pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reasoning Under Threat: Symbolic and Neural Techniques for Cybersecurity Verification
Authors: Sarah Veronica
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving, Formal Logic, Vulnerability Detection

Cybersecurity demands rigorous and scalable techniques to ensure system correctness, robustness, and resilience against evolving threats. Automated reasoning, encompassing formal logic, theorem proving, model checking, and symbolic analysis, provides a foundational framework for verifying security properties across diverse domains such as access control, protocol design, vulnerability detection, and adversarial modeling. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the role of automated reasoning in cybersecurity, analyzing how logical systems, including temporal, deontic, and epistemic logics are employed to formalize and verify security guarantees. We examine SOTA tools and frameworks, explore integrations with AI for neural-symbolic reasoning, and highlight critical research gaps, particularly in scalability, compositionality, and multi-layered security modeling. The paper concludes with a set of well-grounded future research directions, aiming to foster the development of secure systems through formal, automated, and explainable reasoning techniques.
ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning
Authors: Zhaorun Chen, Mintong Kang, Bo Li
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning

Autonomous agents powered by foundation models have seen widespread adoption across various real-world applications. However, they remain highly vulnerable to malicious instructions and attacks, which can result in severe consequences such as privacy breaches and financial losses. More critically, existing guardrails for LLMs are not applicable due to the complex and dynamic nature of agents. To tackle these challenges, we propose ShieldAgent, the first guardrail agent designed to enforce explicit safety policy compliance for the action trajectory of other protected agents through logical reasoning. Specifically, ShieldAgent first constructs a safety policy model by extracting verifiable rules from policy documents and structuring them into a set of action-based probabilistic rule circuits. Given the action trajectory of the protected agent, ShieldAgent retrieves relevant rule circuits and generates a shielding plan, leveraging its comprehensive tool library and executable code for formal verification. In addition, given the lack of guardrail benchmarks for agents, we introduce ShieldAgent-Bench, a dataset with 3K safety-related pairs of agent instructions and action trajectories, collected via SOTA attacks across 6 web environments and 7 risk categories. Experiments show that ShieldAgent achieves SOTA on ShieldAgent-Bench and three existing benchmarks, outperforming prior methods by 11.3% on average with a high recall of 90.1%. Additionally, ShieldAgent reduces API queries by 64.7% and inference time by 58.2%, demonstrating its high precision and efficiency in safeguarding agents.
Protecting Your Video Content: Disrupting Automated Video-based LLM Annotations
Authors: Haitong Liu, Kuofeng Gao, Yang Bai, Jinmin Li, Jinxiao Shan, Tao Dai, Shu-Tao Xia
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Descriptive, Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Recently, video-based large language models (video-based LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various video comprehension tasks. However, this rapid advancement raises significant privacy and security concerns, particularly regarding the unauthorized use of personal video data in automated annotation by video-based LLMs. These unauthorized annotated video-text pairs can then be used to improve the performance of downstream tasks, such as text-to-video generation. To safeguard personal videos from unauthorized use, we propose two series of protective video watermarks with imperceptible adversarial perturbations, named Ramblings and Mutes. Concretely, Ramblings aim to mislead video-based LLMs into generating inaccurate captions for the videos, thereby degrading the quality of video annotations through inconsistencies between video content and captions. Mutes, on the other hand, are designed to prompt video-based LLMs to produce exceptionally brief captions, lacking descriptive detail. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our video watermarking methods effectively protect video data by significantly reducing video annotation performance across various video-based LLMs, showcasing both stealthiness and robustness in protecting personal video content. Our code is available at https://github.com/ttthhl/Protecting_Your_Video_Content.
A Large Scale Analysis of Gender Biases in Text-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Leander Girrbach, Stephan Alaniz, Genevieve Smith, Zeynep Akata
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

With the increasing use of image generation technology, understanding its social biases, including gender bias, is essential. This paper presents the first large-scale study on gender bias in text-to-image (T2I) models, focusing on everyday situations. While previous research has examined biases in occupations, we extend this analysis to gender associations in daily activities, objects, and contexts. We create a dataset of 3,217 gender-neutral prompts and generate 200 images per prompt from five leading T2I models. We automatically detect the perceived gender of people in the generated images and filter out images with no person or multiple people of different genders, leaving 2,293,295 images. To enable a broad analysis of gender bias in T2I models, we group prompts into semantically similar concepts and calculate the proportion of male- and female-gendered images for each prompt. Our analysis shows that T2I models reinforce traditional gender roles, reflect common gender stereotypes in household roles, and underrepresent women in financial related activities. Women are predominantly portrayed in care- and human-centered scenarios, and men in technical or physical labor scenarios.
Towards an intelligent assessment system for evaluating the development of algorithmic thinking skills: An exploratory study in Swiss compulsory schools
Authors: Giorgia Adorni
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00

The rapid digitalisation of contemporary society has profoundly impacted various facets of our lives, including healthcare, communication, business, and education. The ability to engage with new technologies and solve problems has become crucial, making CT skills, such as pattern recognition, decomposition, and algorithm design, essential competencies. In response, Switzerland is conducting research and initiatives to integrate CT into its educational system. This study aims to develop a comprehensive framework for large-scale assessment of CT skills, particularly focusing on AT, the ability to design algorithms. To achieve this, we first developed a competence model capturing the situated and developmental nature of CT, guiding the design of activities tailored to cognitive abilities, age, and context. This framework clarifies how activity characteristics influence CT development and how to assess these competencies. Additionally, we developed an activity for large-scale assessment of AT skills, offered in two variants: one based on non-digital artefacts (unplugged) and manual expert assessment, and the other based on digital artefacts (virtual) and automatic assessment. To provide a more comprehensive evaluation of students' competencies, we developed an IAS based on BNs with noisy gates, which offers real-time probabilistic assessment for each skill rather than a single overall score. The results indicate that the proposed instrument can measure AT competencies across different age groups and educational contexts in Switzerland, demonstrating its applicability for large-scale use. AT competencies exhibit a progressive development, with no overall gender differences, though variations are observed at the school level, significantly influenced by the artefact-based environment and its context, underscoring the importance of creating accessible and adaptable assessment tools.
Concept Map Assessment Through Structure Classification
Authors: Laís P. V. Vossen, Isabela Gasparini, Elaine H. T. Oliveira, Berrit Czinczel, Ute Harms, Lukas Menzel, Sebastian Gombert, Knut Neumann, Hendrik Drachsler
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Descriptive

Due to their versatility, concept maps are used in various educational settings and serve as tools that enable educators to comprehend students' knowledge construction. An essential component for analyzing a concept map is its structure, which can be categorized into three distinct types: spoke, network, and chain. Understanding the predominant structure in a map offers insights into the student's depth of comprehension of the subject. Therefore, this study examined 317 distinct concept map structures, classifying them into one of the three types, and used statistical and descriptive information from the maps to train multiclass classification models. As a result, we achieved an 86\% accuracy in classification using a Decision Tree. This promising outcome can be employed in concept map assessment systems to provide real-time feedback to the student.
LeForecast: Enterprise Hybrid Forecast by Time Series Intelligence
Authors: Zheng Tan, Yiwen Nie, Wenfa Wu, Guanyu Zhang, Yanze Liu, Xinyuan Tian, Kailin Gao, Mengya Liu, Qijiang Cheng, Haipeng Jiang, Yingzheng Ma, Wei Zheng, Yuci Zhu, Yuanyuan Sun, Xiangyu Lei, Xiyu Guan, Wanqing Huang, Shouming Liu, Xiangquan Meng, Pengzhan Qu, Chao Yang, Jiaxuan Fan, Yuan He, HongSheng Qi, Yangzhou Du
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Demand is spiking in industrial fields for multidisciplinary forecasting, where a broad spectrum of sectors needs planning and forecasts to streamline intelligent business management, such as demand forecasting, product planning, inventory optimization, etc. Specifically, these tasks expecting intelligent approaches to learn from sequentially collected historical data and then foresee most possible trend, i.e. time series forecasting. Challenge of it lies in interpreting complex business contexts and the efficiency and generalisation of modelling. With aspirations of pre-trained foundational models for such purpose, given their remarkable success of large foundation model across legions of tasks, we disseminate \leforecast{}, an enterprise intelligence platform tailored for time series tasks. It integrates advanced interpretations of time series data and multi-source information, and a three-pillar modelling engine combining a large foundation model (Le-TSFM), multimodal model and hybrid model to derive insights, predict or infer futures, and then drive optimisation across multiple sectors in enterprise operations. The framework is composed by a model pool, model profiling module, and two different fusion approaches regarding original model architectures. Experimental results verify the efficiency of our trail fusion concepts: router-based fusion network and coordination of large and small models, resulting in high costs for redundant development and maintenance of models. This work reviews deployment of LeForecast and its performance in three industrial use cases. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that LeForecast is a profound and practical platform for efficient and competitive performance. And we do hope that this work can enlighten the research and grounding of time series techniques in accelerating enterprise.
Visual Acuity Consistent Foveated Rendering towards Retinal Resolution
Authors: Zhi Zhang, Meng Gai, Sheng Li
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k

Prior foveated rendering methods often suffer from a limitation where the shading load escalates with increasing display resolution, leading to decreased efficiency, particularly when dealing with retinal-level resolutions. To tackle this challenge, we begin with the essence of the human visual system (HVS) perception and present visual acuity-consistent foveated rendering (VaFR), aiming to achieve exceptional rendering performance at retinal-level resolutions. Specifically, we propose a method with a novel log-polar mapping function derived from the human visual acuity model, which accommodates the natural bandwidth of the visual system. This mapping function and its associated shading rate guarantee a consistent output of rendering information, regardless of variations in the display resolution of the VR HMD. Consequently, our VaFR outperforms alternative methods, improving rendering speed while preserving perceptual visual quality, particularly when operating at retinal resolutions. We validate our approach using both the rasterization and ray-casting rendering pipelines. We also validate our approach using different binocular rendering strategies for HMD devices. In diverse testing scenarios, our approach delivers better perceptual visual quality than prior foveated rendering while achieving an impressive speedup of 6.5$\times$-9.29$\times$ for deferred rendering of 3D scenarios and an even more powerful speedup of 10.4$\times$-16.4$\times$ for ray-casting at retinal resolution. Additionally, our approach significantly enhances the rendering performance of binocular 8K path tracing, achieving smooth frame rates.
SketchVideo: Sketch-based Video Generation and Editing
Authors: Feng-Lin Liu, Hongbo Fu, Xintao Wang, Weicai Ye, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Lin Gao
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Video Editing, Video Generation

Video generation and editing conditioned on text prompts or images have undergone significant advancements. However, challenges remain in accurately controlling global layout and geometry details solely by texts, and supporting motion control and local modification through images. In this paper, we aim to achieve sketch-based spatial and motion control for video generation and support fine-grained editing of real or synthetic videos. Based on the DiT video generation model, we propose a memory-efficient control structure with sketch control blocks that predict residual features of skipped DiT blocks. Sketches are drawn on one or two keyframes (at arbitrary time points) for easy interaction. To propagate such temporally sparse sketch conditions across all frames, we propose an inter-frame attention mechanism to analyze the relationship between the keyframes and each video frame. For sketch-based video editing, we design an additional video insertion module that maintains consistency between the newly edited content and the original video's spatial feature and dynamic motion. During inference, we use latent fusion for the accurate preservation of unedited regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SketchVideo achieves superior performance in controllable video generation and editing.
Geometry in Style: 3D Stylization via Surface Normal Deformation
Authors: Nam Anh Dinh, Itai Lang, Hyunwoo Kim, Oded Stein, Rana Hanocka
Date: 2025-03-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

We present Geometry in Style, a new method for identity-preserving mesh stylization. Existing techniques either adhere to the original shape through overly restrictive deformations such as bump maps or significantly modify the input shape using expressive deformations that may introduce artifacts or alter the identity of the source shape. In contrast, we represent a deformation of a triangle mesh as a target normal vector for each vertex neighborhood. The deformations we recover from target normals are expressive enough to enable detailed stylizations yet restrictive enough to preserve the shape's identity. We achieve such deformations using our novel differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible (dARAP) layer, a neural-network-ready adaptation of the classical ARAP algorithm which we use to solve for per-vertex rotations and deformed vertices. As a differentiable layer, dARAP is paired with a visual loss from a text-to-image model to drive deformations toward style prompts, altogether giving us Geometry in Style. Our project page is at https://threedle.github.io/geometry-in-style.
Ancestral Mamba: Enhancing Selective Discriminant Space Model with Online Visual Prototype Learning for Efficient and Robust Discriminant Approach
Authors: Jiahao Qin, Feng Liu, Lu Zong
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Mamba

In the realm of computer graphics, the ability to learn continuously from non-stationary data streams while adapting to new visual patterns and mitigating catastrophic forgetting is of paramount importance. Existing approaches often struggle to capture and represent the essential characteristics of evolving visual concepts, hindering their applicability to dynamic graphics tasks. In this paper, we propose Ancestral Mamba, a novel approach that integrates online prototype learning into a selective discriminant space model for efficient and robust online continual learning. The key components of our approach include Ancestral Prototype Adaptation (APA), which continuously refines and builds upon learned visual prototypes, and Mamba Feedback (MF), which provides targeted feedback to adapt to challenging visual patterns. APA enables the model to continuously adapt its prototypes, building upon ancestral knowledge to tackle new challenges, while MF acts as a targeted feedback mechanism, focusing on challenging classes and refining their representations. Extensive experiments on graphics-oriented datasets, such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, demonstrate the superior performance of Ancestral Mamba compared to state-of-the-art baselines, achieving significant improvements in accuracy and forgetting mitigation.
A Conceptual Framework for Human-AI Collaborative Genome Annotation
Authors: Xiaomei Li, Alex Whan, Meredith McNeil, David Starns, Jessica Irons, Samuel C. Andrew, Rad Suchecki
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00

Genome annotation is essential for understanding the functional elements within genomes. While automated methods are indispensable for processing large-scale genomic data, they often face challenges in accurately predicting gene structures and functions. Consequently, manual curation by domain experts remains crucial for validating and refining these predictions. These combined outcomes from automated tools and manual curation highlight the importance of integrating human expertise with AI capabilities to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of genome annotation. However, the manual curation process is inherently labor-intensive and time-consuming, making it difficult to scale for large datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual framework, Human-AI Collaborative Genome Annotation (HAICoGA), which leverages the synergistic partnership between humans and artificial intelligence to enhance human capabilities and accelerate the genome annotation process. Additionally, we explore the potential of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into this framework to support and augment specific tasks. Finally, we discuss emerging challenges and outline open research questions to guide further exploration in this area.
Channel Coding meets Sequence Design via Machine Learning for Integrated Sensing and Communications
Authors: Sundar Aditya, Morteza Varasteh, Bruno Clerckx
Date: 2025-03-29 00:00:00

For integrated sensing and communications, an intriguing question is whether information-bearing channel-coded signals can be reused for sensing - specifically ranging. This question forces the hitherto non-overlapping fields of channel coding (communications) and sequence design (sensing) to intersect by motivating the design of error-correcting codes that have good autocorrelation properties. In this letter, we demonstrate how machine learning (ML) is well-suited for designing such codes, especially for short block lengths. As an example, for rate 1/2 and block length 32, we show that even an unsophisticated ML code has a bit-error rate performance similar to a Polar code with the same parameters, but with autocorrelation sidelobes 24dB lower. While a length-32 Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequence has zero autocorrelation sidelobes, there are only 16 such sequences and hence, a 1/2 code rate cannot be realized by using ZC sequences as codewords. Hence, ML bridges channel coding and sequence design by trading off an ideal autocorrelation function for a large (i.e., rate-dependent) codebook size.
CLuP-Based Dual-Deconvolution in Automotive ISAC Scenarios
Authors: Jonathan Monsalve, Kumar Vijay Mishra
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, ISAC, parameter estimation

Accurate target parameter estimation of range, velocity, and angle is essential for vehicle safety in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. To enable spectrum sharing, ADAS may employ integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). This paper examines a dual-deconvolution automotive ISAC scenario where the radar waveform is known but the propagation channel is not, while in the communications domain, the channel is known but the transmitted message is not. Conventional maximum likelihood (ML) estimation for automotive target parameters is computationally demanding. To address this, we propose a low-complexity approach using the controlled loosening-up (CLuP) algorithm, which employs iterative refinement for efficient separation and estimation of radar targets. We achieve this through a nuclear norm restriction that stabilizes the problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate the robustness of this approach under high-mobility and noisy automotive environments, highlighting CLuP's potential as a scalable, real-time solution for ISAC in future vehicular networks.
Consensus on Open Multi-Agent Systems Over Graphs Sampled from Graphons
Authors: Renato Vizuete, Julien M. Hendrickx
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Block Model

We show how graphons can be used to model and analyze open multi-agent systems, which are multi-agent systems subject to arrivals and departures, in the specific case of linear consensus. First, we analyze the case of replacements, where under the assumption of a deterministic interval between two replacements, we derive an upper bound for the disagreement in expectation. Then, we study the case of arrivals and departures, where we define a process for the evolution of the number of agents that guarantees a minimum and a maximum number of agents. Next, we derive an upper bound for the disagreement in expectation, and we establish a link with the spectrum of the expected graph used to generate the graph topologies. Finally, for stochastic block model (SBM) graphons, we prove that the computation of the spectrum of the expected graph can be performed based on a matrix whose dimension depends only on the graphon and it is independent of the number of agents.
LERO: LLM-driven Evolutionary framework with Hybrid Rewards and Enhanced Observation for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yuan Wei, Xiaohan Shan, Jianmin Li
Date: 2025-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces two critical bottlenecks distinct from single-agent RL: credit assignment in cooperative tasks and partial observability of environmental states. We propose LERO, a framework integrating Large language models (LLMs) with evolutionary optimization to address these MARL-specific challenges. The solution centers on two LLM-generated components: a hybrid reward function that dynamically allocates individual credit through reward decomposition, and an observation enhancement function that augments partial observations with inferred environmental context. An evolutionary algorithm optimizes these components through iterative MARL training cycles, where top-performing candidates guide subsequent LLM generations. Evaluations in Multi-Agent Particle Environments (MPE) demonstrate LERO's superiority over baseline methods, with improved task performance and training efficiency.