pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LoRA Fine-Tuning Without GPUs: A CPU-Efficient Meta-Generation Framework for LLMs
Authors: Reza Arabpour, Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde, Anastasis Kratsios
Date: 2025-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) have transformed the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling parameter-efficient updates. However, their widespread adoption remains limited by the reliance on GPU-based training. In this work, we propose a theoretically grounded approach to LoRA fine-tuning designed specifically for users with limited computational resources, particularly those restricted to standard laptop CPUs. Our method learns a meta-operator that maps any input dataset, represented as a probability distribution, to a set of LoRA weights by leveraging a large bank of pre-trained adapters for the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 model. Instead of performing new gradient-based updates, our pipeline constructs adapters via lightweight combinations of existing LoRAs directly on CPU. While the resulting adapters do not match the performance of GPU-trained counterparts, they consistently outperform the base Mistral model on downstream tasks, offering a practical and accessible alternative to traditional GPU-based fine-tuning.
Meta-emulation: An application to the social cost of carbon
Authors: Richard S. J. Tol
Date: 2025-07-02 00:00:00

A large database of published model results is used to estimate the distribution of the social cost of carbon as a function of the underlying assumptions. The literature on the social cost of carbon deviates in its assumptions from the literatures on the impacts of climate change, discounting, and risk aversion. The proposed meta-emulator corrects this. The social cost of carbon is higher than reported in the literature.
CAST-Phys: Contactless Affective States Through Physiological signals Database
Authors: Joaquim Comas, Alexander Joel Vera, Xavier Vives, Eleonora De Filippi, Alexandre Pereda, Federico Sukno
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Photoplethysmography (PPG)

In recent years, affective computing and its applications have become a fast-growing research topic. Despite significant advancements, the lack of affective multi-modal datasets remains a major bottleneck in developing accurate emotion recognition systems. Furthermore, the use of contact-based devices during emotion elicitation often unintentionally influences the emotional experience, reducing or altering the genuine spontaneous emotional response. This limitation highlights the need for methods capable of extracting affective cues from multiple modalities without physical contact, such as remote physiological emotion recognition. To address this, we present the Contactless Affective States Through Physiological Signals Database (CAST-Phys), a novel high-quality dataset explicitly designed for multi-modal remote physiological emotion recognition using facial and physiological cues. The dataset includes diverse physiological signals, such as photoplethysmography (PPG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiration rate (RR), alongside high-resolution uncompressed facial video recordings, enabling the potential for remote signal recovery. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of physiological signals in realistic scenarios where facial expressions alone may not provide sufficient emotional information. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of remote multi-modal emotion recognition by evaluating the impact of individual and fused modalities, showcasing its effectiveness in advancing contactless emotion recognition technologies.
MCAM: Multimodal Causal Analysis Model for Ego-Vehicle-Level Driving Video Understanding
Authors: Tongtong Cheng, Rongzhen Li, Yixin Xiong, Tao Zhang, Jing Wang, Kai Liu
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Video Understanding

Accurate driving behavior recognition and reasoning are critical for autonomous driving video understanding. However, existing methods often tend to dig out the shallow causal, fail to address spurious correlations across modalities, and ignore the ego-vehicle level causality modeling. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Multimodal Causal Analysis Model (MCAM) that constructs latent causal structures between visual and language modalities. Firstly, we design a multi-level feature extractor to capture long-range dependencies. Secondly, we design a causal analysis module that dynamically models driving scenarios using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of driving states. Thirdly, we utilize a vision-language transformer to align critical visual features with their corresponding linguistic expressions. Extensive experiments on the BDD-X, and CoVLA datasets demonstrate that MCAM achieves SOTA performance in visual-language causal relationship learning. Furthermore, the model exhibits superior capability in capturing causal characteristics within video sequences, showcasing its effectiveness for autonomous driving applications. The code is available at https://github.com/SixCorePeach/MCAM.
Robust Speech-Workload Estimation for Intelligent Human-Robot Systems
Authors: Julian Fortune, Julie A. Adams, Jamison Heard
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00

Demanding task environments (e.g., supervising a remotely piloted aircraft) require performing tasks quickly and accurately; however, periods of low and high operator workload can decrease task performance. Intelligent modulation of the system's demands and interaction modality in response to changes in operator workload state may increase performance by avoiding undesirable workload states. This system requires real-time estimation of each workload component (i.e., cognitive, physical, visual, speech, and auditory) to adapt the correct modality. Existing workload systems estimate multiple workload components post-hoc, but few estimate speech workload, or function in real-time. An algorithm to estimate speech workload and mitigate undesirable workload states in real-time is presented. An analysis of the algorithm's accuracy is presented, along with the results demonstrating the algorithm's generalizability across individuals and human-machine teaming paradigms. Real-time speech workload estimation is a crucial element towards developing adaptive human-machine systems.
High-Resolution Visual Reasoning via Multi-Turn Grounding-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinyu Huang, Yuhao Dong, Weiwei Tian, Bo Li, Rui Feng, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: MME, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Grounding, Visual Reasoning

State-of-the-art large multi-modal models (LMMs) face challenges when processing high-resolution images, as these inputs are converted into enormous visual tokens, many of which are irrelevant to the downstream task. In this paper, we propose Multi-turn Grounding-based Policy Optimization (MGPO), an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables LMMs to iteratively focus on key visual regions by automatically cropping sub-images, based on model-predicted grounding coordinates within a multi-turn conversation framework. Compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which requires costly additional grounding annotations, our approach highlights that LMMs can emerge robust grounding abilities during the RL training process, leveraging only a binary reward function derived from the correctness of the final answer. Additionally, we observe that LMMs struggle to autonomously trigger visual grounding during the rollout process. To address this cold start problem, we design a multi-turn conversational template and restrict policy loss computation to model outputs generated across multiple dialogue rounds, thereby promoting stable optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, when trained on standard visual-question-short answering data without grounding annotations, MGPO effectively elicits stronger grounding capabilities compared to GRPO, leading to 5.4\% improvement on in-distribution MME-Realworld and 5.2\% improvement on the challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) V* Bench. Notably, MGPO post-training on Qwen2.5-VL-7B with 21K samples surpasses OpenAI's o1 and GPT-4o models on the OOD V* Bench. Codes are available at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/MGPO.
MusiScene: Leveraging MU-LLaMA for Scene Imagination and Enhanced Video Background Music Generation
Authors: Fathinah Izzati, Xinyue Li, Yuxuan Wu, Gus Xia
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Music Captioning, Music Generation

Humans can imagine various atmospheres and settings when listening to music, envisioning movie scenes that complement each piece. For example, slow, melancholic music might evoke scenes of heartbreak, while upbeat melodies suggest celebration. This paper explores whether a Music Language Model, e.g. MU-LLaMA, can perform a similar task, called Music Scene Imagination (MSI), which requires cross-modal information from video and music to train. To improve upon existing music captioning models which focusing solely on musical elements, we introduce MusiScene, a music captioning model designed to imagine scenes that complement each music. In this paper, (1) we construct a large-scale video-audio caption dataset with 3,371 pairs, (2) we finetune Music Understanding LLaMA for the MSI task to create MusiScene, and (3) we conduct comprehensive evaluations and prove that our MusiScene is more capable of generating contextually relevant captions compared to MU-LLaMA. We leverage the generated MSI captions to enhance Video Background Music Generation (VBMG) from text.
TalkFashion: Intelligent Virtual Try-On Assistant Based on Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Yujie Hu, Xuanyu Zhang, Weiqi Li, Jian Zhang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Virtual Try-on

Virtual try-on has made significant progress in recent years. This paper addresses how to achieve multifunctional virtual try-on guided solely by text instructions, including full outfit change and local editing. Previous methods primarily relied on end-to-end networks to perform single try-on tasks, lacking versatility and flexibility. We propose TalkFashion, an intelligent try-on assistant that leverages the powerful comprehension capabilities of large language models to analyze user instructions and determine which task to execute, thereby activating different processing pipelines accordingly. Additionally, we introduce an instruction-based local repainting model that eliminates the need for users to manually provide masks. With the help of multi-modal models, this approach achieves fully automated local editings, enhancing the flexibility of editing tasks. The experimental results demonstrate better semantic consistency and visual quality compared to the current methods.
LeAD: The LLM Enhanced Planning System Converged with End-to-end Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yuhang Zhang, Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

A principal barrier to large-scale deployment of urban autonomous driving systems lies in the prevalence of complex scenarios and edge cases. Existing systems fail to effectively interpret semantic information within traffic contexts and discern intentions of other participants, consequently generating decisions misaligned with skilled drivers' reasoning patterns. We present LeAD, a dual-rate autonomous driving architecture integrating imitation learning-based end-to-end (E2E) frameworks with large language model (LLM) augmentation. The high-frequency E2E subsystem maintains real-time perception-planning-control cycles, while the low-frequency LLM module enhances scenario comprehension through multi-modal perception fusion with HD maps and derives optimal decisions via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning when baseline planners encounter capability limitations. Our experimental evaluation in the CARLA Simulator demonstrates LeAD's superior handling of unconventional scenarios, achieving 71 points on Leaderboard V1 benchmark, with a route completion of 93%.
Event-RGB Fusion for Spacecraft Pose Estimation Under Harsh Lighting
Authors: Mohsi Jawaid, Marcus Märtens, Tat-Jun Chin
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Sensor Fusion, Spacecraft Pose Estimation

Spacecraft pose estimation is crucial for autonomous in-space operations, such as rendezvous, docking and on-orbit servicing. Vision-based pose estimation methods, which typically employ RGB imaging sensors, is a compelling solution for spacecraft pose estimation, but are challenged by harsh lighting conditions, which produce imaging artifacts such as glare, over-exposure, blooming and lens flare. Due to their much higher dynamic range, neuromorphic or event sensors are more resilient to extreme lighting conditions. However, event sensors generally have lower spatial resolution and suffer from reduced signal-to-noise ratio during periods of low relative motion. This work addresses these individual sensor limitations by introducing a sensor fusion approach combining RGB and event sensors. A beam-splitter prism was employed to achieve precise optical and temporal alignment. Then, a RANSAC-based technique was developed to fuse the information from the RGB and event channels to achieve pose estimation that leveraged the strengths of the two modalities. The pipeline was complemented by dropout uncertainty estimation to detect extreme conditions that affect either channel. To benchmark the performance of the proposed event-RGB fusion method, we collected a comprehensive real dataset of RGB and event data for satellite pose estimation in a laboratory setting under a variety of challenging illumination conditions. Encouraging results on the dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our event-RGB fusion approach and further supports the usage of event sensors for spacecraft pose estimation. To support community research on this topic, our dataset will be released publicly.
Integrated Structural Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Jiahui Wang, Qin Xu, Bo Jiang, Bin Luo
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Prompt Learning, Sample Probing

Prompt learning methods have significantly extended the transferability of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP for various downstream tasks. These methods adopt handcraft templates or learnable vectors to provide text or image instructions in fine-tuning VLMs. However, most existing works ignore the structural relationships between learnable prompts and tokens within and between modalities. Moreover, balancing the performance of base and new classes remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose an Integrated Structural Prompt (ISP) for VLMs to enhance the interaction of information representations between the text and image branches. ISP introduces self-structural and cross-structural prompt modules to model the structural relationships between learnable prompts and frozen tokens within and across modalities. This enables efficient information transfer while preserving feature stability. Additionally, we propose a sample probing module that dynamically adjusts loss coefficients based on sample difficulty, preventing the mode from overfitting to simple samples and improving generalization ability to new classes. Extensive experiments on three widely used settings: base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset evaluation, and domain generalization demonstrate that the proposed ISP achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods.
Graph Learning
Authors: Feng Xia, Ciyuan Peng, Jing Ren, Falih Gozi Febrinanto, Renqiang Luo, Vidya Saikrishna, Shuo Yu, Xiangjie Kong
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Fairness, Fraud Detection, Graph Learning, Navigate, Recommendation Systems

Graph learning has rapidly evolved into a critical subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Its development began with early graph-theoretic methods, gaining significant momentum with the advent of graph neural networks (GNNs). Over the past decade, progress in scalable architectures, dynamic graph modeling, multimodal learning, generative AI, explainable AI (XAI), and responsible AI has broadened the applicability of graph learning to various challenging environments. Graph learning is significant due to its ability to model complex, non-Euclidean relationships that traditional machine learning struggles to capture, thus better supporting real-world applications ranging from drug discovery and fraud detection to recommender systems and scientific reasoning. However, challenges like scalability, generalization, heterogeneity, interpretability, and trustworthiness must be addressed to unlock its full potential. This survey provides a comprehensive introduction to graph learning, focusing on key dimensions including scalable, temporal, multimodal, generative, explainable, and responsible graph learning. We review state-of-the-art techniques for efficiently handling large-scale graphs, capturing dynamic temporal dependencies, integrating heterogeneous data modalities, generating novel graph samples, and enhancing interpretability to foster trust and transparency. We also explore ethical considerations, such as privacy and fairness, to ensure responsible deployment of graph learning models. Additionally, we identify and discuss emerging topics, highlighting recent integration of graph learning and other AI paradigms and offering insights into future directions. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of graph learning.
ADMC: Attention-based Diffusion Model for Missing Modalities Feature Completion
Authors: Wei zhang, Juan Chen, Yanbo J. Wang, En Zhu, Xuan Yang, Yiduo Wang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Recognition

Multimodal emotion and intent recognition is essential for automated human-computer interaction, It aims to analyze users' speech, text, and visual information to predict their emotions or intent. One of the significant challenges is that missing modalities due to sensor malfunctions or incomplete data. Traditional methods that attempt to reconstruct missing information often suffer from over-coupling and imprecise generation processes, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce an Attention-based Diffusion model for Missing Modalities feature Completion (ADMC). Our framework independently trains feature extraction networks for each modality, preserving their unique characteristics and avoiding over-coupling. The Attention-based Diffusion Network (ADN) generates missing modality features that closely align with authentic multimodal distribution, enhancing performance across all missing-modality scenarios. Moreover, ADN's cross-modal generation offers improved recognition even in full-modality contexts. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the IEMOCAP and MIntRec benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in both missing and complete modality scenarios.
AdaptaGen: Domain-Specific Image Generation through Hierarchical Semantic Optimization Framework
Authors: Suoxiang Zhang, Xiaxi Li, Hongrui Chang, Zhuoyan Hou, Guoxin Wu, Ronghua Ji
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Prompt Engineering

Domain-specific image generation aims to produce high-quality visual content for specialized fields while ensuring semantic accuracy and detail fidelity. However, existing methods exhibit two critical limitations: First, current approaches address prompt engineering and model adaptation separately, overlooking the inherent dependence between semantic understanding and visual representation in specialized domains. Second, these techniques inadequately incorporate domain-specific semantic constraints during content synthesis, resulting in generation outcomes that exhibit hallucinations and semantic deviations. To tackle these issues, we propose AdaptaGen, a hierarchical semantic optimization framework that integrates matrix-based prompt optimization with multi-perspective understanding, capturing comprehensive semantic relationships from both global and local perspectives. To mitigate hallucinations in specialized domains, we design a cross-modal adaptation mechanism, which, when combined with intelligent content synthesis, enables preserving core thematic elements while incorporating diverse details across images. Additionally, we introduce a two-phase caption semantic transformation during the generation phase. This approach maintains semantic coherence while enhancing visual diversity, ensuring the generated images adhere to domain-specific constraints. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving superior performance across 40 categories from diverse datasets using only 16 images per category, demonstrating significant improvements in image quality, diversity, and semantic consistency.
Semi-Supervised Defect Detection via Conditional Diffusion and CLIP-Guided Noise Filtering
Authors: Shuai Li, Shihan Chen, Wanru Geng, Zhaohua Xu, Xiaolu Liu, Can Dong, Zhen Tian, Changlin Chen
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Supervised Defect Detection

In the realm of industrial quality inspection, defect detection stands as a critical component, particularly in high-precision, safety-critical sectors such as automotive components aerospace, and medical devices. Traditional methods, reliant on manual inspection or early image processing algorithms, suffer from inefficiencies, high costs, and limited robustness. This paper introduces a semi-supervised defect detection framework based on conditional diffusion (DSYM), leveraging a two-stage collaborative training mechanism and a staged joint optimization strategy. The framework utilizes labeled data for initial training and subsequently incorporates unlabeled data through the generation of pseudo-labels. A conditional diffusion model synthesizes multi-scale pseudo-defect samples, while a CLIP cross-modal feature-based noise filtering mechanism mitigates label contamination. Experimental results on the NEU-DET dataset demonstrate a 78.4% mAP@0.5 with the same amount of labeled data as traditional supervised methods, and 75.1% mAP@0.5 with only 40% of the labeled data required by the original supervised model, showcasing significant advantages in data efficiency. This research provides a high-precision, low-labeling-dependent solution for defect detection in industrial quality inspection scenarios. The work of this article has been open-sourced at https://github.com/cLin-c/Semisupervised-DSYM.