pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Focus on Local: Finding Reliable Discriminative Regions for Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Changwei Wang, Shunpeng Chen, Yukun Song, Rongtao Xu, Zherui Zhang, Jiguang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yu Zhang, Kexue Fu, Shide Du, Zhiwei Xu, Longxiang Gao, Li Guo, Shibiao Xu
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is aimed at predicting the location of a query image by referencing a database of geotagged images. For VPR task, often fewer discriminative local regions in an image produce important effects while mundane background regions do not contribute or even cause perceptual aliasing because of easy overlap. However, existing methods lack precisely modeling and full exploitation of these discriminative regions. In this paper, we propose the Focus on Local (FoL) approach to stimulate the performance of image retrieval and re-ranking in VPR simultaneously by mining and exploiting reliable discriminative local regions in images and introducing pseudo-correlation supervision. First, we design two losses, Extraction-Aggregation Spatial Alignment Loss (SAL) and Foreground-Background Contrast Enhancement Loss (CEL), to explicitly model reliable discriminative local regions and use them to guide the generation of global representations and efficient re-ranking. Second, we introduce a weakly-supervised local feature training strategy based on pseudo-correspondences obtained from aggregating global features to alleviate the lack of local correspondences ground truth for the VPR task. Third, we suggest an efficient re-ranking pipeline that is efficiently and precisely based on discriminative region guidance. Finally, experimental results show that our FoL achieves the state-of-the-art on multiple VPR benchmarks in both image retrieval and re-ranking stages and also significantly outperforms existing two-stage VPR methods in terms of computational efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenshunpeng/FoL
STAF: Sinusoidal Trainable Activation Functions for Implicit Neural Representation
Authors: Alireza Morsali, MohammadJavad Vaez, Hossein Soltani, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Babak Taati, Morteza Mohammad-Noori
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful framework for modeling continuous signals. The spectral bias of ReLU-based networks is a well-established limitation, restricting their ability to capture fine-grained details in target signals. While previous works have attempted to mitigate this issue through frequency-based encodings or architectural modifications, these approaches often introduce additional complexity and do not fully address the underlying challenge of learning high-frequency components efficiently. We introduce Sinusoidal Trainable Activation Functions (STAF), designed to directly tackle this limitation by enabling networks to adaptively learn and represent complex signals with higher precision and efficiency. STAF inherently modulates its frequency components, allowing for self-adaptive spectral learning. This capability significantly improves convergence speed and expressivity, making STAF highly effective for both signal representations and inverse problems. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that STAF outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in accuracy and reconstruction fidelity with superior Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). These results establish STAF as a robust solution for overcoming spectral bias and the capacity-convergence gap, making it valuable for computer graphics and related fields. Our codebase is publicly accessible on the https://github.com/AlirezaMorsali/STAF.
COUNTDOWN: Contextually Sparse Activation Filtering Out Unnecessary Weights in Down Projection
Authors: Jaewon Cheon, Pilsung Kang
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00

The growing size of large language models has created significant computational inefficiencies. To address this challenge, sparse activation methods selectively deactivates non-essential parameters during inference, reducing computational costs in FFNN layers. While existing methods focus on non-linear gating mechanisms, we hypothesize that the sparsity of the FFNN layer lies globally in the form of a linear combination over its internal down projection matrix. Based on this insight, we propose two methods: M-COUNTDOWN, leveraging indirect coefficients, and D-COUNTDOWN, utilizing direct coefficients of the linear combination. Experimental results demonstrate that D-COUNTDOWN can omit 90% of computations with performance loss as low as 5.5% ideally, while M-COUNTDOWN provides a predictor-free solution with up to 29.4% better performance preservation compared to existing methods. Our specialized kernel implementations effectively realize these theoretical gains into substantial real-world acceleration.
Wildfire spread forecasting with Deep Learning
Authors: Nikolaos Anastasiou, Spyros Kondylatos, Ioannis Papoutsis
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning

Accurate prediction of wildfire spread is crucial for effective risk management, emergency response, and strategic resource allocation. In this study, we present a deep learning (DL)-based framework for forecasting the final extent of burned areas, using data available at the time of ignition. We leverage a spatio-temporal dataset that covers the Mediterranean region from 2006 to 2022, incorporating remote sensing data, meteorological observations, vegetation maps, land cover classifications, anthropogenic factors, topography data, and thermal anomalies. To evaluate the influence of temporal context, we conduct an ablation study examining how the inclusion of pre- and post-ignition data affects model performance, benchmarking the temporal-aware DL models against a baseline trained exclusively on ignition-day inputs. Our results indicate that multi-day observational data substantially improve predictive accuracy. Particularly, the best-performing model, incorporating a temporal window of four days before to five days after ignition, improves both the F1 score and the Intersection over Union by almost 5% in comparison to the baseline on the test dataset. We publicly release our dataset and models to enhance research into data-driven approaches for wildfire modeling and response.
SELF: Self-Extend the Context Length With Logistic Growth Function
Authors: Phat Thanh Dang, Saahil Thoppay, Wang Yang, Qifan Wang, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaotian Han
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

Large language models suffer issues when operated on long contexts that are larger than their training context length due to the standard position encoding for tokens in the attention layer. Tokens a long distance apart will rarely have an effect on each other and long prompts yield unexpected results. To solve this problem, we propose SELF (Self-Extend the Context Length With Logistic Growth Function): a solution of grouping consecutive tokens at varying group sizes using a logistic capacity equation combined with a constant group size at smaller relative distances. Our model had an increase in performance of up to 12% compared to the LongLM extension method in LEval (specifically on the Qwen model). On summarization related tasks in LongBench, our model performed up to 6.4% better than LongLM (specifically on the Llama-2-7b model). On reading comprehension tasks from LEval, our model performed up to 5.4% better than the LongLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/alexeipc/SELF-LLM.
Mosaic organization of DNA nucleotides
Authors: C.-K. Peng, S. V. Buldyrev, S. Havlin, M. Simons, H. E. Stanley, A. L. Goldberger
Date: 1994-02-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Physical Review E 1994 2
Tasks: Time Series Analysis

Long-range power-law correlations have been reported recently for DNA sequences containing noncoding regions. We address the question of whether such correlations may be a trivial consequence of the known mosaic structure (‘‘patchiness’’) of DNA. We analyze two classes of controls consisting of patchy nucleotide sequences generated by different algorithms—one without and one with long-range power-law correlations. Although both types of sequences are highly heterogeneous, they are quantitatively distinguishable by new fluctuation analysis method that differentiates local patchiness from long-range correlations. Application of this analysis to selected DNA sequences demonstrates that patchiness is not sufficient to account for long-range correlation properties.
Transformer-Based Named Entity Recognition for Automated Server Provisioning
Authors: Hossein Damavandi, Hasan Jalali, Boshra Pishgoo
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2025 4
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text

This paper introduces a novel method for automated server provisioning by integrating Transformerbased Named Entity Recognition models with Automated Speech Detection using OpenAI's Whisper. Leveraging advanced Transformer architectures-BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa-combined with robust speech-to-text capabilities, our approach enables IT professionals to provision cloud servers efficiently via natural spoken commands. A customannotated dataset containing real-world and AI-generated provisioning requests is presented, meticulously labeled using the BIO tagging scheme across fourteen critical entity categories relevant to cloud infrastructure provisioning. Comprehensive evaluations of model performance and robustness were conducted under realistic conditions, including controlled transcription noise to simulate practical speech recognition errors. While all tested models achieved high performance on clean test data, results from noisy test scenarios revealed notable disparities in model generalization capabilities. Specifically, DeBERTa exhibited exceptional resilience, maintaining an F1 score of 96.23 % under adverse conditions. These findings highlight the practicality and robustness of combining speech-to-text processing with advanced Named Entity Recognition models, significantly advancing real-time, voice-driven IT automation workflows.
BrainOmni: A Brain Foundation Model for Unified EEG and MEG Signals
Authors: Qinfan Xiao, Ziyun Cui, Chi Zhang, Siqi Chen, Wen Wu, Andrew Thwaites, Alexandra Woolgar, BoWen Zhou, Chao Zhang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) measure neural activity non-invasively by capturing electromagnetic fields generated by dendritic currents. Although rooted in the same biophysics, EEG and MEG exhibit distinct signal patterns, further complicated by variations in sensor configurations across modalities and recording devices. Existing approaches typically rely on separate, modality- and dataset-specific models, which limits the performance and cross-domain scalability. This paper proposes BrainOmni, the first brain foundation model that generalises across heterogeneous EEG and MEG recordings. To unify diverse data sources, we introduce BrainTokenizer,the first tokenizer that quantises spatiotemporal brain activity into discrete representations. Central to BrainTokenizer is a novel Sensor Encoder that encodes sensor properties such as spatial layout, orientation, and type, enabling compatibility across devices and modalities. Building upon the discrete representations, BrainOmni learns unified semantic embeddings of brain signals by self-supervised pretraining. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first foundation model to support both EEG and MEG signals, as well as the first to incorporate large-scale MEG pretraining. A total of 1,997 hours of EEG and 656 hours of MEG data are curated and standardised from publicly available sources for pretraining. Experiments show that BrainOmni outperforms both existing foundation models and state-of-the-art task-specific models on a range of downstream tasks. It also demonstrates strong generalisation to unseen EEG and MEG devices. Further analysis reveals that joint EEG-MEG (EMEG) training yields consistent improvements across both modalities. Code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.
The Cell Must Go On: Agar.io for Continual Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mohamed A. Mohamed, Kateryna Nekhomiazh, Vedant Vyas, Marcos M. Jose, Andrew Patterson, Marlos C. Machado
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Continual reinforcement learning (RL) concerns agents that are expected to learn continually, rather than converge to a policy that is then fixed for evaluation. Such an approach is well suited to environments the agent perceives as changing, which renders any static policy ineffective over time. The few simulators explicitly designed for empirical research in continual RL are often limited in scope or complexity, and it is now common for researchers to modify episodic RL environments by artificially incorporating abrupt task changes during interaction. In this paper, we introduce AgarCL, a research platform for continual RL that allows for a progression of increasingly sophisticated behaviour. AgarCL is based on the game Agar.io, a non-episodic, high-dimensional problem featuring stochastic, ever-evolving dynamics, continuous actions, and partial observability. Additionally, we provide benchmark results reporting the performance of DQN, PPO, and SAC in both the primary, challenging continual RL problem, and across a suite of smaller tasks within AgarCL, each of which isolates aspects of the full environment and allow us to characterize the challenges posed by different aspects of the game.
Frequency Feature Fusion Graph Network For Depression Diagnosis Via fNIRS
Authors: Chengkai Yang, Xingping Dong, Xiaofen Zong
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Functional Connectivity, Graph Neural Network

Data-driven approaches for depression diagnosis have emerged as a significant research focus in neuromedicine, driven by the development of relevant datasets. Recently, graph neural network (GNN)-based models have gained widespread adoption due to their ability to capture brain channel functional connectivity from both spatial and temporal perspectives. However, their effectiveness is hindered by the absence of a robust temporal biomarker. In this paper, we introduce a novel and effective biomarker for depression diagnosis by leveraging the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and propose a customized graph network architecture based on Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (TGCN). Our model was trained on a dataset comprising 1,086 subjects, which is over 10 times larger than previous datasets in the field of depression diagnosis. Furthermore, to align with medical requirements, we performed propensity score matching (PSM) to create a refined subset, referred to as the PSM dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating our newly designed biomarker enhances the representation of temporal characteristics in brain channels, leading to improved F1 scores in both the real-world dataset and the PSM dataset. This advancement has the potential to contribute to the development of more effective depression diagnostic tools. In addition, we used SHapley Additive exPlaination (SHAP) to validate the interpretability of our model, ensuring its practical applicability in medical settings.
MedScore: Factuality Evaluation of Free-Form Medical Answers
Authors: Heyuan Huang, Alexandra DeLucia, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Mark Dredze
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Hallucination, Sentence, valid

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generations by decomposing the generations into individual, valid claims. Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, which makes decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new approach to decomposing medical answers into condition-aware valid facts. Our method extracts up to three times more valid facts than existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. The resulting factuality score significantly varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation.
BRIT: Bidirectional Retrieval over Unified Image-Text Graph
Authors: Ainulla Khan, Yamada Moyuru, Srinidhi Akella
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance the quality and relevance of responses generated by large language models. While recent advancements have mainly focused on improving RAG for text-based queries, RAG on multi-modal documents containing both texts and images has not been fully explored. Especially when fine-tuning does not work. This paper proposes BRIT, a novel multi-modal RAG framework that effectively unifies various text-image connections in the document into a multi-modal graph and retrieves the texts and images as a query-specific sub-graph. By traversing both image-to-text and text-to-image paths in the graph, BRIT retrieve not only directly query-relevant images and texts but also further relevant contents to answering complex cross-modal multi-hop questions. To evaluate the effectiveness of BRIT, we introduce MM-RAG test set specifically designed for multi-modal question answering tasks that require to understand the text-image relations. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of BRIT, highlighting its ability to handle cross-modal questions on the multi-modal documents.
Benchmarking Large Language Models for Cyberbullying Detection in Real-World YouTube Comments
Authors: Amel Muminovic
Date: 2025-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

As online platforms grow, comment sections increasingly host harassment that undermines user experience and well-being. This study benchmarks three leading large language models, OpenAI GPT-4.1, Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Anthropic Claude 3 Opus, on a corpus of 5,080 YouTube comments sampled from high-abuse threads in gaming, lifestyle, food vlog, and music channels. The dataset comprises 1,334 harmful and 3,746 non-harmful messages in English, Arabic, and Indonesian, annotated independently by two reviewers with substantial agreement (Cohen's kappa = 0.83). Using a unified prompt and deterministic settings, GPT-4.1 achieved the best overall balance with an F1 score of 0.863, precision of 0.887, and recall of 0.841. Gemini flagged the highest share of harmful posts (recall = 0.875) but its precision fell to 0.767 due to frequent false positives. Claude delivered the highest precision at 0.920 and the lowest false-positive rate of 0.022, yet its recall dropped to 0.720. Qualitative analysis showed that all three models struggle with sarcasm, coded insults, and mixed-language slang. These results underscore the need for moderation pipelines that combine complementary models, incorporate conversational context, and fine-tune for under-represented languages and implicit abuse. A de-identified version of the dataset and full prompts is publicly released to promote reproducibility and further progress in automated content moderation.
Removal of Hallucination on Hallucination: Debate-Augmented RAG
Authors: Wentao Hu, WengYu Zhang, Yiyang Jiang, Chen Jason Zhang, XiaoYong Wei, Qing Li
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances factual accuracy by integrating external knowledge, yet it introduces a critical issue: erroneous or biased retrieval can mislead generation, compounding hallucinations, a phenomenon we term Hallucination on Hallucination. To address this, we propose Debate-Augmented RAG (DRAG), a training-free framework that integrates Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) mechanisms into both retrieval and generation stages. In retrieval, DRAG employs structured debates among proponents, opponents, and judges to refine retrieval quality and ensure factual reliability. In generation, DRAG introduces asymmetric information roles and adversarial debates, enhancing reasoning robustness and mitigating factual inconsistencies. Evaluations across multiple tasks demonstrate that DRAG improves retrieval reliability, reduces RAG-induced hallucinations, and significantly enhances overall factual accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huenao/Debate-Augmented-RAG.
Refining Few-Step Text-to-Multiview Diffusion via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ziyi Zhang, Li Shen, Deheng Ye, Yong Luo, Huangxuan Zhao, Lefei Zhang
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Text-to-multiview (T2MV) generation, which produces coherent multiview images from a single text prompt, remains computationally intensive, while accelerated T2MV methods using few-step diffusion models often sacrifice image fidelity and view consistency. To address this, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning framework tailored for few-step T2MV diffusion models to jointly optimize per-view fidelity and cross-view consistency. Specifically, we first reformulate T2MV denoising across all views as a single unified Markov decision process, enabling multiview-aware policy optimization driven by a joint-view reward objective. Next, we introduce ZMV-Sampling, a test-time T2MV sampling technique that adds an inversion-denoising pass to reinforce both viewpoint and text conditioning, resulting in improved T2MV generation at the cost of inference time. To internalize its performance gains into the base sampling policy, we develop MV-ZigAL, a novel policy optimization strategy that uses reward advantages of ZMV-Sampling over standard sampling as learning signals for policy updates. Finally, noting that the joint-view reward objective under-optimizes per-view fidelity but naively optimizing single-view metrics neglects cross-view alignment, we reframe RL finetuning for T2MV diffusion models as a constrained optimization problem that maximizes per-view fidelity subject to an explicit joint-view constraint, thereby enabling more efficient and balanced policy updates. By integrating this constrained optimization paradigm with MV-ZigAL, we establish our complete RL finetuning framework, referred to as MVC-ZigAL, which effectively refines the few-step T2MV diffusion baseline in both fidelity and consistency while preserving its few-step efficiency.