pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging User History with Transformers for News Clicking: The DArgk Approach
Authors: Juan Manuel Rodriguez, Antonela Tommasel
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACM RecSys Challenge 2024 10
Tasks: Articles, Recommendation Systems

This paper provides an overview of the approach we used as team DArgk1 for the ACM RecSys Challenge 2024. The competition was organized by Ekstra Bladet and focused on addressing both technical and normative challenges in designing an effective and responsible online news recommender system. Our proposed method aims to model user preferences based on implicit behavior while considering the news agenda’s dynamic influence and the news items’ rapid decay. We employed deep learning models to estimate the likelihood of a user clicking on a list of articles seen during a specific timeframe. To this end, we proposed a transformer-based model capable of encoding user reading history to rank articles according to the user preferences with a focus on beyond accuracy performance for users with different preferences than the average user. Our submission achieved the 2nd rank and overall score of 0.7709 in the competition academia-track final results. We release our source code at: https://github.com/dkw-aau/RecSys2024Challenge.
YOLOatr : Deep Learning Based Automatic Target Detection and Localization in Thermal Infrared Imagery
Authors: Aon Safdar, Usman Akram, Waseem Anwar, Basit Malik, Mian Ibad Ali
Date: 2025-07-15 00:00:00

Automatic Target Detection (ATD) and Recognition (ATR) from Thermal Infrared (TI) imagery in the defense and surveillance domain is a challenging computer vision (CV) task in comparison to the commercial autonomous vehicle perception domain. Limited datasets, peculiar domain-specific and TI modality-specific challenges, i.e., limited hardware, scale invariance issues due to greater distances, deliberate occlusion by tactical vehicles, lower sensor resolution and resultant lack of structural information in targets, effects of weather, temperature, and time of day variations, and varying target to clutter ratios all result in increased intra-class variability and higher inter-class similarity, making accurate real-time ATR a challenging CV task. Resultantly, contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning architectures underperform in the ATR domain. We propose a modified anchor-based single-stage detector, called YOLOatr, based on a modified YOLOv5s, with optimal modifications to the detection heads, feature fusion in the neck, and a custom augmentation profile. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on a comprehensive DSIAC MWIR dataset for real-time ATR over both correlated and decorrelated testing protocols. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ATR performance of up to 99.6%.
BitParticle: Partializing Sparse Dual-Factors to Build Quasi-Synchronizing MAC Arrays for Energy-efficient DNNs
Authors: Feilong Qiaoyuan, Jihe Wang, Zhiyu Sun, Linying Wu, Yuanhua Xiao, Danghui Wang
Date: 2025-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Bit-level sparsity in quantized deep neural networks (DNNs) offers significant potential for optimizing Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations. However, two key challenges still limit its practical exploitation. First, conventional bit-serial approaches cannot simultaneously leverage the sparsity of both factors, leading to a complete waste of one factor' s sparsity. Methods designed to exploit dual-factor sparsity are still in the early stages of exploration, facing the challenge of partial product explosion. Second, the fluctuation of bit-level sparsity leads to variable cycle counts for MAC operations. Existing synchronous scheduling schemes that are suitable for dual-factor sparsity exhibit poor flexibility and still result in significant underutilization of MAC units. To address the first challenge, this study proposes a MAC unit that leverages dual-factor sparsity through the emerging particlization-based approach. The proposed design addresses the issue of partial product explosion through simple control logic, resulting in a more area- and energy-efficient MAC unit. In addition, by discarding less significant intermediate results, the design allows for further hardware simplification at the cost of minor accuracy loss. To address the second challenge, a quasi-synchronous scheme is introduced that adds cycle-level elasticity to the MAC array, reducing pipeline stalls and thereby improving MAC unit utilization. Evaluation results show that the exact version of the proposed MAC array architecture achieves a 29.2% improvement in area efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art bit-sparsity-driven architecture, while maintaining comparable energy efficiency. The approximate variant further improves energy efficiency by 7.5%, compared to the exact version. Index-Terms: DNN acceleration, Bit-level sparsity, MAC unit
Comparative Analysis of CNN and Transformer Architectures with Heart Cycle Normalization for Automated Phonocardiogram Classification
Authors: Martin Sondermann, Pinar Bisgin, Niklas Tschorn, Anja Burmann, Christoph M. Friedrich
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Phonocardiogram Classification

The automated classification of phonocardiogram (PCG) recordings represents a substantial advancement in cardiovascular diagnostics. This paper presents a systematic comparison of four distinct models for heart murmur detection: two specialized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and two zero-shot universal audio transformers (BEATs), evaluated using fixed-length and heart cycle normalization approaches. Utilizing the PhysioNet2022 dataset, a custom heart cycle normalization method tailored to individual cardiac rhythms is introduced. The findings indicate the following AUROC values: the CNN model with fixed-length windowing achieves 79.5%, the CNN model with heart cycle normalization scores 75.4%, the BEATs transformer with fixed-length windowing achieves 65.7%, and the BEATs transformer with heart cycle normalization results in 70.1%. The findings indicate that physiological signal constraints, especially those introduced by different normalization strategies, have a substantial impact on model performance. The research provides evidence-based guidelines for architecture selection in clinical settings, emphasizing the need for a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Although specialized CNNs demonstrate superior performance overall, the zero-shot transformer models may offer promising efficiency advantages during development, such as faster training and evaluation cycles, despite their lower classification accuracy. These findings highlight the potential of automated classification systems to enhance cardiac diagnostics and improve patient care.
Interpretable Bayesian Tensor Network Kernel Machines with Automatic Rank and Feature Selection
Authors: Afra Kilic, Kim Batselier
Date: 2025-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Uncertainty Quantification, Variational Inference

Tensor Network (TN) Kernel Machines speed up model learning by representing parameters as low-rank TNs, reducing computation and memory use. However, most TN-based Kernel methods are deterministic and ignore parameter uncertainty. Further, they require manual tuning of model complexity hyperparameters like tensor rank and feature dimensions, often through trial-and-error or computationally costly methods like cross-validation. We propose Bayesian Tensor Network Kernel Machines, a fully probabilistic framework that uses sparsity-inducing hierarchical priors on TN factors to automatically infer model complexity. This enables automatic inference of tensor rank and feature dimensions, while also identifying the most relevant features for prediction, thereby enhancing model interpretability. All the model parameters and hyperparameters are treated as latent variables with corresponding priors. Given the Bayesian approach and latent variable dependencies, we apply a mean-field variational inference to approximate their posteriors. We show that applying a mean-field approximation to TN factors yields a Bayesian ALS algorithm with the same computational complexity as its deterministic counterpart, enabling uncertainty quantification at no extra computational cost. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model in prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, interpretability, and scalability.
Data Augmentation in Time Series Forecasting through Inverted Framework
Authors: Hongming Tan, Ting Chen, Ruochong Jin, Wai Kin Chan
Date: 2025-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Currently, iTransformer is one of the most popular and effective models for multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting. Thanks to its inverted framework, iTransformer effectively captures multivariate correlation. However, the inverted framework still has some limitations. It diminishes temporal interdependency information, and introduces noise in cases of nonsignificant variable correlation. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel data augmentation method on inverted framework, called DAIF. Unlike previous data augmentation methods, DAIF stands out as the first real-time augmentation specifically designed for the inverted framework in MTS forecasting. We first define the structure of the inverted sequence-to-sequence framework, then propose two different DAIF strategies, Frequency Filtering and Cross-variation Patching to address the existing challenges of the inverted framework. Experiments across multiple datasets and inverted models have demonstrated the effectiveness of our DAIF.
Leveraging Out-of-Distribution Unlabeled Images: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with an Open-Vocabulary Model
Authors: WooSeok Shin, Jisu Kang, Hyeonki Jeong, Jin Sob Kim, Sung Won Han
Date: 2025-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

In semi-supervised semantic segmentation, existing studies have shown promising results in academic settings with controlled splits of benchmark datasets. However, the potential benefits of leveraging significantly larger sets of unlabeled images remain unexplored. In real-world scenarios, abundant unlabeled images are often available from online sources (web-scraped images) or large-scale datasets. However, these images may have different distributions from those of the target dataset, a situation known as out-of-distribution (OOD). Using these images as unlabeled data in semi-supervised learning can lead to inaccurate pseudo-labels, potentially misguiding network training. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised semantic segmentation framework with an open-vocabulary segmentation model (SemiOVS) to effectively utilize unlabeled OOD images. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and Context datasets demonstrate two key findings: (1) using additional unlabeled images improves the performance of semi-supervised learners in scenarios with few labels, and (2) using the open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) model to pseudo-label OOD images leads to substantial performance gains. In particular, SemiOVS outperforms existing PrevMatch and SemiVL methods by +3.5 and +3.0 mIoU, respectively, on Pascal VOC with a 92-label setting, achieving state-of-the-art performance. These findings demonstrate that our approach effectively utilizes abundant unlabeled OOD images for semantic segmentation tasks. We hope this work can inspire future research and real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/wooseok-shin/SemiOVS
LLM-TabFlow: Synthetic Tabular Data Generation with Inter-column Logical Relationship Preservation
Authors: Yunbo Long, Liming Xu, Alexandra Brintrup
Date: 2025-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Tabular Data Generation

Synthetic tabular data have widespread applications in industrial domains such as healthcare, finance, and supply chains, owing to their potential to protect privacy and mitigate data scarcity. However, generating realistic synthetic tabular data while preserving inter-column logical relationships remains a significant challenge for the existing generative models. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-TabFlow, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning to capture complex inter-column relationships and compress tabular data, while using Score-based Diffusion to model the distribution of the compressed data in latent space. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation framework, which is absent in literature, to fairly assess the performance of synthetic tabular data generation methods in real-world contexts. Using this framework, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world industrial datasets, evaluating LLM-TabFlow against other five baseline methods, including SMOTE (an interpolation-based approach) and other state-of-the-art generative models. Our results show that LLM-TabFlow outperforms all baselines, fully preserving inter-column relationships while achieving the best balance between data fidelity, utility, and privacy. This study is the first to explicitly address inter-column relationship preservation in synthetic tabular data generation, offering new insights for developing more realistic and reliable tabular data generation methods.
From Semantic Web and MAS to Agentic AI: A Unified Narrative of the Web of Agents
Authors: Tatiana Petrova, Aleksandr Puzikov, Boris Bliznukov, Radu State
Date: 2025-07-14 00:00:00

The concept of the Web of Agents (WoA), which transforms the static, document-centric Web into an environment of autonomous agents acting on users' behalf, has attracted growing interest as large language models (LLMs) become more capable. However, research in this area is still fragmented across different communities. Contemporary surveys catalog the latest LLM-powered frameworks, while the rich histories of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and the Semantic Web are often treated as separate, legacy domains. This fragmentation obscures the intellectual lineage of modern systems and hinders a holistic understanding of the field's trajectory. We present the first comprehensive evolutionary overview of the WoA. We show that modern protocols like A2A and the MCP, are direct evolutionary responses to the well-documented limitations of earlier standards like FIPA standards and OWL-based semantic agents. To systematize this analysis, we introduce a four-axis taxonomy (semantic foundation, communication paradigm, locus of intelligence, discovery mechanism). This framework provides a unified analytical lens for comparing agent architectures across all generations, revealing a clear line of descent where others have seen a disconnect. Our analysis identifies a paradigm shift in the 'locus of intelligence': from being encoded in external data (Semantic Web) or the platform (MAS) to being embedded within the agent's core model (LLM). This shift is foundational to modern Agentic AI, enabling the scalable and adaptive systems the WoA has long envisioned. We conclude that while new protocols are essential, they are insufficient for building a robust, open, trustworthy ecosystem. Finally, we argue that the next research frontier lies in solving persistent socio-technical challenges, and we map out a new agenda focused on decentralized identity, economic models, security, and governance for the emerging WoA.
An Offline Mobile Conversational Agent for Mental Health Support: Learning from Emotional Dialogues and Psychological Texts with Student-Centered Evaluation
Authors: Vimaleswar A, Prabhu Nandan Sahu, Nilesh Kumar Sahu, Haroon R Lone
Date: 2025-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Mental health plays a crucial role in the overall well-being of an individual. In recent years, digital platforms have been increasingly used to expand mental health and emotional support. However, there are persistent challenges related to limited user accessibility, internet connectivity, and data privacy, which highlight the need for an offline, smartphone-based solution. To address these challenges, we propose EmoSApp (Emotional Support App): an entirely offline, smartphone-based conversational app designed for mental health and emotional support. The system leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically fine-tuned, quantized and deployed using Torchtune and Executorch for resource-constrained devices, allowing all inferences to occur on the smartphone. To equip EmoSApp with robust domain expertise, we fine-tuned the LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct model on our custom curated ``Knowledge dataset'' of 14,582 mental-health QA pairs, along with the multi-turn conversational data. Through qualitative human evaluation with the student population, we demonstrate that EmoSApp has the ability to respond coherently, empathetically, maintain interactive dialogue, and provide relevant suggestions to user's mental health problems. Additionally, quantitative evaluations on nine standard commonsense and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our fine-tuned, quantized model in low-resource settings. By prioritizing on-device deployment and specialized domain adaptation, EmoSApp serves as a blueprint for future innovations in portable, secure, and highly tailored AI-driven mental health solutions.
Elite Polarization in European Parliamentary Speeches: a Novel Measurement Approach Using Large Language Models
Authors: Gennadii Iakovlev
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00

This project introduces a new measure of elite polarization via actor and subject detection using artificial intelligence. I identify when politicians mention one another in parliamentary speeches, note who is speaking and who is being addressed, and assess the emotional temperature behind these evaluations. This maps how elites evaluate their various out-parties, allowing us to create an index of mutual out-party hostility, that is, elite polarization. While I analyzed polarization data over the past four decades for the UK, and two decades for Hungary and Italy, my approach lays the groundwork for a twenty-year, EU-wide time-series dataset on elite polarization. I obtain the results that can be aggregated by party and quarter. The resulting index demonstrates a good face validity: it reacts to events such as electoral campaigns, country- and party-level crises, and to parties losing and assuming power.
ImplicitQA: Going beyond frames towards Implicit Video Reasoning
Authors: Sirnam Swetha, Rohit Gupta, Parth Parag Kulkarni, David G Shatwell, Jeffrey A Chan Santiago, Nyle Siddiqui, Joseph Fioresi, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning

Video QA has made significant strides by leveraging multimodal learning to align visual and textual modalities. However, current benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on questions answerable through explicit visual content - actions, objects & events directly observable within individual frames or short clips. In contrast, creative and cinematic videos - such as movies, TV shows, and narrative-driven content - employ storytelling techniques that deliberately omit certain depictions, requiring viewers to infer motives, causality, and relationships across discontinuous frames. Humans naturally excel at such implicit reasoning, seamlessly integrating information across time and context to construct coherent narratives. Current VideoQA systems and benchmarks fail to capture this essential dimension of human-like understanding. To bridge this gap, we present ImplicitQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to test models on implicit reasoning. It comprises 1K meticulously annotated QA pairs derived from 320+ high-quality creative video clips, systematically categorized into key reasoning dimensions: lateral and vertical spatial reasoning, depth and proximity, viewpoint and visibility, motion and trajectory, causal and motivational reasoning, social interactions, physical context, and inferred counting. These annotations are deliberately challenging, crafted by authors ensuring high-quality. Our extensive evaluations on leading VideoQA models reveals performance degradation, underscoring their reliance on surface-level visual cues and highlighting the difficulty of implicit reasoning. Performance variations across models further illustrate the complexity and diversity of the challenges presented by ImplicitQA. By releasing both the dataset and our data collection framework, we aim to stimulate further research and development in the community. https://huggingface.co/datasets/ucf-crcv/ImplicitQA.
CAT-SG: A Large Dynamic Scene Graph Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Cataract Surgery
Authors: Felix Holm, Gözde Ünver, Ghazal Ghazaei, Nassir Navab
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Scene Graph Generation

Understanding the intricate workflows of cataract surgery requires modeling complex interactions between surgical tools, anatomical structures, and procedural techniques. Existing datasets primarily address isolated aspects of surgical analysis, such as tool detection or phase segmentation, but lack comprehensive representations that capture the semantic relationships between entities over time. This paper introduces the Cataract Surgery Scene Graph (CAT-SG) dataset, the first to provide structured annotations of tool-tissue interactions, procedural variations, and temporal dependencies. By incorporating detailed semantic relations, CAT-SG offers a holistic view of surgical workflows, enabling more accurate recognition of surgical phases and techniques. Additionally, we present a novel scene graph generation model, CatSGG, which outperforms current methods in generating structured surgical representations. The CAT-SG dataset is designed to enhance AI-driven surgical training, real-time decision support, and workflow analysis, paving the way for more intelligent, context-aware systems in clinical practice.
CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewards
Authors: Bernhard Jaeger, Daniel Dauner, Jens Beißwenger, Simon Gerstenecker, Kashyap Chitta, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, CARLA longest6, GPU, Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does not suffer from compounding errors like imitation learning. Contemporary RL approaches for driving use complex shaped rewards that sum multiple individual rewards, \eg~progress, position, or orientation rewards. We show that PPO fails to optimize a popular version of these rewards when the mini-batch size is increased, which limits the scalability of these approaches. Instead, we propose a new reward design based primarily on optimizing a single intuitive reward term: route completion. Infractions are penalized by terminating the episode or multiplicatively reducing route completion. We find that PPO scales well with higher mini-batch sizes when trained with our simple reward, even improving performance. Training with large mini-batch sizes enables efficient scaling via distributed data parallelism. We scale PPO to 300M samples in CARLA and 500M samples in nuPlan with a single 8-GPU node. The resulting model achieves 64 DS on the CARLA longest6 v2 benchmark, outperforming other RL methods with more complex rewards by a large margin. Requiring only minimal adaptations from its use in CARLA, the same method is the best learning-based approach on nuPlan. It scores 91.3 in non-reactive and 90.6 in reactive traffic on the Val14 benchmark while being an order of magnitude faster than prior work.