pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond Terabit/s Integrated Neuromorphic Photonic Processor for DSP-Free Optical Interconnects
Authors: Benshan Wang, Qiarong Xiao, Tengji Xu, Li Fan, Shaojie Liu, Jianji Dong, Junwen Zhang, Chaoran Huang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The rapid expansion of generative AI drives unprecedented demands for high-performance computing. Training large-scale AI models now requires vast interconnected GPU clusters across multiple data centers. Multi-scale AI training and inference demand uniform, ultra-low latency, and energy-efficient links to enable massive GPUs to function as a single cohesive unit. However, traditional electrical and optical interconnects, relying on conventional digital signal processors (DSPs) for signal distortion compensation, increasingly fail to meet these stringent requirements. To overcome these limitations, we present an integrated neuromorphic optical signal processor (OSP) that leverages deep reservoir computing and achieves DSP-free, all-optical, real-time processing. Experimentally, our OSP achieves a 100 Gbaud PAM4 per lane, 1.6 Tbit/s data center interconnect over a 5 km optical fiber in the C-band (equivalent to over 80 km in the O-band), far exceeding the reach of state-of-the-art DSP solutions, which are fundamentally constrained by chromatic dispersion in IMDD systems. Simultaneously, it reduces processing latency by four orders of magnitude and energy consumption by three orders of magnitude. Unlike DSPs, which introduce increased latency at high data rates, our OSP maintains consistent, ultra-low latency regardless of data rate scaling, making it ideal for future optical interconnects. Moreover, the OSP retains full optical field information for better impairment compensation and adapts to various modulation formats, data rates, and wavelengths. Fabricated using a mature silicon photonic process, the OSP can be monolithically integrated with silicon photonic transceivers, enhancing the compactness and reliability of all-optical interconnects. This research provides a highly scalable, energy-efficient, and high-speed solution, paving the way for next-generation AI infrastructure.
SOLIDO: A Robust Watermarking Method for Speech Synthesis via Low-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Yue Li, Weizhi Liu, Dongdong Lin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Speech Synthesis

The accelerated advancement of speech generative models has given rise to security issues, including model infringement and unauthorized abuse of content. Although existing generative watermarking techniques have proposed corresponding solutions, most methods require substantial computational overhead and training costs. In addition, some methods have limitations in robustness when handling variable-length inputs. To tackle these challenges, we propose \textsc{SOLIDO}, a novel generative watermarking method that integrates parameter-efficient fine-tuning with speech watermarking through low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for speech diffusion models. Concretely, the watermark encoder converts the watermark to align with the input of diffusion models. To achieve precise watermark extraction from variable-length inputs, the watermark decoder based on depthwise separable convolution is designed for watermark recovery. To further enhance speech generation performance and watermark extraction capability, we propose a speech-driven lightweight fine-tuning strategy, which reduces computational overhead through LoRA. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method ensures high-fidelity watermarked speech even at a large capacity of 2000 bps. Furthermore, against common individual and compound speech attacks, our SOLIDO achieves a maximum average extraction accuracy of 99.20\% and 98.43\%, respectively. It surpasses other state-of-the-art methods by nearly 23\% in resisting time-stretching attacks.
Trainable Quantum Neural Network for Multiclass Image Classification with the Power of Pre-trained Tree Tensor Networks
Authors: Keisuke Murota, Takumi Kobori
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Tensor Networks

Tree tensor networks (TTNs) offer powerful models for image classification. While these TTN image classifiers already show excellent performance on classical hardware, embedding them into quantum neural networks (QNNs) may further improve the performance by leveraging quantum resources. However, embedding TTN classifiers into QNNs for multiclass classification remains challenging. Key obstacles are the highorder gate operations required for large bond dimensions and the mid-circuit postselection with exponentially low success rates necessary for the exact embedding. In this work, to address these challenges, we propose forest tensor network (FTN)-classifiers, which aggregate multiple small-bond-dimension TTNs. This allows us to handle multiclass classification without requiring large gates in the embedded circuits. We then remove the overhead of mid-circuit postselection by extending the adiabatic encoding framework to our setting and smoothly encode the FTN-classifiers into a quantum forest tensor network (qFTN)- classifiers. Numerical experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that we can successfully train FTN-classifiers and encode them into qFTN-classifiers, while maintaining or even improving the performance of the pre-trained FTN-classifiers. These results suggest that synergy between TTN classification models and QNNs can provide a robust and scalable framework for multiclass quantum-enhanced image classification.
aiXamine: Simplified LLM Safety and Security
Authors: Fatih Deniz, Dorde Popovic, Yazan Boshmaf, Euisuh Jeong, Minhaj Ahmad, Sanjay Chawla, Issa Khalil
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, Adversarial Robustness, Fairness, Hallucination, Navigate, Safety Alignment

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) for safety and security remains a complex task, often requiring users to navigate a fragmented landscape of ad hoc benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and reporting formats. To address this challenge, we present aiXamine, a comprehensive black-box evaluation platform for LLM safety and security. aiXamine integrates over 40 tests (i.e., benchmarks) organized into eight key services targeting specific dimensions of safety and security: adversarial robustness, code security, fairness and bias, hallucination, model and data privacy, out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness, over-refusal, and safety alignment. The platform aggregates the evaluation results into a single detailed report per model, providing a detailed breakdown of model performance, test examples, and rich visualizations. We used aiXamine to assess over 50 publicly available and proprietary LLMs, conducting over 2K examinations. Our findings reveal notable vulnerabilities in leading models, including susceptibility to adversarial attacks in OpenAI's GPT-4o, biased outputs in xAI's Grok-3, and privacy weaknesses in Google's Gemini 2.0. Additionally, we observe that open-source models can match or exceed proprietary models in specific services such as safety alignment, fairness and bias, and OOD robustness. Finally, we identify trade-offs between distillation strategies, model size, training methods, and architectural choices.
Evaluating Code Generation of LLMs in Advanced Computer Science Problems
Authors: Emir Catir, Robin Claesson, Rodothea Myrsini Tsoupidi
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT have become popular among programming students. Students use LLMs to assist them in programming courses, including generating source code. Previous work has evaluated the ability of LLMs in solving introductory-course programming assignments. The results have shown that LLMs are highly effective in generating code for introductory Computer Science (CS) courses. However, there is a gap in research on evaluating LLMs' ability to generate code that solves advanced programming assignments. In this work, we evaluate the ability of four LLM tools to solve programming assignments from advanced CS courses in three popular programming languages, Java, Python, and C. We manually select 12 problems, three problems from introductory courses as the baseline and nine programming assignments from second- and third-year CS courses. To evaluate the LLM-generated code, we generate a test suite of 1000 test cases per problem and analyze the program output. Our evaluation shows that although LLMs are highly effective in generating source code for introductory programming courses, solving advanced programming assignments is more challenging. Nonetheless, in many cases, LLMs identify the base problem and provide partial solutions that may be useful to CS students. Furthermore, our results may provide useful guidance for teachers of advanced programming courses on how to design programming assignments.
Speaker Fuzzy Fingerprints: Benchmarking Text-Based Identification in Multiparty Dialogues
Authors: Rui Ribeiro, Luísa Coheur, Joao P. Carvalho
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Speaker Identification

Speaker identification using voice recordings leverages unique acoustic features, but this approach fails when only textual data is available. Few approaches have attempted to tackle the problem of identifying speakers solely from text, and the existing ones have primarily relied on traditional methods. In this work, we explore the use of fuzzy fingerprints from large pre-trained models to improve text-based speaker identification. We integrate speaker-specific tokens and context-aware modeling, demonstrating that conversational context significantly boosts accuracy, reaching 70.6% on the Friends dataset and 67.7% on the Big Bang Theory dataset. Additionally, we show that fuzzy fingerprints can approximate full fine-tuning performance with fewer hidden units, offering improved interpretability. Finally, we analyze ambiguous utterances and propose a mechanism to detect speaker-agnostic lines. Our findings highlight key challenges and provide insights for future improvements in text-based speaker identification.
AGI-Driven Generative Semantic Communications: Principles and Practices
Authors: Xiaojun Yuan, Haoming Ma, Yinuo Huang, Zhoufan Hua, Yong Zuo, Zhi Ding
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Communication

Semantic communications leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to extract semantic information for efficient data delivery, thereby significantly reducing communication cost. With the evolution towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), the increasing demands for AGI services pose new challenges to semantic communications. In this context, an AGI application is typically defined on a general-sense task, covering a broad, even unforeseen, set of objectives, as well as driven by the need for a human-friendly interface in forms (e.g., videos, images, or text) easily understood by human users.In response, we introduce an AGI-driven communication paradigm for supporting AGI applications, called generative semantic communication (GSC). We first describe the basic concept of GSC and its difference from existing semantic communications, and then introduce a general framework of GSC based on advanced AI technologies including foundation models and generative models. Two case studies are presented to verify the advantages of GSC. Finally, open challenges and new research directions are discussed to stimulate this line of research and pave the way for practical applications.
Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidance
Authors: Jianhao Yan, Yafu Li, Zican Hu, Zhi Wang, Ganqu Cui, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng, Yue Zhang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) demonstrate that sophisticated behaviors such as multi-step reasoning and self-reflection can emerge via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards~(\textit{RLVR}). However, existing \textit{RLVR} approaches are inherently ``on-policy'', limiting learning to a model's own outputs and failing to acquire reasoning abilities beyond its initial capabilities. To address this issue, we introduce \textbf{LUFFY} (\textbf{L}earning to reason \textbf{U}nder o\textbf{FF}-polic\textbf{Y} guidance), a framework that augments \textit{RLVR} with off-policy reasoning traces. LUFFY dynamically balances imitation and exploration by combining off-policy demonstrations with on-policy rollouts during training. Specifically, LUFFY combines the Mixed-Policy GRPO framework, which has a theoretically guaranteed convergence rate, alongside policy shaping via regularized importance sampling to avoid superficial and rigid imitation during mixed-policy training. Compared with previous RLVR methods, LUFFY achieves an over \textbf{+6.4} average gain across six math benchmarks and an advantage of over \textbf{+6.2} points in out-of-distribution tasks. Most significantly, we show that LUFFY successfully trains weak models in scenarios where on-policy RLVR completely fails. These results provide compelling evidence that LUFFY transcends the fundamental limitations of on-policy RLVR and demonstrates the great potential of utilizing off-policy guidance in RLVR.
Giving AI a voice: how does AI think it should be treated?
Authors: Maria Fay, Frederik F. Flöther
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

With the astounding progress in (generative) artificial intelligence (AI), there has been significant public discourse regarding regulation and ethics of the technology. Is it sufficient when humans discuss this with other humans? Or, given that AI is increasingly becoming a viable source of inspiration for people (and let alone the hypothetical possibility that the technology may at some point become "artificial general intelligence" and/or develop consciousness), should AI not join the discourse? There are new questions and angles that AI brings to the table that we might not have considered before - so let us make the key subject of this book an active participant. This chapter therefore includes a brief human-AI conversation on the topic of AI rights and ethics.
EducationQ: Evaluating LLMs' Teaching Capabilities Through Multi-Agent Dialogue Framework
Authors: Yao Shi, Rongkeng Liang, Yong Xu
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as educational tools, yet evaluating their teaching capabilities remains challenging due to the resource-intensive, context-dependent, and methodologically complex nature of teacher-student interactions. We introduce EducationQ, a multi-agent dialogue framework that efficiently assesses teaching capabilities through simulated dynamic educational scenarios, featuring specialized agents for teaching, learning, and evaluation. Testing 14 LLMs across major AI Organizations (OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic, and others) on 1,498 questions spanning 13 disciplines and 10 difficulty levels reveals that teaching effectiveness does not correlate linearly with model scale or general reasoning capabilities - with some smaller open-source models outperforming larger commercial counterparts in teaching contexts. This finding highlights a critical gap in current evaluations that prioritize knowledge recall over interactive pedagogy. Our mixed-methods evaluation, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative analysis and expert case studies, identifies distinct pedagogical strengths employed by top-performing models (e.g., sophisticated questioning strategies, adaptive feedback mechanisms). Human expert evaluations show 78% agreement with our automated qualitative analysis of effective teaching behaviors, validating our methodology. EducationQ demonstrates that LLMs-as-teachers require specialized optimization beyond simple scaling, suggesting next-generation educational AI prioritize targeted enhancement of specific pedagogical effectiveness.
Fast Adversarial Training with Weak-to-Strong Spatial-Temporal Consistency in the Frequency Domain on Videos
Authors: Songping Wang, Hanqing Liu, Yueming Lyu, Xiantao Hu, Ziwen He, Wei Wang, Caifeng Shan, Liang Wang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Video Recognition

Adversarial Training (AT) has been shown to significantly enhance adversarial robustness via a min-max optimization approach. However, its effectiveness in video recognition tasks is hampered by two main challenges. First, fast adversarial training for video models remains largely unexplored, which severely impedes its practical applications. Specifically, most video adversarial training methods are computationally costly, with long training times and high expenses. Second, existing methods struggle with the trade-off between clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. To address these challenges, we introduce Video Fast Adversarial Training with Weak-to-Strong consistency (VFAT-WS), the first fast adversarial training method for video data. Specifically, VFAT-WS incorporates the following key designs: First, it integrates a straightforward yet effective temporal frequency augmentation (TF-AUG), and its spatial-temporal enhanced form STF-AUG, along with a single-step PGD attack to boost training efficiency and robustness. Second, it devises a weak-to-strong spatial-temporal consistency regularization, which seamlessly integrates the simpler TF-AUG and the more complex STF-AUG. Leveraging the consistency regularization, it steers the learning process from simple to complex augmentations. Both of them work together to achieve a better trade-off between clean accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on UCF-101 and HMDB-51 with both CNN and Transformer-based models demonstrate that VFAT-WS achieves great improvements in adversarial robustness and corruption robustness, while accelerating training by nearly 490%.
StableQuant: Layer Adaptive Post-Training Quantization for Speech Foundation Models
Authors: Yeona Hong, Hyewon Han, Woo-Jin Chung, Hong-Goo Kang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Quantization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this paper, we propose StableQuant, a novel adaptive post-training quantization (PTQ) algorithm for widely used speech foundation models (SFMs). While PTQ has been successfully employed for compressing large language models (LLMs) due to its ability to bypass additional fine-tuning, directly applying these techniques to SFMs may not yield optimal results, as SFMs utilize distinct network architecture for feature extraction. StableQuant demonstrates optimal quantization performance regardless of the network architecture type, as it adaptively determines the quantization range for each layer by analyzing both the scale distributions and overall performance. We evaluate our algorithm on two SFMs, HuBERT and wav2vec2.0, for an automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, and achieve superior performance compared to traditional PTQ methods. StableQuant successfully reduces the sizes of SFM models to a quarter and doubles the inference speed while limiting the word error rate (WER) performance drop to less than 0.3% with 8-bit quantization.
Guidelines for External Disturbance Factors in the Use of OCR in Real-World Environments
Authors: Kenji Iwata, Eiki Ishidera, Toshifumi Yamaai, Yutaka Satoh, Hiroshi Tanaka, Katsuhiko Takahashi, Akio Furuhata, Yoshihisa Tanabe, Hiroshi Matsumura
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The performance of OCR has improved with the evolution of AI technology. As OCR continues to broaden its range of applications, the increased likelihood of interference introduced by various usage environments can prevent it from achieving its inherent performance. This results in reduced recognition accuracy under certain conditions, and makes the quality control of recognition devices more challenging. Therefore, to ensure that users can properly utilize OCR, we compiled the real-world external disturbance factors that cause performance degradation, along with the resulting image degradation phenomena, into an external disturbance factor table and, by also indicating how to make use of it, organized them into guidelines.
VLM as Policy: Common-Law Content Moderation Framework for Short Video Platform
Authors: Xingyu Lu, Tianke Zhang, Chang Meng, Xiaobei Wang, Jinpeng Wang, Yifan Zhang, Shisong Tang, Changyi Liu, Haojie Ding, Kaiyu Jiang, Kaiyu Tang, Bin Wen, Hai-Tao Zheng, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Exponentially growing short video platforms (SVPs) face significant challenges in moderating content detrimental to users' mental health, particularly for minors. The dissemination of such content on SVPs can lead to catastrophic societal consequences. Although substantial efforts have been dedicated to moderating such content, existing methods suffer from critical limitations: (1) Manual review is prone to human bias and incurs high operational costs. (2) Automated methods, though efficient, lack nuanced content understanding, resulting in lower accuracy. (3) Industrial moderation regulations struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving trends due to long update cycles. In this paper, we annotate the first SVP content moderation benchmark with authentic user/reviewer feedback to fill the absence of benchmark in this field. Then we evaluate various methods on the benchmark to verify the existence of the aforementioned limitations. We further propose our common-law content moderation framework named KuaiMod to address these challenges. KuaiMod consists of three components: training data construction, offline adaptation, and online deployment & refinement. Leveraging large vision language model (VLM) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, KuaiMod adequately models video toxicity based on sparse user feedback and fosters dynamic moderation policy with rapid update speed and high accuracy. Offline experiments and large-scale online A/B test demonstrates the superiority of KuaiMod: KuaiMod achieves the best moderation performance on our benchmark. The deployment of KuaiMod reduces the user reporting rate by 20% and its application in video recommendation increases both Daily Active User (DAU) and APP Usage Time (AUT) on several Kuaishou scenarios. We have open-sourced our benchmark at https://kuaimod.github.io.
Latent Bayesian Optimization via Autoregressive Normalizing Flows
Authors: Seunghun Lee, Jinyoung Park, Jaewon Chu, Minseo Yoon, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been recognized for its effectiveness in optimizing expensive and complex objective functions. Recent advancements in Latent Bayesian Optimization (LBO) have shown promise by integrating generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) to manage the complexity of high-dimensional and structured data spaces. However, existing LBO approaches often suffer from the value discrepancy problem, which arises from the reconstruction gap between input and latent spaces. This value discrepancy problem propagates errors throughout the optimization process, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To address this issue, we propose a Normalizing Flow-based Bayesian Optimization (NF-BO), which utilizes normalizing flow as a generative model to establish one-to-one encoding function from the input space to the latent space, along with its left-inverse decoding function, eliminating the reconstruction gap. Specifically, we introduce SeqFlow, an autoregressive normalizing flow for sequence data. In addition, we develop a new candidate sampling strategy that dynamically adjusts the exploration probability for each token based on its importance. Through extensive experiments, our NF-BO method demonstrates superior performance in molecule generation tasks, significantly outperforming both traditional and recent LBO approaches.