pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BRiTE: Bootstrapping Reinforced Thinking Process to Enhance Language Model Reasoning
Authors: Han Zhong, Yutong Yin, Shenao Zhang, Xiaojun Xu, Yuanxin Liu, Yifei Zuo, Zhihan Liu, Boyi Liu, Sirui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, LiWei Wang, Mingyi Hong, Zhaoran Wang
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Math

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet generating reliable reasoning processes remains a significant challenge. We present a unified probabilistic framework that formalizes LLM reasoning through a novel graphical model incorporating latent thinking processes and evaluation signals. Within this framework, we introduce the Bootstrapping Reinforced Thinking Process (BRiTE) algorithm, which works in two steps. First, it generates high-quality rationales by approximating the optimal thinking process through reinforcement learning, using a novel reward shaping mechanism. Second, it enhances the base LLM by maximizing the joint probability of rationale generation with respect to the model's parameters. Theoretically, we demonstrate BRiTE's convergence at a rate of $1/T$ with $T$ representing the number of iterations. Empirical evaluations on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently improves performance across different base models without requiring human-annotated thinking processes. In addition, BRiTE demonstrates superior performance compared to existing algorithms that bootstrap thinking processes use alternative methods such as rejection sampling, and can even match or exceed the results achieved through supervised fine-tuning with human-annotated data.
Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming
Authors: Mrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Jesse Mu, Jerry Wei, Jorrit Kruthoff, Scott Goodfriend, Euan Ong, Alwin Peng, Raj Agarwal, Cem Anil, Amanda Askell, Nathan Bailey, Joe Benton, Emma Bluemke, Samuel R. Bowman, Eric Christiansen, Hoagy Cunningham, Andy Dau, Anjali Gopal, Rob Gilson, Logan Graham, Logan Howard, Nimit Kalra, Taesung Lee, Kevin Lin, Peter Lofgren, Francesco Mosconi, Clare O'Hara, Catherine Olsson, Linda Petrini, Samir Rajani, Nikhil Saxena, Alex Silverstein, Tanya Singh, Theodore Sumers, Leonard Tang, Kevin K. Troy, Constantin Weisser, Ruiqi Zhong, Giulio Zhou, Jan Leike, Jared Kaplan, Ethan Perez
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to universal jailbreaks-prompting strategies that systematically bypass model safeguards and enable users to carry out harmful processes that require many model interactions, like manufacturing illegal substances at scale. To defend against these attacks, we introduce Constitutional Classifiers: safeguards trained on synthetic data, generated by prompting LLMs with natural language rules (i.e., a constitution) specifying permitted and restricted content. In over 3,000 estimated hours of red teaming, no red teamer found a universal jailbreak that could extract information from an early classifier-guarded LLM at a similar level of detail to an unguarded model across most target queries. On automated evaluations, enhanced classifiers demonstrated robust defense against held-out domain-specific jailbreaks. These classifiers also maintain deployment viability, with an absolute 0.38% increase in production-traffic refusals and a 23.7% inference overhead. Our work demonstrates that defending against universal jailbreaks while maintaining practical deployment viability is tractable.
Pitfalls of defacing whole-head MRI: re-identification risk with diffusion models and compromised research potential
Authors: Chenyu Gao, Kaiwen Xu, Michael E. Kim, Lianrui Zuo, Zhiyuan Li, Derek B. Archer, Timothy J. Hohman, Ann Zenobia Moore, Luigi Ferrucci, Lori L. Beason-Held, Susan M. Resnick, Christos Davatzikos, Jerry L. Prince, Bennett A. Landman
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Defacing is often applied to head magnetic resonance image (MRI) datasets prior to public release to address privacy concerns. The alteration of facial and nearby voxels has provoked discussions about the true capability of these techniques to ensure privacy as well as their impact on downstream tasks. With advancements in deep generative models, the extent to which defacing can protect privacy is uncertain. Additionally, while the altered voxels are known to contain valuable anatomical information, their potential to support research beyond the anatomical regions directly affected by defacing remains uncertain. To evaluate these considerations, we develop a refacing pipeline that recovers faces in defaced head MRIs using cascaded diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs). The DPMs are trained on images from 180 subjects and tested on images from 484 unseen subjects, 469 of whom are from a different dataset. To assess whether the altered voxels in defacing contain universally useful information, we also predict computed tomography (CT)-derived skeletal muscle radiodensity from facial voxels in both defaced and original MRIs. The results show that DPMs can generate high-fidelity faces that resemble the original faces from defaced images, with surface distances to the original faces significantly smaller than those of a population average face (p < 0.05). This performance also generalizes well to previously unseen datasets. For skeletal muscle radiodensity predictions, using defaced images results in significantly weaker Spearman's rank correlation coefficients compared to using original images (p < 10-4). For shin muscle, the correlation is statistically significant (p < 0.05) when using original images but not statistically significant (p > 0.05) when any defacing method is applied, suggesting that defacing might not only fail to protect privacy but also eliminate valuable information.
An Optimal Cascade Feature-Level Spatiotemporal Fusion Strategy for Anomaly Detection in CAN Bus
Authors: Mohammad Fatahi, Danial Sadrian Zadeh, Benyamin Ghojogh, Behzad Moshiri, Otman Basir
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Autonomous Vehicles

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) play a pivotal role in modern infrastructure but face security risks due to the broadcast-based nature of the in-vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN) buses. While numerous machine learning models and strategies have been proposed to detect CAN anomalies, existing approaches lack robustness evaluations and fail to comprehensively detect attacks due to shifting their focus on a subset of dominant structures of anomalies. To overcome these limitations, the current study proposes a cascade feature-level spatiotemporal fusion framework that integrates the spatial features and temporal features through a two-parameter genetic algorithm (2P-GA)-optimized cascade architecture to cover all dominant structures of anomalies. Extensive paired t-test analysis confirms that the model achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.9987, demonstrating robust anomaly detection capabilities. The Spatial Module improves the precision by approximately 4%, while the Temporal Module compensates for recall losses, ensuring high true positive rates. The proposed framework detects all attack types with 100% accuracy on the CAR-HACKING dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. This study provides a validated, robust solution for real-world CAN security challenges.
Bridging the Reasoning Gap: Small LLMs Can Plan with Generalised Strategies
Authors: Andrey Borro, Patricia J Riddle, Michael W Barley, Michael J Witbrock
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

Recent advancements in the reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate an increase in the ability of LLMs to solve simple planning tasks. However, as long as the driving force behind improved reasoning capability is the size and complexity of the model, the financial and computational costs associated with running them will also increase. This trend raises questions about continued accessibility and whether these improvements will increase at the same pace as models continue to grow in size and expense. We propose two approaches to enhance the reasoning ability of less resource-intensive LLMs. (1) Provide them with a generalised strategy for solving tasks within a given domain, generated by a more resource-intensive LLM. (2) Exploit their cost-effectiveness by iteratively prompting these models to correct errors in their proposed solutions. Our empirical results from planning and mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that these methods improve the performance of less resource-intensive LLMs to levels comparable with their more resource-intensive counterparts, at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, we show that the utilisation of generalised strategies in our experiments reduced the cost of the less resource-intensive model by nearly 30 percent on average.
Large Language Models as Common-Sense Heuristics
Authors: Andrey Borro, Patricia J Riddle, Michael W Barley, Michael J Witbrock
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

While systems designed for solving planning tasks vastly outperform Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain, they usually discard the rich semantic information embedded within task descriptions. In contrast, LLMs possess parametrised knowledge across a wide range of topics, enabling them to leverage the natural language descriptions of planning tasks in their solutions. However, current research in this direction faces challenges in generating correct and executable plans. Furthermore, these approaches depend on the LLM to output solutions in an intermediate language, which must be translated into the representation language of the planning task. We introduce a novel planning method, which leverages the parametrised knowledge of LLMs by using their output as a heuristic for Hill-Climbing Search. This approach is further enhanced by prompting the LLM to generate a solution estimate to guide the search. Our method outperforms the task success rate of similar systems within a common household environment by 22 percentage points, with consistently executable plans. All actions are encoded in their original representation, demonstrating that strong results can be achieved without an intermediate language, thus eliminating the need for a translation step.
An Adversarial Approach to Register Extreme Resolution Tissue Cleared 3D Brain Images
Authors: Abdullah Naziba, Clinton Fookes, Dimitri Perrin
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

We developed a generative patch based 3D image registration model that can register very high resolution images obtained from a biochemical process name tissue clearing. Tissue clearing process removes lipids and fats from the tissue and make the tissue transparent. When cleared tissues are imaged with Light-sheet fluorescent microscopy, the resulting images give a clear window to the cellular activities and dynamics inside the tissue.Thus the images obtained are very rich with cellular information and hence their resolution is extremely high (eg .2560x2160x676). Analyzing images with such high resolution is a difficult task for any image analysis pipeline.Image registration is a common step in image analysis pipeline when comparison between images are required. Traditional image registration methods fail to register images with such extant. In this paper we addressed this very high resolution image registration issue by proposing a patch-based generative network named InvGAN. Our proposed network can register very high resolution tissue cleared images. The tissue cleared dataset used in this paper are obtained from a tissue clearing protocol named CUBIC. We compared our method both with traditional and deep-learning based registration methods.Two different versions of CUBIC dataset are used, representing two different resolutions 25% and 100% respectively. Experiments on two different resolutions clearly show the impact of resolution on the registration quality. At 25% resolution, our method achieves comparable registration accuracy with very short time (7 minutes approximately). At 100% resolution, most of the traditional registration methods fail except Elastix registration tool.Elastix takes 28 hours to register where proposed InvGAN takes only 10 minutes.
Every Image Listens, Every Image Dances: Music-Driven Image Animation
Authors: Zhikang Dong, Weituo Hao, Ju-Chiang Wang, Peng Zhang, Pawel Polak
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Animation, Video Generation

Image animation has become a promising area in multimodal research, with a focus on generating videos from reference images. While prior work has largely emphasized generic video generation guided by text, music-driven dance video generation remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce MuseDance, an innovative end-to-end model that animates reference images using both music and text inputs. This dual input enables MuseDance to generate personalized videos that follow text descriptions and synchronize character movements with the music. Unlike existing approaches, MuseDance eliminates the need for complex motion guidance inputs, such as pose or depth sequences, making flexible and creative video generation accessible to users of all expertise levels. To advance research in this field, we present a new multimodal dataset comprising 2,904 dance videos with corresponding background music and text descriptions. Our approach leverages diffusion-based methods to achieve robust generalization, precise control, and temporal consistency, setting a new baseline for the music-driven image animation task.
Compositional Generalization Requires More Than Disentangled Representations
Authors: Qiyao Liang, Daoyuan Qian, Liu Ziyin, Ila Fiete
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Composition-the ability to generate myriad variations from finite means-is believed to underlie powerful generalization. However, compositional generalization remains a key challenge for deep learning. A widely held assumption is that learning disentangled (factorized) representations naturally supports this kind of extrapolation. Yet, empirical results are mixed, with many generative models failing to recognize and compose factors to generate out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. In this work, we investigate a controlled 2D Gaussian "bump" generation task, demonstrating that standard generative architectures fail in OOD regions when training with partial data, even when supplied with fully disentangled $(x, y)$ coordinates, re-entangling them through subsequent layers. By examining the model's learned kernels and manifold geometry, we show that this failure reflects a "memorization" strategy for generation through the superposition of training data rather than by combining the true factorized features. We show that models forced-through architectural modifications with regularization or curated training data-to create disentangled representations in the full-dimensional representational (pixel) space can be highly data-efficient and effective at learning to compose in OOD regions. These findings underscore that bottlenecks with factorized/disentangled representations in an abstract representation are insufficient: the model must actively maintain or induce factorization directly in the representational space in order to achieve robust compositional generalization.
Survey and Improvement Strategies for Gene Prioritization with Large Language Models
Authors: Matthew Neeley, Guantong Qi, Guanchu Wang, Ruixiang Tang, Dongxue Mao, Chaozhong Liu, Sasidhar Pasupuleti, Bo Yuan, Fan Xia, PengFei Liu, Zhandong Liu, Xia Hu
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Rare diseases are challenging to diagnose due to limited patient data and genetic diversity. Despite advances in variant prioritization, many cases remain undiagnosed. While large language models (LLMs) have performed well in medical exams, their effectiveness in diagnosing rare genetic diseases has not been assessed. To identify causal genes, we benchmarked various LLMs for gene prioritization. Using multi-agent and Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) classification, we categorized patients based on phenotypes and solvability levels. As gene set size increased, LLM performance deteriorated, so we used a divide-and-conquer strategy to break the task into smaller subsets. At baseline, GPT-4 outperformed other LLMs, achieving near 30% accuracy in ranking causal genes correctly. The multi-agent and HPO approaches helped distinguish confidently solved cases from challenging ones, highlighting the importance of known gene-phenotype associations and phenotype specificity. We found that cases with specific phenotypes or clear associations were more accurately solved. However, we observed biases toward well-studied genes and input order sensitivity, which hindered gene prioritization. Our divide-and-conquer strategy improved accuracy by overcoming these biases. By utilizing HPO classification, novel multi-agent techniques, and our LLM strategy, we improved causal gene identification accuracy compared to our baseline evaluation. This approach streamlines rare disease diagnosis, facilitates reanalysis of unsolved cases, and accelerates gene discovery, supporting the development of targeted diagnostics and therapies.
OT-Transformer: A Continuous-time Transformer Architecture with Optimal Transport Regularization
Authors: Kelvin Kan, Xingjian Li, Stanley Osher
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Point Cloud Classification

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous tasks. In this paper, we propose a continuous-time formulation of transformers. Specifically, we consider a dynamical system whose governing equation is parametrized by transformer blocks. We leverage optimal transport theory to regularize the training problem, which enhances stability in training and improves generalization of the resulting model. Moreover, we demonstrate in theory that this regularization is necessary as it promotes uniqueness and regularity of solutions. Our model is flexible in that almost any existing transformer architectures can be adopted to construct the dynamical system with only slight modifications to the existing code. We perform extensive numerical experiments on tasks motivated by natural language processing, image classification, and point cloud classification. Our experimental results show that the proposed method improves the performance of its discrete counterpart and outperforms relevant comparing models.
LLM-Generated Heuristics for AI Planning: Do We Even Need Domain-Independence Anymore?
Authors: Alexander Tuisov, Yonatan Vernik, Alexander Shleyfman
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Domain-independent heuristics have long been a cornerstone of AI planning, offering general solutions applicable across a wide range of tasks without requiring domain-specific engineering. However, the advent of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to generate heuristics tailored to specific planning problems, potentially challenging the necessity of domain independence as a strict design principle. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to automatically derive planning heuristics from task descriptions represented as successor generators and goal tests written in general purpose programming language. We investigate the trade-offs between domain-specific LLM-generated heuristics and traditional domain-independent methods in terms of computational efficiency and explainability. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can create heuristics that achieve state-of-the-art performance on some standard IPC domains, as well as their ability to solve problems that lack an adequate Planning Domain Definition Language ({\sc pddl}) representation. We discuss whether these results signify a paradigm shift and how they can complement existing approaches.
Overestimation in LLM Evaluation: A Controlled Large-Scale Study on Data Contamination's Impact on Machine Translation
Authors: Muhammed Yusuf Kocyigit, Eleftheria Briakou, Daniel Deutsch, Jiaming Luo, Colin Cherry, Markus Freitag
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation

Data contamination -- the accidental consumption of evaluation examples within the pre-training data -- can undermine the validity of evaluation benchmarks. In this paper, we present a rigorous analysis of the effects of contamination on language models at 1B and 8B scales on the machine translation task. Starting from a carefully decontaminated train-test split, we systematically introduce contamination at various stages, scales, and data formats to isolate its effect and measure its impact on performance metrics. Our experiments reveal that contamination with both source and target substantially inflates BLEU scores, and this inflation is 2.5 times larger (up to 30 BLEU points) for 8B compared to 1B models. In contrast, source-only and target-only contamination generally produce smaller, less consistent over-estimations. Finally, we study how the temporal distribution and frequency of contaminated samples influence performance over-estimation across languages with varying degrees of data resources.
Diversity By Design: Leveraging Distribution Matching for Offline Model-Based Optimization
Authors: Michael S. Yao, James C. Gee, Osbert Bastani
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The goal of offline model-based optimization (MBO) is to propose new designs that maximize a reward function given only an offline dataset. However, an important desiderata is to also propose a diverse set of final candidates that capture many optimal and near-optimal design configurations. We propose Diversity in Adversarial Model-based Optimization (DynAMO) as a novel method to introduce design diversity as an explicit objective into any MBO problem. Our key insight is to formulate diversity as a distribution matching problem where the distribution of generated designs captures the inherent diversity contained within the offline dataset. Extensive experiments spanning multiple scientific domains show that DynAMO can be used with common optimization methods to significantly improve the diversity of proposed designs while still discovering high-quality candidates.
Breaking the Fake News Barrier: Deep Learning Approaches in Bangla Language
Authors: Pronoy Kumar Mondal, Sadman Sadik Khan, Md. Masud Rana, Shahriar Sultan Ramit, Abdus Sattar, Md. Sadekur Rahman
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Lemmatization

The rapid development of digital stages has greatly compounded the dispersal of untrue data, dissolving certainty and judgment in society, especially among the Bengali-speaking community. Our ponder addresses this critical issue by presenting an interesting strategy that utilizes a profound learning innovation, particularly the Gated Repetitive Unit (GRU), to recognize fake news within the Bangla dialect. The strategy of our proposed work incorporates intensive information preprocessing, which includes lemmatization, tokenization, and tending to course awkward nature by oversampling. This comes about in a dataset containing 58,478 passages. We appreciate the creation of a demonstration based on GRU (Gated Repetitive Unit) that illustrates remarkable execution with a noteworthy precision rate of 94%. This ponder gives an intensive clarification of the methods included in planning the information, selecting the show, preparing it, and assessing its execution. The performance of the model is investigated by reliable metrics like precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. The commitment of the work incorporates making a huge fake news dataset in Bangla and a demonstration that has outperformed other Bangla fake news location models.