pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-Composing Policies for Scalable Continual Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mikel Malagón, Josu Ceberio, Jose A. Lozano
Date: 2025-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning

This work introduces a growable and modular neural network architecture that naturally avoids catastrophic forgetting and interference in continual reinforcement learning. The structure of each module allows the selective combination of previous policies along with its internal policy, accelerating the learning process on the current task. Unlike previous growing neural network approaches, we show that the number of parameters of the proposed approach grows linearly with respect to the number of tasks, and does not sacrifice plasticity to scale. Experiments conducted in benchmark continuous control and visual problems reveal that the proposed approach achieves greater knowledge transfer and performance than alternative methods.
LettinGo: Explore User Profile Generation for Recommendation System
Authors: Lu Wang, Di Zhang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, QIngwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Profile Generation, Recommendation Systems

User profiling is pivotal for recommendation systems, as it transforms raw user interaction data into concise and structured representations that drive personalized recommendations. While traditional embedding-based profiles lack interpretability and adaptability, recent advances with large language models (LLMs) enable text-based profiles that are semantically richer and more transparent. However, existing methods often adhere to fixed formats that limit their ability to capture the full diversity of user behaviors. In this paper, we introduce LettinGo, a novel framework for generating diverse and adaptive user profiles. By leveraging the expressive power of LLMs and incorporating direct feedback from downstream recommendation tasks, our approach avoids the rigid constraints imposed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Instead, we employ Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the profile generator with task-specific performance, ensuring that the profiles remain adaptive and effective. LettinGo operates in three stages: (1) exploring diverse user profiles via multiple LLMs, (2) evaluating profile quality based on their impact in recommendation systems, and (3) aligning the profile generation through pairwise preference data derived from task performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances recommendation accuracy, flexibility, and contextual awareness. This work enhances profile generation as a key innovation for next-generation recommendation systems.
CORONA: A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Graph-based Recommendation with Large Language Models
Authors: Junze Chen, Xinjie Yang, Cheng Yang, Junfei Bao, Zeyuan Guo, Yawen Li, Chuan Shi
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, Re-Ranking, Retrieval

Recommender systems (RSs) are designed to retrieve candidate items a user might be interested in from a large pool. A common approach is using graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture high-order interaction relationships. As large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across domains, researchers are exploring their use to enhance recommendation. However, prior work limits LLMs to re-ranking results or dataset augmentation, failing to utilize their power during candidate filtering - which may lead to suboptimal performance. Instead, we propose to leverage LLMs' reasoning abilities during the candidate filtering process, and introduce Chain Of Retrieval ON grAphs (CORONA) to progressively narrow down the range of candidate items on interaction graphs with the help of LLMs: (1) First, LLM performs preference reasoning based on user profiles, with the response serving as a query to extract relevant users and items from the interaction graph as preference-assisted retrieval; (2) Then, using the information retrieved in the previous step along with the purchase history of target user, LLM conducts intent reasoning to help refine an even smaller interaction subgraph as intent-assisted retrieval; (3) Finally, we employ a GNN to capture high-order collaborative filtering information from the extracted subgraph, performing GNN-enhanced retrieval to generate the final recommendation results. The proposed framework leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs during the retrieval process, while seamlessly integrating GNNs to enhance overall recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on various datasets and settings demonstrate that our proposed CORONA achieves state-of-the-art performance with an 18.6% relative improvement in recall and an 18.4% relative improvement in NDCG on average.
DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement
Authors: Shaoqing Lin, Chong Teng, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Lizhen Qu, Zhuang Li
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Hallucination, Sentence

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers originally designed for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. To address this, we introduce a new task, Discourse-level text Scene Graph parsing (DiscoSG), supported by our dataset DiscoSG-DS, which comprises 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs for images. Each caption averages 9 sentences, and each graph contains at least 3 times more triples than those in existing datasets. While fine-tuning large PLMs (i.e., GPT-4) on DiscoSG-DS improves SPICE by approximately 48% over the best sentence-merging baseline, high inference cost and restrictive licensing hinder its open-source use, and smaller fine-tuned PLMs struggle with complex graphs. We propose DiscoSG-Refiner, which drafts a base graph using one small PLM, then employs a second PLM to iteratively propose graph edits, reducing full-graph generation overhead. Using two Flan-T5-Base models, DiscoSG-Refiner still improves SPICE by approximately 30% over the best baseline while achieving 86 times faster inference than GPT-4. It also consistently improves downstream VLM tasks like discourse-level caption evaluation and hallucination detection. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/ShaoqLin/DiscoSG
SAM2-SGP: Enhancing SAM2 for Medical Image Segmentation via Support-Set Guided Prompting
Authors: Yang Xing, Jiong Wu, Yuheng Bu, Kuang Gong
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Although new vision foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have significantly enhanced zero-shot image segmentation capabilities, reliance on human-provided prompts poses significant challenges in adapting SAM2 to medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, SAM2's performance in medical image segmentation was limited by the domain shift issue, since it was originally trained on natural images and videos. To address these challenges, we proposed SAM2 with support-set guided prompting (SAM2-SGP), a framework that eliminated the need for manual prompts. The proposed model leveraged the memory mechanism of SAM2 to generate pseudo-masks using image-mask pairs from a support set via a Pseudo-mask Generation (PMG) module. We further introduced a novel Pseudo-mask Attention (PMA) module, which used these pseudo-masks to automatically generate bounding boxes and enhance localized feature extraction by guiding attention to relevant areas. Furthermore, a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) strategy was adopted to mitigate the domain shift issue. The proposed framework was evaluated on both 2D and 3D datasets across multiple medical imaging modalities, including fundus photography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound. The results demonstrated a significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art models, such as nnUNet and SwinUNet, as well as foundation models, such as SAM2 and MedSAM2, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/astlian9/SAM_Support.
Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Cascaded Vision Language Models
Authors: Kai Zhao, Wubang Yuan, Zheng Wang, Guanyi Li, Xiaoqiang Zhu, Deng-Ping Fan, Dan Zeng
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Camouflaged Object Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation (OVCOS) seeks to segment and classify camouflaged objects from arbitrary categories, presenting unique challenges due to visual ambiguity and unseen categories.Recent approaches typically adopt a two-stage paradigm: first segmenting objects, then classifying the segmented regions using Vision Language Models (VLMs).However, these methods (1) suffer from a domain gap caused by the mismatch between VLMs' full-image training and cropped-region inference, and (2) depend on generic segmentation models optimized for well-delineated objects, making them less effective for camouflaged objects.Without explicit guidance, generic segmentation models often overlook subtle boundaries, leading to imprecise segmentation.In this paper,we introduce a novel VLM-guided cascaded framework to address these issues in OVCOS.For segmentation, we leverage the Segment Anything Model (SAM), guided by the VLM.Our framework uses VLM-derived features as explicit prompts to SAM, effectively directing attention to camouflaged regions and significantly improving localization accuracy.For classification, we avoid the domain gap introduced by hard cropping.Instead, we treat the segmentation output as a soft spatial prior via the alpha channel, which retains the full image context while providing precise spatial guidance, leading to more accurate and context-aware classification of camouflaged objects.The same VLM is shared across both segmentation and classification to ensure efficiency and semantic consistency.Extensive experiments on both OVCOS and conventional camouflaged object segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the clear superiority of our method, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging rich VLM semantics for both segmentation and classification of camouflaged objects.
Scene-R1: Video-Grounded Large Language Models for 3D Scene Reasoning without 3D Annotations
Authors: Zhihao Yuan, Shuyi Jiang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yaolun Zhang, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li, Na Zhao
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Scene Understanding, Visual Question Answering

Currently, utilizing large language models to understand the 3D world is becoming popular. Yet existing 3D-aware LLMs act as black boxes: they output bounding boxes or textual answers without revealing how those decisions are made, and they still rely on pre-trained 3D detectors to supply object proposals. We introduce Scene-R1, a video-grounded framework that learns to reason about 3D scenes without any point-wise 3D instance supervision by pairing reinforcement-learning-driven reasoning with a two-stage grounding pipeline. In the temporal grounding stage, we explicitly reason about the video and select the video snippets most relevant to an open-ended query. In the subsequent image grounding stage, we analyze the image and predict the 2D bounding box. After that, we track the object using SAM2 to produce pixel-accurate masks in RGB frames, and project them back into 3D, thereby eliminating the need for 3D detector-based proposals while capturing fine geometry and material cues. Scene-R1 can also adapt to the 3D visual question answering task to answer free-form questions directly from video. Our training pipeline only needs task-level 2D boxes or textual labels without dense 3D point-wise labels. Scene-R1 surpasses existing open-vocabulary baselines on multiple datasets, while delivering transparent, step-by-step rationales. These results show that reinforcement-learning-based reasoning combined with RGB-D video alone offers a practical, annotation-efficient route to trustworthy 3D scene understanding.
PicoSAM2: Low-Latency Segmentation In-Sensor for Edge Vision Applications
Authors: Pietro Bonazzi, Nicola Farronato, Stefan Zihlmann, Haotong Qin, Michele Magno
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Privacy Preserving, Segmentation

Real-time, on-device segmentation is critical for latency-sensitive and privacy-aware applications like smart glasses and IoT devices. We introduce PicoSAM2, a lightweight (1.3M parameters, 336M MACs) promptable segmentation model optimized for edge and in-sensor execution, including the Sony IMX500. It builds on a depthwise separable U-Net, with knowledge distillation and fixed-point prompt encoding to learn from the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2). On COCO and LVIS, it achieves 51.9% and 44.9% mIoU, respectively. The quantized model (1.22MB) runs at 14.3 ms on the IMX500-achieving 86 MACs/cycle, making it the only model meeting both memory and compute constraints for in-sensor deployment. Distillation boosts LVIS performance by +3.5% mIoU and +5.1% mAP. These results demonstrate that efficient, promptable segmentation is feasible directly on-camera, enabling privacy-preserving vision without cloud or host processing.
MedSeg-R: Medical Image Segmentation with Clinical Reasoning
Authors: Hao Shao, Qibin Hou
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is challenging due to overlapping anatomies with ambiguous boundaries and a severe imbalance between the foreground and background classes, which particularly affects the delineation of small lesions. Existing methods, including encoder-decoder networks and prompt-driven variants of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), rely heavily on local cues or user prompts and lack integrated semantic priors, thus failing to generalize well to low-contrast or overlapping targets. To address these issues, we propose MedSeg-R, a lightweight, dual-stage framework inspired by inspired by clinical reasoning. Its cognitive stage interprets medical report into structured semantic priors (location, texture, shape), which are fused via transformer block. In the perceptual stage, these priors modulate the SAM backbone: spatial attention highlights likely lesion regions, dynamic convolution adapts feature filters to expected textures, and deformable sampling refines spatial support. By embedding this fine-grained guidance early, MedSeg-R disentangles inter-class confusion and amplifies minority-class cues, greatly improving sensitivity to small lesions. In challenging benchmarks, MedSeg-R produces large Dice improvements in overlapping and ambiguous structures, demonstrating plug-and-play compatibility with SAM-based systems.
Segment Anything for Satellite Imagery: A Strong Baseline and a Regional Dataset for Automatic Field Delineation
Authors: Carmelo Scribano, Elena Govi, Paolo Bertellini, Simone Parisi, Giorgia Franchini, Marko Bertogna
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00

Accurate mapping of agricultural field boundaries is essential for the efficient operation of agriculture. Automatic extraction from high-resolution satellite imagery, supported by computer vision techniques, can avoid costly ground surveys. In this paper, we present a pipeline for field delineation based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), introducing a fine-tuning strategy to adapt SAM to this task. In addition to using published datasets, we describe a method for acquiring a complementary regional dataset that covers areas beyond current sources. Extensive experiments assess segmentation accuracy and evaluate the generalization capabilities. Our approach provides a robust baseline for automated field delineation. The new regional dataset, known as ERAS, is now publicly available.
Baltimore Atlas: FreqWeaver Adapter for Semi-supervised Ultra-high Spatial Resolution Land Cover Classification
Authors: Junhao Wu, Aboagye-Ntow Stephen, Chuyuan Wang, Gang Chen, Xin Huang
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Land Cover Classification, Segmentation

Ultra-high Spatial Resolution Land Cover Classification is essential for fine-grained land cover analysis, yet it remains challenging due to the high cost of pixel-level annotations, significant scale variation, and the limited adaptability of large-scale vision models. Existing methods typically focus on 1-meter spatial resolution imagery and rely heavily on annotated data, whereas practical applications often require processing higher-resolution imagery under weak supervision. To address this, we propose a parameter-efficient semi-supervised segmentation framework for 0.3 m spatial resolution imagery, which leverages the knowledge of SAM2 and introduces a remote sensing-specific FreqWeaver Adapter to enhance fine-grained detail modeling while maintaining a lightweight design at only 5.96% of the total model parameters. By effectively leveraging unlabeled data and maintaining minimal parameter overhead, the proposed method delivers robust segmentation results with superior structural consistency, achieving a 1.78% improvement over existing parameter-efficient tuning strategies and a 3.44% gain compared to state-of-the-art high-resolution remote sensing segmentation approaches.
Data Synthesis with Diverse Styles for Face Recognition via 3DMM-Guided Diffusion
Authors: Yuxi Mi, Zhizhou Zhong, Yuge Huang, Qiuyang Yuan, Xuan Zhao, Jianqing Xu, Shouhong Ding, Shaoming Wang, rizen guo, Shuigeng Zhou
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Face Generation, Face Recognition

Identity-preserving face synthesis aims to generate synthetic face images of virtual subjects that can substitute real-world data for training face recognition models. While prior arts strive to create images with consistent identities and diverse styles, they face a trade-off between them. Identifying their limitation of treating style variation as subject-agnostic and observing that real-world persons actually have distinct, subject-specific styles, this paper introduces MorphFace, a diffusion-based face generator. The generator learns fine-grained facial styles, e.g., shape, pose and expression, from the renderings of a 3D morphable model (3DMM). It also learns identities from an off-the-shelf recognition model. To create virtual faces, the generator is conditioned on novel identities of unlabeled synthetic faces, and novel styles that are statistically sampled from a real-world prior distribution. The sampling especially accounts for both intra-subject variation and subject distinctiveness. A context blending strategy is employed to enhance the generator's responsiveness to identity and style conditions. Extensive experiments show that MorphFace outperforms the best prior arts in face recognition efficacy.
Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking
Authors: Zhecheng Sheng, Xiruo Ding, Brian Hur, Changye Li, Trevor Cohen, Serguei Pakhomov
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Deep transformer models have been used to detect linguistic anomalies in patient transcripts for early Alzheimer's disease (AD) screening. While pre-trained neural language models (LMs) fine-tuned on AD transcripts perform well, little research has explored the effects of the gender of the speakers represented by these transcripts. This work addresses gender confounding in dementia detection and proposes two methods: the $\textit{Extended Confounding Filter}$ and the $\textit{Dual Filter}$, which isolate and ablate weights associated with gender. We evaluate these methods on dementia datasets with first-person narratives from patients with cognitive impairment and healthy controls. Our results show transformer models tend to overfit to training data distributions. Disrupting gender-related weights results in a deconfounded dementia classifier, with the trade-off of slightly reduced dementia detection performance.
Delta-KNN: Improving Demonstration Selection in In-Context Learning for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Authors: Chuyuan Li, Raymond Li, Thalia S. Field, Giuseppe Carenini
Date: 2025-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Alzheimer's Disease Detection, In-Context Learning

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that leads to dementia, and early intervention can greatly benefit from analyzing linguistic abnormalities. In this work, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as health assistants for AD diagnosis from patient-generated text using in-context learning (ICL), where tasks are defined through a few input-output examples. Empirical results reveal that conventional ICL methods, such as similarity-based selection, perform poorly for AD diagnosis, likely due to the inherent complexity of this task. To address this, we introduce Delta-KNN, a novel demonstration selection strategy that enhances ICL performance. Our method leverages a delta score to assess the relative gains of each training example, coupled with a KNN-based retriever that dynamically selects optimal "representatives" for a given input. Experiments on two AD detection datasets across three open-source LLMs demonstrate that Delta-KNN consistently outperforms existing ICL baselines. Notably, when using the Llama-3.1 model, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results, surpassing even supervised classifiers.
Alzheimer's Dementia Detection Using Perplexity from Paired Large Language Models
Authors: Yao Xiao, Heidi Christensen, Stefan Goetze
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decision Making, Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with cognitive decline that commonly impacts language ability. This work extends the paired perplexity approach to detecting AD by using a recent large language model (LLM), the instruction-following version of Mistral-7B. We improve accuracy by an average of 3.33% over the best current paired perplexity method and by 6.35% over the top-ranked method from the ADReSS 2020 challenge benchmark. Our further analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach can effectively detect AD with a clear and interpretable decision boundary in contrast to other methods that suffer from opaque decision-making processes. Finally, by prompting the fine-tuned LLMs and comparing the model-generated responses to human responses, we illustrate that the LLMs have learned the special language patterns of AD speakers, which opens up possibilities for novel methods of model interpretation and data augmentation.