pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BounTCHA: A CAPTCHA Utilizing Boundary Identification in Guided Generative AI-extended Videos
Authors: Lehao Lin, Ke Wang, Maha Abdallah, Wei Cai
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) especially multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), has enabled it to understand text, images, videos, and other multimedia data, allowing AI systems to execute various tasks based on human-provided prompts. However, AI-powered bots have increasingly been able to bypass most existing CAPTCHA systems, posing significant security threats to web applications. This makes the design of new CAPTCHA mechanisms an urgent priority. We observe that humans are highly sensitive to shifts and abrupt changes in videos, while current AI systems still struggle to comprehend and respond to such situations effectively. Based on this observation, we design and implement BounTCHA, a CAPTCHA mechanism that leverages human perception of boundaries in video transitions and disruptions. By utilizing generative AI's capability to extend original videos with prompts, we introduce unexpected twists and changes to create a pipeline for generating guided short videos for CAPTCHA purposes. We develop a prototype and conduct experiments to collect data on humans' time biases in boundary identification. This data serves as a basis for distinguishing between human users and bots. Additionally, we perform a detailed security analysis of BounTCHA, demonstrating its resilience against various types of attacks. We hope that BounTCHA will act as a robust defense, safeguarding millions of web applications in the AI-driven era.
Semantic Web and Creative AI -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2023
Authors: Raia Abu Ahmad, Reham Alharbi, Roberto Barile, Martin Böckling, Francisco Bolanos, Sara Bonfitto, Oleksandra Bruns, Irene Celino, Yashrajsinh Chudasama, Martin Critelli, Claudia d'Amato, Giada D'Ippolito, Ioannis Dasoulas, Stefano De Giorgis, Vincenzo De Leo, Chiara Di Bonaventura, Marco Di Panfilo, Daniil Dobriy, John Domingue, Xuemin Duan, Michel Dumontier, Sefika Efeoglu, Ruben Eschauzier, Fakih Ginwa, Nicolas Ferranti, Arianna Graciotti, Philipp Hanisch, George Hannah, Golsa Heidari, Aidan Hogan, Hassan Hussein, Alexane Jouglar, Jan-Christoph Kalo, Manoé Kieffer, Antonis Klironomos, Inês Koch, Weronika Lajewska, Nicolas Lazzari, Mikael Lindekrans, Anna Sofia Lippolis, Majlinda Llugiqi, Eleonora Mancini, Eleonora Marzi, Laura Menotti, Daniela Milon Flores, Soulakshmee Nagowah, Kerstin Neubert, Emetis Niazmand, Ebrahim Norouzi, Beatriz Olarte Martinez, Anouk Michelle Oudshoorn, Andrea Poltronieri, Valentina Presutti, Disha Purohit, Ensiyeh Raoufi, Celian Ringwald, Johanna Rockstroh, Sebastian Rudolph, Harald Sack, Zafar Saeed, Mohammad Javad Saeedizade, Aya Sahbi, Cristian Santini, Aleksandra Simic, Dennis Sommer, Rita Sousa, Mary Ann Tan, Vidyashree Tarikere, Tabea Tietz, Liam Tirpitz, Arnaldo Tomasino, Frank van Harmelen, Joao Vissoci, Caitlin Woods, Bohui Zhang, Xinyue Zhang, Heng Zheng
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Prompt Engineering

The International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS) is a week-long intensive program designed to immerse participants in the field. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by ten teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending ISWS 2023. Each team provided a different perspective to the topic of creative AI, substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. The 2023 edition of ISWS focuses on the intersection of Semantic Web technologies and Creative AI. ISWS 2023 explored various intersections between Semantic Web technologies and creative AI. A key area of focus was the potential of LLMs as support tools for knowledge engineering. Participants also delved into the multifaceted applications of LLMs, including legal aspects of creative content production, humans in the loop, decentralised approaches to multimodal generative AI models, nanopublications and AI for personal scientific knowledge graphs, commonsense knowledge in automatic story and narrative completion, generative AI for art critique, prompt engineering, automatic music composition, commonsense prototyping and conceptual blending, and elicitation of tacit knowledge. As Large Language Models and semantic technologies continue to evolve, new exciting prospects are emerging: a future where the boundaries between creative expression and factual knowledge become increasingly permeable and porous, leading to a world of knowledge that is both informative and inspiring.
Can we Retrieve Everything All at Once? ARM: An Alignment-Oriented LLM-based Retrieval Method
Authors: Peter Baile Chen, Yi Zhang, Michael Cafarella, Dan Roth
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, RAG, Retrieval

Real-world open-domain questions can be complicated, particularly when answering them involves information from multiple information sources. LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance in decomposing complex tasks into simpler steps, and previous work has used it for better retrieval in support of complex questions. However, LLM's decomposition of questions is unaware of what data is available and how data is organized, often leading to a sub-optimal retrieval performance. Recent effort in agentic RAG proposes to perform retrieval in an iterative fashion, where a followup query is derived as an action based on previous rounds of retrieval. While this provides one way of interacting with the data collection, agentic RAG's exploration of data is inefficient because successive queries depend on previous results rather than being guided by the organization of available data in the collection. To address this problem, we propose an LLM-based retrieval method -- ARM, that aims to better align the question with the organization of the data collection by exploring relationships among data objects beyond matching the utterance of the query, thus leading to a retrieve-all-at-once solution for complex queries. We evaluated ARM on two datasets, Bird and OTT-QA. On Bird, it outperforms standard RAG with query decomposition by up to 5.2 pt in execution accuracy and agentic RAG (ReAct) by up to 15.9 pt. On OTT-QA, it achieves up to 5.5 pt and 19.3 pt higher F1 match scores compared to these approaches.
A Hybrid Data-Driven Approach For Analyzing And Predicting Inpatient Length Of Stay In Health Centre
Authors: Tasfia Noor Chowdhury, Sanjida Afrin Mou, Kazi Naimur Rahman
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Management

Patient length of stay (LoS) is a critical metric for evaluating the efficacy of hospital management. The primary objectives encompass to improve efficiency and reduce costs while enhancing patient outcomes and hospital capacity within the patient journey. By seamlessly merging data-driven techniques with simulation methodologies, the study proposes an all-encompassing framework for the optimization of patient flow. Using a comprehensive dataset of 2.3 million de-identified patient records, we analyzed demographics, diagnoses, treatments, services, costs, and charges with machine learning models (Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Adaboost, LightGBM) and Python tools (Spark, AWS clusters, dimensionality reduction). Our model predicts patient length of stay (LoS) upon admission using supervised learning algorithms. This hybrid approach enables the identification of key factors influencing LoS, offering a robust framework for hospitals to streamline patient flow and resource utilization. The research focuses on patient flow, corroborating the efficacy of the approach, illustrating decreased patient length of stay within a real healthcare environment. The findings underscore the potential of hybrid data-driven models in transforming hospital management practices. This innovative methodology provides generally flexible decision-making, training, and patient flow enhancement; such a system could have huge implications for healthcare administration and overall satisfaction with healthcare.
CLEAR: Cue Learning using Evolution for Accurate Recognition Applied to Sustainability Data Extraction
Authors: Peter J. Bentley, Soo Ling Lim, Fuyuki Ishikawa
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM) image recognition is a powerful tool for extracting data from images, but accuracy depends on providing sufficient cues in the prompt - requiring a domain expert for specialized tasks. We introduce Cue Learning using Evolution for Accurate Recognition (CLEAR), which uses a combination of LLMs and evolutionary computation to generate and optimize cues such that recognition of specialized features in images is improved. It achieves this by auto-generating a novel domain-specific representation and then using it to optimize suitable textual cues with a genetic algorithm. We apply CLEAR to the real-world task of identifying sustainability data from interior and exterior images of buildings. We investigate the effects of using a variable-length representation compared to fixed-length and show how LLM consistency can be improved by refactoring from categorical to real-valued estimates. We show that CLEAR enables higher accuracy compared to expert human recognition and human-authored prompts in every task with error rates improved by up to two orders of magnitude and an ablation study evincing solution concision.
Beyond Prior Limits: Addressing Distribution Misalignment in Particle Filtering
Authors: Yiwei Shi, Jingyu Hu, Yu Zhang, Mengyue Yang, Weinan Zhang, Cunjia Liu, Weiru Liu
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, State Estimation

Particle filtering is a Bayesian inference method and a fundamental tool in state estimation for dynamic systems, but its effectiveness is often limited by the constraints of the initial prior distribution, a phenomenon we define as the Prior Boundary Phenomenon. This challenge arises when target states lie outside the prior's support, rendering traditional particle filtering methods inadequate for accurate estimation. Although techniques like unbounded priors and larger particle sets have been proposed, they remain computationally prohibitive and lack adaptability in dynamic scenarios. To systematically overcome these limitations, we propose the Diffusion-Enhanced Particle Filtering Framework, which introduces three key innovations: adaptive diffusion through exploratory particles, entropy-driven regularisation to prevent weight collapse, and kernel-based perturbations for dynamic support expansion. These mechanisms collectively enable particle filtering to explore beyond prior boundaries, ensuring robust state estimation for out-of-boundary targets. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments validate framework's effectiveness, indicating significant improvements in success rates and estimation accuracy across high-dimensional and non-convex scenarios.
GuardReasoner: Towards Reasoning-based LLM Safeguards
Authors: Yue Liu, Hongcheng Gao, Shengfang Zhai, Jun Xia, Tianyi Wu, Zhiwei Xue, Yulin Chen, Kenji Kawaguchi, Jiaheng Zhang, Bryan Hooi
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

As LLMs increasingly impact safety-critical applications, ensuring their safety using guardrails remains a key challenge. This paper proposes GuardReasoner, a new safeguard for LLMs, by guiding the guard model to learn to reason. Concretely, we first create the GuardReasonerTrain dataset, which consists of 127K samples with 460K detailed reasoning steps. Then, we introduce reasoning SFT to unlock the reasoning capability of guard models. In addition, we present hard sample DPO to further strengthen their reasoning ability. In this manner, GuardReasoner achieves better performance, explainability, and generalizability. Extensive experiments and analyses on 13 benchmarks of 3 guardrail tasks demonstrate its superiority. Remarkably, GuardReasoner 8B surpasses GPT-4o+CoT by 5.74% and LLaMA Guard 3 8B by 20.84% F1 score on average. We release the training data, code, and models with different scales (1B, 3B, 8B) of GuardReasoner : https://github.com/yueliu1999/GuardReasoner/.
Curriculum-based Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Robust Stabilization of a Quadrotor
Authors: Fausto Mauricio Lagos Suarez, Akshit Saradagi, Vidya Sumathy, Shruti Kotpaliwar, George Nikolakopoulos
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

This article introduces a curriculum learning approach to develop a reinforcement learning-based robust stabilizing controller for a Quadrotor that meets predefined performance criteria. The learning objective is to achieve desired positions from random initial conditions while adhering to both transient and steady-state performance specifications. This objective is challenging for conventional one-stage end-to-end reinforcement learning, due to the strong coupling between position and orientation dynamics, the complexity in designing and tuning the reward function, and poor sample efficiency, which necessitates substantial computational resources and leads to extended convergence times. To address these challenges, this work decomposes the learning objective into a three-stage curriculum that incrementally increases task complexity. The curriculum begins with learning to achieve stable hovering from a fixed initial condition, followed by progressively introducing randomization in initial positions, orientations and velocities. A novel additive reward function is proposed, to incorporate transient and steady-state performance specifications. The results demonstrate that the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based curriculum learning approach, coupled with the proposed reward structure, achieves superior performance compared to a single-stage PPO-trained policy with the same reward function, while significantly reducing computational resource requirements and convergence time. The curriculum-trained policy's performance and robustness are thoroughly validated under random initial conditions and in the presence of disturbances.
CLoQ: Enhancing Fine-Tuning of Quantized LLMs via Calibrated LoRA Initialization
Authors: Yanxia Deng, Aozhong zhang, Naigang Wang, Selcuk Gurses, Zi Yang, Penghang Yin
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Arithmetic Reasoning, Text Generation

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a highly efficient approach for downstream tasks, particularly in scenarios with limited computational resources. However, applying LoRA techniques to quantized LLMs poses unique challenges due to the reduced representational precision of quantized weights. In this paper, we introduce CLoQ (Calibrated LoRA initialization for Quantized LLMs), a simplistic initialization strategy designed to overcome these challenges. Our approach focuses on minimizing the layer-wise discrepancy between the original LLM and its quantized counterpart with LoRA components during initialization. By leveraging a small calibration dataset, CLoQ quantizes a pre-trained LLM and determines the optimal LoRA components for each layer, ensuring a strong foundation for subsequent fine-tuning. A key contribution of this work is a novel theoretical result that enables the accurate and closed-form construction of these optimal LoRA components. We validate the efficacy of CLoQ across multiple tasks such as language generation, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms existing LoRA fine-tuning methods for quantized LLMs, especially at ultra low-bit widths.
Beyond Instructed Tasks: Recognizing In-the-Wild Reading Behaviors in the Classroom Using Eye Tracking
Authors: Eduardo Davalos, Jorge Alberto Salas, Yike Zhang, Namrata Srivastava, Yashvitha Thatigotla, Abbey Gonzales, Sara McFadden, Sun-Joo Cho, Gautam Biswas, Amanda Goodwin
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

Understanding reader behaviors such as skimming, deep reading, and scanning is essential for improving educational instruction. While prior eye-tracking studies have trained models to recognize reading behaviors, they often rely on instructed reading tasks, which can alter natural behaviors and limit the applicability of these findings to in-the-wild settings. Additionally, there is a lack of clear definitions for reading behavior archetypes in the literature. We conducted a classroom study to address these issues by collecting instructed and in-the-wild reading data. We developed a mixed-method framework, including a human-driven theoretical model, statistical analyses, and an AI classifier, to differentiate reading behaviors based on their velocity, density, and sequentiality. Our lightweight 2D CNN achieved an F1 score of 0.8 for behavior recognition, providing a robust approach for understanding in-the-wild reading. This work advances our ability to provide detailed behavioral insights to educators, supporting more targeted and effective assessment and instruction.
Conversation Games and a Strategic View of the Turing Test
Authors: Kaveh Aryan
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

Although many game-theoretic models replicate real interactions that often rely on natural language, explicit study of games where language is central to strategic interaction remains limited. This paper introduces the \emph{conversation game}, a multi-stage, extensive-form game based on linguistic strategic interaction. We focus on a subset of the games, called verdict games. In a verdict game, two players alternate to contribute to a conversation, which is evaluated at each stage by a non-strategic judge who may render a conclusive binary verdict, or a decision to continue the dialogue. The game ends once a limit is reached or a verdict is given. We show many familiar processes, such as interrogation or a court process fall under this category. We also, show that the Turing test is an instance of verdict game, and discuss the significance of a strategic view of the Turing test in the age of advanced AI deception. We show the practical relevance of the proposed concepts by simulation experiments, and show that a strategic agent outperforms a naive agent by a high margin.
Clustering Properties of Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Xi Weng, Jianing An, Xudong Ma, Binhang Qi, Jie Luo, Xi Yang, Jin Song Dong, Lei Huang
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods via joint embedding architectures have proven remarkably effective at capturing semantically rich representations with strong clustering properties, magically in the absence of label supervision. Despite this, few of them have explored leveraging these untapped properties to improve themselves. In this paper, we provide an evidence through various metrics that the encoder's output $encoding$ exhibits superior and more stable clustering properties compared to other components. Building on this insight, we propose a novel positive-feedback SSL method, termed Representation Self-Assignment (ReSA), which leverages the model's clustering properties to promote learning in a self-guided manner. Extensive experiments on standard SSL benchmarks reveal that models pretrained with ReSA outperform other state-of-the-art SSL methods by a significant margin. Finally, we analyze how ReSA facilitates better clustering properties, demonstrating that it effectively enhances clustering performance at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels, shaping representations that are inherently more structured and semantically meaningful.
Autonomy and Safety Assurance in the Early Development of Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Authors: Dhaminda B. Abeywickrama, Michael Fisher, Frederic Wheeler, Louise Dennis
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

This report provides an overview of the workshop titled Autonomy and Safety Assurance in the Early Development of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, hosted by the Centre for Robotic Autonomy in Demanding and Long-Lasting Environments (CRADLE) on September 2, 2024, at The University of Manchester, UK. The event brought together representatives from six regulatory and assurance bodies across diverse sectors to discuss challenges and evidence for ensuring the safety of autonomous and robotic systems, particularly autonomous inspection robots (AIR). The workshop featured six invited talks by the regulatory and assurance bodies. CRADLE aims to make assurance an integral part of engineering reliable, transparent, and trustworthy autonomous systems. Key discussions revolved around three research questions: (i) challenges in assuring safety for AIR; (ii) evidence for safety assurance; and (iii) how assurance cases need to differ for autonomous systems. Following the invited talks, the breakout groups further discussed the research questions using case studies from ground (rail), nuclear, underwater, and drone-based AIR. This workshop offered a valuable opportunity for representatives from industry, academia, and regulatory bodies to discuss challenges related to assured autonomy. Feedback from participants indicated a strong willingness to adopt a design-for-assurance process to ensure that robots are developed and verified to meet regulatory expectations.
o3-mini vs DeepSeek-R1: Which One is Safer?
Authors: Aitor Arrieta, Miriam Ugarte, Pablo Valle, José Antonio Parejo, Sergio Segura
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Program Repair, Question Answering

The irruption of DeepSeek-R1 constitutes a turning point for the AI industry in general and the LLMs in particular. Its capabilities have demonstrated outstanding performance in several tasks, including creative thinking, code generation, maths and automated program repair, at apparently lower execution cost. However, LLMs must adhere to an important qualitative property, i.e., their alignment with safety and human values. A clear competitor of DeepSeek-R1 is its American counterpart, OpenAI's o3-mini model, which is expected to set high standards in terms of performance, safety and cost. In this technical report, we systematically assess the safety level of both DeepSeek-R1 (70b version) and OpenAI's o3-mini (beta version). To this end, we make use of our recently released automated safety testing tool, named ASTRAL. By leveraging this tool, we automatically and systematically generated and executed 1,260 test inputs on both models. After conducting a semi-automated assessment of the outcomes provided by both LLMs, the results indicate that DeepSeek-R1 produces significantly more unsafe responses (12%) than OpenAI's o3-mini (1.2%).
Solving Drone Routing Problems with Quantum Computing: A Hybrid Approach Combining Quantum Annealing and Gate-Based Paradigms
Authors: Eneko Osaba, Pablo Miranda-Rodriguez, Andreas Oikonomakis, Matic Petrič, Alejandra Ruiz, Sebastian Bock, Michail-Alexandros Kourtis
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel hybrid approach to solving real-world drone routing problems by leveraging the capabilities of quantum computing. The proposed method, coined Quantum for Drone Routing (Q4DR), integrates the two most prominent paradigms in the field: quantum gate-based computing, through the Eclipse Qrisp programming language; and quantum annealers, by means of D-Wave System's devices. The algorithm is divided into two different phases: an initial clustering phase executed using a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), and a routing phase employing quantum annealers. The efficacy of Q4DR is demonstrated through three use cases of increasing complexity, each incorporating real-world constraints such as asymmetric costs, forbidden paths, and itinerant charging points. This research contributes to the growing body of work in quantum optimization, showcasing the practical applications of quantum computing in logistics and route planning.