pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Hand Palm Motion Gesture Recognition by Eliminating Reference Frame Bias via Frame-Invariant Similarity Measures
Authors: Arno Verduyn, Maxim Vochten, Joris De Schutter
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Gesture Recognition

The ability of robots to recognize human gestures facilitates a natural and accessible human-robot collaboration. However, most work in gesture recognition remains rooted in reference frame-dependent representations. This poses a challenge when reference frames vary due to different work cell layouts, imprecise frame calibrations, or other environmental changes. This paper investigated the use of invariant trajectory descriptors for robust hand palm motion gesture recognition under reference frame changes. First, a novel dataset of recorded Hand Palm Motion (HPM) gestures is introduced. The motion gestures in this dataset were specifically designed to be distinguishable without dependence on specific reference frames or directional cues. Afterwards, multiple invariant trajectory descriptor approaches were benchmarked to assess how their performances generalize to this novel HPM dataset. After this offline benchmarking, the best scoring approach is validated for online recognition by developing a real-time Proof of Concept (PoC). In this PoC, hand palm motion gestures were used to control the real-time movement of a manipulator arm. The PoC demonstrated a high recognition reliability in real-time operation, achieving an $F_1$-score of 92.3%. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of the invariant descriptor approach as a standalone solution. Moreover, we believe that the invariant descriptor approach can also be utilized within other state-of-the-art pattern recognition and learning systems to improve their robustness against reference frame variations.
Augmenting Image Annotation: A Human-LMM Collaborative Framework for Efficient Object Selection and Label Generation
Authors: He Zhang, Xinyi Fu, John M. Carroll
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

Traditional image annotation tasks rely heavily on human effort for object selection and label assignment, making the process time-consuming and prone to decreased efficiency as annotators experience fatigue after extensive work. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages the visual understanding capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs), particularly GPT, to assist annotation workflows. In our proposed approach, human annotators focus on selecting objects via bounding boxes, while the LMM autonomously generates relevant labels. This human-AI collaborative framework enhances annotation efficiency by reducing the cognitive and time burden on human annotators. By analyzing the system's performance across various types of annotation tasks, we demonstrate its ability to generalize to tasks such as object recognition, scene description, and fine-grained categorization. Our proposed framework highlights the potential of this approach to redefine annotation workflows, offering a scalable and efficient solution for large-scale data labeling in computer vision. Finally, we discuss how integrating LMMs into the annotation pipeline can advance bidirectional human-AI alignment, as well as the challenges of alleviating the "endless annotation" burden in the face of information overload by shifting some of the work to AI.
API Agents vs. GUI Agents: Divergence and Convergence
Authors: Chaoyun Zhang, Shilin He, Liqun Li, Si Qin, Yu Kang, QIngwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved beyond simple text generation to power software agents that directly translate natural language commands into tangible actions. While API-based LLM agents initially rose to prominence for their robust automation capabilities and seamless integration with programmatic endpoints, recent progress in multimodal LLM research has enabled GUI-based LLM agents that interact with graphical user interfaces in a human-like manner. Although these two paradigms share the goal of enabling LLM-driven task automation, they diverge significantly in architectural complexity, development workflows, and user interaction models. This paper presents the first comprehensive comparative study of API-based and GUI-based LLM agents, systematically analyzing their divergence and potential convergence. We examine key dimensions and highlight scenarios in which hybrid approaches can harness their complementary strengths. By proposing clear decision criteria and illustrating practical use cases, we aim to guide practitioners and researchers in selecting, combining, or transitioning between these paradigms. Ultimately, we indicate that continuing innovations in LLM-based automation are poised to blur the lines between API- and GUI-driven agents, paving the way for more flexible, adaptive solutions in a wide range of real-world applications.
CALLM: Understanding Cancer Survivors' Emotions and Intervention Opportunities via Mobile Diaries and Context-Aware Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Wang, Katharine E. Daniel, Laura E. Barnes, Philip I. Chow
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Cancer survivors face unique emotional challenges that impact their quality of life. Mobile diary entries provide a promising method for tracking emotional states, improving self-awareness, and promoting well-being outcome. This paper aims to, through mobile diaries, understand cancer survivors' emotional states and key variables related to just-in-time intervention opportunities, including the desire to regulate emotions and the availability to engage in interventions. Although emotion analysis tools show potential for recognizing emotions from text, current methods lack the contextual understanding necessary to interpret brief mobile diary narratives. Our analysis of diary entries from cancer survivors (N=407) reveals systematic relationships between described contexts and emotional states, with administrative and health-related contexts associated with negative affect and regulation needs, while leisure activities promote positive emotions. We propose CALLM, a Context-Aware framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to analyze these brief entries by integrating retrieved peer experiences and personal diary history. CALLM demonstrates strong performance with balanced accuracies reaching 72.96% for positive affect, 73.29% for negative affect, 73.72% for emotion regulation desire, and 60.09% for intervention availability, outperforming language model baselines. Post-hoc analysis reveals that model confidence strongly predicts accuracy, with longer diary entries generally enhancing performance, and brief personalization periods yielding meaningful improvements. Our findings demonstrate how contextual information in mobile diaries can be effectively leveraged to understand emotional experiences, predict key states, and identify optimal intervention moments for personalized just-in-time support.
The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context
Authors: Tamar I. Regev, Chiebuka Ohams, Shaylee Xie, Lukas Wolf, Evelina Fedorenko, Alex Warstadt, Ethan G. Wilcox, Tiago Pimentel
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry distinct information? Prior work has shown that the information carried by prosodic features is substantially redundant with that carried by the surrounding words. Here, we systematically examine the time scale of this relationship, studying how it varies with the length of past and future contexts. We find that a word's prosodic features require an extended past context (3-8 words across different features) to be reliably predicted. Given that long-scale contextual information decays in memory, prosody may facilitate communication by adding information that is locally unique. We also find that a word's prosodic features show some redundancy with future words, but only with a short scale of 1-2 words, consistent with reports of incremental short-term planning in language production. Thus, prosody may facilitate communication by helping listeners predict upcoming material. In tandem, our results highlight potentially distinct roles that prosody plays in facilitating integration of words into past contexts and in helping predict upcoming words.
Decode and Forward Relaying for SC-FDE Systems with a Multi-Antenna Relay
Authors: Farshad Dizani, Ali Olfat
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00

In this paper, a cooperative relay network consisting of a single-antenna source, a multi-antenna relay, and a multi-antenna destination is considered. The relay operates in decode-and-forward (DF) mode under frequency-selective fading. To combat intersymbol interference (ISI), single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) with or without decision feedback is deployed at the relay and the destination. The equalization coefficients are obtained using minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criterion. Both equal and optimum power allocations for a constant total transmit power at the relay are considered. While, the optimum power allocation is a non-convex problem, the solution is obtained using strong duality.
Research Vision: Multi-Agent Path Planning for Cops And Robbers Via Reactive Synthesis
Authors: William Fishell, Andoni Rodriguez, Mark Santolucito
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Program Synthesis

We propose the problem of multi-agent path planning for a generalization of the classic Cops and Robbers game via reactive synthesis. Specifically, through the application of LTLt and Coordination Synthesis, we aim to check whether various Cops and Robbers games are realizable (a strategy exists for the cops which guarantees they catch the robbers). Additionally, we construct this strategy as an executable program for the multiple system players in our games. In this paper we formalize the problem space, and propose potential directions for solutions. We also show how our formalization of this generalized cops and robbers game can be mapped to a broad range of other problems in the reactive program synthesis space.
Prompt Injection Detection and Mitigation via AI Multi-Agent NLP Frameworks
Authors: Diego Gosmar, Deborah A. Dahl, Dario Gosmar
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Prompt injection constitutes a significant challenge for generative AI systems by inducing unintended outputs. We introduce a multi-agent NLP framework specifically designed to address prompt injection vulnerabilities through layered detection and enforcement mechanisms. The framework orchestrates specialized agents for generating responses, sanitizing outputs, and enforcing policy compliance. Evaluation on 500 engineered injection prompts demonstrates a marked reduction in injection success and policy breaches. Novel metrics, including Injection Success Rate (ISR), Policy Override Frequency (POF), Prompt Sanitization Rate (PSR), and Compliance Consistency Score (CCS), are proposed to derive a composite Total Injection Vulnerability Score (TIVS). The system utilizes the OVON (Open Voice Network) framework for inter-agent communication via structured JSON messages, extending a previously established multi-agent architecture from hallucination mitigation to address the unique challenges of prompt injection.
Cerebrum (AIOS SDK): A Platform for Agent Development, Deployment, Distribution, and Discovery
Authors: Balaji Rama, Kai Mei, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Autonomous LLM-based agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for complex task execution, yet the field lacks standardized tools for development, deployment, distribution and discovery of agents. We present Cerebrum, an Agent SDK for AIOS that addresses this gap through three key components: (1) a comprehensive SDK featuring a modular four-layer architecture for agent development, encompassing LLM, memory, storage, and tool management; (2) a community-driven Agent Hub for sharing and discovering agents, complete with version control and dependency management; (3) an interactive web interface for testing and evaluating agents. The platform's effectiveness is demonstrated through implementations of various agent architectures, including Chain of Thought (CoT), ReAct, and tool-use agents. Cerebrum advances the field by providing a unified framework that standardizes agent development while maintaining flexibility for researchers and developers to innovate and distribute their agents. The live website is at https://app.aios.foundation, the code is at https://github.com/agiresearch/Cerebrum, and video is at https://app.aios.foundation/video-demo.
GNNs as Predictors of Agentic Workflow Performances
Authors: Yuanshuo Zhang, Yuchen Hou, Bohan Tang, Shuo Chen, Muhan Zhang, Xiaowen Dong, Siheng Chen
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Position

Agentic workflows invoked by Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in handling complex tasks. However, optimizing such workflows is costly and inefficient in real-world applications due to extensive invocations of LLMs. To fill this gap, this position paper formulates agentic workflows as computational graphs and advocates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as efficient predictors of agentic workflow performances, avoiding repeated LLM invocations for evaluation. To empirically ground this position, we construct FLORA-Bench, a unified platform for benchmarking GNNs for predicting agentic workflow performances. With extensive experiments, we arrive at the following conclusion: GNNs are simple yet effective predictors. This conclusion supports new applications of GNNs and a novel direction towards automating agentic workflow optimization. All codes, models, and data are available at https://github.com/youngsoul0731/Flora-Bench.
From Abstraction to Reality: DARPA's Vision for Robust Sim-to-Real Autonomy
Authors: Erfaun Noorani, Zachary Serlin, Ben Price, Alvaro Velasquez
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Imitation Learning, Meta-Learning

The DARPA Transfer from Imprecise and Abstract Models to Autonomous Technologies (TIAMAT) program aims to address rapid and robust transfer of autonomy technologies across dynamic and complex environments, goals, and platforms. Existing methods for simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) transfer often rely on high-fidelity simulations and struggle with broad adaptation, particularly in time-sensitive scenarios. Although many approaches have shown incredible performance at specific tasks, most techniques fall short when posed with unforeseen, complex, and dynamic real-world scenarios due to the inherent limitations of simulation. In contrast to current research that aims to bridge the gap between simulation environments and the real world through increasingly sophisticated simulations and a combination of methods typically assuming a small sim-to-real gap -- such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, imitation learning, meta-learning, policy distillation, and dynamic optimization -- TIAMAT takes a different approach by instead emphasizing transfer and adaptation of the autonomy stack directly to real-world environments by utilizing a breadth of low(er)-fidelity simulations to create broadly effective sim-to-real transfers. By abstractly learning from multiple simulation environments in reference to their shared semantics, TIAMAT's approaches aim to achieve abstract-to-real transfer for effective and rapid real-world adaptation. Furthermore, this program endeavors to improve the overall autonomy pipeline by addressing the inherent challenges in translating simulated behaviors into effective real-world performance.
Rethinking Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models in Two Stages
Authors: Matteo Farina, Massimiliano Mancini, Giovanni Iacca, Elisa Ricci
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

An old-school recipe for training a classifier is to (i) learn a good feature extractor and (ii) optimize a linear layer atop. When only a handful of samples are available per category, as in Few-Shot Adaptation (FSA), data are insufficient to fit a large number of parameters, rendering the above impractical. This is especially true with large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which motivated successful research at the intersection of Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) and FSA. In this work, we start by analyzing the learning dynamics of PEFT techniques when trained on few-shot data from only a subset of categories, referred to as the ``base'' classes. We show that such dynamics naturally splits into two distinct phases: (i) task-level feature extraction and (ii) specialization to the available concepts. To accommodate this dynamic, we then depart from prompt- or adapter-based methods and tackle FSA differently. Specifically, given a fixed computational budget, we split it to (i) learn a task-specific feature extractor via PEFT and (ii) train a linear classifier on top. We call this scheme Two-Stage Few-Shot Adaptation (2SFS). Differently from established methods, our scheme enables a novel form of selective inference at a category level, i.e., at test time, only novel categories are embedded by the adapted text encoder, while embeddings of base categories are available within the classifier. Results with fixed hyperparameters across two settings, three backbones, and eleven datasets, show that 2SFS matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art, while established methods degrade significantly across settings.
Safe-VAR: Safe Visual Autoregressive Model for Text-to-Image Generative Watermarking
Authors: Ziyi Wang, Songbai Tan, Gang Xu, Xuerui Qiu, Hongbin Xu, Xin Meng, Ming Li, Fei Richard Yu
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

With the success of autoregressive learning in large language models, it has become a dominant approach for text-to-image generation, offering high efficiency and visual quality. However, invisible watermarking for visual autoregressive (VAR) models remains underexplored, despite its importance in misuse prevention. Existing watermarking methods, designed for diffusion models, often struggle to adapt to the sequential nature of VAR models. To bridge this gap, we propose Safe-VAR, the first watermarking framework specifically designed for autoregressive text-to-image generation. Our study reveals that the timing of watermark injection significantly impacts generation quality, and watermarks of different complexities exhibit varying optimal injection times. Motivated by this observation, we propose an Adaptive Scale Interaction Module, which dynamically determines the optimal watermark embedding strategy based on the watermark information and the visual characteristics of the generated image. This ensures watermark robustness while minimizing its impact on image quality. Furthermore, we introduce a Cross-Scale Fusion mechanism, which integrates mixture of both heads and experts to effectively fuse multi-resolution features and handle complex interactions between image content and watermark patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that Safe-VAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing existing counterparts regarding image quality, watermarking fidelity, and robustness against perturbations. Moreover, our method exhibits strong generalization to an out-of-domain watermark dataset QR Codes.
MMS-LLaMA: Efficient LLM-based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Minimal Multimodal Speech Tokens
Authors: Jeong Hun Yeo, Hyeongseop Rha, Se Jin Park, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Computational Efficiency, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Robust Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) achieves robust speech recognition in noisy environments by combining auditory and visual information. However, recent Large Language Model (LLM) based AVSR systems incur high computational costs due to the high temporal resolution of audio-visual speech processed by LLMs. In this work, we introduce an efficient multimodal speech LLM framework that minimizes token length while preserving essential linguistic content. Our approach employs an early AV-fusion module for streamlined feature integration, an audio-visual speech Q-Former that dynamically allocates tokens based on input duration, and a refined query allocation strategy with a speech rate predictor to adjust token allocation according to speaking speed of each audio sample. Extensive experiments on the LRS3 dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a WER of 0.72% while using only 3.5 tokens per second. Moreover, our approach not only reduces token usage by 86% compared to the previous multimodal speech LLM framework, but also improves computational efficiency by reducing FLOPs by 35.7%.
Cross-Modal Learning for Music-to-Music-Video Description Generation
Authors: Zhuoyuan Mao, Mengjie Zhao, Qiyu Wu, Zhi Zhong, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Description, Video Generation

Music-to-music-video generation is a challenging task due to the intrinsic differences between the music and video modalities. The advent of powerful text-to-video diffusion models has opened a promising pathway for music-video (MV) generation by first addressing the music-to-MV description task and subsequently leveraging these models for video generation. In this study, we focus on the MV description generation task and propose a comprehensive pipeline encompassing training data construction and multimodal model fine-tuning. We fine-tune existing pre-trained multimodal models on our newly constructed music-to-MV description dataset based on the Music4All dataset, which integrates both musical and visual information. Our experimental results demonstrate that music representations can be effectively mapped to textual domains, enabling the generation of meaningful MV description directly from music inputs. We also identify key components in the dataset construction pipeline that critically impact the quality of MV description and highlight specific musical attributes that warrant greater focus for improved MV description generation.
MAVFlow: Preserving Paralinguistic Elements with Conditional Flow Matching for Zero-Shot AV2AV Multilingual Translation
Authors: Sungwoo Cho, Jeongsoo Choi, Sungnyun Kim, Se-Young Yun
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Translation

Despite recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) models, audio-visual to audio-visual (AV2AV) translation still faces a critical challenge: maintaining speaker consistency between the original and translated vocal and facial features. To address this issue, we propose a conditional flow matching (CFM) zero-shot audio-visual renderer that utilizes strong dual guidance from both audio and visual modalities. By leveraging multi-modal guidance with CFM, our model robustly preserves speaker-specific characteristics and significantly enhances zero-shot AV2AV translation abilities. For the audio modality, we enhance the CFM process by integrating robust speaker embeddings with x-vectors, which serve to bolster speaker consistency. Additionally, we convey emotional nuances to the face rendering module. The guidance provided by both audio and visual cues remains independent of semantic or linguistic content, allowing our renderer to effectively handle zero-shot translation tasks for monolingual speakers in different languages. We empirically demonstrate that the inclusion of high-quality mel-spectrograms conditioned on facial information not only enhances the quality of the synthesized speech but also positively influences facial generation, leading to overall performance improvements.