pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Toward Onboard AI-Enabled Solutions to Space Object Detection for Space Sustainability
Authors: Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu
Date: 2025-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

The rapid expansion of advanced low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in large constellations is positioning space assets as key to the future, enabling global internet access and relay systems for deep space missions. A solution to the challenge is effective space object detection (SOD) for collision assessment and avoidance. In SOD, an LEO satellite must detect other satellites and objects with high precision and minimal delay. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of employing vision sensors for SOD tasks based on deep learning (DL) models. It introduces models based on the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) layer, Vision Transformer (ViT), and the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) and evaluates their performance under SOD scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed models achieve mean average precision at intersection over union threshold 0.5 (mAP50) scores of up to 0.751 and mean average precision averaged over intersection over union thresholds from 0.5 to 0.95 (mAP50:95) scores of up to 0.280. Compared to the baseline GELAN-t model, the proposed GELAN-ViT-SE model increases the average mAP50 from 0.721 to 0.751, improves the mAP50:95 from 0.266 to 0.274, reduces giga floating point operations (GFLOPs) from 7.3 to 5.6, and lowers peak power consumption from 2080.7 mW to 2028.7 mW by 2.5\%.
A Dual-Task Synergy-Driven Generalization Framework for Pancreatic Cancer Segmentation in CT Scans
Authors: Jun Li, Yijue Zhang, Haibo Shi, Minhong Li, Qiwei Li, Xiaohua Qian
Date: 2025-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Pancreas Segmentation, regression, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning

Pancreatic cancer, characterized by its notable prevalence and mortality rates, demands accurate lesion delineation for effective diagnosis and therapeutic interventions. The generalizability of extant methods is frequently compromised due to the pronounced variability in imaging and the heterogeneous characteristics of pancreatic lesions, which may mimic normal tissues and exhibit significant inter-patient variability. Thus, we propose a generalization framework that synergizes pixel-level classification and regression tasks, to accurately delineate lesions and improve model stability. This framework not only seeks to align segmentation contours with actual lesions but also uses regression to elucidate spatial relationships between diseased and normal tissues, thereby improving tumor localization and morphological characterization. Enhanced by the reciprocal transformation of task outputs, our approach integrates additional regression supervision within the segmentation context, bolstering the model's generalization ability from a dual-task perspective. Besides, dual self-supervised learning in feature spaces and output spaces augments the model's representational capability and stability across different imaging views. Experiments on 594 samples composed of three datasets with significant imaging differences demonstrate that our generalized pancreas segmentation results comparable to mainstream in-domain validation performance (Dice: 84.07%). More importantly, it successfully improves the results of the highly challenging cross-lesion generalized pancreatic cancer segmentation task by 9.51%. Thus, our model constitutes a resilient and efficient foundational technological support for pancreatic disease management and wider medical applications. The codes will be released at https://github.com/SJTUBME-QianLab/Dual-Task-Seg.
From Lab to Wrist: Bridging Metabolic Monitoring and Consumer Wearables for Heart Rate and Oxygen Consumption Modeling
Authors: Barak Gahtan, Sanketh Vedula, Gil Samuelly Leichtag, Einat Kodesh, Alex M. Bronstein
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

Understanding physiological responses during running is critical for performance optimization, tailored training prescriptions, and athlete health management. We introduce a comprehensive framework -- what we believe to be the first capable of predicting instantaneous oxygen consumption (VO$_{2}$) trajectories exclusively from consumer-grade wearable data. Our approach employs two complementary physiological models: (1) accurate modeling of heart rate (HR) dynamics via a physiologically constrained ordinary differential equation (ODE) and neural Kalman filter, trained on over 3 million HR observations, achieving 1-second interval predictions with mean absolute errors as low as 2.81\,bpm (correlation 0.87); and (2) leveraging the principles of precise HR modeling, a novel VO$_{2}$ prediction architecture requiring only the initial second of VO$_{2}$ data for calibration, enabling robust, sequence-to-sequence metabolic demand estimation. Despite relying solely on smartwatch and chest-strap data, our method achieves mean absolute percentage errors of approximately 13\%, effectively capturing rapid physiological transitions and steady-state conditions across diverse running intensities. Our synchronized dataset, complemented by blood lactate measurements, further lays the foundation for future noninvasive metabolic zone identification. By embedding physiological constraints within modern machine learning, this framework democratizes advanced metabolic monitoring, bridging laboratory-grade accuracy and everyday accessibility, thus empowering both elite athletes and recreational fitness enthusiasts.
Grounding Task Assistance with Multimodal Cues from a Single Demonstration
Authors: Gabriel Sarch, Balasaravanan Thoravi Kumaravel, Sahithya Ravi, Vibhav Vineet, Andrew D. Wilson
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

A person's demonstration often serves as a key reference for others learning the same task. However, RGB video, the dominant medium for representing these demonstrations, often fails to capture fine-grained contextual cues such as intent, safety-critical environmental factors, and subtle preferences embedded in human behavior. This sensory gap fundamentally limits the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to reason about why actions occur and how they should adapt to individual users. To address this, we introduce MICA (Multimodal Interactive Contextualized Assistance), a framework that improves conversational agents for task assistance by integrating eye gaze and speech cues. MICA segments demonstrations into meaningful sub-tasks and extracts keyframes and captions that capture fine-grained intent and user-specific cues, enabling richer contextual grounding for visual question answering. Evaluations on questions derived from real-time chat-assisted task replication show that multimodal cues significantly improve response quality over frame-based retrieval. Notably, gaze cues alone achieves 93% of speech performance, and their combination yields the highest accuracy. Task type determines the effectiveness of implicit (gaze) vs. explicit (speech) cues, underscoring the need for adaptable multimodal models. These results highlight the limitations of frame-based context and demonstrate the value of multimodal signals for real-world AI task assistance.
PainFormer: a Vision Foundation Model for Automatic Pain Assessment
Authors: Stefanos Gkikas, Raul Fernandez Rojas, Manolis Tsiknakis
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Pain is a manifold condition that impacts a significant percentage of the population. Accurate and reliable pain evaluation for the people suffering is crucial to developing effective and advanced pain management protocols. Automatic pain assessment systems provide continuous monitoring and support decision-making processes, ultimately aiming to alleviate distress and prevent functionality decline. This study introduces PainFormer, a vision foundation model based on multi-task learning principles trained simultaneously on 14 tasks/datasets with a total of 10.9 million samples. Functioning as an embedding extractor for various input modalities, the foundation model provides feature representations to the Embedding-Mixer, a transformer-based module that performs the final pain assessment. Extensive experiments employing behavioral modalities-including RGB, synthetic thermal, and estimated depth videos-and physiological modalities such as ECG, EMG, GSR, and fNIRS revealed that PainFormer effectively extracts high-quality embeddings from diverse input modalities. The proposed framework is evaluated on two pain datasets, BioVid and AI4Pain, and directly compared to 75 different methodologies documented in the literature. Experiments conducted in unimodal and multimodal settings demonstrate state-of-the-art performances across modalities and pave the way toward general-purpose models for automatic pain assessment.
A Sensor Agnostic Domain Generalization Framework for Leveraging Geospatial Foundation Models: Enhancing Semantic Segmentation viaSynergistic Pseudo-Labeling and Generative Learning
Authors: Anan Yaghmour, Melba M. Crawford, Saurabh Prasad
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Yield Prediction, Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing enables a wide range of critical applications such as land cover and land use mapping, crop yield prediction, and environmental monitoring. Advances in satellite technology have expanded remote sensing datasets, yet high-performance segmentation models remain dependent on extensive labeled data, challenged by annotation scarcity and variability across sensors, illumination, and geography. Domain adaptation offers a promising solution to improve model generalization. This paper introduces a domain generalization approach to leveraging emerging geospatial foundation models by combining soft-alignment pseudo-labeling with source-to-target generative pre-training. We further provide new mathematical insights into MAE-based generative learning for domain-invariant feature learning. Experiments with hyperspectral and multispectral remote sensing datasets confirm our method's effectiveness in enhancing adaptability and segmentation.
Adaptive 3D UI Placement in Mixed Reality Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Feiyu Lu, Mengyu Chen, Hsiang Hsu, Pranav Deshpande, Cheng Yao Wang, Blair MacIntyre
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Mixed Reality, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Mixed Reality (MR) could assist users' tasks by continuously integrating virtual content with their view of the physical environment. However, where and how to place these content to best support the users has been a challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of MR experiences. In contrast to prior work that investigates optimization-based methods, we are exploring how reinforcement learning (RL) could assist with continuous 3D content placement that is aware of users' poses and their surrounding environments. Through an initial exploration and preliminary evaluation, our results demonstrate the potential of RL to position content that maximizes the reward for users on the go. We further identify future directions for research that could harness the power of RL for personalized and optimized UI and content placement in MR.
WorldGenBench: A World-Knowledge-Integrated Benchmark for Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Daoan Zhang, Che Jiang, Ruoshi Xu, Biaoxiang Chen, Zijian Jin, Yutian Lu, JianGuo Zhang, Liang Yong, Jiebo Luo, Shengda Luo
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, World Knowledge

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have achieved impressive results, yet existing models still struggle with prompts that require rich world knowledge and implicit reasoning: both of which are critical for producing semantically accurate, coherent, and contextually appropriate images in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{WorldGenBench}, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate T2I models' world knowledge grounding and implicit inferential capabilities, covering both the humanities and nature domains. We propose the \textbf{Knowledge Checklist Score}, a structured metric that measures how well generated images satisfy key semantic expectations. Experiments across 21 state-of-the-art models reveal that while diffusion models lead among open-source methods, proprietary auto-regressive models like GPT-4o exhibit significantly stronger reasoning and knowledge integration. Our findings highlight the need for deeper understanding and inference capabilities in next-generation T2I systems. Project Page: \href{https://dwanzhang-ai.github.io/WorldGenBench/}{https://dwanzhang-ai.github.io/WorldGenBench/}
Efficient Conversational Search via Topical Locality in Dense Retrieval
Authors: Cristina Ioana Muntean, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego, Guido Rocchietti, Cosimo Rulli
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction, response time remains a critical bottleneck of conversational search systems. To address this, we exploit the topical locality inherent in conversational queries, i.e., the tendency of queries within a conversation to focus on related topics. By leveraging query embedding similarities, we dynamically restrict the search space to semantically relevant document clusters, reducing computational complexity without compromising retrieval quality. We evaluate our approach on the TREC CAsT 2019 and 2020 datasets using multiple embedding models and vector indexes, achieving improvements in processing speed of up to 10.4X with little loss in performance (4.4X without any loss). Our results show that the proposed system effectively handles complex, multiturn queries with high precision and efficiency, offering a practical solution for real-time conversational search.
Global Collinearity-aware Polygonizer for Polygonal Building Mapping in Remote Sensing
Authors: Fahong Zhang, Yilei Shi, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses the challenge of mapping polygonal buildings from remote sensing images and introduces a novel algorithm, the Global Collinearity-aware Polygonizer (GCP). GCP, built upon an instance segmentation framework, processes binary masks produced by any instance segmentation model. The algorithm begins by collecting polylines sampled along the contours of the binary masks. These polylines undergo a refinement process using a transformer-based regression module to ensure they accurately fit the contours of the targeted building instances. Subsequently, a collinearity-aware polygon simplification module simplifies these refined polylines and generate the final polygon representation. This module employs dynamic programming technique to optimize an objective function that balances the simplicity and fidelity of the polygons, achieving globally optimal solutions. Furthermore, the optimized collinearity-aware objective is seamlessly integrated into network training, enhancing the cohesiveness of the entire pipeline. The effectiveness of GCP has been validated on two public benchmarks for polygonal building mapping. Further experiments reveal that applying the collinearity-aware polygon simplification module to arbitrary polylines, without prior knowledge, enhances accuracy over traditional methods such as the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. This finding underscores the broad applicability of GCP. The code for the proposed method will be made available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab.
IRL Dittos: Embodied Multimodal AI Agent Interactions in Open Spaces
Authors: Seonghee Lee, Denae Ford, John Tang, Sasa Junuzovic, Asta Roseway, Ed Cutrell, Kori Inkpen
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

We introduce the In Real Life (IRL) Ditto, an AI-driven embodied agent designed to represent remote colleagues in shared office spaces, creating opportunities for real-time exchanges even in their absence. IRL Ditto offers a unique hybrid experience by allowing in-person colleagues to encounter a digital version of their remote teammates, initiating greetings, updates, or small talk as they might in person. Our research question examines: How can the IRL Ditto influence interactions and relationships among colleagues in a shared office space? Through a four-day study, we assessed IRL Ditto's ability to strengthen social ties by simulating presence and enabling meaningful interactions across different levels of social familiarity. We find that enhancing social relationships depended deeply on the foundation of the relationship participants had with the source of the IRL Ditto. This study provides insights into the role of embodied agents in enriching workplace dynamics for distributed teams.
Monitoring morphometric drift in lifelong learning segmentation of the spinal cord
Authors: Enamundram Naga Karthik, Sandrine Bédard, Jan Valošek, Christoph S. Aigner, Elise Bannier, Josef Bednařík, Virginie Callot, Anna Combes, Armin Curt, Gergely David, Falk Eippert, Lynn Farner, Michael G Fehlings, Patrick Freund, Tobias Granberg, Cristina Granziera, RHSCIR Network Imaging Group, Ulrike Horn, Tomáš Horák, Suzanne Humphreys, Markus Hupp, Anne Kerbrat, Nawal Kinany, Shannon Kolind, Petr Kudlička, Anna Lebret, Lisa Eunyoung Lee, Caterina Mainero, Allan R. Martin, Megan McGrath, Govind Nair, Kristin P. O'Grady, Jiwon Oh, Russell Ouellette, Nikolai Pfender, Dario Pfyffer, Pierre-François Pradat, Alexandre Prat, Emanuele Pravatà, Daniel S. Reich, Ilaria Ricchi, Naama Rotem-Kohavi, Simon Schading-Sassenhausen, Maryam Seif, Andrew Smith, Seth A Smith, Grace Sweeney, Roger Tam, Anthony Traboulsee, Constantina Andrada Treaba, Charidimos Tsagkas, Zachary Vavasour, Dimitri Van De Ville, Kenneth Arnold Weber II, Sarath Chandar, Julien Cohen-Adad
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lifelong learning, Segmentation

Morphometric measures derived from spinal cord segmentations can serve as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in neurological diseases and injuries affecting the spinal cord. While robust, automatic segmentation methods to a wide variety of contrasts and pathologies have been developed over the past few years, whether their predictions are stable as the model is updated using new datasets has not been assessed. This is particularly important for deriving normative values from healthy participants. In this study, we present a spinal cord segmentation model trained on a multisite $(n=75)$ dataset, including 9 different MRI contrasts and several spinal cord pathologies. We also introduce a lifelong learning framework to automatically monitor the morphometric drift as the model is updated using additional datasets. The framework is triggered by an automatic GitHub Actions workflow every time a new model is created, recording the morphometric values derived from the model's predictions over time. As a real-world application of the proposed framework, we employed the spinal cord segmentation model to update a recently-introduced normative database of healthy participants containing commonly used measures of spinal cord morphometry. Results showed that: (i) our model outperforms previous versions and pathology-specific models on challenging lumbar spinal cord cases, achieving an average Dice score of $0.95 \pm 0.03$; (ii) the automatic workflow for monitoring morphometric drift provides a quick feedback loop for developing future segmentation models; and (iii) the scaling factor required to update the database of morphometric measures is nearly constant among slices across the given vertebral levels, showing minimum drift between the current and previous versions of the model monitored by the framework. The model is freely available in Spinal Cord Toolbox v7.0.
Passive Measurement of Autonomic Arousal in Real-World Settings
Authors: Samy Abdel-Ghaffar, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Conor Heneghan, Xin Liu, Sarah Kernasovskiy, Brennan Garrett, Andrew Barakat, Daniel McDuff
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is activated during stress, which can have negative effects on cardiovascular health, sleep, the immune system, and mental health. While there are ways to quantify ANS activity in laboratories, there is a paucity of methods that have been validated in real-world contexts. We present the Fitbit Body Response Algorithm, an approach to continuous remote measurement of ANS activation through widely available remote wrist-based sensors. The design was validated via two experiments, a Trier Social Stress Test (n = 45) and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of perceived stress (n=87), providing both controlled and ecologically valid test data. Model performance predicting perceived stress when using all available sensor modalities was consistent with expectations (accuracy=0.85) and outperformed models with access to only a subset of the signals. We discuss and address challenges to sensing that arise in real world settings that do not present in conventional lab environments.
RecGaze: The First Eye Tracking and User Interaction Dataset for Carousel Interfaces
Authors: Santiago de Leon-Martinez, Jingwei Kang, Robert Moro, Maarten de Rijke, Branislav Kveton, Harrie Oosterhuis, Maria Bielikova
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Carousel interfaces are widely used in e-commerce and streaming services, but little research has been devoted to them. Previous studies of interfaces for presenting search and recommendation results have focused on single ranked lists, but it appears their results cannot be extrapolated to carousels due to the added complexity. Eye tracking is a highly informative approach to understanding how users click, yet there are no eye tracking studies concerning carousels. There are very few interaction datasets on recommenders with carousel interfaces and none that contain gaze data. We introduce the RecGaze dataset: the first comprehensive feedback dataset on carousels that includes eye tracking results, clicks, cursor movements, and selection explanations. The dataset comprises of interactions from 3 movie selection tasks with 40 different carousel interfaces per user. In total, 87 users and 3,477 interactions are logged. In addition to the dataset, its description and possible use cases, we provide results of a survey on carousel design and the first analysis of gaze data on carousels, which reveals a golden triangle or F-pattern browsing behavior. Our work seeks to advance the field of carousel interfaces by providing the first dataset with eye tracking results on carousels. In this manner, we provide and encourage an empirical understanding of interactions with carousel interfaces, for building better recommender systems through gaze information, and also encourage the development of gaze-based recommenders.