pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Driver Assistance System Based on Multimodal Data Hazard Detection
Authors: Long Zhouxiang, Ovanes Petrosian
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving technology has advanced significantly, yet detecting driving anomalies remains a major challenge due to the long-tailed distribution of driving events. Existing methods primarily rely on single-modal road condition video data, which limits their ability to capture rare and unpredictable driving incidents. This paper proposes a multimodal driver assistance detection system that integrates road condition video, driver facial video, and audio data to enhance incident recognition accuracy. Our model employs an attention-based intermediate fusion strategy, enabling end-to-end learning without separate feature extraction. To support this approach, we develop a new three-modality dataset using a driving simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively captures cross-modal correlations, reducing misjudgments and improving driving safety.
Disentangling CLIP for Multi-Object Perception
Authors: Samyak Rawlekar, Yujun Cai, Yiwei Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Narendra Ahuja
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Image Classification, Object, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Vision-language models like CLIP excel at recognizing the single, prominent object in a scene. However, they struggle in complex scenes containing multiple objects. We identify a fundamental reason behind this limitation: VLMs features space exhibits significant semantic entanglement, where features of one class contain substantial information about other unrelated classes, a phenomenon we term mutual feature information (MFI). This entanglement becomes evident during class-specific queries, as unrelated objects are activated alongside the queried class. To address this limitation, we propose DCLIP, a framework that disentangles CLIP features using two complementary objectives: a novel MFI Loss that orthogonalizes the text (class) features to reduce inter-class similarity, and the Asymmetric Loss (ASL) that aligns image features with the disentangled text features. Our experiment demonstrates that DCLIP reduces inter-class feature similarity by 30\% compared to CLIP, leading to significant performance gains on multi-label recognition (MLR) and zero-shot semantic segmentation (ZS3). In MLR, DCLIP outperforms SOTA approaches on VOC2007 and COCO-14 while using 75\% fewer parameters, and surpasses SOTA ZS3 methods by 3.4 mIoU on VOC2012 and 2.8 mIoU on COCO-17. These results establish feature disentanglement as a critical factor for effective multi-object perception in vision-language models.
CleanSurvival: Automated data preprocessing for time-to-event models using reinforcement learning
Authors: Yousef Koka, David Selby, Gerrit Großmann, Sebastian Vollmer
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Outlier Detection, Q-Learning, Survival Analysis

Data preprocessing is a critical yet frequently neglected aspect of machine learning, often paid little attention despite its potentially significant impact on model performance. While automated machine learning pipelines are starting to recognize and integrate data preprocessing into their solutions for classification and regression tasks, this integration is lacking for more specialized tasks like survival or time-to-event models. As a result, survival analysis not only faces the general challenges of data preprocessing but also suffers from the lack of tailored, automated solutions in this area. To address this gap, this paper presents 'CleanSurvival', a reinforcement-learning-based solution for optimizing preprocessing pipelines, extended specifically for survival analysis. The framework can handle continuous and categorical variables, using Q-learning to select which combination of data imputation, outlier detection and feature extraction techniques achieves optimal performance for a Cox, random forest, neural network or user-supplied time-to-event model. The package is available on GitHub: https://github.com/datasciapps/CleanSurvival Experimental benchmarks on real-world datasets show that the Q-learning-based data preprocessing results in superior predictive performance to standard approaches, finding such a model up to 10 times faster than undirected random grid search. Furthermore, a simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness in different types and levels of missingness and noise in the data.
Mirror Descent Actor Critic via Bounded Advantage Learning
Authors: Ryo Iwaki
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Regularization is a core component of recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Mirror Descent Value Iteration (MDVI) uses both Kullback-Leibler divergence and entropy as regularizers in its value and policy updates. Despite its empirical success in discrete action domains and strong theoretical guarantees, the performance of a MDVI-based method does not surpass an entropy-only-regularized method in continuous action domains. In this study, we propose Mirror Descent Actor Critic (MDAC) as an actor-critic style instantiation of MDVI for continuous action domains, and show that its empirical performance is significantly boosted by bounding the actor's log-density terms in the critic's loss function, compared to a non-bounded naive instantiation. Further, we relate MDAC to Advantage Learning by recalling that the actor's log-probability is equal to the regularized advantage function in tabular cases, and theoretically discuss when and why bounding the advantage terms is validated and beneficial. We also empirically explore a good choice for the bounding function, and show that MDAC perfoms better than strong non-regularized and entropy-only-regularized methods with an appropriate choice of the bounding function.
FairT2I: Mitigating Social Bias in Text-to-Image Generation via Large Language Model-Assisted Detection and Attribute Rebalancing
Authors: Jinya Sakurai, Issei Sato
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Bias Detection, Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Marketing, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

The proliferation of Text-to-Image (T2I) models has revolutionized content creation, providing powerful tools for diverse applications ranging from artistic expression to educational material development and marketing. Despite these technological advancements, significant ethical concerns arise from these models' reliance on large-scale datasets that often contain inherent societal biases. These biases are further amplified when AI-generated content is included in training data, potentially reinforcing and perpetuating stereotypes in the generated outputs. In this paper, we introduce FairT2I, a novel framework that harnesses large language models to detect and mitigate social biases in T2I generation. Our framework comprises two key components: (1) an LLM-based bias detection module that identifies potential social biases in generated images based on text prompts, and (2) an attribute rebalancing module that fine-tunes sensitive attributes within the T2I model to mitigate identified biases. Our extensive experiments across various T2I models and datasets show that FairT2I can significantly reduce bias while maintaining high-quality image generation. We conducted both qualitative user studies and quantitative non-parametric analyses in the generated image feature space, building upon the occupational dataset introduced in the Stable Bias study. Our results show that FairT2I successfully mitigates social biases and enhances the diversity of sensitive attributes in generated images. We further demonstrate, using the P2 dataset, that our framework can detect subtle biases that are challenging for human observers to perceive, extending beyond occupation-related prompts. On the basis of these findings, we introduce a new benchmark dataset for evaluating bias in T2I models.
LLM Alignment as Retriever Optimization: An Information Retrieval Perspective
Authors: Bowen Jin, Jinsung Yoon, Zhen Qin, Ziqi Wang, Wei Xiong, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han, Sercan O. Arik
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Misinformation, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with capabilities in reasoning, coding, and communication, driving innovation across industries. Their true potential depends on effective alignment to ensure correct, trustworthy and ethical behavior, addressing challenges like misinformation, hallucinations, bias and misuse. While existing Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based alignment methods are notoriously complex, direct optimization approaches offer a simpler alternative. In this work, we introduce a novel direct optimization approach for LLM alignment by drawing on established Information Retrieval (IR) principles. We present a systematic framework that bridges LLM alignment and IR methodologies, mapping LLM generation and reward models to IR's retriever-reranker paradigm. Building on this foundation, we propose LLM Alignment as Retriever Preference Optimization (LarPO), a new alignment method that enhances overall alignment quality. Extensive experiments validate LarPO's effectiveness with 38.9 % and 13.7 % averaged improvement on AlpacaEval2 and MixEval-Hard respectively. Our work opens new avenues for advancing LLM alignment by integrating IR foundations, offering a promising direction for future research.
The Hidden Life of Tokens: Reducing Hallucination of Large Vision-Language Models via Visual Information Steering
Authors: Zhuowei Li, Haizhou Shi, Yunhe Gao, Di Liu, Zhenting Wang, Yuxiao Chen, Ting Liu, Long Zhao, Hao Wang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can reason effectively over both textual and visual inputs, but they tend to hallucinate syntactically coherent yet visually ungrounded contents. In this paper, we investigate the internal dynamics of hallucination by examining the tokens logits rankings throughout the generation process, revealing three key patterns in how LVLMs process information: (1) gradual visual information loss -- visually grounded tokens gradually become less favored throughout generation, and (2) early excitation -- semantically meaningful tokens achieve peak activation in the layers earlier than the final layer. (3) hidden genuine information -- visually grounded tokens though not being eventually decided still retain relatively high rankings at inference. Based on these insights, we propose VISTA (Visual Information Steering with Token-logit Augmentation), a training-free inference-time intervention framework that reduces hallucination while promoting genuine information. VISTA works by combining two complementary approaches: reinforcing visual information in activation space and leveraging early layer activations to promote semantically meaningful decoding. Compared to existing methods, VISTA requires no external supervision and is applicable to various decoding strategies. Extensive experiments show that VISTA on average reduces hallucination by abount 40% on evaluated open-ended generation task, and it consistently outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks across four architectures under three decoding strategies.
Controllable Emotion Generation with Emotion Vectors
Authors: Yurui Dong, Luozhijie Jin, Yao Yang, Bingjie Lu, Jiaxi Yang, Zhi Liu
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00

In recent years, technologies based on large-scale language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in many fields, especially in customer service, content creation, and embodied intelligence, showing broad application potential. However, The LLM's ability to express emotions with proper tone, timing, and in both direct and indirect forms is still insufficient but significant. Few works have studied on how to build the controlable emotional expression capability of LLMs. In this work, we propose a method for emotion expression output by LLMs, which is universal, highly flexible, and well controllable proved with the extensive experiments and verifications. This method has broad application prospects in fields involving emotions output by LLMs, such as intelligent customer service, literary creation, and home companion robots. The extensive experiments on various LLMs with different model-scales and architectures prove the versatility and the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond
Authors: Mardhiyah Sanni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Devendra D. Kayande, Emmanuel Ayodele, Naome A. Etori, Michael S. Mollel, Moshood Yekini, Chibuzor Okocha, Lukman E. Ismaila, Folafunmi Omofoye, Boluwatife A. Adewale, Tobi Olatunji
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Conversation Summarization, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark dataset of 50 simulated medical and non-medical African-accented English conversations, designed to evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and related technologies. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) speaker diarization and ASR systems on long-form, accented speech, comparing their performance with native accents and discover a 10%+ performance degradation. Additionally, we explore medical conversation summarization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to demonstrate the impact of ASR errors on downstream medical summaries, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities for speech technologies in the Global South. Our work highlights the need for more inclusive datasets to advance conversational AI in low-resource settings.
Advanced Object Detection and Pose Estimation with Hybrid Task Cascade and High-Resolution Networks
Authors: Yuhui Jin, YaQiong Zhang, Zheyuan Xu, Wenqing Zhang, Jingyu Xu
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation

In the field of computer vision, 6D object detection and pose estimation are critical for applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving. Traditional methods often struggle with achieving high accuracy in both object detection and precise pose estimation simultaneously. This study proposes an improved 6D object detection and pose estimation pipeline based on the existing 6D-VNet framework, enhanced by integrating a Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC) and a High-Resolution Network (HRNet) backbone. By leveraging the strengths of HTC's multi-stage refinement process and HRNet's ability to maintain high-resolution representations, our approach significantly improves detection accuracy and pose estimation precision. Furthermore, we introduce advanced post-processing techniques and a novel model integration strategy that collectively contribute to superior performance on public and private benchmarks. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements over state-of-the-art models, making it a valuable contribution to the domain of 6D object detection and pose estimation.
DynVFX: Augmenting Real Videos with Dynamic Content
Authors: Danah Yatim, Rafail Fridman, Omer Bar-Tal, Tali Dekel
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

We present a method for augmenting real-world videos with newly generated dynamic content. Given an input video and a simple user-provided text instruction describing the desired content, our method synthesizes dynamic objects or complex scene effects that naturally interact with the existing scene over time. The position, appearance, and motion of the new content are seamlessly integrated into the original footage while accounting for camera motion, occlusions, and interactions with other dynamic objects in the scene, resulting in a cohesive and realistic output video. We achieve this via a zero-shot, training-free framework that harnesses a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion transformer to synthesize the new content and a pre-trained Vision Language Model to envision the augmented scene in detail. Specifically, we introduce a novel inference-based method that manipulates features within the attention mechanism, enabling accurate localization and seamless integration of the new content while preserving the integrity of the original scene. Our method is fully automated, requiring only a simple user instruction. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a wide range of edits applied to real-world videos, encompassing diverse objects and scenarios involving both camera and object motion.
Every Angle Is Worth A Second Glance: Mining Kinematic Skeletal Structures from Multi-view Joint Cloud
Authors: Junkun Jiang, Jie Chen, Ho Yin Au, Mingyuan Chen, Wei Xue, Yike Guo
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Multi-person motion capture over sparse angular observations is a challenging problem under interference from both self- and mutual-occlusions. Existing works produce accurate 2D joint detection, however, when these are triangulated and lifted into 3D, available solutions all struggle in selecting the most accurate candidates and associating them to the correct joint type and target identity. As such, in order to fully utilize all accurate 2D joint location information, we propose to independently triangulate between all same-typed 2D joints from all camera views regardless of their target ID, forming the Joint Cloud. Joint Cloud consist of both valid joints lifted from the same joint type and target ID, as well as falsely constructed ones that are from different 2D sources. These redundant and inaccurate candidates are processed over the proposed Joint Cloud Selection and Aggregation Transformer (JCSAT) involving three cascaded encoders which deeply explore the trajectile, skeletal structural, and view-dependent correlations among all 3D point candidates in the cross-embedding space. An Optimal Token Attention Path (OTAP) module is proposed which subsequently selects and aggregates informative features from these redundant observations for the final prediction of human motion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of JCSAT, we build and publish a new multi-person motion capture dataset BUMocap-X with complex interactions and severe occlusions. Comprehensive experiments over the newly presented as well as benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods, especially under challenging occlusion scenarios.
PoleStack: Robust Pole Estimation of Irregular Objects from Silhouette Stacking
Authors: Jacopo Villa, Jay W. McMahon, Issa A. D. Nesnas
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

We present an algorithm to estimate the rotation pole of a principal-axis rotator using silhouette images collected from multiple camera poses. First, a set of images is stacked to form a single silhouette-stack image, where the object's rotation introduces reflective symmetry about the imaged pole direction. We estimate this projected-pole direction by identifying maximum symmetry in the silhouette stack. To handle unknown center-of-mass image location, we apply the Discrete Fourier Transform to produce the silhouette-stack amplitude spectrum, achieving translation invariance and increased robustness to noise. Second, the 3D pole orientation is estimated by combining two or more projected-pole measurements collected from different camera orientations. We demonstrate degree-level pole estimation accuracy using low-resolution imagery, showing robustness to severe surface shadowing and centroid-based image-registration errors. The proposed approach could be suitable for pole estimation during both the approach phase toward a target object and while hovering.
AIoT-based smart traffic management system
Authors: Ahmed Mahmoud Elbasha, Mohammad M. Abdellatif
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper presents a novel AI-based smart traffic management system de-signed to optimize traffic flow and reduce congestion in urban environments. By analysing live footage from existing CCTV cameras, this approach eliminates the need for additional hardware, thereby minimizing both deployment costs and ongoing maintenance expenses. The AI model processes live video feeds to accurately count vehicles and assess traffic density, allowing for adaptive signal control that prioritizes directions with higher traffic volumes. This real-time adaptability ensures smoother traffic flow, reduces congestion, and minimizes waiting times for drivers. Additionally, the proposed system is simulated using PyGame to evaluate its performance under various traffic conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the AI-based system out-performs traditional static traffic light systems by 34%, leading to significant improvements in traffic flow efficiency. The use of AI to optimize traffic signals can play a crucial role in addressing urban traffic challenges, offering a cost-effective, scalable, and efficient solution for modern cities. This innovative system represents a key advancement in the field of smart city infra-structure and intelligent transportation systems.
A Methodology for Studying Linguistic and Cultural Change in China, 1900-1950
Authors: Spencer Dean Stewart
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

This paper presents a quantitative approach to studying linguistic and cultural change in China during the first half of the twentieth century, a period that remains understudied in computational humanities research. The dramatic changes in Chinese language and culture during this time call for greater reflection on the tools and methods used for text analysis. This preliminary study offers a framework for analyzing Chinese texts from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, demonstrating how established methods such as word counts and word embeddings can provide new historical insights into the complex negotiations between Western modernity and Chinese cultural discourse.
Decision Trees That Remember: Gradient-Based Learning of Recurrent Decision Trees with Memory
Authors: Sascha Marton, Moritz Schneider
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, State Space Models

Neural architectures such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Transformers, and State-Space Models have shown great success in handling sequential data by learning temporal dependencies. Decision Trees (DTs), on the other hand, remain a widely used class of models for structured tabular data but are typically not designed to capture sequential patterns directly. Instead, DT-based approaches for time-series data often rely on feature engineering, such as manually incorporating lag features, which can be suboptimal for capturing complex temporal dependencies. To address this limitation, we introduce ReMeDe Trees, a novel recurrent DT architecture that integrates an internal memory mechanism, similar to RNNs, to learn long-term dependencies in sequential data. Our model learns hard, axis-aligned decision rules for both output generation and state updates, optimizing them efficiently via gradient descent. We provide a proof-of-concept study on synthetic benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.