pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Strategy Coopetition Explains the Emergence and Transience of In-Context Learning
Authors: Aaditya K. Singh, Ted Moskovitz, Sara Dragutinovic, Felix Hill, Stephanie C. Y. Chan, Andrew M. Saxe
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear after long training times. In this work, we sought a mechanistic understanding of these transient dynamics. Firstly, we find that, after the disappearance of ICL, the asymptotic strategy is a remarkable hybrid between in-weights and in-context learning, which we term "context-constrained in-weights learning" (CIWL). CIWL is in competition with ICL, and eventually replaces it as the dominant strategy of the model (thus leading to ICL transience). However, we also find that the two competing strategies actually share sub-circuits, which gives rise to cooperative dynamics as well. For example, in our setup, ICL is unable to emerge quickly on its own, and can only be enabled through the simultaneous slow development of asymptotic CIWL. CIWL thus both cooperates and competes with ICL, a phenomenon we term "strategy coopetition." We propose a minimal mathematical model that reproduces these key dynamics and interactions. Informed by this model, we were able to identify a setup where ICL is truly emergent and persistent.
FonTS: Text Rendering with Typography and Style Controls
Authors: Wenda Shi, Yiren Song, Dengming Zhang, Jiaming Liu, Xingxing Zou
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Visual text rendering are widespread in various real-world applications, requiring careful font selection and typographic choices. Recent progress in diffusion transformer (DiT)-based text-to-image (T2I) models show promise in automating these processes. However, these methods still encounter challenges like inconsistent fonts, style variation, and limited fine-grained control, particularly at the word-level. This paper proposes a two-stage DiT-based pipeline to address these problems by enhancing controllability over typography and style in text rendering. We introduce typography control fine-tuning (TC-FT), an parameter-efficient fine-tuning method (on $5\%$ key parameters) with enclosing typography control tokens (ETC-tokens), which enables precise word-level application of typographic features. To further address style inconsistency in text rendering, we propose a text-agnostic style control adapter (SCA) that prevents content leakage while enhancing style consistency. To implement TC-FT and SCA effectively, we incorporated HTML-render into the data synthesis pipeline and proposed the first word-level controllable dataset. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving superior word-level typographic control, font consistency, and style consistency in text rendering tasks. The datasets and models will be available for academic use.
R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model
Authors: Hengguang Zhou, Xirui Li, Ruochen Wang, Minhao Cheng, Tianyi Zhou, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Visual Reasoning

Recently DeepSeek R1 demonstrated how reinforcement learning with simple rule-based incentives can enable autonomous development of complex reasoning in large language models, characterized by the "aha moment", in which the model manifest self-reflection and increased response length during training. However, attempts to extend this success to multimodal reasoning often failed to reproduce these key characteristics. In this report, we present the first successful replication of these emergent characteristics for multimodal reasoning on only a non-SFT 2B model. Starting with Qwen2-VL-2B and applying reinforcement learning directly on the SAT dataset, our model achieves 59.47% accuracy on CVBench, outperforming the base model by approximately ~30% and exceeding both SFT setting by ~2%. In addition, we share our failed attempts and insights in attempting to achieve R1-like reasoning using RL with instruct models. aiming to shed light on the challenges involved. Our key observations include: (1) applying RL on instruct model often results in trivial reasoning trajectories, and (2) naive length reward are ineffective in eliciting reasoning capabilities. The project code is available at https://github.com/turningpoint-ai/VisualThinker-R1-Zero
FEDS: Feature and Entropy-Based Distillation Strategy for Efficient Learned Image Compression
Authors: Haisheng Fu, Jie Liang, Zhenman Fang, Jingning Han
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have recently outperformed traditional codecs such as VVC in rate-distortion performance. However, their large models and high computational costs have limited their practical adoption. In this paper, we first construct a high-capacity teacher model by integrating Swin-Transformer V2-based attention modules, additional residual blocks, and expanded latent channels, thus achieving enhanced compression performance. Building on this foundation, we propose a \underline{F}eature and \underline{E}ntropy-based \underline{D}istillation \underline{S}trategy (\textbf{FEDS}) that transfers key knowledge from the teacher to a lightweight student model. Specifically, we align intermediate feature representations and emphasize the most informative latent channels through an entropy-based loss. A staged training scheme refines this transfer in three phases: feature alignment, channel-level distillation, and final fine-tuning. Our student model nearly matches the teacher across Kodak (1.24\% BD-Rate increase), Tecnick (1.17\%), and CLIC (0.55\%) while cutting parameters by about 63\% and accelerating encoding/decoding by around 73\%. Moreover, ablation studies indicate that FEDS generalizes effectively to transformer-based networks. The experimental results demonstrate our approach strikes a compelling balance among compression performance, speed, and model parameters, making it well-suited for real-time or resource-limited scenarios.
Image is All You Need: Towards Efficient and Effective Large Language Model-Based Recommender Systems
Authors: Kibum Kim, Sein Kim, Hongseok Kang, Jiwan Kim, Heewoong Noh, Yeonjun In, Kanghoon Yoon, Jinoh Oh, Chanyoung Park
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Attribute, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful backbone for recommender systems. Existing LLM-based recommender systems take two different approaches for representing items in natural language, i.e., Attribute-based Representation and Description-based Representation. In this work, we aim to address the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness that these two approaches encounter, when representing items consumed by users. Based on our interesting observation that there is a significant information overlap between images and descriptions associated with items, we propose a novel method, Image is all you need for LLM-based Recommender system (I-LLMRec). Our main idea is to leverage images as an alternative to lengthy textual descriptions for representing items, aiming at reducing token usage while preserving the rich semantic information of item descriptions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that I-LLMRec outperforms existing methods in both efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging images. Moreover, a further appeal of I-LLMRec is its ability to reduce sensitivity to noise in descriptions, leading to more robust recommendations.
AlignPxtr: Aligning Predicted Behavior Distributions for Bias-Free Video Recommendations
Authors: Chengzhi Lin, Chuyuan Wang, Annan Xie, Wuhong Wang, Ziye Zhang, Canguang Ruan, Yuancai Huang, Yongqi Liu
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In video recommendation systems, user behaviors such as watch time, likes, and follows are commonly used to infer user interest. However, these behaviors are influenced by various biases, including duration bias, demographic biases, and content category biases, which obscure true user preferences. In this paper, we hypothesize that biases and user interest are independent of each other. Based on this assumption, we propose a novel method that aligns predicted behavior distributions across different bias conditions using quantile mapping, theoretically guaranteeing zero mutual information between bias variables and the true user interest. By explicitly modeling the conditional distributions of user behaviors under different biases and mapping these behaviors to quantiles, we effectively decouple user interest from the confounding effects of various biases. Our approach uniquely handles both continuous signals (e.g., watch time) and discrete signals (e.g., likes, comments), while simultaneously addressing multiple bias dimensions. Additionally, we introduce a computationally efficient mean alignment alternative technique for practical real-time inference in large-scale systems. We validate our method through online A/B testing on two major video platforms: Kuaishou Lite and Kuaishou. The results demonstrate significant improvements in user engagement and retention, with \textbf{cumulative lifts of 0.267\% and 0.115\% in active days, and 1.102\% and 0.131\% in average app usage time}, respectively. The results demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves significant improvements in long-term user retention and substantial gains in average app usage time across different platforms. Our core code will be publised at https://github.com/justopit/CQE.
Multi-Behavior Recommender Systems: A Survey
Authors: Kyungho Kim, Sunwoo Kim, Geon Lee, Jinhong Jung, Kijung Shin
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Survey

Traditional recommender systems primarily rely on a single type of user-item interaction, such as item purchases or ratings, to predict user preferences. However, in real-world scenarios, users engage in a variety of behaviors, such as clicking on items or adding them to carts, offering richer insights into their interests. Multi-behavior recommender systems leverage these diverse interactions to enhance recommendation quality, and research on this topic has grown rapidly in recent years. This survey provides a timely review of multi-behavior recommender systems, focusing on three key steps: (1) Data Modeling: representing multi-behaviors at the input level, (2) Encoding: transforming these inputs into vector representations (i.e., embeddings), and (3) Training: optimizing machine-learning models. We systematically categorize existing multi-behavior recommender systems based on the commonalities and differences in their approaches across the above steps. Additionally, we discuss promising future directions for advancing multi-behavior recommender systems.
Process-Supervised LLM Recommenders via Flow-guided Tuning
Authors: Chongming Gao, Mengyao Gao, Chenxiao Fan, Shuai Yuan, Wentao Shi, Xiangnan He
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Fairness, Recommendation Systems

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted for recommendation systems via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), this approach amplifies popularity bias due to its likelihood maximization objective, compromising recommendation diversity and fairness. To address this, we present Flow-guided fine-tuning recommender (Flower), which replaces SFT with a Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework that enacts process supervision through token-level reward propagation. Flower's key innovation lies in decomposing item-level rewards into constituent token rewards, enabling direct alignment between token generation probabilities and their reward signals. This mechanism achieves three critical advancements: (1) popularity bias mitigation and fairness enhancement through empirical distribution matching, (2) preservation of diversity through GFlowNet's proportional sampling, and (3) flexible integration of personalized preferences via adaptable token rewards. Experiments demonstrate Flower's superior distribution-fitting capability and its significant advantages over traditional SFT in terms of accuracy, fairness, and diversity, highlighting its potential to improve LLM-based recommendation systems. The implementation is available via https://github.com/MrPeach0301/Flower
Talking to GDELT Through Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Audun Myers, Max Vargas, Sinan G. Aksoy, Cliff Joslyn, Benjamin Wilson, Tom Grimes
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Model, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval

In this work we study various Retrieval Augmented Regeneration (RAG) approaches to gain an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach in a question-answering analysis. To gain this understanding we use a case-study subset of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) dataset as well as a corpus of raw text scraped from the online news articles. To retrieve information from the text corpus we implement a traditional vector store RAG as well as state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) based approaches for automatically constructing KGs and retrieving the relevant subgraphs. In addition to these corpus approaches, we develop a novel ontology-based framework for constructing knowledge graphs (KGs) from GDELT directly which leverages the underlying schema of GDELT to create structured representations of global events. For retrieving relevant information from the ontology-based KGs we implement both direct graph queries and state-of-the-art graph retrieval approaches. We compare the performance of each method in a question-answering task. We find that while our ontology-based KGs are valuable for question-answering, automated extraction of the relevant subgraphs is challenging. Conversely, LLM-generated KGs, while capturing event summaries, often lack consistency and interpretability. Our findings suggest benefits of a synergistic approach between ontology and LLM-based KG construction, with proposed avenues toward that end.
Zero-Shot Hashing Based on Reconstruction With Part Alignment
Authors: Yan Jiang, Zhongmiao Qi, Jianhao Li, Jiangbo Qian, Chong Wang, Yu Xin
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Retrieval

Hashing algorithms have been widely used in large-scale image retrieval tasks, especially for seen class data. Zero-shot hashing algorithms have been proposed to handle unseen class data. The key technique in these algorithms involves learning features from seen classes and transferring them to unseen classes, that is, aligning the feature embeddings between the seen and unseen classes. Most existing zero-shot hashing algorithms use the shared attributes between the two classes of interest to complete alignment tasks. However, the attributes are always described for a whole image, even though they represent specific parts of the image. Hence, these methods ignore the importance of aligning attributes with the corresponding image parts, which explicitly introduces noise and reduces the accuracy achieved when aligning the features of seen and unseen classes. To address this problem, we propose a new zero-shot hashing method called RAZH. We first use a clustering algorithm to group similar patches to image parts for attribute matching and then replace the image parts with the corresponding attribute vectors, gradually aligning each part with its nearest attribute. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of the RAZH method over several state-of-the-art methods.
From Limited Labels to Open Domains: An Efficient Learning Paradigm for UAV-view Geo-Localization
Authors: Zhongwei Chen, Zhao-Xu Yang, Hai-Jun Rong, Jiawei Lang
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: geo-localization, Transfer Learning

Traditional UAV-view Geo-Localization (UVGL) supervised paradigms are constrained by the strict reliance on paired data for positive sample selection, which limits their ability to learn cross-view domain-invariant representations from unpaired data. Moreover, it is necessary to reconstruct the pairing relationship with expensive re-labeling costs for scenario-specific training when deploying in a new domain, which fails to meet the practical demands of open-environment applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel cross-domain invariance knowledge transfer network (CDIKTNet), which comprises a cross-domain invariance sub-network and a cross-domain transfer sub-network to realize a closed-loop framework of invariance feature learning and knowledge transfer. The cross-domain invariance sub-network is utilized to construct an essentially shared feature space across domains by learning structural invariance and spatial invariance in cross-view features. Meanwhile, the cross-domain transfer sub-network uses these invariant features as anchors and employs a dual-path contrastive memory learning mechanism to mine latent cross-domain correlation patterns in unpaired data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under fully supervised conditions. More importantly, with merely 2\% paired data, our method exhibits performance comparable to existing supervised paradigms and possesses the ability to transfer directly to qualify for applications in the other scenarios completely without any prior pairing relationship.
LapSum -- One Method to Differentiate Them All: Ranking, Sorting and Top-k Selection
Authors: Łukasz Struski, Michał B. Bednarczyk, Igor T. Podolak, Jacek Tabor
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: All, CPU

We present a novel technique for constructing differentiable order-type operations, including soft ranking, soft top-k selection, and soft permutations. Our approach leverages an efficient closed-form formula for the inverse of the function LapSum, defined as the sum of Laplace distributions. This formulation ensures low computational and memory complexity in selecting the highest activations, enabling losses and gradients to be computed in $O(n\log{}n)$ time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for high-dimensional vectors and large $k$ values. Furthermore, we provide efficient implementations for both CPU and CUDA environments, underscoring the practicality and scalability of our method for large-scale ranking and differentiable ordering problems.
Causal Discovery and Inference towards Urban Elements and Associated Factors
Authors: Tao Feng, Yunke Zhang, Xiaochen Fan, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

To uncover the city's fundamental functioning mechanisms, it is important to acquire a deep understanding of complicated relationships among citizens, location, and mobility behaviors. Previous research studies have applied direct correlation analysis to investigate such relationships. Nevertheless, due to the ubiquitous confounding effects, empirical correlation analysis may not accurately reflect underlying causal relationships among basic urban elements. In this paper, we propose a novel urban causal computing framework to comprehensively explore causalities and confounding effects among a variety of factors across different types of urban elements. In particular, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm to discover the potential causal graph, which depicts the causal relations between urban factors. The causal graph further serves as the guidance for estimating causal effects between pair-wise urban factors by propensity score matching. After removing the confounding effects from correlations, we leverage significance levels of causal effects in downstream urban mobility prediction tasks. Experimental studies on open-source urban datasets show that the discovered causal graph demonstrates a hierarchical structure, where citizens affect locations, and they both cause changes in urban mobility behaviors. Experimental results in urban mobility prediction tasks further show that the proposed method can effectively reduce confounding effects and enhance performance of urban computing tasks.
Optimizing Minimum Vertex Cover Solving via a GCN-assisted Heuristic Algorithm
Authors: Enqiang Zhu, Qiqi Bao, Yu Zhang, Chanjuan Liu
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Heuristic Search, Scheduling

The problem of finding a minimum vertex cover (MVC) in a graph is a well-known NP-hard problem with significant practical applications in optimization and scheduling. Its complexity, combined with the increasing scale of problems, underscores the need for efficient and effective algorithms. However, existing heuristic algorithms for MVC often rely on simplistic initialization strategies and overlook the impact of edge attributes and neighborhood information on vertex selection. In this paper, we introduce GCNIVC, a novel heuristic search algorithm designed to address the limitations of existing methods for solving MVC problems in large-scale graphs. Our approach features two main innovations. First, it utilizes a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to capture the global structure of graphs, which enables the generation of high-quality initial solutions that enhance the efficiency of the subsequent search process. Second, GCNIVC introduces a new heuristic that employs three containers and the concept of double-covered edges (dc-edges), improving search efficiency and providing greater flexibility for adding and removing operations based on edge attributes. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that GCNIVC outperforms state-of-the-art MVC algorithms in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Our results highlight the effectiveness of GCNIVC's GCN-assisted initialization and its edge-informed search strategy. This study not only advances the understanding of MVC problem-solving but also contributes a new tool for addressing large-scale graph optimization challenges.
Performant LLM Agentic Framework for Conversational AI
Authors: Alex Casella, Wayne Wang
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

The rise of Agentic applications and automation in the Voice AI industry has led to an increased reliance on Large Language Models (LLMs) to navigate graph-based logic workflows composed of nodes and edges. However, existing methods face challenges such as alignment errors in complex workflows and hallucinations caused by excessive context size. To address these limitations, we introduce the Performant Agentic Framework (PAF), a novel system that assists LLMs in selecting appropriate nodes and executing actions in order when traversing complex graphs. PAF combines LLM-based reasoning with a mathematically grounded vector scoring mechanism, achieving both higher accuracy and reduced latency. Our approach dynamically balances strict adherence to predefined paths with flexible node jumps to handle various user inputs efficiently. Experiments demonstrate that PAF significantly outperforms baseline methods, paving the way for scalable, real-time Conversational AI systems in complex business environments.