pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond One-Hot Labels: Semantic Mixing for Model Calibration
Authors: Haoyang Luo, Linwei Tao, Minjing Dong, Chang Xu
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Model calibration seeks to ensure that models produce confidence scores that accurately reflect the true likelihood of their predictions being correct. However, existing calibration approaches are fundamentally tied to datasets of one-hot labels implicitly assuming full certainty in all the annotations. Such datasets are effective for classification but provides insufficient knowledge of uncertainty for model calibration, necessitating the curation of datasets with numerically rich ground-truth confidence values. However, due to the scarcity of uncertain visual examples, such samples are not easily available as real datasets. In this paper, we introduce calibration-aware data augmentation to create synthetic datasets of diverse samples and their ground-truth uncertainty. Specifically, we present Calibration-aware Semantic Mixing (CSM), a novel framework that generates training samples with mixed class characteristics and annotates them with distinct confidence scores via diffusion models. Based on this framework, we propose calibrated reannotation to tackle the misalignment between the annotated confidence score and the mixing ratio during the diffusion reverse process. Besides, we explore the loss functions that better fit the new data representation paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that CSM achieves superior calibration compared to the state-of-the-art calibration approaches. Code is available at github.com/E-Galois/CSM.
Enhancing Multilingual Sentiment Analysis with Explainability for Sinhala, English, and Code-Mixed Content
Authors: Azmarah Rizvi, Navojith Thamindu, A. M. N. H. Adhikari, W. P. U. Senevirathna, Dharshana Kasthurirathna, Lakmini Abeywardhana
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is crucial for brand reputation management in the banking sector, where customer feedback spans English, Sinhala, Singlish, and code-mixed text. Existing models struggle with low-resource languages like Sinhala and lack interpretability for practical use. This research develops a hybrid aspect-based sentiment analysis framework that enhances multilingual capabilities with explainable outputs. Using cleaned banking customer reviews, we fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa for Sinhala and code-mixed text, integrate domain-specific lexicon correction, and employ BERT-base-uncased for English. The system classifies sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) with confidence scores, while SHAP and LIME improve interpretability by providing real-time sentiment explanations. Experimental results show that our approaches outperform traditional transformer-based classifiers, achieving 92.3 percent accuracy and an F1-score of 0.89 in English and 88.4 percent in Sinhala and code-mixed content. An explainability analysis reveals key sentiment drivers, improving trust and transparency. A user-friendly interface delivers aspect-wise sentiment insights, ensuring accessibility for businesses. This research contributes to robust, transparent sentiment analysis for financial applications by bridging gaps in multilingual, low-resource NLP and explainability.
SwitchMT: An Adaptive Context Switching Methodology for Scalable Multi-Task Learning in Intelligent Autonomous Agents
Authors: Avaneesh Devkota, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Muhammad Shafique
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Multi-Task Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The ability to train intelligent autonomous agents (such as mobile robots) on multiple tasks is crucial for adapting to dynamic real-world environments. However, state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) methods only excel in single-task settings, and still struggle to generalize across multiple tasks due to task interference. Moreover, real-world environments also demand the agents to have data stream processing capabilities. Toward this, a state-of-the-art work employs Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to improve multi-task learning by exploiting temporal information in data stream, while enabling lowpower/energy event-based operations. However, it relies on fixed context/task-switching intervals during its training, hence limiting the scalability and effectiveness of multi-task learning. To address these limitations, we propose SwitchMT, a novel adaptive task-switching methodology for RL-based multi-task learning in autonomous agents. Specifically, SwitchMT employs the following key ideas: (1) a Deep Spiking Q-Network with active dendrites and dueling structure, that utilizes task-specific context signals to create specialized sub-networks; and (2) an adaptive task-switching policy that leverages both rewards and internal dynamics of the network parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that SwitchMT achieves superior performance in multi-task learning compared to state-of-the-art methods. It achieves competitive scores in multiple Atari games (i.e., Pong: -8.8, Breakout: 5.6, and Enduro: 355.2) compared to the state-of-the-art, showing its better generalized learning capability. These results highlight the effectiveness of our SwitchMT methodology in addressing task interference while enabling multi-task learning automation through adaptive task switching, thereby paving the way for more efficient generalist agents with scalable multi-task learning capabilities.
CheatAgent: Attacking LLM-Empowered Recommender Systems via LLM Agent
Authors: Liang-bo Ning, Shijie Wang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Xin Xu, Hao Chen, Feiran Huang
Date: 2025-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recently, Large Language Model (LLM)-empowered recommender systems (RecSys) have brought significant advances in personalized user experience and have attracted considerable attention. Despite the impressive progress, the research question regarding the safety vulnerability of LLM-empowered RecSys still remains largely under-investigated. Given the security and privacy concerns, it is more practical to focus on attacking the black-box RecSys, where attackers can only observe the system's inputs and outputs. However, traditional attack approaches employing reinforcement learning (RL) agents are not effective for attacking LLM-empowered RecSys due to the limited capabilities in processing complex textual inputs, planning, and reasoning. On the other hand, LLMs provide unprecedented opportunities to serve as attack agents to attack RecSys because of their impressive capability in simulating human-like decision-making processes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel attack framework called CheatAgent by harnessing the human-like capabilities of LLMs, where an LLM-based agent is developed to attack LLM-Empowered RecSys. Specifically, our method first identifies the insertion position for maximum impact with minimal input modification. After that, the LLM agent is designed to generate adversarial perturbations to insert at target positions. To further improve the quality of generated perturbations, we utilize the prompt tuning technique to improve attacking strategies via feedback from the victim RecSys iteratively. Extensive experiments across three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed attacking method.
CoT-RAG: Integrating Chain of Thought and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Feiyang Li, Peng Fang, Zhan Shi, Arijit Khan, Fang Wang, Dan Feng, WeiHao Wang, Xin Zhang, Yongjian Cui
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and interference from natural language reasoning steps with the models' inference process, also known as the inference logic of LLMs. To address these issues, we propose CoT-RAG, a novel reasoning framework with three key designs: (i) Knowledge Graph-driven CoT Generation,featuring knowledge graphs to modulate reasoning chain generation of LLMs, thereby enhancing reasoning credibility; (ii) Learnable Knowledge Case-aware RAG, which incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into knowledge graphs to retrieve relevant sub-cases and sub-descriptions, providing LLMs with learnable information; (iii) Pseudo-Program Prompting Execution, which promotes greater logical rigor by guiding LLMs to execute reasoning tasks as pseudo-programs. Evaluations on nine public datasets spanning three reasoning tasks reveal significant accuracy gains--ranging from 4.0% to 44.3%--over state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, tests on four domain-specific datasets demonstrate exceptional accuracy and efficient execution, underscoring its practical applicability and scalability.
Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Station Locations: A Data-driven System with Multi-source Fusion
Authors: Lihuan Li, Du Yin, Hao Xue, David Lillo-Trynes, Flora Salim
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

With the growing electric vehicles (EVs) charging demand, urban planners face the challenges of providing charging infrastructure at optimal locations. For example, range anxiety during long-distance travel and the inadequate distribution of residential charging stations are the major issues many cities face. To achieve reasonable estimation and deployment of the charging demand, we develop a data-driven system based on existing EV trips in New South Wales (NSW) state, Australia, incorporating multiple factors that enhance the geographical feasibility of recommended charging stations. Our system integrates data sources including EV trip data, geographical data such as route data and Local Government Area (LGA) boundaries, as well as features like fire and flood risks, and Points of Interest (POIs). We visualize our results to intuitively demonstrate the findings from our data-driven, multi-source fusion system, and evaluate them through case studies. The outcome of this work can provide a platform for discussion to develop new insights that could be used to give guidance on where to position future EV charging stations.
Large Language Models for Validating Network Protocol Parsers
Authors: Mingwei Zheng, Danning Xie, Xiangyu Zhang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Network protocol parsers are essential for enabling correct and secure communication between devices. Bugs in these parsers can introduce critical vulnerabilities, including memory corruption, information leakage, and denial-of-service attacks. An intuitive way to assess parser correctness is to compare the implementation with its official protocol standard. However, this comparison is challenging because protocol standards are typically written in natural language, whereas implementations are in source code. Existing methods like model checking, fuzzing, and differential testing have been used to find parsing bugs, but they either require significant manual effort or ignore the protocol standards, limiting their ability to detect semantic violations. To enable more automated validation of parser implementations against protocol standards, we propose PARVAL, a multi-agent framework built on large language models (LLMs). PARVAL leverages the capabilities of LLMs to understand both natural language and code. It transforms both protocol standards and their implementations into a unified intermediate representation, referred to as format specifications, and performs a differential comparison to uncover inconsistencies. We evaluate PARVAL on the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. Our experiments demonstrate that PARVAL successfully identifies inconsistencies between the implementation and its RFC standard, achieving a low false positive rate of 5.6%. PARVAL uncovers seven unique bugs, including five previously unknown issues.
Unified Parameter-Efficient Unlearning for LLMs
Authors: Chenlu Ding, Jiancan Wu, Yancheng Yuan, Jinda Lu, Kai Zhang, Alex Su, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities across a variety of tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific domains, particularly through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies like LoRA, has become a prevalent practice due to its efficiency. However, this raises significant privacy and security concerns, as models may inadvertently retain and disseminate sensitive or undesirable information. To address these issues, we introduce a novel instance-wise unlearning framework, LLMEraser, which systematically categorizes unlearning tasks and applies precise parameter adjustments using influence functions. Unlike traditional unlearning techniques that are often limited in scope and require extensive retraining, LLMEraser is designed to handle a broad spectrum of unlearning tasks without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LLMEraser excels in efficiently managing various unlearning scenarios while maintaining the overall integrity and efficacy of the models.
Semantic Matters: Multimodal Features for Affective Analysis
Authors: Tobias Hallmen, Robin-Nico Kampa, Fabian Deuser, Norbert Oswald, Elisabeth André
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00

In this study, we present our methodology for two tasks: the Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation Challenge and the Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) Recognition Challenge, both conducted as part of the 8th Workshop and Competition on Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-wild. We utilize a Wav2Vec 2.0 model pre-trained on a large podcast dataset to extract various audio features, capturing both linguistic and paralinguistic information. Our approach incorporates a valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) module derived from Wav2Vec 2.0, a BERT text encoder, and a vision transformer (ViT) with predictions subsequently processed through a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture or a convolution-like method for temporal modeling. We integrate the textual and visual modality into our analysis, recognizing that semantic content provides valuable contextual cues and underscoring that the meaning of speech often conveys more critical insights than its acoustic counterpart alone. Fusing in the vision modality helps in some cases to interpret the textual modality more precisely. This combined approach results in significant performance improvements, achieving in EMI $\rho_{\text{TEST}} = 0.706$ and in BAH $F1_{\text{TEST}} = 0.702$, securing first place in the EMI challenge and second place in the BAH challenge.
Integrating Locality-Aware Attention with Transformers for General Geometry PDEs
Authors: Minsu Koh, Beom-Chul Park, Heejo Kong, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Neural operators have emerged as promising frameworks for learning mappings governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), serving as data-driven alternatives to traditional numerical methods. While methods such as the Fourier neural operator (FNO) have demonstrated notable performance, their reliance on uniform grids restricts their applicability to complex geometries and irregular meshes. Recently, Transformer-based neural operators with linear attention mechanisms have shown potential in overcoming these limitations for large-scale PDE simulations. However, these approaches predominantly emphasize global feature aggregation, often overlooking fine-scale dynamics and localized PDE behaviors essential for accurate solutions. To address these challenges, we propose the Locality-Aware Attention Transformer (LA2Former), which leverages K-nearest neighbors for dynamic patchifying and integrates global-local attention for enhanced PDE modeling. By combining linear attention for efficient global context encoding with pairwise attention for capturing intricate local interactions, LA2Former achieves an optimal balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. Extensive evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate that LA2Former improves predictive accuracy by over 50% relative to existing linear attention methods, while also outperforming full pairwise attention under optimal conditions. This work underscores the critical importance of localized feature learning in advancing Transformer-based neural operators for solving PDEs on complex and irregular domains.
Creating 'Full-Stack' Hybrid Reasoning Systems that Prioritize and Enhance Human Intelligence
Authors: Sean Koon
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Ingenuity

The idea of augmented or hybrid intelligence offers a compelling vision for combining human and AI capabilities, especially in tasks where human wisdom, expertise, or common sense are essential. Unfortunately, human reasoning can be flawed and shortsighted, resulting in adverse individual impacts or even long-term societal consequences. While strong efforts are being made to develop and optimize the AI aspect of hybrid reasoning, the real urgency lies in fostering wiser and more intelligent human participation. Tools that enhance critical thinking, ingenuity, expertise, and even wisdom could be essential in addressing the challenges of our emerging future. This paper proposes the development of generative AI-based tools that enhance both the human ability to reflect upon a problem as well as the ability to explore the technical aspects of it. A high-level model is also described for integrating AI and human capabilities in a way that centralizes human participation and control.
Interpersonal Theory of Suicide as a Lens to Examine Suicidal Ideation in Online Spaces
Authors: Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Paul A. Bloom, Dong Whi Yoo, Koustuv Saha
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Suicide is a critical global public health issue, with millions experiencing suicidal ideation (SI) each year. Online spaces enable individuals to express SI and seek peer support. While prior research has revealed the potential of detecting SI using machine learning and natural language analysis, a key limitation is the lack of a theoretical framework to understand the underlying factors affecting high-risk suicidal intent. To bridge this gap, we adopted the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS) as an analytic lens to analyze 59,607 posts from Reddit's r/SuicideWatch, categorizing them into SI dimensions (Loneliness, Lack of Reciprocal Love, Self Hate, and Liability) and risk factors (Thwarted Belongingness, Perceived Burdensomeness, and Acquired Capability of Suicide). We found that high-risk SI posts express planning and attempts, methods and tools, and weaknesses and pain. In addition, we also examined the language of supportive responses through psycholinguistic and content analyses to find that individuals respond differently to different stages of Suicidal Ideation (SI) posts. Finally, we explored the role of AI chatbots in providing effective supportive responses to suicidal ideation posts. We found that although AI improved structural coherence, expert evaluations highlight persistent shortcomings in providing dynamic, personalized, and deeply empathetic support. These findings underscore the need for careful reflection and deeper understanding in both the development and consideration of AI-driven interventions for effective mental health support.
CodeVisionary: An Agent-based Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation
Authors: Xinchen Wang, Pengfei Gao, Chao Peng, Ruida Hu, Cuiyun Gao
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, underscoring the critical need for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches fall into three categories, including human-centered, metric-based, and LLM-based. Considering that human-centered approaches are labour-intensive and metric-based ones overly rely on reference answers, LLM-based approaches are gaining increasing attention due to their stronger contextual understanding capabilities and superior efficiency. However, the performance of LLM-based approaches remains limited due to: (1) lack of multisource domain knowledge, and (2) insufficient comprehension of complex code. To mitigate the limitations, we propose CodeVisionary, the first LLM-based agent framework for evaluating LLMs in code generation. CodeVisionary consists of two stages: (1) Multiscore knowledge analysis stage, which aims to gather multisource and comprehensive domain knowledge by formulating and executing a stepwise evaluation plan. (2) Negotiation-based scoring stage, which involves multiple judges engaging in discussions to better comprehend the complex code and reach a consensus on the evaluation score. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CodeVisionary achieves the best performance for evaluating LLMs in code generation, outperforming the best baseline methods with average improvements of 0.202, 0.139, and 0.117 in Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall-Tau coefficients, respectively. Besides, CodeVisionary provides detailed evaluation reports, which assist developers in identifying shortcomings and making improvements. The resources of CodeVisionary are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CodeVisionary.
Chain-of-Thought Textual Reasoning for Few-shot Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Hongwei Ji, Wulian Yun, Mengshi Qi, Huadong Ma
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Localization, Few-Shot Learning, Few Shot Temporal Action Localization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Temporal Action Localization

Traditional temporal action localization (TAL) methods rely on large amounts of detailed annotated data, whereas few-shot TAL reduces this dependence by using only a few training samples to identify unseen action categories. However, existing few-shot TAL methods typically focus solely on video-level information, neglecting textual information, which can provide valuable semantic support for the localization task. Therefore, we propose a new few-shot temporal action localization method by Chain-of-Thought textual reasoning to improve localization performance. Specifically, we design a novel few-shot learning framework that leverages textual semantic information to enhance the model's ability to capture action commonalities and variations, which includes a semantic-aware text-visual alignment module designed to align the query and support videos at different levels. Meanwhile, to better express the temporal dependencies and causal relationships between actions at the textual level to assist action localization, we design a Chain of Thought (CoT)-like reasoning method that progressively guides the Vision Language Model (VLM) and Large Language Model (LLM) to generate CoT-like text descriptions for videos. The generated texts can capture more variance of action than visual features. We conduct extensive experiments on the publicly available ActivityNet1.3 and THUMOS14 datasets. We introduce the first dataset named Human-related Anomaly Localization and explore the application of the TAL task in human anomaly detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in single-instance and multi-instance scenarios. We will release our code, data and benchmark.