pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Foam-Agent: Towards Automated Intelligent CFD Workflows
Authors: Ling Yue, Nithin Somasekharan, Yadi Cao, Shaowu Pan
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an essential simulation tool in various engineering disciplines, but it often requires substantial domain expertise and manual configuration, creating barriers to entry. We present Foam-Agent, a multi-agent framework that automates complex OpenFOAM-based CFD simulation workflows from natural language inputs. Our innovation includes (1) a hierarchical multi-index retrieval system with specialized indices for different simulation aspects, (2) a dependency-aware file generation system that provides consistency management across configuration files, and (3) an iterative error correction mechanism that diagnoses and resolves simulation failures without human intervention. Through comprehensive evaluation on the dataset of 110 simulation tasks, Foam-Agent achieves an 83.6% success rate with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming existing frameworks (55.5% for MetaOpenFOAM and 37.3% for OpenFOAM-GPT). Ablation studies demonstrate the critical contribution of each system component, with the specialized error correction mechanism providing a 36.4% performance improvement. Foam-Agent substantially lowers the CFD expertise threshold while maintaining modeling accuracy, demonstrating the potential of specialized multi-agent systems to democratize access to complex scientific simulation tools. The code is public at https://github.com/csml-rpi/Foam-Agent
Rethinking Invariance in In-context Learning
Authors: Lizhe Fang, Yifei Wang, Khashayar Gatmiry, Lei Fang, Yisen Wang
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a pivotal capability of auto-regressive large language models, yet it is hindered by a notable sensitivity to the ordering of context examples regardless of their mutual independence. To address this issue, recent studies have introduced several variant algorithms of ICL that achieve permutation invariance. However, many of these do not exhibit comparable performance with the standard auto-regressive ICL algorithm. In this work, we identify two crucial elements in the design of an invariant ICL algorithm: information non-leakage and context interdependence, which are not simultaneously achieved by any of the existing methods. These investigations lead us to the proposed Invariant ICL (InvICL), a methodology designed to achieve invariance in ICL while ensuring the two properties. Empirically, our findings reveal that InvICL surpasses previous models, both invariant and non-invariant, in most benchmark datasets, showcasing superior generalization capabilities across varying input lengths. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/InvICL.
Decomposition of Probabilities of Causation with Two Mediators
Authors: Yuta Kawakami, Jin Tian
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Mediation analysis for probabilities of causation (PoC) provides a fundamental framework for evaluating the necessity and sufficiency of treatment in provoking an event through different causal pathways. One of the primary objectives of causal mediation analysis is to decompose the total effect into path-specific components. In this study, we investigate the path-specific probability of necessity and sufficiency (PNS) to decompose the total PNS into path-specific components along distinct causal pathways between treatment and outcome, incorporating two mediators. We define the path-specific PNS for decomposition and provide an identification theorem. Furthermore, we conduct numerical experiments to assess the properties of the proposed estimators from finite samples and demonstrate their practical application using a real-world educational dataset.
ChainMarks: Securing DNN Watermark with Cryptographic Chain
Authors: Brian Choi, Shu Wang, Isabelle Choi, Kun Sun
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

With the widespread deployment of deep neural network (DNN) models, dynamic watermarking techniques are being used to protect the intellectual property of model owners. However, recent studies have shown that existing watermarking schemes are vulnerable to watermark removal and ambiguity attacks. Besides, the vague criteria for determining watermark presence further increase the likelihood of such attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure DNN watermarking scheme named ChainMarks, which generates secure and robust watermarks by introducing a cryptographic chain into the trigger inputs and utilizes a two-phase Monte Carlo method for determining watermark presence. First, ChainMarks generates trigger inputs as a watermark dataset by repeatedly applying a hash function over a secret key, where the target labels associated with trigger inputs are generated from the digital signature of model owner. Then, the watermarked model is produced by training a DNN over both the original and watermark datasets. To verify watermarks, we compare the predicted labels of trigger inputs with the target labels and determine ownership with a more accurate decision threshold that considers the classification probability of specific models. Experimental results show that ChainMarks exhibits higher levels of robustness and security compared to state-of-the-art watermarking schemes. With a better marginal utility, ChainMarks provides a higher probability guarantee of watermark presence in DNN models with the same level of watermark accuracy.
AI and Vision based Autonomous Navigation of Nano-Drones in Partially-Known Environments
Authors: Mattia Sartori, Chetna Singhal, Neelabhro Roy, Davide Brunelli, James Gross
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

The miniaturisation of sensors and processors, the advancements in connected edge intelligence, and the exponential interest in Artificial Intelligence are boosting the affirmation of autonomous nano-size drones in the Internet of Robotic Things ecosystem. However, achieving safe autonomous navigation and high-level tasks such as exploration and surveillance with these tiny platforms is extremely challenging due to their limited resources. This work focuses on enabling the safe and autonomous flight of a pocket-size, 30-gram platform called Crazyflie 2.1 in a partially known environment. We propose a novel AI-aided, vision-based reactive planning method for obstacle avoidance under the ambit of Integrated Sensing, Computing and Communication paradigm. We deal with the constraints of the nano-drone by splitting the navigation task into two parts: a deep learning-based object detector runs on the edge (external hardware) while the planning algorithm is executed onboard. The results show the ability to command the drone at $\sim8$ frames-per-second and a model performance reaching a COCO mean-average-precision of $60.8$. Field experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the solution with the drone flying at a top speed of $1$ m/s while steering away from an obstacle placed in an unknown position and reaching the target destination. The outcome highlights the compatibility of the communication delay and the model performance with the requirements of the real-time navigation task. We provide a feasible alternative to a fully onboard implementation that can be extended to autonomous exploration with nano-drones.
Moments of Causal Effects
Authors: Yuta Kawakami, Jin Tian
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

The moments of random variables are fundamental statistical measures for characterizing the shape of a probability distribution, encompassing metrics such as mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. Additionally, the product moments, including covariance and correlation, reveal the relationships between multiple random variables. On the other hand, the primary focus of causal inference is the evaluation of causal effects, which are defined as the difference between two potential outcomes. While traditional causal effect assessment focuses on the average causal effect, this work provides definitions, identification theorems, and bounds for moments and product moments of causal effects to analyze their distribution and relationships. We conduct experiments to illustrate the estimation of the moments of causal effects from finite samples and demonstrate their practical application using a real-world medical dataset.
AI-Powered Agile Analog Circuit Design and Optimization
Authors: Jinhai Hu, Wang Ling Goh, Yuan Gao
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Keyword Spotting

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are transforming analog circuit design by automating device-level tuning and enabling system-level co-optimization. This paper integrates two approaches: (1) AI-assisted transistor sizing using Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (MOBO) for direct circuit parameter optimization, demonstrated on a linearly tunable transconductor; and (2) AI-integrated circuit transfer function modeling for system-level optimization in a keyword spotting (KWS) application, demonstrated by optimizing an analog bandpass filter within a machine learning training loop. The combined insights highlight how AI can improve analog performance, reduce design iteration effort, and jointly optimize analog components and application-level metrics.
Position: The AI Conference Peer Review Crisis Demands Author Feedback and Reviewer Rewards
Authors: Jaeho Kim, Yunseok Lee, Seulki Lee
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

The peer review process in major artificial intelligence (AI) conferences faces unprecedented challenges with the surge of paper submissions (exceeding 10,000 submissions per venue), accompanied by growing concerns over review quality and reviewer responsibility. This position paper argues for the need to transform the traditional one-way review system into a bi-directional feedback loop where authors evaluate review quality and reviewers earn formal accreditation, creating an accountability framework that promotes a sustainable, high-quality peer review system. The current review system can be viewed as an interaction between three parties: the authors, reviewers, and system (i.e., conference), where we posit that all three parties share responsibility for the current problems. However, issues with authors can only be addressed through policy enforcement and detection tools, and ethical concerns can only be corrected through self-reflection. As such, this paper focuses on reforming reviewer accountability with systematic rewards through two key mechanisms: (1) a two-stage bi-directional review system that allows authors to evaluate reviews while minimizing retaliatory behavior, (2)a systematic reviewer reward system that incentivizes quality reviewing. We ask for the community's strong interest in these problems and the reforms that are needed to enhance the peer review process.
Theoretical Foundations for Semantic Cognition in Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Sebastian Dumbrava
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

This monograph presents a modular cognitive architecture for artificial intelligence grounded in the formal modeling of belief as structured semantic state. Belief states are defined as dynamic ensembles of linguistic expressions embedded within a navigable manifold, where operators enable assimilation, abstraction, nullification, memory, and introspection. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience, we develop a layered framework that enables self-regulating epistemic agents capable of reflective, goal-directed thought. At the core of this framework is the epistemic vacuum: a class of semantically inert cognitive states that serves as the conceptual origin of belief space. From this foundation, the Null Tower arises as a generative structure recursively built through internal representational capacities. The theoretical constructs are designed to be implementable in both symbolic and neural systems, including large language models, hybrid agents, and adaptive memory architectures. This work offers a foundational substrate for constructing agents that reason, remember, and regulate their beliefs in structured, interpretable ways.
ADD: Physics-Based Motion Imitation with Adversarial Differential Discriminators
Authors: Ziyu Zhang, Sergey Bashkirov, Dun Yang, Michael Taylor, Xue Bin Peng
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Multi-objective optimization problems, which require the simultaneous optimization of multiple terms, are prevalent across numerous applications. Existing multi-objective optimization methods often rely on manually tuned aggregation functions to formulate a joint optimization target. The performance of such hand-tuned methods is heavily dependent on careful weight selection, a time-consuming and laborious process. These limitations also arise in the setting of reinforcement-learning-based motion tracking for physically simulated characters, where intricately crafted reward functions are typically used to achieve high-fidelity results. Such solutions not only require domain expertise and significant manual adjustment, but also limit the applicability of the resulting reward function across diverse skills. To bridge this gap, we present a novel adversarial multi-objective optimization technique that is broadly applicable to a range of multi-objective optimization problems, including motion tracking. The proposed adversarial differential discriminator receives a single positive sample, yet is still effective at guiding the optimization process. We demonstrate that our technique can enable characters to closely replicate a variety of acrobatic and agile behaviors, achieving comparable quality to state-of-the-art motion-tracking methods, without relying on manually tuned reward functions. Results are best visualized through https://youtu.be/rz8BYCE9E2w.
Graffe: Graph Representation Learning via Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Authors: Dingshuo Chen, Shuchen Xue, Liuji Chen, Yingheng Wang, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Zhi-Ming Ma, Liang Wang
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Graph Classification, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs), widely recognized for their potential to generate high-quality samples, tend to go unnoticed in representation learning. While recent progress has highlighted their potential for capturing visual semantics, adapting DPMs to graph representation learning remains in its infancy. In this paper, we introduce Graffe, a self-supervised diffusion model proposed for graph representation learning. It features a graph encoder that distills a source graph into a compact representation, which, in turn, serves as the condition to guide the denoising process of the diffusion decoder. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we first explore the theoretical foundations of applying diffusion models to representation learning, proving that the denoising objective implicitly maximizes the conditional mutual information between data and its representation. Specifically, we prove that the negative logarithm of the denoising score matching loss is a tractable lower bound for the conditional mutual information. Empirically, we conduct a series of case studies to validate our theoretical insights. In addition, Graffe delivers competitive results under the linear probing setting on node and graph classification tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 9 of the 11 real-world datasets. These findings indicate that powerful generative models, especially diffusion models, serve as an effective tool for graph representation learning.
Chain-of-Thought Tokens are Computer Program Variables
Authors: Fangwei Zhu, Peiyi Wang, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

Chain-of-thoughts (CoT) requires large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate steps before reaching the final answer, and has been proven effective to help LLMs solve complex reasoning tasks. However, the inner mechanism of CoT still remains largely unclear. In this paper, we empirically study the role of CoT tokens in LLMs on two compositional tasks: multi-digit multiplication and dynamic programming. While CoT is essential for solving these problems, we find that preserving only tokens that store intermediate results would achieve comparable performance. Furthermore, we observe that storing intermediate results in an alternative latent form will not affect model performance. We also randomly intervene some values in CoT, and notice that subsequent CoT tokens and the final answer would change correspondingly. These findings suggest that CoT tokens may function like variables in computer programs but with potential drawbacks like unintended shortcuts and computational complexity limits between tokens. The code and data are available at https://github.com/solitaryzero/CoTs_are_Variables.
Position: Epistemic Artificial Intelligence is Essential for Machine Learning Models to Know When They Do Not Know
Authors: Shireen Kudukkil Manchingal, Fabio Cuzzolin
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Domain Adaptation, Position

Despite the impressive achievements of AI, including advancements in generative models and large language models, there remains a significant gap in the ability of AI to handle uncertainty and generalize beyond the training data. We argue that AI models, especially in autonomous systems, fail to make robust predictions when faced with unfamiliar or adversarial data, as evidenced by incidents with autonomous vehicles. Traditional machine learning approaches struggle to address these issues due to an overemphasis on data fitting and domain adaptation. This position paper posits a paradigm shift towards epistemic artificial intelligence, emphasizing the need for models to learn not only from what they know but also from their ignorance. This approach, which focuses on recognizing and managing uncertainty, offers a potential solution to improve the resilience and robustness of AI systems, ensuring that they can better handle unpredictable real-world environments.
T2VTextBench: A Human Evaluation Benchmark for Textual Control in Video Generation Models
Authors: Xuyang Guo, Jiayan Huo, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Jiahao Zhang, Jiale Zhao
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Thanks to recent advancements in scalable deep architectures and large-scale pretraining, text-to-video generation has achieved unprecedented capabilities in producing high-fidelity, instruction-following content across a wide range of styles, enabling applications in advertising, entertainment, and education. However, these models' ability to render precise on-screen text, such as captions or mathematical formulas, remains largely untested, posing significant challenges for applications requiring exact textual accuracy. In this work, we introduce T2VTextBench, the first human-evaluation benchmark dedicated to evaluating on-screen text fidelity and temporal consistency in text-to-video models. Our suite of prompts integrates complex text strings with dynamic scene changes, testing each model's ability to maintain detailed instructions across frames. We evaluate ten state-of-the-art systems, ranging from open-source solutions to commercial offerings, and find that most struggle to generate legible, consistent text. These results highlight a critical gap in current video generators and provide a clear direction for future research aimed at enhancing textual manipulation in video synthesis.
Structural Alignment in Link Prediction
Authors: Jeffrey Seathrún Sardina
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Prediction, Transfer Learning

While Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have become increasingly popular across various scientific disciplines for their ability to model and interlink huge quantities of data, essentially all real-world KGs are known to be incomplete. As such, with the growth of KG use has been a concurrent development of machine learning tools designed to predict missing information in KGs, which is referred to as the Link Prediction Task. The majority of state-of-the-art link predictors to date have followed an embedding-based paradigm. In this paradigm, it is assumed that the information content of a KG is best represented by the (individual) vector representations of its nodes and edges, and that therefore node and edge embeddings are particularly well-suited to performing link prediction. This thesis proposes an alternative perspective on the field's approach to link prediction and KG data modelling. Specifically, this work re-analyses KGs and state-of-the-art link predictors from a graph-structure-first perspective that models the information content of a KG in terms of whole triples, rather than individual nodes and edges. Following a literature review and two core sets of experiments, this thesis concludes that a structure-first perspective on KGs and link prediction is both viable and useful for understanding KG learning and for enabling cross-KG transfer learning for the link prediction task. This observation is used to create and propose the Structural Alignment Hypothesis, which postulates that link prediction can be understood and modelled as a structural task. All code and data used for this thesis are open-sourced. This thesis was written bilingually, with the main document in English and an informal extended summary in Irish. An Irish-language translation dictionary of machine learning terms (the Focl\'oir Tr\'achtais) created for this work is open-sourced as well.
Fair Uncertainty Quantification for Depression Prediction
Authors: Yonghong Li, Xiuzhuang Zhou
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Fairness, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Trustworthy depression prediction based on deep learning, incorporating both predictive reliability and algorithmic fairness across diverse demographic groups, is crucial for clinical application. Recently, achieving reliable depression predictions through uncertainty quantification has attracted increasing attention. However, few studies have focused on the fairness of uncertainty quantification (UQ) in depression prediction. In this work, we investigate the algorithmic fairness of UQ, namely Equal Opportunity Coverage (EOC) fairness, and propose Fair Uncertainty Quantification (FUQ) for depression prediction. FUQ pursues reliable and fair depression predictions through group-based analysis. Specifically, we first group all the participants by different sensitive attributes and leverage conformal prediction to quantify uncertainty within each demographic group, which provides a theoretically guaranteed and valid way to quantify uncertainty for depression prediction and facilitates the investigation of fairness across different demographic groups. Furthermore, we propose a fairness-aware optimization strategy that formulates fairness as a constrained optimization problem under EOC constraints. This enables the model to preserve predictive reliability while adapting to the heterogeneous uncertainty levels across demographic groups, thereby achieving optimal fairness. Through extensive evaluations on several visual and audio depression datasets, our approach demonstrates its effectiveness.
Belief Filtering for Epistemic Control in Linguistic State Space
Authors: Sebastian Dumbrava
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

We examine belief filtering as a mechanism for the epistemic control of artificial agents, focusing on the regulation of internal cognitive states represented as linguistic expressions. This mechanism is developed within the Semantic Manifold framework, where belief states are dynamic, structured ensembles of natural language fragments. Belief filters act as content-aware operations on these fragments across various cognitive transitions. This paper illustrates how the inherent interpretability and modularity of such a linguistically-grounded cognitive architecture directly enable belief filtering, offering a principled approach to agent regulation. The study highlights the potential for enhancing AI safety and alignment through structured interventions in an agent's internal semantic space and points to new directions for architecturally embedded cognitive governance.