pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
L2HCount:Generalizing Crowd Counting from Low to High Crowd Density via Density Simulation
Authors: Guoliang Xu, Jianqin Yin, Ren Zhang, Yonghao Dang, Feng Zhou, Bo Yu
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

Since COVID-19, crowd-counting tasks have gained wide applications. While supervised methods are reliable, annotation is more challenging in high-density scenes due to small head sizes and severe occlusion, whereas it's simpler in low-density scenes. Interestingly, can we train the model in low-density scenes and generalize it to high-density scenes? Therefore, we propose a low- to high-density generalization framework (L2HCount) that learns the pattern related to high-density scenes from low-density ones, enabling it to generalize well to high-density scenes. Specifically, we first introduce a High-Density Simulation Module and a Ground-Truth Generation Module to construct fake high-density images along with their corresponding ground-truth crowd annotations respectively by image-shifting technique, effectively simulating high-density crowd patterns. However, the simulated images have two issues: image blurring and loss of low-density image characteristics. Therefore, we second propose a Head Feature Enhancement Module to extract clear features in the simulated high-density scene. Third, we propose a Dual-Density Memory Encoding Module that uses two crowd memories to learn scene-specific patterns from low- and simulated high-density scenes, respectively. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets have shown the promising performance of L2HCount.
Consistent-Point: Consistent Pseudo-Points for Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting and Localization
Authors: Yuda Zou, Zelong Liu, Yuliang Gu, Bo Du, Yongchao Xu
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Management

Crowd counting and localization are important in applications such as public security and traffic management. Existing methods have achieved impressive results thanks to extensive laborious annotations. This paper propose a novel point-localization-based semi-supervised crowd counting and localization method termed Consistent-Point. We identify and address two inconsistencies of pseudo-points, which have not been adequately explored. To enhance their position consistency, we aggregate the positions of neighboring auxiliary proposal-points. Additionally, an instance-wise uncertainty calibration is proposed to improve the class consistency of pseudo-points. By generating more consistent pseudo-points, Consistent-Point provides more stable supervision to the training process, yielding improved results. Extensive experiments across five widely used datasets and three different labeled ratio settings demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in crowd localization while also attaining impressive crowd counting results. The code will be available.
EHNet: An Efficient Hybrid Network for Crowd Counting and Localization
Authors: Yuqing Yan, Yirui Wu
Date: 2025-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Decoder

In recent years, crowd counting and localization have become crucial techniques in computer vision, with applications spanning various domains. The presence of multi-scale crowd distributions within a single image remains a fundamental challenge in crowd counting tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Efficient Hybrid Network (EHNet), a novel framework for efficient crowd counting and localization. By reformulating crowd counting into a point regression framework, EHNet leverages the Spatial-Position Attention Module (SPAM) to capture comprehensive spatial contexts and long-range dependencies. Additionally, we develop an Adaptive Feature Aggregation Module (AFAM) to effectively fuse and harmonize multi-scale feature representations. Building upon these, we introduce the Multi-Scale Attentive Decoder (MSAD). Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that EHNet achieves competitive performance with reduced computational overhead, outperforming existing methods on ShanghaiTech Part \_A, ShanghaiTech Part \_B, UCF-CC-50, and UCF-QNRF. Our code is in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EHNet.
Differential equation quantum solvers: engineering measurements to reduce cost
Authors: Annie Paine, Casper Gyurik, Antonio Andrea Gentile
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00

Quantum computers have been proposed as a solution for efficiently solving non-linear differential equations (DEs), a fundamental task across diverse technological and scientific domains. However, a crucial milestone in this regard is to design protocols that are hardware-aware, making efficient use of limited available quantum resources. We focus here on promising variational methods derived from scientific machine learning: differentiable quantum circuits (DQC), addressing specifically their cost in number of circuit evaluations. Reducing the number of quantum circuit evaluations is particularly valuable in hybrid quantum/classical protocols, where the time required to interface and run quantum hardware at each cycle can impact the total wall-time much more than relatively inexpensive classical post-processing overhead. Here, we propose and test two sample-efficient protocols for solving non-linear DEs, achieving exponential savings in quantum circuit evaluations. These protocols are based on redesigning the extraction of information from DQC in a ``measure-first" approach, by introducing engineered cost operators similar to the randomized-measurement toolbox (i.e. classical shadows). In benchmark simulations on one and two-dimensional DEs, we report up to $\sim$ 100 fold reductions in circuit evaluations. Our protocols thus hold the promise to unlock larger and more challenging non-linear differential equation demonstrations with existing quantum hardware.
Tropical Bisectors and Carlini-Wagner Attacks
Authors: Gillian Grindstaff, Julia Lindberg, Daniela Schkoda, Miruna-Stefana Sorea, Ruriko Yoshida
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00

Pasque et al. showed that using a tropical symmetric metric as an activation function in the last layer can improve the robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) against state-of-the-art attacks, including the Carlini-Wagner attack. This improvement occurs when the attacks are not specifically adapted to the non-differentiability of the tropical layer. Moreover, they showed that the decision boundary of a tropical CNN is defined by tropical bisectors. In this paper, we explore the combinatorics of tropical bisectors and analyze how the tropical embedding layer enhances robustness against Carlini-Wagner attacks. We prove an upper bound on the number of linear segments the decision boundary of a tropical CNN can have. We then propose a refined version of the Carlini-Wagner attack, specifically tailored for the tropical architecture. Computational experiments with MNIST and LeNet5 showcase our attacks improved success rate.
Sentiment Classification of Thai Central Bank Press Releases Using Supervised Learning
Authors: Stefano Grassi
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Central bank communication plays a critical role in shaping economic expectations and monetary policy effectiveness. This study applies supervised machine learning techniques to classify the sentiment of press releases from the Bank of Thailand, addressing gaps in research that primarily focus on lexicon-based approaches. My findings show that supervised learning can be an effective method, even with smaller datasets, and serves as a starting point for further automation. However, achieving higher accuracy and better generalization requires a substantial amount of labeled data, which is time-consuming and demands expertise. Using models such as Na\"ive Bayes, Random Forest and SVM, this study demonstrates the applicability of machine learning for central bank sentiment analysis, with English-language communications from the Thai Central Bank as a case study.
Using Machine Learning for Lunar Mineralogy-I: Hyperspectral Imaging of Volcanic Samples
Authors: Fatemeh Fazel Hesar, Mojtaba Raouf, Peyman Soltani, Bernard Foing, Michiel J. A. de Dood, Fons J. Verbeek, Esther Cheng, Chenming Zhou
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This study examines the mineral composition of volcanic samples similar to lunar materials, focusing on olivine and pyroxene. Using hyperspectral imaging from 400 to 1000 nm, we created data cubes to analyze the reflectance characteristics of samples from samples from Vulcano, a volcanically active island in the Aeolian Archipelago, north of Sicily, Italy, categorizing them into nine regions of interest and analyzing spectral data for each. We applied various unsupervised clustering algorithms, including K-Means, Hierarchical Clustering, GMM, and Spectral Clustering, to classify the spectral profiles. Principal Component Analysis revealed distinct spectral signatures associated with specific minerals, facilitating precise identification. Clustering performance varied by region, with K-Means achieving the highest silhouette-score of 0.47, whereas GMM performed poorly with a score of only 0.25. Non-negative Matrix Factorization aided in identifying similarities among clusters across different methods and reference spectra for olivine and pyroxene. Hierarchical clustering emerged as the most reliable technique, achieving a 94\% similarity with the olivine spectrum in one sample, whereas GMM exhibited notable variability. Overall, the analysis indicated that both Hierarchical and K-Means methods yielded lower errors in total measurements, with K-Means demonstrating superior performance in estimated dispersion and clustering. Additionally, GMM showed a higher root mean square error compared to the other models. The RMSE analysis confirmed K-Means as the most consistent algorithm across all samples, suggesting a predominance of olivine in the Vulcano region relative to pyroxene. This predominance is likely linked to historical formation conditions similar to volcanic processes on the Moon, where olivine-rich compositions are common in ancient lava flows and impact melt rocks.
Reinforcement Learning for Machine Learning Model Deployment: Evaluating Multi-Armed Bandits in ML Ops Environments
Authors: S. Aaron McClendon, Vishaal Venkatesh, Juan Morinelli
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Model Selection, Multi-Armed Bandits, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In modern ML Ops environments, model deployment is a critical process that traditionally relies on static heuristics such as validation error comparisons and A/B testing. However, these methods require human intervention to adapt to real-world deployment challenges, such as model drift or unexpected performance degradation. We investigate whether reinforcement learning, specifically multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms, can dynamically manage model deployment decisions more effectively. Our approach enables more adaptive production environments by continuously evaluating deployed models and rolling back underperforming ones in real-time. We test six model selection strategies across two real-world datasets and find that RL based approaches match or exceed traditional methods in performance. Our findings suggest that reinforcement learning (RL)-based model management can improve automation, reduce reliance on manual interventions, and mitigate risks associated with post-deployment model failures.
Comparing Methods for Bias Mitigation in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Barbara Hoffmann, Ruben Mayer
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Fairness

This paper examines the critical role of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in data preparation for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems, with a particular focus on addressing and mitigating biases. We present a comparative analysis of three distinct methods for bias mitigation: data sparsification, feature modification, and synthetic data augmentation. Through experimental analysis using the german credit dataset, we evaluate these approaches using multiple fairness metrics, including statistical parity, equality of opportunity, and false positive rates. Our research demonstrates that while all methods improve fairness metrics compared to the original dataset, stratified sampling and synthetic data augmentation using GraphSAGE prove particularly effective in balancing demographic representation while maintaining model performance. The results provide practical insights for developing more equitable AI systems while maintaining model performance.
Benchmarking Ultra-Low-Power $μ$NPUs
Authors: Josh Millar, Yushan Huang, Sarab Sethi, Hamed Haddadi, Anil Madhavapeddy
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Efficient on-device neural network (NN) inference has various advantages over cloud-based processing, including predictable latency, enhanced privacy, greater reliability, and reduced operating costs for vendors. This has sparked the recent rapid development of microcontroller-scale NN accelerators, often referred to as neural processing units ($\mu$NPUs), designed specifically for ultra-low-power applications. In this paper we present the first comparative evaluation of a number of commercially-available $\mu$NPUs, as well as the first independent benchmarks for several of these platforms. We develop and open-source a model compilation framework to enable consistent benchmarking of quantized models across diverse $\mu$NPU hardware. Our benchmark targets end-to-end performance and includes model inference latency, power consumption, and memory overhead, alongside other factors. The resulting analysis uncovers both expected performance trends as well as surprising disparities between hardware specifications and actual performance, including $\mu$NPUs exhibiting unexpected scaling behaviors with increasing model complexity. Our framework provides a foundation for further evaluation of $\mu$NPU platforms alongside valuable insights for both hardware designers and software developers in this rapidly evolving space.
Efficient Verified Machine Unlearning For Distillation
Authors: Yijun Quan, Zushu Li, Giovanni Montana
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Unlearning

Growing data privacy demands, driven by regulations like GDPR and CCPA, require machine unlearning methods capable of swiftly removing the influence of specific training points. Although verified approaches like SISA, using data slicing and checkpointing, achieve efficient unlearning for single models by reverting to intermediate states, these methods struggle in teacher-student knowledge distillation settings. Unlearning in the teacher typically forces costly, complete student retraining due to pervasive information propagation during distillation. Our primary contribution is PURGE (Partitioned Unlearning with Retraining Guarantee for Ensembles), a novel framework integrating verified unlearning with distillation. We introduce constituent mapping and an incremental multi-teacher strategy that partitions the distillation process, confines each teacher constituent's impact to distinct student data subsets, and crucially maintains data isolation. The PURGE framework substantially reduces retraining overhead, requiring only partial student updates when teacher-side unlearning occurs. We provide both theoretical analysis, quantifying significant speed-ups in the unlearning process, and empirical validation on multiple datasets, demonstrating that PURGE achieves these efficiency gains while maintaining student accuracy comparable to standard baselines.
MixFunn: A Neural Network for Differential Equations with Improved Generalization and Interpretability
Authors: Tiago de Souza Farias, Gubio Gomes de Lima, Jonas Maziero, Celso Jorge Villas-Boas
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00

We introduce MixFunn, a novel neural network architecture designed to solve differential equations with enhanced precision, interpretability, and generalization capability. The architecture comprises two key components: the mixed-function neuron, which integrates multiple parameterized nonlinear functions to improve representational flexibility, and the second-order neuron, which combines a linear transformation of its inputs with a quadratic term to capture cross-combinations of input variables. These features significantly enhance the expressive power of the network, enabling it to achieve comparable or superior results with drastically fewer parameters and a reduction of up to four orders of magnitude compared to conventional approaches. We applied MixFunn in a physics-informed setting to solve differential equations in classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and fluid dynamics, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving higher accuracy and improved generalization to regions outside the training domain relative to standard machine learning models. Furthermore, the architecture facilitates the extraction of interpretable analytical expressions, offering valuable insights into the underlying solutions.
Assessing Foundation Models for Sea Ice Type Segmentation in Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery
Authors: Samira Alkaee Taleghan, Morteza Karimzadeh, Andrew P. Barrett, Walter N. Meier, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of sea ice types is essential for mapping and operational forecasting of sea ice conditions for safe navigation and resource extraction in ice-covered waters, as well as for understanding polar climate processes. While deep learning methods have shown promise in automating sea ice segmentation, they often rely on extensive labeled datasets which require expert knowledge and are time-consuming to create. Recently, foundation models (FMs) have shown excellent results for segmenting remote sensing images by utilizing pre-training on large datasets using self-supervised techniques. However, their effectiveness for sea ice segmentation remains unexplored, especially given sea ice's complex structures, seasonal changes, and unique spectral signatures, as well as peculiar Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery characteristics including banding and scalloping noise, and varying ice backscatter characteristics, which are often missing in standard remote sensing pre-training datasets. In particular, SAR images over polar regions are acquired using different modes than used to capture the images at lower latitudes by the same sensors that form training datasets for FMs. This study evaluates ten remote sensing FMs for sea ice type segmentation using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, focusing on their seasonal and spatial generalization. Among the selected models, Prithvi-600M outperforms the baseline models, while CROMA achieves a very similar performance in F1-score. Our contributions include offering a systematic methodology for selecting FMs for sea ice data analysis, a comprehensive benchmarking study on performances of FMs for sea ice segmentation with tailored performance metrics, and insights into existing gaps and future directions for improving domain-specific models in polar applications using SAR data.
Learnable cut flow
Authors: Jing Li, Hao Sun
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Neural networks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for tasks in high energy physics, yet their opaque training process renders them as a black box. In contrast, the traditional cut flow method offers simplicity and interpretability but demands human effort to identify optimal boundaries. To merge the strengths of both approaches, we propose the Learnable Cut Flow (LCF), a neural network that transforms the traditional cut selection into a fully differentiable, data-driven process. LCF implements two cut strategies-parallel, where observable distributions are treated independently, and sequential, where prior cuts shape subsequent ones-to flexibly determine optimal boundaries. Building on this, we introduce the Learnable Importance, a metric that quantifies feature importance and adjusts their contributions to the loss accordingly, offering model-driven insights unlike ad-hoc metrics. To ensure differentiability, a modified loss function replaces hard cuts with mask operations, preserving data shape throughout the training process. LCF is tested on six varied mock datasets and a realistic diboson vs. QCD dataset. Results demonstrate that LCF (1) accurately learns cut boundaries across typical feature distributions in both parallel and sequential strategies, (2) assigns higher importance to discriminative features with minimal overlap, (3) handles redundant or correlated features robustly, and (4) performs effectively in real-world scenarios. In diboson dataset, LCF initially underperforms boosted decision trees and multiplayer perceptrons when using all observables. However, pruning less critical features-guided by learned importance-boosts its performance to match or exceed these baselines. LCF bridges the gap between traditional cut flow method and modern black-box neural networks, delivering actionable insights into the training process and feature importance.
SPDNet: Seasonal-Periodic Decomposition Network for Advanced Residential Demand Forecasting
Authors: Reza Nematirad, Anil Pahwa, Balasubramaniam Natarajan
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Demand Forecasting, energy management

Residential electricity demand forecasting is critical for efficient energy management and grid stability. Accurate predictions enable utility companies to optimize planning and operations. However, real-world residential electricity demand data often exhibit intricate temporal variability, including multiple seasonalities, periodicities, and abrupt fluctuations, which pose significant challenges for forecasting models. Previous models that rely on statistical methods, recurrent, convolutional neural networks, and transformers often struggle to capture these intricate temporal dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose the Seasonal-Periodic Decomposition Network (SPDNet), a novel deep learning framework consisting of two main modules. The first is the Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Module (STDM), which decomposes the input data into trend, seasonal, and residual components. The second is the Periodical Decomposition Module (PDM), which employs the Fast Fourier Transform to identify the dominant periods. For each dominant period, 1D input data is reshaped into a 2D tensor, where rows represent periods and columns correspond to frequencies. The 2D representations are then processed through three submodules: a 1D convolution to capture sharp fluctuations, a transformer-based encoder to model global patterns, and a 2D convolution to capture interactions between periods. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world residential electricity load data demonstrate that SPDNet outperforms traditional and advanced models in both forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency. The code is available in this repository: https://github.com/Tims2D/SPDNet.
Probabilistic Uncertain Reward Model
Authors: Wangtao Sun, Xiang Cheng, Xing Yu, Haotian Xu, Zhao Yang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a critical technique for training large language models. However, conventional reward models based on the Bradley-Terry model (BTRM) often suffer from overconfidence when faced with inconsistent labels or out-of-distribution samples, leading to reward hacking, where the policy model blindly optimizes for proxy rewards while degrading true performance. This paper proposes the Probabilistic Uncertain Reward Model (PURM), which generalizes the Bradley-Terry model to learn the reward distributions that emerged from the preference data. We theoretically derive the loss function of PURM and introduce a novel method that uses the overlap between distributions to quantify uncertainty. Empirical results show that PURM outperforms existing methods with more accurate reward and sound uncertainty estimations, and sustains effective learning for more optimization steps and obtain higher maximum win rate in RLHF. The data and code of this paper are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Probabilistic-Uncertain-Reward-Model/