pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
$\texttt{SAGE}$: A Generic Framework for LLM Safety Evaluation
Authors: Madhur Jindal, Hari Shrawgi, Parag Agrawal, Sandipan Dandapat
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming, Safety Alignment

Safety evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made progress and attracted academic interest, but it remains challenging to keep pace with the rapid integration of LLMs across diverse applications. Different applications expose users to various harms, necessitating application-specific safety evaluations with tailored harms and policies. Another major gap is the lack of focus on the dynamic and conversational nature of LLM systems. Such potential oversights can lead to harms that go unnoticed in standard safety benchmarks. This paper identifies the above as key requirements for robust LLM safety evaluation and recognizing that current evaluation methodologies do not satisfy these, we introduce the $\texttt{SAGE}$ (Safety AI Generic Evaluation) framework. $\texttt{SAGE}$ is an automated modular framework designed for customized and dynamic harm evaluations. It utilizes adversarial user models that are system-aware and have unique personalities, enabling a holistic red-teaming evaluation. We demonstrate $\texttt{SAGE}$'s effectiveness by evaluating seven state-of-the-art LLMs across three applications and harm policies. Our experiments with multi-turn conversational evaluations revealed a concerning finding that harm steadily increases with conversation length. Furthermore, we observe significant disparities in model behavior when exposed to different user personalities and scenarios. Our findings also reveal that some models minimize harmful outputs by employing severe refusal tactics that can hinder their usefulness. These insights highlight the necessity of adaptive and context-specific testing to ensure better safety alignment and safer deployment of LLMs in real-world scenarios.
Towards Ball Spin and Trajectory Analysis in Table Tennis Broadcast Videos via Physically Grounded Synthetic-to-Real Transfer
Authors: Daniel Kienzle, Robin Schön, Rainer Lienhart, Shin'ichi Satoh
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Monocular 3D Object Localization, Sports Analytics, Synthetic Data Generation, Trajectory Prediction, Zero-shot Generalization

Analyzing a player's technique in table tennis requires knowledge of the ball's 3D trajectory and spin. While, the spin is not directly observable in standard broadcasting videos, we show that it can be inferred from the ball's trajectory in the video. We present a novel method to infer the initial spin and 3D trajectory from the corresponding 2D trajectory in a video. Without ground truth labels for broadcast videos, we train a neural network solely on synthetic data. Due to the choice of our input data representation, physically correct synthetic training data, and using targeted augmentations, the network naturally generalizes to real data. Notably, these simple techniques are sufficient to achieve generalization. No real data at all is required for training. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a method for spin and trajectory prediction in simple monocular broadcast videos, achieving an accuracy of 92.0% in spin classification and a 2D reprojection error of 0.19% of the image diagonal.
Tracking-Aided Multi-User MIMO Communications with Hybrid Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
Authors: Ioannis Gavras, George C. Alexandropoulos
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: ISAC

Hybrid Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (HRISs) constitute a new paradigm that redefines smart metasurfaces, not only offering tunable reflections of incoming signals, but also incorporating signal reception and processing capabilities. In this paper, leveraging the simultaneous dual-functionality of HRISs, we propose a novel framework for tracking-aided multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communications. In particular, a joint design of the transmit multi-user precoding matrix together with the HRIS reflection and analog combining configurations is presented, with the objective to maximize the accuracy of position estimation of multiple mobile users while meeting their individual quality-of-service constraints for sensing-aided communications. The Cramer-Rao bound for the users' positioning parameters is derived together with a prediction approach based on the extended Kalman filter. Our simulation results showcase the efficacy of the proposed Integrated Sensing And Communications (ISAC) framework over various system configuration parameters.
Right Prediction, Wrong Reasoning: Uncovering LLM Misalignment in RA Disease Diagnosis
Authors: Umakanta Maharana, Sarthak Verma, Avarna Agarwal, Prakashini Mruthyunjaya, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Sakir Ahmed, Murari Mandal
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Disease Prediction, Prediction

Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising pre-screening tool, improving early disease detection and providing enhanced healthcare access for underprivileged communities. The early diagnosis of various diseases continues to be a significant challenge in healthcare, primarily due to the nonspecific nature of early symptoms, the shortage of expert medical practitioners, and the need for prolonged clinical evaluations, all of which can delay treatment and adversely affect patient outcomes. With impressive accuracy in prediction across a range of diseases, LLMs have the potential to revolutionize clinical pre-screening and decision-making for various medical conditions. In this work, we study the diagnostic capability of LLMs for Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) with real world patients data. Patient data was collected alongside diagnoses from medical experts, and the performance of LLMs was evaluated in comparison to expert diagnoses for RA disease prediction. We notice an interesting pattern in disease diagnosis and find an unexpected \textit{misalignment between prediction and explanation}. We conduct a series of multi-round analyses using different LLM agents. The best-performing model accurately predicts rheumatoid arthritis (RA) diseases approximately 95\% of the time. However, when medical experts evaluated the reasoning generated by the model, they found that nearly 68\% of the reasoning was incorrect. This study highlights a clear misalignment between LLMs high prediction accuracy and its flawed reasoning, raising important questions about relying on LLM explanations in clinical settings. \textbf{LLMs provide incorrect reasoning to arrive at the correct answer for RA disease diagnosis.}
If Concept Bottlenecks are the Question, are Foundation Models the Answer?
Authors: Nicola Debole, Pietro Barbiero, Francesco Giannini, Andrea Passeggini, Stefano Teso, Emanuele Marconato
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are neural networks designed to conjoin high performance with ante-hoc interpretability. CBMs work by first mapping inputs (e.g., images) to high-level concepts (e.g., visible objects and their properties) and then use these to solve a downstream task (e.g., tagging or scoring an image) in an interpretable manner. Their performance and interpretability, however, hinge on the quality of the concepts they learn. The go-to strategy for ensuring good quality concepts is to leverage expert annotations, which are expensive to collect and seldom available in applications. Researchers have recently addressed this issue by introducing "VLM-CBM" architectures that replace manual annotations with weak supervision from foundation models. It is however unclear what is the impact of doing so on the quality of the learned concepts. To answer this question, we put state-of-the-art VLM-CBMs to the test, analyzing their learned concepts empirically using a selection of significant metrics. Our results show that, depending on the task, VLM supervision can sensibly differ from expert annotations, and that concept accuracy and quality are not strongly correlated. Our code is available at https://github.com/debryu/CQA.
MOOC student dropout prediction model based on learning behavior features and parameter optimization
Authors: Cong Jin
Date: 2023-08-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: 1 2023 8
Tasks: Student dropout

Since the advent of massive open online courses (MOOC), it has been the focus of educators and learners around the world, however the high dropout rate of MOOC has had a serious negative impact on its popularity and promotion. How to effectively predict students' dropout status in MOOC for early intervention has become a hot topic in MOOC research. Due to there are huge differences in the learning behaviors, study habits and learning time of different students in MOOC, i.e. the students' learning behavior data containing rich learning information, so it can be used to predict the students' dropout status. In this paper, according to the students' learning behaviour data, a feature extraction method is firstly designed, which can reflect the characteristics of weekly student learning behaviors. Then, the intelligently optimized support vector regression (SVR) model is used as the student dropout prediction (SDP) model. In this SDP model, the three parameters of SVR are not randomly selected but determined by an improved quantum particle swarm optimization (IQPSO) algorithm. Experimental results from both direct observation and statistical analysis on public data indicate that the proposed SDP model can achieve better predictive performance than various benchmark SDP models.
A Multimodal Hybrid Late-Cascade Fusion Network for Enhanced 3D Object Detection
Authors: Carlo Sgaravatti, Roberto Basla, Riccardo Pieroni, Matteo Corno, Sergio M. Savaresi, Luca Magri, Giacomo Boracchi
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

We present a new way to detect 3D objects from multimodal inputs, leveraging both LiDAR and RGB cameras in a hybrid late-cascade scheme, that combines an RGB detection network and a 3D LiDAR detector. We exploit late fusion principles to reduce LiDAR False Positives, matching LiDAR detections with RGB ones by projecting the LiDAR bounding boxes on the image. We rely on cascade fusion principles to recover LiDAR False Negatives leveraging epipolar constraints and frustums generated by RGB detections of separate views. Our solution can be plugged on top of any underlying single-modal detectors, enabling a flexible training process that can take advantage of pre-trained LiDAR and RGB detectors, or train the two branches separately. We evaluate our results on the KITTI object detection benchmark, showing significant performance improvements, especially for the detection of Pedestrians and Cyclists.
Theoretical Framework for Tempered Fractional Gradient Descent: Application to Breast Cancer Classification
Authors: Omar Naifar
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification

This paper introduces Tempered Fractional Gradient Descent (TFGD), a novel optimization framework that synergizes fractional calculus with exponential tempering to enhance gradient-based learning. Traditional gradient descent methods often suffer from oscillatory updates and slow convergence in high-dimensional, noisy landscapes. TFGD addresses these limitations by incorporating a tempered memory mechanism, where historical gradients are weighted by fractional coefficients $|w_j| = \binom{\alpha}{j}$ and exponentially decayed via a tempering parameter $\lambda$. Theoretical analysis establishes TFGD's convergence guarantees: in convex settings, it achieves an $\mathcal{O}(1/K)$ rate with alignment coefficient $d_{\alpha,\lambda} = (1 - e^{-\lambda})^{-\alpha}$, while stochastic variants attain $\mathcal{O}(1/k^\alpha)$ error decay. The algorithm maintains $\mathcal{O}(n)$ time complexity equivalent to SGD, with memory overhead scaling as $\mathcal{O}(d/\lambda)$ for parameter dimension $d$. Empirical validation on the Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset demonstrates TFGD's superiority, achieving 98.25\% test accuracy (vs. 92.11\% for SGD) and 2$\times$ faster convergence. The tempered memory mechanism proves particularly effective in medical classification tasks, where feature correlations benefit from stable gradient averaging. These results position TFGD as a robust alternative to conventional optimizers in both theoretical and applied machine learning.
Delay Estimation Based on Multiple Stage Message Passing With Attention Mechanism Using a Real Network Communication Dataset
Authors: Cláudio Modesto, Rebecca Aben-Athar, Andrey Silva, Silvia Lins, Glauco Gonçalves, Aldebaro Klautau
Date: 2024-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: TU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies 2024 12
Tasks: feature selection

Modeling network communication environments with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has gained notoriety in recent years due to the capability of GNNs to generalize well for data defined over graphs. Hence, GNN models have been used to abstract complex relationships from network environments, creating the so-called digital twins, with the objective of predicting important quality of service metrics, such as delay, jitter, link utilization, and so on. However, most previous work has used synthetic data obtained with simulations. The research question posed by the "ITU Graph Neural Networking Challenge 2023" is whether GNN models are capable of estimating the mean per-flow delay network, using data from a real network environment. The solution presented in this paper achieved first place in the mentioned challenge. It adopted a GNN based on multiple-stage message passing and the attention mechanism to predict the mean per-flow delay. Furthermore, feature selection was used to choose a reasonable subset of input parameters. The developed GNN model achieved a mean absolute percentage error under 20.1% in the challenge test dataset, which was composed by network conditions not used in the training dataset.
A Conceptual Framework for AI-based Decision Systems in Critical Infrastructures
Authors: Milad Leyli-Abadi, Ricardo J. Bessa, Jan Viebahn, Daniel Boos, Clark Borst, Alberto Castagna, Ricardo Chavarriaga, Mohamed Hassouna, Bruno Lemetayer, Giulia Leto, Antoine Marot, Maroua Meddeb, Manuel Meyer, Viola Schiaffonati, Manuel Schneider, Toni Waefler
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Philosophy

The interaction between humans and AI in safety-critical systems presents a unique set of challenges that remain partially addressed by existing frameworks. These challenges stem from the complex interplay of requirements for transparency, trust, and explainability, coupled with the necessity for robust and safe decision-making. A framework that holistically integrates human and AI capabilities while addressing these concerns is notably required, bridging the critical gaps in designing, deploying, and maintaining safe and effective systems. This paper proposes a holistic conceptual framework for critical infrastructures by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. It integrates traditionally distinct fields such as mathematics, decision theory, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive engineering and draws on specialized engineering domains, particularly energy, mobility, and aeronautics. The flexibility in its adoption is also demonstrated through its instantiation on an already existing framework.
Task-Oriented Communications for Visual Navigation with Edge-Aerial Collaboration in Low Altitude Economy
Authors: Zhengru Fang, Zhenghao Liu, Jingjing Wang, Senkang Hu, Yu Guo, Yiqin Deng, Yuguang Fang
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Navigation

To support the Low Altitude Economy (LAE), it is essential to achieve precise localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban areas where global positioning system (GPS) signals are unavailable. Vision-based methods offer a viable alternative but face severe bandwidth, memory and processing constraints on lightweight UAVs. Inspired by mammalian spatial cognition, we propose a task-oriented communication framework, where UAVs equipped with multi-camera systems extract compact multi-view features and offload localization tasks to edge servers. We introduce the Orthogonally-constrained Variational Information Bottleneck encoder (O-VIB), which incorporates automatic relevance determination (ARD) to prune non-informative features while enforcing orthogonality to minimize redundancy. This enables efficient and accurate localization with minimal transmission cost. Extensive evaluation on a dedicated LAE UAV dataset shows that O-VIB achieves high-precision localization under stringent bandwidth budgets. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at: github.com/fangzr/TOC-Edge-Aerial.
ClusterLOB: Enhancing Trading Strategies by Clustering Orders in Limit Order Books
Authors: Yichi Zhang, Mihai Cucuringu, Alexander Y. Shestopaloff, Stefan Zohren
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Algorithmic Trading, Clustering

In the rapidly evolving world of financial markets, understanding the dynamics of limit order book (LOB) is crucial for unraveling market microstructure and participant behavior. We introduce ClusterLOB as a method to cluster individual market events in a stream of market-by-order (MBO) data into different groups. To do so, each market event is augmented with six time-dependent features. By applying the K-means++ clustering algorithm to the resulting order features, we are then able to assign each new order to one of three distinct clusters, which we identify as directional, opportunistic, and market-making participants, each capturing unique trading behaviors. Our experimental results are performed on one year of MBO data containing small-tick, medium-tick, and large-tick stocks from NASDAQ. To validate the usefulness of our clustering, we compute order flow imbalances across each cluster within 30-minute buckets during the trading day. We treat each cluster's imbalance as a signal that provides insights into trading strategies and participants' responses to varying market conditions. To assess the effectiveness of these signals, we identify the trading strategy with the highest Sharpe ratio in the training dataset, and demonstrate that its performance in the test dataset is superior to benchmark trading strategies that do not incorporate clustering. We also evaluate trading strategies based on order flow imbalance decompositions across different market event types, including add, cancel, and trade events, to assess their robustness in various market conditions. This work establishes a robust framework for clustering market participant behavior, which helps us to better understand market microstructure, and inform the development of more effective predictive trading signals with practical applications in algorithmic trading and quantitative finance.
WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks
Authors: Ivan Evtimov, Arman Zharmagambetov, Aaron Grattafiori, Chuan Guo, Kamalika Chaudhuri
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Autonomous UI agents powered by AI have tremendous potential to boost human productivity by automating routine tasks such as filing taxes and paying bills. However, a major challenge in unlocking their full potential is security, which is exacerbated by the agent's ability to take action on their user's behalf. Existing tests for prompt injections in web agents either over-simplify the threat by testing unrealistic scenarios or giving the attacker too much power, or look at single-step isolated tasks. To more accurately measure progress for secure web agents, we introduce WASP -- a new publicly available benchmark for end-to-end evaluation of Web Agent Security against Prompt injection attacks. Evaluating with WASP shows that even top-tier AI models, including those with advanced reasoning capabilities, can be deceived by simple, low-effort human-written injections in very realistic scenarios. Our end-to-end evaluation reveals a previously unobserved insight: while attacks partially succeed in up to 86% of the case, even state-of-the-art agents often struggle to fully complete the attacker goals -- highlighting the current state of security by incompetence.
Backdoor Defense in Diffusion Models via Spatial Attention Unlearning
Authors: Abha Jha, Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan, Matthew Salaway, Atharva Sandeep Bhide, Duygu Nur Yaldiz
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: backdoor defense

Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where malicious modifications to the training data cause the model to generate unintended outputs when specific triggers are present. While classification models have seen extensive development of defense mechanisms, generative models remain largely unprotected due to their high-dimensional output space, which complicates the detection and mitigation of subtle perturbations. Defense strategies for diffusion models, in particular, remain under-explored. In this work, we propose Spatial Attention Unlearning (SAU), a novel technique for mitigating backdoor attacks in diffusion models. SAU leverages latent space manipulation and spatial attention mechanisms to isolate and remove the latent representation of backdoor triggers, ensuring precise and efficient removal of malicious effects. We evaluate SAU across various types of backdoor attacks, including pixel-based and style-based triggers, and demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving 100% trigger removal accuracy. Furthermore, SAU achieves a CLIP score of 0.7023, outperforming existing methods while preserving the model's ability to generate high-quality, semantically aligned images. Our results show that SAU is a robust, scalable, and practical solution for securing text-to-image diffusion models against backdoor attacks.
DS_FusionNet: Dynamic Dual-Stream Fusion with Bidirectional Knowledge Distillation for Plant Disease Recognition
Authors: Yanghui Song, Chengfu Yang
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Management

Given the severe challenges confronting the global growth security of economic crops, precise identification and prevention of plant diseases has emerged as a critical issue in artificial intelligence-enabled agricultural technology. To address the technical challenges in plant disease recognition, including small-sample learning, leaf occlusion, illumination variations, and high inter-class similarity, this study innovatively proposes a Dynamic Dual-Stream Fusion Network (DS_FusionNet). The network integrates a dual-backbone architecture, deformable dynamic fusion modules, and bidirectional knowledge distillation strategy, significantly enhancing recognition accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that DS_FusionNet achieves classification accuracies exceeding 90% using only 10% of the PlantDisease and CIFAR-10 datasets, while maintaining 85% accuracy on the complex PlantWild dataset, exhibiting exceptional generalization capabilities. This research not only provides novel technical insights for fine-grained image classification but also establishes a robust foundation for precise identification and management of agricultural diseases.