pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Effective Red-Teaming of Policy-Adherent Agents
Authors: Itay Nakash, George Kour, Koren Lazar, Matan Vetzler, Guy Uziel, Ateret Anaby-Tavor
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Task-oriented LLM-based agents are increasingly used in domains with strict policies, such as refund eligibility or cancellation rules. The challenge lies in ensuring that the agent consistently adheres to these rules and policies, appropriately refusing any request that would violate them, while still maintaining a helpful and natural interaction. This calls for the development of tailored design and evaluation methodologies to ensure agent resilience against malicious user behavior. We propose a novel threat model that focuses on adversarial users aiming to exploit policy-adherent agents for personal benefit. To address this, we present CRAFT, a multi-agent red-teaming system that leverages policy-aware persuasive strategies to undermine a policy-adherent agent in a customer-service scenario, outperforming conventional jailbreak methods such as DAN prompts, emotional manipulation, and coercive. Building upon the existing tau-bench benchmark, we introduce tau-break, a complementary benchmark designed to rigorously assess the agent's robustness against manipulative user behavior. Finally, we evaluate several straightforward yet effective defense strategies. While these measures provide some protection, they fall short, highlighting the need for stronger, research-driven safeguards to protect policy-adherent agents from adversarial attacks
AngleRoCL: Angle-Robust Concept Learning for Physically View-Invariant T2I Adversarial Patches
Authors: Wenjun Ji, Yuxiang Fu, Luyang Ying, Deng-Ping Fan, Yuyi Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ivor Tsang, Qing Guo
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Cutting-edge works have demonstrated that text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models can generate adversarial patches that mislead state-of-the-art object detectors in the physical world, revealing detectors' vulnerabilities and risks. However, these methods neglect the T2I patches' attack effectiveness when observed from different views in the physical world (i.e., angle robustness of the T2I adversarial patches). In this paper, we study the angle robustness of T2I adversarial patches comprehensively, revealing their angle-robust issues, demonstrating that texts affect the angle robustness of generated patches significantly, and task-specific linguistic instructions fail to enhance the angle robustness. Motivated by the studies, we introduce Angle-Robust Concept Learning (AngleRoCL), a simple and flexible approach that learns a generalizable concept (i.e., text embeddings in implementation) representing the capability of generating angle-robust patches. The learned concept can be incorporated into textual prompts and guides T2I models to generate patches with their attack effectiveness inherently resistant to viewpoint variations. Through extensive simulation and physical-world experiments on five SOTA detectors across multiple views, we demonstrate that AngleRoCL significantly enhances the angle robustness of T2I adversarial patches compared to baseline methods. Our patches maintain high attack success rates even under challenging viewing conditions, with over 50% average relative improvement in attack effectiveness across multiple angles. This research advances the understanding of physically angle-robust patches and provides insights into the relationship between textual concepts and physical properties in T2I-generated contents.
Adversarial Surrogate Risk Bounds for Binary Classification
Authors: Natalie S. Frank
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification

A central concern in classification is the vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training is one of the most popular techniques for training robust classifiers, which involves minimizing an adversarial surrogate risk. Recent work characterized when a minimizing sequence of an adversarial surrogate risk is also a minimizing sequence of the adversarial classification risk for binary classification -- a property known as adversarial consistency. However, these results do not address the rate at which the adversarial classification risk converges to its optimal value for such a sequence of functions that minimize the adversarial surrogate. This paper provides surrogate risk bounds that quantify that convergence rate. Additionally, we derive distribution-dependent surrogate risk bounds in the standard (non-adversarial) learning setting, that may be of independent interest.
PatchGuard: Adversarially Robust Anomaly Detection and Localization through Vision Transformers and Pseudo Anomalies
Authors: Mojtaba Nafez, Amirhossein Koochakian, Arad Maleki, Jafar Habibi, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Localization

Anomaly Detection (AD) and Anomaly Localization (AL) are crucial in fields that demand high reliability, such as medical imaging and industrial monitoring. However, current AD and AL approaches are often susceptible to adversarial attacks due to limitations in training data, which typically include only normal, unlabeled samples. This study introduces PatchGuard, an adversarially robust AD and AL method that incorporates pseudo anomalies with localization masks within a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based architecture to address these vulnerabilities. We begin by examining the essential properties of pseudo anomalies, and follow it by providing theoretical insights into the attention mechanisms required to enhance the adversarial robustness of AD and AL systems. We then present our approach, which leverages Foreground-Aware Pseudo-Anomalies to overcome the deficiencies of previous anomaly-aware methods. Our method incorporates these crafted pseudo-anomaly samples into a ViT-based framework, with adversarial training guided by a novel loss function designed to improve model robustness, as supported by our theoretical analysis. Experimental results on well-established industrial and medical datasets demonstrate that PatchGuard significantly outperforms previous methods in adversarial settings, achieving performance gains of $53.2\%$ in AD and $68.5\%$ in AL, while also maintaining competitive accuracy in non-adversarial settings. The code repository is available at https://github.com/rohban-lab/PatchGuard .
Adversarial Text Generation with Dynamic Contextual Perturbation
Authors: Hetvi Waghela, Jaydip Sen, Sneha Rakshit, Subhasis Dasgupta
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text, Text Generation

Adversarial attacks on Natural Language Processing (NLP) models expose vulnerabilities by introducing subtle perturbations to input text, often leading to misclassification while maintaining human readability. Existing methods typically focus on word-level or local text segment alterations, overlooking the broader context, which results in detectable or semantically inconsistent perturbations. We propose a novel adversarial text attack scheme named Dynamic Contextual Perturbation (DCP). DCP dynamically generates context-aware perturbations across sentences, paragraphs, and documents, ensuring semantic fidelity and fluency. Leveraging the capabilities of pre-trained language models, DCP iteratively refines perturbations through an adversarial objective function that balances the dual objectives of inducing model misclassification and preserving the naturalness of the text. This comprehensive approach allows DCP to produce more sophisticated and effective adversarial examples that better mimic natural language patterns. Our experimental results, conducted on various NLP models and datasets, demonstrate the efficacy of DCP in challenging the robustness of state-of-the-art NLP systems. By integrating dynamic contextual analysis, DCP significantly enhances the subtlety and impact of adversarial attacks. This study highlights the critical role of context in adversarial attacks and lays the groundwork for creating more robust NLP systems capable of withstanding sophisticated adversarial strategies.
Vectorized Region Based Brush Strokes for Artistic Rendering
Authors: Jeripothula Prudviraj, Vikram Jamwal
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Creating a stroke-by-stroke evolution process of a visual artwork tries to bridge the emotional and educational gap between the finished static artwork and its creation process. Recent stroke-based painting systems focus on capturing stroke details by predicting and iteratively refining stroke parameters to maximize the similarity between the input image and the rendered output. However, these methods often struggle to produce stroke compositions that align with artistic principles and intent. To address this, we explore an image-to-painting method that (i) facilitates semantic guidance for brush strokes in targeted regions, (ii) computes the brush stroke parameters, and (iii) establishes a sequence among segments and strokes to sequentially render the final painting. Experimental results on various input image types, such as face images, paintings, and photographic images, show that our method aligns with a region-based painting strategy while rendering a painting with high fidelity and superior stroke quality.
Outside Knowledge Conversational Video (OKCV) Dataset -- Dialoguing over Videos
Authors: Benjamin Reichman, Constantin Patsch, Jack Truxal, Atishay Jain, Larry Heck
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In outside knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA), the model must identify relevant visual information within an image and incorporate external knowledge to accurately respond to a question. Extending this task to a visually grounded dialogue setting based on videos, a conversational model must both recognize pertinent visual details over time and answer questions where the required information is not necessarily present in the visual information. Moreover, the context of the overall conversation must be considered for the subsequent dialogue. To explore this task, we introduce a dataset comprised of $2,017$ videos with $5,986$ human-annotated dialogues consisting of $40,954$ interleaved dialogue turns. While the dialogue context is visually grounded in specific video segments, the questions further require external knowledge that is not visually present. Thus, the model not only has to identify relevant video parts but also leverage external knowledge to converse within the dialogue. We further provide several baselines evaluated on our dataset and show future challenges associated with this task. The dataset is made publicly available here: https://github.com/c-patsch/OKCV.
Fluoroscopic Shape and Pose Tracking of Catheters with Custom Radiopaque Markers
Authors: Jared Lawson, Rohan Chitale, Nabil Simaan
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Pose Estimation, Pose Tracking

Safe navigation of steerable and robotic catheters in the cerebral vasculature requires awareness of the catheters shape and pose. Currently, a significant perception burden is placed on interventionalists to mentally reconstruct and predict catheter motions from biplane fluoroscopy images. Efforts to track these catheters are limited to planar segmentation or bulky sensing instrumentation, which are incompatible with microcatheters used in neurointervention. In this work, a catheter is equipped with custom radiopaque markers arranged to enable simultaneous shape and pose estimation under biplane fluoroscopy. A design measure is proposed to guide the arrangement of these markers to minimize sensitivity to marker tracking uncertainty. This approach was deployed for microcatheters smaller than 2mm OD navigating phantom vasculature with shape tracking errors less than 1mm and catheter roll errors below 40 degrees. This work can enable steerable catheters to autonomously navigate under biplane imaging.
Structural-Spectral Graph Convolution with Evidential Edge Learning for Hyperspectral Image Clustering
Authors: Jianhan Qi, Yuheng Jia, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, hyperspectral image clustering, Image Clustering, Representation Learning, Superpixels

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering assigns similar pixels to the same class without any annotations, which is an important yet challenging task. For large-scale HSIs, most methods rely on superpixel segmentation and perform superpixel-level clustering based on graph neural networks (GNNs). However, existing GNNs cannot fully exploit the spectral information of the input HSI, and the inaccurate superpixel topological graph may lead to the confusion of different class semantics during information aggregation. To address these challenges, we first propose a structural-spectral graph convolutional operator (SSGCO) tailored for graph-structured HSI superpixels to improve their representation quality through the co-extraction of spatial and spectral features. Second, we propose an evidence-guided adaptive edge learning (EGAEL) module that adaptively predicts and refines edge weights in the superpixel topological graph. We integrate the proposed method into a contrastive learning framework to achieve clustering, where representation learning and clustering are simultaneously conducted. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves clustering accuracy by 2.61%, 6.06%, 4.96% and 3.15% over the best compared methods on four HSI datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jhqi/SSGCO-EGAEL.
Corrections to Friis noise factor formulas for cascade networks
Authors: Ankitha E Bangera
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

The signal-to-noise ratio of a multistage cascade network is often estimated using the well-known Friis' formulas for noise factors (or the noise figures in decibels). However, this article addresses the major errors in Friis' noise factor formulas for higher stages. Additionally, we re-derive the correct formulas to calculate the stage-wise noise factors for cascade networks from the basic definition of noise factors. We then present a comparison of our derived formulas with Friis' noise factor formulas. Contrary to Friis' formula, we define the total noise factor of an n-stage cascade network as the product of its stage-wise noise factors. We further validate our derived formulas for a cascade network by correlating them with the expressions for a staircase avalanche photodiode.
Discrete Scale-invariant Metric Learning for Efficient Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Yan Zhang, Li Deng, Lixin Duan, Sami Azam
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Metric Learning, Recommendation Systems

Metric learning has attracted extensive interest for its ability to provide personalized recommendations based on the importance of observed user-item interactions. Current metric learning methods aim to push negative items away from the corresponding users and positive items by an absolute geometrical distance margin. However, items may come from imbalanced categories with different intra-class variations. Thus, the absolute distance margin may not be ideal for estimating the difference between user preferences over imbalanced items. To this end, we propose a new method, named discrete scale-invariant metric learning (DSIML), by adding binary constraints to users and items, which maps users and items into binary codes of a shared Hamming subspace to speed up the online recommendation. Specifically, we firstly propose a scale-invariant margin based on angles at the negative item points in the shared Hamming subspace. Then, we derive a scale-invariant triple hinge loss based on the margin. To capture more preference difference information, we integrate a pairwise ranking loss into the scale-invariant loss in the proposed model. Due to the difficulty of directly optimizing the mixed integer optimization problem formulated with \textit{log-sum-exp} functions, we seek to optimize its variational quadratic upper bound and learn hash codes with an alternating optimization strategy. Experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that our proposed method is superior to competitive metric learning and hashing-based baselines for recommender systems. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/AnonyFeb/dsml.
Superstudent intelligence in thermodynamics
Authors: Rebecca Loubet, Pascal Zittlau, Marco Hoffmann, Luisa Vollmer, Sophie Fellenz, Heike Leitte, Fabian Jirasek, Johannes Lenhard, Hans Hasse
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

In this short note, we report and analyze a striking event: OpenAI's large language model o3 has outwitted all students in a university exam on thermodynamics. The thermodynamics exam is a difficult hurdle for most students, where they must show that they have mastered the fundamentals of this important topic. Consequently, the failure rates are very high, A-grades are rare - and they are considered proof of the students' exceptional intellectual abilities. This is because pattern learning does not help in the exam. The problems can only be solved by knowledgeably and creatively combining principles of thermodynamics. We have given our latest thermodynamics exam not only to the students but also to OpenAI's most powerful reasoning model, o3, and have assessed the answers of o3 exactly the same way as those of the students. In zero-shot mode, the model o3 solved all problems correctly, better than all students who took the exam; its overall score was in the range of the best scores we have seen in more than 10,000 similar exams since 1985. This is a turning point: machines now excel in complex tasks, usually taken as proof of human intellectual capabilities. We discuss the consequences this has for the work of engineers and the education of future engineers.
Accurate and efficient zero-shot 6D pose estimation with frozen foundation models
Authors: Andrea Caraffa, Davide Boscaini, Fabio Poiesi
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Instance Segmentation, Pose Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Estimating the 6D pose of objects from RGBD data is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications in robotics and augmented reality. A key challenge is achieving generalization to novel objects that were not seen during training. Most existing approaches address this by scaling up training on synthetic data tailored to the task, a process that demands substantial computational resources. But is task-specific training really necessary for accurate and efficient 6D pose estimation of novel objects? To answer No!, we introduce FreeZeV2, the second generation of FreeZe: a training-free method that achieves strong generalization to unseen objects by leveraging geometric and vision foundation models pre-trained on unrelated data. FreeZeV2 improves both accuracy and efficiency over FreeZe through three key contributions: (i) a sparse feature extraction strategy that reduces inference-time computation without sacrificing accuracy; (ii) a feature-aware scoring mechanism that improves both pose selection during RANSAC-based 3D registration and the final ranking of pose candidates; and (iii) a modular design that supports ensembles of instance segmentation models, increasing robustness to segmentation masks errors. We evaluate FreeZeV2 on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, where it establishes a new state-of-the-art in 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. When using the same segmentation masks, FreeZeV2 achieves a remarkable 8x speedup over FreeZe while also improving accuracy by 5%. When using ensembles of segmentation models, FreeZeV2 gains an additional 8% in accuracy while still running 2.5x faster than FreeZe. FreeZeV2 was awarded Best Overall Method at the BOP Challenge 2024.
ELBO-T2IAlign: A Generic ELBO-Based Method for Calibrating Pixel-level Text-Image Alignment in Diffusion Models
Authors: Qin Zhou, Zhiyang Zhang, Jinglong Wang, XiaoBin Li, Jing Zhang, Qian Yu, Lu Sheng, Dong Xu
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, text-guided-image-editing

Diffusion models excel at image generation. Recent studies have shown that these models not only generate high-quality images but also encode text-image alignment information through attention maps or loss functions. This information is valuable for various downstream tasks, including segmentation, text-guided image editing, and compositional image generation. However, current methods heavily rely on the assumption of perfect text-image alignment in diffusion models, which is not the case. In this paper, we propose using zero-shot referring image segmentation as a proxy task to evaluate the pixel-level image and class-level text alignment of popular diffusion models. We conduct an in-depth analysis of pixel-text misalignment in diffusion models from the perspective of training data bias. We find that misalignment occurs in images with small sized, occluded, or rare object classes. Therefore, we propose ELBO-T2IAlign, a simple yet effective method to calibrate pixel-text alignment in diffusion models based on the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of likelihood. Our method is training-free and generic, eliminating the need to identify the specific cause of misalignment and works well across various diffusion model architectures. Extensive experiments on commonly used benchmark datasets on image segmentation and generation have verified the effectiveness of our proposed calibration approach.
DGS-LRM: Real-Time Deformable 3D Gaussian Reconstruction From Monocular Videos
Authors: Chieh Hubert Lin, Zhaoyang Lv, Songyin Wu, Zhen Xu, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Hung-Yu Tseng, Julian Straub, Numair Khan, Lei Xiao, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yuheng Ren, Richard Newcombe, Zhao Dong, Zhengqin Li
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Reconstruction

We introduce the Deformable Gaussian Splats Large Reconstruction Model (DGS-LRM), the first feed-forward method predicting deformable 3D Gaussian splats from a monocular posed video of any dynamic scene. Feed-forward scene reconstruction has gained significant attention for its ability to rapidly create digital replicas of real-world environments. However, most existing models are limited to static scenes and fail to reconstruct the motion of moving objects. Developing a feed-forward model for dynamic scene reconstruction poses significant challenges, including the scarcity of training data and the need for appropriate 3D representations and training paradigms. To address these challenges, we introduce several key technical contributions: an enhanced large-scale synthetic dataset with ground-truth multi-view videos and dense 3D scene flow supervision; a per-pixel deformable 3D Gaussian representation that is easy to learn, supports high-quality dynamic view synthesis, and enables long-range 3D tracking; and a large transformer network that achieves real-time, generalizable dynamic scene reconstruction. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that DGS-LRM achieves dynamic scene reconstruction quality comparable to optimization-based methods, while significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art predictive dynamic reconstruction method on real-world examples. Its predicted physically grounded 3D deformation is accurate and can readily adapt for long-range 3D tracking tasks, achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art monocular video 3D tracking methods.