pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ROSA: A Knowledge-based Solution for Robot Self-Adaptation
Authors: Gustavo Rezende Silva, Juliane Päßler, S. Lizeth Tapia Tarifa, Einar Broch Johnsen, Carlos Hernández Corbato
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Autonomous robots must operate in diverse environments and handle multiple tasks despite uncertainties. This creates challenges in designing software architectures and task decision-making algorithms, as different contexts may require distinct task logic and architectural configurations. To address this, robotic systems can be designed as self-adaptive systems capable of adapting their task execution and software architecture at runtime based on their context.This paper introduces ROSA, a novel knowledge-based framework for RObot Self-Adaptation, which enables task-and-architecture co-adaptation (TACA) in robotic systems. ROSA achieves this by providing a knowledge model that captures all application-specific knowledge required for adaptation and by reasoning over this knowledge at runtime to determine when and how adaptation should occur. In addition to a conceptual framework, this work provides an open-source ROS 2-based reference implementation of ROSA and evaluates its feasibility and performance in an underwater robotics application. Experimental results highlight ROSA's advantages in reusability and development effort for designing self-adaptive robotic systems.
Hydra: Marker-Free RGB-D Hand-Eye Calibration
Authors: Martin Huber, Huanyu Tian, Christopher E. Mower, Lucas-Raphael Müller, Sébastien Ourselin, Christos Bergeles, Tom Vercauteren
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

This work presents an RGB-D imaging-based approach to marker-free hand-eye calibration using a novel implementation of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm with a robust point-to-plane (PTP) objective formulated on a Lie algebra. Its applicability is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments using three well known serial manipulators and two RGB-D cameras. With only three randomly chosen robot configurations, our approach achieves approximately 90% successful calibrations, demonstrating 2-3x higher convergence rates to the global optimum compared to both marker-based and marker-free baselines. We also report 2 orders of magnitude faster convergence time (0.8 +/- 0.4 s) for 9 robot configurations over other marker-free methods. Our method exhibits significantly improved accuracy (5 mm in task space) over classical approaches (7 mm in task space) whilst being marker-free. The benchmarking dataset and code are open sourced under Apache 2.0 License, and a ROS 2 integration with robot abstraction is provided to facilitate deployment.
Automatic Legal Writing Evaluation of LLMs
Authors: Ramon Pires, Roseval Malaquias Junior, Rodrigo Nogueira
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00

Despite the recent advances in Large Language Models, benchmarks for evaluating legal writing remain scarce due to the inherent complexity of assessing open-ended responses in this domain. One of the key challenges in evaluating language models on domain-specific tasks is finding test datasets that are public, frequently updated, and contain comprehensive evaluation guidelines. The Brazilian Bar Examination meets these requirements. We introduce oab-bench, a benchmark comprising 105 questions across seven areas of law from recent editions of the exam. The benchmark includes comprehensive evaluation guidelines and reference materials used by human examiners to ensure consistent grading. We evaluate the performance of four LLMs on oab-bench, finding that Claude-3.5 Sonnet achieves the best results with an average score of 7.93 out of 10, passing all 21 exams. We also investigated whether LLMs can serve as reliable automated judges for evaluating legal writing. Our experiments show that frontier models like OpenAI's o1 achieve a strong correlation with human scores when evaluating approved exams, suggesting their potential as reliable automated evaluators despite the inherently subjective nature of legal writing assessment. The source code and the benchmark -- containing questions, evaluation guidelines, model-generated responses, and their respective automated evaluations -- are publicly available.
Small or Large? Zero-Shot or Finetuned? Guiding Language Model Choice for Specialized Applications in Healthcare
Authors: Lovedeep Gondara, Jonathan Simkin, Graham Sayle, Shebnum Devji, Gregory Arbour, Raymond Ng
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Selection

This study aims to guide language model selection by investigating: 1) the necessity of finetuning versus zero-shot usage, 2) the benefits of domain-adjacent versus generic pretrained models, 3) the value of further domain-specific pretraining, and 4) the continued relevance of Small Language Models (SLMs) compared to Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks. Using electronic pathology reports from the British Columbia Cancer Registry (BCCR), three classification scenarios with varying difficulty and data size are evaluated. Models include various SLMs and an LLM. SLMs are evaluated both zero-shot and finetuned; the LLM is evaluated zero-shot only. Finetuning significantly improved SLM performance across all scenarios compared to their zero-shot results. The zero-shot LLM outperformed zero-shot SLMs but was consistently outperformed by finetuned SLMs. Domain-adjacent SLMs generally performed better than the generic SLM after finetuning, especially on harder tasks. Further domain-specific pretraining yielded modest gains on easier tasks but significant improvements on the complex, data-scarce task. The results highlight the critical role of finetuning for SLMs in specialized domains, enabling them to surpass zero-shot LLM performance on targeted classification tasks. Pretraining on domain-adjacent or domain-specific data provides further advantages, particularly for complex problems or limited finetuning data. While LLMs offer strong zero-shot capabilities, their performance on these specific tasks did not match that of appropriately finetuned SLMs. In the era of LLMs, SLMs remain relevant and effective, offering a potentially superior performance-resource trade-off compared to LLMs.
PRISM: Projection-based Reward Integration for Scene-Aware Real-to-Sim-to-Real Transfer with Few Demonstrations
Authors: Haowen Sun, Han Wang, Chengzhong Ma, Shaolong Zhang, Jiawei Ye, Xingyu Chen, Xuguang Lan
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning from few demonstrations to develop policies robust to variations in robot initial positions and object poses is a problem of significant practical interest in robotics. Compared to imitation learning, which often struggles to generalize from limited samples, reinforcement learning (RL) can autonomously explore to obtain robust behaviors. Training RL agents through direct interaction with the real world is often impractical and unsafe, while building simulation environments requires extensive manual effort, such as designing scenes and crafting task-specific reward functions. To address these challenges, we propose an integrated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that constructs simulation environments based on expert demonstrations by identifying scene objects from images and retrieving their corresponding 3D models from existing libraries. We introduce a projection-based reward model for RL policy training that is supervised by a vision-language model (VLM) using human-guided object projection relationships as prompts, with the policy further fine-tuned using expert demonstrations. In general, our work focuses on the construction of simulation environments and RL-based policy training, ultimately enabling the deployment of reliable robotic control policies in real-world scenarios.
Detecting Manipulated Contents Using Knowledge-Grounded Inference
Authors: Mark Huasong Meng, Ruizhe Wang, Meng Xu, Chuan Yan, Guangdong Bai
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Fact Checking, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The detection of manipulated content, a prevalent form of fake news, has been widely studied in recent years. While existing solutions have been proven effective in fact-checking and analyzing fake news based on historical events, the reliance on either intrinsic knowledge obtained during training or manually curated context hinders them from tackling zero-day manipulated content, which can only be recognized with real-time contextual information. In this work, we propose Manicod, a tool designed for detecting zero-day manipulated content. Manicod first sources contextual information about the input claim from mainstream search engines, and subsequently vectorizes the context for the large language model (LLM) through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The LLM-based inference can produce a "truthful" or "manipulated" decision and offer a textual explanation for the decision. To validate the effectiveness of Manicod, we also propose a dataset comprising 4270 pieces of manipulated fake news derived from 2500 recent real-world news headlines. Manicod achieves an overall F1 score of 0.856 on this dataset and outperforms existing methods by up to 1.9x in F1 score on their benchmarks on fact-checking and claim verification.
LLM Enhancer: Merged Approach using Vector Embedding for Reducing Large Language Model Hallucinations with External Knowledge
Authors: Naheed Rayhan, Md. Ashrafuzzaman
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated the capability to generate human like, natural responses across a range of tasks, including task oriented dialogue and question answering. However, their application in real world, critical scenarios is often hindered by a tendency to produce inaccurate information and a limited ability to leverage external knowledge sources. This paper introduces the LLM ENHANCER system, designed to integrate multiple online sources such as Google, Wikipedia, and DuckDuckGo to enhance data accuracy. The LLMs employed within this system are open source. The data acquisition process for the LLM ENHANCER system operates in parallel, utilizing custom agent tools to manage the flow of information. Vector embeddings are used to identify the most pertinent information, which is subsequently supplied to the LLM for user interaction. The LLM ENHANCER system mitigates hallucinations in chat based LLMs while preserving response naturalness and accuracy.
The Mean of Multi-Object Trajectories
Authors: Tran Thien Dat Nguyen, Ba Tuong Vo, Ba-Ngu Vo, Hoa Van Nguyen, Changbeom Shim
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

This paper introduces the concept of a mean for trajectories and multi-object trajectories--sets or multi-sets of trajectories--along with algorithms for computing them. Specifically, we use the Fr\'{e}chet mean, and metrics based on the optimal sub-pattern assignment (OSPA) construct, to extend the notion of average from vectors to trajectories and multi-object trajectories. Further, we develop efficient algorithms to compute these means using greedy search and Gibbs sampling. Using distributed multi-object tracking as an application, we demonstrate that the Fr\'{e}chet mean approach to multi-object trajectory consensus significantly outperforms state-of-the-art distributed multi-object tracking methods.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective NLG Evaluation Prompts
Authors: Hanhua Hong, Chenghao Xiao, Yang Wang, Yiqi Liu, Wenge Rong, Chenghua Lin
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Diversity, nlg evaluation, Prompt Engineering, Text Generation, valid

Evaluating natural language generation (NLG) systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. While human evaluation is the gold standard, it suffers from inconsistencies, lack of standardisation, and demographic biases, limiting reproducibility. LLM-based evaluation offers a scalable alternative but is highly sensitive to prompt design, where small variations can lead to significant discrepancies. In this work, we propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions, enabling the automatic generation of highly effective, model-specific evaluation prompts. Our method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual prompt engineering, thereby improving both efficiency and robustness. Our work contributes toward a new direction for more robust and efficient LLM-based evaluation.
Graph RAG for Legal Norms: A Hierarchical and Temporal Approach
Authors: Hudson de Martim
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This article proposes an adaptation of Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (Graph RAG) specifically designed for the analysis and comprehension of legal norms, which are characterized by their predefined hierarchical structure, extensive network of internal and external references and multiple temporal versions. By combining structured knowledge graphs with contextually enriched text segments, Graph RAG offers a promising solution to address the inherent complexity and vast volume of legal data. The integration of hierarchical structure and temporal evolution into knowledge graphs - along with the concept of comprehensive Text Units - facilitates the construction of richer, interconnected representations of legal knowledge. Through a detailed analysis of Graph RAG and its application to legal norm datasets, this article aims to advance the field of Artificial Intelligence applied to Law, creating opportunities for more effective systems in legal research, legislative analysis, and decision support.
DRO: Doppler-Aware Direct Radar Odometry
Authors: Cedric Le Gentil, Leonardo Brizi, Daniil Lisus, Xinyuan Qiao, Giorgio Grisetti, Timothy D. Barfoot
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Radar odometry

A renaissance in radar-based sensing for mobile robotic applications is underway. Compared to cameras or lidars, millimetre-wave radars have the ability to `see' through thin walls, vegetation, and adversarial weather conditions such as heavy rain, fog, snow, and dust. In this paper, we propose a novel SE(2) odometry approach for spinning frequency-modulated continuous-wave radars. Our method performs scan-to-local-map registration of the incoming radar data in a direct manner using all the radar intensity information without the need for feature or point cloud extraction. The method performs locally continuous trajectory estimation and accounts for both motion and Doppler distortion of the radar scans. If the radar possesses a specific frequency modulation pattern that makes radial Doppler velocities observable, an additional Doppler-based constraint is formulated to improve the velocity estimate and enable odometry in geometrically feature-deprived scenarios (e.g., featureless tunnels). Our method has been validated on over 250km of on-road data sourced from public datasets (Boreas and MulRan) and collected using our automotive platform. With the aid of a gyroscope, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves an average relative translation error of 0.26% on the Boreas leaderboard. When using data with the appropriate Doppler-enabling frequency modulation pattern, the translation error is reduced to 0.18% in similar environments. We also benchmarked our algorithm using 1.5 hours of data collected with a mobile robot in off-road environments with various levels of structure to demonstrate its versatility. Our real-time implementation is publicly available: https://github.com/utiasASRL/dro.
HyPerAlign: Interpretable Personalized LLM Alignment via Hypothesis Generation
Authors: Cristina Garbacea, Chenhao Tan
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Authorship Attribution

Alignment algorithms are widely used to align large language models (LLMs) to human users based on preference annotations. Typically these (often divergent) preferences are aggregated over a diverse set of users, resulting in fine-tuned models that are aligned to the ``average-user'' preference. Nevertheless, current models are used by individual users in very specific contexts and situations, emphasizing the need for user-dependent preference control. In this work we address the problem of personalizing LLM outputs to their users. We aim to generate customized responses tailored to specific individuals instead of generic outputs that emulate the collective voices of diverse populations. We propose HyPerAlign, an interpretable and sample-efficient hypothesis-driven personalization approach for LLM models. Given few-shot examples written by a particular user, we first infer hypotheses about their communication strategies, personality, and writing style, then prompt LLM models with these hypotheses and user-specific attributes to generate customized outputs. We conduct experiments on two different personalization tasks, namely authorship attribution and deliberative alignment, with datasets from diverse domains (news articles, blog posts, emails, jailbreaking benchmarks). Results demonstrate the superiority of hypothesis-driven LLM personalization compared to preference-based fine-tuning methods. For authorship attribution, HyPerAlign generations have consistently high win-rates (commonly $> 90\%$) against state-of-the-art preference fine-tuning approaches across diverse user profiles and LLM models. For deliberative alignment, the helpfulness of LLM models is improved by up to $70\%$ on average. Overall, HyPerAlign represents an interpretable and sample-efficient strategy for the personalization of LLM models to individual users.
SetKE: Knowledge Editing for Knowledge Elements Overlap
Authors: Yifan Wei, Xiaoyan Yu, Ran Song, Hao Peng, Angsheng Li
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, knowledge editing, Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as retrieval and question answering but require updates to incorporate new knowledge and reduce inaccuracies and hallucinations. Traditional updating methods, like fine-tuning and incremental learning, face challenges such as overfitting and high computational costs. Knowledge Editing (KE) provides a promising alternative but often overlooks the Knowledge Element Overlap (KEO) phenomenon, where multiple triplets share common elements, leading to editing conflicts. We identify the prevalence of KEO in existing KE datasets and show its significant impact on current KE methods, causing performance degradation in handling such triplets. To address this, we propose a new formulation, Knowledge Set Editing (KSE), and introduce SetKE, a method that edits sets of triplets simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that SetKE outperforms existing methods in KEO scenarios on mainstream LLMs. Additionally, we introduce EditSet, a dataset containing KEO triplets, providing a comprehensive benchmark.
Information Gravity: A Field-Theoretic Model for Token Selection in Large Language Models
Authors: Maryna Vyshnyvetska
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Sensitivity, Text Generation

We propose a theoretical model called "information gravity" to describe the text generation process in large language models (LLMs). The model uses physical apparatus from field theory and spacetime geometry to formalize the interaction between user queries and the probability distribution of generated tokens. A query is viewed as an object with "information mass" that curves the semantic space of the model, creating gravitational potential wells that "attract" tokens during generation. This model offers a mechanism to explain several observed phenomena in LLM behavior, including hallucinations (emerging from low-density semantic voids), sensitivity to query formulation (due to semantic field curvature changes), and the influence of sampling temperature on output diversity.
Improving trajectory continuity in drone-based crowd monitoring using a set of minimal-cost techniques and deep discriminative correlation filters
Authors: Bartosz Ptak, Marek Kraft
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Motion Compensation, Object Tracking

Drone-based crowd monitoring is the key technology for applications in surveillance, public safety, and event management. However, maintaining tracking continuity and consistency remains a significant challenge. Traditional detection-assignment tracking methods struggle with false positives, false negatives, and frequent identity switches, leading to degraded counting accuracy and making in-depth analysis impossible. This paper introduces a point-oriented online tracking algorithm that improves trajectory continuity and counting reliability in drone-based crowd monitoring. Our method builds on the Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) framework, replacing the original bounding-box assignment with a point-distance metric. The algorithm is enhanced with three cost-effective techniques: camera motion compensation, altitude-aware assignment, and classification-based trajectory validation. Further, Deep Discriminative Correlation Filters (DDCF) that re-use spatial feature maps from localisation algorithms for increased computational efficiency through neural network resource sharing are integrated to refine object tracking by reducing noise and handling missed detections. The proposed method is evaluated on the DroneCrowd and newly shared UP-COUNT-TRACK datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements in tracking metrics, reducing counting errors to 23% and 15%, respectively. The results also indicate a significant reduction of identity switches while maintaining high tracking accuracy, outperforming baseline online trackers and even an offline greedy optimisation method.
Towards Understanding the Nature of Attention with Low-Rank Sparse Decomposition
Authors: Zhengfu He, Junxuan Wang, Rui Lin, Xuyang Ge, Wentao Shu, Qiong Tang, Junping Zhang, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning

We propose Low-Rank Sparse Attention (Lorsa), a sparse replacement model of Transformer attention layers to disentangle original Multi Head Self Attention (MHSA) into individually comprehensible components. Lorsa is designed to address the challenge of attention superposition to understand attention-mediated interaction between features in different token positions. We show that Lorsa heads find cleaner and finer-grained versions of previously discovered MHSA behaviors like induction heads, successor heads and attention sink behavior (i.e., heavily attending to the first token). Lorsa and Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) are both sparse dictionary learning methods applied to different Transformer components, and lead to consistent findings in many ways. For instance, we discover a comprehensive family of arithmetic-specific Lorsa heads, each corresponding to an atomic operation in Llama-3.1-8B. Automated interpretability analysis indicates that Lorsa achieves parity with SAE in interpretability while Lorsa exhibits superior circuit discovery properties, especially for features computed collectively by multiple MHSA heads. We also conduct extensive experiments on architectural design ablation, Lorsa scaling law and error analysis.