pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Out-of-Distribution Samples: A Latent-Variable Study
Authors: Yu Wang, Fu-Chieh Chang, Pei-Yuan Wu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful technique to improve in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) by breaking complex reasoning into intermediate steps. However, the ability of CoT to generalize under distribution shift remains poorly understood. In this work, we extend a latent-variable framework for CoT prompting and study its behavior on two prototypical out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios: (i) the latent variables for CoT steps are permuted into novel combinations, and (ii) the latent variables uniformly scaled by a factor. Our experiments demonstrate that CoT inference generalizes effectively to OOD samples whose latent variables closely resemble those seen during training, but its performance degrades as this similarity decreases. These findings provide foundational insights into the strengths and limitations of CoT prompting under OOD conditions and suggest directions for developing more resilient reasoning strategies in future LLMs.
Inference-friendly Graph Compression for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yangxin Fan, Haolai Che, Yinghui Wu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promising performance in graph analysis. Nevertheless, the inference process of GNNs remains costly, hindering their applications for large graphs. This paper proposes inference-friendly graph compression (IFGC), a graph compression scheme to accelerate GNNs inference. Given a graph $G$ and a GNN $M$, an IFGC computes a small compressed graph $G_c$, to best preserve the inference results of $M$ over $G$, such that the result can be directly inferred by accessing $G_c$ with no or little decompression cost. (1) We characterize IFGC with a class of inference equivalence relation. The relation captures the node pairs in $G$ that are not distinguishable for GNN inference. (2) We introduce three practical specifications of IFGC for representative GNNs: structural preserving compression (SPGC), which computes $G_c$ that can be directly processed by GNN inference without decompression; ($\alpha$, $r$)-compression, that allows for a configurable trade-off between compression ratio and inference quality, and anchored compression that preserves inference results for specific nodes of interest. For each scheme, we introduce compression and inference algorithms with guarantees of efficiency and quality of the inferred results. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse sets of large-scale graphs, which verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of our graph compression approaches.
An All-Atom Generative Model for Designing Protein Complexes
Authors: Ruizhe Chen, Dongyu Xue, Xiangxin Zhou, Zaixiang Zheng, Xiangxiang Zeng, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Proteins typically exist in complexes, interacting with other proteins or biomolecules to perform their specific biological roles. Research on single-chain protein modeling has been extensively and deeply explored, with advancements seen in models like the series of ESM and AlphaFold. Despite these developments, the study and modeling of multi-chain proteins remain largely uncharted, though they are vital for understanding biological functions. Recognizing the importance of these interactions, we introduce APM (All-Atom Protein Generative Model), a model specifically designed for modeling multi-chain proteins. By integrating atom-level information and leveraging data on multi-chain proteins, APM is capable of precisely modeling inter-chain interactions and designing protein complexes with binding capabilities from scratch. It also performs folding and inverse-folding tasks for multi-chain proteins. Moreover, APM demonstrates versatility in downstream applications: it achieves enhanced performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while also supporting zero-shot sampling in certain tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Code will be released at https://github.com/bytedance/apm.
Hadamard product in deep learning: Introduction, Advances and Challenges
Authors: Grigorios G Chrysos, Yongtao Wu, Razvan Pascanu, Philip Torr, Volkan Cevher
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Deep Learning, Edge-computing, Image Inpainting, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

While convolution and self-attention mechanisms have dominated architectural design in deep learning, this survey examines a fundamental yet understudied primitive: the Hadamard product. Despite its widespread implementation across various applications, the Hadamard product has not been systematically analyzed as a core architectural primitive. We present the first comprehensive taxonomy of its applications in deep learning, identifying four principal domains: higher-order correlation, multimodal data fusion, dynamic representation modulation, and efficient pairwise operations. The Hadamard product's ability to model nonlinear interactions with linear computational complexity makes it particularly valuable for resource-constrained deployments and edge computing scenarios. We demonstrate its natural applicability in multimodal fusion tasks, such as visual question answering, and its effectiveness in representation masking for applications including image inpainting and pruning. This systematic review not only consolidates existing knowledge about the Hadamard product's role in deep learning architectures but also establishes a foundation for future architectural innovations. Our analysis reveals the Hadamard product as a versatile primitive that offers compelling trade-offs between computational efficiency and representational power, positioning it as a crucial component in the deep learning toolkit.
Transfer Learning via Auxiliary Labels with Application to Cold-Hardiness Prediction
Authors: Kristen Goebel, Paola Pesantez-Cabrera, Markus Keller, Alan Fern
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Transfer Learning

Cold temperatures can cause significant frost damage to fruit crops depending on their resilience, or cold hardiness, which changes throughout the dormancy season. This has led to the development of predictive cold-hardiness models, which help farmers decide when to deploy expensive frost-mitigation measures. Unfortunately, cold-hardiness data for model training is only available for some fruit cultivars due to the need for specialized equipment and expertise. Rather, farmers often do have years of phenological data (e.g. date of budbreak) that they regularly collect for their crops. In this work, we introduce a new transfer-learning framework, Transfer via Auxiliary Labels (TAL), that allows farmers to leverage the phenological data to produce more accurate cold-hardiness predictions, even when no cold-hardiness data is available for their specific crop. The framework assumes a set of source tasks (cultivars) where each has associated primary labels (cold hardiness) and auxiliary labels (phenology). However, the target task (new cultivar) is assumed to only have the auxiliary labels. The goal of TAL is to predict primary labels for the target task via transfer from the source tasks. Surprisingly, despite the vast literature on transfer learning, to our knowledge, the TAL formulation has not been previously addressed. Thus, we propose several new TAL approaches based on model selection and averaging that can leverage recent deep multi-task models for cold-hardiness prediction. Our results on real-world cold-hardiness and phenological data for multiple grape cultivars demonstrate that TAL can leverage the phenological data to improve cold-hardiness predictions in the absence of cold-hardiness data.
Aligning Constraint Generation with Design Intent in Parametric CAD
Authors: Evan Casey, Tianyu Zhang, Shu Ishida, John Roger Thompson, Amir Khasahmadi, Joseph George Lambourne, Pradeep Kumar Jayaraman, Karl D. D. Willis
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

We adapt alignment techniques from reasoning LLMs to the task of generating engineering sketch constraints found in computer-aided design (CAD) models. Engineering sketches consist of geometric primitives (e.g. points, lines) connected by constraints (e.g. perpendicular, tangent) that define the relationships between them. For a design to be easily editable, the constraints must effectively capture design intent, ensuring the geometry updates predictably when parameters change. Although current approaches can generate CAD designs, an open challenge remains to align model outputs with design intent, we label this problem `design alignment'. A critical first step towards aligning generative CAD models is to generate constraints which fully-constrain all geometric primitives, without over-constraining or distorting sketch geometry. Using alignment techniques to train an existing constraint generation model with feedback from a constraint solver, we are able to fully-constrain 93% of sketches compared to 34% when using a na\"ive supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baseline and only 8.9% without alignment. Our approach can be applied to any existing constraint generation model and sets the stage for further research bridging alignment strategies between the language and design domains.
Geographical Context Matters: Bridging Fine and Coarse Spatial Information to Enhance Continental Land Cover Mapping
Authors: Babak Ghassemi, Cassio Fraga-Dantas, Raffaele Gaetano, Dino Ienco, Omid Ghorbanzadeh, Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier, Francesco Vuolo
Date: 2025-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Earth Observation, Land Cover Classification

Land use and land cover mapping from Earth Observation (EO) data is a critical tool for sustainable land and resource management. While advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms excel at analyzing EO imagery data, they often overlook crucial geospatial metadata information that could enhance scalability and accuracy across regional, continental, and global scales. To address this limitation, we propose BRIDGE-LC (Bi-level Representation Integration for Disentangled GEospatial Land Cover), a novel deep learning framework that integrates multi-scale geospatial information into the land cover classification process. By simultaneously leveraging fine-grained (latitude/longitude) and coarse-grained (biogeographical region) spatial information, our lightweight multi-layer perceptron architecture learns from both during training but only requires fine-grained information for inference, allowing it to disentangle region-specific from region-agnostic land cover features while maintaining computational efficiency. To assess the quality of our framework, we use an open-access in-situ dataset and adopt several competing classification approaches commonly considered for large-scale land cover mapping. We evaluated all approaches through two scenarios: an extrapolation scenario in which training data encompasses samples from all biogeographical regions, and a leave-one-region-out scenario where one region is excluded from training. We also explore the spatial representation learned by our model, highlighting a connection between its internal manifold and the geographical information used during training. Our results demonstrate that integrating geospatial information improves land cover mapping performance, with the most substantial gains achieved by jointly leveraging both fine- and coarse-grained spatial information.
Parsimonious Dataset Construction for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Structure Segmentation
Authors: Yuning Zhou, Henry Badgery, Matthew Read, James Bailey, Catherine Davey
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Informativeness, Semantic Segmentation

Labeling has always been expensive in the medical context, which has hindered related deep learning application. Our work introduces active learning in surgical video frame selection to construct a high-quality, affordable Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy dataset for semantic segmentation. Active learning allows the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) learning pipeline to include the dataset construction workflow, which means DNNs trained by existing dataset will identify the most informative data from the newly collected data. At the same time, DNNs' performance and generalization ability improve over time when the newly selected and annotated data are included in the training data. We assessed different data informativeness measurements and found the deep features distances select the most informative data in this task. Our experiments show that with half of the data selected by active learning, the DNNs achieve almost the same performance with 0.4349 mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) compared to the same DNNs trained on the full dataset (0.4374 mIoU) on the critical anatomies and surgical instruments.
Disentangling Polysemantic Channels in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Robin Hesse, Jonas Fischer, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Stefan Roth
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Mechanistic interpretability is concerned with analyzing individual components in a (convolutional) neural network (CNN) and how they form larger circuits representing decision mechanisms. These investigations are challenging since CNNs frequently learn polysemantic channels that encode distinct concepts, making them hard to interpret. To address this, we propose an algorithm to disentangle a specific kind of polysemantic channel into multiple channels, each responding to a single concept. Our approach restructures weights in a CNN, utilizing that different concepts within the same channel exhibit distinct activation patterns in the previous layer. By disentangling these polysemantic features, we enhance the interpretability of CNNs, ultimately improving explanatory techniques such as feature visualizations.
Vision and Language Integration for Domain Generalization
Authors: Yanmei Wang, Xiyao Liu, Fupeng Chu, Zhi Han
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Domain generalization aims at training on source domains to uncover a domain-invariant feature space, allowing the model to perform robust generalization ability on unknown target domains. However, due to domain gaps, it is hard to find reliable common image feature space, and the reason for that is the lack of suitable basic units for images. Different from image in vision space, language has comprehensive expression elements that can effectively convey semantics. Inspired by the semantic completeness of language and intuitiveness of image, we propose VLCA, which combine language space and vision space, and connect the multiple image domains by using semantic space as the bridge domain. Specifically, in language space, by taking advantage of the completeness of language basic units, we tend to capture the semantic representation of the relations between categories through word vector distance. Then, in vision space, by taking advantage of the intuitiveness of image features, the common pattern of sample features with the same class is explored through low-rank approximation. In the end, the language representation is aligned with the vision representation through the multimodal space of text and image. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
VistaDPO: Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization for Large Video Models
Authors: Haojian Huang, Haodong Chen, Shengqiong Wu, Meng Luo, Jinlan Fu, Xinya Du, Hanwang Zhang, Hao Fei
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Video Understanding

Large Video Models (LVMs) built upon Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in video understanding but often suffer from misalignment with human intuition and video hallucination issues. To address these challenges, we introduce VistaDPO, a novel framework for Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization. VistaDPO enhances text-video preference alignment across three hierarchical levels: i) Instance Level, aligning overall video content with responses; ii) Temporal Level, aligning video temporal semantics with event descriptions; and iii) Perceptive Level, aligning spatial objects with language tokens. Given the lack of datasets for fine-grained video-language preference alignment, we construct VistaDPO-7k, a dataset of 7.2K QA pairs annotated with chosen and rejected responses, along with spatial-temporal grounding information such as timestamps, keyframes, and bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as Video Hallucination, Video QA, and Captioning performance tasks demonstrate that VistaDPO significantly improves the performance of existing LVMs, effectively mitigating video-language misalignment and hallucination. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HaroldChen19/VistaDPO.
Multi-output Classification Framework and Frequency Layer Normalization for Compound Fault Diagnosis in Motor
Authors: Wonjun Yi, Yong-Hwa Park
Date: 2025-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diagnostic, Domain Adaptation, Fault Diagnosis, Multi-class Classification

This work introduces a multi-output classification (MOC) framework designed for domain adaptation in fault diagnosis, particularly under partially labeled (PL) target domain scenarios and compound fault conditions in rotating machinery. Unlike traditional multi-class classification (MCC) methods that treat each fault combination as a distinct class, the proposed approach independently estimates the severity of each fault type, improving both interpretability and diagnostic accuracy. The model incorporates multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) and entropy minimization (EM) losses to facilitate feature transfer from the source to the target domain. In addition, frequency layer normalization (FLN) is applied to preserve structural properties in the frequency domain, which are strongly influenced by system dynamics and are often stationary with respect to changes in rpm. Evaluations across six domain adaptation cases with PL data demonstrate that MOC outperforms baseline models in macro F1 score. Moreover, MOC consistently achieves better classification performance for individual fault types, and FLN shows superior adaptability compared to other normalization techniques.
DMM: Building a Versatile Image Generation Model via Distillation-Based Model Merging
Authors: Tianhui Song, Weixin Feng, Shuai Wang, Xubin Li, Tiezheng Ge, Bo Zheng, LiMin Wang
Date: 2025-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, model

The success of text-to-image (T2I) generation models has spurred a proliferation of numerous model checkpoints fine-tuned from the same base model on various specialized datasets. This overwhelming specialized model production introduces new challenges for high parameter redundancy and huge storage cost, thereby necessitating the development of effective methods to consolidate and unify the capabilities of diverse powerful models into a single one. A common practice in model merging adopts static linear interpolation in the parameter space to achieve the goal of style mixing. However, it neglects the features of T2I generation task that numerous distinct models cover sundry styles which may lead to incompatibility and confusion in the merged model. To address this issue, we introduce a style-promptable image generation pipeline which can accurately generate arbitrary-style images under the control of style vectors. Based on this design, we propose the score distillation based model merging paradigm (DMM), compressing multiple models into a single versatile T2I model. Moreover, we rethink and reformulate the model merging task in the context of T2I generation, by presenting new merging goals and evaluation protocols. Our experiments demonstrate that DMM can compactly reorganize the knowledge from multiple teacher models and achieve controllable arbitrary-style generation.
WORLDMEM: Long-term Consistent World Simulation with Memory
Authors: Zeqi Xiao, Yushi Lan, Yifan Zhou, Wenqi Ouyang, Shuai Yang, Yanhong Zeng, Xingang Pan
Date: 2025-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Generation

World simulation has gained increasing popularity due to its ability to model virtual environments and predict the consequences of actions. However, the limited temporal context window often leads to failures in maintaining long-term consistency, particularly in preserving 3D spatial consistency. In this work, we present WorldMem, a framework that enhances scene generation with a memory bank consisting of memory units that store memory frames and states (e.g., poses and timestamps). By employing a memory attention mechanism that effectively extracts relevant information from these memory frames based on their states, our method is capable of accurately reconstructing previously observed scenes, even under significant viewpoint or temporal gaps. Furthermore, by incorporating timestamps into the states, our framework not only models a static world but also captures its dynamic evolution over time, enabling both perception and interaction within the simulated world. Extensive experiments in both virtual and real scenarios validate the effectiveness of our approach.
InstantCharacter: Personalize Any Characters with a Scalable Diffusion Transformer Framework
Authors: Jiale Tao, Yanbing Zhang, Qixun Wang, Yiji Cheng, Haofan Wang, Xu Bai, Zhengguang Zhou, Ruihuang Li, Linqing Wang, Chunyu Wang, Qin Lin, Qinglin Lu
Date: 2025-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Current learning-based subject customization approaches, predominantly relying on U-Net architectures, suffer from limited generalization ability and compromised image quality. Meanwhile, optimization-based methods require subject-specific fine-tuning, which inevitably degrades textual controllability. To address these challenges, we propose InstantCharacter, a scalable framework for character customization built upon a foundation diffusion transformer. InstantCharacter demonstrates three fundamental advantages: first, it achieves open-domain personalization across diverse character appearances, poses, and styles while maintaining high-fidelity results. Second, the framework introduces a scalable adapter with stacked transformer encoders, which effectively processes open-domain character features and seamlessly interacts with the latent space of modern diffusion transformers. Third, to effectively train the framework, we construct a large-scale character dataset containing 10-million-level samples. The dataset is systematically organized into paired (multi-view character) and unpaired (text-image combinations) subsets. This dual-data structure enables simultaneous optimization of identity consistency and textual editability through distinct learning pathways. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the advanced capabilities of InstantCharacter in generating high-fidelity, text-controllable, and character-consistent images, setting a new benchmark for character-driven image generation. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/InstantCharacter.