pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DRIVINGVQA: Analyzing Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of Vision Language Models in Real-World Scenarios with Driving Theory Tests
Authors: Charles Corbière, Simon Roburin, Syrielle Montariol, Antoine Bosselut, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, Multiple-choice, Visual Reasoning

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) augment language models with visual understanding, enabling multimodal reasoning. However, due to the modality gap between textual and visual data, they often face significant challenges, such as over-reliance on text priors, hallucinations, and limited capacity for complex visual reasoning. Existing benchmarks to evaluate visual reasoning in LVLMs often rely on schematic or synthetic images and on imprecise machine-generated explanations. To bridge the modality gap, we present DrivingVQA, a new benchmark derived from driving theory tests to evaluate visual chain-of-thought reasoning in complex real-world scenarios. It offers 3,931 expert-crafted multiple-choice problems and interleaved explanations grounded with entities relevant to the reasoning process. We leverage this dataset to perform an extensive study of LVLMs' ability to reason about complex visual scenarios. Our experiments reveal that open-source and proprietary LVLMs struggle with visual chain-of-thought reasoning under zero-shot settings. We investigate training strategies that leverage relevant entities to improve visual reasoning. Notably, we observe a performance boost of up to 7\% when reasoning over image tokens of cropped regions tied to these entities.
Assessing Language Comprehension in Large Language Models Using Construction Grammar
Authors: Wesley Scivetti, Melissa Torgbi, Austin Blodgett, Mollie Shichman, Taylor Hudson, Claire Bonial, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Natural Language Understanding

Large Language Models, despite their significant capabilities, are known to fail in surprising and unpredictable ways. Evaluating their true `understanding' of language is particularly challenging due to the extensive web-scale data they are trained on. Therefore, we construct an evaluation to systematically assess natural language understanding (NLU) in LLMs by leveraging Construction Grammar (CxG), which provides insights into the meaning captured by linguistic elements known as constructions (Cxns). CxG is well-suited for this purpose because provides a theoretical basis to construct targeted evaluation sets. These datasets are carefully constructed to include examples which are unlikely to appear in pre-training data, yet intuitive and easy for humans to understand, enabling a more targeted and reliable assessment. Our experiments focus on downstream natural language inference and reasoning tasks by comparing LLMs' understanding of the underlying meanings communicated through 8 unique Cxns with that of humans. The results show that while LLMs demonstrate some knowledge of constructional information, even the latest models including GPT-o1 struggle with abstract meanings conveyed by these Cxns, as demonstrated in cases where test sentences are dissimilar to their pre-training data. We argue that such cases provide a more accurate test of true language understanding, highlighting key limitations in LLMs' semantic capabilities. We make our novel dataset and associated experimental data including prompts and model responses publicly available.
Knowledge Retrieval Based on Generative AI
Authors: Te-Lun Yang, Jyi-Shane Liu, Yuen-Hsien Tseng, Jyh-Shing Roger Jang
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This study develops a question-answering system based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) using Chinese Wikipedia and Lawbank as retrieval sources. Using TTQA and TMMLU+ as evaluation datasets, the system employs BGE-M3 for dense vector retrieval to obtain highly relevant search results and BGE-reranker to reorder these results based on query relevance. The most pertinent retrieval outcomes serve as reference knowledge for a Large Language Model (LLM), enhancing its ability to answer questions and establishing a knowledge retrieval system grounded in generative AI. The system's effectiveness is assessed through a two-stage evaluation: automatic and assisted performance evaluations. The automatic evaluation calculates accuracy by comparing the model's auto-generated labels with ground truth answers, measuring performance under standardized conditions without human intervention. The assisted performance evaluation involves 20 finance-related multiple-choice questions answered by 20 participants without financial backgrounds. Initially, participants answer independently. Later, they receive system-generated reference information to assist in answering, examining whether the system improves accuracy when assistance is provided. The main contributions of this research are: (1) Enhanced LLM Capability: By integrating BGE-M3 and BGE-reranker, the system retrieves and reorders highly relevant results, reduces hallucinations, and dynamically accesses authorized or public knowledge sources. (2) Improved Data Privacy: A customized RAG architecture enables local operation of the LLM, eliminating the need to send private data to external servers. This approach enhances data security, reduces reliance on commercial services, lowers operational costs, and mitigates privacy risks.
MedCoDi-M: A Multi-Prompt Foundation Model for Multimodal Medical Data Generation
Authors: Daniele Molino, Francesco Di Feola, Eliodoro Faiella, Deborah Fazzini, Domiziana Santucci, Linlin Shen, Valerio Guarrasi, Paolo Soda
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diagnostic

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing medical practice, enhancing diagnostic accuracy and healthcare delivery. However, its adaptation in medical settings still faces significant challenges, related to data availability and privacy constraints. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate these issues, addressing data scarcity while preserving privacy. Recently, Latent Diffusion Models have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-quality synthetic data. Meanwhile, the integration of different modalities has gained interest, emphasizing the need of models capable of handle multimodal medical data. Existing approaches struggle to integrate complementary information and lack the ability to generate modalities simultaneously. To address this challenge, we present MedCoDi-M, a 6.77-billion-parameter model, designed for multimodal medical data generation, that, following Foundation Model paradigm, exploits contrastive learning and large quantity of data to build a shared latent space which capture the relationships between different data modalities. Further, we introduce the Multi-Prompt training technique, which significantly boosts MedCoDi-M's generation under different settings. We extensively validate MedCoDi-M: first we benchmark it against five competitors on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, a state-of-the-art dataset for Chest X-ray and radiological report generation. Secondly, we perform a Visual Turing Test with expert radiologists to assess the realism and clinical relevance of the generated data, ensuring alignment with real-world scenarios. Finally, we assess the utility of MedCoDi-M in addressing key challenges in the medical field, such as anonymization, data scarcity and imbalance learning. The results are promising, demonstrating the applicability of MedCoDi-M in medical contexts. Project page is at https://cosbidev.github.io/MedCoDi-M/.
Federated-Continual Dynamic Segmentation of Histopathology guided by Barlow Continuity
Authors: Niklas Babendererde, Haozhe Zhu, Moritz Fuchs, Jonathan Stieber, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Federated- and Continual Learning have been established as approaches to enable privacy-aware learning on continuously changing data, as required for deploying AI systems in histopathology images. However, data shifts can occur in a dynamic world, spatially between institutions and temporally, due to changing data over time. This leads to two issues: Client Drift, where the central model degrades from aggregating data from clients trained on shifted data, and Catastrophic Forgetting, from temporal shifts such as changes in patient populations. Both tend to degrade the model's performance of previously seen data or spatially distributed training. Despite both problems arising from the same underlying problem of data shifts, existing research addresses them only individually. In this work, we introduce a method that can jointly alleviate Client Drift and Catastrophic Forgetting by using our proposed Dynamic Barlow Continuity that evaluates client updates on a public reference dataset and uses this to guide the training process to a spatially and temporally shift-invariant model. We evaluate our approach on the histopathology datasets BCSS and Semicol and prove our method to be highly effective by jointly improving the dice score as much as from 15.8% to 71.6% in Client Drift and from 42.5% to 62.8% in Catastrophic Forgetting. This enables Dynamic Learning by establishing spatio-temporal shift-invariance.
A 65 nm Bayesian Neural Network Accelerator with 360 fJ/Sample In-Word GRNG for AI Uncertainty Estimation
Authors: Zephan M. Enciso, Boyang Cheng, Likai Pei, Jianbo Liu, Steven Davis, Michael Niemier, Ningyuan Cao
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Medical Diagnosis

Uncertainty estimation is an indispensable capability for AI-enabled, safety-critical applications, e.g. autonomous vehicles or medical diagnosis. Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) use Bayesian statistics to provide both classification predictions and uncertainty estimation, but they suffer from high computational overhead associated with random number generation and repeated sample iterations. Furthermore, BNNs are not immediately amenable to acceleration through compute-in-memory architectures due to the frequent memory writes necessary after each RNG operation. To address these challenges, we present an ASIC that integrates 360 fJ/Sample Gaussian RNG directly into the SRAM memory words. This integration reduces RNG overhead and enables fully-parallel compute-in-memory operations for BNNs. The prototype chip achieves 5.12 GSa/s RNG throughput and 102 GOp/s neural network throughput while occupying 0.45 mm2, bringing AI uncertainty estimation to edge computation.
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection
Authors: Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei, Congkai Xie, Xueyu Hu, Xinchen Xu, Shengyu Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have shown great potential for task automation on computing devices such as computers and mobile phones. However, existing agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. We introduce \textit{InfiGUIAgent}, an MLLM-based GUI Agent trained with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline. Stage 1 enhances fundamental skills such as GUI understanding and grounding, while Stage 2 integrates hierarchical reasoning and expectation-reflection reasoning skills using synthesized data to enable native reasoning abilities of the agents. \textit{InfiGUIAgent} achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. Resources are available at \url{https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUIAgent}.
Feedback-Driven Vision-Language Alignment with Minimal Human Supervision
Authors: Giorgio Giannone, Ruoteng Li, Qianli Feng, Evgeny Perevodchikov, Rui Chen, Aleix Martinez
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in integrating visual and linguistic information, but their performance is often constrained by the need for extensive, high-quality image-text training data. Curation of these image-text pairs is both time-consuming and computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we introduce SVP (Sampling-based Visual Projection), a novel framework that enhances vision-language alignment without relying on manually curated text-image pairs or preference annotation. SVP leverages a small set of manually selected images, self-captioning and a pre-trained grounding model as a feedback mechanism to elicit latent information in VLMs. We evaluate our approach across six key areas: captioning, referring, visual question answering, multitasking, hallucination control, and object recall. Results demonstrate significant improvements, including a 14 % average improvement in captioning tasks, up to 12 % increase in object recall, and significantly reduced hallucinations, while maintaining question-answering capabilities. Using SVP, a small VLM achieves hallucination reductions similar to a model five times larger, while a VLM with initially poor referring capabilities more than doubles its performance, approaching parity with a model twice its size.
Cyber-Physical Steganography in Robotic Motion Control
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Yijie Lin, Isao Echizen
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

Steganography, the art of information hiding, has continually evolved across visual, auditory and linguistic domains, adapting to the ceaseless interplay between steganographic concealment and steganalytic revelation. This study seeks to extend the horizons of what constitutes a viable steganographic medium by introducing a steganographic paradigm in robotic motion control. Based on the observation of the robot's inherent sensitivity to changes in its environment, we propose a methodology to encode messages as environmental stimuli influencing the motions of the robotic agent and to decode messages from the resulting motion trajectory. The constraints of maximal robot integrity and minimal motion deviation are established as fundamental principles underlying secrecy. As a proof of concept, we conduct experiments in simulated environments across various manipulation tasks, incorporating robotic embodiments equipped with generalist multimodal policies.
Towards a Problem-Oriented Domain Adaptation Framework for Machine Learning
Authors: Philipp Spitzer, Dominik Martin, Laurin Eichberger, Niklas Kühl
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation is a sub-field of machine learning that involves transferring knowledge from a source domain to perform the same task in the target domain. It is a typical challenge in machine learning that arises, e.g., when data is obtained from various sources or when using a data basis that changes over time. Recent advances in the field offer promising methods, but it is still challenging for researchers and practitioners to determine if domain adaptation is suitable for a given problem -- and, subsequently, to select the appropriate approach. This article employs design science research to develop a problem-oriented framework for domain adaptation, which is matured in three evaluation episodes. We describe a framework that distinguishes between five domain adaptation scenarios, provides recommendations for addressing each scenario, and offers guidelines for determining if a problem falls into one of these scenarios. During the multiple evaluation episodes, the framework is tested on artificial and real-world datasets and an experimental study involving 100 participants. The evaluation demonstrates that the framework has the explanatory power to capture any domain adaptation problem effectively. In summary, we provide clear guidance for researchers and practitioners who want to employ domain adaptation but lack in-depth knowledge of the possibilities.
CGP-Tuning: Structure-Aware Soft Prompt Tuning for Code Vulnerability Detection
Authors: Ruijun Feng, Hammond Pearce, Pietro Liguori, Yulei Sui
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, cross-modal alignment, Vulnerability Detection

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as powerful tools for detecting software vulnerabilities, where task-specific fine-tuning is typically employed to provide vulnerability-specific knowledge to the LLMs for this purpose. However, traditional full-parameter fine-tuning is inefficient for modern, complex LLMs, which contain billions of parameters. Soft prompt tuning has been suggested as a more efficient alternative for fine-tuning LLMs in general cases. However, pure soft prompt tuning treats source code as plain text, losing structural information inherent in source code. Meanwhile, graph-enhanced soft prompt tuning methods, which aim to address this issue, are unable to preserve the rich semantic information within code graphs, as they are primarily designed for general graph-related tasks and focus more on adjacency information. They also fail to ensure computational efficiency while accounting for graph-text interactions. This paper, therefore, introduces a new code graph-enhanced, structure-aware soft prompt tuning method for vulnerability detection, referred to as CGP-Tuning. It employs innovative type-aware embeddings to capture the rich semantic information within code graphs, along with a novel and efficient cross-modal alignment module that achieves linear computational cost while incorporating graph-text interactions. The proposed CGP-Tuning is evaluated on the latest DiverseVul dataset and the most recent open-source code LLMs, CodeLlama and CodeGemma. Experimental results demonstrate that CGP-Tuning outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by an average of 3.5 percentage points in accuracy, without compromising its vulnerability detection capabilities for long source code.
The Role of Machine Learning in Congenital Heart Disease Diagnosis: Datasets, Algorithms, and Insights
Authors: Khalil Khan, Farhan Ullah, Ikram Syed, Irfan Ullah
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Systematic Literature Review

Congenital heart disease is among the most common fetal abnormalities and birth defects. Despite identifying numerous risk factors influencing its onset, a comprehensive understanding of its genesis and management across diverse populations remains limited. Recent advancements in machine learning have demonstrated the potential for leveraging patient data to enable early congenital heart disease detection. Over the past seven years, researchers have proposed various data-driven and algorithmic solutions to address this challenge. This paper presents a systematic review of congential heart disease recognition using machine learning, conducting a meta-analysis of 432 references from leading journals published between 2018 and 2024. A detailed investigation of 74 scholarly works highlights key factors, including databases, algorithms, applications, and solutions. Additionally, the survey outlines reported datasets used by machine learning experts for congenital heart disease recognition. Using a systematic literature review methodology, this study identifies critical challenges and opportunities in applying machine learning to congenital heart disease.
Integrating remote sensing data assimilation, deep learning and large language model for interactive wheat breeding yield prediction
Authors: Guofeng Yang, Nanfei Jin, Wenjie Ai, Zhonghua Zheng, Yuhong He, Yong He
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Yield Prediction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Yield is one of the core goals of crop breeding. By predicting the potential yield of different breeding materials, breeders can screen these materials at various growth stages to select the best performing. Based on unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing technology, high-throughput crop phenotyping data in breeding areas is collected to provide data support for the breeding decisions of breeders. However, the accuracy of current yield predictions still requires improvement, and the usability and user-friendliness of yield forecasting tools remain suboptimal. To address these challenges, this study introduces a hybrid method and tool for crop yield prediction, designed to allow breeders to interactively and accurately predict wheat yield by chatting with a large language model (LLM). First, the newly designed data assimilation algorithm is used to assimilate the leaf area index into the WOFOST model. Then, selected outputs from the assimilation process, along with remote sensing inversion results, are used to drive the time-series temporal fusion transformer model for wheat yield prediction. Finally, based on this hybrid method and leveraging an LLM with retrieval augmented generation technology, we developed an interactive yield prediction Web tool that is user-friendly and supports sustainable data updates. This tool integrates multi-source data to assist breeding decision-making. This study aims to accelerate the identification of high-yield materials in the breeding process, enhance breeding efficiency, and enable more scientific and smart breeding decisions.
Research on environment perception and behavior prediction of intelligent UAV based on semantic communication
Authors: Kechong Ren, Li Gao, Qi Guan
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Communication

The convergence of drone delivery systems, virtual worlds, and blockchain has transformed logistics and supply chain management, providing a fast, and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional ground transportation methods;Provide users with a real-world experience, virtual service providers need to collect up-to-the-minute delivery information from edge devices. To address this challenge, 1) a reinforcement learning approach is introduced to enable drones with fast training capabilities and the ability to autonomously adapt to new virtual scenarios for effective resource allocation.2) A semantic communication framework for meta-universes is proposed, which utilizes the extraction of semantic information to reduce the communication cost and incentivize the transmission of information for meta-universe services.3) In order to ensure that user information security, a lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme is designed between the drone and the user by introducing blockchain technology. In our experiments, the drone adaptation performance is improved by about 35\%, and the local offloading rate can reach 90\% with the increase of the number of base stations. The semantic communication system proposed in this paper is compared with the Cross Entropy baseline model. Introducing blockchain technology the throughput of the transaction is maintained at a stable value with different number of drones.