pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Faster, Cheaper, Better: Multi-Objective Hyperparameter Optimization for LLM and RAG Systems
Authors: Matthew Barker, Andrew Bell, Evan Thomas, James Carr, Thomas Andrews, Umang Bhatt
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Hyperparameter Optimization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

While Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular technique for improving Large Language Model (LLM) systems, it introduces a large number of choices, parameters and hyperparameters that must be made or tuned. This includes the LLM, embedding, and ranker models themselves, as well as hyperparameters governing individual RAG components. Yet, collectively optimizing the entire configuration in a RAG or LLM system remains under-explored - especially in multi-objective settings - due to intractably large solution spaces, noisy objective evaluations, and the high cost of evaluations. In this work, we introduce the first approach for multi-objective parameter optimization of cost, latency, safety and alignment over entire LLM and RAG systems. We find that Bayesian optimization methods significantly outperform baseline approaches, obtaining a superior Pareto front on two new RAG benchmark tasks. We conclude our work with important considerations for practitioners who are designing multi-objective RAG systems, highlighting nuances such as how optimal configurations may not generalize across tasks and objectives.
Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?
Authors: Toby Ord
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model -- a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take to do the task. This implies an exponentially declining success rate with the length of the task and that each agent could be characterised by its own half-life. This empirical regularity allows us to estimate the success rate for an agent at different task lengths. And the fact that this model is a good fit for the data is suggestive of the underlying causes of failure on longer tasks -- that they involve increasingly large sets of subtasks where failing any one fails the task. Whether this model applies more generally on other suites of tasks is unknown and an important subject for further work.
Multi-agent Embodied AI: Advances and Future Directions
Authors: Zhaohan Feng, Ruiqi Xue, Lei Yuan, Yang Yu, Ning Ding, Meiqin Liu, Bingzhao Gao, Jian Sun, Xinhu Zheng, Gang Wang
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Embodied artificial intelligence (Embodied AI) plays a pivotal role in the application of advanced technologies in the intelligent era, where AI systems are integrated with physical bodies that enable them to perceive, reason, and interact with their environments. Through the use of sensors for input and actuators for action, these systems can learn and adapt based on real-world feedback, allowing them to perform tasks effectively in dynamic and unpredictable environments. As techniques such as deep learning (DL), reinforcement learning (RL), and large language models (LLMs) mature, embodied AI has become a leading field in both academia and industry, with applications spanning robotics, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. However, most research has focused on single-agent systems that often assume static, closed environments, whereas real-world embodied AI must navigate far more complex scenarios. In such settings, agents must not only interact with their surroundings but also collaborate with other agents, necessitating sophisticated mechanisms for adaptation, real-time learning, and collaborative problem-solving. Despite increasing interest in multi-agent systems, existing research remains narrow in scope, often relying on simplified models that fail to capture the full complexity of dynamic, open environments for multi-agent embodied AI. Moreover, no comprehensive survey has systematically reviewed the advancements in this area. As embodied AI rapidly evolves, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of multi-agent embodied AI to address the challenges presented by real-world applications. To fill this gap and foster further development in the field, this paper reviews the current state of research, analyzes key contributions, and identifies challenges and future directions, providing insights to guide innovation and progress in this field.
A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Sequence Classification with Relational and Temporal Knowledge
Authors: Luca Salvatore Lorello, Marco Lippi, Stefano Melacci
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

One of the goals of neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence is to exploit background knowledge to improve the performance of learning tasks. However, most of the existing frameworks focus on the simplified scenario where knowledge does not change over time and does not cover the temporal dimension. In this work we consider the much more challenging problem of knowledge-driven sequence classification where different portions of knowledge must be employed at different timesteps, and temporal relations are available. Our experimental evaluation compares multi-stage neuro-symbolic and neural-only architectures, and it is conducted on a newly-introduced benchmarking framework. Results demonstrate the challenging nature of this novel setting, and also highlight under-explored shortcomings of neuro-symbolic methods, representing a precious reference for future research.
Beyond Low-rank Decomposition: A Shortcut Approach for Efficient On-Device Learning
Authors: Le-Trung Nguyen, Ael Quelennec, Van-Tam Nguyen, Enzo Tartaglione
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

On-device learning has emerged as a promising direction for AI development, particularly because of its potential to reduce latency issues and mitigate privacy risks associated with device-server communication, while improving energy efficiency. Despite these advantages, significant memory and computational constraints still represent major challenges for its deployment. Drawing on previous studies on low-rank decomposition methods that address activation memory bottlenecks in backpropagation, we propose a novel shortcut approach as an alternative. Our analysis and experiments demonstrate that our method can reduce activation memory usage, even up to $120.09\times$ compared to vanilla training, while also reducing overall training FLOPs up to $1.86\times$ when evaluated on traditional benchmarks.
Large Language Models for Outpatient Referral: Problem Definition, Benchmarking and Challenges
Authors: Xiaoxiao Liu, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Xiangbo Wu, Bairui Zhang, Xiang Wan, Jian Chang, Guangjun Yu, Yan Hu, Benyou Wang
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to outpatient referral tasks across healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of standardized evaluation criteria to assess their effectiveness, particularly in dynamic, interactive scenarios. In this study, we systematically examine the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in managing tasks within Intelligent Outpatient Referral (IOR) systems and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework specifically designed for such systems. This framework comprises two core tasks: static evaluation, which focuses on evaluating the ability of predefined outpatient referrals, and dynamic evaluation, which evaluates capabilities of refining outpatient referral recommendations through iterative dialogues. Our findings suggest that LLMs offer limited advantages over BERT-like models, but show promise in asking effective questions during interactive dialogues.
Advancing Embodied Agent Security: From Safety Benchmarks to Input Moderation
Authors: Ning Wang, Zihan Yan, Weiyang Li, Chuan Ma, He Chen, Tao Xiang
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00

Embodied agents exhibit immense potential across a multitude of domains, making the assurance of their behavioral safety a fundamental prerequisite for their widespread deployment. However, existing research predominantly concentrates on the security of general large language models, lacking specialized methodologies for establishing safety benchmarks and input moderation tailored to embodied agents. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel input moderation framework, meticulously designed to safeguard embodied agents. This framework encompasses the entire pipeline, including taxonomy definition, dataset curation, moderator architecture, model training, and rigorous evaluation. Notably, we introduce EAsafetyBench, a meticulously crafted safety benchmark engineered to facilitate both the training and stringent assessment of moderators specifically designed for embodied agents. Furthermore, we propose Pinpoint, an innovative prompt-decoupled input moderation scheme that harnesses a masked attention mechanism to effectively isolate and mitigate the influence of functional prompts on moderation tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on diverse benchmark datasets and models validate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that our methodologies achieve an impressive average detection accuracy of 94.58%, surpassing the performance of existing state-of-the-art techniques, alongside an exceptional moderation processing time of merely 0.002 seconds per instance.
FG-CLIP: Fine-Grained Visual and Textual Alignment
Authors: Chunyu Xie, Bin Wang, Fanjing Kong, Jincheng Li, Dawei Liang, Gengshen Zhang, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, object-detection, Object Detection, Open-vocabulary object detection, Open Vocabulary Object Detection, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification but struggles with fine-grained understanding due to its focus on coarse-grained short captions. To address this, we propose Fine-Grained CLIP (FG-CLIP), which enhances fine-grained understanding through three key innovations. First, we leverage large multimodal models to generate 1.6 billion long caption-image pairs for capturing global-level semantic details. Second, a high-quality dataset is constructed with 12 million images and 40 million region-specific bounding boxes aligned with detailed captions to ensure precise, context-rich representations. Third, 10 million hard fine-grained negative samples are incorporated to improve the model's ability to distinguish subtle semantic differences. We construct a comprehensive dataset, termed FineHARD, by integrating high-quality region-specific annotations with hard fine-grained negative samples. Corresponding training methods are meticulously designed for these data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FG-CLIP outperforms the original CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including fine-grained understanding, open-vocabulary object detection, image-text retrieval, and general multimodal benchmarks. These results highlight FG-CLIP's effectiveness in capturing fine-grained image details and improving overall model performance. The data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/FG-CLIP.
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning for the Floorplanning of Analog ICs with Beam Search
Authors: Sandro Junior Della Rovere, Davide Basso, Luca Bortolussi, Mirjana Videnovic-Misic, Husni Habal
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The layout of analog ICs requires making complex trade-offs, while addressing device physics and variability of the circuits. This makes full automation with learning-based solutions hard to achieve. However, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently reached significant results, particularly in solving the floorplanning problem. This paper presents a hybrid method that combines RL with a beam (BS) strategy. The BS algorithm enhances the agent's inference process, allowing for the generation of flexible floorplans by accomodating various objective weightings, and addressing congestion without without the need for policy retraining or fine-tuning. Moreover, the RL agent's generalization ability stays intact, along with its efficient handling of circuit features and constraints. Experimental results show approx. 5-85% improvement in area, dead space and half-perimeter wire length compared to a standard RL application, along with higher rewards for the agent. Moreover, performance and efficiency align closely with those of existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Teochew-Wild: The First In-the-wild Teochew Dataset with Orthographic Annotations
Authors: Linrong Pan, Chenglong Jiang, Gaoze Hou, Ying Gao
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

This paper reports the construction of the Teochew-Wild, a speech corpus of the Teochew dialect. The corpus includes 18.9 hours of in-the-wild Teochew speech data from multiple speakers, covering both formal and colloquial expressions, with precise orthographic and pinyin annotations. Additionally, we provide supplementary text processing tools and resources to propel research and applications in speech tasks for this low-resource language, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available Teochew dataset with accurate orthographic annotations. We conduct experiments on the corpus, and the results validate its effectiveness in ASR and TTS tasks.
Direct Image Classification from Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy Measurements without Reconstruction
Authors: Navya Sonal Agarwal, Jan Philipp Schneider, Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota, Syed Muhammad Kazim, John Meshreki, Ivo Ihrke, Michael Moeller
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

The computational imaging technique of Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy (FPM) enables high-resolution imaging with a wide field of view and can serve as an extremely valuable tool, e.g. in the classification of cells in medical applications. However, reconstructing a high-resolution image from tens or even hundreds of measurements is computationally expensive, particularly for a wide field of view. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the idea of classifying the image content in the FPM measurements directly without performing a reconstruction step first. We show that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can extract meaningful information from measurement sequences, significantly outperforming the classification on a single band-limited image (up to 12 %) while being significantly more efficient than a reconstruction of a high-resolution image. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a learned multiplexing of several raw measurements allows maintaining the classification accuracy while reducing the amount of data (and consequently also the acquisition time) significantly.
Image-Text Relation Prediction for Multilingual Tweets
Authors: Matīss Rikters, Edison Marrese-Taylor
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prediction, Relation, Relation Prediction

Various social networks have been allowing media uploads for over a decade now. Still, it has not always been clear what is their relation with the posted text or even if there is any at all. In this work, we explore how multilingual vision-language models tackle the task of image-text relation prediction in different languages, and construct a dedicated balanced benchmark data set from Twitter posts in Latvian along with their manual translations into English. We compare our results to previous work and show that the more recently released vision-language model checkpoints are becoming increasingly capable at this task, but there is still much room for further improvement.
Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons: Building A Reputation System for Generative Multi-agent Systems
Authors: Siyue Ren, Wanli Fu, Xinkun Zou, Chen Shen, Yi Cai, Chen Chu, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

The tragedy of the commons, where individual self-interest leads to collectively disastrous outcomes, is a pervasive challenge in human society. Recent studies have demonstrated that similar phenomena can arise in generative multi-agent systems (MASs). To address this challenge, this paper explores the use of reputation systems as a remedy. We propose RepuNet, a dynamic, dual-level reputation framework that models both agent-level reputation dynamics and system-level network evolution. Specifically, driven by direct interactions and indirect gossip, agents form reputations for both themselves and their peers, and decide whether to connect or disconnect other agents for future interactions. Through two distinct scenarios, we show that RepuNet effectively mitigates the 'tragedy of the commons', promoting and sustaining cooperation in generative MASs. Moreover, we find that reputation systems can give rise to rich emergent behaviors in generative MASs, such as the formation of cooperative clusters, the social isolation of exploitative agents, and the preference for sharing positive gossip rather than negative ones.
Generating Reliable Synthetic Clinical Trial Data: The Role of Hyperparameter Optimization and Domain Constraints
Authors: Waldemar Hahn, Jan-Niklas Eckardt, Christoph Röllig, Martin Sedlmayr, Jan Moritz Middeke, Markus Wolfien
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization, Synthetic Data Generation

The generation of synthetic clinical trial data offers a promising approach to mitigating privacy concerns and data accessibility limitations in medical research. However, ensuring that synthetic datasets maintain high fidelity, utility, and adherence to domain-specific constraints remains a key challenge. While hyperparameter optimization (HPO) has been shown to improve generative model performance, the effectiveness of different optimization strategies for synthetic clinical data remains unclear. This study systematically evaluates four HPO strategies across eight generative models, comparing single-metric optimization against compound metric optimization approaches. Our results demonstrate that HPO consistently improves synthetic data quality, with TVAE, CTGAN, and CTAB-GAN+ achieving improvements of up to 60%, 39%, and 38%, respectively. Compound metric optimization outperformed single-metric strategies, producing more balanced and generalizable synthetic datasets. Interestingly, HPO alone is insufficient to ensure clinically valid synthetic data, as all models exhibited violations of fundamental survival constraints. Preprocessing and postprocessing played a crucial role in reducing these violations, as models lacking robust processing steps produced invalid data in up to 61% of cases. These findings underscore the necessity of integrating explicit domain knowledge alongside HPO to create high quality synthetic datasets. Our study provides actionable recommendations for improving synthetic data generation, with future research needed to refine metric selection and validate these findings on larger datasets to enhance clinical applicability.
An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Free-Text Keyboard Dynamics for Continuous Authentication
Authors: Roberto Dillon, Arushi
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Continuous authentication systems leveraging free-text keyboard dynamics offer a promising additional layer of security in a multifactor authentication setup that can be used in a transparent way with no impact on user experience. This study investigates the efficacy of behavioral biometrics by employing an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate diverse typing profiles across mechanical and membrane keyboards. Specifically, we generated synthetic keystroke data from five unique agents, capturing features related to dwell time, flight time, and error rates within sliding 5-second windows updated every second. Two machine learning approaches, One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM) and Random Forest (RF), were evaluated for user verification. Results revealed a stark contrast in performance: while One-Class SVM failed to differentiate individual users within each group, Random Forest achieved robust intra-keyboard user recognition (Accuracy > 0.7) but struggled to generalize across keyboards for the same user, highlighting the significant impact of keyboard hardware on typing behavior. These findings suggest that: (1) keyboard-specific user profiles may be necessary for reliable authentication, and (2) ensemble methods like RF outperform One-Class SVM in capturing fine-grained user-specific patterns.
StabStitch++: Unsupervised Online Video Stitching with Spatiotemporal Bidirectional Warps
Authors: Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Yun Zhang, Shuaicheng Liu, Yao Zhao
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Stitching, Video Stabilization

We retarget video stitching to an emerging issue, named warping shake, which unveils the temporal content shakes induced by sequentially unsmooth warps when extending image stitching to video stitching. Even if the input videos are stable, the stitched video can inevitably cause undesired warping shakes and affect the visual experience. To address this issue, we propose StabStitch++, a novel video stitching framework to realize spatial stitching and temporal stabilization with unsupervised learning simultaneously. First, different from existing learning-based image stitching solutions that typically warp one image to align with another, we suppose a virtual midplane between original image planes and project them onto it. Concretely, we design a differentiable bidirectional decomposition module to disentangle the homography transformation and incorporate it into our spatial warp, evenly spreading alignment burdens and projective distortions across two views. Then, inspired by camera paths in video stabilization, we derive the mathematical expression of stitching trajectories in video stitching by elaborately integrating spatial and temporal warps. Finally, a warp smoothing model is presented to produce stable stitched videos with a hybrid loss to simultaneously encourage content alignment, trajectory smoothness, and online collaboration. Compared with StabStitch that sacrifices alignment for stabilization, StabStitch++ makes no compromise and optimizes both of them simultaneously, especially in the online mode. To establish an evaluation benchmark and train the learning framework, we build a video stitching dataset with a rich diversity in camera motions and scenes. Experiments exhibit that StabStitch++ surpasses current solutions in stitching performance, robustness, and efficiency, offering compelling advancements in this field by building a real-time online video stitching system.