pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
External-Wrench Estimation for Aerial Robots Exploiting a Learned Model
Authors: Ayham Alharbat, Gabriele Ruscelli, Roberto Diversi, Abeje Mersha
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

This paper presents an external wrench estimator that uses a hybrid dynamics model consisting of a first-principles model and a neural network. This framework addresses one of the limitations of the state-of-the-art model-based wrench observers: the wrench estimation of these observers comprises the external wrench (e.g. collision, physical interaction, wind); in addition to residual wrench (e.g. model parameters uncertainty or unmodeled dynamics). This is a problem if these wrench estimations are to be used as wrench feedback to a force controller, for example. In the proposed framework, a neural network is combined with a first-principles model to estimate the residual dynamics arising from unmodeled dynamics and parameters uncertainties, then, the hybrid trained model is used to estimate the external wrench, leading to a wrench estimation that has smaller contributions from the residual dynamics, and affected more by the external wrench. This method is validated with numerical simulations of an aerial robot in different flying scenarios and different types of residual dynamics, and the statistical analysis of the results shows that the wrench estimation error has improved significantly compared to a model-based wrench observer using only a first-principles model.
RL-based Control of UAS Subject to Significant Disturbance
Authors: Kousheek Chakraborty, Thijs Hof, Ayham Alharbat, Abeje Mersha
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper proposes a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based control framework for position and attitude control of an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) subjected to significant disturbance that can be associated with an uncertain trigger signal. The proposed method learns the relationship between the trigger signal and disturbance force, enabling the system to anticipate and counteract the impending disturbances before they occur. We train and evaluate three policies: a baseline policy trained without exposure to the disturbance, a reactive policy trained with the disturbance but without the trigger signal, and a predictive policy that incorporates the trigger signal as an observation and is exposed to the disturbance during training. Our simulation results show that the predictive policy outperforms the other policies by minimizing position deviations through a proactive correction maneuver. This work highlights the potential of integrating predictive cues into RL frameworks to improve UAS performance.
Vector Quantized-Elites: Unsupervised and Problem-Agnostic Quality-Diversity Optimization
Authors: Constantinos Tsakonas, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Quality-Diversity algorithms have transformed optimization by prioritizing the discovery of diverse, high-performing solutions over a single optimal result. However, traditional Quality-Diversity methods, such as MAP-Elites, rely heavily on predefined behavioral descriptors and complete prior knowledge of the task to define the behavioral space grid, limiting their flexibility and applicability. In this work, we introduce Vector Quantized-Elites (VQ-Elites), a novel Quality-Diversity algorithm that autonomously constructs a structured behavioral space grid using unsupervised learning, eliminating the need for prior task-specific knowledge. At the core of VQ-Elites is the integration of Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders, which enables the dynamic learning of behavioral descriptors and the generation of a structured, rather than unstructured, behavioral space grid - a significant advancement over existing unsupervised Quality-Diversity approaches. This design establishes VQ-Elites as a flexible, robust, and task-agnostic optimization framework. To further enhance the performance of unsupervised Quality-Diversity algorithms, we introduce two key components: behavioral space bounding and cooperation mechanisms, which significantly improve convergence and performance. We validate VQ-Elites on robotic arm pose-reaching and mobile robot space-covering tasks. The results demonstrate its ability to efficiently generate diverse, high-quality solutions, emphasizing its adaptability, scalability, robustness to hyperparameters, and potential to extend Quality-Diversity optimization to complex, previously inaccessible domains.
Reverberation-based Features for Sound Event Localization and Detection with Distance Estimation
Authors: Davide Berghi, Philip J. B. Jackson
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Direction of Arrival Estimation, Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) involves predicting active sound event classes over time while estimating their positions. The localization subtask in SELD is usually treated as a direction of arrival estimation problem, ignoring source distance. Only recently, SELD was extended to 3D by incorporating distance estimation, enabling the prediction of sound event positions in 3D space (3D SELD). However, existing methods lack input features designed for distance estimation. We argue that reverberation encodes valuable information for this task. This paper introduces two novel feature formats for 3D SELD based on reverberation: one using direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR) and another leveraging signal autocorrelation to provide the model with insights into early reflections. Pre-training on synthetic data improves relative distance error (RDE) and overall SELD score, with autocorrelation-based features reducing RDE by over 3 percentage points on the STARSS23 dataset. The code to extract the features is available at github.com/dberghi/SELD-distance-features.
On The Landscape of Spoken Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Siddhant Arora, Kai-Wei Chang, Chung-Ming Chien, Yifan Peng, Haibin Wu, Yossi Adi, Emmanuel Dupoux, Hung-Yi Lee, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The field of spoken language processing is undergoing a shift from training custom-built, task-specific models toward using and optimizing spoken language models (SLMs) which act as universal speech processing systems. This trend is similar to the progression toward universal language models that has taken place in the field of (text) natural language processing. SLMs include both "pure" language models of speech -- models of the distribution of tokenized speech sequences -- and models that combine speech encoders with text language models, often including both spoken and written input or output. Work in this area is very diverse, with a range of terminology and evaluation settings. This paper aims to contribute an improved understanding of SLMs via a unifying literature survey of recent work in the context of the evolution of the field. Our survey categorizes the work in this area by model architecture, training, and evaluation choices, and describes some key challenges and directions for future work.
Mitigating Timbre Leakage with Universal Semantic Mapping Residual Block for Voice Conversion
Authors: Na Li, Chuke Wang, Yu Gu, Zhifeng Li
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) transforms source speech into a target voice by preserving the content. However, timbre information from the source speaker is inherently embedded in the content representations, causing significant timbre leakage and reducing similarity to the target speaker. To address this, we introduce a residual block to a content extractor. The residual block consists of two weighted branches: 1) universal semantic dictionary based Content Feature Re-expression (CFR) module, supplying timbre-free content representation. 2) skip connection to the original content layer, providing complementary fine-grained information. In the CFR module, each dictionary entry in the universal semantic dictionary represents a phoneme class, computed statistically using speech from multiple speakers, creating a stable, speaker-independent semantic set. We introduce a CFR method to obtain timbre-free content representations by expressing each content frame as a weighted linear combination of dictionary entries using corresponding phoneme posteriors as weights. Extensive experiments across various VC frameworks demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates timbre leakage and significantly improves similarity to the target speaker.
Passive Underwater Acoustic Signal Separation based on Feature Decoupling Dual-path Network
Authors: Yucheng Liu, Longyu Jiang
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Separation

Signal separation in the passive underwater acoustic domain has heavily relied on deep learning techniques to isolate ship radiated noise. However, the separation networks commonly used in this domain stem from speech separation applications and may not fully consider the unique aspects of underwater acoustics beforehand, such as the influence of different propagation media, signal frequencies and modulation characteristics. This oversight highlights the need for tailored approaches that account for the specific characteristics of underwater sound propagation. This study introduces a novel temporal network designed to separate ship radiated noise by employing a dual-path model and a feature decoupling approach. The mixed signals' features are transformed into a space where they exhibit greater independence, with each dimension's significance decoupled. Subsequently, a fusion of local and global attention mechanisms is employed in the separation layer. Extensive comparisons showcase the effectiveness of this method when compared to other prevalent network models, as evidenced by its performance in the ShipsEar and DeepShip datasets.
Generalized Multilingual Text-to-Speech Generation with Language-Aware Style Adaptation
Authors: Haowei Lou, Hye-Young Paik, Sheng Li, Wen Hu, Lina Yao
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Text-to-Speech (TTS) models can generate natural, human-like speech across multiple languages by transforming phonemes into waveforms. However, multilingual TTS remains challenging due to discrepancies in phoneme vocabularies and variations in prosody and speaking style across languages. Existing approaches either train separate models for each language, which achieve high performance at the cost of increased computational resources, or use a unified model for multiple languages that struggles to capture fine-grained, language-specific style variations. In this work, we propose LanStyleTTS, a non-autoregressive, language-aware style adaptive TTS framework that standardizes phoneme representations and enables fine-grained, phoneme-level style control across languages. This design supports a unified multilingual TTS model capable of producing accurate and high-quality speech without the need to train language-specific models. We evaluate LanStyleTTS by integrating it with several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive TTS architectures. Results show consistent performance improvements across different model backbones. Furthermore, we investigate a range of acoustic feature representations, including mel-spectrograms and autoencoder-derived latent features. Our experiments demonstrate that latent encodings can significantly reduce model size and computational cost while preserving high-quality speech generation.
Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Fabian Retkowski, Maike Züfle, Andreas Sudmann, Dinah Pfau, Shinji Watanabe, Jan Niehues, Alexander Waibel
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Meeting Summarization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Survey, Text Summarization

Speech summarization has become an essential tool for efficiently managing and accessing the growing volume of spoken and audiovisual content. However, despite its increasing importance, speech summarization remains loosely defined. The field intersects with several research areas, including speech recognition, text summarization, and specific applications like meeting summarization. This survey not only examines existing datasets and evaluation protocols, which are crucial for assessing the quality of summarization approaches, but also synthesizes recent developments in the field, highlighting the shift from traditional systems to advanced models like fine-tuned cascaded architectures and end-to-end solutions. In doing so, we surface the ongoing challenges, such as the need for realistic evaluation benchmarks, multilingual datasets, and long-context handling.
Towards an Understanding of Context Utilization in Code Intelligence
Authors: Yanlin Wang, Kefeng Duan, Dewu Zheng, Ensheng Shi, Fengji Zhang, Yanli Wang, Jiachi Chen, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma, Hongyu Zhang, Qianxiang Wang, Zibin Zheng
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00

Code intelligence is an emerging domain in software engineering, aiming to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various code-related tasks. Recent research suggests that incorporating contextual information beyond the basic original task inputs (i.e., source code) can substantially enhance model performance. Such contextual signals may be obtained directly or indirectly from sources such as API documentation or intermediate representations like abstract syntax trees can significantly improve the effectiveness of code intelligence. Despite growing academic interest, there is a lack of systematic analysis of context in code intelligence. To address this gap, we conduct an extensive literature review of 146 relevant studies published between September 2007 and August 2024. Our investigation yields four main contributions. (1) A quantitative analysis of the research landscape, including publication trends, venues, and the explored domains; (2) A novel taxonomy of context types used in code intelligence; (3) A task-oriented analysis investigating context integration strategies across diverse code intelligence tasks; (4) A critical evaluation of evaluation methodologies for context-aware methods. Based on these findings, we identify fundamental challenges in context utilization in current code intelligence systems and propose a research roadmap that outlines key opportunities for future research.
DocAgent: A Multi-Agent System for Automated Code Documentation Generation
Authors: Dayu Yang, Antoine Simoulin, Xin Qian, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Grey Yang
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Documentation Generation

High-quality code documentation is crucial for software development especially in the era of AI. However, generating it automatically using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing approaches often produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. We introduce DocAgent, a novel multi-agent collaborative system using topological code processing for incremental context building. Specialized agents (Reader, Searcher, Writer, Verifier, Orchestrator) then collaboratively generate documentation. We also propose a multi-faceted evaluation framework assessing Completeness, Helpfulness, and Truthfulness. Comprehensive experiments show DocAgent significantly outperforms baselines consistently. Our ablation study confirms the vital role of the topological processing order. DocAgent offers a robust approach for reliable code documentation generation in complex and proprietary repositories.
SeaView: Software Engineering Agent Visual Interface for Enhanced Workflow
Authors: Timothy Bula, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Mihaela Bornea, Avirup Sil
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GitHub issue resolution

Auto-regressive LLM-based software engineering (SWE) agents, henceforth SWE agents, have made tremendous progress (>60% on SWE-Bench Verified) on real-world coding challenges including GitHub issue resolution. SWE agents use a combination of reasoning, environment interaction and self-reflection to resolve issues thereby generating "trajectories". Analysis of SWE agent trajectories is difficult, not only as they exceed LLM sequence length (sometimes, greater than 128k) but also because it involves a relatively prolonged interaction between an LLM and the environment managed by the agent. In case of an agent error, it can be hard to decipher, locate and understand its scope. Similarly, it can be hard to track improvements or regression over multiple runs or experiments. While a lot of research has gone into making these SWE agents reach state-of-the-art, much less focus has been put into creating tools to help analyze and visualize agent output. We propose a novel tool called SeaView: Software Engineering Agent Visual Interface for Enhanced Workflow, with a vision to assist SWE-agent researchers to visualize and inspect their experiments. SeaView's novel mechanisms help compare experimental runs with varying hyper-parameters or LLMs, and quickly get an understanding of LLM or environment related problems. Based on our user study, experienced researchers spend between 10 and 30 minutes to gather the information provided by SeaView, while researchers with little experience can spend between 30 minutes to 1 hour to diagnose their experiment.
MooseAgent: A LLM Based Multi-agent Framework for Automating Moose Simulation
Authors: Tao Zhang, Zhenhai Liu, Yong Xin, Yongjun Jiao
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00

The Finite Element Method (FEM) is widely used in engineering and scientific computing, but its pre-processing, solver configuration, and post-processing stages are often time-consuming and require specialized knowledge. This paper proposes an automated solution framework, MooseAgent, for the multi-physics simulation framework MOOSE, which combines large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs) with a multi-agent system. The framework uses LLMs to understand user-described simulation requirements in natural language and employs task decomposition and multi-round iterative verification strategies to automatically generate MOOSE input files. To improve accuracy and reduce model hallucinations, the system builds and utilizes a vector database containing annotated MOOSE input cards and function documentation. We conducted experimental evaluations on several typical cases, including heat transfer, mechanics, phase field, and multi-physics coupling. The results show that MooseAgent can automate the MOOSE simulation process to a certain extent, especially demonstrating a high success rate when dealing with relatively simple single-physics problems. The main contribution of this research is the proposal of a multi-agent automated framework for MOOSE, which validates its potential in simplifying finite element simulation processes and lowering the user barrier, providing new ideas for the development of intelligent finite element simulation software. The code for the MooseAgent framework proposed in this paper has been open-sourced and is available at https://github.com/taozhan18/MooseAgent
Adopting Large Language Models to Automated System Integration
Authors: Robin D. Pesl
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Service Composition

Modern enterprise computing systems integrate numerous subsystems to resolve a common task by yielding emergent behavior. A widespread approach is using services implemented with Web technologies like REST or OpenAPI, which offer an interaction mechanism and service documentation standard, respectively. Each service represents a specific business functionality, allowing encapsulation and easier maintenance. Despite the reduced maintenance costs on an individual service level, increased integration complexity arises. Consequently, automated service composition approaches have arisen to mitigate this issue. Nevertheless, these approaches have not achieved high acceptance in practice due to their reliance on complex formal modeling. Within this Ph.D. thesis, we analyze the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically integrate the services based on a natural language input. The result is a reusable service composition, e.g., as program code. While not always generating entirely correct results, the result can still be helpful by providing integration engineers with a close approximation of a suitable solution, which requires little effort to become operational. Our research involves (i) introducing a software architecture for automated service composition using LLMs, (ii) analyzing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for service discovery, (iii) proposing a novel natural language query-based benchmark for service discovery, and (iv) extending the benchmark to complete service composition scenarios. We have presented our software architecture as Compositio Prompto, the analysis of RAG for service discovery, and submitted a proposal for the service discovery benchmark. Open topics are primarily the extension of the service discovery benchmark to service composition scenarios and the improvements of the service composition generation, e.g., using fine-tuning or LLM agents.
Bringing Structure to Naturalness: On the Naturalness of ASTs
Authors: Profir-Petru Pârţachi, Mahito Sugiyama
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Language Modelling

Source code comes in different shapes and forms. Previous research has already shown code to be more predictable than natural language as well as highlighted its statistical predictability at the token level: source code can be natural. More recently, the structure of code -- control flow, syntax graphs, abstract syntax trees etc. -- has been successfully used to improve the state-of-the-art on numerous tasks: code suggestion, code summarisation, method naming etc. This body of work implicitly assumes that structured representations of code are similarly statistically predictable, i.e. that a structured view of code is also natural. We consider that this view should be made explicit and propose directly studying the Structured Naturalness Hypothesis. Beyond just naming existing research that assumes this hypothesis and formulating it, we also provide evidence in the case of trees: TreeLSTM models over ASTs for some languages, such as Ruby, are competitive with $n$-gram models while handling the syntax token issue highlighted by previous research 'for free'. For other languages, such as Java or Python, we find tree models to perform worse, suggesting that downstream task improvement is uncorrelated to the language modelling task. Further, we show how such naturalness signals can be employed for near state-of-the-art results on just-in-time defect prediction while forgoing manual feature engineering work.