pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Time and Frequency Domain-based Anomaly Detection in Smart Meter Data for Distribution Network Studies
Authors: Petar Labura, Tomislav Antic, Tomislav Capuder
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

The widespread integration of new technologies in low-voltage distribution networks on the consumer side creates the need for distribution system operators to perform advanced real-time calculations to estimate network conditions. In recent years, data-driven models based on machine learning and big data analysis have emerged for calculation purposes, leveraging the information available in large datasets obtained from smart meters and other advanced measurement infrastructure. However, existing data-driven algorithms do not take into account the quality of data collected from smart meters. They lack built-in anomaly detection mechanisms and fail to differentiate anomalies based on whether the value or context of anomalous data instances deviates from the norm. This paper focuses on methods for detecting and mitigating the impact of anomalies on the consumption of active and reactive power datasets. It proposes an anomaly detection framework based on the Isolation Forest machine learning algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform filtering that works in both the time and frequency domain and is unaffected by point anomalies or contextual anomalies of the power consumption data. The importance of integrating anomaly detection methods is demonstrated in the analysis important for distribution networks with a high share of smart meters.
OmniSage: Large Scale, Multi-Entity Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Anirudhan Badrinath, Alex Yang, Kousik Rajesh, Prabhat Agarwal, Jaewon Yang, Haoyu Chen, Jiajing Xu, Charles Rosenberg
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Representation learning, a task of learning latent vectors to represent entities, is a key task in improving search and recommender systems in web applications. Various representation learning methods have been developed, including graph-based approaches for relationships among entities, sequence-based methods for capturing the temporal evolution of user activities, and content-based models for leveraging text and visual content. However, the development of a unifying framework that integrates these diverse techniques to support multiple applications remains a significant challenge. This paper presents OmniSage, a large-scale representation framework that learns universal representations for a variety of applications at Pinterest. OmniSage integrates graph neural networks with content-based models and user sequence models by employing multiple contrastive learning tasks to effectively process graph data, user sequence data, and content signals. To support the training and inference of OmniSage, we developed an efficient infrastructure capable of supporting Pinterest graphs with billions of nodes. The universal representations generated by OmniSage have significantly enhanced user experiences on Pinterest, leading to an approximate 2.5% increase in sitewide repins (saves) across five applications. This paper highlights the impact of unifying representation learning methods, and we will open source the OmniSage code by the time of publication.
Recent advances in data-driven methods for degradation modelling across applications
Authors: Anna Jarosz, Marta Zagorowska, Jerzy Baranowski
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Understanding degradation is crucial for ensuring the longevity and performance of materials, systems, and organisms. To illustrate the similarities across applications, this article provides a review of data-based method in materials science, engineering, and medicine. The methods analyzed in this paper include regression analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Bayesian statistics, hidden Markov models, nonparametric Bayesian modeling of time series, supervised learning, and deep learning. The review provides an overview of degradation models, referencing books and methods, and includes detailed tables highlighting the applications and insights offered in medicine, power engineering, and material science. It also discusses the classification of methods, emphasizing statistical inference, dynamic prediction, machine learning, and hybrid modeling techniques. Overall, this review enhances understanding of degradation modelling across diverse domains.
Multiple Target Tracking Using a UAV Swarm in Maritime Environments
Authors: Andreas Anastasiou, Savvas Papaioannou, Panayiotis Kolios, Christos G. Panayiotou
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control, State Estimation

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized in search and rescue missions, a trend driven by technological advancements, including enhancements in automation, avionics, and the reduced cost of electronics. In this work, we introduce a collaborative model predictive control (MPC) framework aimed at addressing the joint problem of guidance and state estimation for tracking multiple castaway targets with a fleet of autonomous UAV agents. We assume that each UAV agent is equipped with a camera sensor, which has a limited sensing range and is utilized for receiving noisy observations from multiple moving castaways adrift in maritime conditions. We derive a nonlinear mixed integer programming (NMIP) -based controller that facilitates the guidance of the UAVs by generating non-myopic trajectories within a receding planning horizon. These trajectories are designed to minimize the tracking error across multiple targets by directing the UAV fleet to locations expected to yield targets measurements, thereby minimizing the uncertainty of the estimated target states. Extensive simulation experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in tracking multiple castaways in maritime environments.
Efficient Recommendation with Millions of Items by Dynamic Pruning of Sub-Item Embeddings
Authors: Aleksandr V. Petrov, Craig Macdonald, Nicola Tonellotto
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00

A large item catalogue is a major challenge for deploying modern sequential recommender models, since it makes the memory footprint of the model large and increases inference latency. One promising approach to address this is RecJPQ, which replaces item embeddings with sub-item embeddings. However, slow inference remains problematic because finding the top highest-scored items usually requires scoring all items in the catalogue, which may not be feasible for large catalogues. By adapting dynamic pruning concepts from document retrieval, we propose the RecJPQPrune dynamic pruning algorithm to efficiently find the top highest-scored items without computing the scores of all items in the catalogue. Our RecJPQPrune algorithm is safe-up-to-rank K since it theoretically guarantees that no potentially high-scored item is excluded from the final top K recommendation list, thereby ensuring no impact on effectiveness. Our experiments on two large datasets and three recommendation models demonstrate the efficiency achievable using RecJPQPrune: for instance, on the Tmall dataset with 2.2M items, we can reduce the median model scoring time by 64 times compared to the Transformer Default baseline, and 5.3 times compared to a recent scoring approach called PQTopK. Overall, this paper demonstrates the effective and efficient inference of Transformer-based recommendation models at catalogue scales not previously reported in the literature. Indeed, our RecJPQPrune algorithm can score 2 million items in under 10 milliseconds without GPUs, and without relying on Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) techniques.
Graph Spectral Filtering with Chebyshev Interpolation for Recommendation
Authors: Chanwoo Kim, Jinkyu Sung, Yebonn Han, Joonseok Lee
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

Graph convolutional networks have recently gained prominence in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommendations. However, we identify potential bottlenecks in two foundational components. First, the embedding layer leads to a latent space with limited capacity, overlooking locally observed but potentially valuable preference patterns. Also, the widely-used neighborhood aggregation is limited in its ability to leverage diverse preference patterns in a fine-grained manner. Building on spectral graph theory, we reveal that these limitations stem from graph filtering with a cut-off in the frequency spectrum and a restricted linear form. To address these issues, we introduce ChebyCF, a CF framework based on graph spectral filtering. Instead of a learned embedding, it takes a user's raw interaction history to utilize the full spectrum of signals contained in it. Also, it adopts Chebyshev interpolation to effectively approximate a flexible non-linear graph filter, and further enhances it by using an additional ideal pass filter and degree-based normalization. Through extensive experiments, we verify that ChebyCF overcomes the aforementioned bottlenecks and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and reasonably fast inference. Our code is available at https://github.com/chanwoo0806/ChebyCF.
CIVIL: Causal and Intuitive Visual Imitation Learning
Authors: Yinlong Dai, Robert Ramirez Sanchez, Ryan Jeronimus, Shahabedin Sagheb, Cara M. Nunez, Heramb Nemlekar, Dylan P. Losey
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Today's robots learn new tasks by imitating human examples. However, this standard approach to visual imitation learning is fundamentally limited: the robot observes what the human does, but not why the human chooses those behaviors. Without understanding the features that factor into the human's decisions, robot learners often misinterpret the data and fail to perform the task when the environment changes. We therefore propose a shift in perspective: instead of asking human teachers just to show what actions the robot should take, we also enable humans to indicate task-relevant features using markers and language prompts. Our proposed algorithm, CIVIL, leverages this augmented data to filter the robot's visual observations and extract a feature representation that causally informs human actions. CIVIL then applies these causal features to train a transformer-based policy that emulates human behaviors without being confused by visual distractors. Our simulations, real-world experiments, and user study demonstrate that robots trained with CIVIL can learn from fewer human demonstrations and perform better than state-of-the-art baselines, especially in previously unseen scenarios. See videos at our project website: https://civil2025.github.io
Can LLMs Be Trusted for Evaluating RAG Systems? A Survey of Methods and Datasets
Authors: Lorenz Brehme, Thomas Ströhle, Ruth Breu
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Benchmarking, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced significantly in recent years. The complexity of RAG systems, which involve multiple components-such as indexing, retrieval, and generation-along with numerous other parameters, poses substantial challenges for systematic evaluation and quality enhancement. Previous research highlights that evaluating RAG systems is essential for documenting advancements, comparing configurations, and identifying effective approaches for domain-specific applications. This study systematically reviews 63 academic articles to provide a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art RAG evaluation methodologies, focusing on four key areas: datasets, retrievers, indexing and databases, and the generator component. We observe the feasibility of an automated evaluation approach for each component of a RAG system, leveraging an LLM capable of both generating evaluation datasets and conducting evaluations. In addition, we found that further practical research is essential to provide companies with clear guidance on the do's and don'ts of implementing and evaluating RAG systems. By synthesizing evaluation approaches for key RAG components and emphasizing the creation and adaptation of domain-specific datasets for benchmarking, we contribute to the advancement of systematic evaluation methods and the improvement of evaluation rigor for RAG systems. Furthermore, by examining the interplay between automated approaches leveraging LLMs and human judgment, we contribute to the ongoing discourse on balancing automation and human input, clarifying their respective contributions, limitations, and challenges in achieving robust and reliable evaluations.
Natural Language Processing tools for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Information Extraction from Patents
Authors: Diego Alvarado-Maldonado, Blair Johnston, Cameron J. Brown
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER

Abundant and diverse data on medicines manufacturing and other lifecycle components has been made easily accessible in the last decades. However, a significant proportion of this information is characterised by not being tabulated and usable for machine learning purposes. Thus, natural language processing tools have been used to build databases in domains such as biomedical and chemical to address this limitation. This has allowed the development of artificial intelligence applications, which have improved drug discovery and treatments. In the pharmaceutical manufacturing context, some initiatives and datasets for primary processing can be found, but the manufacturing of drug products is an area which is still lacking, to the best of our knowledge. This works aims to explore and adapt NLP tools used in other domains to extract information on both primary and secondary manufacturing, employing patents as the main source of data. Thus, two independent, but complementary, models were developed comprising a method to select fragments of text that contain manufacturing data, and a named entity recognition system that enables extracting information on operations, materials, and conditions of a process. For the first model, the identification of relevant sections was achieved using an unsupervised approach combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation and k-Means clustering. The performance of this model measured as a Cohen's kappa between model output and manual revision was higher than 90%. NER model consisted of a deep neural network, and an f1-score micro average of 84.2% was obtained which is comparable to other works. Some considerations for these tools to be used in data extraction are discussed throughout this document.
Recursive Identification of Structured Systems: An Instrumental-Variable Approach Applied to Mechanical Systems
Authors: Koen Classens, Rodrigo A. González, Tom Oomen
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, parameter estimation

Online system identification algorithms are widely used for monitoring, diagnostics and control by continuously adapting to time-varying dynamics. Typically, these algorithms consider a model structure that lacks parsimony and offers limited physical interpretability. The objective of this paper is to develop a real-time parameter estimation algorithm aimed at identifying time-varying dynamics within an interpretable model structure. An additive model structure is adopted for this purpose, which offers enhanced parsimony and is shown to be particularly suitable for mechanical systems. The proposed approach integrates the recursive simplified refined instrumental variable method with block-coordinate descent to minimize an exponentially-weighted output error cost function. This novel recursive identification method delivers parametric continuous-time additive models and is applicable in both open-loop and closed-loop controlled systems. Its efficacy is shown using numerical simulations and is further validated using experimental data to detect the time-varying resonance dynamics of a flexible beam system. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for online and interpretable estimation for advanced monitoring and control applications.
Design and benchmarking of a two degree of freedom tendon driver unit for cable-driven wearable technologies
Authors: Adrian Esser, Chiara Basla, Peter Wolf, Robert Riener
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Exosuits have recently been developed as alternatives to rigid exoskeletons and are increasingly adopted for both upper and lower limb therapy and assistance in clinical and home environments. Many cable-driven exosuits have been developed but little has been published on their electromechanical designs and performance. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive design and performance analysis of a two degree of freedom tendon driver unit (TDU) for cable-driven wearable exosuits. Detailed methodologies are presented to benchmark the functionality of the TDU. A static torque output test compares the commanded and measured torques. A velocity control test evaluates the attenuation and phase shift across velocities. A noise test evaluates how loud the TDU is for the wearer under different speeds. A thermal stress test captures the cooling performance of the TDU to ensure safe operation at higher loads. Finally, a battery endurance test evaluates the runtime of the TDU under various loading conditions to inform the usable time. To demonstrate these tests, a modular TDU system for cable-driven applications is introduced, which allows components such as motors, pulleys, and sensors to be adapted based on the requirements of the intended application. By sharing detailed methodologies and performance results, this study aims to provide a TDU design that may be leveraged by others and resources for researchers and engineers to better document the capabilities of their TDU designs.
Learning Universal User Representations Leveraging Cross-domain User Intent at Snapchat
Authors: Clark Mingxuan Ju, Leonardo Neves, Bhuvesh Kumar, Liam Collins, Tong Zhao, Yuwei Qiu, Qing Dou, Yang Zhou, Sohail Nizam, Rengim Ozturk, Yvette Liu, Sen yang, Manish Malik, Neil Shah
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Form, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

The development of powerful user representations is a key factor in the success of recommender systems (RecSys). Online platforms employ a range of RecSys techniques to personalize user experience across diverse in-app surfaces. User representations are often learned individually through user's historical interactions within each surface and user representations across different surfaces can be shared post-hoc as auxiliary features or additional retrieval sources. While effective, such schemes cannot directly encode collaborative filtering signals across different surfaces, hindering its capacity to discover complex relationships between user behaviors and preferences across the whole platform. To bridge this gap at Snapchat, we seek to conduct universal user modeling (UUM) across different in-app surfaces, learning general-purpose user representations which encode behaviors across surfaces. Instead of replacing domain-specific representations, UUM representations capture cross-domain trends, enriching existing representations with complementary information. This work discusses our efforts in developing initial UUM versions, practical challenges, technical choices and modeling and research directions with promising offline performance. Following successful A/B testing, UUM representations have been launched in production, powering multiple use cases and demonstrating their value. UUM embedding has been incorporated into (i) Long-form Video embedding-based retrieval, leading to 2.78% increase in Long-form Video Open Rate, (ii) Long-form Video L2 ranking, with 19.2% increase in Long-form Video View Time sum, (iii) Lens L2 ranking, leading to 1.76% increase in Lens play time, and (iv) Notification L2 ranking, with 0.87% increase in Notification Open Rate.
Fault Diagnosis in New Wind Turbines using Knowledge from Existing Turbines by Generative Domain Adaptation
Authors: Stefan Jonas, Angela Meyer
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Domain Adaptation, Fault Diagnosis

Intelligent condition monitoring of wind turbines is essential for reducing downtimes. Machine learning models trained on wind turbine operation data are commonly used to detect anomalies and, eventually, operation faults. However, data-driven normal behavior models (NBMs) require a substantial amount of training data, as NBMs trained with scarce data may result in unreliable fault diagnosis. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel generative deep learning approach to make SCADA samples from one wind turbine lacking training data resemble SCADA data from wind turbines with representative training data. Through CycleGAN-based domain mapping, our method enables the application of an NBM trained on an existing wind turbine to one with severely limited data. We demonstrate our approach on field data mapping SCADA samples across 7 substantially different WTs. Our findings show significantly improved fault diagnosis in wind turbines with scarce data. Our method achieves the most similar anomaly scores to an NBM trained with abundant data, outperforming NBMs trained on scarce training data with improvements of +10.3% in F1-score when 1 month of training data is available and +16.8% when 2 weeks are available. The domain mapping approach outperforms conventional fine-tuning at all considered degrees of data scarcity, ranging from 1 to 8 weeks of training data. The proposed technique enables earlier and more reliable fault diagnosis in newly installed wind farms, demonstrating a novel and promising research direction to improve anomaly detection when faced with training data scarcity.
A Quadratic Control Framework for Dynamic Systems
Authors: Igor Ladnik
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

This article presents a unified approach to quadratic optimal control for both linear and nonlinear discrete-time systems, with a focus on trajectory tracking. The control strategy is based on minimizing a quadratic cost function that penalizes deviations of system states and control inputs from their desired trajectories. For linear systems, the classical Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) solution is derived using dynamic programming, resulting in recursive equations for feedback and feedforward terms. For nonlinear dynamics, the Iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) method is employed, which iteratively linearizes the system and solves a sequence of LQR problems to converge to an optimal policy. To implement this approach, a software service was developed and tested on several canonical models, including: Rayleigh oscillator, inverted pendulum on a moving cart, two-link manipulator, and quadcopter. The results confirm that iLQR enables efficient and accurate trajectory tracking in the presence of nonlinearities. To further enhance performance, it can be seamlessly integrated with Model Predictive Control (MPC), enabling online adaptation and improved robustness to constraints and system uncertainties.