rigid-mix augmentations. Experiments on the ModelNet-C benchmark demonstrate that BeyondRPC achieves a mean Corruption Error of 0.455, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, including RPC, GDANet, and CurveNet, while maintaining high clean overall accuracy at 0.930. These results underscore the importance of joint contrastive representation learning and corruption- aware augmentation for robust 3D point cloud understanding.
Real-Time Per-Garment Virtual Try-On with Temporal Consistency for Loose-Fitting Garments
Authors: Zaiqiang Wu, I-Chao Shen, Takeo Igarashi
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Virtual Try-on

Per-garment virtual try-on methods collect garment-specific datasets and train networks tailored to each garment to achieve superior results. However, these approaches often struggle with loose-fitting garments due to two key limitations: (1) They rely on human body semantic maps to align garments with the body, but these maps become unreliable when body contours are obscured by loose-fitting garments, resulting in degraded outcomes; (2) They train garment synthesis networks on a per-frame basis without utilizing temporal information, leading to noticeable jittering artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage approach for robust semantic map estimation. First, we extract a garment-invariant representation from the raw input image. This representation is then passed through an auxiliary network to estimate the semantic map. This enhances the robustness of semantic map estimation under loose-fitting garments during garment-specific dataset generation. Furthermore, we introduce a recurrent garment synthesis framework that incorporates temporal dependencies to improve frame-to-frame coherence while maintaining real-time performance. We conducted qualitative and quantitative evaluations to demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in both image quality and temporal coherence. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the garment-invariant representation and the recurrent synthesis framework.
GeoRecon: Graph-Level Representation Learning for 3D Molecules via Reconstruction-Based Pretraining
Authors: Shaoheng Yan, Zian Li, Muhan Zhang
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, molecular representation, Property Prediction, Representation Learning

The pretraining-and-finetuning paradigm has driven significant advances across domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision, with representative pretraining paradigms such as masked language modeling and next-token prediction. However, in molecular representation learning, the task design remains largely limited to node-level denoising, which is effective at modeling local atomic environments, yet maybe insufficient for capturing the global molecular structure required by graph-level property prediction tasks, such as energy estimation and molecular regression. In this work, we present GeoRecon, a novel graph-level pretraining framework that shifts the focus from individual atoms to the molecule as an integrated whole. GeoRecon introduces a graph-level reconstruction task: during pretraining, the model is trained to generate an informative graph representation capable of accurately guiding reconstruction of the molecular geometry. This encourages the model to learn coherent, global structural features rather than isolated atomic details. Without relying on additional supervision or external data, GeoRecon outperforms node-centric baselines on multiple molecular benchmarks (e.g., QM9, MD17), demonstrating the benefit of incorporating graph-level reconstruction for learning more holistic and geometry-aware molecular embeddings.
Overcoming Overfitting in Reinforcement Learning via Gaussian Process Diffusion Policy
Authors: Amornyos Horprasert, Esa Apriaskar, Xingyu Liu, Lanlan Su, Lyudmila S. Mihaylova
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPR, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

One of the key challenges that Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces is its limited capability to adapt to a change of data distribution caused by uncertainties. This challenge arises especially in RL systems using deep neural networks as decision makers or policies, which are prone to overfitting after prolonged training on fixed environments. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Gaussian Process Diffusion Policy (GPDP), a new algorithm that integrates diffusion models and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to represent the policy. GPR guides diffusion models to generate actions that maximize learned Q-function, resembling the policy improvement in RL. Furthermore, the kernel-based nature of GPR enhances the policy's exploration efficiency under distribution shifts at test time, increasing the chance of discovering new behaviors and mitigating overfitting. Simulation results on the Walker2d benchmark show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms under distribution shift condition by achieving around 67.74% to 123.18% improvement in the RL's objective function while maintaining comparable performance under normal conditions.
MmCows: A Multimodal Dataset for Dairy Cattle Monitoring
Authors: Hien Vu, Omkar Chandrakant Prabhune, Unmesh Raskar, Dimuth Panditharatne, Hanwook Chung, Christopher Choi, and Younghyun Kim
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2024 12

Precision livestock farming (PLF) has been transformed by machine learning (ML), enabling more precise and timely interventions that enhance overall farm productivity, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. However, despite the availability of various sensing technologies, few datasets leverage multiple modalities, which are crucial for developing more accurate and efficient monitoring devices and ML models. To address this gap, we present MmCows, a multimodal dataset for dairy cattle monitoring. This dataset comprises a large amount of synchronized, high-quality measurement data on behavioral, physiological, and environmental factors. It includes two weeks of data collected using wearable and implantable sensors deployed on ten milking Holstein cows, such as ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors, inertial sensors, and body temperature sensors. In addition, it features 4.8 million frames of high-resolution image sequences from four isometric view cameras, as well as temperature and humidity data from environmental sensors. We also gathered milk yield data and outdoor weather conditions. One full day’s worth of image data is annotated as ground truth, totaling 20,000 frames with 213,000 bounding boxes of 16 cows, along with their 3D locations and behavior labels. An extensive analysis of MmCows is provided to evaluate the modalities individually and their complementary benefits. The release of MmCows and its benchmarks will facilitate research on multimodal monitoring of dairy cattle, thereby promoting sustainable dairy farming. The dataset and the code for benchmarks are available at https://github.com/neis-lab/mmcows.
Quantum-Inspired Differentiable Integral Neural Networks (QIDINNs): A Feynman-Based Architecture for Continuous Learning Over Streaming Data
Authors: Oscar Boullosa Dapena
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

Real-time continuous learning over streaming data remains a central challenge in deep learning and AI systems. Traditional gradient-based models such as backpropagation through time (BPTT) face computational and stability limitations when dealing with temporally unbounded data. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture, Quantum-Inspired Differentiable Integral Neural Networks (QIDINNs), which leverages the Feynman technique of differentiation under the integral sign to formulate neural updates as integrals over historical data. This reformulation allows for smoother, more stable learning dynamics that are both physically interpretable and computationally tractable. Inspired by Feynman's path integral formalism and compatible with quantum gradient estimation frameworks, QIDINNs open a path toward hybrid classical-quantum neural computation. We demonstrate our model's effectiveness on synthetic and real-world streaming tasks, and we propose directions for quantum extensions and scalable implementations.
Vine Copulas as Differentiable Computational Graphs
Authors: Tuoyuan Cheng, Thibault Vatter, Thomas Nagler, Kan Chen
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Scheduling, Uncertainty Quantification

Vine copulas are sophisticated models for multivariate distributions and are increasingly used in machine learning. To facilitate their integration into modern ML pipelines, we introduce the vine computational graph, a DAG that abstracts the multilevel vine structure and associated computations. On this foundation, we devise new algorithms for conditional sampling, efficient sampling-order scheduling, and constructing vine structures for customized conditioning variables. We implement these ideas in torchvinecopulib, a GPU-accelerated Python library built upon PyTorch, delivering improved scalability for fitting, sampling, and density evaluation. Our experiments illustrate how gradient flowing through the vine can improve Vine Copula Autoencoders and that incorporating vines for uncertainty quantification in deep learning can outperform MC-dropout, deep ensembles, and Bayesian Neural Networks in sharpness, calibration, and runtime. By recasting vine copula models as computational graphs, our work connects classical dependence modeling with modern deep-learning toolchains and facilitates the integration of state-of-the-art copula methods in modern machine learning pipelines.
Flow-Based Policy for Online Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Lei Lv, Yunfei Li, Yu Luo, Fuchun Sun, Tao Kong, Jiafeng Xu, Xiao Ma
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We present \textbf{FlowRL}, a novel framework for online reinforcement learning that integrates flow-based policy representation with Wasserstein-2-regularized optimization. We argue that in addition to training signals, enhancing the expressiveness of the policy class is crucial for the performance gains in RL. Flow-based generative models offer such potential, excelling at capturing complex, multimodal action distributions. However, their direct application in online RL is challenging due to a fundamental objective mismatch: standard flow training optimizes for static data imitation, while RL requires value-based policy optimization through a dynamic buffer, leading to difficult optimization landscapes. FlowRL first models policies via a state-dependent velocity field, generating actions through deterministic ODE integration from noise. We derive a constrained policy search objective that jointly maximizes Q through the flow policy while bounding the Wasserstein-2 distance to a behavior-optimal policy implicitly derived from the replay buffer. This formulation effectively aligns the flow optimization with the RL objective, enabling efficient and value-aware policy learning despite the complexity of the policy class. Empirical evaluations on DMControl and Humanoidbench demonstrate that FlowRL achieves competitive performance in online reinforcement learning benchmarks.
OscNet v1.5: Energy Efficient Hopfield Network on CMOS Oscillators for Image Classification
Authors: Wenxiao Cai, Zongru Li, Iris Wang, Yu-Neng Wang, Thomas H. Lee
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Machine learning has achieved remarkable advancements but at the cost of significant computational resources. This has created an urgent need for a novel and energy-efficient computational fabric. CMOS Oscillator Networks (OscNet) is a brain inspired and specially designed hardware for low energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a Hopfield Network based machine learning algorithm that can be implemented on OscNet. The network is trained using forward propagation alone to learn sparsely connected weights, yet achieves an 8% improvement in accuracy compared to conventional deep learning models on MNIST dataset. OscNet v1.5 achieves competitive accuracy on MNIST and is well-suited for implementation using CMOS-compatible ring oscillator arrays with SHIL. In oscillator-based implementation, we utilize only 24% of the connections used in a fully connected Hopfield network, with merely a 0.1% drop in accuracy. OscNet v1.5 relies solely on forward propagation and employs sparse connections, making it an energy-efficient machine learning pipeline designed for CMOS oscillator computing. The repository for OscNet family is: https://github.com/RussRobin/OscNet.
Automated Risk Management Mechanisms in DeFi Lending Protocols: A Crosschain Comparative Analysis of Aave and Compound
Authors: Erum Iftikhar, Wei Wei, John Cartlidge
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Blockchain-based decentralised lending is a rapidly growing and evolving alternative to traditional lending, but it poses new risks. To mitigate these risks, lending protocols have integrated automated risk management tools into their smart contracts. However, the effectiveness of the latest risk management features introduced in the most recent versions of these lending protocols is understudied. To close this gap, we use a panel regression fixed effects model to empirically analyse the cross-version (v2 and v3) and cross-chain (L1 and L2) performance of the liquidation mechanisms of the two most popular lending protocols, Aave and Compound, during the period Jan 2021 to Dec 2024. Our analysis reveals that liquidation events in v3 of both protocols lead to an increase in total value locked and total revenue, with stronger impact on the L2 blockchain compared to L1. In contrast, liquidations in v2 have an insignificant impact, which indicates that the most recent v3 protocols have better risk management than the earlier v2 protocols. We also show that L1 blockchains are the preferred choice among large investors for their robust liquidity and ecosystem depth, while L2 blockchains are more popular among retail investors for their lower fees and faster execution.
Vector Ontologies as an LLM world view extraction method
Authors: Kaspar Rothenfusser, Bekk Blando
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess intricate internal representations of the world, yet these latent structures are notoriously difficult to interpret or repurpose beyond the original prediction task. Building on our earlier work (Rothenfusser, 2025), which introduced the concept of vector ontologies as a framework for translating high-dimensional neural representations into interpretable geometric structures, this paper provides the first empirical validation of that approach. A vector ontology defines a domain-specific vector space spanned by ontologically meaningful dimensions, allowing geometric analysis of concepts and relationships within a domain. We construct an 8-dimensional vector ontology of musical genres based on Spotify audio features and test whether an LLM's internal world model of music can be consistently and accurately projected into this space. Using GPT-4o-mini, we extract genre representations through multiple natural language prompts and analyze the consistency of these projections across linguistic variations and their alignment with ground-truth data. Our results show (1) high spatial consistency of genre projections across 47 query formulations, (2) strong alignment between LLM-inferred genre locations and real-world audio feature distributions, and (3) evidence of a direct relationship between prompt phrasing and spatial shifts in the LLM's inferred vector ontology. These findings demonstrate that LLMs internalize structured, repurposable knowledge and that vector ontologies offer a promising method for extracting and analyzing this knowledge in a transparent and verifiable way.
CLIP the Landscape: Automated Tagging of Crowdsourced Landscape Images
Authors: Ilya Ilyankou, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Tao Cheng, James Haworth
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

We present a CLIP-based, multi-modal, multi-label classifier for predicting geographical context tags from landscape photos in the Geograph dataset--a crowdsourced image archive spanning the British Isles, including remote regions lacking POIs and street-level imagery. Our approach addresses a Kaggle competition\footnote{https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/predict-geographic-context-from-landscape-photos} task based on a subset of Geograph's 8M images, with strict evaluation: exact match accuracy is required across 49 possible tags. We show that combining location and title embeddings with image features improves accuracy over using image embeddings alone. We release a lightweight pipeline\footnote{https://github.com/SpaceTimeLab/ClipTheLandscape} that trains on a modest laptop, using pre-trained CLIP image and text embeddings and a simple classification head. Predicted tags can support downstream tasks such as building location embedders for GeoAI applications, enriching spatial understanding in data-sparse regions.