pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improved Algorithms for Differentially Private Language Model Alignment
Authors: Keyu Chen, Hao Tang, Qinglin Liu, Yizhao Xu
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Privacy Preserving

Language model alignment is crucial for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) align with human preferences, yet it often involves sensitive user data, raising significant privacy concerns. While prior work has integrated differential privacy (DP) with alignment techniques, their performance remains limited. In this paper, we propose novel algorithms for privacy-preserving alignment and rigorously analyze their effectiveness across varying privacy budgets and models. Our framework can be deployed on two celebrated alignment techniques, namely direct preference optimization (DPO) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Through systematic experiments on large-scale language models, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, one of our algorithms, DP-AdamW, combined with DPO, surpasses existing methods, improving alignment quality by up to 15% under moderate privacy budgets ({\epsilon}=2-5). We further investigate the interplay between privacy guarantees, alignment efficacy, and computational demands, providing practical guidelines for optimizing these trade-offs.
On the interplay of Explainability, Privacy and Predictive Performance with Explanation-assisted Model Extraction
Authors: Fatima Ezzeddine, Rinad Akel, Ihab Sbeity, Silvia Giordano, Marc Langheinrich, Omran Ayoub
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Model extraction

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has gained important attraction as a means for deploying powerful predictive models, offering ease of use that enables organizations to leverage advanced analytics without substantial investments in specialized infrastructure or expertise. However, MLaaS platforms must be safeguarded against security and privacy attacks, such as model extraction (MEA) attacks. The increasing integration of explainable AI (XAI) within MLaaS has introduced an additional privacy challenge, as attackers can exploit model explanations particularly counterfactual explanations (CFs) to facilitate MEA. In this paper, we investigate the trade offs among model performance, privacy, and explainability when employing Differential Privacy (DP), a promising technique for mitigating CF facilitated MEA. We evaluate two distinct DP strategies: implemented during the classification model training and at the explainer during CF generation.
Evaluating Simplification Algorithms for Interpretability of Time Series Classification
Authors: Felix Marti-Perez, Brigt Håvardstun, Cèsar Ferri, Carlos Monserrat, Jan Arne Telle
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Classification

In this work, we introduce metrics to evaluate the use of simplified time series in the context of interpretability of a TSC - a Time Series Classifier. Such simplifications are important because time series data, in contrast to text and image data, are not intuitively understandable to humans. These metrics are related to the complexity of the simplifications - how many segments they contain - and to their loyalty - how likely they are to maintain the classification of the original time series. We employ these metrics to evaluate four distinct simplification algorithms, across several TSC algorithms and across datasets of varying characteristics, from seasonal or stationary to short or long. Our findings suggest that using simplifications for interpretability of TSC is much better than using the original time series, particularly when the time series are seasonal, non-stationary and/or with low entropy.
Validation of Conformal Prediction in Cervical Atypia Classification
Authors: Misgina Tsighe Hagos, Antti Suutala, Dmitrii Bychkov, Hakan Kücükel, Joar von Bahr, Milda Poceviciute, Johan Lundin, Nina Linder, Claes Lundström
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Classification, Conformal Prediction, Deep Learning, Diagnostic, Prediction

Deep learning based cervical cancer classification can potentially increase access to screening in low-resource regions. However, deep learning models are often overconfident and do not reliably reflect diagnostic uncertainty. Moreover, they are typically optimized to generate maximum-likelihood predictions, which fail to convey uncertainty or ambiguity in their results. Such challenges can be addressed using conformal prediction, a model-agnostic framework for generating prediction sets that contain likely classes for trained deep-learning models. The size of these prediction sets indicates model uncertainty, contracting as model confidence increases. However, existing conformal prediction evaluation primarily focuses on whether the prediction set includes or covers the true class, often overlooking the presence of extraneous classes. We argue that prediction sets should be truthful and valuable to end users, ensuring that the listed likely classes align with human expectations rather than being overly relaxed and including false positives or unlikely classes. In this study, we comprehensively validate conformal prediction sets using expert annotation sets collected from multiple annotators. We evaluate three conformal prediction approaches applied to three deep-learning models trained for cervical atypia classification. Our expert annotation-based analysis reveals that conventional coverage-based evaluations overestimate performance and that current conformal prediction methods often produce prediction sets that are not well aligned with human labels. Additionally, we explore the capabilities of the conformal prediction methods in identifying ambiguous and out-of-distribution data.
CellTypeAgent: Trustworthy cell type annotation with Large Language Models
Authors: Jiawen Chen, Jianghao Zhang, Huaxiu Yao, Yun Li
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Cell type annotation is a critical yet laborious step in single-cell RNA sequencing analysis. We present a trustworthy large language model (LLM)-agent, CellTypeAgent, which integrates LLMs with verification from relevant databases. CellTypeAgent achieves higher accuracy than existing methods while mitigating hallucinations. We evaluated CellTypeAgent across nine real datasets involving 303 cell types from 36 tissues. This combined approach holds promise for more efficient and reliable cell type annotation.
Will AI Take My Job? Evolving Perceptions of Automation and Labor Risk in Latin America
Authors: Andrea Cremaschi, Dae-Jin Lee, Manuele Leonelli
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00

As artificial intelligence and robotics increasingly reshape the global labor market, understanding public perceptions of these technologies becomes critical. We examine how these perceptions have evolved across Latin America, using survey data from the 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2023 waves of the Latinobar\'ometro. Drawing on responses from over 48,000 individuals across 16 countries, we analyze fear of job loss due to artificial intelligence and robotics. Using statistical modeling and latent class analysis, we identify key structural and ideological predictors of concern, with education level and political orientation emerging as the most consistent drivers. Our findings reveal substantial temporal and cross-country variation, with a notable peak in fear during 2018 and distinct attitudinal profiles emerging from latent segmentation. These results offer new insights into the social and structural dimensions of AI anxiety in emerging economies and contribute to a broader understanding of public attitudes toward automation beyond the Global North.
Ultrasound Report Generation with Multimodal Large Language Models for Standardized Texts
Authors: Peixuan Ge, Tongkun Su, Faqin Lv, Baoliang Zhao, Peng Zhang, Chi Hong Wong, Liang Yao, Yu Sun, Zenan Wang, Pak Kin Wong, Ying Hu
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Ultrasound (US) report generation is a challenging task due to the variability of US images, operator dependence, and the need for standardized text. Unlike X-ray and CT, US imaging lacks consistent datasets, making automation difficult. In this study, we propose a unified framework for multi-organ and multilingual US report generation, integrating fragment-based multilingual training and leveraging the standardized nature of US reports. By aligning modular text fragments with diverse imaging data and curating a bilingual English-Chinese dataset, the method achieves consistent and clinically accurate text generation across organ sites and languages. Fine-tuning with selective unfreezing of the vision transformer (ViT) further improves text-image alignment. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art KMVE method, our approach achieves relative gains of about 2\% in BLEU scores, approximately 3\% in ROUGE-L, and about 15\% in CIDEr, while significantly reducing errors such as missing or incorrect content. By unifying multi-organ and multi-language report generation into a single, scalable framework, this work demonstrates strong potential for real-world clinical workflows.
Robustness Analysis against Adversarial Patch Attacks in Fully Unmanned Stores
Authors: Hyunsik Na, Wonho Lee, Seungdeok Roh, Sohee Park, Daeseon Choi
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The advent of convenient and efficient fully unmanned stores equipped with artificial intelligence-based automated checkout systems marks a new era in retail. However, these systems have inherent artificial intelligence security vulnerabilities, which are exploited via adversarial patch attacks, particularly in physical environments. This study demonstrated that adversarial patches can severely disrupt object detection models used in unmanned stores, leading to issues such as theft, inventory discrepancies, and interference. We investigated three types of adversarial patch attacks -- Hiding, Creating, and Altering attacks -- and highlighted their effectiveness. We also introduce the novel color histogram similarity loss function by leveraging attacker knowledge of the color information of a target class object. Besides the traditional confusion-matrix-based attack success rate, we introduce a new bounding-boxes-based metric to analyze the practical impact of these attacks. Starting with attacks on object detection models trained on snack and fruit datasets in a digital environment, we evaluated the effectiveness of adversarial patches in a physical testbed that mimicked a real unmanned store with RGB cameras and realistic conditions. Furthermore, we assessed the robustness of these attacks in black-box scenarios, demonstrating that shadow attacks can enhance success rates of attacks even without direct access to model parameters. Our study underscores the necessity for robust defense strategies to protect unmanned stores from adversarial threats. Highlighting the limitations of the current defense mechanisms in real-time detection systems and discussing various proactive measures, we provide insights into improving the robustness of object detection models and fortifying unmanned retail environments against these attacks.
Crowd Scene Analysis using Deep Learning Techniques
Authors: Muhammad Junaid Asif
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Binary Classification, Crowd Counting, Deep Learning

Our research is focused on two main applications of crowd scene analysis crowd counting and anomaly detection In recent years a large number of researches have been presented in the domain of crowd counting We addressed two main challenges in this domain 1 Deep learning models are datahungry paradigms and always need a large amount of annotated data for the training of algorithm It is timeconsuming and costly task to annotate such large amount of data Selfsupervised training is proposed to deal with this challenge 2 MCNN consists of multicolumns of CNN with different sizes of filters by presenting a novel approach based on a combination of selfsupervised training and MultiColumn CNN This enables the model to learn features at different levels and makes it effective in dealing with challenges of occluded scenes nonuniform density complex backgrounds and scale invariation The proposed model was evaluated on publicly available data sets such as ShanghaiTech and UCFQNRF by means of MAE and MSE A spatiotemporal model based on VGG19 is proposed for crowd anomaly detection addressing challenges like lighting environmental conditions unexpected objects and scalability The model extracts spatial and temporal features allowing it to be generalized to realworld scenes Spatial features are learned using CNN while temporal features are learned using LSTM blocks The model works on binary classification and can detect normal or abnormal behavior The models performance is improved by replacing fully connected layers with dense residual blocks Experiments on the Hockey Fight dataset and SCVD dataset show our models outperform other stateoftheart approaches
Federated Large Language Models: Feasibility, Robustness, Security and Future Directions
Authors: Wenhao Jiang, Yuchuan Luo, Guilin Deng, Silong Chen, Xu Yang, Shihong Wu, Xinwen Gao, Lin Liu, Shaojing Fu
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Few-Shot Learning, Machine Unlearning, Survey

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising solution for joint training on distributed data while preserving privacy and addressing data silo issues. However, this emerging field, known as Federated Large Language Models (FLLM), faces significant challenges, including communication and computation overheads, heterogeneity, privacy and security concerns. Current research has primarily focused on the feasibility of FLLM, but future trends are expected to emphasize enhancing system robustness and security. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in FLLM, examining challenges from four critical perspectives: feasibility, robustness, security, and future directions. We present an exhaustive survey of existing studies on FLLM feasibility, introduce methods to enhance robustness in the face of resource, data, and task heterogeneity, and analyze novel risks associated with this integration, including privacy threats and security challenges. We also review the latest developments in defense mechanisms and explore promising future research directions, such as few-shot learning, machine unlearning, and IP protection. This survey highlights the pressing need for further research to enhance system robustness and security while addressing the unique challenges posed by the integration of FL and LLM.
Aggregating Concepts of Accuracy and Fairness in Prediction Algorithms
Authors: David Kinney
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

An algorithm that outputs predictions about the state of the world will almost always be designed with the implicit or explicit goal of outputting accurate predictions (i.e., predictions that are likely to be true). In addition, the rise of increasingly powerful predictive algorithms brought about by the recent revolution in artificial intelligence has led to an emphasis on building predictive algorithms that are fair, in the sense that their predictions do not systematically evince bias or bring about harm to certain individuals or groups. This state of affairs presents two conceptual challenges. First, the goals of accuracy and fairness can sometimes be in tension, and there are no obvious normative guidelines for managing the trade-offs between these two desiderata when they arise. Second, there are many distinct ways of measuring both the accuracy and fairness of a predictive algorithm; here too, there are no obvious guidelines on how to aggregate our preferences for predictive algorithms that satisfy disparate measures of fairness and accuracy to various extents. The goal of this paper is to address these challenges by arguing that there are good reasons for using a linear combination of accuracy and fairness metrics to measure the all-things-considered value of a predictive algorithm for agents who care about both accuracy and fairness. My argument depends crucially on a classic result in the preference aggregation literature due to Harsanyi. After making this formal argument, I apply my result to an analysis of accuracy-fairness trade-offs using the COMPAS dataset compiled by Angwin et al.
Human-AI Collaboration or Academic Misconduct? Measuring AI Use in Student Writing Through Stylometric Evidence
Authors: Eduardo Araujo Oliveira, Madhavi Mohoni, Sonsoles López-Pernas, Mohammed Saqr
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Verification

As human-AI collaboration becomes increasingly prevalent in educational contexts, understanding and measuring the extent and nature of such interactions pose significant challenges. This research investigates the use of authorship verification (AV) techniques not as a punitive measure, but as a means to quantify AI assistance in academic writing, with a focus on promoting transparency, interpretability, and student development. Building on prior work, we structured our investigation into three stages: dataset selection and expansion, AV method development, and systematic evaluation. Using three datasets - including a public dataset (PAN-14) and two from University of Melbourne students from various courses - we expanded the data to include LLM-generated texts, totalling 1,889 documents and 540 authorship problems from 506 students. We developed an adapted Feature Vector Difference AV methodology to construct robust academic writing profiles for students, designed to capture meaningful, individual characteristics of their writing. The method's effectiveness was evaluated across multiple scenarios, including distinguishing between student-authored and LLM-generated texts and testing resilience against LLMs' attempts to mimic student writing styles. Results demonstrate the enhanced AV classifier's ability to identify stylometric discrepancies and measure human-AI collaboration at word and sentence levels while providing educators with a transparent tool to support academic integrity investigations. This work advances AV technology, offering actionable insights into the dynamics of academic writing in an AI-driven era.
Self Rewarding Self Improving
Authors: Toby Simonds, Kevin Lopez, Akira Yoshiyama, Dominique Garmier
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We demonstrate that large language models can effectively self-improve through self-judging without requiring reference solutions, leveraging the inherent asymmetry between generating and verifying solutions. Our experiments on Countdown puzzles and MIT Integration Bee problems show that models can provide reliable reward signals without ground truth answers, enabling reinforcement learning in domains previously not possible. By implementing self-judging, we achieve significant performance gains maintaining alignment with formal verification. When combined with synthetic question generation, we establish a complete self-improvement loop where models generate practice problems, solve them, and evaluate their own performance-achieving an 8% improvement with Qwen 2.5 7B over baseline and surpassing GPT-4o performance on integration tasks. Our findings demonstrate that LLM judges can provide effective reward signals for training models, unlocking many reinforcement learning environments previously limited by the difficulty of creating programmatic rewards. This suggests a potential paradigm shift toward AI systems that continuously improve through self-directed learning rather than human-guided training, potentially accelerating progress in domains with scarce training data or complex evaluation requirements.
Multi-source Plume Tracing via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Pedro Antonio Alarcon Granadeno, Theodore Chambers, Jane Cleland-Huang
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Industrial catastrophes like the Bhopal disaster (1984) and the Aliso Canyon gas leak (2015) demonstrate the urgent need for rapid and reliable plume tracing algorithms to protect public health and the environment. Traditional methods, such as gradient-based or biologically inspired approaches, often fail in realistic, turbulent conditions. To address these challenges, we present a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm designed for localizing multiple airborne pollution sources using a swarm of small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS). Our method models the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Game (POMG), employing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based Action-specific Double Deep Recurrent Q-Network (ADDRQN) that uses full sequences of historical action-observation pairs, effectively approximating latent states. Unlike prior work, we use a general-purpose simulation environment based on the Gaussian Plume Model (GPM), incorporating realistic elements such as a three-dimensional environment, sensor noise, multiple interacting agents, and multiple plume sources. The incorporation of action histories as part of the inputs further enhances the adaptability of our model in complex, partially observable environments. Extensive simulations show that our algorithm significantly outperforms conventional approaches. Specifically, our model allows agents to explore only 1.29\% of the environment to successfully locate pollution sources.
An Extra RMSNorm is All You Need for Fine Tuning to 1.58 Bits
Authors: Cody Steinmetz, Gavin Childress, Aaron Herbst, Gavin Jones, Jasdeep Singh, Eli Vang, Keagan Weinstock
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural-language processing, yet their scale makes real-world deployment costly. Post-training quantization reduces memory and computation but often degrades accuracy, while quantization-aware training can recover performance at the cost of extra training. Pushing quantization to the ternary (2-bit) regime yields even larger savings but is notoriously unstable. Building on recent work showing that a bias-free, RMS-normalized Transformer with straight-through estimation can reach 1.58-bit precision, we demonstrate that simply inserting RMS normalization before every linear projection and applying a gradual, layer-wise quantization schedule stably fine-tunes full-precision checkpoints into ternary LLMs. Our approach matches or surpasses more elaborate knowledge-distillation pipelines on standard language-modeling benchmarks without adding model complexity. These results indicate that careful normalization alone can close much of the accuracy gap between ternary and full-precision LLMs, making ultra-low-bit inference practical.