pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quantum Conflict Measurement in Decision Making for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Yilin Dong, Tianyun Zhu, Xinde Li, Jean Dezert, Rigui Zhou, Changming Zhu, Lei Cao, Shuzhi Sam Ge
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Quantum Dempster-Shafer Theory (QDST) uses quantum interference effects to derive a quantum mass function (QMF) as a fuzzy metric type from information obtained from various data sources. In addition, QDST uses quantum parallel computing to speed up computation. Nevertheless, the effective management of conflicts between multiple QMFs in QDST is a challenging question. This work aims to address this problem by proposing a Quantum Conflict Indicator (QCI) that measures the conflict between two QMFs in decision-making. Then, the properties of the QCI are carefully investigated. The obtained results validate its compliance with desirable conflict measurement properties such as non-negativity, symmetry, boundedness, extreme consistency and insensitivity to refinement. We then apply the proposed QCI in conflict fusion methods and compare its performance with several commonly used fusion approaches. This comparison demonstrates the superiority of the QCI-based conflict fusion method. Moreover, the Class Description Domain Space (C-DDS) and its optimized version, C-DDS+ by utilizing the QCI-based fusion method, are proposed to address the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection task. The experimental results show that the proposed approach gives better OOD performance with respect to several state-of-the-art baseline OOD detection methods. Specifically, it achieves an average increase in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 1.2% and a corresponding average decrease in False Positive Rate at 95% True Negative Rate (FPR95) of 5.4% compared to the optimal baseline method.
RESAR-BEV: An Explainable Progressive Residual Autoregressive Approach for Camera-Radar Fusion in BEV Segmentation
Authors: Zhiwen Zeng, Yunfei Yin, Zheng Yuan, Argho Dey, Xianjian Bao
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, BEV Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) semantic segmentation provides comprehensive environmental perception for autonomous driving but suffers multi-modal misalignment and sensor noise. We propose RESAR-BEV, a progressive refinement framework that advances beyond single-step end-to-end approaches: (1) progressive refinement through residual autoregressive learning that decomposes BEV segmentation into interpretable coarse-to-fine stages via our Drive-Transformer and Modifier-Transformer residual prediction cascaded architecture, (2) robust BEV representation combining ground-proximity voxels with adaptive height offsets and dual-path voxel feature encoding (max+attention pooling) for efficient feature extraction, and (3) decoupled supervision with offline Ground Truth decomposition and online joint optimization to prevent overfitting while ensuring structural coherence. Experiments on nuScenes demonstrate RESAR-BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance with 54.0% mIoU across 7 essential driving-scene categories while maintaining real-time capability at 14.6 FPS. The framework exhibits robustness in challenging scenarios of long-range perception and adverse weather conditions.
HCMA: Hierarchical Cross-model Alignment for Grounded Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Hang Wang, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Chenhao Lin, Chao Shen, Lei Zhang
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image synthesis has progressed to the point where models can generate visually compelling images from natural language prompts. Yet, existing methods often fail to reconcile high-level semantic fidelity with explicit spatial control, particularly in scenes involving multiple objects, nuanced relations, or complex layouts. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Cross-Modal Alignment (HCMA) framework for grounded text-to-image generation. HCMA integrates two alignment modules into each diffusion sampling step: a global module that continuously aligns latent representations with textual descriptions to ensure scene-level coherence, and a local module that employs bounding-box layouts to anchor objects at specified locations, enabling fine-grained spatial control. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO 2014 validation set show that HCMA surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 0.69 improvement in Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and a 0.0295 gain in CLIP Score. These results demonstrate HCMA's effectiveness in faithfully capturing intricate textual semantics while adhering to user-defined spatial constraints, offering a robust solution for semantically grounded image generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hwang-cs-ime/HCMA.
PC-SRGAN: Physically Consistent Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for General Transient Simulations
Authors: Md Rakibul Hasan, Pouria Behnoudfar, Dan MacKinlay, Thomas Poulet
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Super-Resolution

Machine Learning, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has revolutionised Super Resolution (SR). However, generated images often lack physical meaningfulness, which is essential for scientific applications. Our approach, PC-SRGAN, enhances image resolution while ensuring physical consistency for interpretable simulations. PC-SRGAN significantly improves both the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio and the Structural Similarity Index Measure compared to conventional methods, even with limited training data (e.g., only 13% of training data required for SRGAN). Beyond SR, PC-SRGAN augments physically meaningful machine learning, incorporating numerically justified time integrators and advanced quality metrics. These advancements promise reliable and causal machine-learning models in scientific domains. A significant advantage of PC-SRGAN over conventional SR techniques is its physical consistency, which makes it a viable surrogate model for time-dependent problems. PC-SRGAN advances scientific machine learning, offering improved accuracy and efficiency for image processing, enhanced process understanding, and broader applications to scientific research. We publicly release the complete source code at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/PC-SRGAN.
CompSLAM: Complementary Hierarchical Multi-Modal Localization and Mapping for Robot Autonomy in Underground Environments
Authors: Shehryar Khattak, Timon Homberger, Lukas Bernreiter, Julian Nubert, Olov Andersson, Roland Siegwart, Kostas Alexis, Marco Hutter
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Robot autonomy in unknown, GPS-denied, and complex underground environments requires real-time, robust, and accurate onboard pose estimation and mapping for reliable operations. This becomes particularly challenging in perception-degraded subterranean conditions under harsh environmental factors, including darkness, dust, and geometrically self-similar structures. This paper details CompSLAM, a highly resilient and hierarchical multi-modal localization and mapping framework designed to address these challenges. Its flexible architecture achieves resilience through redundancy by leveraging the complementary nature of pose estimates derived from diverse sensor modalities. Developed during the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, CompSLAM was successfully deployed on all aerial, legged, and wheeled robots of Team Cerberus during their competition-winning final run. Furthermore, it has proven to be a reliable odometry and mapping solution in various subsequent projects, with extensions enabling multi-robot map sharing for marsupial robotic deployments and collaborative mapping. This paper also introduces a comprehensive dataset acquired by a manually teleoperated quadrupedal robot, covering a significant portion of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge finals course. This dataset evaluates CompSLAM's robustness to sensor degradations as the robot traverses 740 meters in an environment characterized by highly variable geometries and demanding lighting conditions. The CompSLAM code and the DARPA SubT Finals dataset are made publicly available for the benefit of the robotics community
PromptIQ: Who Cares About Prompts? Let System Handle It -- A Component-Aware Framework for T2I Generation
Authors: Nisan Chhetri, Arpan Sainju
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Generating high-quality images without prompt engineering expertise remains a challenge for text-to-image (T2I) models, which often misinterpret poorly structured prompts, leading to distortions and misalignments. While humans easily recognize these flaws, metrics like CLIP fail to capture structural inconsistencies, exposing a key limitation in current evaluation methods. To address this, we introduce PromptIQ, an automated framework that refines prompts and assesses image quality using our novel Component-Aware Similarity (CAS) metric, which detects and penalizes structural errors. Unlike conventional methods, PromptIQ iteratively generates and evaluates images until the user is satisfied, eliminating trial-and-error prompt tuning. Our results show that PromptIQ significantly improves generation quality and evaluation accuracy, making T2I models more accessible for users with little to no prompt engineering expertise.
Toward Advancing License Plate Super-Resolution in Real-World Scenarios: A Dataset and Benchmark
Authors: Valfride Nascimento, Gabriel E. Lima, Rafael O. Ribeiro, William Robson Schwartz, Rayson Laroca, David Menotti
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: License Plate Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Super-Resolution

Recent advancements in super-resolution for License Plate Recognition (LPR) have sought to address challenges posed by low-resolution (LR) and degraded images in surveillance, traffic monitoring, and forensic applications. However, existing studies have relied on private datasets and simplistic degradation models. To address this gap, we introduce UFPR-SR-Plates, a novel dataset containing 10,000 tracks with 100,000 paired low and high-resolution license plate images captured under real-world conditions. We establish a benchmark using multiple sequential LR and high-resolution (HR) images per vehicle -- five of each -- and two state-of-the-art models for super-resolution of license plates. We also investigate three fusion strategies to evaluate how combining predictions from a leading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model for multiple super-resolved license plates enhances overall performance. Our findings demonstrate that super-resolution significantly boosts LPR performance, with further improvements observed when applying majority vote-based fusion techniques. Specifically, the Layout-Aware and Character-Driven Network (LCDNet) model combined with the Majority Vote by Character Position (MVCP) strategy led to the highest recognition rates, increasing from 1.7% with low-resolution images to 31.1% with super-resolution, and up to 44.7% when combining OCR outputs from five super-resolved images. These findings underscore the critical role of super-resolution and temporal information in enhancing LPR accuracy under real-world, adverse conditions. The proposed dataset is publicly available to support further research and can be accessed at: https://valfride.github.io/nascimento2024toward/
Deep Learning-Based Robust Optical Guidance for Hypersonic Platforms
Authors: Adrien Chan-Hon-Tong, Aurélien Plyer, Baptiste Cadalen, Laurent Serre
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Sensor-based guidance is required for long-range platforms. To bypass the structural limitation of classical registration on reference image framework, we offer in this paper to encode a stack of images of the scene into a deep network. Relying on a stack is showed to be relevant on bimodal scene (e.g. when the scene can or can not be snowy).
Robust & Precise Knowledge Distillation-based Novel Context-Aware Predictor for Disease Detection in Brain and Gastrointestinal
Authors: Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer, Andreas Dengel
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Disease Prediction, Knowledge Distillation, Model Selection, Transfer Learning

Medical disease prediction, particularly through imaging, remains a challenging task due to the complexity and variability of medical data, including noise, ambiguity, and differing image quality. Recent deep learning models, including Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods, have shown promising results in brain tumor image identification but still face limitations in handling uncertainty and generalizing across diverse medical conditions. Traditional KD methods often rely on a context-unaware temperature parameter to soften teacher model predictions, which does not adapt effectively to varying uncertainty levels present in medical images. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that integrates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for optimal teacher-student model selection and a novel context-aware predictor approach for temperature scaling. The proposed context-aware framework adjusts the temperature based on factors such as image quality, disease complexity, and teacher model confidence, allowing for more robust knowledge transfer. Additionally, ACO efficiently selects the most appropriate teacher-student model pair from a set of pre-trained models, outperforming current optimization methods by exploring a broader solution space and better handling complex, non-linear relationships within the data. The proposed framework is evaluated using three publicly available benchmark datasets, each corresponding to a distinct medical imaging task. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving top accuracy rates: 98.01% on the MRI brain tumor (Kaggle) dataset, 92.81% on the Figshare MRI dataset, and 96.20% on the GastroNet dataset. This enhanced performance is further evidenced by the improved results, surpassing existing benchmarks of 97.24% (Kaggle), 91.43% (Figshare), and 95.00% (GastroNet).
LMLCC-Net: A Semi-Supervised Deep Learning Model for Lung Nodule Malignancy Prediction from CT Scans using a Novel Hounsfield Unit-Based Intensity Filtering
Authors: Adhora Madhuri, Nusaiba Sobir, Tasnia Binte Mamun, Taufiq Hasan
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00

Lung cancer is the leading cause of patient mortality in the world. Early diagnosis of malignant pulmonary nodules in CT images can have a significant impact on reducing disease mortality and morbidity. In this work, we propose LMLCC-Net, a novel deep learning framework for classifying nodules from CT scan images using a 3D CNN, considering Hounsfield Unit (HU)-based intensity filtering. Benign and malignant nodules have significant differences in their intensity profile of HU, which was not exploited in the literature. Our method considers the intensity pattern as well as the texture for the prediction of malignancies. LMLCC-Net extracts features from multiple branches that each use a separate learnable HU-based intensity filtering stage. Various combinations of branches and learnable ranges of filters were explored to finally produce the best-performing model. In addition, we propose a semi-supervised learning scheme for labeling ambiguous cases and also developed a lightweight model to classify the nodules. The experimental evaluations are carried out on the LUNA16 dataset. Our proposed method achieves a classification accuracy (ACC) of 91.96%, a sensitivity (SEN) of 92.04%, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 91.87%, showing improved performance compared to existing methods. The proposed method can have a significant impact in helping radiologists in the classification of pulmonary nodules and improving patient care.
Understanding and Mitigating Toxicity in Image-Text Pretraining Datasets: A Case Study on LLaVA
Authors: Karthik Reddy Kanjula, Surya Guthikonda, Nahid Alam, Shayekh Bin Islam
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00

Pretraining datasets are foundational to the development of multimodal models, yet they often have inherent biases and toxic content from the web-scale corpora they are sourced from. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of toxicity in LLaVA image-text pretraining dataset, examining how harmful content manifests in different modalities. We present a comprehensive analysis of common toxicity categories and propose targeted mitigation strategies, resulting in the creation of a refined toxicity-mitigated dataset. This dataset removes 7,531 of toxic image-text pairs in the LLaVA pre-training dataset. We offer guidelines for implementing robust toxicity detection pipelines. Our findings underscore the need to actively identify and filter toxic content - such as hate speech, explicit imagery, and targeted harassment - to build more responsible and equitable multimodal systems. The toxicity-mitigated dataset is open source and is available for further research.
Automatically Differentiable Model Updating (ADiMU): conventional, hybrid, and neural network material model discovery including history-dependency
Authors: Bernardo P. Ferreira, Miguel A. Bessa
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Discovery

We introduce the first Automatically Differentiable Model Updating (ADiMU) framework that finds any history-dependent material model from full-field displacement and global force data (global, indirect discovery) or from strain-stress data (local, direct discovery). We show that ADiMU can update conventional (physics-based), neural network (data-driven), and hybrid material models. Moreover, this framework requires no fine-tuning of hyperparameters or additional quantities beyond those inherent to the user-selected material model architecture and optimizer. The robustness and versatility of ADiMU is extensively exemplified by updating different models spanning tens to millions of parameters, in both local and global discovery settings. Relying on fully differentiable code, the algorithmic implementation leverages vectorizing maps that enable history-dependent automatic differentiation via efficient batched execution of shared computation graphs. This contribution also aims to facilitate the integration, evaluation and application of future material model architectures by openly supporting the research community. Therefore, ADiMU is released as an open-source computational tool, integrated into a carefully designed and documented software named HookeAI.
A Theoretical Framework for Explaining Reinforcement Learning with Shapley Values
Authors: Daniel Beechey, Thomas M. S. Smith, Özgür Şimşek
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning agents can achieve superhuman performance, but their decisions are often difficult to interpret. This lack of transparency limits deployment, especially in safety-critical settings where human trust and accountability are essential. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for explaining reinforcement learning through the influence of state features, which represent what the agent observes in its environment. We identify three core elements of the agent-environment interaction that benefit from explanation: behaviour (what the agent does), performance (what the agent achieves), and value estimation (what the agent expects to achieve). We treat state features as players cooperating to produce each element and apply Shapley values, a principled method from cooperative game theory, to identify the influence of each feature. This approach yields a family of mathematically grounded explanations with clear semantics and theoretical guarantees. We use illustrative examples to show how these explanations align with human intuition and reveal novel insights. Our framework unifies and extends prior work, making explicit the assumptions behind existing approaches, and offers a principled foundation for more interpretable and trustworthy reinforcement learning.
Analytic theory of dropout regularization
Authors: Francesco Mori, Francesca Mignacco
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00

Dropout is a regularization technique widely used in training artificial neural networks to mitigate overfitting. It consists of dynamically deactivating subsets of the network during training to promote more robust representations. Despite its widespread adoption, dropout probabilities are often selected heuristically, and theoretical explanations of its success remain sparse. Here, we analytically study dropout in two-layer neural networks trained with online stochastic gradient descent. In the high-dimensional limit, we derive a set of ordinary differential equations that fully characterize the evolution of the network during training and capture the effects of dropout. We obtain a number of exact results describing the generalization error and the optimal dropout probability at short, intermediate, and long training times. Our analysis shows that dropout reduces detrimental correlations between hidden nodes, mitigates the impact of label noise, and that the optimal dropout probability increases with the level of noise in the data. Our results are validated by extensive numerical simulations.
Relative Overfitting and Accept-Reject Framework
Authors: Yanxin Liu, Yunqi Zhang
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

Currently, the scaling law of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces challenges and bottlenecks. This paper posits that noise effects, stemming from changes in the signal-to-noise ratio under diminishing marginal returns, are the root cause of these issues. To control this noise, we investigated the differences between models with performance advantages and disadvantages, introducing the concept of "relative overfitting." Based on their complementary strengths, we have proposed an application framework, Accept-Reject (AR). In Natural Language Processing (NLP), we use LLMs and Small Language Models (SLMs) as the medium for discussion. This framework enables SLMs to exert a universal positive influence on LLM decision outputs, rather than the intuitively expected negative influence. We validated our approach using self-built models based on mainstream architectures and pre-trained mainstream models across multiple datasets, including basic language modeling, long-context tasks, subject examination, and question-answering (QA) benchmarks. The results demonstrate that through our structure, compared to increasing the LLM's parameters, we can achieve better performance improvements with significantly lower parameter and computational costs in many scenarios. These improvements are universal, stable, and effective. Furthermore, we explore the potential of "relative overfitting" and the AR framework in other machine learning domains, such as computer vision (CV) and AI for science. We hope the proposed approach can help scale laws overcome existing bottlenecks.