pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Target-unspecific Tasks through a Features Matrix
Authors: Fangming Cui, Yonggang Zhang, Xuan Wang, Xinmei Tian, Jun Yu
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Prompt Learning

Recent developments in prompt learning of large vision-language models have significantly improved performance in target-specific tasks. However, these prompt optimizing methods often struggle to tackle the target-unspecific or generalizable tasks effectively. It may be attributed to the fact that overfitting training causes the model to forget its general knowledge having strong promotion on target-unspecific tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel Features Matrix (FM) regularization approach designed to enhance these models on target-unspecific tasks. Our method extracts and leverages general knowledge, shaping a Features Matrix (FM). Specifically, the FM captures the semantics of diverse inputs from a deep and fine perspective, preserving essential general knowledge, which mitigates the risk of overfitting. Representative evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the FM is compatible with existing frameworks as a generic and flexible module, and 2) the FM significantly showcases its effectiveness in enhancing target-unspecific tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Intelligent Task Scheduling for Microservices via A3C-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yang Wang, Tengda Tang, Zhou Fang, Yingnan Deng, Yifei Duan
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

To address the challenges of high resource dynamism and intensive task concurrency in microservice systems, this paper proposes an adaptive resource scheduling method based on the A3C reinforcement learning algorithm. The scheduling problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, where policy and value networks are jointly optimized to enable fine-grained resource allocation under varying load conditions. The method incorporates an asynchronous multi-threaded learning mechanism, allowing multiple agents to perform parallel sampling and synchronize updates to the global network parameters. This design improves both policy convergence efficiency and model stability. In the experimental section, a real-world dataset is used to construct a scheduling scenario. The proposed method is compared with several typical approaches across multiple evaluation metrics, including task delay, scheduling success rate, resource utilization, and convergence speed. The results show that the proposed method delivers high scheduling performance and system stability in multi-task concurrent environments. It effectively alleviates the resource allocation bottlenecks faced by traditional methods under heavy load, demonstrating its practical value for intelligent scheduling in microservice systems.
CXR-AD: Component X-ray Image Dataset for Industrial Anomaly Detection
Authors: Haoyu Bai, Jie Wang, Gaomin Li, Xuan Li, Xiaohu Zhang, Xia Yang
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Defect Detection, Zero-Shot Learning

Internal defect detection constitutes a critical process in ensuring component quality, for which anomaly detection serves as an effective solution. However, existing anomaly detection datasets predominantly focus on surface defects in visible-light images, lacking publicly available X-ray datasets targeting internal defects in components. To address this gap, we construct the first publicly accessible component X-ray anomaly detection (CXR-AD) dataset, comprising real-world X-ray images. The dataset covers five industrial component categories, including 653 normal samples and 561 defect samples with precise pixel-level mask annotations. We systematically analyze the dataset characteristics and identify three major technical challenges: (1) strong coupling between complex internal structures and defect regions, (2) inherent low contrast and high noise interference in X-ray imaging, and (3) significant variations in defect scales and morphologies. To evaluate dataset complexity, we benchmark three state-of-the-art anomaly detection frameworks (feature-based, reconstruction-based, and zero-shot learning methods). Experimental results demonstrate a 29.78% average performance degradation on CXR-AD compared to MVTec AD, highlighting the limitations of current algorithms in handling internal defect detection tasks. To the best of our knowledge, CXR-AD represents the first publicly available X-ray dataset for component anomaly detection, providing a real-world industrial benchmark to advance algorithm development and enhance precision in internal defect inspection technologies.
GenTorrent: Scaling Large Language Model Serving with An Overley Network
Authors: Fei Fang, Yifan Hua, Shengze Wang, Ruilin Zhou, Yi Liu, Chen Qian, Xiaoxue Zhang
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

While significant progress has been made in research and development on open-source and cost-efficient large-language models (LLMs), serving scalability remains a critical challenge, particularly for small organizations and individuals seeking to deploy and test their LLM innovations. Inspired by peer-to-peer networks that leverage decentralized overlay nodes to increase throughput and availability, we propose GenTorrent, an LLM serving overlay that harnesses computing resources from decentralized contributors. We identify four key research problems inherent to enabling such a decentralized infrastructure: 1) overlay network organization; 2) LLM communication privacy; 3) overlay forwarding for resource efficiency; and 4) verification of serving quality. This work presents the first systematic study of these fundamental problems in the context of decentralized LLM serving. Evaluation results from a prototype implemented on a set of decentralized nodes demonstrate that GenTorrent achieves a latency reduction of over 50% compared to the baseline design without overlay forwarding. Furthermore, the security features introduce minimal overhead to serving latency and throughput. We believe this work pioneers a new direction for democratizing and scaling future AI serving capabilities.
Towards Application-Specific Evaluation of Vision Models: Case Studies in Ecology and Biology
Authors: Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Otto Brookes, Urs Waldmann, Hemal Naik, Iain D. Couzin, Majid Mirmehdi, Noël Adiko Houa, Emmanuelle Normand, Christophe Boesch, Lukas Boesch, Mimi Arandjelovic, Hjalmar Kühl, Tilo Burghardt, Fumihiro Kano
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00

Computer vision methods have demonstrated considerable potential to streamline ecological and biological workflows, with a growing number of datasets and models becoming available to the research community. However, these resources focus predominantly on evaluation using machine learning metrics, with relatively little emphasis on how their application impacts downstream analysis. We argue that models should be evaluated using application-specific metrics that directly represent model performance in the context of its final use case. To support this argument, we present two disparate case studies: (1) estimating chimpanzee abundance and density with camera trap distance sampling when using a video-based behaviour classifier and (2) estimating head rotation in pigeons using a 3D posture estimator. We show that even models with strong machine learning performance (e.g., 87% mAP) can yield data that leads to discrepancies in abundance estimates compared to expert-derived data. Similarly, the highest-performing models for posture estimation do not produce the most accurate inferences of gaze direction in pigeons. Motivated by these findings, we call for researchers to integrate application-specific metrics in ecological/biological datasets, allowing for models to be benchmarked in the context of their downstream application and to facilitate better integration of models into application workflows.
GPRat: Gaussian Process Regression with Asynchronous Tasks
Authors: Maksim Helmann, Alexander Strack, Dirk Pflüger
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: C++ code, CPU, regression

Python is the de-facto language for software development in artificial intelligence (AI). Commonly used libraries, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, rely on parallelization built into their BLAS backends to achieve speedup on CPUs. However, only applying parallelization in a low-level backend can lead to performance and scaling degradation. In this work, we present a novel way of binding task-based C++ code built on the asynchronous runtime model HPX to a high-level Python API using pybind11. We develop a parallel Gaussian process (GP) li- brary as an application. The resulting Python library GPRat combines the ease of use of commonly available GP libraries with the performance and scalability of asynchronous runtime systems. We evaluate the per- formance on a mass-spring-damper system, a standard benchmark from control theory, for varying numbers of regressors (features). The results show almost no binding overhead when binding the asynchronous HPX code using pybind11. Compared to GPyTorch and GPflow, GPRat shows superior scaling on up to 64 cores on an AMD EPYC 7742 CPU for train- ing. Furthermore, our library achieves a prediction speedup of 7.63 over GPyTorch and 25.25 over GPflow. If we increase the number of features from eight to 128, we observe speedups of 29.62 and 21.19, respectively. These results showcase the potential of using asynchronous tasks within Python-based AI applications.
EOPose : Exemplar-based object reposing using Generalized Pose Correspondences
Authors: Sarthak Mehrotra, Rishabh Jain, Mayur Hemani, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Mausoom Sarkar
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, SSIM

Reposing objects in images has a myriad of applications, especially for e-commerce where several variants of product images need to be produced quickly. In this work, we leverage the recent advances in unsupervised keypoint correspondence detection between different object images of the same class to propose an end-to-end framework for generic object reposing. Our method, EOPose, takes a target pose-guidance image as input and uses its keypoint correspondence with the source object image to warp and re-render the latter into the target pose using a novel three-step approach. Unlike generative approaches, our method also preserves the fine-grained details of the object such as its exact colors, textures, and brand marks. We also prepare a new dataset of paired objects based on the Objaverse dataset to train and test our network. EOPose produces high-quality reposing output as evidenced by different image quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM and FID). Besides a description of the method and the dataset, the paper also includes detailed ablation and user studies to indicate the efficacy of the proposed method
Attention-aggregated Attack for Boosting the Transferability of Facial Adversarial Examples
Authors: Jian-Wei Li, Wen-Ze Shao
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Adversarial examples have revealed the vulnerability of deep learning models and raised serious concerns about information security. The transfer-based attack is a hot topic in black-box attacks that are practical to real-world scenarios where the training datasets, parameters, and structure of the target model are unknown to the attacker. However, few methods consider the particularity of class-specific deep models for fine-grained vision tasks, such as face recognition (FR), giving rise to unsatisfactory attacking performance. In this work, we first investigate what in a face exactly contributes to the embedding learning of FR models and find that both decisive and auxiliary facial features are specific to each FR model, which is quite different from the biological mechanism of human visual system. Accordingly we then propose a novel attack method named Attention-aggregated Attack (AAA) to enhance the transferability of adversarial examples against FR, which is inspired by the attention divergence and aims to destroy the facial features that are critical for the decision-making of other FR models by imitating their attentions on the clean face images. Extensive experiments conducted on various FR models validate the superiority and robust effectiveness of the proposed method over existing methods.
Reducing Annotation Burden in Physical Activity Research Using Vision-Language Models
Authors: Abram Schonfeldt, Benjamin Maylor, Xiaofang Chen, Ronald Clark, Aiden Doherty
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00

Introduction: Data from wearable devices collected in free-living settings, and labelled with physical activity behaviours compatible with health research, are essential for both validating existing wearable-based measurement approaches and developing novel machine learning approaches. One common way of obtaining these labels relies on laborious annotation of sequences of images captured by cameras worn by participants through the course of a day. Methods: We compare the performance of three vision language models and two discriminative models on two free-living validation studies with 161 and 111 participants, collected in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom and Sichuan, China, respectively, using the Autographer (OMG Life, defunct) wearable camera. Results: We found that the best open-source vision-language model (VLM) and fine-tuned discriminative model (DM) achieved comparable performance when predicting sedentary behaviour from single images on unseen participants in the Oxfordshire study; median F1-scores: VLM = 0.89 (0.84, 0.92), DM = 0.91 (0.86, 0.95). Performance declined for light (VLM = 0.60 (0.56,0.67), DM = 0.70 (0.63, 0.79)), and moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity (VLM = 0.66 (0.53, 0.85); DM = 0.72 (0.58, 0.84)). When applied to the external Sichuan study, performance fell across all intensity categories, with median Cohen's kappa-scores falling from 0.54 (0.49, 0.64) to 0.26 (0.15, 0.37) for the VLM, and from 0.67 (0.60, 0.74) to 0.19 (0.10, 0.30) for the DM. Conclusion: Freely available computer vision models could help annotate sedentary behaviour, typically the most prevalent activity of daily living, from wearable camera images within similar populations to seen data, reducing the annotation burden.
UAV Marketplace Simulation Tool for BVLOS Operations
Authors: Kıvanç Şerefoğlu, Önder Gürcan, Reyhan Aydoğan
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

We present a simulation tool for evaluating team formation in autonomous multi-UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) missions that operate Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). The tool models UAV collaboration and mission execution in dynamic and adversarial conditions, where Byzantine UAVs attempt to disrupt operations. Our tool allows researchers to integrate and compare various team formation strategies in a controlled environment with configurable mission parameters and adversarial behaviors. The log of each simulation run is stored in a structured way along with performance metrics so that statistical analysis could be done straightforwardly. The tool is versatile for testing and improving UAV coordination strategies in real-world applications.
Galvatron: An Automatic Distributed System for Efficient Foundation Model Training
Authors: Xinyi Liu, Yujie Wang, Shenhan Zhu, Fangcheng Fu, Qingshuo Liu, Guangming Lin, Bin Cui
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Galvatron is a distributed system for efficiently training large-scale Foundation Models. It overcomes the complexities of selecting optimal parallelism strategies by automatically identifying the most efficient hybrid strategy, incorporating data, tensor, pipeline, sharded data, and sequence parallelism, along with recomputation. The system's architecture includes a profiler for hardware and model analysis, a search engine for strategy optimization using decision trees and dynamic programming, and a runtime for executing these strategies efficiently. Benchmarking on various clusters demonstrates Galvatron's superior throughput compared to existing frameworks. This open-source system offers user-friendly interfaces and comprehensive documentation, making complex distributed training accessible and efficient. The source code of Galvatron is available at https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/Hetu-Galvatron.
3D Surface Reconstruction with Enhanced High-Frequency Details
Authors: Shikun Zhang, Yiqun Wang, Cunjian Chen, Yong Li, Qiuhong Ke
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit 3D reconstruction can reproduce shapes without 3D supervision, and it learns the 3D scene through volume rendering methods and neural implicit representations. Current neural surface reconstruction methods tend to randomly sample the entire image, making it difficult to learn high-frequency details on the surface, and thus the reconstruction results tend to be too smooth. We designed a method (FreNeuS) based on high-frequency information to solve the problem of insufficient surface detail. Specifically, FreNeuS uses pixel gradient changes to easily acquire high-frequency regions in an image and uses the obtained high-frequency information to guide surface detail reconstruction. High-frequency information is first used to guide the dynamic sampling of rays, applying different sampling strategies according to variations in high-frequency regions. To further enhance the focus on surface details, we have designed a high-frequency weighting method that constrains the representation of high-frequency details during the reconstruction process. Qualitative and quantitative results show that our method can reconstruct fine surface details and obtain better surface reconstruction quality compared to existing methods. In addition, our method is more applicable and can be generalized to any NeuS-based work.
Interpretable Zero-shot Learning with Infinite Class Concepts
Authors: Zihan Ye, Shreyank N Gowda, Shiming Chen, Yaochu Jin, Kaizhu Huang, Xiaobo Jin
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes by aligning images with intermediate class semantics, like human-annotated concepts or class definitions. An emerging alternative leverages Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate class documents. However, these methods often face challenges with transparency in the classification process and may suffer from the notorious hallucination problem in LLMs, resulting in non-visual class semantics. This paper redefines class semantics in ZSL with a focus on transferability and discriminability, introducing a novel framework called Zero-shot Learning with Infinite Class Concepts (InfZSL). Our approach leverages the powerful capabilities of LLMs to dynamically generate an unlimited array of phrase-level class concepts. To address the hallucination challenge, we introduce an entropy-based scoring process that incorporates a ``goodness" concept selection mechanism, ensuring that only the most transferable and discriminative concepts are selected. Our InfZSL framework not only demonstrates significant improvements on three popular benchmark datasets but also generates highly interpretable, image-grounded concepts. Code will be released upon acceptance.
FedHERO: A Federated Learning Approach for Node Classification Task on Heterophilic Graphs
Authors: Zihan Chen, Xingbo Fu, Yushun Dong, Jundong Li, Cong Shen
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Graph Learning, Node Classification

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) empowers clients to collaboratively train Graph neural networks (GNNs) in a distributed manner while preserving data privacy. However, FGL methods usually require that the graph data owned by all clients is homophilic to ensure similar neighbor distribution patterns of nodes. Such an assumption ensures that the learned knowledge is consistent across the local models from all clients. Therefore, these local models can be properly aggregated as a global model without undermining the overall performance. Nevertheless, when the neighbor distribution patterns of nodes vary across different clients (e.g., when clients hold graphs with different levels of heterophily), their local models may gain different and even conflict knowledge from their node-level predictive tasks. Consequently, aggregating these local models usually leads to catastrophic performance deterioration on the global model. To address this challenge, we propose FedHERO, an FGL framework designed to harness and share insights from heterophilic graphs effectively. At the heart of FedHERO is a dual-channel GNN equipped with a structure learner, engineered to discern the structural knowledge encoded in the local graphs. With this specialized component, FedHERO enables the local model for each client to identify and learn patterns that are universally applicable across graphs with different patterns of node neighbor distributions. FedHERO not only enhances the performance of individual client models by leveraging both local and shared structural insights but also sets a new precedent in this field to effectively handle graph data with various node neighbor distribution patterns. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the superior performance of FedHERO against existing alternatives.
GUAVA: Generalizable Upper Body 3D Gaussian Avatar
Authors: Dongbin Zhang, Yunfei Liu, Lijian Lin, Ye Zhu, Yang Li, Minghan Qin, Yu Li, Haoqian Wang
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00

Reconstructing a high-quality, animatable 3D human avatar with expressive facial and hand motions from a single image has gained significant attention due to its broad application potential. 3D human avatar reconstruction typically requires multi-view or monocular videos and training on individual IDs, which is both complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, limited by SMPLX's expressiveness, these methods often focus on body motion but struggle with facial expressions. To address these challenges, we first introduce an expressive human model (EHM) to enhance facial expression capabilities and develop an accurate tracking method. Based on this template model, we propose GUAVA, the first framework for fast animatable upper-body 3D Gaussian avatar reconstruction. We leverage inverse texture mapping and projection sampling techniques to infer Ubody (upper-body) Gaussians from a single image. The rendered images are refined through a neural refiner. Experimental results demonstrate that GUAVA significantly outperforms previous methods in rendering quality and offers significant speed improvements, with reconstruction times in the sub-second range (0.1s), and supports real-time animation and rendering.
Hubs and Spokes Learning: Efficient and Scalable Collaborative Machine Learning
Authors: Atul Sharma, Kavindu Herath, Saurabh Bagchi, Chaoyue Liu, Somali Chaterji
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

We introduce the Hubs and Spokes Learning (HSL) framework, a novel paradigm for collaborative machine learning that combines the strengths of Federated Learning (FL) and Decentralized Learning (P2PL). HSL employs a two-tier communication structure that avoids the single point of failure inherent in FL and outperforms the state-of-the-art P2PL framework, Epidemic Learning Local (ELL). At equal communication budgets (total edges), HSL achieves higher performance than ELL, while at significantly lower communication budgets, it can match ELL's performance. For instance, with only 400 edges, HSL reaches the same test accuracy that ELL achieves with 1000 edges for 100 peers (spokes) on CIFAR-10, demonstrating its suitability for resource-constrained systems. HSL also achieves stronger consensus among nodes after mixing, resulting in improved performance with fewer training rounds. We substantiate these claims through rigorous theoretical analyses and extensive experimental results, showcasing HSL's practicality for large-scale collaborative learning.