pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling
Authors: Xin Zhang, Qiyu Wei, Yingjie Zhu, Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou, Sophia Ananiadou
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

User reviews on e-commerce platforms exhibit dynamic sentiment patterns driven by temporal and contextual factors. Traditional sentiment analysis methods focus on static reviews, failing to capture the evolving temporal relationship between user sentiment rating and textual content. Sentiment analysis on streaming reviews addresses this limitation by modeling and predicting the temporal evolution of user sentiments. However, it suffers from data sparsity, manifesting in temporal, spatial, and combined forms. In this paper, we introduce SynGraph, a novel framework designed to address data sparsity in sentiment analysis on streaming reviews. SynGraph alleviates data sparsity by categorizing users into mid-tail, long-tail, and extreme scenarios and incorporating LLM-augmented enhancements within a dynamic graph-based structure. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in addressing sparsity and improving sentiment modeling in streaming reviews.
A Hybrid Multi-Agent Prompting Approach for Simplifying Complex Sentences
Authors: Pratibha Zunjare, Michael Hsiao
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design, Sentence

This paper addresses the challenge of transforming complex sentences into sequences of logical, simplified sentences while preserving semantic and logical integrity with the help of Large Language Models. We propose a hybrid approach that combines advanced prompting with multi-agent architectures to enhance the sentence simplification process. Experimental results show that our approach was able to successfully simplify 70% of the complex sentences written for video game design application. In comparison, a single-agent approach attained a 48% success rate on the same task.
Enhancing Clinical Models with Pseudo Data for De-identification
Authors: Paul Landes, Aaron J Chaise, Tarak Nath Nandi, Ravi K Madduri
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, De-identification

Many models are pretrained on redacted text for privacy reasons. Clinical foundation models are often trained on de-identified text, which uses special syntax (masked) text in place of protected health information. Even though these models have increased in popularity, there has been little effort in understanding the effects of training them on redacted text. In this work, we pretrain several encoder-only models on a dataset that contains redacted text and a version with replaced realistic pseudo text. We then fine-tuned models for the protected health information de-identification task and show how our methods significantly outperform previous baselines. The contributions of this work include: a) our novel, and yet surprising findings with training recommendations, b) redacted text replacements used to produce the pseudo dataset, c) pretrained embeddings and fine-tuned task specific models, and d) freely available pseudo training dataset generation and model source code used in our experiments.
Surprise Calibration for Better In-Context Learning
Authors: Zhihang Tan, Jingrui Hou, Ping Wang, Qibiao Hu, Peng Zhu
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, In-Context Learning, Sequential Bayesian Inference

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for task adaptation in large language models (LLMs), where models infer underlying task structures from a few demonstrations. However, ICL remains susceptible to biases that arise from prior knowledge and contextual demonstrations, which can degrade the performance of LLMs. Existing bias calibration methods typically apply fixed class priors across all inputs, limiting their efficacy in dynamic ICL settings where the context for each query differs. To address these limitations, we adopt implicit sequential Bayesian inference as a framework for interpreting ICL, identify "surprise" as an informative signal for class prior shift, and introduce a novel method--Surprise Calibration (SC). SC leverages the notion of surprise to capture the temporal dynamics of class priors, providing a more adaptive and computationally efficient solution for in-context learning. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of SC over existing bias calibration techniques across a range of benchmark natural language processing tasks.
AI-Facilitated Analysis of Abstracts and Conclusions: Flagging Unsubstantiated Claims and Ambiguous Pronouns
Authors: Evgeny Markhasin
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00

We present and evaluate a suite of proof-of-concept (PoC), structured workflow prompts designed to elicit human-like hierarchical reasoning while guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) in the high-level semantic and linguistic analysis of scholarly manuscripts. The prompts target two non-trivial analytical tasks within academic summaries (abstracts and conclusions): identifying unsubstantiated claims (informational integrity) and flagging semantically confusing ambiguous pronoun references (linguistic clarity). We conducted a systematic, multi-run evaluation on two frontier models (Gemini Pro 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT Plus o3) under varied context conditions. Our results for the informational integrity task reveal a significant divergence in model performance: while both models successfully identified an unsubstantiated head of a noun phrase (95% success), ChatGPT consistently failed (0% success) to identify an unsubstantiated adjectival modifier that Gemini correctly flagged (95% success), raising a question regarding the potential influence of the target's syntactic role. For the linguistic analysis task, both models performed well (80-90% success) with full manuscript context. Surprisingly, in a summary-only setting, Gemini's performance was substantially degraded, while ChatGPT achieved a perfect (100%) success rate. Our findings suggest that while structured prompting is a viable methodology for complex textual analysis, prompt performance may be highly dependent on the interplay between the model, task type, and context, highlighting the need for rigorous, model-specific testing.
Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction
Authors: Didi Zhang, Yaxin Fan, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Goal-oriented proactive dialogue systems are designed to guide user conversations seamlessly towards specific objectives by planning a goal-oriented path. However, previous research has focused predominantly on optimizing these paths while neglecting the inconsistencies that may arise between generated responses and dialogue contexts, including user profiles, dialogue history, domain knowledge, and subgoals. To address this issue, we introduce a model-agnostic two-stage Consistency Reflection and Correction (CRC) framework. Specifically, in the consistency reflection stage, the model is prompted to reflect on the discrepancies between generated responses and dialogue contexts, identifying inconsistencies and suggesting possible corrections. In the consistency correction stage, the model generates responses that are more consistent with the dialogue context based on these reflection results. We conducted experiments on various model architectures with different parameter sizes, including encoder-decoder models (BART, T5) and decoder-only models (GPT-2, DialoGPT, Phi3, Mistral and LLaMA3), and the experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our CRC framework significantly improves the consistency between generated responses and dialogue contexts.
ROSAQ: Rotation-based Saliency-Aware Weight Quantization for Efficiently Compressing Large Language Models
Authors: Junho Yoon, Geom Lee, Donghyeon Jeon, Inho Kang, Seung-Hoon Na
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Quantization has been widely studied as an effective technique for reducing the memory requirement of large language models (LLMs), potentially improving the latency time as well. Utilizing the characteristic of rotational invariance of transformer, we propose the rotation-based saliency-aware weight quantization (ROSAQ), which identifies salient channels in the projection feature space, not in the original feature space, where the projected "principal" dimensions are naturally considered as "salient" features. The proposed ROSAQ consists of 1) PCA-based projection, which first performs principal component analysis (PCA) on a calibration set and transforms via the PCA projection, 2) Salient channel dentification, which selects dimensions corresponding to the K-largest eigenvalues as salient channels, and 3) Saliency-aware quantization with mixed-precision, which uses FP16 for salient dimensions and INT3/4 for other dimensions. Experiment results show that ROSAQ shows improvements over the baseline saliency-aware quantization on the original feature space and other existing quantization methods. With kernel fusion, ROSAQ presents about 2.3x speed up over FP16 implementation in generating 256 tokens with a batch size of 64.
Prefix-Tuning+: Modernizing Prefix-Tuning by Decoupling the Prefix from Attention
Authors: Haonan Wang, Brian Chen, Siquan Li, Xinhe Liang, Hwee Kuan Lee, Kenji Kawaguchi, Tianyang Hu
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have become crucial for rapidly adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. Prefix-Tuning, an early and effective PEFT technique, demonstrated the ability to achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning with significantly reduced computational and memory overhead. However, despite its earlier success, its effectiveness in training modern state-of-the-art LLMs has been very limited. In this work, we demonstrate empirically that Prefix-Tuning underperforms on LLMs because of an inherent tradeoff between input and prefix significance within the attention head. This motivates us to introduce Prefix-Tuning+, a novel architecture that generalizes the principles of Prefix-Tuning while addressing its shortcomings by shifting the prefix module out of the attention head itself. We further provide an overview of our construction process to guide future users when constructing their own context-based methods. Our experiments show that, across a diverse set of benchmarks, Prefix-Tuning+ consistently outperforms existing Prefix-Tuning methods. Notably, it achieves performance on par with the widely adopted LoRA method on several general benchmarks, highlighting the potential modern extension of Prefix-Tuning approaches. Our findings suggest that by overcoming its inherent limitations, Prefix-Tuning can remain a competitive and relevant research direction in the landscape of parameter-efficient LLM adaptation.
ConsistencyChecker: Tree-based Evaluation of LLM Generalization Capabilities
Authors: Zhaochen Hong, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation

Evaluating consistency in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring reliability, particularly in complex, multi-step interactions between humans and LLMs. Traditional self-consistency methods often miss subtle semantic changes in natural language and functional shifts in code or equations, which can accumulate over multiple transformations. To address this, we propose ConsistencyChecker, a tree-based evaluation framework designed to measure consistency through sequences of reversible transformations, including machine translation tasks and AI-assisted programming tasks. In our framework, nodes represent distinct text states, while edges correspond to pairs of inverse operations. Dynamic and LLM-generated benchmarks ensure a fair assessment of the model's generalization ability and eliminate benchmark leakage. Consistency is quantified based on similarity across different depths of the transformation tree. Experiments on eight models from various families and sizes show that ConsistencyChecker can distinguish the performance of different models. Notably, our consistency scores-computed entirely without using WMT paired data-correlate strongly (r > 0.7) with WMT 2024 auto-ranking, demonstrating the validity of our benchmark-free approach. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/consistencychecker.
'Memory States' from Almost Nothing: Representing and Computing in a Non-associative Algebra
Authors: Stefan Reimann
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This note presents a non-associative algebraic framework for the representation and computation of information items in high-dimensional space. This framework is consistent with the principles of spatial computing and with the empirical findings in cognitive science about memory. Computations are performed through a process of multiplication-like binding and non-associative interference-like bundling. Models that rely on associative bundling typically lose order information, which necessitates the use of auxiliary order structures, such as position markers, to represent sequential information that is important for cognitive tasks. In contrast, the non-associative bundling proposed allows the construction of sparse representations of arbitrarily long sequences that maintain their temporal structure across arbitrary lengths. In this operation, noise is a constituent element of the representation of order information, rather than a means of obscuring it. The non-associative nature of the proposed framework results in the representation of a single sequence by two distinct states. The L-state, generated through left-associative bundling, continuously updates and emphasises a recency effect, while the R-state, formed through right-associative bundling, encodes finite sequences or chunks, capturing a primacy effect. The construction of these states may be associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex in relation to short-term memory and hippocampal encoding in long-term memory, respectively. The accuracy of retrieval is contingent upon a decision-making process that is based on the mutual information between the memory states and the cue. The model is able to replicate the Serial Position Curve, which reflects the empirical recency and primacy effects observed in cognitive experiments.
Representing Time-Continuous Behavior of Cyber-Physical Systems in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Milapji Singh Gill, Tom Jeleniewski, Felix Gehlhoff, Alexander Fay
Date: 2025-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Knowledge Graphs

Time-continuous dynamic models are essential for various Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications. To ensure effective usability in different lifecycle phases, such behavioral information in the form of differential equations must be contextualized and integrated with further CPS information. While knowledge graphs provide a formal description and structuring mechanism for this task, there is a lack of reusable ontological artifacts and methods to reduce manual instantiation effort. Hence, this contribution introduces two artifacts: Firstly, a modular semantic model based on standards is introduced to represent differential equations directly within knowledge graphs and to enrich them semantically. Secondly, a method for efficient knowledge graph generation is presented. A validation of these artifacts was conducted in the domain of aviation maintenance. Results show that differential equations of a complex Electro-Hydraulic Servoactuator can be formally represented in a knowledge graph and be contextualized with other lifecycle data, proving the artifacts' practical applicability.
The NordDRG AI Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Tapio Pitkäranta
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are already being piloted for clinical coding and decision support. However, until now, no open benchmark has targeted the hospital funding layer where Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRG) determine reimbursement across many countries. We release NordDRG-AI-Benchmark, the first public test-bed that captures a complete DRG rule set and evaluates an LLM's ability to reason over multilingual diagnosis, procedure, and tariff logic. The benchmark bundles three classes of artefacts: (i) definition tables with 20 interlinked tables covering DRG logic, ICD and NCSP codes, age/sex splits, and country flags; (ii) expert manuals and changelog templates describing real governance workflows; and (iii) a prompt pack of 14 CaseMix tasks that span code lookup, cross-table inference, multilingual terminology, and quality-assurance audits. All artefacts are available at: https://github.com/longshoreforrest/norddrg-ai-benchmark A baseline demonstration shows that five state-of-the-art LLMs perform very differently on the nine automatically verifiable tasks: o3 (OpenAI) scores 9 out of 9, GPT-4o and o4-mini-high score 7 out of 9, while Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash solve only 5 out of 9 and 3 out of 9, respectively. These results confirm that NordDRG-AI-Benchmark highlights domain-specific strengths and weaknesses that remain hidden in generic LLM benchmarks, offering a reproducible baseline for research on trustworthy automation in hospital funding.
Med-REFL: Medical Reasoning Enhancement via Self-Corrected Fine-grained Reflection
Authors: Zongxian Yang, Jiayu Qian, Zegao Peng, Haoyu Zhang, Zhi-An Huang
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Question Answering, MedQA, Question Answering

Large reasoning models have recently made significant strides in mathematical and code reasoning, yet their success has not transferred smoothly to the medical domain. While multiple factors contribute to this disparity, a critical issue is the inadequate focus on the quality of intermediate reflection steps, which is particularly crucial in high-stakes medical scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Med-REFL, a \underline{\textbf{Med}}ical \underline{\textbf{R}}easoning \underline{\textbf{E}}nhancement via self-corrected \underline{\textbf{F}}ine-grained ref\underline{\textbf{L}}ection. Our method leverages a tree-of-thought approach to decompose medical questions into fine-grained reasoning paths, quantitatively evaluating each step and its subsequent reflections. These assessments enable automatic construction of direct preference optimization data, reducing reliance on expensive expert annotations while guiding models to identify and correct reasoning errors. Experimental results on the MedQA-USMLE benchmark demonstrate Med-REFL achieves consistent improvements, with average gains up to 4.11\%. Notably, it further boosts the state-of-the-art performance of 7B/8B models by an additional 4.13\%. Furthermore, Med-REFL exhibits strong generalization capabilities and robustness across several challenging medical question-answering datasets. Our work illustrates that prioritizing reflection quality leads to more accurate and trustworthy reasoning in medical AI applications. Checkpoints, code, and data can be found in https://github.com/TianYin123/Med-REFL.
BotTrans: A Multi-Source Graph Domain Adaptation Approach for Social Bot Detection
Authors: Boshen Shi, Yongqing Wang, Fangda Guo, Jiangli Shao, HuaWei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, GRAPH DOMAIN ADAPTATION, Model Optimization, Transfer Learning

Transferring extensive knowledge from relevant social networks has emerged as a promising solution to overcome label scarcity in detecting social bots and other anomalies with GNN-based models. However, effective transfer faces two critical challenges. Firstly, the network heterophily problem, which is caused by bots hiding malicious behaviors via indiscriminately interacting with human users, hinders the model's ability to learn sufficient and accurate bot-related knowledge from source domains. Secondly, single-source transfer might lead to inferior and unstable results, as the source network may embody weak relevance to the task and provide limited knowledge. To address these challenges, we explore multiple source domains and propose a multi-source graph domain adaptation model named \textit{BotTrans}. We initially leverage the labeling knowledge shared across multiple source networks to establish a cross-source-domain topology with increased network homophily. We then aggregate cross-domain neighbor information to enhance the discriminability of source node embeddings. Subsequently, we integrate the relevance between each source-target pair with model optimization, which facilitates knowledge transfer from source networks that are more relevant to the detection task. Additionally, we propose a refinement strategy to improve detection performance by utilizing semantic knowledge within the target domain. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that \textit{BotTrans} outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, revealing its efficacy in leveraging multi-source knowledge when the target detection task is unlabeled.
Feedforward Ordering in Neural Connectomes via Feedback Arc Minimization
Authors: Soroush Vahidi
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

We present a suite of scalable algorithms for minimizing feedback arcs in large-scale weighted directed graphs, with the goal of revealing biologically meaningful feedforward structure in neural connectomes. Using the FlyWire Connectome Challenge dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our ranking strategies in maximizing the total weight of forward-pointing edges. Our methods integrate greedy heuristics, gain-aware local refinements, and global structural analysis based on strongly connected components. Experiments show that our best solution improves the forward edge weight over previous top-performing methods. All algorithms are implemented efficiently in Python and validated using cloud-based execution on Google Colab Pro+.
Causality in the human niche: lessons for machine learning
Authors: Richard D. Lange, Konrad P. Kording
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

Humans interpret the world around them in terms of cause and effect and communicate their understanding of the world to each other in causal terms. These causal aspects of human cognition are thought to underlie humans' ability to generalize and learn efficiently in new domains, an area where current machine learning systems are weak. Building human-like causal competency into machine learning systems may facilitate the construction of effective and interpretable AI. Indeed, the machine learning community has been importing ideas on causality formalized by the Structural Causal Model (SCM) framework, which provides a rigorous formal language for many aspects of causality and has led to significant advances. However, the SCM framework fails to capture some salient aspects of human causal cognition and has likewise not yet led to advances in machine learning in certain critical areas where humans excel. We contend that the problem of causality in the ``human niche'' -- for a social, autonomous, and goal-driven agent sensing and acting in the world in which humans live -- is quite different from the kind of causality captured by SCMs. For example, everyday objects come in similar types that have similar causal properties, and so humans readily generalize knowledge of one type of object (cups) to another related type (bowls) by drawing causal analogies between objects with similar properties, but such analogies are at best awkward to express in SCMs. We explore how such causal capabilities are adaptive in, and motivated by, the human niche. By better appreciating properties of human causal cognition and, crucially, how those properties are adaptive in the niche in which humans live, we hope that future work at the intersection of machine learning and causality will leverage more human-like inductive biases to create more capable, controllable, and interpretable systems.