pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners
Authors: Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Congkai Xie, Xavier Hu, Xiaotian Han, Shengyu Zhang, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Logical Reasoning, Spatial Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have powered Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, showing promise in automating tasks on computing devices. Recent works have begun exploring reasoning in GUI tasks with encouraging results. However, many current approaches rely on manually designed reasoning templates, which may result in reasoning that is not sufficiently robust and adaptive for complex GUI environments. Meanwhile, some existing agents continue to operate as Reactive Actors, relying primarily on implicit reasoning that may lack sufficient depth for GUI tasks demanding planning and error recovery. We argue that advancing these agents requires a shift from reactive acting towards acting based on deliberate reasoning. To facilitate this transformation, we introduce InfiGUI-R1, an MLLM-based GUI agent developed through our Actor2Reasoner framework, a reasoning-centric, two-stage training approach designed to progressively evolve agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners. The first stage, Reasoning Injection, focuses on establishing a basic reasoner. We employ Spatial Reasoning Distillation to transfer cross-modal spatial reasoning capabilities from teacher models to MLLMs through trajectories with explicit reasoning steps, enabling models to integrate GUI visual-spatial information with logical reasoning before action generation. The second stage, Deliberation Enhancement, refines the basic reasoner into a deliberative one using Reinforcement Learning. This stage introduces two approaches: Sub-goal Guidance, which rewards models for generating accurate intermediate sub-goals, and Error Recovery Scenario Construction, which creates failure-and-recovery training scenarios from identified prone-to-error steps. Experimental results show InfiGUI-R1 achieves strong performance in GUI grounding and trajectory tasks. Resources at https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUI-R1.
Assessing AI-Generated Questions' Alignment with Cognitive Frameworks in Educational Assessment
Authors: Antoun Yaacoub, Jérôme Da-Rugna, Zainab Assaghir
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multiple-choice

This study evaluates the integration of Bloom's Taxonomy into OneClickQuiz, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven plugin for automating Multiple-Choice Question (MCQ) generation in Moodle. Bloom's Taxonomy provides a structured framework for categorizing educational objectives into hierarchical cognitive levels. Our research investigates whether incorporating this taxonomy can improve the alignment of AI-generated questions with specific cognitive objectives. We developed a dataset of 3691 questions categorized according to Bloom's levels and employed various classification models-Multinomial Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Linear Support Vector Classification (SVC), and a Transformer-based model (DistilBERT)-to evaluate their effectiveness in categorizing questions. Our results indicate that higher Bloom's levels generally correlate with increased question length, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), and Lexical Density (LD), reflecting the increased complexity of higher cognitive demands. Multinomial Logistic Regression showed varying accuracy across Bloom's levels, performing best for "Knowledge" and less accurately for higher-order levels. Merging higher-level categories improved accuracy for complex cognitive tasks. Naive Bayes and Linear SVC also demonstrated effective classification for lower levels but struggled with higher-order tasks. DistilBERT achieved the highest performance, significantly improving classification of both lower and higher-order cognitive levels, achieving an overall validation accuracy of 91%. This study highlights the potential of integrating Bloom's Taxonomy into AI-driven assessment tools and underscores the advantages of advanced models like DistilBERT for enhancing educational content generation.
Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale
Authors: Bowen Jiang, Zhuoqun Hao, Young-Min Cho, Bryan Li, Yuan Yuan, Sihao Chen, Lyle Ungar, Camillo J. Taylor, Dan Roth
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as personalized assistants for users across a wide range of tasks -- from offering writing support to delivering tailored recommendations or consultations. Over time, the interaction history between a user and an LLM can provide extensive information about an individual's traits and preferences. However, open questions remain on how well LLMs today can effectively leverage such history to (1) internalize the user's inherent traits and preferences, (2) track how the user profiling and preferences evolve over time, and (3) generate personalized responses accordingly in new scenarios. In this work, we introduce the PERSONAMEM benchmark. PERSONAMEM features curated user profiles with over 180 simulated user-LLM interaction histories, each containing up to 60 sessions of multi-turn conversations across 15 real-world tasks that require personalization. Given an in-situ user query, i.e. query issued by the user from the first-person perspective, we evaluate LLM chatbots' ability to identify the most suitable response according to the current state of the user's profile. We observe that current LLMs still struggle to recognize the dynamic evolution in users' profiles over time through direct prompting approaches. As a consequence, LLMs often fail to deliver responses that align with users' current situations and preferences, with frontier models such as GPT-4.1, o4-mini, GPT-4.5, o1, or Gemini-2.0 achieving only around 50% overall accuracy, suggesting room for improvement. We hope that PERSONAMEM, along with the user profile and conversation simulation pipeline, can facilitate future research in the development of truly user-aware chatbots. Code and data are available at github.com/bowen-upenn/PersonaMem.
SimplifyMyText: An LLM-Based System for Inclusive Plain Language Text Simplification
Authors: Michael Färber, Parisa Aghdam, Kyuri Im, Mario Tawfelis, Hardik Ghoshal
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Simplification

Text simplification is essential for making complex content accessible to diverse audiences who face comprehension challenges. Yet, the limited availability of simplified materials creates significant barriers to personal and professional growth and hinders social inclusion. Although researchers have explored various methods for automatic text simplification, none fully leverage large language models (LLMs) to offer tailored customization for different target groups and varying levels of simplicity. Moreover, despite its proven benefits for both consumers and organizations, the well-established practice of plain language remains underutilized. In this paper, we https://simplifymytext.org, the first system designed to produce plain language content from multiple input formats, including typed text and file uploads, with flexible customization options for diverse audiences. We employ GPT-4 and Llama-3 and evaluate outputs across multiple metrics. Overall, our work contributes to research on automatic text simplification and highlights the importance of tailored communication in promoting inclusivity.
Understanding the Repeat Curse in Large Language Models from a Feature Perspective
Authors: Junchi Yao, Shu Yang, Jianhua Xu, Lijie Hu, Mengdi Li, Di Wang
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in various domains, yet they often suffer from repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we refer to as the "Repeat Curse". While previous studies have proposed decoding strategies to mitigate repetition, the underlying mechanism behind this issue remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we investigate the root causes of repetition in LLMs through the lens of mechanistic interpretability. Inspired by recent advances in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which enable monosemantic feature extraction, we propose a novel approach, "Duplicatus Charm", to induce and analyze the Repeat Curse. Our method systematically identifies "Repetition Features" -the key model activations responsible for generating repetitive outputs. First, we locate the layers most involved in repetition through logit analysis. Next, we extract and stimulate relevant features using SAE-based activation manipulation. To validate our approach, we construct a repetition dataset covering token and paragraph level repetitions and introduce an evaluation pipeline to quantify the influence of identified repetition features. Furthermore, by deactivating these features, we have effectively mitigated the Repeat Curse.
Bias Analysis and Mitigation through Protected Attribute Detection and Regard Classification
Authors: Takuma Udagawa, Yang Zhao, Hiroshi Kanayama, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Large language models (LLMs) acquire general linguistic knowledge from massive-scale pretraining. However, pretraining data mainly comprised of web-crawled texts contain undesirable social biases which can be perpetuated or even amplified by LLMs. In this study, we propose an efficient yet effective annotation pipeline to investigate social biases in the pretraining corpora. Our pipeline consists of protected attribute detection to identify diverse demographics, followed by regard classification to analyze the language polarity towards each attribute. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effect of our bias analysis and mitigation measures, focusing on Common Crawl as the most representative pretraining corpus.
EIoU-EMC: A Novel Loss for Domain-specific Nested Entity Recognition
Authors: Jian Zhang, Tianqing Zhang, Qi Li, Hongwei Wang
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: NER

In recent years, research has mainly focused on the general NER task. There still have some challenges with nested NER task in the specific domains. Specifically, the scenarios of low resource and class imbalance impede the wide application for biomedical and industrial domains. In this study, we design a novel loss EIoU-EMC, by enhancing the implement of Intersection over Union loss and Multiclass loss. Our proposed method specially leverages the information of entity boundary and entity classification, thereby enhancing the model's capacity to learn from a limited number of data samples. To validate the performance of this innovative method in enhancing NER task, we conducted experiments on three distinct biomedical NER datasets and one dataset constructed by ourselves from industrial complex equipment maintenance documents. Comparing to strong baselines, our method demonstrates the competitive performance across all datasets. During the experimental analysis, our proposed method exhibits significant advancements in entity boundary recognition and entity classification. Our code are available here.
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models
Authors: Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Ren Ma, Yinfan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Xingjian Wei, Jiantao Qiu, Chi Zhang, Ying Qian, Conghui He
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00

The composition of pre-training datasets for large language models (LLMs) remains largely undisclosed, hindering transparency and efforts to optimize data quality, a critical driver of model performance. Current data selection methods, such as natural language quality assessments, diversity-based filters, and classifier-based approaches, are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. To address these gaps, we propose PRRC to evaluate data quality across Professionalism, Readability, Reasoning, and Cleanliness. We further introduce Meta-rater, a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates these dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. Meta-rater employs proxy models to train a regression model that predicts validation loss, enabling the identification of optimal combinations of quality scores. Experiments demonstrate that Meta-rater doubles convergence speed for 1.3B parameter models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23, with scalable benefits observed in 3.3B models trained on 100B tokens. Additionally, we release the annotated SlimPajama-627B dataset, labeled across 25 quality metrics (including PRRC), to advance research in data-centric LLM development. Our work establishes that holistic, multi-dimensional quality integration significantly outperforms conventional single-dimension approaches, offering a scalable paradigm for enhancing pre-training efficiency and model capability.
The First VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge
Authors: Natalia Tomashenko, Xiaoxiao Miao, Emmanuel Vincent, Junichi Yamagishi
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

The First VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge is an ICASSP 2025 SP Grand Challenge which focuses on evaluating attacker systems against a set of voice anonymization systems submitted to the VoicePrivacy 2024 Challenge. Training, development, and evaluation datasets were provided along with a baseline attacker. Participants developed their attacker systems in the form of automatic speaker verification systems and submitted their scores on the development and evaluation data. The best attacker systems reduced the equal error rate (EER) by 25-44% relative w.r.t. the baseline.
Hypothetical Documents or Knowledge Leakage? Rethinking LLM-based Query Expansion
Authors: Yejun Yoon, JaeYoon Jung, Seunghyun Yoon, Kunwoo Park
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Verification, Retrieval

Query expansion methods powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness in zero-shot retrieval tasks. These methods assume that LLMs can generate hypothetical documents that, when incorporated into a query vector, enhance the retrieval of real evidence. However, we challenge this assumption by investigating whether knowledge leakage in benchmarks contributes to the observed performance gains. Using fact verification as a testbed, we analyzed whether the generated documents contained information entailed by ground truth evidence and assessed their impact on performance. Our findings indicate that performance improvements occurred consistently only for claims whose generated documents included sentences entailed by ground truth evidence. This suggests that knowledge leakage may be present in these benchmarks, inflating the perceived performance of LLM-based query expansion methods, particularly in real-world scenarios that require retrieving niche or novel knowledge.
Self-Correction Makes LLMs Better Parsers
Authors: Ziyan Zhang, Yang Hou, Chen Gong, Zhenghua Li
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent studies suggest that they still face challenges in performing fundamental NLP tasks essential for deep language understanding, particularly syntactic parsing. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LLM parsing capabilities, delving into the specific shortcomings of their parsing results. We find that LLMs may stem from limitations to fully leverage grammar rules in existing treebanks, which restricts their capability to generate valid syntactic structures. To help LLMs acquire knowledge without additional training, we propose a self-correction method that leverages grammar rules from existing treebanks to guide LLMs in correcting previous errors. Specifically, we automatically detect potential errors and dynamically search for relevant rules, offering hints and examples to guide LLMs in making corrections themselves. Experimental results on three datasets with various LLMs, demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance in both in-domain and cross-domain settings on the English and Chinese datasets.
Uncovering Conspiratorial Narratives within Arabic Online Content
Authors: Djamila Mohdeb, Meriem Laifa, Zineb Guemraoui, Dalila Behih
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

This study investigates the spread of conspiracy theories in Arabic digital spaces through computational analysis of online content. By combining Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling techniques, specifically the Top2Vec algorithm, we analyze data from Arabic blogs and Facebook to identify and classify conspiratorial narratives. Our analysis uncovers six distinct categories: gender/feminist, geopolitical, government cover-ups, apocalyptic, Judeo-Masonic, and geoengineering. The research highlights how these narratives are deeply embedded in Arabic social media discourse, shaped by regional historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts. By applying advanced Natural Language Processing methods to Arabic content, this study addresses a gap in conspiracy theory research, which has traditionally focused on English-language content or offline data. The findings provide new insights into the manifestation and evolution of conspiracy theories in Arabic digital spaces, enhancing our understanding of their role in shaping public discourse in the Arab world.
The Iterative Chainlet Partitioning Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone and Neural Acceleration
Authors: Jae Hyeok Lee, Minjun Kim, Jinkyoo Park, Changhyun Kwon
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Traveling Salesman Problem

This study introduces the Iterative Chainlet Partitioning (ICP) algorithm and its neural acceleration for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone (TSP-D). The proposed ICP algorithm decomposes a TSP-D solution into smaller segments called chainlets, each optimized individually by a dynamic programming subroutine. The chainlet with the highest improvement is updated and the procedure is repeated until no further improvement is possible. The number of subroutine calls is bounded linearly in problem size for the first iteration and remains constant in subsequent iterations, ensuring algorithmic scalability. Empirical results show that ICP outperforms existing algorithms in both solution quality and computational time. Tested over 1,059 benchmark instances, ICP yields an average improvement of 2.75% in solution quality over the previous state-of-the-art algorithm while reducing computational time by 79.8%. The procedure is deterministic, ensuring reliability without requiring multiple runs. The subroutine is the computational bottleneck in the already efficient ICP algorithm. To reduce the necessity of subroutine calls, we integrate a graph neural network (GNN) to predict incremental improvements. We demonstrate that the resulting Neuro ICP (NICP) achieves substantial acceleration while maintaining solution quality. Compared to ICP, NICP reduces the total computational time by 49.7%, while the objective function value increase is limited to 0.12%. The framework's adaptability to various operational constraints makes it a valuable foundation for developing efficient algorithms for truck-drone synchronized routing problems.
An island-parallel ensemble metaheuristic algorithm for large graph coloring problems
Authors: Tansel Dokeroglu, Tayfun Kucukyilmaz, Ahmet Cosar
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning

Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) is an NP-Hard vertex labeling problem in graphs such that no two adjacent vertices can have the same color. Large instances of GCP cannot be solved in reasonable execution times by exact algorithms. Therefore, soft computing approaches, such as metaheuristics, have proven to be very efficient for solving large instances of GCP. In this study, we propose a new island-parallel ensemble metaheuristic algorithm (PEM-Color) to solve large GCP instances. Ensemble learning is a new machine learning approach based on combining the output of multiple models instead of using a single one. We use Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel computation libraries to combine recent state-of-the-art metaheuristics: Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), and Teaching Learning Based (TLBO) to improve the quality of their solutions further. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that combines metaheuristics and applies to the GCP using an ensemble approach. We conducted experiments on large graph instances from the well-known DIMACS benchmark using 64 processors and achieved significant improvements in execution times. The experiments also indicate an almost linear speed-up with a strong scalability potential. The solution quality of the instances is promising, as our algorithm outperforms 13 state-of-the-art algorithms.
Unlearning Works Better Than You Think: Local Reinforcement-Based Selection of Auxiliary Objectives
Authors: Abderrahim Bendahi, Adrien Fradin, Matthieu Lerasle
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We introduce Local Reinforcement-Based Selection of Auxiliary Objectives (LRSAO), a novel approach that selects auxiliary objectives using reinforcement learning (RL) to support the optimization process of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) as in EA+RL framework and furthermore incorporates the ability to unlearn previously used objectives. By modifying the reward mechanism to penalize moves that do no increase the fitness value and relying on the local auxiliary objectives, LRSAO dynamically adapts its selection strategy to optimize performance according to the landscape and unlearn previous objectives when necessary. We analyze and evaluate LRSAO on the black-box complexity version of the non-monotonic Jump function, with gap parameter $\ell$, where each auxiliary objective is beneficial at specific stages of optimization. The Jump function is hard to optimize for evolutionary-based algorithms and the best-known complexity for reinforcement-based selection on Jump was $O(n^2 \log(n) / \ell)$. Our approach improves over this result to achieve a complexity of $\Theta(n^2 / \ell^2 + n \log(n))$ resulting in a significant improvement, which demonstrates the efficiency and adaptability of LRSAO, highlighting its potential to outperform traditional methods in complex optimization scenarios.
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment With Brain Waves as a Tool for Optimizing Engagement
Authors: Nir Cafri
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG

This study explores the use of electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain wave monitoring to enable dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) in a virtual reality (VR) gaming environment. Using the Task Engagement Index (TEI) derived from frontal EEG electrodes, we adapt game challenge levels in real time to maintain optimal player engagement. In a within-subject design with six participants, we found that the DDA condition significantly increased engagement duration by 19.79% compared to a non-DDA control condition. These results suggest that combining EEG, DDA, and VR technologies can enhance user experience and has potential applications in adaptive learning, rehabilitation, and personalized interfaces.