pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Intelligent Road Anomaly Detection with Real-time Notification System for Enhanced Road Safety
Authors: Ali Almakhluk, Uthman Baroudi, Yasser El-Alfy
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This study aims to improve transportation safety, especially traffic safety. Road damage anomalies such as potholes and cracks have emerged as a significant and recurring cause for accidents. To tackle this problem and improve road safety, a comprehensive system has been developed to detect potholes, cracks (e.g. alligator, transverse, longitudinal), classify their sizes, and transmit this data to the cloud for appropriate action by authorities. The system also broadcasts warning signals to nearby vehicles warning them if a severe anomaly is detected on the road. Moreover, the system can count road anomalies in real-time. It is emulated through the utilization of Raspberry Pi, a camera module, deep learning model, laptop, and cloud service. Deploying this innovative solution aims to proactively enhance road safety by notifying relevant authorities and drivers about the presence of potholes and cracks to take actions, thereby mitigating potential accidents arising from this prevalent road hazard leading to safer road conditions for the whole community.
Total Variation-Based Image Decomposition and Denoising for Microscopy Images
Authors: Marco Corrias, Giada Franceschi, Michele Riva, Alberto Tampieri, Karin Föttinger, Ulrike Diebold, Thomas Pock, Cesare Franchini
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Experimentally acquired microscopy images are unavoidably affected by the presence of noise and other unwanted signals, which degrade their quality and might hide relevant features. With the recent increase in image acquisition rate, modern denoising and restoration solutions become necessary. This study focuses on image decomposition and denoising of microscopy images through a workflow based on total variation (TV), addressing images obtained from various microscopy techniques, including atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Our approach consists in restoring an image by extracting its unwanted signal components and subtracting them from the raw one, or by denoising it. We evaluate the performance of TV-$L^1$, Huber-ROF, and TGV-$L^1$ in achieving this goal in distinct study cases. Huber-ROF proved to be the most flexible one, while TGV-$L^1$ is the most suitable for denoising. Our results suggest a wider applicability of this method in microscopy, restricted not only to STM, AFM, and SEM images. The Python code used for this study is publicly available as part of AiSurf. It is designed to be integrated into experimental workflows for image acquisition or can be used to denoise previously acquired images.
Adaptive Security Policy Management in Cloud Environments Using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Muhammad Saqib, Dipkumar Mehta, Fnu Yashu, Shubham Malhotra
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Intrusion Detection, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The security of cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), is complex and dynamic. Static security policies have become inadequate as threats evolve and cloud resources exhibit elasticity [1]. This paper addresses the limitations of static policies by proposing a security policy management framework that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to adapt dynamically. Specifically, we employ deep reinforcement learning algorithms, including deep Q Networks and proximal policy optimization, enabling the learning and continuous adjustment of controls such as firewall rules and Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. The proposed RL based solution leverages cloud telemetry data (AWS Cloud Trail logs, network traffic data, threat intelligence feeds) to continuously refine security policies, maximizing threat mitigation, and compliance while minimizing resource impact. Experimental results demonstrate that our adaptive RL based framework significantly outperforms static policies, achieving higher intrusion detection rates (92% compared to 82% for static policies) and substantially reducing incident detection and response times by 58%. In addition, it maintains high conformity with security requirements and efficient resource usage. These findings validate the effectiveness of adaptive reinforcement learning approaches in improving cloud security policy management.
Generative AI for Urban Planning: Synthesizing Satellite Imagery via Diffusion Models
Authors: Qingyi Wang, Yuebing Liang, Yunhan Zheng, Kaiyuan Xu, Jinhua Zhao, Shenhao Wang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00

Generative AI offers new opportunities for automating urban planning by creating site-specific urban layouts and enabling flexible design exploration. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce realistic and practical designs at scale. Therefore, we adapt a state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, extended with ControlNet, to generate high-fidelity satellite imagery conditioned on land use descriptions, infrastructure, and natural environments. To overcome data availability limitations, we spatially link satellite imagery with structured land use and constraint information from OpenStreetMap. Using data from three major U.S. cities, we demonstrate that the proposed diffusion model generates realistic and diverse urban landscapes by varying land-use configurations, road networks, and water bodies, facilitating cross-city learning and design diversity. We also systematically evaluate the impacts of varying language prompts and control imagery on the quality of satellite imagery generation. Our model achieves high FID and KID scores and demonstrates robustness across diverse urban contexts. Qualitative assessments from urban planners and the general public show that generated images align closely with design descriptions and constraints, and are often preferred over real images. This work establishes a benchmark for controlled urban imagery generation and highlights the potential of generative AI as a tool for enhancing planning workflows and public engagement.
Thoughts on Objectives of Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Image Model
Authors: Asahi Miyazaki, Tsuyoshi Okita
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Masked image modeling is one of the most poplular objectives of training. Recently, the SparK model has been proposed with superior performance among self-supervised learning models. This paper proposes a new mask pattern for this SparK model, proposing it as the Mesh Mask-ed SparK model. We report the effect of the mask pattern used for image masking in pre-training on performance.
Towards SFW sampling for diffusion models via external conditioning
Authors: Camilo Carvajal Reyes, Joaquín Fontbona, Felipe Tobar
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Score-based generative models (SBM), also known as diffusion models, are the de facto state of the art for image synthesis. Despite their unparalleled performance, SBMs have recently been in the spotlight for being tricked into creating not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, such as violent images and non-consensual nudity. Current approaches that prevent unsafe generation are based on the models' own knowledge, and the majority of them require fine-tuning. This article explores the use of external sources for ensuring safe outputs in SBMs. Our safe-for-work (SFW) sampler implements a Conditional Trajectory Correction step that guides the samples away from undesired regions in the ambient space using multimodal models as the source of conditioning. Furthermore, using Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), our method admits user-defined NSFW classes, which can vary in different settings. Our experiments on the text-to-image SBM Stable Diffusion validate that the proposed SFW sampler effectively reduces the generation of explicit content while being competitive with other fine-tuning-based approaches, as assessed via independent NSFW detectors. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of the SFW sampler on image quality and show that the proposed correction scheme comes at a minor cost with negligible effect on samples not needing correction. Our study confirms the suitability of the SFW sampler towards aligned SBM models and the potential of using model-agnostic conditioning for the prevention of unwanted images.
TUGS: Physics-based Compact Representation of Underwater Scenes by Tensorized Gaussian
Authors: Shijie Lian, Ziyi Zhang, Laurence Tianruo Yang and, Mengyu Ren, Debin Liu, Hua Li
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Scene Reconstruction, NeRF, Underwater 3D Scene Reconstruction

Underwater 3D scene reconstruction is crucial for undewater robotic perception and navigation. However, the task is significantly challenged by the complex interplay between light propagation, water medium, and object surfaces, with existing methods unable to model their interactions accurately. Additionally, expensive training and rendering costs limit their practical application in underwater robotic systems. Therefore, we propose Tensorized Underwater Gaussian Splatting (TUGS), which can effectively solve the modeling challenges of the complex interactions between object geometries and water media while achieving significant parameter reduction. TUGS employs lightweight tensorized higher-order Gaussians with a physics-based underwater Adaptive Medium Estimation (AME) module, enabling accurate simulation of both light attenuation and backscatter effects in underwater environments. Compared to other NeRF-based and GS-based methods designed for underwater, TUGS is able to render high-quality underwater images with faster rendering speeds and less memory usage. Extensive experiments on real-world underwater datasets have demonstrated that TUGS can efficiently achieve superior reconstruction quality using a limited number of parameters, making it particularly suitable for memory-constrained underwater UAV applications
Adaptively-weighted Nearest Neighbors for Matrix Completion
Authors: Tathagata Sadhukhan, Manit Paul, Raaz Dwivedi
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference, Matrix Completion, Recommendation Systems

In this technical note, we introduce and analyze AWNN: an adaptively weighted nearest neighbor method for performing matrix completion. Nearest neighbor (NN) methods are widely used in missing data problems across multiple disciplines such as in recommender systems and for performing counterfactual inference in panel data settings. Prior works have shown that in addition to being very intuitive and easy to implement, NN methods enjoy nice theoretical guarantees. However, the performance of majority of the NN methods rely on the appropriate choice of the radii and the weights assigned to each member in the nearest neighbor set and despite several works on nearest neighbor methods in the past two decades, there does not exist a systematic approach of choosing the radii and the weights without relying on methods like cross-validation. AWNN addresses this challenge by judiciously balancing the bias variance trade off inherent in weighted nearest-neighbor regression. We provide theoretical guarantees for the proposed method under minimal assumptions and support the theory via synthetic experiments.
DataMIL: Selecting Data for Robot Imitation Learning with Datamodels
Authors: Shivin Dass, Alaa Khaddaj, Logan Engstrom, Aleksander Madry, Andrew Ilyas, Roberto Martín-Martín
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Recently, the robotics community has amassed ever larger and more diverse datasets to train generalist robot policies. However, while these policies achieve strong mean performance across a variety of tasks, they often underperform on individual, specialized tasks and require further tuning on newly acquired task-specific data. Combining task-specific data with carefully curated subsets of large prior datasets via co-training can produce better specialized policies, but selecting data naively may actually harm downstream performance. To address this, we introduce DataMIL, a policy-driven data selection framework built on the datamodels paradigm that reasons about data selection in an end-to-end manner, using the policy itself to identify which data points will most improve performance. Unlike standard practices that filter data using human notions of quality (e.g., based on semantic or visual similarity), DataMIL directly optimizes data selection for task success, allowing us to select data that enhance the policy while dropping data that degrade it. To avoid performing expensive rollouts in the environment during selection, we use a novel surrogate loss function on task-specific data, allowing us to use DataMIL in the real world without degrading performance. We validate our approach on a suite of more than 60 simulation and real-world manipulation tasks - most notably showing successful data selection from the Open X-Embodiment datasets-demonstrating consistent gains in success rates and superior performance over multiple baselines. Our results underscore the importance of end-to-end, performance-aware data selection for unlocking the potential of large prior datasets in robotics. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/datamodels4imitation/
Adversarial Suffix Filtering: a Defense Pipeline for LLMs
Authors: David Khachaturov, Robert Mullins
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in autonomous systems and public-facing environments, yet they remain susceptible to jailbreak vulnerabilities that may undermine their security and trustworthiness. Adversarial suffixes are considered to be the current state-of-the-art jailbreak, consistently outperforming simpler methods and frequently succeeding even in black-box settings. Existing defenses rely on access to the internal architecture of models limiting diverse deployment, increase memory and computation footprints dramatically, or can be bypassed with simple prompt engineering methods. We introduce $\textbf{Adversarial Suffix Filtering}$ (ASF), a lightweight novel model-agnostic defensive pipeline designed to protect LLMs against adversarial suffix attacks. ASF functions as an input preprocessor and sanitizer that detects and filters adversarially crafted suffixes in prompts, effectively neutralizing malicious injections. We demonstrate that ASF provides comprehensive defense capabilities across both black-box and white-box attack settings, reducing the attack efficacy of state-of-the-art adversarial suffix generation methods to below 4%, while only minimally affecting the target model's capabilities in non-adversarial scenarios.
Online Isolation Forest
Authors: Filippo Leveni, Guilherme Weigert Cassales, Bernhard Pfahringer, Albert Bifet, Giacomo Boracchi
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fault Detection

The anomaly detection literature is abundant with offline methods, which require repeated access to data in memory, and impose impractical assumptions when applied to a streaming context. Existing online anomaly detection methods also generally fail to address these constraints, resorting to periodic retraining to adapt to the online context. We propose Online-iForest, a novel method explicitly designed for streaming conditions that seamlessly tracks the data generating process as it evolves over time. Experimental validation on real-world datasets demonstrated that Online-iForest is on par with online alternatives and closely rivals state-of-the-art offline anomaly detection techniques that undergo periodic retraining. Notably, Online-iForest consistently outperforms all competitors in terms of efficiency, making it a promising solution in applications where fast identification of anomalies is of primary importance such as cybersecurity, fraud and fault detection.
Rhomboid Tiling for Geometric Graph Deep Learning
Authors: YiPeng Zhang, Longlong Li, Kelin Xia
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning, Graph Classification, Graph Clustering

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven effective for learning from graph-structured data through their neighborhood-based message passing framework. Many hierarchical graph clustering pooling methods modify this framework by introducing clustering-based strategies, enabling the construction of more expressive and powerful models. However, all of these message passing framework heavily rely on the connectivity structure of graphs, limiting their ability to capture the rich geometric features inherent in geometric graphs. To address this, we propose Rhomboid Tiling (RT) clustering, a novel clustering method based on the rhomboid tiling structure, which performs clustering by leveraging the complex geometric information of the data and effectively extracts its higher-order geometric structures. Moreover, we design RTPool, a hierarchical graph clustering pooling model based on RT clustering for graph classification tasks. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance, outperforming 21 state-of-the-art competitors on all the 7 benchmark datasets.
TuneNSearch: a hybrid transfer learning and local search approach for solving vehicle routing problems
Authors: Arthur Corrêa, Cristóvão Silva, Liming Xu, Alexandra Brintrup, Samuel Moniz
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Multi-Task Learning, Transfer Learning, Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper introduces TuneNSearch, a hybrid transfer learning and local search approach for addressing different variants of vehicle routing problems (VRP). Recently, multi-task learning has gained much attention for solving VRP variants. However, this adaptability often compromises the performance of the models. To address this challenge, we first pre-train a reinforcement learning model on the multi-depot VRP, followed by a short fine-tuning phase to adapt it to different variants. By leveraging the complexity of the multi-depot VRP, the pre-trained model learns richer node representations and gains more transferable knowledge compared to models trained on simpler routing problems, such as the traveling salesman problem. TuneNSearch employs, in the first stage, a Transformer-based architecture, augmented with a residual edge-graph attention network to capture the impact of edge distances and residual connections between layers. This architecture allows for a more precise capture of graph-structured data, improving the encoding of VRP's features. After inference, our model is also coupled with a second stage composed of a local search algorithm, which yields substantial performance gains with minimal computational overhead added. Results show that TuneNSearch outperforms many existing state-of-the-art models trained for each VRP variant, requiring only one-fifth of the training epochs. Our approach demonstrates strong generalization, achieving high performance across different tasks, distributions and problem sizes, thus addressing a long-standing gap in the literature.
SAD Neural Networks: Divergent Gradient Flows and Asymptotic Optimality via o-minimal Structures
Authors: Julian Kranz, Davide Gallon, Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00

We study gradient flows for loss landscapes of fully connected feed forward neural networks with commonly used continuously differentiable activation functions such as the logistic, hyperbolic tangent, softplus or GELU function. We prove that the gradient flow either converges to a critical point or diverges to infinity while the loss converges to an asymptotic critical value. Moreover, we prove the existence of a threshold $\varepsilon>0$ such that the loss value of any gradient flow initialized at most $\varepsilon$ above the optimal level converges to it. For polynomial target functions and sufficiently big architecture and data set, we prove that the optimal loss value is zero and can only be realized asymptotically. From this setting, we deduce our main result that any gradient flow with sufficiently good initialization diverges to infinity. Our proof heavily relies on the geometry of o-minimal structures. We confirm these theoretical findings with numerical experiments and extend our investigation to real-world scenarios, where we observe an analogous behavior.
Scalable Computations for Generalized Mixed Effects Models with Crossed Random Effects Using Krylov Subspace Methods
Authors: Pascal Kündig, Fabio Sigrist
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: subspace methods

Mixed effects models are widely used for modeling data with hierarchically grouped structures and high-cardinality categorical predictor variables. However, for high-dimensional crossed random effects, current standard computations relying on Cholesky decompositions can become prohibitively slow. In this work, we present novel Krylov subspace-based methods that address several existing computational bottlenecks. Among other things, we theoretically analyze and empirically evaluate various preconditioners for the conjugate gradient and stochastic Lanczos quadrature methods, derive new convergence results, and develop computationally efficient methods for calculating predictive variances. Extensive experiments using simulated and real-world data sets show that our proposed methods scale much better than Cholesky-based computations, for instance, achieving a runtime reduction of approximately two orders of magnitudes for both estimation and prediction. Moreover, our software implementation is up to 10'000 times faster and more stable than state-of-the-art implementations such as lme4 and glmmTMB when using default settings. Our methods are implemented in the free C++ software library GPBoost with high-level Python and R packages.
Distilling Realizable Students from Unrealizable Teachers
Authors: Yujin Kim, Nathaniel Chin, Arnav Vasudev, Sanjiban Choudhury
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Imitation Learning

We study policy distillation under privileged information, where a student policy with only partial observations must learn from a teacher with full-state access. A key challenge is information asymmetry: the student cannot directly access the teacher's state space, leading to distributional shifts and policy degradation. Existing approaches either modify the teacher to produce realizable but sub-optimal demonstrations or rely on the student to explore missing information independently, both of which are inefficient. Our key insight is that the student should strategically interact with the teacher --querying only when necessary and resetting from recovery states --to stay on a recoverable path within its own observation space. We introduce two methods: (i) an imitation learning approach that adaptively determines when the student should query the teacher for corrections, and (ii) a reinforcement learning approach that selects where to initialize training for efficient exploration. We validate our methods in both simulated and real-world robotic tasks, demonstrating significant improvements over standard teacher-student baselines in training efficiency and final performance. The project website is available at : https://portal-cornell.github.io/CritiQ_ReTRy/