pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SAFEPATH: Preventing Harmful Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought via Early Alignment
Authors: Wonje Jeung, Sangyeon Yoon, Minsuk Kahng, Albert No
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful outputs but can degrade reasoning depth, leading to significant trade-offs in complex, multi-step tasks, and remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To address this, we introduce SAFEPATH, a lightweight alignment method that fine-tunes LRMs to emit a short, 8-token Safety Primer at the start of their reasoning, in response to harmful prompts, while leaving the rest of the reasoning process unsupervised. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks indicate that SAFEPATH effectively reduces harmful outputs while maintaining reasoning performance. Specifically, SAFEPATH reduces harmful responses by up to 90.0% and blocks 83.3% of jailbreak attempts in the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B model, while requiring 295.9x less compute than Direct Refusal and 314.1x less than SafeChain. We further introduce a zero-shot variant that requires no fine-tuning. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how existing methods in LLMs generalize, or fail, when applied to reasoning-centric models, revealing critical gaps and new directions for safer AI.
Automating Intervention Discovery from Scientific Literature: A Progressive Ontology Prompting and Dual-LLM Framework
Authors: Yuting Hu, Dancheng Liu, Qingyun Wang, Charles Yu, Chenhui Xu, Qingxiao Zheng, Heng Ji, JinJun Xiong
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Identifying effective interventions from the scientific literature is challenging due to the high volume of publications, specialized terminology, and inconsistent reporting formats, making manual curation laborious and prone to oversight. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel framework leveraging large language models (LLMs), which integrates a progressive ontology prompting (POP) algorithm with a dual-agent system, named LLM-Duo. On the one hand, the POP algorithm conducts a prioritized breadth-first search (BFS) across a predefined ontology, generating structured prompt templates and action sequences to guide the automatic annotation process. On the other hand, the LLM-Duo system features two specialized LLM agents, an explorer and an evaluator, working collaboratively and adversarially to continuously refine annotation quality. We showcase the real-world applicability of our framework through a case study focused on speech-language intervention discovery. Experimental results show that our approach surpasses advanced baselines, achieving more accurate and comprehensive annotations through a fully automated process. Our approach successfully identified 2,421 interventions from a corpus of 64,177 research articles in the speech-language pathology domain, culminating in the creation of a publicly accessible intervention knowledge base with great potential to benefit the speech-language pathology community.
Assumed Identities: Quantifying Gender Bias in Machine Translation of Gender-Ambiguous Occupational Terms
Authors: Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Symeonaki, Giorgos Stamou
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Machine Translation, Translation

Machine Translation (MT) systems frequently encounter gender-ambiguous occupational terms, where they must assign gender without explicit contextual cues. While individual translations in such cases may not be inherently biased, systematic patterns-such as consistently translating certain professions with specific genders-can emerge, reflecting and perpetuating societal stereotypes. This ambiguity challenges traditional instance-level single-answer evaluation approaches, as no single gold standard translation exists. To address this, we introduce GRAPE, a probability-based metric designed to evaluate gender bias by analyzing aggregated model responses. Alongside this, we present GAMBIT-MT, a benchmarking dataset in English with gender-ambiguous occupational terms. Using GRAPE, we evaluate several MT systems and examine whether their gendered translations in Greek and French align with or diverge from societal stereotypes, real-world occupational gender distributions, and normative standards.
Spiking Neural Networks with Random Network Architecture
Authors: Zihan Dai, Huanfei Ma
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00

The spiking neural network, known as the third generation neural network, is an important network paradigm. Due to its mode of information propagation that follows biological rationality, the spiking neural network has strong energy efficiency and has advantages in complex high-energy application scenarios. However, unlike the artificial neural network (ANN) which has a mature and unified framework, the SNN models and training methods have not yet been widely unified due to the discontinuous and non-differentiable property of the firing mechanism. Although several algorithms for training spiking neural networks have been proposed in the subsequent development process, some fundamental issues remain unsolved. Inspired by random network design, this work proposes a new architecture for spiking neural networks, RanSNN, where only part of the network weights need training and all the classic training methods can be adopted. Compared with traditional training methods for spiking neural networks, it greatly improves the training efficiency while ensuring the training performance, and also has good versatility and stability as validated by benchmark tests.
Benchmarking MOEAs for solving continuous multi-objective RL problems
Authors: Carlos Hernández, Roberto Santana
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Evolutionary Algorithms, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) addresses the challenge of simultaneously optimizing multiple, often conflicting, rewards, moving beyond the single-reward focus of conventional reinforcement learning (RL). This approach is essential for applications where agents must balance trade-offs between diverse goals, such as speed, energy efficiency, or stability, as a series of sequential decisions. This paper investigates the applicability and limitations of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) in solving complex MORL problems. We assess whether these algorithms can effectively address the unique challenges posed by MORL and how MORL instances can serve as benchmarks to evaluate and improve MOEA performance. In particular, we propose a framework to characterize the features influencing MORL instance complexity, select representative MORL problems from the literature, and benchmark a suite of MOEAs alongside single-objective EAs using scalarized MORL formulations. Additionally, we evaluate the utility of existing multi-objective quality indicators in MORL scenarios, such as hypervolume conducting a comparison of the algorithms supported by statistical analysis. Our findings provide insights into the interplay between MORL problem characteristics and algorithmic effectiveness, highlighting opportunities for advancing both MORL research and the design of evolutionary algorithms.
RAG/LLM Augmented Switching Driven Polymorphic Metaheuristic Framework
Authors: Faramarz Safi Esfahani, Ghassan Beydoun, Morteza Saberi, Brad McCusker, Biswajeet Pradhan
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, RAG

Metaheuristic algorithms are widely used for solving complex optimization problems, yet their effectiveness is often constrained by fixed structures and the need for extensive tuning. The Polymorphic Metaheuristic Framework (PMF) addresses this limitation by introducing a self-adaptive metaheuristic switching mechanism driven by real-time performance feedback and dynamic algorithmic selection. PMF leverages the Polymorphic Metaheuristic Agent (PMA) and the Polymorphic Metaheuristic Selection Agent (PMSA) to dynamically select and transition between metaheuristic algorithms based on key performance indicators, ensuring continuous adaptation. This approach enhances convergence speed, adaptability, and solution quality, outperforming traditional metaheuristics in high-dimensional, dynamic, and multimodal environments. Experimental results on benchmark functions demonstrate that PMF significantly improves optimization efficiency by mitigating stagnation and balancing exploration-exploitation strategies across various problem landscapes. By integrating AI-driven decision-making and self-correcting mechanisms, PMF paves the way for scalable, intelligent, and autonomous optimization frameworks, with promising applications in engineering, logistics, and complex decision-making systems.
Weak Pareto Boundary: The Achilles' Heel of Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Ruihao Zheng, Jingda Deng, Zhenkun Wang
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Evolutionary Algorithms

The weak Pareto boundary ($WPB$) refers to a boundary in the objective space of a multi-objective optimization problem, characterized by weak Pareto optimality rather than Pareto optimality. The $WPB$ brings severe challenges to multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), as it may mislead the algorithms into finding dominance-resistant solutions (DRSs), i.e., solutions that excel on some objectives but severely underperform on the others, thereby missing Pareto-optimal solutions. Although the severe impact of the $WPB$ on MOEAs has been recognized, a systematic and detailed analysis remains lacking. To fill this gap, this paper studies the attributes of the $WPB$. In particular, the category of a $WPB$, as an attribute derived from its weakly Pareto-optimal property, is theoretically analyzed. The analysis reveals that the dominance resistance degrees of DRSs induced by different categories of $WPB$s exhibit distinct asymptotic growth rates as the DRSs in the objective space approach the $WPB$s, where a steeper asymptotic growth rate indicates a greater hindrance to MOEAs. Beyond that, experimental studies are conducted on various new test problems to investigate the impact of $WPB$'s attributes. The experimental results demonstrate consistency with our theoretical findings. Experiments on other attributes show that the performance of an MOEA is highly sensitive to some attributes. Overall, no existing MOEAs can comprehensively address challenges brought by these attributes.
Do Language Models Use Their Depth Efficiently?
Authors: Róbert Csordás, Christopher D. Manning, Christopher Potts
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Modern LLMs are increasingly deep, and depth correlates with performance, albeit with diminishing returns. However, do these models use their depth efficiently? Do they compose more features to create higher-order computations that are impossible in shallow models, or do they merely spread the same kinds of computation out over more layers? To address these questions, we analyze the residual stream of the Llama 3.1 and Qwen 3 family of models. We find: First, comparing the output of the sublayers to the residual stream reveals that layers in the second half contribute much less than those in the first half, with a clear phase transition between the two halves. Second, skipping layers in the second half has a much smaller effect on future computations and output predictions. Third, for multihop tasks, we are unable to find evidence that models are using increased depth to compose subresults in examples involving many hops. Fourth, we seek to directly address whether deeper models are using their additional layers to perform new kinds of computation. To do this, we train linear maps from the residual stream of a shallow model to a deeper one. We find that layers with the same relative depth map best to each other, suggesting that the larger model simply spreads the same computations out over its many layers. All this evidence suggests that deeper models are not using their depth to learn new kinds of computation, but only using the greater depth to perform more fine-grained adjustments to the residual. This may help explain why increasing scale leads to diminishing returns for stacked Transformer architectures.
X-KAN: Optimizing Local Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks via Evolutionary Rule-Based Machine Learning
Authors: Hiroki Shiraishi, Hisao Ishibuchi, Masaya Nakata
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Function approximation is a critical task in various fields. However, existing neural network approaches struggle with locally complex or discontinuous functions due to their reliance on a single global model covering the entire problem space. We propose X-KAN, a novel method that optimizes multiple local Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) through an evolutionary rule-based machine learning framework called XCSF. X-KAN combines KAN's high expressiveness with XCSF's adaptive partitioning capability by implementing local KAN models as rule consequents and defining local regions via rule antecedents. Our experimental results on artificial test functions and real-world datasets demonstrate that X-KAN significantly outperforms conventional methods, including XCSF, Multi-Layer Perceptron, and KAN, in terms of approximation accuracy. Notably, X-KAN effectively handles functions with locally complex or discontinuous structures that are challenging for conventional KAN, using a compact set of rules (average 7.2 $\pm$ 2.3 rules). These results validate the effectiveness of using KAN as a local model in XCSF, which evaluates the rule fitness based on both accuracy and generality. Our X-KAN implementation is available at https://github.com/YNU-NakataLab/X-KAN.
AgentSGEN: Multi-Agent LLM in the Loop for Semantic Collaboration and GENeration of Synthetic Data
Authors: Vu Dinh Xuan, Hao Vo, David Murphy, Hoang D. Nguyen
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

The scarcity of data depicting dangerous situations presents a major obstacle to training AI systems for safety-critical applications, such as construction safety, where ethical and logistical barriers hinder real-world data collection. This creates an urgent need for an end-to-end framework to generate synthetic data that can bridge this gap. While existing methods can produce synthetic scenes, they often lack the semantic depth required for scene simulations, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we propose a novel multi-agent framework that employs an iterative, in-the-loop collaboration between two agents: an Evaluator Agent, acting as an LLM-based judge to enforce semantic consistency and safety-specific constraints, and an Editor Agent, which generates and refines scenes based on this guidance. Powered by LLM's capabilities to reasoning and common-sense knowledge, this collaborative design produces synthetic images tailored to safety-critical scenarios. Our experiments suggest this design can generate useful scenes based on realistic specifications that address the shortcomings of prior approaches, balancing safety requirements with visual semantics. This iterative process holds promise for delivering robust, aesthetically sound simulations, offering a potential solution to the data scarcity challenge in multimedia safety applications.
ADALog: Adaptive Unsupervised Anomaly detection in Logs with Self-attention Masked Language Model
Authors: Przemek Pospieszny, Wojciech Mormul, Karolina Szyndler, Sanjeev Kumar
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Log Parsing, Masked Language Modeling, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Modern software systems generate extensive heterogeneous log data with dynamic formats, fragmented event sequences, and varying temporal patterns, making anomaly detection both crucial and challenging. To address these complexities, we propose ADALog, an adaptive, unsupervised anomaly detection framework designed for practical applicability across diverse real-world environments. Unlike traditional methods reliant on log parsing, strict sequence dependencies, or labeled data, ADALog operates on individual unstructured logs, extracts intra-log contextual relationships, and performs adaptive thresholding on normal data. The proposed approach utilizes a transformer-based, pretrained bidirectional encoder with a masked language modeling task, fine-tuned on normal logs to capture domain-specific syntactic and semantic patterns essential for accurate anomaly detection. Anomalies are identified via token-level reconstruction probabilities, aggregated into log-level scores, with adaptive percentile-based thresholding calibrated only on normal data. This allows the model to dynamically adapt to evolving system behaviors while avoiding rigid, heuristic-based thresholds common in traditional systems. We evaluate ADALog on benchmark datasets BGL, Thunderbird, and Spirit, showing strong generalization and competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods. Additional ablation studies examine the effects of masking, fine-tuning, and token positioning on model behavior and interpretability.
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Mastering Full-Pipeline Financial Workflows with LLMs
Authors: Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Financial tasks are pivotal to global economic stability; however, their execution faces challenges including labor intensive processes, low error tolerance, data fragmentation, and tool limitations. Although large language models (LLMs) have succeeded in various natural language processing tasks and have shown potential in automating workflows through reasoning and contextual understanding, current benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in finance lack sufficient domain-specific data, have simplistic task design, and incomplete evaluation frameworks. To address these gaps, this article presents FinMaster, a comprehensive financial benchmark designed to systematically assess the capabilities of LLM in financial literacy, accounting, auditing, and consulting. Specifically, FinMaster comprises three main modules: i) FinSim, which builds simulators that generate synthetic, privacy-compliant financial data for companies to replicate market dynamics; ii) FinSuite, which provides tasks in core financial domains, spanning 183 tasks of various types and difficulty levels; and iii) FinEval, which develops a unified interface for evaluation. Extensive experiments over state-of-the-art LLMs reveal critical capability gaps in financial reasoning, with accuracy dropping from over 90% on basic tasks to merely 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. This degradation exhibits the propagation of computational errors, where single-metric calculations initially demonstrating 58% accuracy decreased to 37% in multimetric scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, FinMaster is the first benchmark that covers full-pipeline financial workflows with challenging tasks. We hope that FinMaster can bridge the gap between research and industry practitioners, driving the adoption of LLMs in real-world financial practices to enhance efficiency and accuracy.
Language and Thought: The View from LLMs
Authors: Daniel Rothschild
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00

Daniel Dennett speculated in *Kinds of Minds* 1996: "Perhaps the kind of mind you get when you add language to it is so different from the kind of mind you can have without language that calling them both minds is a mistake." Recent work in AI can be seen as testing Dennett's thesis by exploring the performance of AI systems with and without linguistic training. I argue that the success of Large Language Models at inferential reasoning, limited though it may be, supports Dennett's radical view about the effect of language on thought. I suggest it is the abstractness and efficiency of linguistic encoding that lies behind the capacity of LLMs to perform inferences across a wide range of domains. In a slogan, language makes inference computationally tractable. I assess what these results in AI indicate about the role of language in the workings of our own biological minds.
MAFA: A multi-agent framework for annotation
Authors: Mahmood Hegazy, Aaron Rodrigues, Azzam Naeem
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00

Modern applications require accurate and efficient retrieval of information in response to user queries. Mapping user utterances to the most relevant Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is a crucial component of these systems. Traditional approaches often rely on a single model or technique, which may not capture the nuances of diverse user inquiries. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent framework for FAQ annotation that combines multiple specialized agents with different approaches and a judge agent that reranks candidates to produce optimal results. Our agents utilize a structured reasoning approach inspired by Attentive Reasoning Queries (ARQs), which guides them through systematic reasoning steps using targeted, task-specific JSON queries. Our framework features a specialized few-shot example strategy, where each agent receives different few-shots, enhancing ensemble diversity and coverage of the query space. We evaluate our framework on a real-world banking dataset as well as public benchmark datasets (LCQMC and FiQA), demonstrating significant improvements over single-agent approaches across multiple metrics, including a 14% increase in Top-1 accuracy, an 18% increase in Top-5 accuracy, and a 12% improvement in Mean Reciprocal Rank on our dataset, and similar gains on public benchmarks when compared with traditional single agent annotation techniques. Our framework is particularly effective at handling ambiguous queries, making it well-suited for deployment in production applications while showing strong generalization capabilities across different domains and languages.
A*-Decoding: Token-Efficient Inference Scaling
Authors: Giannis Chatziveroglou
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful alternative to parameter scaling for improving language model performance on complex reasoning tasks. While existing methods have shown strong performance gains under fixed compute budgets, there has been little focus on optimally utilizing that budget during inference. In this work, we introduce A*-decoding, a search-based inference-time strategy that builds on the A* search algorithm to optimally utilize a fixed compute budget by prioritizing high-quality reasoning paths during generation. We frame language model decoding as a structured search in a state space of partial solutions, applying the A* transition model to identify promising continuations guided by an external process supervision signal. In our experiments, A*-decoding reaches the performance levels of strong inference scaling baselines like best-of-N and particle filtering while using up to 3x fewer tokens and 30% fewer PRM passes under equivalent compute budgets. On the MATH500 and AIME 2024 benchmarks, A*-decoding enables Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct to match the performance of the 70x larger Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct, and allows Qwen3-1.7B to reach o1-like reasoning accuracy. These results highlight the power of structured search in decoding, offering an alternative to brute-force sampling or scale-driven gains. Our work demonstrates how thoughtful inference-time strategies can enhance reasoning in SLMs, pointing toward future advances in more efficient and scalable language model deployment.