pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast Finite-Time Sliding Mode Control for Chattering-Free Trajectory Tracking of Robotic Manipulators
Authors: Momammad Ali Ranjbar
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

Achieving precise and efficient trajectory tracking in robotic arms remains a key challenge due to system uncertainties and chattering effects in conventional sliding mode control (SMC). This paper presents a chattering-free fast terminal sliding mode control (FTSMC) strategy for a three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) robotic arm, designed to enhance tracking accuracy and robustness while ensuring finite-time convergence. The control framework is developed using Newton-Euler dynamics, followed by a state-space representation that captures the system's angular position and velocity. By incorporating an improved sliding surface and a Lyapunov-based stability analysis, the proposed FTSMC effectively mitigates chattering while preserving the advantages of SMC, such as fast response and strong disturbance rejection. The controller's performance is rigorously evaluated through comparisons with conventional PD sliding mode control (PDSMC) and terminal sliding mode control (TSMC). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior trajectory tracking performance, faster convergence, and enhanced stability compared to existing methods, making it a promising solution for high-precision robotic applications.
From Target Tracking to Targeting Track -- Part II: Regularized Polynomial Trajectory Optimization
Authors: Tiancheng Li, Yan Song, Guchong Li, Hao Li
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00

Target tracking entails the estimation of the evolution of the target state over time, namely the target trajectory. Different from the classical state space model, our series of studies, including this paper, model the collection of the target state as a stochastic process (SP) that is further decomposed into a deterministic part which represents the trend of the trajectory and a residual SP representing the residual fitting error. Subsequently, the tracking problem is formulated as a learning problem regarding the trajectory SP for which a key part is to estimate a trajectory FoT (T-FoT) best fitting the measurements in time series. For this purpose, we consider the polynomial T-FoT and address the regularized polynomial T-FoT optimization employing two distinct regularization strategies seeking trade-off between the accuracy and simplicity. One limits the order of the polynomial and then the best choice is determined by grid searching in a narrow, bounded range while the other adopts $\ell_0$ norm regularization for which the hybrid Newton solver is employed. Simulation results obtained in both single and multiple maneuvering target scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.
Exploring Gender Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition Technology
Authors: Hend ElGhazaly, Bahman Mirheidari, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Heidi Christensen
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Fairness, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This study investigates factors influencing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems' fairness and performance across genders, beyond the conventional examination of demographics. Using the LibriSpeech dataset and the Whisper small model, we analyze how performance varies across different gender representations in training data. Our findings suggest a complex interplay between the gender ratio in training data and ASR performance. Optimal fairness occurs at specific gender distributions rather than a simple 50-50 split. Furthermore, our findings suggest that factors like pitch variability can significantly affect ASR accuracy. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of biases in ASR systems, highlighting the importance of carefully curated training data in mitigating gender bias.
From Vision to Sound: Advancing Audio Anomaly Detection with Vision-Based Algorithms
Authors: Manuel Barusco, Francesco Borsatti, Davide Dalle Pezze, Francesco Paissan, Elisabetta Farella, Gian Antonio Susto
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Recent advances in Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) have introduced sophisticated algorithms leveraging embeddings generated by pre-trained feature extractors. Inspired by these developments, we investigate the adaptation of such algorithms to the audio domain to address the problem of Audio Anomaly Detection (AAD). Unlike most existing AAD methods, which primarily classify anomalous samples, our approach introduces fine-grained temporal-frequency localization of anomalies within the spectrogram, significantly improving explainability. This capability enables a more precise understanding of where and when anomalies occur, making the results more actionable for end users. We evaluate our approach on industrial and environmental benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of VAD techniques in detecting anomalies in audio signals. Moreover, they improve explainability by enabling localized anomaly identification, making audio anomaly detection systems more interpretable and practical.
Steering Language Model to Stable Speech Emotion Recognition via Contextual Perception and Chain of Thought
Authors: Zhixian Zhao, Xinfa Zhu, Xinsheng Wang, Shuiyuan Wang, Xuelong Geng, Wenjie Tian, Lei Xie
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Speech Emotion Recognition

Large-scale audio language models (ALMs), such as Qwen2-Audio, are capable of comprehending diverse audio signal, performing audio analysis and generating textual responses. However, in speech emotion recognition (SER), ALMs often suffer from hallucinations, resulting in misclassifications or irrelevant outputs. To address these challenges, we propose C$^2$SER, a novel ALM designed to enhance the stability and accuracy of SER through Contextual perception and Chain of Thought (CoT). C$^2$SER integrates the Whisper encoder for semantic perception and Emotion2Vec-S for acoustic perception, where Emotion2Vec-S extends Emotion2Vec with semi-supervised learning to enhance emotional discrimination. Additionally, C$^2$SER employs a CoT approach, processing SER in a step-by-step manner while leveraging speech content and speaking styles to improve recognition. To further enhance stability, C$^2$SER introduces self-distillation from explicit CoT to implicit CoT, mitigating error accumulation and boosting recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments show that C$^2$SER outperforms existing popular ALMs, such as Qwen2-Audio and SECap, delivering more stable and precise emotion recognition. We release the training code, checkpoints, and test sets to facilitate further research.
NotaGen: Advancing Musicality in Symbolic Music Generation with Large Language Model Training Paradigms
Authors: Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu, Jianhuai Hu, Xingjian Du, Yueqi Peng, Yongxin Huang, Shuai Fan, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Music Generation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We introduce NotaGen, a symbolic music generation model aiming to explore the potential of producing high-quality classical sheet music. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), NotaGen adopts pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning paradigms (henceforth referred to as the LLM training paradigms). It is pre-trained on 1.6M pieces of music in ABC notation, and then fine-tuned on approximately 9K high-quality classical compositions conditioned on "period-composer-instrumentation" prompts. For reinforcement learning, we propose the CLaMP-DPO method, which further enhances generation quality and controllability without requiring human annotations or predefined rewards. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CLaMP-DPO in symbolic music generation models with different architectures and encoding schemes. Furthermore, subjective A/B tests show that NotaGen outperforms baseline models against human compositions, greatly advancing musical aesthetics in symbolic music generation.
Enhancing Speech Quality through the Integration of BGRU and Transformer Architectures
Authors: Souliman Alghnam, Mohammad Alhussien, Khaled Shaheen
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement plays an essential role in improving the quality of speech signals in noisy environments. This paper investigates the efficacy of integrating Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BGRU) and Transformer models for speech enhancement tasks. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, our study demonstrates the superiority of this hybrid architecture over traditional methods and standalone models. The combined BGRU-Transformer framework excels in capturing temporal dependencies and learning complex signal patterns, leading to enhanced noise reduction and improved speech quality. Results show significant performance gains compared to existing approaches, highlighting the potential of this integrated model in real-world applications. The seamless integration of BGRU and Transformer architectures not only enhances system robustness but also opens the road for advanced speech processing techniques. This research contributes to the ongoing efforts in speech enhancement technology and sets a solid foundation for future investigations into optimizing model architectures, exploring many application scenarios, and advancing the field of speech processing in noisy environments.
Perceptual Noise-Masking with Music through Deep Spectral Envelope Shaping
Authors: Clémentine Berger, Roland Badeau, Slim Essid
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

People often listen to music in noisy environments, seeking to isolate themselves from ambient sounds. Indeed, a music signal can mask some of the noise's frequency components due to the effect of simultaneous masking. In this article, we propose a neural network based on a psychoacoustic masking model, designed to enhance the music's ability to mask ambient noise by reshaping its spectral envelope with predicted filter frequency responses. The model is trained with a perceptual loss function that balances two constraints: effectively masking the noise while preserving the original music mix and the user's chosen listening level. We evaluate our approach on simulated data replicating a user's experience of listening to music with headphones in a noisy environment. The results, based on defined objective metrics, demonstrate that our system improves the state of the art.
voc2vec: A Foundation Model for Non-Verbal Vocalization
Authors: Alkis Koudounas, Moreno La Quatra, Marco Sabato Siniscalchi, Elena Baralis
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Speech foundation models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in speech-related tasks. Nevertheless, these models often struggle with non-verbal audio data, such as vocalizations, baby crying, etc., which are critical for various real-world applications. Audio foundation models well handle non-speech data but also fail to capture the nuanced features of non-verbal human sounds. In this work, we aim to overcome the above shortcoming and propose a novel foundation model, termed voc2vec, specifically designed for non-verbal human data leveraging exclusively open-source non-verbal audio datasets. We employ a collection of 10 datasets covering around 125 hours of non-verbal audio. Experimental results prove that voc2vec is effective in non-verbal vocalization classification, and it outperforms conventional speech and audio foundation models. Moreover, voc2vec consistently outperforms strong baselines, namely OpenSmile and emotion2vec, on six different benchmark datasets. To the best of the authors' knowledge, voc2vec is the first universal representation model for vocalization tasks.
Multizone sound field reproduction with direction-of-arrival-distribution-based regularization and its application to binaural-centered mode-matching
Authors: Ryo Matsuda, Makoto Otani
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00

In higher-order Ambisonics, a framework for sound field reproduction, secondary-source driving signals are generally obtained by regularized mode matching. The authors have proposed a regularization technique based on direction-of-arrival (DoA) distribution of wavefronts in the primary sound field. Such DoA-distribution-based regularization enables a suppression of excessively large driving signal gains for secondary sources that are in the directions far from the primary source direction. This improves the reproduction accuracy at regions away from the reproduction center. First, this study applies the DoA-distribution-based regularization to a multizone sound field reproduction based on the addition theorem. Furthermore, the regularized multizone sound field reproduction is extended to a binaural-centered mode matching (BCMM), which produces two reproduction points, one at each ear, to avoid a degraded reproduction accuracy due to a shrinking sweet spot at higher frequencies. Free-field and binaural simulations were numerically performed to examine the effectiveness of the DoA-distribution-based regularization on the multizone sound field reproduction and the BCMM.
LLM-Based Design Pattern Detection
Authors: Christian Schindler, Andreas Rausch
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Detecting design pattern instances in unfamiliar codebases remains a challenging yet essential task for improving software quality and maintainability. Traditional static analysis tools often struggle with the complexity, variability, and lack of explicit annotations that characterize real-world pattern implementations. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models to automatically identify design pattern instances across diverse codebases. Our method focuses on recognizing the roles classes play within the pattern instances. By providing clearer insights into software structure and intent, this research aims to support developers, improve comprehension, and streamline tasks such as refactoring, maintenance, and adherence to best practices.
SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution
Authors: Yuxiang Wei, Olivier Duchenne, Jade Copet, Quentin Carbonneaux, Lingming Zhang, Daniel Fried, Gabriel Synnaeve, Rishabh Singh, Sida I. Wang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The recent DeepSeek-R1 release has demonstrated the immense potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the general reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While DeepSeek-R1 and other follow-up work primarily focus on applying RL to competitive coding and math problems, this paper introduces SWE-RL, the first approach to scale RL-based LLM reasoning for real-world software engineering. Leveraging a lightweight rule-based reward (e.g., the similarity score between ground-truth and LLM-generated solutions), SWE-RL enables LLMs to autonomously recover a developer's reasoning processes and solutions by learning from extensive open-source software evolution data -- the record of a software's entire lifecycle, including its code snapshots, code changes, and events such as issues and pull requests. Trained on top of Llama 3, our resulting reasoning model, Llama3-SWE-RL-70B, achieves a 41.0% solve rate on SWE-bench Verified -- a human-verified collection of real-world GitHub issues. To our knowledge, this is the best performance reported for medium-sized (<100B) LLMs to date, even comparable to leading proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o. Surprisingly, despite performing RL solely on software evolution data, Llama3-SWE-RL has even emerged with generalized reasoning skills. For example, it shows improved results on five out-of-domain tasks, namely, function coding, library use, code reasoning, mathematics, and general language understanding, whereas a supervised-finetuning baseline even leads to performance degradation on average. Overall, SWE-RL opens up a new direction to improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through reinforcement learning on massive software engineering data.
Phoeni6: a Systematic Approach for Evaluating the Energy Consumption of Neural Networks
Authors: Antônio Oliveira-Filho, Wellington Silva-de-Souza, Carlos Alberto Valderrama Sakuyama, Samuel Xavier-de-Souza
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper presents Phoeni6, a systematic approach for assessing the energy consumption of neural networks while upholding the principles of fair comparison and reproducibility. Phoeni6 offers a comprehensive solution for managing energy-related data and configurations, ensuring portability, transparency, and coordination during evaluations. The methodology automates energy evaluations through containerized tools, robust database management, and versatile data models. In the first case study, the energy consumption of AlexNet and MobileNet was compared using raw and resized images. Results showed that MobileNet is up to 6.25% more energy-efficient for raw images and 2.32% for resized datasets, while maintaining competitive accuracy levels. In the second study, the impact of image file formats on energy consumption was evaluated. BMP images reduced energy usage by up to 30% compared to PNG, highlighting the influence of file formats on energy efficiency. These findings emphasize the importance of Phoeni6 in optimizing energy consumption for diverse neural network applications and establishing sustainable artificial intelligence practices.
Architecting Digital Twins for Intelligent Transportation Systems
Authors: Hiya Bhatt, Sahil, Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Rahul Biju, Deepak Gangadharan, Ramona Trestian, Purav Shah
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Management

Modern transportation systems face growing challenges in managing traffic flow, ensuring safety, and maintaining operational efficiency amid dynamic traffic patterns. Addressing these challenges requires intelligent solutions capable of real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and adaptive control. This paper proposes an architecture for DigIT, a Digital Twin (DT) platform for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), designed to overcome the limitations of existing frameworks by offering a modular and scalable solution for traffic management. Built on a Domain Concept Model (DCM), the architecture systematically models key ITS components enabling seamless integration of predictive modeling and simulations. The architecture leverages machine learning models to forecast traffic patterns based on historical and real-time data. To adapt to evolving traffic patterns, the architecture incorporates adaptive Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), automating the deployment and lifecycle management of predictive models. Evaluation results highlight the effectiveness of the architecture in delivering accurate predictions and computational efficiency.
Large Language Model Driven Agents for Simulating Echo Chamber Formation
Authors: Chenhao Gu, Ling Luo, Zainab Razia Zaidi, Shanika Karunasekera
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The rise of echo chambers on social media platforms has heightened concerns about polarization and the reinforcement of existing beliefs. Traditional approaches for simulating echo chamber formation have often relied on predefined rules and numerical simulations, which, while insightful, may lack the nuance needed to capture complex, real-world interactions. In this paper, we present a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as generative agents to simulate echo chamber dynamics within social networks. The novelty of our approach is that it incorporates both opinion updates and network rewiring behaviors driven by LLMs, allowing for a context-aware and semantically rich simulation of social interactions. Additionally, we utilize real-world Twitter (now X) data to benchmark the LLM-based simulation against actual social media behaviors, providing insights into the accuracy and realism of the generated opinion trends. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of LLMs in modeling echo chamber formation, capturing both structural and semantic dimensions of opinion clustering. %This work contributes to a deeper understanding of social influence dynamics and offers a new tool for studying polarization in online communities.
AutoCas: Autoregressive Cascade Predictor in Social Networks via Large Language Models
Authors: Yuhao Zheng, Chenghua Gong, Rui Sun, Juyuan Zhang, Liming Pan, Linyuan Lv
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, Misinformation, Prediction, Prompt Learning, Time Series, Time Series Prediction

Popularity prediction in information cascades plays a crucial role in social computing, with broad applications in viral marketing, misinformation control, and content recommendation. However, information propagation mechanisms, user behavior, and temporal activity patterns exhibit significant diversity, necessitating a foundational model capable of adapting to such variations. At the same time, the amount of available cascade data remains relatively limited compared to the vast datasets used for training large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of leveraging LLMs for time-series prediction by exploiting commonalities across different time-series domains. Building on this insight, we introduce the Autoregressive Information Cascade Predictor (AutoCas), an LLM-enhanced model designed specifically for cascade popularity prediction. Unlike natural language sequences, cascade data is characterized by complex local topologies, diffusion contexts, and evolving dynamics, requiring specialized adaptations for effective LLM integration. To address these challenges, we first tokenize cascade data to align it with sequence modeling principles. Next, we reformulate cascade diffusion as an autoregressive modeling task to fully harness the architectural strengths of LLMs. Beyond conventional approaches, we further introduce prompt learning to enhance the synergy between LLMs and cascade prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoCas significantly outperforms baseline models in cascade popularity prediction while exhibiting scaling behavior inherited from LLMs. Code is available at this repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AutoCas-85C6
Leveraging Structural Knowledge in Diffusion Models for Source Localization in Data-Limited Graph Scenarios
Authors: Hongyi Chen, Jingtao Ding, Xiaojun Liang, Yong Li, Xiao-Ping Zhang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Misinformation

The source localization problem in graph information propagation is crucial for managing various network disruptions, from misinformation spread to infrastructure failures. While recent deep generative approaches have shown promise in this domain, their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of real-world propagation data. This paper introduces SIDSL (\textbf{S}tructure-prior \textbf{I}nformed \textbf{D}iffusion model for \textbf{S}ource \textbf{L}ocalization), a novel framework that addresses three key challenges in limited-data scenarios: unknown propagation patterns, complex topology-propagation relationships, and class imbalance between source and non-source nodes. SIDSL incorporates topology-aware priors through graph label propagation and employs a propagation-enhanced conditional denoiser with a GNN-parameterized label propagation module (GNN-LP). Additionally, we propose a structure-prior biased denoising scheme that initializes from structure-based source estimations rather than random noise, effectively countering class imbalance issues. Experimental results across four real-world datasets demonstrate SIDSL's superior performance, achieving 7.5-13.3% improvements in F1 scores compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, when pretrained with simulation data of synthetic patterns, SIDSL maintains robust performance with only 10% of training data, surpassing baselines by more than 18.8%. These results highlight SIDSL's effectiveness in real-world applications where labeled data is scarce.