pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Leonardo Berti, Flavio Giorgi, Gjergji Kasneci
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Misconceptions, Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) are leading a new technological revolution as one of the most promising research streams toward artificial general intelligence. The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters and the magnitude of the training datasets, has been linked to various so-called emergent abilities that were previously unobserved. These emergent abilities, ranging from advanced reasoning and in-context learning to coding and problem-solving, have sparked an intense scientific debate: Are they truly emergent, or do they simply depend on external factors, such as training dynamics, the type of problems, or the chosen metric? What underlying mechanism causes them? Despite their transformative potential, emergent abilities remain poorly understood, leading to misconceptions about their definition, nature, predictability, and implications. In this work, we shed light on emergent abilities by conducting a comprehensive review of the phenomenon, addressing both its scientific underpinnings and real-world consequences. We first critically analyze existing definitions, exposing inconsistencies in conceptualizing emergent abilities. We then explore the conditions under which these abilities appear, evaluating the role of scaling laws, task complexity, pre-training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. Our review extends beyond traditional LLMs and includes Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which leverage reinforcement learning and inference-time search to amplify reasoning and self-reflection. However, emergence is not inherently positive. As AI systems gain autonomous reasoning capabilities, they also develop harmful behaviors, including deception, manipulation, and reward hacking. We highlight growing concerns about safety and governance, emphasizing the need for better evaluation frameworks and regulatory oversight.
Rank-R1: Enhancing Reasoning in LLM-based Document Rerankers via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Shengyao Zhuang, Xueguang Ma, Bevan Koopman, Jimmy Lin, Guido Zuccon
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking

In this paper, we introduce Rank-R1, a novel LLM-based reranker that performs reasoning over both the user query and candidate documents before performing the ranking task. Existing document reranking methods based on large language models (LLMs) typically rely on prompting or fine-tuning LLMs to order or label candidate documents according to their relevance to a query. For Rank-R1, we use a reinforcement learning algorithm along with only a small set of relevance labels (without any reasoning supervision) to enhance the reasoning ability of LLM-based rerankers. Our hypothesis is that adding reasoning capabilities to the rerankers can improve their relevance assessement and ranking capabilities. Our experiments on the TREC DL and BRIGHT datasets show that Rank-R1 is highly effective, especially for complex queries. In particular, we find that Rank-R1 achieves effectiveness on in-domain datasets at par with that of supervised fine-tuning methods, but utilizing only 18\% of the training data used by the fine-tuning methods. We also find that the model largely outperforms zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning when applied to out-of-domain datasets featuring complex queries, especially when a 14B-size model is used. Finally, we qualitatively observe that Rank-R1's reasoning process improves the explainability of the ranking results, opening new opportunities for search engine results presentation and fruition.
A Novel Trustworthy Video Summarization Algorithm Through a Mixture of LoRA Experts
Authors: Wenzhuo Du, Gerun Wang, Guancheng Chen, Hang Zhao, Xin Li, Jian Gao
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Video Summarization

With the exponential growth of user-generated content on video-sharing platforms, the challenge of facilitating efficient searching and browsing of videos has garnered significant attention. To enhance users' ability to swiftly locate and review pertinent videos, the creation of concise and informative video summaries has become increasingly important. Video-llama is an effective tool for generating video summarization, but it cannot effectively unify and optimize the modeling of temporal and spatial features and requires a lot of computational resources and time. Therefore, we propose MiLoRA-ViSum to more efficiently capture complex temporal dynamics and spatial relationships inherent in video data and to control the number of parameters for training. By extending traditional Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into a sophisticated mixture-of-experts paradigm, MiLoRA-ViSum incorporates a dual temporal-spatial adaptation mechanism tailored specifically for video summarization tasks. This approach dynamically integrates specialized LoRA experts, each fine-tuned to address distinct temporal or spatial dimensions. Extensive evaluations of the VideoXum and ActivityNet datasets demonstrate that MiLoRA-ViSum achieves the best summarization performance compared to state-of-the-art models, while maintaining significantly lower computational costs. The proposed mixture-of-experts strategy, combined with the dual adaptation mechanism, highlights the model's potential to enhance video summarization capabilities, particularly in large-scale applications requiring both efficiency and precision.
AF-KAN: Activation Function-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient Representation Learning
Authors: Hoang-Thang Ta, Anh Tran
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Representation Learning

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have inspired numerous works exploring their applications across a wide range of scientific problems, with the potential to replace Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). While many KANs are designed using basis and polynomial functions, such as B-splines, ReLU-KAN utilizes a combination of ReLU functions to mimic the structure of B-splines and take advantage of ReLU's speed. However, ReLU-KAN is not built for multiple inputs, and its limitations stem from ReLU's handling of negative values, which can restrict feature extraction. To address these issues, we introduce Activation Function-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (AF-KAN), expanding ReLU-KAN with various activations and their function combinations. This novel KAN also incorporates parameter reduction methods, primarily attention mechanisms and data normalization, to enhance performance on image classification datasets. We explore different activation functions, function combinations, grid sizes, and spline orders to validate the effectiveness of AF-KAN and determine its optimal configuration. In the experiments, AF-KAN significantly outperforms MLP, ReLU-KAN, and other KANs with the same parameter count. It also remains competitive even when using fewer than 6 to 10 times the parameters while maintaining the same network structure. However, AF-KAN requires a longer training time and consumes more FLOPs. The repository for this work is available at https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN.
Explainable Synthetic Image Detection through Diffusion Timestep Ensembling
Authors: Yixin Wu, Feiran Zhang, Tianyuan Shi, Ruicheng Yin, Zhenghua Wang, Zhenliang Gan, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2025-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Explanation Generation, Synthetic Image Detection

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we reveal that natural and synthetic images exhibit distinct differences in the high-frequency domains of their Fourier power spectra after undergoing iterative noise perturbations through an inverse multi-step denoising process, suggesting that such noise can provide additional discriminative information for identifying synthetic images. Based on this observation, we propose a novel detection method that amplifies these differences by progressively adding noise to the original images across multiple timesteps, and train an ensemble of classifiers on these noised images. To enhance human comprehension, we introduce an explanation generation and refinement module to identify flaws located in AI-generated images. Additionally, we construct two new datasets, GenHard and GenExplain, derived from the GenImage benchmark, providing detection samples of greater difficulty and high-quality rationales for fake images. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with 98.91% and 95.89% detection accuracy on regular and harder samples, increasing a minimal of 2.51% and 3.46% compared to baselines. Furthermore, our method also generalizes effectively to images generated by other diffusion models. Our code and datasets will be made publicly available.
TI-JEPA: An Innovative Energy-based Joint Embedding Strategy for Text-Image Multimodal Systems
Authors: Khang H. N. Vo, Duc P. T. Nguyen, Thong Nguyen, Tho T. Quan
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Question Answering, Self-Supervised Learning, Sentiment Analysis, Visual Question Answering

This paper focuses on multimodal alignment within the realm of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in text and image modalities. The semantic gap between the textual and visual modality poses a discrepancy problem towards the effectiveness of multi-modalities fusion. Therefore, we introduce Text-Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (TI-JEPA), an innovative pre-training strategy that leverages energy-based model (EBM) framework to capture complex cross-modal relationships. TI-JEPA combines the flexibility of EBM in self-supervised learning to facilitate the compatibility between textual and visual elements. Through extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that TI-JEPA achieves state-of-the-art performance on multimodal sentiment analysis task (and potentially on a wide range of multimodal-based tasks, such as Visual Question Answering), outperforming existing pre-training methodologies. Our findings highlight the potential of using energy-based framework in advancing multimodal fusion and suggest significant improvements for downstream applications.
Think Twice, Click Once: Enhancing GUI Grounding via Fast and Slow Systems
Authors: Fei Tang, Yongliang Shen, Hang Zhang, Siqi Chen, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Kaitao Song, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00

Humans can flexibly switch between different modes of thinking based on task complexity: from rapid intuitive judgments to in-depth analytical understanding. However, current Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding systems which locate interface elements based on natural language instructions rely solely on immediate prediction without reasoning, struggling to understand complex interface layouts with nested structures and hierarchical relationships, limiting their effectiveness on complex interfaces. Inspired by human dual-system cognition, we present Focus, a novel GUI grounding framework that combines fast prediction with systematic analysis. The framework dynamically switches between rapid and deliberate processing through an adaptive system switching based on task complexity, optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. Focus decomposes grounding into progressive stages: interface summarization, visual focused analysis, and precise coordinate prediction. This structured decomposition enables systematic understanding of both interface layouts and visual relationships. Extensive experiments show that Focus achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 300K of the training data with a 2B parameter model compared to existing approaches. Focus demonstrates superior performance particularly in complex GUI scenarios, achieving 77.4% average accuracy on ScreenSpot and 13.3% on the more challenging ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals the effectiveness of this dual-system approach while demonstrating its potential for improving complex GUI interaction scenarios.
HuixiangDou2: A Robustly Optimized GraphRAG Approach
Authors: Huanjun Kong, Zhefan Wang, Chenyang Wang, Zhe Ma, Nanqing Dong
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on familiar queries but struggle with specialized or emerging topics. Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) addresses this by structuring domain knowledge as a graph for dynamic retrieval. However, existing pipelines involve complex engineering workflows, making it difficult to isolate the impact of individual components. Evaluating retrieval effectiveness is also challenging due to dataset overlap with LLM pretraining data. In this work, we introduce HuixiangDou2, a robustly optimized GraphRAG framework. Specifically, we leverage the effectiveness of dual-level retrieval and optimize its performance in a 32k context for maximum precision, and compare logic-based retrieval and dual-level retrieval to enhance overall functionality. Our implementation includes comparative experiments on a test set, where Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct initially underperformed. With our approach, the score improved significantly from 60 to 74.5, as illustrated in the Figure. Experiments on domain-specific datasets reveal that dual-level retrieval enhances fuzzy matching, while logic-form retrieval improves structured reasoning. Furthermore, we propose a multi-stage verification mechanism to improve retrieval robustness without increasing computational cost. Empirical results show significant accuracy gains over baselines, highlighting the importance of adaptive retrieval. To support research and adoption, we release HuixiangDou2 as an open-source resource https://github.com/tpoisonooo/huixiangdou2.
SKG-LLM: Developing a Mathematical Model for Stroke Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models
Authors: Ali Sarabadani, Kheirolah Rahsepar Fard, Hamid Dalvand
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, graph construction

The purpose of this study is to introduce SKG-LLM. A knowledge graph (KG) is constructed from stroke-related articles using mathematical and large language models (LLMs). SKG-LLM extracts and organizes complex relationships from the biomedical literature, using it to increase the accuracy and depth of KG in stroke research. In the proposed method, GPT-4 was used for data pre-processing, and the extraction of embeddings was also done by GPT-4 in the whole KG construction process. The performance of the proposed model was tested with two evaluation criteria: Precision and Recall. For further validation of the proposed model, GPT-4 was used. Compared with Wikidata and WN18RR, the proposed KG-LLM approach performs better, especially in precision and recall. By including GPT-4 in the preprocessing process, the SKG-LLM model achieved a precision score of 0.906 and a recall score of 0.923. Expert reviews further improved the results and increased precision to 0.923 and recall to 0.918. The knowledge graph constructed by SKG-LLM contains 2692 nodes and 5012 edges, which are 13 distinct types of nodes and 24 types of edges.
Revisiting Early Detection of Sexual Predators via Turn-level Optimization
Authors: Jinmyeong An, Sangwon Ryu, Heejin Do, Yunsu Kim, Jungseul Ok, Gary Geunbae Lee
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00

Online grooming is a severe social threat where sexual predators gradually entrap child victims with subtle and gradual manipulation. Therefore, timely intervention for online grooming is critical for proactive protection. However, previous methods fail to determine the optimal intervention points (i.e., jump to conclusions) as they rely on chat-level risk labels by causing weak supervision of risky utterances. For timely detection, we propose speed control reinforcement learning (SCoRL) (The code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/jinmyeongAN/SCoRL), incorporating a practical strategy derived from luring communication theory (LCT). To capture the predator's turn-level entrapment, we use a turn-level risk label based on the LCT. Then, we design a novel speed control reward function that balances the trade-off between speed and accuracy based on turn-level risk label; thus, SCoRL can identify the optimal intervention moment. In addition, we introduce a turn-level metric for precise evaluation, identifying limitations in previously used chat-level metrics. Experimental results show that SCoRL effectively preempted online grooming, offering a more proactive and timely solution. Further analysis reveals that our method enhances performance while intuitively identifying optimal early intervention points.
Attention, Please! PixelSHAP Reveals What Vision-Language Models Actually Focus On
Authors: Roni Goldshmidt
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making

Interpretability in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is crucial for trust, debugging, and decision-making in high-stakes applications. We introduce PixelSHAP, a model-agnostic framework extending Shapley-based analysis to structured visual entities. Unlike previous methods focusing on text prompts, PixelSHAP applies to vision-based reasoning by systematically perturbing image objects and quantifying their influence on a VLM's response. PixelSHAP requires no model internals, operating solely on input-output pairs, making it compatible with open-source and commercial models. It supports diverse embedding-based similarity metrics and scales efficiently using optimization techniques inspired by Shapley-based methods. We validate PixelSHAP in autonomous driving, highlighting its ability to enhance interpretability. Key challenges include segmentation sensitivity and object occlusion. Our open-source implementation facilitates further research.
Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Wenxuan Huang, Bohan Jia, Zijie Zhai, Shaosheng Cao, Zheyu Ye, Fei Zhao, Yao Hu, Shaohui Lin
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Multimodal Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

DeepSeek-R1-Zero has successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities in LLMs purely through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Inspired by this breakthrough, we explore how RL can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capability of MLLMs. However, direct training with RL struggles to activate complex reasoning capabilities such as questioning and reflection in MLLMs, due to the absence of substantial high-quality multimodal reasoning data. To address this issue, we propose the reasoning MLLM, Vision-R1, to improve multimodal reasoning capability. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality multimodal CoT dataset without human annotations by leveraging an existing MLLM and DeepSeek-R1 through modality bridging and data filtering to obtain a 200K multimodal CoT dataset, Vision-R1-cold dataset. It serves as cold-start initialization data for Vision-R1. To mitigate the optimization challenges caused by overthinking after cold start, we propose Progressive Thinking Suppression Training (PTST) strategy and employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with the hard formatting result reward function to gradually refine the model's ability to learn correct and complex reasoning processes on a 10K multimodal math dataset. Comprehensive experiments show our model achieves an average improvement of $\sim$6% across various multimodal math reasoning benchmarks. Vision-R1-7B achieves a 73.5% accuracy on the widely used MathVista benchmark, which is only 0.4% lower than the leading reasoning model, OpenAI O1. The datasets and code will be released in: https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-R1 .
Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study
Authors: Yizheng Sun, Hao Li, Chang Xu, Hongpeng Zhou, Chenghua Lin, Riza Batista-Navarro, Jingyuan Sun
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Token Reduction, Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful yet computationally intensive for widespread practical deployments. To address such challenge without costly re-training, post-training acceleration techniques like quantization and token reduction are extensively explored. However, current acceleration evaluations primarily target minimal overall performance degradation, overlooking a crucial question: does the accelerated model still give the same answers to the same questions as it did before acceleration? This is vital for stability-centered industrial applications where consistently correct answers for specific, known situations are paramount, such as in AI-based disease diagnosis. We systematically investigate this for accelerated VLMs, testing four leading models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-Next, Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL) with eight acceleration methods on ten multi-modal benchmarks. Our findings are stark: despite minimal aggregate performance drops, accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time. Critically, up to 6.5% of these changes converted correct answers to incorrect. Input perturbations magnified these inconsistencies, and the trend is confirmed by case studies with the medical VLM LLaVA-Med. This research reveals a significant oversight in VLM acceleration, stressing an urgent need for instance-level stability checks to ensure trustworthy real-world deployment.
Multi-Modal 3D Mesh Reconstruction from Images and Text
Authors: Melvin Reka, Tessa Pulli, Markus Vincze
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Object, Object Reconstruction, Pose Estimation

6D object pose estimation for unseen objects is essential in robotics but traditionally relies on trained models that require large datasets, high computational costs, and struggle to generalize. Zero-shot approaches eliminate the need for training but depend on pre-existing 3D object models, which are often impractical to obtain. To address this, we propose a language-guided few-shot 3D reconstruction method, reconstructing a 3D mesh from few input images. In the proposed pipeline, receives a set of input images and a language query. A combination of GroundingDINO and Segment Anything Model outputs segmented masks from which a sparse point cloud is reconstructed with VGGSfM. Subsequently, the mesh is reconstructed with the Gaussian Splatting method SuGAR. In a final cleaning step, artifacts are removed, resulting in the final 3D mesh of the queried object. We evaluate the method in terms of accuracy and quality of the geometry and texture. Furthermore, we study the impact of imaging conditions such as viewing angle, number of input images, and image overlap on 3D object reconstruction quality, efficiency, and computational scalability.