pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Consistency and Inconsistency in $K$-Means Clustering
Authors: Moïse Blanchard, Adam Quinn Jaffe, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

A celebrated result of Pollard proves asymptotic consistency for $k$-means clustering when the population distribution has finite variance. In this work, we point out that the population-level $k$-means clustering problem is, in fact, well-posed under the weaker assumption of a finite expectation, and we investigate whether some form of asymptotic consistency holds in this setting. As we illustrate in a variety of negative results, the complete story is quite subtle; for example, the empirical $k$-means cluster centers may fail to converge even if there exists a unique set of population $k$-means cluster centers. A detailed analysis of our negative results reveals that inconsistency arises because of an extreme form of cluster imbalance, whereby the presence of outlying samples leads to some empirical $k$-means clusters possessing very few points. We then give a collection of positive results which show that some forms of asymptotic consistency, under only the assumption of finite expectation, may be recovered by imposing some a priori degree of balance among the empirical $k$-means clusters.
Efficiency-Effectiveness Reranking FLOPs for LLM-based Rerankers
Authors: Zhiyuan Peng, Ting-Ruen Wei, Tingyu Song, Yilun Zhao, Yi Fang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Reranking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high computational demands often hinder practical deployment. Existing studies evaluate the efficiency of LLM-based rerankers using proxy metrics such as latency, the number of forward passes, input tokens, and output tokens. However, these metrics depend on hardware and running-time choices (\eg parallel or not, batch size, etc), and often fail to account for model size, making it difficult to interpret and obscuring the evaluation of the efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. To address this issue, we propose E\textsuperscript{2}R-FLOPs, for LLM-based rerankers: ranking metrics per PetaFLOP (RPP) for relevance per compute and queries per PetaFLOP (QPP) for hardware-agnostic throughput. Companied with the new metrics, an interpretable FLOPs estimator is built to estimate the FLOPs of an LLM-based reranker even without running any experiments. Based on the proposed metrics, we conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of LLM-based rerankers with different architecture, studying the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off and bringing this issue to the attention of the research community.
Deep Learning Optimization of Two-State Pinching Antennas Systems
Authors: Odysseas G. Karagiannidis, Victoria E. Galanopoulou, Panagiotis D. Diamantoulakis, Zhiguo Ding, Octavia Dobre
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The evolution of wireless communication systems requires flexible, energy-efficient, and cost-effective antenna technologies. Pinching antennas (PAs), which can dynamically control electromagnetic wave propagation through binary activation states, have recently emerged as a promising candidate. In this work, we investigate the problem of optimally selecting a subset of fixed-position PAs to activate in a waveguide, when the aim is to maximize the communication rate at a user terminal. Due to the complex interplay between antenna activation, waveguide-induced phase shifts, and power division, this problem is formulated as a combinatorial fractional 0-1 quadratic program. To efficiently solve this challenging problem, we use neural network architectures of varying complexity to learn activation policies directly from data, leveraging spatial features and signal structure. Furthermore, we incorporate user location uncertainty into our training and evaluation pipeline to simulate realistic deployment conditions. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed models.
Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?
Authors: Modi shi, Li Chen, Jin Chen, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Diversity

Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the nuanced role of data diversity in robot learning by examining three critical dimensions-task (what to do), embodiment (which robot to use), and expert (who demonstrates)-challenging the conventional intuition of "more diverse is better". Throughout extensive experiments on various robot platforms, we reveal that (1) task diversity proves more critical than per-task demonstration quantity, benefiting transfer from diverse pre-training tasks to novel downstream scenarios; (2) multi-embodiment pre-training data is optional for cross-embodiment transfer-models trained on high-quality single-embodiment data can efficiently transfer to different platforms, showing more desirable scaling property during fine-tuning than multi-embodiment pre-trained models; and (3) expert diversity, arising from individual operational preferences and stochastic variations in human demonstrations, can be confounding to policy learning, with velocity multimodality emerging as a key contributing factor. Based on this insight, we propose a distribution debiasing method to mitigate velocity ambiguity, the yielding GO-1-Pro achieves substantial performance gains of 15%, equivalent to using 2.5 times pre-training data. Collectively, these findings provide new perspectives and offer practical guidance on how to scale robotic manipulation datasets effectively.
What ZTF Saw Where Rubin Looked: Anomaly Hunting in DR23
Authors: Maria V. Pruzhinskaya, Anastasia D. Lavrukhina, Timofey A. Semenikhi, Alina A. Volnova, Sreevarsha Sreejith, Vadim V. Krushinsky, Emmanuel Gangler, Emille E. O. Ishida, Matwey V. Kornilov, Konstantin L. Malanchev
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

We present results from the SNAD VIII Workshop, during which we conducted the first systematic anomaly search in the ZTF fields also observed by LSSTComCam during Rubin Scientific Pipeline commissioning. Using the PineForest active anomaly detection algorithm, we analysed four selected fields (two galactic and two extragalactic) and visually inspected 400 candidates. As a result, we discovered six previously uncatalogued variable stars, including RS~CVn, BY Draconis, ellipsoidal, and solar-type variables, and refined classifications and periods for six known objects. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SNAD anomaly detection pipeline and provide a preview of the discovery potential in the upcoming LSST data.
Modern Methods in Associative Memory
Authors: Dmitry Krotov, Benjamin Hoover, Parikshit Ram, Bao Pham
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00

Associative Memories like the famous Hopfield Networks are elegant models for describing fully recurrent neural networks whose fundamental job is to store and retrieve information. In the past few years they experienced a surge of interest due to novel theoretical results pertaining to their information storage capabilities, and their relationship with SOTA AI architectures, such as Transformers and Diffusion Models. These connections open up possibilities for interpreting the computation of traditional AI networks through the theoretical lens of Associative Memories. Additionally, novel Lagrangian formulations of these networks make it possible to design powerful distributed models that learn useful representations and inform the design of novel architectures. This tutorial provides an approachable introduction to Associative Memories, emphasizing the modern language and methods used in this area of research, with practical hands-on mathematical derivations and coding notebooks.
CultureCLIP: Empowering CLIP with Cultural Awareness through Synthetic Images and Contextualized Captions
Authors: Yuchen Huang, Zhiyuan Fan, Zhitao He, Sandeep Polisetty, Wenyan Li, Yi R. Fung
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP excel in multimodal understanding but struggle with contextually relevant fine-grained visual features, making it difficult to distinguish visually similar yet culturally distinct concepts. This limitation stems from the scarcity of high-quality culture-specific datasets, the lack of integrated contextual knowledge, and the absence of hard negatives highlighting subtle distinctions. To address these challenges, we first design a data curation pipeline that leverages open-sourced VLMs and text-to-image diffusion models to construct CulTwin, a synthetic cultural dataset. This dataset consists of paired concept-caption-image triplets, where concepts visually resemble each other but represent different cultural contexts. Then, we fine-tune CLIP on CulTwin to create CultureCLIP, which aligns cultural concepts with contextually enhanced captions and synthetic images through customized contrastive learning, enabling finer cultural differentiation while preserving generalization capabilities. Experiments on culturally relevant benchmarks show that CultureCLIP outperforms the base CLIP, achieving up to a notable 5.49% improvement in fine-grained concept recognition on certain tasks, while preserving CLIP's original generalization ability, validating the effectiveness of our data synthesis and VLM backbone training paradigm in capturing subtle cultural distinctions.
Differential Mamba
Authors: Nadav Schneider, Itamar Zimerman, Eliya Nachmani
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Mamba, Retrieval

Sequence models like Transformers and RNNs often overallocate attention to irrelevant context, leading to noisy intermediate representations. This degrades LLM capabilities by promoting hallucinations, weakening long-range and retrieval abilities, and reducing robustness. Recent work has shown that differential design can mitigate this issue in Transformers, improving their effectiveness across various applications. In this paper, we explore whether these techniques, originally developed for Transformers, can be applied to Mamba, a recent architecture based on selective state-space layers that achieves Transformer-level performance with greater efficiency. We show that a naive adaptation of differential design to Mamba is insufficient and requires careful architectural modifications. To address this, we introduce a novel differential mechanism for Mamba, empirically validated on language modeling benchmarks, demonstrating improved retrieval capabilities and superior performance over vanilla Mamba. Finally, we conduct extensive ablation studies and empirical analyses to justify our design choices and provide evidence that our approach effectively mitigates the overallocation problem in Mamba-based models. Our code is publicly available.
UQLM: A Python Package for Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models
Authors: Dylan Bouchard, Mohit Singh Chauhan, David Skarbrevik, Ho-Kyeong Ra, Viren Bajaj, Zeya Ahmad
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Uncertainty Quantification

Hallucinations, defined as instances where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate false or misleading content, pose a significant challenge that impacts the safety and trust of downstream applications. We introduce UQLM, a Python package for LLM hallucination detection using state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques. This toolkit offers a suite of UQ-based scorers that compute response-level confidence scores ranging from 0 to 1. This library provides an off-the-shelf solution for UQ-based hallucination detection that can be easily integrated to enhance the reliability of LLM outputs.
SQLBarber: A System Leveraging Large Language Models to Generate Customized and Realistic SQL Workloads
Authors: Jiale Lao, Immanuel Trummer
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Database research and development often require a large number of SQL queries for benchmarking purposes. However, acquiring real-world SQL queries is challenging due to privacy concerns, and existing SQL generation methods are limited in customization and in satisfying realistic constraints. To address this issue, we present SQLBarber, a system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate customized and realistic SQL workloads. SQLBarber (i) eliminates the need for users to manually craft SQL templates in advance, while providing the flexibility to accept natural language specifications to constrain SQL templates, (ii) scales efficiently to generate large volumes of queries matching any user-defined cost distribution (e.g., cardinality and execution plan cost), and (iii) uses execution statistics from Amazon Redshift and Snowflake to derive SQL template specifications and query cost distributions that reflect real-world query characteristics. SQLBarber introduces (i) a declarative interface for users to effortlessly generate customized SQL templates, (ii) an LLM-powered pipeline augmented with a self-correction module that profiles, refines, and prunes SQL templates based on query costs, and (iii) a Bayesian Optimizer to efficiently explore different predicate values and identify a set of queries that satisfy the target cost distribution. We construct and open-source ten benchmarks of varying difficulty levels and target query cost distributions based on real-world statistics from Snowflake and Amazon Redshift. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks show that SQLBarber is the only system that can generate customized SQL templates. It reduces query generation time by one to three orders of magnitude, and significantly improves alignment with the target cost distribution, compared with existing methods.
Conservative approximation-based feedforward neural network for WENO schemes
Authors: Kwanghyuk Park, Jiaxi Gu, Jae-Hun Jung
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00

In this work, we present the feedforward neural network based on the conservative approximation to the derivative from point values, for the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes in solving hyperbolic conservation laws. The feedforward neural network, whose inputs are point values from the three-point stencil and outputs are two nonlinear weights, takes the place of the classical WENO weighting procedure. For the training phase, we employ the supervised learning and create a new labeled dataset for one-dimensional conservative approximation, where we construct a numerical flux function from the given point values such that the flux difference approximates the derivative to high-order accuracy. The symmetric-balancing term is introduced for the loss function so that it propels the neural network to match the conservative approximation to the derivative and satisfy the symmetric property that WENO3-JS and WENO3-Z have in common. The consequent WENO schemes, WENO3-CADNNs, demonstrate robust generalization across various benchmark scenarios and resolutions, where they outperform WENO3-Z and achieve accuracy comparable to WENO5-JS.
DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Detecting Subjectivity via Transfer-Learning and Corrective Data Augmentation
Authors: Maximilian Heil, Dionne Bang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Data Augmentation, Transfer Learning

This paper presents our submission to Task 1, Subjectivity Detection, of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2025. We investigate the effectiveness of transfer-learning and stylistic data augmentation to improve classification of subjective and objective sentences in English news text. Our approach contrasts fine-tuning of pre-trained encoders and transfer-learning of fine-tuned transformer on related tasks. We also introduce a controlled augmentation pipeline using GPT-4o to generate paraphrases in predefined subjectivity styles. To ensure label and style consistency, we employ the same model to correct and refine the generated samples. Results show that transfer-learning of specified encoders outperforms fine-tuning general-purpose ones, and that carefully curated augmentation significantly enhances model robustness, especially in detecting subjective content. Our official submission placed us $16^{th}$ of 24 participants. Overall, our findings underscore the value of combining encoder specialization with label-consistent augmentation for improved subjectivity detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2025-subject.
The Delta Learning Hypothesis: Preference Tuning on Weak Data can Yield Strong Gains
Authors: Scott Geng, Hamish Ivison, Chun-Liang Li, Maarten Sap, Jerry Li, Ranjay Krishna, Pang Wei Koh
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, MMLU

Improvements in language models are often driven by improving the quality of the data we train them on, which can be limiting when strong supervision is scarce. In this work, we show that paired preference data consisting of individually weak data points can enable gains beyond the strength of each individual data point. We formulate the delta learning hypothesis to explain this phenomenon, positing that the relative quality delta between points suffices to drive learning via preference tuning--even when supervised finetuning on the weak data hurts. We validate our hypothesis in controlled experiments and at scale, where we post-train 8B models on preference data generated by pairing a small 3B model's responses with outputs from an even smaller 1.5B model to create a meaningful delta. Strikingly, on a standard 11-benchmark evaluation suite (MATH, MMLU, etc.), our simple recipe matches the performance of Tulu 3, a state-of-the-art open model tuned from the same base model while relying on much stronger supervisors (e.g., GPT-4o). Thus, delta learning enables simpler and cheaper open recipes for state-of-the-art post-training. To better understand delta learning, we prove in logistic regression that the performance gap between two weak teacher models provides useful signal for improving a stronger student. Overall, our work shows that models can learn surprisingly well from paired data that might typically be considered weak.
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization
Authors: Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Automated Theorem Proving, Mathematical Reasoning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Translating natural language mathematical statements into formal, executable code is a fundamental challenge in automated theorem proving. While prior work has focused on generation and compilation success, little attention has been paid to the critic phase-the evaluation of whether generated formalizations truly capture the semantic intent of the original problem. In this paper, we introduce CriticLean, a novel critic-guided reinforcement learning framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component. Specifically, first, we propose the CriticLeanGPT, trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to rigorously assess the semantic fidelity of Lean 4 formalizations. Then, we introduce CriticLeanBench, a benchmark designed to measure models' ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations, and demonstrate that our trained CriticLeanGPT models can significantly outperform strong open- and closed-source baselines. Building on the CriticLean framework, we construct FineLeanCorpus, a dataset comprising over 285K problems that exhibits rich domain diversity, broad difficulty coverage, and high correctness based on human evaluation. Overall, our findings highlight that optimizing the critic phase is essential for producing reliable formalizations, and we hope our CriticLean will provide valuable insights for future advances in formal mathematical reasoning.
Fast Bilateral Teleoperation and Imitation Learning Using Sensorless Force Control via Accurate Dynamics Model
Authors: Koki Yamane, Yunhan Li, Masashi Konosu, Koki Inami, Junji Oaki, Sho Sakaino, Toshiaki Tsuji
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

In recent years, the advancement of imitation learning has led to increased interest in teleoperating low-cost manipulators to collect demonstration data. However, most existing systems rely on unilateral control, which only transmits target position values. While this approach is easy to implement and suitable for slow, non-contact tasks, it struggles with fast or contact-rich operations due to the absence of force feedback. This work demonstrates that fast teleoperation with force feedback is feasible even with force-sensorless, low-cost manipulators by leveraging 4-channel bilateral control. Based on accurately identified manipulator dynamics, our method integrates nonlinear terms compensation, velocity and external force estimation, and variable gain corresponding to inertial variation. Furthermore, using data collected by 4-channel bilateral control, we show that incorporating force information into both the input and output of learned policies improves performance in imitation learning. These results highlight the practical effectiveness of our system for high-fidelity teleoperation and data collection on affordable hardware.
A Method for Optimizing Connections in Differentiable Logic Gate Networks
Authors: Wout Mommen, Lars Keuninckx, Matthias Hartmann, Piet Wambacq
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00

We introduce a novel method for partial optimization of the connections in Deep Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (LGNs). Our training method utilizes a probability distribution over a subset of connections per gate input, selecting the connection with highest merit, after which the gate-types are selected. We show that the connection-optimized LGNs outperform standard fixed-connection LGNs on the Yin-Yang, MNIST and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks, while requiring only a fraction of the number of logic gates. When training all connections, we demonstrate that 8000 simple logic gates are sufficient to achieve over 98% on the MNIST data set. Additionally, we show that our network has 24 times fewer gates, while performing better on the MNIST data set compared to standard fully connected LGNs. As such, our work shows a pathway towards fully trainable Boolean logic.