pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedAvgen: Metadata for Model Aggregation In Communication Systems
Authors: Anthony Kiggundu, Dennis Krummacker, Hans D. Schotten
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Federated Learning, model

To improve business efficiency and minimize costs, Artificial Intelligence (AI) practitioners have adopted a shift from formulating models from scratch towards sharing pretrained models. The pretrained models are then aggregated into a global model with higher generalization capabilities, which is afterwards distributed to the client devices. This approach is known as federated learning and inherently utilizes different techniques to select the candidate client models averaged to obtain the global model. This approach, in the case of communication systems, faces challenges arising from the existential diversity in device profiles. The multiplicity in profiles motivates our conceptual assessment of a metaheuristic algorithm (FedAvgen), which relates each pretrained model with its weight space as metadata, to a phenotype and genotype, respectively. This parent-child genetic evolution characterizes the global averaging step in federated learning. We then compare the results of our approach to two widely adopted baseline federated learning algorithms like Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and Federated Stochastic Gradient Descent (FedSGD).
Evolutionary Optimization for the Classification of Small Molecules Regulating the Circadian Rhythm Period: A Reliable Assessment
Authors: Antonio Arauzo-Azofra, Jose Molina-Baena, Maria Luque-Rodriguez
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, feature selection, Rhythm

The circadian rhythm plays a crucial role in regulating biological processes, and its disruption is linked to various health issues. Identifying small molecules that influence the circadian period is essential for developing targeted therapies. This study explores the use of evolutionary optimization techniques to enhance the classification of these molecules. We applied an evolutionary algorithm to optimize feature selection and classification performance. Several machine learning classifiers were employed, and performance was evaluated using accuracy and generalization ability. The findings demonstrate that the proposed evolutionary optimization method improves classification accuracy and reduces overfitting compared to baseline models. Additionally, the use of variance in accuracy as a penalty factor may enhance the model's reliability for real-world applications. Our study confirms that evolutionary optimization is an effective strategy for classifying small molecules regulating the circadian rhythm. The proposed approach not only improves predictive performance but also ensures a more robust model.
An Efficient Transport-Based Dissimilarity Measure for Time Series Classification under Warping Distortions
Authors: Akram Aldroubi, Rocío Díaz Martín, Ivan Medri, Kristofor E. Pas, Gustavo K. Rohde, Abu Hasnat Mohammad Rubaiyat
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Dynamic Time Warping, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important problem with numerous applications in science and technology. Dissimilarity-based approaches, such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), are classical methods for distinguishing time series when time deformations are confounding information. In this paper, starting from a deformation-based model for signal classes we define a problem statement for time series classification problem. We show that, under theoretically ideal conditions, a continuous version of classic 1NN-DTW method can solve the stated problem, even when only one training sample is available. In addition, we propose an alternative dissimilarity measure based on Optimal Transport and show that it can also solve the aforementioned problem statement at a significantly reduced computational cost. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the newly proposed approach in simulated and real time series classification data, showing the efficacy of the method.
Cost-Effective, Low Latency Vector Search with Azure Cosmos DB
Authors: Nitish Upreti, Krishnan Sundaram, Hari Sudan Sundar, Samer Boshra, Balachandar Perumalswamy, Shivam Atri, Martin Chisholm, Revti Raman Singh, Greg Yang, Subramanyam Pattipaka, Tamara Hass, Nitesh Dudhey, James Codella, Mark Hildebrand, Magdalen Manohar, Jack Moffitt, Haiyang Xu, Naren Datha, Suryansh Gupta, Ravishankar Krishnaswamy, Prashant Gupta, Abhishek Sahu, Ritika Mor, Santosh Kulkarni, Hemeswari Varada, Sudhanshu Barthwal, Amar Sagare, Dinesh Billa, Zishan Fu, Neil Deshpande, Shaun Cooper, Kevin Pilch, Simon Moreno, Aayush Kataria, Vipul Vishal, Harsha Vardhan Simhadri
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00

Vector indexing enables semantic search over diverse corpora and has become an important interface to databases for both users and AI agents. Efficient vector search requires deep optimizations in database systems. This has motivated a new class of specialized vector databases that optimize for vector search quality and cost. Instead, we argue that a scalable, high-performance, and cost-efficient vector search system can be built inside a cloud-native operational database like Azure Cosmos DB while leveraging the benefits of a distributed database such as high availability, durability, and scale. We do this by deeply integrating DiskANN, a state-of-the-art vector indexing library, inside Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL. This system uses a single vector index per partition stored in existing index trees, and kept in sync with underlying data. It supports < 20ms query latency over an index spanning 10 million of vectors, has stable recall over updates, and offers nearly 15x and 41x lower query cost compared to Zilliz and Pinecone serverless enterprise products. It also scales out to billions of vectors via automatic partitioning. This convergent design presents a point in favor of integrating vector indices into operational databases in the context of recent debates on specialized vector databases, and offers a template for vector indexing in other databases.
An Automated LLM-based Pipeline for Asset-Level Database Creation to Assess Deforestation Impact
Authors: Avanija Menon, Ovidiu Serban
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00

The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires companies to prove their products do not contribute to deforestation, creating a critical demand for precise, asset-level environmental impact data. Current databases lack the necessary detail, relying heavily on broad financial metrics and manual data collection, which limits regulatory compliance and accurate environmental modeling. This study presents an automated, end-to-end data extraction pipeline that uses LLMs to create, clean, and validate structured databases, specifically targeting sectors with a high risk of deforestation. The pipeline introduces Instructional, Role-Based, Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (IRZ-CoT) prompting to enhance data extraction accuracy and a Retrieval-Augmented Validation (RAV) process that integrates real-time web searches for improved data reliability. Applied to SEC EDGAR filings in the Mining, Oil & Gas, and Utilities sectors, the pipeline demonstrates significant improvements over traditional zero-shot prompting approaches, particularly in extraction accuracy and validation coverage. This work advances NLP-driven automation for regulatory compliance, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and ESG, with broad sectoral applicability.
Navigating Label Ambiguity for Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild
Authors: JunGyu Lee, Yeji Choi, Haksub Kim, Ig-Jae Kim, Gi Pyo Nam
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expression recognition (FER) remains a challenging task due to label ambiguity caused by the subjective nature of facial expressions and noisy samples. Additionally, class imbalance, which is common in real-world datasets, further complicates FER. Although many studies have shown impressive improvements, they typically address only one of these issues, leading to suboptimal results. To tackle both challenges simultaneously, we propose a novel framework called Navigating Label Ambiguity (NLA), which is robust under real-world conditions. The motivation behind NLA is that dynamically estimating and emphasizing ambiguous samples at each iteration helps mitigate noise and class imbalance by reducing the model's bias toward majority classes. To achieve this, NLA consists of two main components: Noise-aware Adaptive Weighting (NAW) and consistency regularization. Specifically, NAW adaptively assigns higher importance to ambiguous samples and lower importance to noisy ones, based on the correlation between the intermediate prediction scores for the ground truth and the nearest negative. Moreover, we incorporate a regularization term to ensure consistent latent distributions. Consequently, NLA enables the model to progressively focus on more challenging ambiguous samples, which primarily belong to the minority class, in the later stages of training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLA outperforms existing methods in both overall and mean accuracy, confirming its robustness against noise and class imbalance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework to address both problems simultaneously.
Comparative Evaluation of VaR Models: Historical Simulation, GARCH-Based Monte Carlo, and Filtered Historical Simulation
Authors: Xin Tian
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

This report presents a comprehensive evaluation of three Value-at-Risk (VaR) modeling approaches: Historical Simulation (HS), GARCH with Normal approximation (GARCH-N), and GARCH with Filtered Historical Simulation (FHS), using both in-sample and multi-day forecasting frameworks. We compute daily 5 percent VaR estimates using each method and assess their accuracy via empirical breach frequencies and visual breach indicators. Our findings reveal severe miscalibration in the HS and GARCH-N models, with empirical breach rates far exceeding theoretical levels. In contrast, the FHS method consistently aligns with theoretical expectations and exhibits desirable statistical and visual behavior. We further simulate 5-day cumulative returns under both GARCH-N and GARCH-FHS frameworks to compute multi-period VaR and Expected Shortfall. Results show that GARCH-N underestimates tail risk due to its reliance on the Gaussian assumption, whereas GARCH-FHS provides more robust and conservative tail estimates. Overall, the study demonstrates that the GARCH-FHS model offers superior performance in capturing fat-tailed risks and provides more reliable short-term risk forecasts.
Interval Regression: A Comparative Study with Proposed Models
Authors: Tung L Nguyen, Toby Dylan Hocking
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Regression models are essential for a wide range of real-world applications. However, in practice, target values are not always precisely known; instead, they may be represented as intervals of acceptable values. This challenge has led to the development of Interval Regression models. In this study, we provide a comprehensive review of existing Interval Regression models and introduce alternative models for comparative analysis. Experiments are conducted on both real-world and synthetic datasets to offer a broad perspective on model performance. The results demonstrate that no single model is universally optimal, highlighting the importance of selecting the most suitable model for each specific scenario.
From Complexity to Clarity: Transforming Chest X-ray Reports with Chained Prompting (Student Abstract)
Authors: Sujoy Nath, Arkaprabha Basu, Kushal Bose, Swagatam Das
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI 2025 4
Tasks: Decoder, Medical Diagnosis

In the rapidly advancing field of AI-assisted medical diagnosis, the generation of medical reports for Chest X-rays (CXR) has significantly improved with the increased availability of radiographs and their corresponding reports. However, these reports often contain complex medical terminology, making them difficult for patients and non-healthcare professionals to understand. In this study, we introduce a strategy called Chained Prompting for Improved Readability of Medical Reports (CPIR-MR), which translates original medical reports into more comprehensible language. Our primary contribution is the creation of a new extension to the IU X-Ray dataset, providing Simplified Medical Reports (SMRs) generated by CPIR-MR. Additionally, we demonstrate that standard methodologies can effectively produce these simplified reports by proposing a multi-modal text decoder (MTD) that combines BLIP with a classification network to generate simplified medical explanations (SMEs) when fine-tuned on SMRs.
Streaming Sliced Optimal Transport
Authors: Khai Nguyen
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Point Detection, Point Cloud Classification

Sliced optimal transport (SOT) or sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance is widely recognized for its statistical and computational scalability. In this work, we further enhance the computational scalability by proposing the first method for computing SW from sample streams, called \emph{streaming sliced Wasserstein} (Stream-SW). To define Stream-SW, we first introduce the streaming computation of the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance. Since the one-dimensional Wasserstein (1DW) distance has a closed-form expression, given by the absolute difference between the quantile functions of the compared distributions, we leverage quantile approximation techniques for sample streams to define the streaming 1DW distance. By applying streaming 1DW to all projections, we obtain Stream-SW. The key advantage of Stream-SW is its low memory complexity while providing theoretical guarantees on the approximation error. We demonstrate that Stream-SW achieves a more accurate approximation of SW than random subsampling, with lower memory consumption, in comparing Gaussian distributions and mixtures of Gaussians from streaming samples. Additionally, we conduct experiments on point cloud classification, point cloud gradient flows, and streaming change point detection to further highlight the favorable performance of Stream-SW.
AnimalMotionCLIP: Embedding motion in CLIP for Animal Behavior Analysis
Authors: Enmin Zhong, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Daniel Berjón, Fernando Jaureguizar, Narciso García
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in applying deep learning techniques to animal behavior recognition, particularly leveraging pre-trained visual language models, such as CLIP, due to their remarkable generalization capacity across various downstream tasks. However, adapting these models to the specific domain of animal behavior recognition presents two significant challenges: integrating motion information and devising an effective temporal modeling scheme. In this paper, we propose AnimalMotionCLIP to address these challenges by interleaving video frames and optical flow information in the CLIP framework. Additionally, several temporal modeling schemes using an aggregation of classifiers are proposed and compared: dense, semi dense, and sparse. As a result, fine temporal actions can be correctly recognized, which is of vital importance in animal behavior analysis. Experiments on the Animal Kingdom dataset demonstrate that AnimalMotionCLIP achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
High-Dimensional Importance-Weighted Information Criteria: Theory and Optimality
Authors: Yong-Syun Cao, Shinpei Imori, Ching-Kang Ing
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection

Imori and Ing (2025) proposed the importance-weighted orthogonal greedy algorithm (IWOGA) for model selection in high-dimensional misspecified regression models under covariate shift. To determine the number of IWOGA iterations, they introduced the high-dimensional importance-weighted information criterion (HDIWIC). They argued that the combined use of IWOGA and HDIWIC, IWOGA + HDIWIC, achieves an optimal trade-off between variance and squared bias, leading to optimal convergence rates in terms of conditional mean squared prediction error. In this article, we provide a theoretical justification for this claim by establishing the optimality of IWOGA + HDIWIC under a set of reasonable assumptions.
SpectrumFM: A Foundation Model for Intelligent Spectrum Management
Authors: Fuhui Zhou, Chunyu Liu, Hao Zhang, Wei Wu, Qihui Wu, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Tony Q. S. Quek, Chan-Byoung Chae
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Few-Shot Learning, Management, model, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Intelligent spectrum management is crucial for improving spectrum efficiency and achieving secure utilization of spectrum resources. However, existing intelligent spectrum management methods, typically based on small-scale models, suffer from notable limitations in recognition accuracy, convergence speed, and generalization, particularly in the complex and dynamic spectrum environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel spectrum foundation model, termed SpectrumFM, establishing a new paradigm for spectrum management. SpectrumFM features an innovative encoder architecture that synergistically exploits the convolutional neural networks and the multi-head self-attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction and enable robust representation learning. The model is pre-trained via two novel self-supervised learning tasks, namely masked reconstruction and next-slot signal prediction, which leverage large-scale in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data to achieve comprehensive and transferable spectrum representations. Furthermore, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy is proposed to enable SpectrumFM to adapt to various downstream spectrum management tasks, including automatic modulation classification (AMC), wireless technology classification (WTC), spectrum sensing (SS), and anomaly detection (AD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpectrumFM achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, adaptability, few-shot learning efficiency, and convergence speed, consistently outperforming conventional methods across multiple benchmarks. Specifically, SpectrumFM improves AMC accuracy by up to 12.1% and WTC accuracy by 9.3%, achieves an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.97 in SS at -4 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and enhances AD performance by over 10%.
Unified Continuous Generative Models
Authors: Peng Sun, Yi Jiang, Tao Lin
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent advances in continuous generative models, including multi-step approaches like diffusion and flow-matching (typically requiring 8-1000 sampling steps) and few-step methods such as consistency models (typically 1-8 steps), have demonstrated impressive generative performance. However, existing work often treats these approaches as distinct paradigms, resulting in separate training and sampling methodologies. We introduce a unified framework for training, sampling, and analyzing these models. Our implementation, the Unified Continuous Generative Models Trainer and Sampler (UCGM-{T,S}), achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. For example, on ImageNet 256x256 using a 675M diffusion transformer, UCGM-T trains a multi-step model achieving 1.30 FID in 20 steps and a few-step model reaching 1.42 FID in just 2 steps. Additionally, applying UCGM-S to a pre-trained model (previously 1.26 FID at 250 steps) improves performance to 1.06 FID in only 40 steps. Code is available at: https://github.com/LINs-lab/UCGM.
Nature's Insight: A Novel Framework and Comprehensive Analysis of Agentic Reasoning Through the Lens of Neuroscience
Authors: Zinan Liu, Haoran Li, Jingyi Lu, Gaoyuan Ma, Xu Hong, Giovanni Iacca, Arvind Kumar, Shaojun Tang, Lin Wang
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00

Autonomous AI is no longer a hard-to-reach concept, it enables the agents to move beyond executing tasks to independently addressing complex problems, adapting to change while handling the uncertainty of the environment. However, what makes the agents truly autonomous? It is agentic reasoning, that is crucial for foundation models to develop symbolic logic, statistical correlations, or large-scale pattern recognition to process information, draw inferences, and make decisions. However, it remains unclear why and how existing agentic reasoning approaches work, in comparison to biological reasoning, which instead is deeply rooted in neural mechanisms involving hierarchical cognition, multimodal integration, and dynamic interactions. In this work, we propose a novel neuroscience-inspired framework for agentic reasoning. Grounded in three neuroscience-based definitions and supported by mathematical and biological foundations, we propose a unified framework modeling reasoning from perception to action, encompassing four core types, perceptual, dimensional, logical, and interactive, inspired by distinct functional roles observed in the human brain. We apply this framework to systematically classify and analyze existing AI reasoning methods, evaluating their theoretical foundations, computational designs, and practical limitations. We also explore its implications for building more generalizable, cognitively aligned agents in physical and virtual environments. Finally, building on our framework, we outline future directions and propose new neural-inspired reasoning methods, analogous to chain-of-thought prompting. By bridging cognitive neuroscience and AI, this work offers a theoretical foundation and practical roadmap for advancing agentic reasoning in intelligent systems. The associated project can be found at: https://github.com/BioRAILab/Awesome-Neuroscience-Agent-Reasoning .
Structural Entropy Guided Agent for Detecting and Repairing Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs
Authors: Yifan Wei, Xiaoyan Yu, Tengfei Pan, Angsheng Li, Li Du
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Knowledge Distillation, Knowledge Graphs, Reinforcement Learning, Synthetic Data Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance by leveraging vast pretraining corpora, yet their performance remains suboptimal in knowledge-intensive domains such as medicine and scientific research, where high factual precision is required. While synthetic data provides a promising avenue for augmenting domain knowledge, existing methods frequently generate redundant samples that do not align with the model's true knowledge gaps. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structural Entropy-guided Knowledge Navigator (SENATOR) framework that addresses the intrinsic knowledge deficiencies of LLMs. Our approach employs the Structure Entropy (SE) metric to quantify uncertainty along knowledge graph paths and leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to selectively explore regions where the model lacks domain-specific knowledge. Guided by these insights, the framework generates targeted synthetic data for supervised fine-tuning, enabling continuous self-improvement. Experimental results on LLaMA-3 and Qwen2 across multiple domain-specific benchmarks show that SENATOR effectively detects and repairs knowledge deficiencies, achieving notable performance improvements. The code and data for our methods and experiments are available at https://github.com/weiyifan1023/senator.