pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Next Phase of Scientific Fact-Checking: Advanced Evidence Retrieval from Complex Structured Academic Papers
Authors: Xingyu Deng, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Retrieval

Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the evolving nature of scientific knowledge, the structural complexity of academic literature and the challenges posed by long-form, multimodal scientific expression. However, existing approaches focus on simplified versions of the problem based on small-scale datasets consisting of abstracts rather than full papers, thereby avoiding the distinct challenges associated with processing complete documents. This paper examines the limitations of current scientific fact-checking systems and reveals the many potential features and resources that could be exploited to advance their performance. It identifies key research challenges within evidence retrieval, including (1) evidence-driven retrieval that addresses semantic limitations and topic imbalance (2) time-aware evidence retrieval with citation tracking to mitigate outdated information, (3) structured document parsing to leverage long-range context, (4) handling complex scientific expressions, including tables, figures, and domain-specific terminology and (5) assessing the credibility of scientific literature. Preliminary experiments were conducted to substantiate these challenges and identify potential solutions. This perspective paper aims to advance scientific fact-checking with a specialised IR system tailored for real-world applications.
How Good Are Synthetic Requirements ? Evaluating LLM-Generated Datasets for AI4RE
Authors: Abdelkarim El-Hajjami, Camille Salinesi
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Diversity, Synthetic Data Generation

The shortage of publicly available, labeled requirements datasets remains a major barrier to advancing Artificial Intelligence for Requirements Engineering (AI4RE). While Large Language Models offer promising capabilities for synthetic data generation, systematic approaches to control and optimize the quality of generated requirements remain underexplored. This paper presents Synthline v1, an enhanced Product Line approach for generating synthetic requirements data that extends our earlier v0 version with advanced generation strategies and curation techniques. We investigate four research questions assessing how prompting strategies, automated prompt optimization, and post-generation curation affect data quality across four classification tasks: defect detection, functional vs. non-functional, quality vs. non-quality, and security vs. non-security. Our evaluation shows that multi-sample prompting significantly boosts both utility and diversity over single-sample generation, with F1-score gains from 6 to 44 points. The use of PACE (Prompt Actor-Critic Editing) for automated prompt optimization yields task-dependent results, greatly improving functional classification (+32.5 points) but reducing performance on others. Interestingly, similarity-based curation improves diversity but often harms classification performance, indicating that some redundancy may help ML models. Most importantly, our results show that synthetic requirements can match or outperform human-authored ones for specific tasks, with synthetic data surpassing human data for security (+7.8 points) and defect classification (+15.4 points). These findings offer practical insights for AI4RE and chart a viable path to mitigating dataset scarcity through systematic synthetic generation.
Adaptive Control Attention Network for Underwater Acoustic Localization and Domain Adaptation
Authors: Quoc Thinh Vo, Joe Woods, Priontu Chowdhury, David K. Han
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Localizing acoustic sound sources in the ocean is a challenging task due to the complex and dynamic nature of the environment. Factors such as high background noise, irregular underwater geometries, and varying acoustic properties make accurate localization difficult. To address these obstacles, we propose a multi-branch network architecture designed to accurately predict the distance between a moving acoustic source and a receiver, tested on real-world underwater signal arrays. The network leverages Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for robust spatial feature extraction and integrates Conformers with self-attention mechanism to effectively capture temporal dependencies. Log-mel spectrogram and generalized cross-correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT) features are employed as input representations. To further enhance the model performance, we introduce an Adaptive Gain Control (AGC) layer, that adaptively adjusts the amplitude of input features, ensuring consistent energy levels across varying ranges, signal strengths, and noise conditions. We assess the model's generalization capability by training it in one domain and testing it in a different domain, using only a limited amount of data from the test domain for fine-tuning. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in similar settings, establishing new benchmarks for underwater sound localization.
SMARTIES: Spectrum-Aware Multi-Sensor Auto-Encoder for Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Gencer Sumbul, Chang Xu, Emanuele Dalsasso, Devis Tuia
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00

From optical sensors to microwave radars, leveraging the complementary strengths of remote sensing (RS) sensors is crucial for achieving dense spatio-temporal monitoring of our planet. In contrast, recent deep learning models, whether task-specific or foundational, are often specific to single sensors or to fixed combinations: adapting such models to different sensory inputs requires both architectural changes and re-training, limiting scalability and generalization across multiple RS sensors. On the contrary, a single model able to modulate its feature representations to accept diverse sensors as input would pave the way to agile and flexible multi-sensor RS data processing. To address this, we introduce SMARTIES, a generic and versatile foundation model lifting sensor-specific/dependent efforts and enabling scalability and generalization to diverse RS sensors: SMARTIES projects data from heterogeneous sensors into a shared spectrum-aware space, enabling the use of arbitrary combinations of bands both for training and inference. To obtain sensor-agnostic representations, we train a single, unified transformer model reconstructing masked multi-sensor data with cross-sensor token mixup. On both single- and multi-modal tasks across diverse sensors, SMARTIES outperforms previous models that rely on sensor-specific pretraining. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://gsumbul.github.io/SMARTIES.
Generative Blocks World: Moving Things Around in Pictures
Authors: Vaibhav Vavilala, Seemandhar Jain, Rahul Vasanth, D. A. Forsyth, Anand Bhattad
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00

We describe Generative Blocks World to interact with the scene of a generated image by manipulating simple geometric abstractions. Our method represents scenes as assemblies of convex 3D primitives, and the same scene can be represented by different numbers of primitives, allowing an editor to move either whole structures or small details. Once the scene geometry has been edited, the image is generated by a flow-based method which is conditioned on depth and a texture hint. Our texture hint takes into account the modified 3D primitives, exceeding texture-consistency provided by existing key-value caching techniques. These texture hints (a) allow accurate object and camera moves and (b) largely preserve the identity of objects depicted. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior works in visual fidelity, editability, and compositional generalization.
Non-collective Calibrating Strategy for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Bin Wang, Yongqi Han, Minbo Ma, Tianrui Li, Junbo Zhang, Feng Hong, Yanwei Yu
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated significant advancements in time series forecasting. Despite these ongoing developments, the complex dynamics of time series make it challenging to establish the rule of thumb for designing the golden model architecture. In this study, we argue that refining existing advanced models through a universal calibrating strategy can deliver substantial benefits with minimal resource costs, as opposed to elaborating and training a new model from scratch. We first identify a multi-target learning conflict in the calibrating process, which arises when optimizing variables across time steps, leading to the underutilization of the model's learning capabilities. To address this issue, we propose an innovative calibrating strategy called Socket+Plug (SoP). This approach retains an exclusive optimizer and early-stopping monitor for each predicted target within each Plug while keeping the fully trained Socket backbone frozen. The model-agnostic nature of SoP allows it to directly calibrate the performance of any trained deep forecasting models, regardless of their specific architectures. Extensive experiments on various time series benchmarks and a spatio-temporal meteorological ERA5 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of SoP, achieving up to a 22% improvement even when employing a simple MLP as the Plug (highlighted in Figure 1)
Curve-Aware Gaussian Splatting for 3D Parametric Curve Reconstruction
Authors: Zhirui Gao. Renjiao Yi, Yaqiao Dai, Xuening Zhu, Wei Chen, Chenyang Zhu, Kai Xu
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Point cloud reconstruction

This paper presents an end-to-end framework for reconstructing 3D parametric curves directly from multi-view edge maps. Contrasting with existing two-stage methods that follow a sequential ``edge point cloud reconstruction and parametric curve fitting'' pipeline, our one-stage approach optimizes 3D parametric curves directly from 2D edge maps, eliminating error accumulation caused by the inherent optimization gap between disconnected stages. However, parametric curves inherently lack suitability for rendering-based multi-view optimization, necessitating a complementary representation that preserves their geometric properties while enabling differentiable rendering. We propose a novel bi-directional coupling mechanism between parametric curves and edge-oriented Gaussian components. This tight correspondence formulates a curve-aware Gaussian representation, \textbf{CurveGaussian}, that enables differentiable rendering of 3D curves, allowing direct optimization guided by multi-view evidence. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamically adaptive topology optimization framework during training to refine curve structures through linearization, merging, splitting, and pruning operations. Comprehensive evaluations on the ABC dataset and real-world benchmarks demonstrate our one-stage method's superiority over two-stage alternatives, particularly in producing cleaner and more robust reconstructions. Additionally, by directly optimizing parametric curves, our method significantly reduces the parameter count during training, achieving both higher efficiency and superior performance compared to existing approaches.
Symmetric Sliding-Mode Control of Grid-Forming Inverters With Controllable Region Under AC and DC Sides Varying
Authors: Qianxi Tang, Li Peng
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

Conventional grid-forming (GFM) controls often entangle voltage formation with power flow and dc-source dynamics, which can degrade voltage tracking performance and stability under grid disturbances, load transients, and dc-side perturbations. To address this issue, a symmetric sliding-mode control (SSMC) method is developed and its explicit voltage controllable region is derived. It illustrates how much ac-side power dynamics and dc-link voltage varying can be decoupled from the voltage regulation task, which helps predict when the entangling appears. While conventional sliding-mode controls address voltage-tracking error through complex sliding surface designs, repetitive correction techniques or special reaching laws, this work identifies that the error at power-line frequency primarily stem from the asymmetry property of inverters with the delay effect and the computational inaccuracy. Guided by this insight, a symmetric compensation structure is proposed, which avoids added design complexity and directly mitigates low-frequency voltage tracking errors. Furthermore, the control design is supported by a physical and quantitative explanation, aiding in parameter tuning. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves faster tracking responses-on the order of hundreds of microseconds-while maintaining robust and more accurate tracking under both dc-link voltage and ac-side current variations. Conventional grid-forming and classical sliding-mode controllers, which handle these disturbances separately, cannot match this combined speed and robustness. Furthermore, the voltage controllability analysis is explicitly verified.
MAx-DNN: Multi-Level Arithmetic Approximation for Energy-Efficient DNN Hardware Accelerators
Authors: Vasileios Leon, Georgios Makris, Sotirios Xydis, Kiamal Pekmestzi, Dimitrios Soudris
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures has established them as the defacto approach for providing advanced Machine Learning tasks with excellent accuracy. Targeting low-power DNN computing, this paper examines the interplay of fine-grained error resilience of DNN workloads in collaboration with hardware approximation techniques, to achieve higher levels of energy efficiency. Utilizing the state-of-the-art ROUP approximate multipliers, we systematically explore their fine-grained distribution across the network according to our layer-, filter-, and kernel-level approaches, and examine their impact on accuracy and energy. We use the ResNet-8 model on the CIFAR-10 dataset to evaluate our approximations. The proposed solution delivers up to 54% energy gains in exchange for up to 4% accuracy loss, compared to the baseline quantized model, while it provides 2x energy gains with better accuracy versus the state-of-the-art DNN approximations.
FINN-GL: Generalized Mixed-Precision Extensions for FPGA-Accelerated LSTMs
Authors: Shashwat Khandelwal, Jakoba Petri-Koenig, Thomas B. Preußer, Michaela Blott, Shreejith Shanker
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Stock Prediction

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), particularly LSTMs, are effective for time-series tasks like sentiment analysis and short-term stock prediction. However, their computational complexity poses challenges for real-time deployment in resource constrained environments. While FPGAs offer a promising platform for energy-efficient AI acceleration, existing tools mainly target feed-forward networks, and LSTM acceleration typically requires full custom implementation. In this paper, we address this gap by leveraging the open-source and extensible FINN framework to enable the generalized deployment of LSTMs on FPGAs. Specifically, we leverage the Scan operator from the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) specification to model the recurrent nature of LSTM computations, enabling support for mixed quantisation within them and functional verification of LSTM-based models. Furthermore, we introduce custom transformations within the FINN compiler to map the quantised ONNX computation graph to hardware blocks from the HLS kernel library of the FINN compiler and Vitis HLS. We validate the proposed tool-flow by training a quantised ConvLSTM model for a mid-price stock prediction task using the widely used dataset and generating a corresponding hardware IP of the model using our flow, targeting the XCZU7EV device. We show that the generated quantised ConvLSTM accelerator through our flow achieves a balance between performance (latency) and resource consumption, while matching (or bettering) inference accuracy of state-of-the-art models with reduced precision. We believe that the generalisable nature of the proposed flow will pave the way for resource-efficient RNN accelerator designs on FPGAs.
Characterization and Mitigation of Training Instabilities in Microscaling Formats
Authors: Huangyuan Su, Mujin Kwun, Stephanie Gil, Sham Kakade, Nikhil Anand
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00

Training large language models is an expensive, compute-bound process that must be repeated as models scale, algorithms improve, and new data is collected. To address this, next-generation hardware accelerators increasingly support lower-precision arithmetic formats, such as the Microscaling (MX) formats introduced in NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture. These formats use a shared scale within blocks of parameters to extend representable range and perform forward/backward GEMM operations in reduced precision for efficiency gains. In this work, we investigate the challenges and viability of block-scaled precision formats during model training. Across nearly one thousand language models trained from scratch -- spanning compute budgets from $2 \times 10^{17}$ to $4.8 \times 10^{19}$ FLOPs and sweeping over a broad range of weight-activation precision combinations -- we consistently observe that training in MX formats exhibits sharp, stochastic instabilities in the loss, particularly at larger compute scales. To explain this phenomenon, we conduct controlled experiments and ablations on a smaller proxy model that exhibits similar behavior as the language model, sweeping across architectural settings, hyperparameters, and precision formats. These experiments motivate a simple model in which multiplicative gradient bias introduced by the quantization of layer-norm affine parameters and a small fraction of activations can trigger runaway divergence. Through \emph{in situ} intervention experiments on our proxy model, we demonstrate that instabilities can be averted or delayed by modifying precision schemes mid-training. Guided by these findings, we evaluate stabilization strategies in the LLM setting and show that certain hybrid configurations recover performance competitive with full-precision training. We release our code at https://github.com/Hither1/systems-scaling.
Institutional Noise, Strategic Deviation, and Intertemporal Collapse: A Formal Model of Miner Behaviour under Protocol Uncertainty
Authors: Craig Steven Wright
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00

This paper develops a formal game-theoretic model to examine how protocol mutability disrupts cooperative mining behaviour in blockchain systems. Using a repeated game framework with stochastic rule shocks, we show that even minor uncertainty in institutional rules increases time preference and induces strategic deviation. Fixed-rule environments support long-term investment and stable equilibrium strategies; in contrast, mutable protocols lead to short-termism, higher discounting, and collapse of coordinated engagement. Simulation results identify instability zones in the parameter space where rational mining gives way to extractive or arbitrage conduct. These findings support an Austrian economic interpretation: calculability requires rule stability. Institutional noise undermines the informational basis for productive action. We conclude that protocol design must be treated as a constitutional economic constraint, not a discretionary variable, if sustainable cooperation is to emerge in decentralised systems.
LLM-guided Chemical Process Optimization with a Multi-Agent Approach
Authors: Tong Zeng, Srivathsan Badrinarayanan, Janghoon Ock, Cheng-Kai Lai, Amir Barati Farimani
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Chemical Process, Computational Efficiency, Evolutionary Algorithms, Large Language Model

Chemical process optimization is crucial to maximize production efficiency and economic performance. Traditional methods, including gradient-based solvers, evolutionary algorithms, and parameter grid searches, become impractical when operating constraints are ill-defined or unavailable, requiring engineers to rely on subjective heuristics to estimate feasible parameter ranges. To address this constraint definition bottleneck, we present a multi-agent framework of large language model (LLM) agents that autonomously infer operating constraints from minimal process descriptions, then collaboratively guide optimization using the inferred constraints. Our AutoGen-based agentic framework employs OpenAI's o3 model, with specialized agents for constraint generation, parameter validation, simulation execution, and optimization guidance. Through two phases - autonomous constraint generation using embedded domain knowledge, followed by iterative multi-agent optimization - the framework eliminates the need for predefined operational bounds. Validated on the hydrodealkylation process across cost, yield, and yield-to-cost ratio metrics, the framework demonstrated competitive performance with conventional optimization methods while achieving better computational efficiency, requiring fewer iterations to converge. Our approach converged in under 20 minutes, achieving a 31-fold speedup over grid search. Beyond computational efficiency, the framework's reasoning-guided search demonstrates sophisticated process understanding, correctly identifying utility trade-offs, and applying domain-informed heuristics. This approach shows significant potential for optimization scenarios where operational constraints are poorly characterized or unavailable, particularly for emerging processes and retrofit applications.
MultiFinRAG: An Optimized Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Framework for Financial Question Answering
Authors: Chinmay Gondhalekar, Urjitkumar Patel, Fang-Chun Yeh
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Financial documents--such as 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and investor presentations--span hundreds of pages and combine diverse modalities, including dense narrative text, structured tables, and complex figures. Answering questions over such content often requires joint reasoning across modalities, which strains traditional large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines due to token limitations, layout loss, and fragmented cross-modal context. We introduce MultiFinRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework purpose-built for financial QA. MultiFinRAG first performs multimodal extraction by grouping table and figure images into batches and sending them to a lightweight, quantized open-source multimodal LLM, which produces both structured JSON outputs and concise textual summaries. These outputs, along with narrative text, are embedded and indexed with modality-aware similarity thresholds for precise retrieval. A tiered fallback strategy then dynamically escalates from text-only to text+table+image contexts when necessary, enabling cross-modal reasoning while reducing irrelevant context. Despite running on commodity hardware, MultiFinRAG achieves 19 percentage points higher accuracy than ChatGPT-4o (free-tier) on complex financial QA tasks involving text, tables, images, and combined multimodal reasoning.