pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EPR-GAIL: An EPR-Enhanced Hierarchical Imitation Learning Framework to Simulate Complex User Consumption Behaviors
Authors: Tao Feng, Yunke Zhang, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

User consumption behavior data, which records individuals' online spending history at various types of stores, has been widely used in various applications, such as store recommendation, site selection, and sale forecasting. However, its high worth is limited due to deficiencies in data comprehensiveness and changes of application scenarios. Thus, generating high-quality sequential consumption data by simulating complex user consumption behaviors is of great importance to real-world applications. Two branches of existing sequence generation methods are both limited in quality. Model-based methods with simplified assumptions fail to model the complex decision process of user consumption, while data-driven methods that emulate real-world data are prone to noises, unobserved behaviors, and dynamic decision space. In this work, we propose to enhance the fidelity and trustworthiness of the data-driven Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) method by blending it with the Exploration and Preferential Return EPR model . The core idea of our EPR-GAIL framework is to model user consumption behaviors as a complex EPR decision process, which consists of purchase, exploration, and preference decisions. Specifically, we design the hierarchical policy function in the generator as a realization of the EPR decision process and employ the probability distributions of the EPR model to guide the reward function in the discriminator. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets of user consumption behaviors on an online platform demonstrate that the EPR-GAIL framework outperforms the best state-of-the-art baseline by over 19\% in terms of data fidelity. Furthermore, the generated consumption behavior data can improve the performance of sale prediction and location recommendation by up to 35.29% and 11.19%, respectively, validating its advantage for practical applications.
Causality Enhanced Origin-Destination Flow Prediction in Data-Scarce Cities
Authors: Tao Feng, Yunke Zhang, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Knowledge Distillation, Prediction

Accurate origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is of great importance to developing cities, as it can contribute to optimize urban structures and layouts. However, with the common issues of missing regional features and lacking OD flow data, it is quite daunting to predict OD flow in developing cities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Causality-Enhanced OD Flow Prediction (CE-OFP), a unified framework that aims to transfer urban knowledge between cities and achieve accuracy improvements in OD flow predictions across data-scarce cities. In specific, we propose a novel reinforcement learning model to discover universal causalities among urban features in data-rich cities and build corresponding causal graphs. Then, we further build Causality-Enhanced Variational Auto-Encoder (CE-VAE) to incorporate causal graphs for effective feature reconstruction in data-scarce cities. Finally, with the reconstructed features, we devise a knowledge distillation method with a graph attention network to migrate the OD prediction model from data-rich cities to data-scare cities. Extensive experiments on two pairs of real-world datasets validate that the proposed CE-OFP remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, which can reduce the RMSE of OD flow prediction for data-scarce cities by up to 11%.
Pre-Training Meta-Rule Selection Policy for Visual Generative Abductive Learning
Authors: Yu Jin, Jingming Liu, Zhexu Luo, Yifei Peng, Ziang Qin, Wang-Zhou Dai, Yao-Xiang Ding, Kun Zhou
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Visual generative abductive learning studies jointly training symbol-grounded neural visual generator and inducing logic rules from data, such that after learning, the visual generation process is guided by the induced logic rules. A major challenge for this task is to reduce the time cost of logic abduction during learning, an essential step when the logic symbol set is large and the logic rule to induce is complicated. To address this challenge, we propose a pre-training method for obtaining meta-rule selection policy for the recently proposed visual generative learning approach AbdGen [Peng et al., 2023], aiming at significantly reducing the candidate meta-rule set and pruning the search space. The selection model is built based on the embedding representation of both symbol grounding of cases and meta-rules, which can be effectively integrated with both neural model and logic reasoning system. The pre-training process is done on pure symbol data, not involving symbol grounding learning of raw visual inputs, making the entire learning process low-cost. An additional interesting observation is that the selection policy can rectify symbol grounding errors unseen during pre-training, which is resulted from the memorization ability of attention mechanism and the relative stability of symbolic patterns. Experimental results show that our method is able to effectively address the meta-rule selection problem for visual abduction, boosting the efficiency of visual generative abductive learning. Code is available at https://github.com/future-item/metarule-select.
Interference-Aware Edge Runtime Prediction with Conformal Matrix Completion
Authors: Tianshu Huang, Arjun Ramesh, Emily Ruppel, Nuno Pereira, Anthony Rowe, Carlee Joe-Wong
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Matrix Completion, Prediction

Accurately estimating workload runtime is a longstanding goal in computer systems, and plays a key role in efficient resource provisioning, latency minimization, and various other system management tasks. Runtime prediction is particularly important for managing increasingly complex distributed systems in which more sophisticated processing is pushed to the edge in search of better latency. Previous approaches for runtime prediction in edge systems suffer from poor data efficiency or require intensive instrumentation; these challenges are compounded in heterogeneous edge computing environments, where historical runtime data may be sparsely available and instrumentation is often challenging. Moreover, edge computing environments often feature multi-tenancy due to limited resources at the network edge, potentially leading to interference between workloads and further complicating the runtime prediction problem. Drawing from insights across machine learning and computer systems, we design a matrix factorization-inspired method that generates accurate interference-aware predictions with tight provably-guaranteed uncertainty bounds. We validate our method on a novel WebAssembly runtime dataset collected from 24 unique devices, achieving a prediction error of 5.2% -- 2x better than a naive application of existing methods.
Privacy Protection in Prosumer Energy Management Based on Federated Learning
Authors: Yunfeng Li, Xiaolin Li Zhitao Li, Gangqiang Li
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Federated Learning, Management

With the booming development of prosumers, there is an urgent need for a prosumer energy management system to take full advantage of the flexibility of prosumers and take into account the interests of other parties. However, building such a system will undoubtedly reveal users' privacy. In this paper, by solving the non-independent and identical distribution of data (Non-IID) problem in federated learning with federated cluster average(FedClusAvg) algorithm, prosumers' information can efficiently participate in the intelligent decision making of the system without revealing privacy. In the proposed FedClusAvg algorithm, each client performs cluster stratified sampling and multiple iterations. Then, the average weight of the parameters of the sub-server is determined according to the degree of deviation of the parameter from the average parameter. Finally, the sub-server multiple local iterations and updates, and then upload to the main server. The advantages of FedClusAvg algorithm are the following two parts. First, the accuracy of the model in the case of Non-IID is improved through the method of clustering and parameter weighted average. Second, local multiple iterations and three-tier framework can effectively reduce communication rounds.
HFedCKD: Toward Robust Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Data-free Knowledge Distillation and Two-way Contrast
Authors: Yiting Zheng, Bohan Lin, Jinqian Chen, Jihua Zhu
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-free Knowledge Distillation, Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Most current federated learning frameworks are modeled as static processes, ignoring the dynamic characteristics of the learning system. Under the limited communication budget of the central server, the flexible model architecture of a large number of clients participating in knowledge transfer requires a lower participation rate, active clients have uneven contributions, and the client scale seriously hinders the performance of FL. We consider a more general and practical federation scenario and propose a system heterogeneous federation method based on data-free knowledge distillation and two-way contrast (HFedCKD). We apply the Inverse Probability Weighted Distillation (IPWD) strategy to the data-free knowledge transfer framework. The generator completes the data features of the nonparticipating clients. IPWD implements a dynamic evaluation of the prediction contribution of each client under different data distributions. Based on the antibiased weighting of its prediction loss, the weight distribution of each client is effectively adjusted to fairly integrate the knowledge of participating clients. At the same time, the local model is split into a feature extractor and a classifier. Through differential contrast learning, the feature extractor is aligned with the global model in the feature space, while the classifier maintains personalized decision-making capabilities. HFedCKD effectively alleviates the knowledge offset caused by a low participation rate under data-free knowledge distillation and improves the performance and stability of the model. We conduct extensive experiments on image and IoT datasets to comprehensively evaluate and verify the generalization and robustness of the proposed HFedCKD framework.
Towards Superior Quantization Accuracy: A Layer-sensitive Approach
Authors: Feng Zhang, Yanbin Liu, Weihua Li, Jie Lv, Xiaodan Wang, Quan Bai
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Model Compression, Quantization, Sensitivity

Large Vision and Language Models have exhibited remarkable human-like intelligence in tasks such as natural language comprehension, problem-solving, logical reasoning, and knowledge retrieval. However, training and serving these models require substantial computational resources, posing a significant barrier to their widespread application and further research. To mitigate this challenge, various model compression techniques have been developed to reduce computational requirements. Nevertheless, existing methods often employ uniform quantization configurations, failing to account for the varying difficulties across different layers in quantizing large neural network models. This paper tackles this issue by leveraging layer-sensitivity features, such as activation sensitivity and weight distribution Kurtosis, to identify layers that are challenging to quantize accurately and allocate additional memory budget. The proposed methods, named SensiBoost and KurtBoost, respectively, demonstrate notable improvement in quantization accuracy, achieving up to 9% lower perplexity with only a 2% increase in memory budget on LLama models compared to the baseline.
Generative modelling with jump-diffusions
Authors: Adrian Baule
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Score-based diffusion models generate samples from an unknown target distribution using a time-reversed diffusion process. While such models represent state-of-the-art approaches in industrial applications such as artificial image generation, it has recently been noted that their performance can be further improved by considering injection noise with heavy tailed characteristics. Here, I present a generalization of generative diffusion processes to a wide class of non-Gaussian noise processes. I consider forward processes driven by standard Gaussian noise with super-imposed Poisson jumps representing a finite activity Levy process. The generative process is shown to be governed by a generalized score function that depends on the jump amplitude distribution. Both probability flow ODE and SDE formulations are derived using basic technical effort, and are implemented for jump amplitudes drawn from a multivariate Laplace distribution. Remarkably, for the problem of capturing a heavy-tailed target distribution, the jump-diffusion Laplace model outperforms models driven by alpha-stable noise despite not containing any heavy-tailed characteristics. The framework can be readily applied to other jump statistics that could further improve on the performance of standard diffusion models.
Human Cognition Inspired RAG with Knowledge Graph for Complex Problem Solving
Authors: Yao Cheng, Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Yao Liu, Xing Sun, Xiang Li
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Question Answering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential across various domains, yet they face significant challenges in knowledge integration and complex problem reasoning, often leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance LLMs accuracy by incorporating external knowledge. However, traditional RAG systems struggle with processing complex relational information and multi-step reasoning, limiting their effectiveness in advanced problem-solving tasks. To address these limitations, we propose CogGRAG, a cognition inspired graph-based RAG framework, designed to improve LLMs performance in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). Inspired by the human cognitive process of decomposing complex problems and performing self-verification, our framework introduces a three-stage methodology: decomposition, retrieval, and reasoning with self-verification. By integrating these components, CogGRAG enhances the accuracy of LLMs in complex problem solving. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on four benchmark datasets, where CogGRAG outperforms the baselines.
SHIP: A Shapelet-based Approach for Interpretable Patient-Ventilator Asynchrony Detection
Authors: Xuan-May Le, Ling Luo, Uwe Aickelin, Minh-Tuan Tran, David Berlowitz, Mark Howard
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Patient-ventilator asynchrony (PVA) is a common and critical issue during mechanical ventilation, affecting up to 85% of patients. PVA can result in clinical complications such as discomfort, sleep disruption, and potentially more severe conditions like ventilator-induced lung injury and diaphragm dysfunction. Traditional PVA management, which relies on manual adjustments by healthcare providers, is often inadequate due to delays and errors. While various computational methods, including rule-based, statistical, and deep learning approaches, have been developed to detect PVA events, they face challenges related to dataset imbalances and lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a shapelet-based approach SHIP for PVA detection, utilizing shapelets - discriminative subsequences in time-series data - to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. Our method addresses dataset imbalances through shapelet-based data augmentation and constructs a shapelet pool to transform the dataset for more effective classification. The combined shapelet and statistical features are then used in a classifier to identify PVA events. Experimental results on medical datasets show that SHIP significantly improves PVA detection while providing interpretable insights into model decisions.
FW-Shapley: Real-time Estimation of Weighted Shapley Values
Authors: Pranoy Panda, Siddharth Tandon, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Valuation

Fair credit assignment is essential in various machine learning (ML) applications, and Shapley values have emerged as a valuable tool for this purpose. However, in critical ML applications such as data valuation and feature attribution, the uniform weighting of Shapley values across subset cardinalities leads to unintuitive credit assignments. To address this, weighted Shapley values were proposed as a generalization, allowing different weights for subsets with different cardinalities. Despite their advantages, similar to Shapley values, Weighted Shapley values suffer from exponential compute costs, making them impractical for high-dimensional datasets. To tackle this issue, we present two key contributions. Firstly, we provide a weighted least squares characterization of weighted Shapley values. Next, using this characterization, we propose Fast Weighted Shapley (FW-Shapley), an amortized framework for efficiently computing weighted Shapley values using a learned estimator. We further show that our estimator's training procedure is theoretically valid even though we do not use ground truth Weighted Shapley values during training. On the feature attribution task, we outperform the learned estimator FastSHAP by $27\%$ (on average) in terms of Inclusion AUC. For data valuation, we are much faster (14 times) while being comparable to the state-of-the-art KNN Shapley.
Interpretable Model Drift Detection
Authors: Pranoy Panda, Kancheti Sai Srinivas, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Gaurav Sinha
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Drift Detection, model

Data in the real world often has an evolving distribution. Thus, machine learning models trained on such data get outdated over time. This phenomenon is called model drift. Knowledge of this drift serves two purposes: (i) Retain an accurate model and (ii) Discovery of knowledge or insights about change in the relationship between input features and output variable w.r.t. the model. Most existing works focus only on detecting model drift but offer no interpretability. In this work, we take a principled approach to study the problem of interpretable model drift detection from a risk perspective using a feature-interaction aware hypothesis testing framework, which enjoys guarantees on test power. The proposed framework is generic, i.e., it can be adapted to both classification and regression tasks. Experiments on several standard drift detection datasets show that our method is superior to existing interpretable methods (especially on real-world datasets) and on par with state-of-the-art black-box drift detection methods. We also quantitatively and qualitatively study the interpretability aspect including a case study on USENET2 dataset. We find our method focuses on model and drift sensitive features compared to baseline interpretable drift detectors.
Using Subgraph GNNs for Node Classification:an Overlooked Potential Approach
Authors: Qian Zeng, Xin Lin, Jingyi Gao, Yang Yu
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Node Classification

Previous studies have demonstrated the strong performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in node classification. However, most existing GNNs adopt a node-centric perspective and rely on global message passing, leading to high computational and memory costs that hinder scalability. To mitigate these challenges, subgraph-based methods have been introduced, leveraging local subgraphs as approximations of full computational trees. While this approach improves efficiency, it often suffers from performance degradation due to the loss of global contextual information, limiting its effectiveness compared to global GNNs. To address this trade-off between scalability and classification accuracy, we reformulate the node classification task as a subgraph classification problem and propose SubGND (Subgraph GNN for NoDe). This framework introduces a differentiated zero-padding strategy and an Ego-Alter subgraph representation method to resolve label conflicts while incorporating an Adaptive Feature Scaling Mechanism to dynamically adjust feature contributions based on dataset-specific dependencies. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that SubGND achieves performance comparable to or surpassing global message-passing GNNs, particularly in heterophilic settings, highlighting its effectiveness and scalability as a promising solution for node classification.
BTFL: A Bayesian-based Test-Time Generalization Method for Internal and External Data Distributions in Federated learning
Authors: Yu Zhou, Bingyan Liu
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively develop a global model while maintaining data privacy. However, online FL deployment faces challenges due to distribution shifts and evolving test samples. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) tailors the global model to individual client distributions, but struggles with Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) samples during testing, leading to performance degradation. In real-world scenarios, balancing personalization and generalization during online testing is crucial and existing methods primarily focus on training-phase generalization. To address the test-time trade-off, we introduce a new scenario: Test-time Generalization for Internal and External Distributions in Federated Learning (TGFL), which evaluates adaptability under Internal Distribution (IND) and External Distribution (EXD). We propose BTFL, a Bayesian-based test-time generalization method for TGFL, which balances generalization and personalization at the sample level during testing. BTFL employs a two-head architecture to store local and global knowledge, interpolating predictions via a dual-Bayesian framework that considers both historical test data and current sample characteristics with theoretical guarantee and faster speed. Our experiments demonstrate that BTFL achieves improved performance across various datasets and models with less time cost. The source codes are made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhouYuCS/BTFL .