pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Appearance Defect Detection Method for Cigarettes Based on C-CenterNet
Authors: Hongyu Liu, Guowu Yuan, Lei Yang, Kunxiao Liu, Hao Zhou
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Keypoint Estimation

Due to the poor adaptability of traditional methods in the cigarette detection task on the automatic cigarette production line, it is difficult to accurately identify whether a cigarette has defects and the types of defects; thus, a cigarette appearance defect detection method based on C-CenterNet is proposed. This detector uses keypoint estimation to locate center points and regresses all other defect properties. Firstly, Resnet50 is used as the backbone feature extraction network, and the convolutional block attention mechanism (CBAM) is introduced to enhance the network's ability to extract effective features and reduce the interference of non-target information. At the same time, the feature pyramid network is used to enhance the feature extraction of each layer. Then, deformable convolution is used to replace part of the common convolution to enhance the learning ability of different shape defects. Finally, the activation function ACON (ActivateOrNot) is used instead of the ReLU activation function, and the activation operation of some neurons is adaptively selected to improve the detection accuracy of the network. The experimental results are mainly acquired via the mean Average Precision (mAP). The experimental results show that the mAP of the C-CenterNet model applied in the cigarette appearance defect detection task is 95.01%. Compared with the original CenterNet model, the model's success rate is increased by 6.14%, so it can meet the requirements of precision and adaptability in cigarette detection tasks on the automatic cigarette production line.
Many-Task Federated Fine-Tuning via Unified Task Vectors
Authors: Vasileios Tsouvalas, Tanir Ozcelebi, Nirvana Meratnia
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Federated Learning, Transfer Learning

Federated Learning (FL) traditionally assumes homogeneous client tasks; however, in real-world scenarios, clients often specialize in diverse tasks, introducing task heterogeneity. To address this challenge, Many-Task FL (MaT-FL) has emerged, enabling clients to collaborate effectively despite task diversity. Existing MaT-FL approaches rely on client grouping or personalized layers, requiring the server to manage individual models and failing to account for clients handling multiple tasks. We propose MaTU, a MaT-FL approach that enables joint learning of task vectors across clients, eliminating the need for clustering or client-specific weight storage at the server. Our method introduces a novel aggregation mechanism that determines task similarity based on the direction of clients task vectors and constructs a unified task vector encapsulating all tasks. To address task-specific requirements, we augment the unified task vector with lightweight modulators that facilitate knowledge transfer among related tasks while disentangling dissimilar ones. Evaluated across 30 datasets, MaTU achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art MaT-FL approaches, with results comparable to per-task fine-tuning, while delivering significant communication savings.
Provably Near-Optimal Federated Ensemble Distillation with Negligible Overhead
Authors: Won-Jun Jang, Hyeon-Seo Park, Si-Hyeon Lee
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Federated ensemble distillation addresses client heterogeneity by generating pseudo-labels for an unlabeled server dataset based on client predictions and training the server model using the pseudo-labeled dataset. The unlabeled server dataset can either be pre-existing or generated through a data-free approach. The effectiveness of this approach critically depends on the method of assigning weights to client predictions when creating pseudo-labels, especially in highly heterogeneous settings. Inspired by theoretical results from GANs, we propose a provably near-optimal weighting method that leverages client discriminators trained with a server-distributed generator and local datasets. Our experiments on various image classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms baselines. Furthermore, we show that the additional communication cost, client-side privacy leakage, and client-side computational overhead introduced by our method are negligible, both in scenarios with and without a pre-existing server dataset.
Confidence Improves Self-Consistency in LLMs
Authors: Amir Taubenfeld, Tom Sheffer, Eran Ofek, Amir Feder, Ariel Goldstein, Zorik Gekhman, Gal Yona
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Self-consistency decoding enhances LLMs' performance on reasoning tasks by sampling diverse reasoning paths and selecting the most frequent answer. However, it is computationally expensive, as sampling many of these (lengthy) paths is required to increase the chances that the correct answer emerges as the most frequent one. To address this, we introduce Confidence-Informed Self-Consistency (CISC). CISC performs a weighted majority vote based on confidence scores obtained directly from the model. By prioritizing high-confidence paths, it can identify the correct answer with a significantly smaller sample size. When tested on nine models and four datasets, CISC outperforms self-consistency in nearly all configurations, reducing the required number of reasoning paths by over 40% on average. In addition, we introduce the notion of within-question confidence evaluation, after showing that standard evaluation methods are poor predictors of success in distinguishing correct and incorrect answers to the same question. In fact, the most calibrated confidence method proved to be the least effective for CISC. Lastly, beyond these practical implications, our results and analyses show that LLMs can effectively judge the correctness of their own outputs, contributing to the ongoing debate on this topic.
Fine-Tuning Federated Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Systems for Transportation IoT
Authors: Robert Akinie, Nana Kankam Brym Gyimah, Mansi Bhavsar, John Kelly
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Federated Learning, Intrusion Detection

The rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) and on-device computing has revolutionized various industries, including transportation, through the development of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). These technologies improve traffic management and vehicle safety, but also introduce significant security and privacy concerns, such as cyberattacks and data breaches. Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are increasingly inadequate in detecting modern threats, leading to the adoption of ML-based IDS solutions. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising method for enabling the decentralized training of IDS models on distributed edge devices without sharing sensitive data. However, deploying FL-based IDS in CAV networks poses unique challenges, including limited computational and memory resources on edge devices, competing demands from critical applications such as navigation and safety systems, and the need to scale across diverse hardware and connectivity conditions. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid server-edge FL framework that offloads pre-training to a central server while enabling lightweight fine-tuning on edge devices. This approach reduces memory usage by up to 42%, decreases training times by up to 75%, and achieves competitive IDS accuracy of up to 99.2%. Scalability analyses further demonstrates minimal performance degradation as the number of clients increase, highlighting the framework's feasibility for CAV networks and other IoT applications.
Federated Learning with Reservoir State Analysis for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Keigo Nogami, Tamura Hiroto, Gouhei Tanaka
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Computational Efficiency, Federated Learning, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection

With a growing data privacy concern, federated learning has emerged as a promising framework to train machine learning models without sharing locally distributed data. In federated learning, local model training by multiple clients and model integration by a server are repeated only through model parameter sharing. Most existing federated learning methods assume training deep learning models, which are often computationally demanding. To deal with this issue, we propose federated learning methods with reservoir state analysis to seek computational efficiency and data privacy protection simultaneously. Specifically, our method relies on Mahalanobis Distance of Reservoir States (MD-RS) method targeting time series anomaly detection, which learns a distribution of reservoir states for normal inputs and detects anomalies based on a deviation from the learned distribution. Iterative updating of statistical parameters in the MD-RS enables incremental federated learning (IncFed MD-RS). We evaluate the performance of IncFed MD-RS using benchmark datasets for time series anomaly detection. The results show that IncFed MD-RS outperforms other federated learning methods with deep learning and reservoir computing models particularly when clients' data are relatively short and heterogeneous. We demonstrate that IncFed MD-RS is robust against reduced sample data compared to other methods. We also show that the computational cost of IncFed MD-RS can be reduced by subsampling from the reservoir states without performance degradation. The proposed method is beneficial especially in anomaly detection applications where computational efficiency, algorithm simplicity, and low communication cost are required.
Using Federated Machine Learning in Predictive Maintenance of Jet Engines
Authors: Asaph Matheus Barbosa, Thao Vy Nhat Ngo, Elaheh Jafarigol, Theodore B. Trafalis, Emuobosa P. Ojoboh
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

The goal of this paper is to predict the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of turbine jet engines using a federated machine learning framework. Federated Learning enables multiple edge devices/nodes or servers to collaboratively train a shared model without sharing sensitive data, thus preserving data privacy and security. By implementing a nonlinear model, the system aims to capture complex relationships and patterns in the engine data to enhance the accuracy of RUL predictions. This approach leverages decentralized computation, allowing models to be trained locally at each device before aggregating the learned weights at a central server. By predicting the RUL of jet engines accurately, maintenance schedules can be optimized, downtime reduced, and operational efficiency improved, ultimately leading to cost savings and enhanced performance in the aviation industry. Computational results are provided by using the C-MAPSS dataset which is publicly available on the NASA website and is a valuable resource for studying and analyzing engine degradation behaviors in various operational scenarios.
Principles and Components of Federated Learning Architectures
Authors: MD Abdullah Al Nasim, Fatema Tuj Johura Soshi, Parag Biswas, A. S. M Anas Ferdous, Abdur Rashid, Angona Biswas, Kishor Datta Gupta
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning framework where multiple clients, from mobiles to enterprises, collaboratively construct a model under the orchestration of a central server but still retain the decentralized nature of the training data. This decentralized training of models offers numerous advantages, including cost savings, enhanced privacy, improved security, and compliance with legal requirements. However, for all its apparent advantages, FL is not immune to the limitations of conventional machine learning methodologies. This article provides an elaborate explanation of the inherent concepts and features found within federated learning architecture, addressing five key domains: system heterogeneity, data partitioning, machine learning models, communication protocols, and privacy techniques. This article also highlights the limitations in this domain and proposes avenues for future work. Besides, we provide a set of architectural patterns for federated learning systems, which are derived from the systematic survey of the literature. The main elements of FL, the fundamentals of Federated Learning, and a few architectural specifics will all be better understood with the aid of this research.
CHIRLA: Comprehensive High-resolution Identification and Re-identification for Large-scale Analysis
Authors: Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Felix Escalona, Francisco Gomez-Donoso, Miguel Cazorla
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a key challenge in computer vision, requiring the matching of individuals across different cameras, locations, and time periods. While most research focuses on short-term scenarios with minimal appearance changes, real-world applications demand robust Re-ID systems capable of handling long-term scenarios, where persons' appearances can change significantly due to variations in clothing and physical characteristics. In this paper, we present CHIRLA, Comprehensive High-resolution Identification and Re-identification for Large-scale Analysis, a novel dataset specifically designed for long-term person Re-ID. CHIRLA consists of recordings from strategically placed cameras over a seven-month period, capturing significant variations in both temporal and appearance attributes, including controlled changes in participants' clothing and physical features. The dataset includes 22 individuals, four connected indoor environments, and seven cameras. We collected more than five hours of video that we semi-automatically labeled to generate around one million bounding boxes with identity annotations. By introducing this comprehensive benchmark, we aim to facilitate the development and evaluation of Re-ID algorithms that can reliably perform in challenging, long-term real-world scenarios.
Can We Trust AI Benchmarks? An Interdisciplinary Review of Current Issues in AI Evaluation
Authors: Maria Eriksson, Erasmo Purificato, Arman Noroozian, Joao Vinagre, Guillaume Chaslot, Emilia Gomez, David Fernandez-Llorca
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Quantitative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Benchmarks have emerged as fundamental tools for evaluating the performance, capability, and safety of AI models and systems. Currently, they shape the direction of AI development and are playing an increasingly prominent role in regulatory frameworks. As their influence grows, however, so too does concerns about how and with what effects they evaluate highly sensitive topics such as capabilities, including high-impact capabilities, safety and systemic risks. This paper presents an interdisciplinary meta-review of about 100 studies that discuss shortcomings in quantitative benchmarking practices, published in the last 10 years. It brings together many fine-grained issues in the design and application of benchmarks (such as biases in dataset creation, inadequate documentation, data contamination, and failures to distinguish signal from noise) with broader sociotechnical issues (such as an over-focus on evaluating text-based AI models according to one-time testing logic that fails to account for how AI models are increasingly multimodal and interact with humans and other technical systems). Our review also highlights a series of systemic flaws in current benchmarking practices, such as misaligned incentives, construct validity issues, unknown unknowns, and problems with the gaming of benchmark results. Furthermore, it underscores how benchmark practices are fundamentally shaped by cultural, commercial and competitive dynamics that often prioritise state-of-the-art performance at the expense of broader societal concerns. By providing an overview of risks associated with existing benchmarking procedures, we problematise disproportionate trust placed in benchmarks and contribute to ongoing efforts to improve the accountability and relevance of quantitative AI benchmarks within the complexities of real-world scenarios.
On the Computability of Multiclass PAC Learning
Authors: Pascale Gourdeau, Tosca Lechner, Ruth Urner
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: PAC learning

We study the problem of computable multiclass learnability within the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning framework of Valiant (1984). In the recently introduced computable PAC (CPAC) learning framework of Agarwal et al. (2020), both learners and the functions they output are required to be computable. We focus on the case of finite label space and start by proposing a computable version of the Natarajan dimension and showing that it characterizes CPAC learnability in this setting. We further generalize this result by establishing a meta-characterization of CPAC learnability for a certain family of dimensions: computable distinguishers. Distinguishers were defined by Ben-David et al. (1992) as a certain family of embeddings of the label space, with each embedding giving rise to a dimension. It was shown that the finiteness of each such dimension characterizes multiclass PAC learnability for finite label space in the non-computable setting. We show that the corresponding computable dimensions for distinguishers characterize CPAC learning. We conclude our analysis by proving that the DS dimension, which characterizes PAC learnability for infinite label space, cannot be expressed as a distinguisher (even in the case of finite label space).
Imitation Learning from a Single Temporally Misaligned Video
Authors: William Huey, Huaxiaoyue Wang, Anne Wu, Yoav Artzi, Sanjiban Choudhury
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

We examine the problem of learning sequential tasks from a single visual demonstration. A key challenge arises when demonstrations are temporally misaligned due to variations in timing, differences in embodiment, or inconsistencies in execution. Existing approaches treat imitation as a distribution-matching problem, aligning individual frames between the agent and the demonstration. However, we show that such frame-level matching fails to enforce temporal ordering or ensure consistent progress. Our key insight is that matching should instead be defined at the level of sequences. We propose that perfect matching occurs when one sequence successfully covers all the subgoals in the same order as the other sequence. We present ORCA (ORdered Coverage Alignment), a dense per-timestep reward function that measures the probability of the agent covering demonstration frames in the correct order. On temporally misaligned demonstrations, we show that agents trained with the ORCA reward achieve $4.5$x improvement ($0.11 \rightarrow 0.50$ average normalized returns) for Meta-world tasks and $6.6$x improvement ($6.55 \rightarrow 43.3$ average returns) for Humanoid-v4 tasks compared to the best frame-level matching algorithms. We also provide empirical analysis showing that ORCA is robust to varying levels of temporal misalignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca/
Towards Foundational Models for Dynamical System Reconstruction: Hierarchical Meta-Learning via Mixture of Experts
Authors: Roussel Desmond Nzoyem, David A. W. Barton, Tom Deakin
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Mixture-of-Experts, scientific discovery

As foundational models reshape scientific discovery, a bottleneck persists in dynamical system reconstruction (DSR): the ability to learn across system hierarchies. Many meta-learning approaches have been applied successfully to single systems, but falter when confronted with sparse, loosely related datasets requiring multiple hierarchies to be learned. Mixture of Experts (MoE) offers a natural paradigm to address these challenges. Despite their potential, we demonstrate that naive MoEs are inadequate for the nuanced demands of hierarchical DSR, largely due to their gradient descent-based gating update mechanism which leads to slow updates and conflicted routing during training. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MixER: Mixture of Expert Reconstructors, a novel sparse top-1 MoE layer employing a custom gating update algorithm based on $K$-means and least squares. Extensive experiments validate MixER's capabilities, demonstrating efficient training and scalability to systems of up to ten parametric ordinary differential equations. However, our layer underperforms state-of-the-art meta-learners in high-data regimes, particularly when each expert is constrained to process only a fraction of a dataset composed of highly related data points. Further analysis with synthetic and neuroscientific time series suggests that the quality of the contextual representations generated by MixER is closely linked to the presence of hierarchical structure in the data.
Diffusion Models for Computational Neuroimaging: A Survey
Authors: Haokai Zhao, Haowei Lou, Lina Yao, Wei Peng, Ehsan Adeli, Kilian M Pohl, Yu Zhang
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Decoding, Denoising, Survey

Computational neuroimaging involves analyzing brain images or signals to provide mechanistic insights and predictive tools for human cognition and behavior. While diffusion models have shown stability and high-quality generation in natural images, there is increasing interest in adapting them to analyze brain data for various neurological tasks such as data enhancement, disease diagnosis and brain decoding. This survey provides an overview of recent efforts to integrate diffusion models into computational neuroimaging. We begin by introducing the common neuroimaging data modalities, follow with the diffusion formulations and conditioning mechanisms. Then we discuss how the variations of the denoising starting point, condition input and generation target of diffusion models are developed and enhance specific neuroimaging tasks. For a comprehensive overview of the ongoing research, we provide a publicly available repository at https://github.com/JoeZhao527/dm4neuro.
Group-CLIP Uncertainty Modeling for Group Re-Identification
Authors: Qingxin Zhang, Haoyan Wei, Yang Qian
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Group Re-Identification (Group ReID) aims matching groups of pedestrians across non-overlapping cameras. Unlike single-person ReID, Group ReID focuses more on the changes in group structure, emphasizing the number of members and their spatial arrangement. However, most methods rely on certainty-based models, which consider only the specific group structures in the group images, often failing to match unseen group configurations. To this end, we propose a novel Group-CLIP UncertaintyModeling (GCUM) approach that adapts group text descriptions to undetermined accommodate member and layout variations. Specifically, we design a Member Variant Simulation (MVS)module that simulates member exclusions using a Bernoulli distribution and a Group Layout Adaptation (GLA) module that generates uncertain group text descriptions with identity-specific tokens. In addition, we design a Group RelationshipConstruction Encoder (GRCE) that uses group features to refine individual features, and employ cross-modal contrastive loss to obtain generalizable knowledge from group text descriptions. It is worth noting that we are the first to employ CLIP to GroupReID, and extensive experiments show that GCUM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art Group ReID methods.