pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Salience-Invariant Consistent Policy Learning for Generalization in Visual Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Sun Jingbo, Tu Songjun, Zhang Qichao, Chen Ke, Zhao Dongbin
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-shot Generalization

Generalizing policies to unseen scenarios remains a critical challenge in visual reinforcement learning, where agents often overfit to the specific visual observations of the training environment. In unseen environments, distracting pixels may lead agents to extract representations containing task-irrelevant information. As a result, agents may deviate from the optimal behaviors learned during training, thereby hindering visual generalization.To address this issue, we propose the Salience-Invariant Consistent Policy Learning (SCPL) algorithm, an efficient framework for zero-shot generalization. Our approach introduces a novel value consistency module alongside a dynamics module to effectively capture task-relevant representations. The value consistency module, guided by saliency, ensures the agent focuses on task-relevant pixels in both original and perturbed observations, while the dynamics module uses augmented data to help the encoder capture dynamic- and reward-relevant representations. Additionally, our theoretical analysis highlights the importance of policy consistency for generalization. To strengthen this, we introduce a policy consistency module with a KL divergence constraint to maintain consistent policies across original and perturbed observations.Extensive experiments on the DMC-GB, Robotic Manipulation, and CARLA benchmarks demonstrate that SCPL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalization. Notably, SCPL achieves average performance improvements of 14\%, 39\%, and 69\% in the challenging DMC video hard setting, the Robotic hard setting, and the CARLA benchmark, respectively.Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/scpl-rl.
The Danger of Overthinking: Examining the Reasoning-Action Dilemma in Agentic Tasks
Authors: Alejandro Cuadron, Dacheng Li, Wenjie Ma, Xingyao Wang, Yichuan Wang, Siyuan Zhuang, Shu Liu, Luis Gaspar Schroeder, Tian Xia, Huanzhi Mao, Nicholas Thumiger, Aditya Desai, Ion Stoica, Ana Klimovic, Graham Neubig, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) represent a breakthrough in AI problem-solving capabilities, but their effectiveness in interactive environments can be limited. This paper introduces and analyzes overthinking in LRMs. A phenomenon where models favor extended internal reasoning chains over environmental interaction. Through experiments on software engineering tasks using SWE Bench Verified, we observe three recurring patterns: Analysis Paralysis, Rogue Actions, and Premature Disengagement. We propose a framework to study these behaviors, which correlates with human expert assessments, and analyze 4018 trajectories. We observe that higher overthinking scores correlate with decreased performance, with reasoning models exhibiting stronger tendencies toward overthinking compared to non-reasoning models. Our analysis reveals that simple efforts to mitigate overthinking in agentic environments, such as selecting the solution with the lower overthinking score, can improve model performance by almost 30% while reducing computational costs by 43%. These results suggest that mitigating overthinking has strong practical implications. We suggest that by leveraging native function-calling capabilities and selective reinforcement learning overthinking tendencies could be mitigated. We also open-source our evaluation framework and dataset to facilitate research in this direction at https://github.com/AlexCuadron/Overthinking.
Fino1: On the Transferability of Reasoning Enhanced LLMs to Finance
Authors: Lingfei Qian, Weipeng Zhou, Yan Wang, Xueqing Peng, Han Yi, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Jianyun Nie
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Long-Context Understanding

While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong general reasoning capabilities, their effectiveness in financial reasoning, which is crucial for real-world financial applications remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art general and reasoning-focused LLMs across four complex financial reasoning tasks involving financial text, tabular data, and equations. We assess key capabilities such as numerical reasoning, tabular interpretation, financial terminology comprehension, long-context understanding, and equation-based problem solving. Our analysis reveals that while data quality and pretraining contribute to performance, general techniques like chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning offer limited gains in financial tasks. To address this, we propose two domain-adapted models, Fino1-8B and Fino1-14B, trained with CoT fine-tuning and reinforcement learning using domain-specific reasoning paths. Our models are trained on a carefully curated dataset integrating high-quality examples from diverse sources, covering financial reports, tables, equations, and structured XBRL texts. Despite limited training data, they achieve an 7-9% performance improvement, outperforming several advanced LLMs, including GPT-o1, GPT-o3-mini, GPT-4.5, and comparable with DeepSeek models (V3 and R1), demonstrating strong practical value in resource, constrained scenarios. Our findings highlight the need for domain-specific adaptations in financial reasoning, and we release all datasets, models, and code for future research.
Model Selection for Off-policy Evaluation: New Algorithms and Experimental Protocol
Authors: Pai Liu, Lingfeng Zhao, Shivangi Agarwal, Jinghan Liu, Audrey Huang, Philip Amortila, Nan Jiang
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Off-policy evaluation, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Holdout validation and hyperparameter tuning from data is a long-standing problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A standard framework is to use off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods to evaluate and select the policies, but OPE either incurs exponential variance (e.g., importance sampling) or has hyperparameters on their own (e.g., FQE and model-based). In this work we focus on hyperparameter tuning for OPE itself, which is even more under-investigated. Concretely, we select among candidate value functions ("model-free") or dynamics ("model-based") to best assess the performance of a target policy. We develop: (1) new model-free and model-based selectors with theoretical guarantees, and (2) a new experimental protocol for empirically evaluating them. Compared to the model-free protocol in prior works, our new protocol allows for more stable generation and better control of candidate value functions in an optimization-free manner, and evaluation of model-free and model-based methods alike. We exemplify the protocol on Gym-Hopper, and find that our new model-free selector, LSTD-Tournament, demonstrates promising empirical performance.
A Survey of In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Amir Moeini, Jiuqi Wang, Jacob Beck, Ethan Blaser, Shimon Whiteson, Rohan Chandra, Shangtong Zhang
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning on additional context such as their action-observation histories. This paper surveys work on such behavior, known as in-context reinforcement learning.
Advancing Autonomous VLM Agents via Variational Subgoal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Qingyuan Wu, Jianheng Liu, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang, Kun Shao
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

State-of-the-art (SOTA) reinforcement learning (RL) methods have enabled vision-language model (VLM) agents to learn from interaction with online environments without human supervision. However, these methods often struggle with learning inefficiencies when applied to complex, real-world decision-making tasks with sparse rewards and long-horizon dependencies. We propose a novel framework, Variational Subgoal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (VSC-RL), advancing the VLM agents in resolving challenging decision-making tasks. Fundamentally distinct from existing methods, VSC-RL reformulates the decision-making problem as a variational subgoal-conditioned RL problem with the newly derived optimization objective, Subgoal Evidence Lower BOund (SGC-ELBO), which comprises two key components: (a) maximizing the subgoal-conditioned return, and (b) minimizing the divergence from a reference goal-conditioned policy. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that the VSC-RL can efficiently improve the learning efficiency without compromising performance guarantees. Across a diverse set of challenging benchmarks, including mobile device and web control tasks, VSC-RL consistently outperforms existing SOTA methods, achieving superior learning efficiency and performance.
Active Advantage-Aligned Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Data
Authors: Xuefeng Liu, Hung T. C. Le, Siyu Chen, Rick Stevens, Zhuoran Yang, Matthew R. Walter, Yuxin Chen
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Online reinforcement learning (RL) enhances policies through direct interactions with the environment, but faces challenges related to sample efficiency. In contrast, offline RL leverages extensive pre-collected data to learn policies, but often produces suboptimal results due to limited data coverage. Recent efforts have sought to integrate offline and online RL in order to harness the advantages of both approaches. However, effectively combining online and offline RL remains challenging due to issues that include catastrophic forgetting, lack of robustness and sample efficiency. In an effort to address these challenges, we introduce A3 RL , a novel method that actively selects data from combined online and offline sources to optimize policy improvement. We provide theoretical guarantee that validates the effectiveness our active sampling strategy and conduct thorough empirical experiments showing that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art online RL techniques that utilize offline data. Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/xuefeng-cs/A3RL.
MAA: Meticulous Adversarial Attack against Vision-Language Pre-trained Models
Authors: Peng-Fei Zhang, Guangdong Bai, Zi Huang
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Current adversarial attacks for evaluating the robustness of vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models in multi-modal tasks suffer from limited transferability, where attacks crafted for a specific model often struggle to generalize effectively across different models, limiting their utility in assessing robustness more broadly. This is mainly attributed to the over-reliance on model-specific features and regions, particularly in the image modality. In this paper, we propose an elegant yet highly effective method termed Meticulous Adversarial Attack (MAA) to fully exploit model-independent characteristics and vulnerabilities of individual samples, achieving enhanced generalizability and reduced model dependence. MAA emphasizes fine-grained optimization of adversarial images by developing a novel resizing and sliding crop (RScrop) technique, incorporating a multi-granularity similarity disruption (MGSD) strategy. Extensive experiments across diverse VLP models, multiple benchmark datasets, and a variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MAA significantly enhances the effectiveness and transferability of adversarial attacks. A large cohort of performance studies is conducted to generate insights into the effectiveness of various model configurations, guiding future advancements in this domain.
Intrinsic Bias is Predicted by Pretraining Data and Correlates with Downstream Performance in Vision-Language Encoders
Authors: Kshitish Ghate, Isaac Slaughter, Kyra Wilson, Mona Diab, Aylin Caliskan
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00

While recent work has found that vision-language models trained under the Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) framework contain intrinsic social biases, the extent to which different upstream pre-training features of the framework relate to these biases, and hence how intrinsic bias and downstream performance are connected has been unclear. In this work, we present the largest comprehensive analysis to-date of how the upstream pre-training factors and downstream performance of CLIP models relate to their intrinsic biases. Studying 131 unique CLIP models, trained on 26 datasets, using 55 architectures, and in a variety of sizes, we evaluate bias in each model using 26 well-established unimodal and cross-modal principled Embedding Association Tests. We find that the choice of pre-training dataset is the most significant upstream predictor of bias, whereas architectural variations have minimal impact. Additionally, datasets curated using sophisticated filtering techniques aimed at enhancing downstream model performance tend to be associated with higher levels of intrinsic bias. Finally, we observe that intrinsic bias is often significantly correlated with downstream performance ($0.3 \leq r \leq 0.8$), suggesting that models optimized for performance inadvertently learn to amplify representational biases. Comparisons between unimodal and cross-modal association tests reveal that social group bias depends heavily on the modality. Our findings imply that more sophisticated strategies are needed to address intrinsic model bias for vision-language models across the entire model development pipeline.
ADMN: A Layer-Wise Adaptive Multimodal Network for Dynamic Input Noise and Compute Resources
Authors: Jason Wu, Kang Yang, Lance Kaplan, Mani Srivastava
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Deep Learning

Multimodal deep learning systems are deployed in dynamic scenarios due to the robustness afforded by multiple sensing modalities. Nevertheless, they struggle with varying compute resource availability (due to multi-tenancy, device heterogeneity, etc.) and fluctuating quality of inputs (from sensor feed corruption, environmental noise, etc.). Current multimodal systems employ static resource provisioning and cannot easily adapt when compute resources change over time. Additionally, their reliance on processing sensor data with fixed feature extractors is ill-equipped to handle variations in modality quality. Consequently, uninformative modalities, such as those with high noise, needlessly consume resources better allocated towards other modalities. We propose ADMN, a layer-wise Adaptive Depth Multimodal Network capable of tackling both challenges - it adjusts the total number of active layers across all modalities to meet compute resource constraints, and continually reallocates layers across input modalities according to their modality quality. Our evaluations showcase ADMN can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art networks while reducing up to 75% of their floating-point operations.
Captured by Captions: On Memorization and its Mitigation in CLIP Models
Authors: Wenhao Wang, Adam Dziedzic, Grace C. Kim, Michael Backes, Franziska Boenisch
Date: 2025-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Memorization, Self-Supervised Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Multi-modal models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong performance in aligning visual and textual representations, excelling in tasks like image retrieval and zero-shot classification. Despite this success, the mechanisms by which these models utilize training data, particularly the role of memorization, remain unclear. In uni-modal models, both supervised and self-supervised, memorization has been shown to be essential for generalization. However, it is not well understood how these findings would apply to CLIP, which incorporates elements from both supervised learning via captions that provide a supervisory signal similar to labels, and from self-supervised learning via the contrastive objective. To bridge this gap in understanding, we propose a formal definition of memorization in CLIP (CLIPMem) and use it to quantify memorization in CLIP models. Our results indicate that CLIP's memorization behavior falls between the supervised and self-supervised paradigms, with "mis-captioned" samples exhibiting highest levels of memorization. Additionally, we find that the text encoder contributes more to memorization than the image encoder, suggesting that mitigation strategies should focus on the text domain. Building on these insights, we propose multiple strategies to reduce memorization while at the same time improving utility--something that had not been shown before for traditional learning paradigms where reducing memorization typically results in utility decrease.
AdvSwap: Covert Adversarial Perturbation with High Frequency Info-swapping for Autonomous Driving Perception
Authors: Yuanhao Huang, Qinfan Zhang, Jiandong Xing, Mengyue Cheng, Haiyang Yu, Yilong Ren, Xiao Xiong
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Perception module of Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are increasingly susceptible to be attacked, which exploit vulnerabilities in neural networks through adversarial inputs, thereby compromising the AI safety. Some researches focus on creating covert adversarial samples, but existing global noise techniques are detectable and difficult to deceive the human visual system. This paper introduces a novel adversarial attack method, AdvSwap, which creatively utilizes wavelet-based high-frequency information swapping to generate covert adversarial samples and fool the camera. AdvSwap employs invertible neural network for selective high-frequency information swapping, preserving both forward propagation and data integrity. The scheme effectively removes the original label data and incorporates the guidance image data, producing concealed and robust adversarial samples. Experimental evaluations and comparisons on the GTSRB and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that AdvSwap can make concealed attacks on common traffic targets. The generates adversarial samples are also difficult to perceive by humans and algorithms. Meanwhile, the method has strong attacking robustness and attacking transferability.
A Survey on Pre-Trained Diffusion Model Distillations
Authors: Xuhui Fan, Zhangkai Wu, Hongyu Wu
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, model, Survey

Diffusion Models~(DMs) have emerged as the dominant approach in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), owing to their remarkable performance in tasks such as text-to-image synthesis. However, practical DMs, such as stable diffusion, are typically trained on massive datasets and thus usually require large storage. At the same time, many steps may be required, i.e., recursively evaluating the trained neural network, to generate a high-quality image, which results in significant computational costs during sample generation. As a result, distillation methods on pre-trained DM have become widely adopted practices to develop smaller, more efficient models capable of rapid, few-step generation in low-resource environment. When these distillation methods are developed from different perspectives, there is an urgent need for a systematic survey, particularly from a methodological perspective. In this survey, we review distillation methods through three aspects: output loss distillation, trajectory distillation and adversarial distillation. We also discuss current challenges and outline future research directions in the conclusion.
LLMs can implicitly learn from mistakes in-context
Authors: Lisa Alazraki, Maximilian Mozes, Jon Ander Campos, Yi Chern Tan, Marek Rei, Max Bartolo
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

Learning from mistakes is a fundamental feature of human intelligence. Previous work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can also learn from incorrect answers when provided with a comprehensive rationale detailing why an answer is wrong or how to correct it. In this work, we examine whether LLMs can learn from mistakes in mathematical reasoning tasks when these explanations are not provided. We investigate if LLMs are able to implicitly infer such rationales simply from observing both incorrect and correct answers. Surprisingly, we find that LLMs perform better, on average, when rationales are eliminated from the context and incorrect answers are simply shown alongside correct ones. This approach also substantially outperforms chain-of-thought prompting in our evaluations. We show that these results are consistent across LLMs of different sizes and varying reasoning abilities. Further, we carry out an in-depth analysis, and show that prompting with both wrong and correct answers leads to greater performance and better generalisation than introducing additional, more diverse question-answer pairs into the context. Finally, we show that new rationales generated by models that have only observed incorrect and correct answers are scored equally as highly by humans as those produced with the aid of exemplar rationales. Our results demonstrate that LLMs are indeed capable of in-context implicit learning.
Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish
Authors: Aylin Gunal, Bowen Yi, John Piette, Rada Mihalcea, Verónica Pérez-Rosas
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00

Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.
From Haystack to Needle: Label Space Reduction for Zero-shot Classification
Authors: Nathan Vandemoortele, Bram Steenwinckel, Femke Ongenae, Sofie Van Hoecke
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

We present Label Space Reduction (LSR), a novel method for improving zero-shot classification performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). LSR iteratively refines the classification label space by systematically ranking and reducing candidate classes, enabling the model to concentrate on the most relevant options. By leveraging unlabeled data with the statistical learning capabilities of data-driven models, LSR dynamically optimizes the label space representation at test time. Our experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that LSR improves macro-F1 scores by an average of 7.0% (up to 14.2%) with Llama-3.1-70B and 3.3% (up to 11.1%) with Claude-3.5-Sonnet compared to standard zero-shot classification baselines. To reduce the computational overhead of LSR, which requires an additional LLM call at each iteration, we propose distilling the model into a probabilistic classifier, allowing for efficient inference.