pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Efficient Educational Chatbots: Benchmarking RAG Frameworks
Authors: Umar Ali Khan, Ekram Khan, Fiza Khan, Athar Ali Moinuddin
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Chatbot, Computational Efficiency, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven immensely beneficial in education by capturing vast amounts of literature-based information, allowing them to generate context without relying on external sources. In this paper, we propose a generative AI-powered GATE question-answering framework (GATE stands for Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) that leverages LLMs to explain GATE solutions and support students in their exam preparation. We conducted extensive benchmarking to select the optimal embedding model and LLM, evaluating our framework based on criteria such as latency, faithfulness, and relevance, with additional validation through human evaluation. Our chatbot integrates state-of-the-art embedding models and LLMs to deliver accurate, context-aware responses. Through rigorous experimentation, we identified configurations that balance performance and computational efficiency, ensuring a reliable chatbot to serve students' needs. Additionally, we discuss the challenges faced in data processing and modeling and implemented solutions. Our work explores the application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for GATE Q/A explanation tasks, and our findings demonstrate significant improvements in retrieval accuracy and response quality. This research offers practical insights for developing effective AI-driven educational tools while highlighting areas for future enhancement in usability and scalability.
FLOAT Drone: A Fully-actuated Coaxial Aerial Robot for Close-Proximity Operations
Authors: Junxiao Lin, Shuhang Ji, Yuze Wu, Tianyue Wu, Zhichao Han, Fei Gao
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

How to endow aerial robots with the ability to operate in close proximity remains an open problem. The core challenges lie in the propulsion system's dual-task requirement: generating manipulation forces while simultaneously counteracting gravity. These competing demands create dynamic coupling effects during physical interactions. Furthermore, rotor-induced airflow disturbances critically undermine operational reliability. Although fully-actuated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) alleviate dynamic coupling effects via six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) force-torque decoupling, existing implementations fail to address the aerodynamic interference between drones and environments. They also suffer from oversized designs, which compromise maneuverability and limit their applications in various operational scenarios. To address these limitations, we present FLOAT Drone (FuLly-actuated cOaxial Aerial roboT), a novel fully-actuated UAV featuring two key structural innovations. By integrating control surfaces into fully-actuated systems for the first time, we significantly suppress lateral airflow disturbances during operations. Furthermore, a coaxial dual-rotor configuration enables a compact size while maintaining high hovering efficiency. Through dynamic modeling, we have developed hierarchical position and attitude controllers that support both fully-actuated and underactuated modes. Experimental validation through comprehensive real-world experiments confirms the system's functional capabilities in close-proximity operations.
Taming Infinity one Chunk at a Time: Concisely Represented Strategies in One-Counter MDPs
Authors: Michal Ajdarów, James C. A. Main, Petr Novotný, Mickael Randour
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a canonical model to reason about decision making within a stochastic environment. We study a fundamental class of infinite MDPs: one-counter MDPs (OC-MDPs). They extend finite MDPs via an associated counter taking natural values, thus inducing an infinite MDP over the set of configurations (current state and counter value). We consider two characteristic objectives: reaching a target state (state-reachability), and reaching a target state with counter value zero (selective termination). The synthesis problem for the latter is not known to be decidable and connected to major open problems in number theory. Furthermore, even seemingly simple strategies (e.g., memoryless ones) in OC-MDPs might be impossible to build in practice (due to the underlying infinite configuration space): we need finite, and preferably small, representations. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce two natural classes of concisely represented strategies based on a (possibly infinite) partition of counter values in intervals. For both classes, and both objectives, we study the verification problem (does a given strategy ensure a high enough probability for the objective?), and two synthesis problems (does there exist such a strategy?): one where the interval partition is fixed as input, and one where it is only parameterized. We develop a generic approach based on a compression of the induced infinite MDP that yields decidability in all cases, with all complexities within PSPACE.
Bridging Spectral-wise and Multi-spectral Depth Estimation via Geometry-guided Contrastive Learning
Authors: Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, Jean Oh
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Contrastive Learning, Depth Estimation

Deploying depth estimation networks in the real world requires high-level robustness against various adverse conditions to ensure safe and reliable autonomy. For this purpose, many autonomous vehicles employ multi-modal sensor systems, including an RGB camera, NIR camera, thermal camera, LiDAR, or Radar. They mainly adopt two strategies to use multiple sensors: modality-wise and multi-modal fused inference. The former method is flexible but memory-inefficient, unreliable, and vulnerable. Multi-modal fusion can provide high-level reliability, yet it needs a specialized architecture. In this paper, we propose an effective solution, named align-and-fuse strategy, for the depth estimation from multi-spectral images. In the align stage, we align embedding spaces between multiple spectrum bands to learn shareable representation across multi-spectral images by minimizing contrastive loss of global and spatially aligned local features with geometry cue. After that, in the fuse stage, we train an attachable feature fusion module that can selectively aggregate the multi-spectral features for reliable and robust prediction results. Based on the proposed method, a single-depth network can achieve both spectral-invariant and multi-spectral fused depth estimation while preserving reliability, memory efficiency, and flexibility.
Towards Reliable LLM-Driven Fuzz Testing: Vision and Road Ahead
Authors: Yiran Cheng, Hong Jin Kang, Lwin Khin Shar, Chaopeng Dong, Zhiqiang Shi, Shichao Lv, Limin Sun
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing, valid

Fuzz testing is a crucial component of software security assessment, yet its effectiveness heavily relies on valid fuzz drivers and diverse seed inputs. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer transformative potential for automating fuzz testing (LLM4Fuzz), particularly in generating drivers and seeds. However, current LLM4Fuzz solutions face critical reliability challenges, including low driver validity rates and seed quality trade-offs, hindering their practical adoption. This paper aims to examine the reliability bottlenecks of LLM-driven fuzzing and explores potential research directions to address these limitations. It begins with an overview of the current development of LLM4SE and emphasizes the necessity for developing reliable LLM4Fuzz solutions. Following this, the paper envisions a vision where reliable LLM4Fuzz transforms the landscape of software testing and security for industry, software development practitioners, and economic accessibility. It then outlines a road ahead for future research, identifying key challenges and offering specific suggestions for the researchers to consider. This work strives to spark innovation in the field, positioning reliable LLM4Fuzz as a fundamental component of modern software testing.
AI Agents for Ground-Based Gamma Astronomy
Authors: D. Kostunin, V. Sotnikov, S. Golovachev, A. Strube
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Code Generation

Next-generation instruments for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy are marked by a substantial increase in complexity, featuring dozens of telescopes. This leap in scale introduces significant challenges in managing system operations and offline data analysis. Methods, which depend on advanced personnel training and sophisticated software, become increasingly strained as system complexity grows, making it more challenging to effectively support users in such a multifaceted environment. To address these challenges, we propose the development of AI agents based on instruction-finetuned large language models (LLMs). These agents align with specific documentation and codebases, understand the environmental context, operate with external APIs, and communicate with humans in natural language. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of modern LLMs, which can process and retain vast amounts of information, these AI agents offer a transformative approach to system management and data analysis by automating complex tasks and providing intelligent assistance. We present two prototypes that integrate with the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory pipelines for operations and offline data analysis. The first prototype automates data model implementation and maintenance for the Configuration Database of the Array Control and Data Acquisition (ACADA). The second prototype is an open-access code generation application tailored for data analysis based on the Gammapy framework.
CyberCScope: Mining Skewed Tensor Streams and Online Anomaly Detection in Cybersecurity Systems
Authors: Kota Nakamura, Koki Kawabata, Shungo Tanaka, Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Cybersecurity systems are continuously producing a huge number of time-stamped events in the form of high-order tensors, such as {count; time, port, flow duration, packet size, . . . }, and so how can we detect anomalies/intrusions in real time? How can we identify multiple types of intrusions and capture their characteristic behaviors? The tensor data consists of categorical and continuous attributes and the data distributions of continuous attributes typically exhibit skew. These data properties require handling skewed infinite and finite dimensional spaces simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel streaming method, namely CyberCScope. The method effectively decomposes incoming tensors into major trends while explicitly distinguishing between categorical and skewed continuous attributes. To our knowledge, it is the first to compute hybrid skewed infinite and finite dimensional decomposition. Based on this decomposition, it streamingly finds distinct time-evolving patterns, enabling the detection of multiple types of anomalies. Extensive experiments on large-scale real datasets demonstrate that CyberCScope detects various intrusions with higher accuracy than state-of-the-art baselines while providing meaningful summaries for the intrusions that occur in practice.
Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks by an Input Transpose
Authors: Qing Wan, Shilong Deng, Xun Wang
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are highly susceptible to adversarial examples--subtle perturbations applied to inputs that are often imperceptible to humans yet lead to incorrect model predictions. In black-box scenarios, however, existing adversarial examples exhibit limited transferability and struggle to effectively compromise multiple unseen DNN models. Previous strategies enhance the cross-model generalization of adversarial examples by introducing versatility into adversarial perturbations, thereby improving transferability. However, further refining perturbation versatility often demands intricate algorithm development and substantial computation consumption. In this work, we propose an input transpose method that requires almost no additional labor and computation costs but can significantly improve the transferability of existing adversarial strategies. Even without adding adversarial perturbations, our method demonstrates considerable effectiveness in cross-model attacks. Our exploration finds that on specific datasets, a mere $1^\circ$ left or right rotation might be sufficient for most adversarial examples to deceive unseen models. Our further analysis suggests that this transferability improvement triggered by rotating only $1^\circ$ may stem from visible pattern shifts in the DNN's low-level feature maps. Moreover, this transferability exhibits optimal angles that, when identified under unrestricted query conditions, could potentially yield even greater performance.
Can AI Model the Complexities of Human Moral Decision-Making? A Qualitative Study of Kidney Allocation Decisions
Authors: Vijay Keswani, Vincent Conitzer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Breanna K. Nguyen, Hoda Heidari, Jana Schaich Borg
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

A growing body of work in Ethical AI attempts to capture human moral judgments through simple computational models. The key question we address in this work is whether such simple AI models capture {the critical} nuances of moral decision-making by focusing on the use case of kidney allocation. We conducted twenty interviews where participants explained their rationale for their judgments about who should receive a kidney. We observe participants: (a) value patients' morally-relevant attributes to different degrees; (b) use diverse decision-making processes, citing heuristics to reduce decision complexity; (c) can change their opinions; (d) sometimes lack confidence in their decisions (e.g., due to incomplete information); and (e) express enthusiasm and concern regarding AI assisting humans in kidney allocation decisions. Based on these findings, we discuss challenges of computationally modeling moral judgments {as a stand-in for human input}, highlight drawbacks of current approaches, and suggest future directions to address these issues.
Cross Modality Medical Image Synthesis for Improving Liver Segmentation
Authors: Muhammad Rafiq, Hazrat Ali, Ghulam Mujtaba, Zubair Shah, Shoaib Azmat
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Liver Segmentation

Deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of medical images requires large datasets. However, the lack of large publicly available labeled datasets limits the development of deep learning-based CAD systems. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in particular, CycleGAN, can be used to generate new cross-domain images without paired training data. However, most CycleGAN-based synthesis methods lack the potential to overcome alignment and asymmetry between the input and generated data. We propose a two-stage technique for the synthesis of abdominal MRI using cross-modality translation of abdominal CT. We show that the synthetic data can help improve the performance of the liver segmentation network. We increase the number of abdominal MRI images through cross-modality image transformation of unpaired CT images using a CycleGAN inspired deformation invariant network called EssNet. Subsequently, we combine the synthetic MRI images with the original MRI images and use them to improve the accuracy of the U-Net on a liver segmentation task. We train the U-Net on real MRI images and then on real and synthetic MRI images. Consequently, by comparing both scenarios, we achieve an improvement in the performance of U-Net. In summary, the improvement achieved in the Intersection over Union (IoU) is 1.17%. The results show potential to address the data scarcity challenge in medical imaging.
SemViQA: A Semantic Question Answering System for Vietnamese Information Fact-Checking
Authors: Dien X. Tran, Nam V. Nguyen, Thanh T. Tran, Anh T. Hoang, Tai V. Duong, Di T. Le, Phuc-Lu Le
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fact Verification, Information Retrieval, Misinformation, Question Answering, Vietnamese Fact Checking

The rise of misinformation, exacerbated by Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and Gemini, demands robust fact-checking solutions, especially for low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Existing methods struggle with semantic ambiguity, homonyms, and complex linguistic structures, often trading accuracy for efficiency. We introduce SemViQA, a novel Vietnamese fact-checking framework integrating Semantic-based Evidence Retrieval (SER) and Two-step Verdict Classification (TVC). Our approach balances precision and speed, achieving state-of-the-art results with 78.97\% strict accuracy on ISE-DSC01 and 80.82\% on ViWikiFC, securing 1st place in the UIT Data Science Challenge. Additionally, SemViQA Faster improves inference speed 7x while maintaining competitive accuracy. SemViQA sets a new benchmark for Vietnamese fact verification, advancing the fight against misinformation. The source code is available at: https://github.com/DAVID-NGUYEN-S16/SemViQA.
Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Speech Translation Systems through Targeted Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Chang Liu, Haolin Wu, Xi Yang, Kui Zhang, Cong Wu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu, Tianwei Zhang, Qing Guo, Jie Zhang
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two innovative approaches: (1) the injection of perturbation into source audio, and (2) the generation of adversarial music designed to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks prove effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. The implications of this research extend beyond immediate security concerns, shedding light on the interpretability and robustness of neural speech processing systems. Our findings underscore the need for advanced defense mechanisms and more resilient architectures in the realm of audio systems. More details and samples can be found at https://adv-st.github.io.
A Semantic Search Pipeline for Causality-driven Adhoc Information Retrieval
Authors: Dhairya Dalal, Sharmi Dev Gupta, Bentolhoda Binaei
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

We present a unsupervised semantic search pipeline for the Causality-driven Adhoc Information Retrieval (CAIR-2021) shared task. The CAIR shared task expands traditional information retrieval to support the retrieval of documents containing the likely causes of a query event. A successful system must be able to distinguish between topical documents and documents containing causal descriptions of events that are causally related to the query event. Our approach involves aggregating results from multiple query strategies over a semantic and lexical index. The proposed approach leads the CAIR-2021 leaderboard and outperformed both traditional IR and pure semantic embedding-based approaches.
MedUnifier: Unifying Vision-and-Language Pre-training on Medical Data with Vision Generation Task using Discrete Visual Representations
Authors: Ziyang Zhang, Yang Yu, Yucheng Chen, Xulei Yang, Si Yong Yeo
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Image-text matching, Image-text Retrieval, Medical Report Generation, Quantization, Text Generation, Text Matching, Text Retrieval, Zero-Shot Image Classification

Despite significant progress in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), current approaches predominantly emphasize feature extraction and cross-modal comprehension, with limited attention to generating or transforming visual content. This gap hinders the model's ability to synthesize coherent and novel visual representations from textual prompts, thereby reducing the effectiveness of multi-modal learning. In this work, we propose MedUnifier, a unified VLP framework tailored for medical data. MedUnifier seamlessly integrates text-grounded image generation capabilities with multi-modal learning strategies, including image-text contrastive alignment, image-text matching and image-grounded text generation. Unlike traditional methods that reply on continuous visual representations, our approach employs visual vector quantization, which not only facilitates a more cohesive learning strategy for cross-modal understanding but also enhances multi-modal generation quality by effectively leveraging discrete representations. Our framework's effectiveness is evidenced by the experiments on established benchmarks, including uni-modal tasks (supervised fine-tuning), cross-modal tasks (image-text retrieval and zero-shot image classification), and multi-modal tasks (medical report generation, image synthesis), where it achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. MedUnifier also offers a highly adaptable tool for a wide range of language and vision tasks in healthcare, marking advancement toward the development of a generalizable AI model for medical applications.
LLM-Fusion: A Novel Multimodal Fusion Model for Accelerated Material Discovery
Authors: Onur Boyar, Indra Priyadarsini, Seiji Takeda, Lisa Hamada
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Property Prediction

Discovering materials with desirable properties in an efficient way remains a significant problem in materials science. Many studies have tackled this problem by using different sets of information available about the materials. Among them, multimodal approaches have been found to be promising because of their ability to combine different sources of information. However, fusion algorithms to date remain simple, lacking a mechanism to provide a rich representation of multiple modalities. This paper presents LLM-Fusion, a novel multimodal fusion model that leverages large language models (LLMs) to integrate diverse representations, such as SMILES, SELFIES, text descriptions, and molecular fingerprints, for accurate property prediction. Our approach introduces a flexible LLM-based architecture that supports multimodal input processing and enables material property prediction with higher accuracy than traditional methods. We validate our model on two datasets across five prediction tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness compared to unimodal and naive concatenation baselines.