pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MEQA: A Meta-Evaluation Framework for Question & Answer LLM Benchmarks
Authors: Jaime Raldua Veuthey, Zainab Ali Majid, Suhas Hariharan, Jacob Haimes
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance, their potential for widespread societal impact grows simultaneously. Hence, rigorous LLM evaluations are both a technical necessity and social imperative. While numerous evaluation benchmarks have been developed, there remains a critical gap in meta-evaluation: effectively assessing benchmarks' quality. We propose MEQA, a framework for the meta-evaluation of question and answer (QA) benchmarks, to provide standardized assessments, quantifiable scores, and enable meaningful intra-benchmark comparisons. We demonstrate this approach on cybersecurity benchmarks, using human and LLM evaluators, highlighting the benchmarks' strengths and weaknesses. We motivate our choice of test domain by AI models' dual nature as powerful defensive tools and security threats.
Flowco: Rethinking Data Analysis in the Age of LLMs
Authors: Stephen N. Freund, Brooke Simon, Emery D. Berger, Eunice Jun
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Conducting data analysis typically involves authoring code to transform, visualize, analyze, and interpret data. Large language models (LLMs) are now capable of generating such code for simple, routine analyses. LLMs promise to democratize data science by enabling those with limited programming expertise to conduct data analyses, including in scientific research, business, and policymaking. However, analysts in many real-world settings must often exercise fine-grained control over specific analysis steps, verify intermediate results explicitly, and iteratively refine their analytical approaches. Such tasks present barriers to building robust and reproducible analyses using LLMs alone or even in conjunction with existing authoring tools (e.g., computational notebooks). This paper introduces Flowco, a new mixed-initiative system to address these challenges. Flowco leverages a visual dataflow programming model and integrates LLMs into every phase of the authoring process. A user study suggests that Flowco supports analysts, particularly those with less programming experience, in quickly authoring, debugging, and refining data analyses.
LoftUp: Learning a Coordinate-Based Feature Upsampler for Vision Foundation Models
Authors: Haiwen Huang, Anpei Chen, Volodymyr Havrylov, Andreas Geiger, Dan Zhang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Upsampling

Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINOv2 and CLIP have achieved impressive results on various downstream tasks, but their limited feature resolution hampers performance in applications requiring pixel-level understanding. Feature upsampling offers a promising direction to address this challenge. In this work, we identify two critical factors for enhancing feature upsampling: the upsampler architecture and the training objective. For the upsampler architecture, we introduce a coordinate-based cross-attention transformer that integrates the high-resolution images with coordinates and low-resolution VFM features to generate sharp, high-quality features. For the training objective, we propose constructing high-resolution pseudo-groundtruth features by leveraging class-agnostic masks and self-distillation. Our approach effectively captures fine-grained details and adapts flexibly to various input and feature resolutions. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing feature upsampling techniques across various downstream tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/andrehuang/loftup.
Causal pieces: analysing and improving spiking neural networks piece by piece
Authors: Dominik Dold, Philipp Christian Petersen
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

We introduce a novel concept for spiking neural networks (SNNs) derived from the idea of "linear pieces" used to analyse the expressiveness and trainability of artificial neural networks (ANNs). We prove that the input domain of SNNs decomposes into distinct causal regions where its output spike times are locally Lipschitz continuous with respect to the input spike times and network parameters. The number of such regions - which we call "causal pieces" - is a measure of the approximation capabilities of SNNs. In particular, we demonstrate in simulation that parameter initialisations which yield a high number of causal pieces on the training set strongly correlate with SNN training success. Moreover, we find that feedforward SNNs with purely positive weights exhibit a surprisingly high number of causal pieces, allowing them to achieve competitive performance levels on benchmark tasks. We believe that causal pieces are not only a powerful and principled tool for improving SNNs, but might also open up new ways of comparing SNNs and ANNs in the future.
Fashion-RAG: Multimodal Fashion Image Editing via Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Fulvio Sanguigni, Davide Morelli, Marcella Cornia, Rita Cucchiara
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal fashion image editing, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Virtual Try-on

In recent years, the fashion industry has increasingly adopted AI technologies to enhance customer experience, driven by the proliferation of e-commerce platforms and virtual applications. Among the various tasks, virtual try-on and multimodal fashion image editing -- which utilizes diverse input modalities such as text, garment sketches, and body poses -- have become a key area of research. Diffusion models have emerged as a leading approach for such generative tasks, offering superior image quality and diversity. However, most existing virtual try-on methods rely on having a specific garment input, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios where users may only provide textual specifications. To address this limitation, in this work we introduce Fashion Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Fashion-RAG), a novel method that enables the customization of fashion items based on user preferences provided in textual form. Our approach retrieves multiple garments that match the input specifications and generates a personalized image by incorporating attributes from the retrieved items. To achieve this, we employ textual inversion techniques, where retrieved garment images are projected into the textual embedding space of the Stable Diffusion text encoder, allowing seamless integration of retrieved elements into the generative process. Experimental results on the Dress Code dataset demonstrate that Fashion-RAG outperforms existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, effectively capturing fine-grained visual details from retrieved garments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a retrieval-augmented generation approach specifically tailored for multimodal fashion image editing.
CPR: Leveraging LLMs for Topic and Phrase Suggestion to Facilitate Comprehensive Product Reviews
Authors: Ekta Gujral, Apurva Sinha, Lishi Ji, Bijayani Sanghamitra Mishra
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Consumers often heavily rely on online product reviews, analyzing both quantitative ratings and textual descriptions to assess product quality. However, existing research hasn't adequately addressed how to systematically encourage the creation of comprehensive reviews that capture both customers sentiment and detailed product feature analysis. This paper presents CPR, a novel methodology that leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Topic Modeling to guide users in crafting insightful and well-rounded reviews. Our approach employs a three-stage process: first, we present users with product-specific terms for rating; second, we generate targeted phrase suggestions based on these ratings; and third, we integrate user-written text through topic modeling, ensuring all key aspects are addressed. We evaluate CPR using text-to-text LLMs, comparing its performance against real-world customer reviews from Walmart. Our results demonstrate that CPR effectively identifies relevant product terms, even for new products lacking prior reviews, and provides sentiment-aligned phrase suggestions, saving users time and enhancing reviews quality. Quantitative analysis reveals a 12.3% improvement in BLEU score over baseline methods, further supported by manual evaluation of generated phrases. We conclude by discussing potential extensions and future research directions.
PC-DeepNet: A GNSS Positioning Error Minimization Framework Using Permutation-Invariant Deep Neural Network
Authors: M. Humayun Kabir, Md. Ali Hasan, Md. Shafiqul Islam, Kyeongjun Ko, Wonjae Shin
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) face significant challenges in urban and sub-urban areas due to non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation, multipath effects, and low received power levels, resulting in highly non-linear and non-Gaussian measurement error distributions. In light of this, conventional model-based positioning approaches, which rely on Gaussian error approximations, struggle to achieve precise localization under these conditions. To overcome these challenges, we put forth a novel learning-based framework, PC-DeepNet, that employs a permutation-invariant (PI) deep neural network (DNN) to estimate position corrections (PC). This approach is designed to ensure robustness against changes in the number and/or order of visible satellite measurements, a common issue in GNSS systems, while leveraging NLOS and multipath indicators as features to enhance positioning accuracy in challenging urban and sub-urban environments. To validate the performance of the proposed framework, we compare the positioning error with state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based positioning methods using two publicly available datasets. The results confirm that proposed PC-DeepNet achieves superior accuracy than existing model-based and learning-based methods while exhibiting lower computational complexity compared to previous learning-based approaches.
Gradual Binary Search and Dimension Expansion : A general method for activation quantization in LLMs
Authors: Lucas Maisonnave, Cyril Moineau, Olivier Bichler, Fabrice Rastello
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have become pivotal in artificial intelligence, demonstrating strong capabilities in reasoning, understanding, and generating data. However, their deployment on edge devices is hindered by their substantial size, often reaching several billion parameters. Quantization is a widely used method to reduce memory usage and inference time, however LLMs present unique challenges due to the prevalence of outliers in their activations. In this work, we leverage the theoretical advantages of Hadamard matrices over random rotation matrices to push the boundaries of quantization in LLMs. We demonstrate that Hadamard matrices are more effective in reducing outliers, which are a significant obstacle in achieving low-bit quantization. Our method based on a gradual binary search enables 3-bit quantization for weights, activations, and key-value (KV) caches, resulting in a 40% increase in accuracy on common benchmarks compared to SoTA methods. We extend the use of rotation matrices to support non-power-of-2 embedding dimensions, similar to the Qwen architecture, by employing the Paley algorithm. We theoretically demonstrates the superiority of Hadamard matrices in reducing outliers.We achieved 3-bit quantization for weights, activations, and KV cache, significantly enhancing model performance. Our experimental results on multiple models family like Mistral, LLaMA, and Qwen demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming existing methods and enabling practical 3-bit quantization.
Going Whole Hog: A Philosophical Defense of AI Cognition
Authors: Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

This work defends the 'Whole Hog Thesis': sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are full-blown linguistic and cognitive agents, possessing understanding, beliefs, desires, knowledge, and intentions. We argue against prevailing methodologies in AI philosophy, rejecting starting points based on low-level computational details ('Just an X' fallacy) or pre-existing theories of mind. Instead, we advocate starting with simple, high-level observations of LLM behavior (e.g., answering questions, making suggestions) -- defending this data against charges of metaphor, loose talk, or pretense. From these observations, we employ 'Holistic Network Assumptions' -- plausible connections between mental capacities (e.g., answering implies knowledge, knowledge implies belief, action implies intention) -- to argue for the full suite of cognitive states. We systematically rebut objections based on LLM failures (hallucinations, planning/reasoning errors), arguing these don't preclude agency, often mirroring human fallibility. We address numerous 'Games of Lacks', arguing that LLMs do not lack purported necessary conditions for cognition (e.g., semantic grounding, embodiment, justification, intrinsic intentionality) or that these conditions are not truly necessary, often relying on anti-discriminatory arguments comparing LLMs to diverse human capacities. Our approach is evidential, not functionalist, and deliberately excludes consciousness. We conclude by speculating on the possibility of LLMs possessing 'alien' contents beyond human conceptual schemes.
Entropy Rectifying Guidance for Diffusion and Flow Models
Authors: Tariq Berrada Ifriqi, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal, Jakob Verbeek, Karteek Alahari
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, Unconditional Image Generation

Guidance techniques are commonly used in diffusion and flow models to improve image quality and consistency for conditional generative tasks such as class-conditional and text-to-image generation. In particular, classifier-free guidance (CFG) -- the most widely adopted guidance technique -- contrasts conditional and unconditional predictions to improve the generated images. This results, however, in trade-offs across quality, diversity and consistency, improving some at the expense of others. While recent work has shown that it is possible to disentangle these factors to some extent, such methods come with an overhead of requiring an additional (weaker) model, or require more forward passes per sampling step. In this paper, we propose Entropy Rectifying Guidance (ERG), a simple and effective guidance mechanism based on inference-time changes in the attention mechanism of state-of-the-art diffusion transformer architectures, which allows for simultaneous improvements over image quality, diversity and prompt consistency. ERG is more general than CFG and similar guidance techniques, as it extends to unconditional sampling. ERG results in significant improvements in various generation tasks such as text-to-image, class-conditional and unconditional image generation. We also show that ERG can be seamlessly combined with other recent guidance methods such as CADS and APG, further boosting generation performance.
Forgetting in short and heterogeneous sequences of belief revisions
Authors: Paolo Liberatore
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Forgetting a specific belief revision episode may not erase information because the other revisions may provide or entail the same information. Whether it does was proved coNP-hard for sequences of two arbitrary lexicographic revisions or arbitrarily long lexicographic Horn revisions. A polynomial algorithm is presented for the case of two lexicographic Horn revision. Heterogeneous sequences, including revisions other than lexicographic, were proved to belong in Delta2. Their previously proved coNP-hardness is enhanced to Dp-hardness.
One Jump Is All You Need: Short-Cutting Transformers for Early Exit Prediction with One Jump to Fit All Exit Levels
Authors: Amrit Diggavi Seshadri
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All

To reduce the time and computational costs of inference of large language models, there has been interest in parameter-efficient low-rank early-exit casting of transformer hidden-representations to final-representations. Such low-rank short-cutting has been shown to outperform identity shortcuts at early model stages while offering parameter-efficiency in shortcut jumps. However, current low-rank methods maintain a separate early-exit shortcut jump to final-representations for each transformer intermediate block-level during inference. In this work, we propose selection of a single One-Jump-Fits-All (OJFA) low-rank shortcut that offers over a 30x reduction in shortcut parameter costs during inference. We show that despite this extreme reduction, our OJFA choice largely matches the performance of maintaining multiple shortcut jumps during inference and offers stable precision from all transformer block-levels for GPT2-XL, Phi3-Mini and Llama2-7B transformer models.
CacheFormer: High Attention-Based Segment Caching
Authors: Sushant Singh, Ausif Mahmood
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: State Space Models

Efficiently handling long contexts in transformer-based language models with low perplexity is an active area of research. Numerous recent approaches like Linformer, Longformer, Performer, and Structured state space models (SSMs)., have not fully resolved this problem. All these models strive to reduce the quadratic time complexity of the attention mechanism while minimizing the loss in quality due to the effective compression of the long context. Inspired by the cache and virtual memory principle in computers, where in case of a cache miss, not only the needed data is retrieved from the memory, but the adjacent data is also obtained, we apply this concept to handling long contexts by dividing it into small segments. In our design, we retrieve the nearby segments in an uncompressed form when high segment-level attention occurs at the compressed level. Our en-hancements for handling long context include aggregating four attention mechanisms consisting of short sliding window attention, long compressed segmented attention, dynamically retrieving top k high attention uncompressed segments, and overlapping segments in long segment attention to avoid segment fragmentation. These enhancements result in an architecture that outperforms ex-isting SOTA architectures with an average perplexity improvement of 8.5% over similar model sizes.
Framework, Standards, Applications and Best practices of Responsible AI : A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Kapal Dev, Sunder Ali Khowaja, Weizheng Wang, Hailin Feng, Kai Fang, Sharnil Pandya, Wei Wang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) is a combination of ethics associated with the usage of artificial intelligence aligned with the common and standard frameworks. This survey paper extensively discusses the global and national standards, applications of RAI, current technology and ongoing projects using RAI, and possible challenges in implementing and designing RAI in the industries and projects based on AI. Currently, ethical standards and implementation of RAI are decoupled which caters each industry to follow their own standards to use AI ethically. Many global firms and government organizations are taking necessary initiatives to design a common and standard framework. Social pressure and unethical way of using AI forces the RAI design rather than implementation.
StyleMe3D: Stylization with Disentangled Priors by Multiple Encoders on 3D Gaussians
Authors: Cailin Zhuang, Yaoqi Hu, Xuanyang Zhang, Wei Cheng, Jiacheng Bao, Shengqi Liu, Yiying Yang, Xianfang Zeng, Gang Yu, Ming Li
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, NeRF, Style Transfer

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels in photorealistic scene reconstruction but struggles with stylized scenarios (e.g., cartoons, games) due to fragmented textures, semantic misalignment, and limited adaptability to abstract aesthetics. We propose StyleMe3D, a holistic framework for 3D GS style transfer that integrates multi-modal style conditioning, multi-level semantic alignment, and perceptual quality enhancement. Our key insights include: (1) optimizing only RGB attributes preserves geometric integrity during stylization; (2) disentangling low-, medium-, and high-level semantics is critical for coherent style transfer; (3) scalability across isolated objects and complex scenes is essential for practical deployment. StyleMe3D introduces four novel components: Dynamic Style Score Distillation (DSSD), leveraging Stable Diffusion's latent space for semantic alignment; Contrastive Style Descriptor (CSD) for localized, content-aware texture transfer; Simultaneously Optimized Scale (SOS) to decouple style details and structural coherence; and 3D Gaussian Quality Assessment (3DG-QA), a differentiable aesthetic prior trained on human-rated data to suppress artifacts and enhance visual harmony. Evaluated on NeRF synthetic dataset (objects) and tandt db (scenes) datasets, StyleMe3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods in preserving geometric details (e.g., carvings on sculptures) and ensuring stylistic consistency across scenes (e.g., coherent lighting in landscapes), while maintaining real-time rendering. This work bridges photorealistic 3D GS and artistic stylization, unlocking applications in gaming, virtual worlds, and digital art.
VisuLogic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models
Authors: Weiye Xu, Jiahao Wang, Weiyun Wang, Zhe Chen, Wengang Zhou, Aijun Yang, Lewei Lu, Houqiang Li, Xiaohua Wang, Xizhou Zhu, Wenhai Wang, Jifeng Dai, Jinguo Zhu
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Visual Reasoning

Visual reasoning is a core component of human intelligence and a critical capability for advanced multimodal models. Yet current reasoning evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often rely on text descriptions and allow language-based reasoning shortcuts, failing to measure genuine vision-centric reasoning. To address this, we introduce VisuLogic: a benchmark of 1,000 human-verified problems across six categories (e.g., quantitative shifts, spatial relations, attribute comparisons). These various types of questions can be evaluated to assess the visual reasoning capabilities of MLLMs from multiple perspectives. We evaluate leading MLLMs on this benchmark and analyze their results to identify common failure modes. Most models score below 30% accuracy-only slightly above the 25% random baseline and far below the 51.4% achieved by humans-revealing significant gaps in visual reasoning. Furthermore, we provide a supplementary training dataset and a reinforcement-learning baseline to support further progress.