pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mispronunciation Detection Without L2 Pronunciation Dataset in Low-Resource Setting: A Case Study in Finland Swedish
Authors: Nhan Phan, Mikko Kuronen, Maria Kautonen, Riikka Ullakonoja, Anna von Zansen, Yaroslav Getman, Ekaterina Voskoboinik, Tamás Grósz, Mikko Kurimo
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00

Mispronunciation detection (MD) models are the cornerstones of many language learning applications. Unfortunately, most systems are built for English and other major languages, while low-resourced language varieties, such as Finland Swedish (FS), lack such tools. In this paper, we introduce our MD model for FS, trained on 89 hours of first language (L1) speakers' spontaneous speech and tested on 33 minutes of L2 transcribed read-aloud speech. We trained a multilingual wav2vec 2.0 model with entropy regularization, followed by temperature scaling and top-k normalization after the inference to better adapt it for MD. The main novelty of our method lies in its simplicity, requiring minimal L2 data. The process is also language-independent, making it suitable for other low-resource languages. Our proposed algorithm allows us to balance Recall (43.2%) and Precision (29.8%), compared with the baseline model's Recall (77.5%) and Precision (17.6%).
EfficientFER: EfficientNetv2 Based Deep Learning Approach for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Mehmet Emin KONUK
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2025 2025 6
Tasks: Deep Learning, Emotion Recognition, Facial Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Transfer Learning

Facial expression recognition (FER), aiming to classify human emotions automatically, is a significant problem in computer vision. Recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision have led to notable progress in FER. This work proposes an enhanced emotion recognition framework utilizing the FER-2013 dataset, augmented with additional training data for improved generalization performance. The EfficientNetv2 architecture is employed with transfer learning for robust and comprehensive feature extraction. The proposed method leverages attention mechanisms to capture critical facial details while mitigating the influence of irrelevant information. The model trained with approximately 23.8 million parameters surpassed the performance of existing methods by classifying with %82.47 accuracy rate on the FER-2013 dataset. These results indicate the potential applicability of the proposed approach to emotion recognition tasks.
Quantization-based Bounds on the Wasserstein Metric
Authors: Jonathan Bobrutsky, Amit Moscovich
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Domain Adaptation, Image Retrieval, Quantization, valid

The Wasserstein metric has become increasingly important in many machine learning applications such as generative modeling, image retrieval and domain adaptation. Despite its appeal, it is often too costly to compute. This has motivated approximation methods like entropy-regularized optimal transport, downsampling, and subsampling, which trade accuracy for computational efficiency. In this paper, we consider the challenge of computing efficient approximations to the Wasserstein metric that also serve as strict upper or lower bounds. Focusing on discrete measures on regular grids, our approach involves formulating and exactly solving a Kantorovich problem on a coarse grid using a quantized measure and specially designed cost matrix, followed by an upscaling and correction stage. This is done either in the primal or dual space to obtain valid upper and lower bounds on the Wasserstein metric of the full-resolution inputs. We evaluate our methods on the DOTmark optimal transport images benchmark, demonstrating a 10x-100x speedup compared to entropy-regularized OT while keeping the approximation error below 2%.
G2S: A General-to-Specific Learning Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting with Large Language Models
Authors: Long Bai, Zixuan Li, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Knowledge Graphs

Forecasting over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) which predicts future facts based on historical ones has received much attention. Recent studies have introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task to enhance the models' generalization abilities. However, these models perform forecasting via simultaneously learning two kinds of entangled knowledge in the TKG: (1) general patterns, i.e., invariant temporal structures shared across different scenarios; and (2) scenario information, i.e., factual knowledge engaged in specific scenario, such as entities and relations. As a result, the learning processes of these two kinds of knowledge may interfere with each other, which potentially impact the generalization abilities of the models. To enhance the generalization ability of LLMs on this task, in this paper, we propose a General-to-Specific learning framework (G2S) that disentangles the learning processes of the above two kinds of knowledge. In the general learning stage, we mask the scenario information in different TKGs and convert it into anonymous temporal structures. After training on these structures, the model is able to capture the general patterns across different TKGs. In the specific learning stage, we inject the scenario information into the structures via either in-context learning or fine-tuning modes. Experimental results show that G2S effectively improves the generalization abilities of LLMs.
Exposure-slot: Exposure-centric representations learning with Slot-in-Slot Attention for Region-aware Exposure Correction
Authors: Donggoo Jung*, Daehyun Kim*, Guanhui Wang, Tae Hyun Kim
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Exposure Correction, Image Enhancement

Image exposure correction enhances images captured under diverse real-world conditions by addressing issues of under- and over-exposure, which can result in the loss of critical details and hinder content recognition. While significant advancements have been made, current methods often fail to achieve optimal feature learning for effective correction. To overcome these challenges, we propose Exposure-slot, a novel framework that integrates a prompt-based slot-in-slot attention mechanism to cluster exposed
feature regions and learn exposure-centric features for each cluster. By extending the Slot Attention algorithm with a hierarchical structure, our approach progressively clusters features, enabling precise and region-aware correction. In particular, learnable prompts tailored to exposure characteristics of slots further enhance feature quality, adapting dynamically to varying conditions. Our method delivers superior performance on benchmark datasets, surpassing the current state-of-the-art with a PSNR improvement of over 1.85 dB on the SICE dataset and 0.4 dB on the LCDP dataset, thereby establishing a new benchmark for multi-exposure correction.
Channel-Imposed Fusion: A Simple yet Effective Method for Medical Time Series Classification
Authors: Ming Hu, Jianfu Yin, Mingyu Dou, Yuqi Wang, Ruochen Dang, Siyi Liang, Cong Hu, Yao Wang, Bingliang Hu, Quan Wang
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Time Series, Time Series Classification

The automatic classification of medical time series signals, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG), plays a pivotal role in clinical decision support and early detection of diseases. Although Transformer based models have achieved notable performance by implicitly modeling temporal dependencies through self-attention mechanisms, their inherently complex architectures and opaque reasoning processes undermine their trustworthiness in high stakes clinical settings. In response to these limitations, this study shifts focus toward a modeling paradigm that emphasizes structural transparency, aligning more closely with the intrinsic characteristics of medical data. We propose a novel method, Channel Imposed Fusion (CIF), which enhances the signal-to-noise ratio through cross-channel information fusion, effectively reduces redundancy, and improves classification performance. Furthermore, we integrate CIF with the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), known for its structural simplicity and controllable receptive field, to construct an efficient and explicit classification framework. Experimental results on multiple publicly available EEG and ECG datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in terms of various classification metrics, but also significantly enhances the transparency of the classification process, offering a novel perspective for medical time series classification.
RARE: Retrieval-Aware Robustness Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Authors: Yixiao Zeng, Tianyu Cao, Danqing Wang, Xinran Zhao, Zimeng Qiu, Morteza Ziyadi, Tongshuang Wu, Lei LI
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances recency and factuality in answers. However, existing evaluations rarely test how well these systems cope with real-world noise, conflicting between internal and external retrieved contexts, or fast-changing facts. We introduce Retrieval-Aware Robustness Evaluation (RARE), a unified framework and large-scale benchmark that jointly stress-tests query and document perturbations over dynamic, time-sensitive corpora. One of the central features of RARE is a knowledge-graph-driven synthesis pipeline (RARE-Get) that automatically extracts single and multi-hop relations from the customized corpus and generates multi-level question sets without manual intervention. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct a dataset (RARE-Set) spanning 400 expert-level time-sensitive finance, economics, and policy documents and 48,322 questions whose distribution evolves as the underlying sources change. To quantify resilience, we formalize retrieval-conditioned robustness metrics (RARE-Met) that capture a model's ability to remain correct or recover when queries, documents, or real-world retrieval results are systematically altered. Our results show that RAG systems exhibit surprising vulnerability to perturbations, with document robustness consistently being the weakest point regardless of generator size or architecture. RAG systems consistently show lower robustness on multi-hop queries than single-hop queries across all domains.
Rapid yet accurate Tile-circuit and device modeling for Analog In-Memory Computing
Authors: J. Luquin, C. Mackin, S. Ambrogio, A. Chen, F. Baldi, G. Miralles, M. J. Rasch, J. Büchel, M. Lalwani, W. Ponghiran, P. Solomon, H. Tsai, G. W. Burr, P. Narayanan
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Analog In-Memory Compute (AIMC) can improve the energy efficiency of Deep Learning by orders of magnitude. Yet analog-domain device and circuit non-idealities -- within the analog ``Tiles'' performing Matrix-Vector Multiply (MVM) operations -- can degrade neural-network task accuracy. We quantify the impact of low-level distortions and noise, and develop a mathematical model for Multiply-ACcumulate (MAC) operations mapped to analog tiles. Instantaneous-current IR-drop (the most significant circuit non-ideality), and ADC quantization effects are fully captured by this model, which can predict MVM tile-outputs both rapidly and accurately, as compared to much slower rigorous circuit simulations. A statistical model of PCM read noise at nanosecond timescales is derived from -- and matched against -- experimental measurements. We integrate these (statistical) device and (deterministic) circuit effects into a PyTorch-based framework to assess the accuracy impact on the BERT and ALBERT Transformer networks. We show that hardware-aware fine-tuning using simple Gaussian noise provides resilience against ADC quantization and PCM read noise effects, but is less effective against IR-drop. This is because IR-drop -- although deterministic -- is non-linear, is changing significantly during the time-integration window, and is ultimately dependent on all the excitations being introduced in parallel into the analog tile. The apparent inability of simple Gaussian noise applied during training to properly prepare a DNN network for IR-drop during inference implies that more complex training approaches -- incorporating advances such as the Tile-circuit model introduced here -- will be critical for resilient deployment of large neural networks onto AIMC hardware.
Confidence intervals for forced alignment boundaries using model ensembles
Authors: Matthew C. Kelley
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00

Forced alignment is a common tool to align audio with orthographic and phonetic transcriptions. Most forced alignment tools provide only a single estimate of a boundary. The present project introduces a method of deriving confidence intervals for these boundaries using a neural network ensemble technique. Ten different segment classifier neural networks were previously trained, and the alignment process is repeated with each model. The alignment ensemble is then used to place the boundary at the median of the boundaries in the ensemble, and 97.85% confidence intervals are constructed using order statistics. On the Buckeye and TIMIT corpora, the ensemble boundaries show a slight improvement over using just a single model. The confidence intervals are incorporated into Praat TextGrids using a point tier, and they are also output as a table for researchers to analyze separately as diagnostics or to incorporate uncertainty into their analyses.
LEMONADE: A Large Multilingual Expert-Annotated Abstractive Event Dataset for the Real World
Authors: Sina J. Semnani, Pingyue Zhang, Wanyue Zhai, Haozhuo Li, Ryan Beauchamp, Trey Billing, Katayoun Kishi, Manling Li, Monica S. Lam
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Entity Linking, Event Extraction, Zero-shot Event Extraction

This paper presents LEMONADE, a large-scale conflict event dataset comprising 39,786 events across 20 languages and 171 countries, with extensive coverage of region-specific entities. LEMONADE is based on a partially reannotated subset of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), which has documented global conflict events for over a decade. To address the challenge of aggregating multilingual sources for global event analysis, we introduce abstractive event extraction (AEE) and its subtask, abstractive entity linking (AEL). Unlike conventional span-based event extraction, our approach detects event arguments and entities through holistic document understanding and normalizes them across the multilingual dataset. We evaluate various large language models (LLMs) on these tasks, adapt existing zero-shot event extraction systems, and benchmark supervised models. Additionally, we introduce ZEST, a novel zero-shot retrieval-based system for AEL. Our best zero-shot system achieves an end-to-end F1 score of 58.3%, with LLMs outperforming specialized event extraction models such as GoLLIE. For entity linking, ZEST achieves an F1 score of 45.7%, significantly surpassing OneNet, a state-of-the-art zero-shot baseline that achieves only 23.7%. However, these zero-shot results lag behind the best supervised systems by 20.1% and 37.0% in the end-to-end and AEL tasks, respectively, highlighting the need for further research.
Autonomous Behavior and Whole-Brain Dynamics Emerge in Embodied Zebrafish Agents with Model-based Intrinsic Motivation
Authors: Reece Keller, Alyn Tornell, Felix Pei, Xaq Pitkow, Leo Kozachkov, Aran Nayebi
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00

Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in sparse reward and reward-free environments, including class of methods known as intrinsic motivation, exhibit inconsistent exploration patterns and thus fail to produce robust autonomous behaviors observed in animals. Moreover, systems neuroscience has largely overlooked the neural basis of autonomy, focusing instead on experimental paradigms where animals are motivated by external reward rather than engaging in unconstrained, naturalistic and task-independent behavior. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a novel model-based intrinsic drive explicitly designed to capture robust autonomous exploration observed in animals. Our method (3M-Progress) motivates naturalistic behavior by tracking divergence between the agent's current world model and an ethological prior. We demonstrate that artificial embodied agents trained with 3M-Progress capture the explainable variance in behavioral patterns and whole-brain neural-glial dynamics recorded from autonomously-behaving larval zebrafish, introducing the first goal-driven, population-level model of neural-glial computation. Our findings establish a computational framework connecting model-based intrinsic motivation to naturalistic behavior, providing a foundation for building artificial agents with animal-like autonomy.
DeepCS-TRD, a Deep Learning-based Cross-Section Tree Ring Detector
Authors: Henry Marichal, Verónica Casaravilla, Candice Power, Karolain Mello, Joaquín Mazarino, Christine Lucas, Ludmila Profumo, Diego Passarella, Gregory Randall
Date: 2025-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing 2025 9
Tasks: Edge Detection

Here, we propose Deep CS-TRD, a new automatic algorithm for detecting tree rings in whole cross-sections. It substitutes the edge detection step of CS-TRD by a deep-learning-based approach (U-Net), which allows the application of the method to different image domains: microscopy, scanner or smartphone acquired, and species (Pinus taeda, Gleditsia triachantos and Salix glauca). Additionally, we introduce two publicly available datasets of annotated images to the community. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in macro images (Pinus taeda and Gleditsia triacanthos) while showing slightly lower performance in microscopy images of Salix glauca. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies automatic tree ring detection for such different species and acquisition conditions. The dataset and source code are available in this https URL
On Designing Diffusion Autoencoders for Efficient Generation and Representation Learning
Authors: Magdalena Proszewska, Nikolay Malkin, N. Siddharth
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Representation Learning

Diffusion autoencoders (DAs) are variants of diffusion generative models that use an input-dependent latent variable to capture representations alongside the diffusion process. These representations, to varying extents, can be used for tasks such as downstream classification, controllable generation, and interpolation. However, the generative performance of DAs relies heavily on how well the latent variables can be modelled and subsequently sampled from. Better generative modelling is also the primary goal of another class of diffusion models -- those that learn their forward (noising) process. While effective at adjusting the noise process in an input-dependent manner, they must satisfy additional constraints derived from the terminal conditions of the diffusion process. Here, we draw a connection between these two classes of models and show that certain design decisions (latent variable choice, conditioning method, etc.) in the DA framework -- leading to a model we term DMZ -- allow us to obtain the best of both worlds: effective representations as evaluated on downstream tasks, including domain transfer, as well as more efficient modelling and generation with fewer denoising steps compared to standard DMs.
Multi-Behavior Recommendation with Personalized Directed Acyclic Behavior Graphs
Authors: Xi Zhu, Fake Lin, Ziwei Zhao, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Zikai Yin, Xueying Li, Enhong Chen
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2024 12
Tasks: Benchmarking, Computational Efficiency, Multi-Task Learning

A well-developed recommendation system can not only leverage multi-typed interactions (such as page view, add-to-cart, and purchase) to better identify user preferences but also demonstrate high performance, low complexity, and strong interpretability. However, many existing solutions for multi-behavior recommendation fall short of intuitive modeling of real-world scenarios, leading to overly complex models with massive parameters and cumbersome components. In particular, they share two critical limitations: (1) Some pioneering models are built upon the strict assumption of cascade effects across behaviors, which contradicts multifarious behavior paths in practical applications. (2) Existing approaches fail to explicitly capture the unique idiosyncrasies of users and even neglect the inherent nature of items involved in the multi-behavior interactions. To this end, we propose a novel Directed Acyclic Graph Convolutional Network (DA-GCN) for the multi-behavior recommendation task. Specifically, we pinpoint the partial order relations within the monotonic behavior chain and extend it to personalized directed acyclic behavior graphs to exploit behavior dependencies. Then, a GCN-based directed edge encoder is employed to distill rich collaborative signals embodied by each directed edge. In light of the information flows over the directed acyclic structure, we propose an attentive aggregation module to gather messages from all potential antecedent behaviors, representing distinct perspectives to understand the terminated behavior. Thus, we obtain comprehensive representations for the follow-up behavior through learnable distributions over its preceding behaviors, explicitly reflecting personalized interactive patterns of users and underlying properties of items simultaneously. Finally, we design a customized multi-task learning objective for flexible joint optimization. Extensive experiments on public benchmarking datasets fully demonstrate the superiority of DA-GCN with significant performance improvement and computational efficiency over a wide range of state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xizhu1022/DA-GCN.
A Dynamic Framework for Semantic Grouping of Common Data Elements (CDE) Using Embeddings and Clustering
Authors: Madan Krishnamurthy, Daniel Korn, Melissa A Haendel, Christopher J Mungall, Anne E Thessen
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, scientific discovery

This research aims to develop a dynamic and scalable framework to facilitate harmonization of Common Data Elements (CDEs) across heterogeneous biomedical datasets by addressing challenges such as semantic heterogeneity, structural variability, and context dependence to streamline integration, enhance interoperability, and accelerate scientific discovery. Our methodology leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for context-aware text embeddings that convert CDEs into dense vectors capturing semantic relationships and patterns. These embeddings are clustered using Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) to group semantically similar CDEs. The framework incorporates four key steps: (1) LLM-based text embedding to mathematically represent semantic context, (2) unsupervised clustering of embeddings via HDBSCAN, (3) automated labeling using LLM summarization, and (4) supervised learning to train a classifier assigning new or unclustered CDEs to labeled clusters. Evaluated on the NIH NLM CDE Repository with over 24,000 CDEs, the system identified 118 meaningful clusters at an optimized minimum cluster size of 20. The classifier achieved 90.46 percent overall accuracy, performing best in larger categories. External validation against Gravity Projects Social Determinants of Health domains showed strong agreement (Adjusted Rand Index 0.52, Normalized Mutual Information 0.78), indicating that embeddings effectively capture cluster characteristics. This adaptable and scalable approach offers a practical solution to CDE harmonization, improving selection efficiency and supporting ongoing data interoperability.