pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedBKD: Distilled Federated Learning to Embrace Gerneralization and Personalization on Non-IID Data
Authors: Yushan Zhao, Jinyuan He, Donglai Chen, Weijie Luo, Chong Xie, Ri Zhang, Yonghong Chen, Yan Xu
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized collaborative machine learning (ML) technique. It provides a solution to the issues of isolated data islands and data privacy leakage in industrial ML practices. One major challenge in FL is handling the non-identical and independent distributed (non-IID) data. Current solutions either focus on constructing an all-powerful global model, or customizing personalized local models. Few of them can provide both a well-generalized global model and well-performed local models at the same time. Additionally, many FL solutions to the non-IID problem are benefited from introducing public datasets. However, this will also increase the risk of data leakage. To tackle the problems, we propose a novel data-free distillation framework, Federated Bidirectional Knowledge Distillation (FedBKD). Specifically, we train Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for synthetic data. During the GAN training, local models serve as discriminators and their parameters are frozen. The synthetic data is then used for bidirectional distillation between global and local models to achieve knowledge interactions so that performances for both sides are improved. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 benchmarks under different non-IID settings. The results show that FedBKD achieves SOTA performances in every case.
Q-resafe: Assessing Safety Risks and Quantization-aware Safety Patching for Quantized Large Language Models
Authors: KeJia Chen, Jiawen Zhang, Jiacong Hu, Yu Wang, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Quantized large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention and significance for enabling deployment in resource-constrained environments. However, emerging studies on a few calibration dataset-free quantization methods suggest that quantization may compromise the safety capabilities of LLMs, underscoring the urgent need for systematic safety evaluations and effective mitigation strategies. In this paper, we present comprehensive safety evaluations across various mainstream quantization techniques and diverse calibration datasets, utilizing widely accepted safety benchmarks. To address the identified safety vulnerabilities, we propose a quantization-aware safety patching framework, Q-resafe, to efficiently restore the safety capabilities of quantized LLMs while minimizing any adverse impact on utility. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Q-resafe successfully re-aligns the safety of quantized LLMs with their pre-quantization counterparts, even under challenging evaluation scenarios. Project page is available at: https://github.com/Thecommonirin/Qresafe.
Time-series surrogates from energy consumers generated by machine learning approaches for long-term forecasting scenarios
Authors: Ben Gerhards, Nikita Popkov, Annekatrin König, Marcel Arpogaus, Bastian Schäfermeier, Leonie Riedl, Stephan Vogt, Philip Hehlert
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Generative Adversarial Network, Time Series

Forecasting attracts a lot of research attention in the electricity value chain. However, most studies concentrate on short-term forecasting of generation or consumption with a focus on systems and less on individual consumers. Even more neglected is the topic of long-term forecasting of individual power consumption. Here, we provide an in-depth comparative evaluation of data-driven methods for generating synthetic time series data tailored to energy consumption long-term forecasting. High-fidelity synthetic data is crucial for a wide range of applications, including state estimations in energy systems or power grid planning. In this study, we assess and compare the performance of multiple state-of-the-art but less common techniques: a hybrid Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN), Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and Masked Autoregressive Bernstein polynomial normalizing Flows (MABF). We analyze the ability of each method to replicate the temporal dynamics, long-range dependencies, and probabilistic transitions characteristic of individual energy consumption profiles. Our comparative evaluation highlights the strengths and limitations of: WGAN, DDPM, HMM and MABF aiding in selecting the most suitable approach for state estimations and other energy-related tasks. Our generation and analysis framework aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of synthetic power consumption data while generating data that fulfills criteria like anonymisation - preserving privacy concerns mitigating risks of specific profiling of single customers. This study utilizes an open-source dataset from households in Germany with 15min time resolution. The generated synthetic power profiles can readily be used in applications like state estimations or consumption forecasting.
Generating and Customizing Robotic Arm Trajectories using Neural Networks
Authors: Andrej Lúčny, Matilde Antonj, Carlo Mazzola, Hana Hornáčková, Igor Farkaš
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00

We introduce a neural network approach for generating and customizing the trajectory of a robotic arm, that guarantees precision and repeatability. To highlight the potential of this novel method, we describe the design and implementation of the technique and show its application in an experimental setting of cognitive robotics. In this scenario, the NICO robot was characterized by the ability to point to specific points in space with precise linear movements, increasing the predictability of the robotic action during its interaction with humans. To achieve this goal, the neural network computes the forward kinematics of the robot arm. By integrating it with a generator of joint angles, another neural network was developed and trained on an artificial dataset created from suitable start and end poses of the robotic arm. Through the computation of angular velocities, the robot was characterized by its ability to perform the movement, and the quality of its action was evaluated in terms of shape and accuracy. Thanks to its broad applicability, our approach successfully generates precise trajectories that could be customized in their shape and adapted to different settings.
Argumentative Ensembling for Robust Recourse under Model Multiplicity
Authors: Junqi Jiang, Antonio Rago, Francesco Leofante, Francesca Toni
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

In machine learning, it is common to obtain multiple equally performing models for the same prediction task, e.g., when training neural networks with different random seeds. Model multiplicity (MM) is the situation which arises when these competing models differ in their predictions for the same input, for which ensembling is often employed to determine an aggregation of the outputs. Providing recourse recommendations via counterfactual explanations (CEs) under MM thus becomes complex, since the CE may not be valid across all models, i.e., the CEs are not robust under MM. In this work, we formalise the problem of providing recourse under MM, which we name recourse-aware ensembling (RAE). We propose the idea that under MM, CEs for each individual model should be considered alongside their predictions so that the aggregated prediction and recourse are decided in tandem. Centred around this intuition, we introduce six desirable properties for solutions to this problem. For solving RAE, we propose a novel argumentative ensembling method which guarantees the robustness of CEs under MM. Specifically, our method leverages computational argumentation to explicitly represent the conflicts between models and counterfactuals regarding prediction results and CE validity. It then uses argumentation semantics to resolve the conflicts and obtain the final solution, in a manner which is parametric to the chosen semantics. Our method also allows for the specification of preferences over the models under MM, allowing further customisation of the ensemble. In a comprehensive theoretical analysis, we characterise the behaviour of argumentative ensembling with four different argumentation semantics. We then empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in satisfying desirable properties with eight instantiations of our method. (Abstract is shortened for arXiv.)
Beyond-Expert Performance with Limited Demonstrations: Efficient Imitation Learning with Double Exploration
Authors: Heyang Zhao, Xingrui Yu, David M. Bossens, Ivor W. Tsang, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, MuJoCo

Imitation learning is a central problem in reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn a policy that mimics the expert's behavior. In practice, it is often challenging to learn the expert policy from a limited number of demonstrations accurately due to the complexity of the state space. Moreover, it is essential to explore the environment and collect data to achieve beyond-expert performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel imitation learning algorithm called Imitation Learning with Double Exploration (ILDE), which implements exploration in two aspects: (1) optimistic policy optimization via an exploration bonus that rewards state-action pairs with high uncertainty to potentially improve the convergence to the expert policy, and (2) curiosity-driven exploration of the states that deviate from the demonstration trajectories to potentially yield beyond-expert performance. Empirically, we demonstrate that ILDE outperforms the state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms in terms of sample efficiency and achieves beyond-expert performance on Atari and MuJoCo tasks with fewer demonstrations than in previous work. We also provide a theoretical justification of ILDE as an uncertainty-regularized policy optimization method with optimistic exploration, leading to a regret growing sublinearly in the number of episodes.
Comparative Analysis of Deep Learning Models for Crop Disease Detection: A Transfer Learning Approach
Authors: Saundarya Subramaniam, Shalini Majumdar, Shantanu Nadar, Kaustubh Kulkarni
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Management, Transfer Learning

This research presents the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) - driven crop disease detection system designed to assist farmers in rural areas with limited resources. We aim to compare different deep learning models for a comparative analysis, focusing on their efficacy in transfer learning. By leveraging deep learning models, including EfficientNet, ResNet101, MobileNetV2, and our custom CNN, which achieved a validation accuracy of 95.76%, the system effectively classifies plant diseases. This research demonstrates the potential of transfer learning in reshaping agricultural practices, improving crop health management, and supporting sustainable farming in rural environments.
Feature Hallucination for Self-supervised Action Recognition
Authors: Lei Wang, Piotr Koniusz
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Hallucination, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, Saliency Detection, Self-Supervised Action Recognition

Understanding human actions in videos requires more than raw pixel analysis; it relies on high-level semantic reasoning and effective integration of multimodal features. We propose a deep translational action recognition framework that enhances recognition accuracy by jointly predicting action concepts and auxiliary features from RGB video frames. At test time, hallucination streams infer missing cues, enriching feature representations without increasing computational overhead. To focus on action-relevant regions beyond raw pixels, we introduce two novel domain-specific descriptors. Object Detection Features (ODF) aggregate outputs from multiple object detectors to capture contextual cues, while Saliency Detection Features (SDF) highlight spatial and intensity patterns crucial for action recognition. Our framework seamlessly integrates these descriptors with auxiliary modalities such as optical flow, Improved Dense Trajectories, skeleton data, and audio cues. It remains compatible with state-of-the-art architectures, including I3D, AssembleNet, Video Transformer Network, FASTER, and recent models like VideoMAE V2 and InternVideo2. To handle uncertainty in auxiliary features, we incorporate aleatoric uncertainty modeling in the hallucination step and introduce a robust loss function to mitigate feature noise. Our multimodal self-supervised action recognition framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V2, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing fine-grained action dynamics.
DipSVD: Dual-importance Protected SVD for Efficient LLM Compression
Authors: Xuan Ding, Rui Sun, Yunjian Zhang, Xiu Yan, Yueqi Zhou, Kaihao Huang, Suzhong Fu, Chuanlong Xie, Yao Zhu
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression, Quantization

The ever-increasing computational demands and deployment costs of large language models (LLMs) have spurred numerous compressing methods. Compared to quantization and unstructured pruning, SVD compression offers superior hardware compatibility and theoretical guarantees. However, existing SVD-based methods focus on the overall discrepancy between the original and compressed matrices while overlooking the protection of critical components within the matrix, which leads to inferior performance in the compressed models. This paper proposes a dual-level importance protection mechanism to enhance SVD-based compression methods: (1) local importance protection: preserving the most critical singular vectors within each weight matrix through channel-weighted data whitening; and (2) global importance protection: enabling less important layers to bear a greater portion of the compression burden through either a heuristic or optimization-based approach, thereby minimizing the impact of compression on critical layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DipSVD outperforms existing SVD-based compression approaches across multiple benchmarks, achieving superior model performance especially at high model compression ratios.
A foundation model with multi-variate parallel attention to generate neuronal activity
Authors: Francesco Carzaniga, Michael Hersche, Abu Sebastian, Kaspar Schindler, Abbas Rahimi
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Seizure Detection, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Learning from multi-variate time-series with heterogeneous channel configurations remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly in clinical domains such as intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), where channel setups vary widely across subjects. In this work, we introduce multi-variate parallel attention (MVPA), a novel self-attention mechanism that disentangles content, temporal, and spatial attention, enabling flexible, generalizable, and efficient modeling of time-series data with varying channel counts and configurations. We use MVPA to build MVPFormer, a generative foundation model for human electrophysiology, trained to predict the evolution of iEEG signals across diverse subjects. To support this and future effort by the community, we release the SWEC iEEG dataset, the largest publicly available iEEG dataset to date, comprising nearly 10,000 hours of recordings from heterogeneous clinical sources. MVPFormer leverages MVPA to achieve strong generalization across subjects, demonstrating expert-level performance in seizure detection and outperforming state-of-the-art Transformer baselines on our SWEC, the MAYO, and the FNUSA dataset. We further validate MVPA on standard time-series forecasting and classification tasks, where it matches or exceeds existing attention-based models. Together, our contributions establish MVPA as a general-purpose attention mechanism for heterogeneous time-series and MVPFormer as the first open-source, open-weights, and open-data iEEG foundation model with state-of-the-art clinical performance. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/multi-variate-parallel-transformer. The SWEC iEEG dataset is available at https://mb-neuro.medical-blocks.ch/public_access/databases/ieeg/swec_ieeg.
Self-Supervised Graph Learning via Spectral Bootstrapping and Laplacian-Based Augmentations
Authors: Lorenzo Bini, Stephane Marchand-Maillet
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

We present LaplaceGNN, a novel self-supervised graph learning framework that bypasses the need for negative sampling by leveraging spectral bootstrapping techniques. Our method integrates Laplacian-based signals into the learning process, allowing the model to effectively capture rich structural representations without relying on contrastive objectives or handcrafted augmentations. By focusing on positive alignment, LaplaceGNN achieves linear scaling while offering a simpler, more efficient, self-supervised alternative for graph neural networks, applicable across diverse domains. Our contributions are twofold: we precompute spectral augmentations through max-min centrality-guided optimization, enabling rich structural supervision without relying on handcrafted augmentations, then we integrate an adversarial bootstrapped training scheme that further strengthens feature learning and robustness. Our extensive experiments on different benchmark datasets show that LaplaceGNN achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art self-supervised graph methods, offering a promising direction for efficiently learning expressive graph representations.
CARMA: Context-Aware Situational Grounding of Human-Robot Group Interactions by Combining Vision-Language Models with Object and Action Recognition
Authors: Joerg Deigmoeller, Stephan Hasler, Nakul Agarwal, Daniel Tanneberg, Anna Belardinelli, Reza Ghoddoosian, Chao Wang, Felix Ocker, Fan Zhang, Behzad Dariush, Michael Gienger
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Decision Making

We introduce CARMA, a system for situational grounding in human-robot group interactions. Effective collaboration in such group settings requires situational awareness based on a consistent representation of present persons and objects coupled with an episodic abstraction of events regarding actors and manipulated objects. This calls for a clear and consistent assignment of instances, ensuring that robots correctly recognize and track actors, objects, and their interactions over time. To achieve this, CARMA uniquely identifies physical instances of such entities in the real world and organizes them into grounded triplets of actors, objects, and actions. To validate our approach, we conducted three experiments, where multiple humans and a robot interact: collaborative pouring, handovers, and sorting. These scenarios allow the assessment of the system's capabilities as to role distinction, multi-actor awareness, and consistent instance identification. Our experiments demonstrate that the system can reliably generate accurate actor-action-object triplets, providing a structured and robust foundation for applications requiring spatiotemporal reasoning and situated decision-making in collaborative settings.
Client Clustering Meets Knowledge Sharing: Enhancing Privacy and Robustness in Personalized Peer-to-Peer Learning
Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Maheri, Denys Herasymuk, Hamed Haddadi
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

The growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has intensified the need for personalized learning methods that can operate efficiently and privately across heterogeneous, resource-constrained devices. However, enabling effective personalized learning in decentralized settings introduces several challenges, including efficient knowledge transfer between clients, protection of data privacy, and resilience against poisoning attacks. In this paper, we address these challenges by developing P4 (Personalized, Private, Peer-to-Peer) -- a method designed to deliver personalized models for resource-constrained IoT devices while ensuring differential privacy and robustness against poisoning attacks. Our solution employs a lightweight, fully decentralized algorithm to privately detect client similarity and form collaborative groups. Within each group, clients leverage differentially private knowledge distillation to co-train their models, maintaining high accuracy while ensuring robustness to the presence of malicious clients. We evaluate P4 on popular benchmark datasets using both linear and CNN-based architectures across various heterogeneity settings and attack scenarios. Experimental results show that P4 achieves 5% to 30% higher accuracy than leading differentially private peer-to-peer approaches and maintains robustness with up to 30% malicious clients. Additionally, we demonstrate its practicality by deploying it on resource-constrained devices, where collaborative training between two clients adds only ~7 seconds of overhead.
SV-LLM: An Agentic Approach for SoC Security Verification using Large Language Models
Authors: Dipayan Saha, Shams Tarek, Hasan Al Shaikh, Khan Thamid Hasan, Pavan Sai Nalluri, Md. Ajoad Hasan, Nashmin Alam, Jingbo Zhou, Sujan Kumar Saha, Mark Tehranipoor, Farimah Farahmandi
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, In-Context Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Vulnerability Detection

Ensuring the security of complex system-on-chips (SoCs) designs is a critical imperative, yet traditional verification techniques struggle to keep pace due to significant challenges in automation, scalability, comprehensiveness, and adaptability. The advent of large language models (LLMs), with their remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and advanced reasoning, presents a new paradigm for tackling these issues. Moving beyond monolithic models, an agentic approach allows for the creation of multi-agent systems where specialized LLMs collaborate to solve complex problems more effectively. Recognizing this opportunity, we introduce SV-LLM, a novel multi-agent assistant system designed to automate and enhance SoC security verification. By integrating specialized agents for tasks like verification question answering, security asset identification, threat modeling, test plan and property generation, vulnerability detection, and simulation-based bug validation, SV-LLM streamlines the workflow. To optimize their performance in these diverse tasks, agents leverage different learning paradigms, such as in-context learning, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The system aims to reduce manual intervention, improve accuracy, and accelerate security analysis, supporting proactive identification and mitigation of risks early in the design cycle. We demonstrate its potential to transform hardware security practices through illustrative case studies and experiments that showcase its applicability and efficacy.