pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dendritic Computing with Multi-Gate Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistors
Authors: A N M Nafiul Islam, Xuezhong Niu, Jiahui Duan, Shubham Kumar, Kai Ni, Abhronil Sengupta
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Although inspired by neuronal systems in the brain, artificial neural networks generally employ point-neurons, which offer far less computational complexity than their biological counterparts. Neurons have dendritic arbors that connect to different sets of synapses and offer local non-linear accumulation - playing a pivotal role in processing and learning. Inspired by this, we propose a novel neuron design based on a multi-gate ferroelectric field-effect transistor that mimics dendrites. It leverages ferroelectric nonlinearity for local computations within dendritic branches, while utilizing the transistor action to generate the final neuronal output. The branched architecture paves the way for utilizing smaller crossbar arrays in hardware integration, leading to greater efficiency. Using an experimentally calibrated device-circuit-algorithm co-simulation framework, we demonstrate that networks incorporating our dendritic neurons achieve superior performance in comparison to much larger networks without dendrites ($\sim$17$\times$ fewer trainable weight parameters). These findings suggest that dendritic hardware can significantly improve computational efficiency, and learning capacity of neuromorphic systems optimized for edge applications.
Transfer Learning-Based Deep Residual Learning for Speech Recognition in Clean and Noisy Environments
Authors: Noussaiba Djeffal, Djamel Addou, Hamza Kheddar, Sid Ahmed Selouani
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Addressing the detrimental impact of non-stationary environmental noise on automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a persistent and significant research focus. Despite advancements, this challenge continues to be a major concern. Recently, data-driven supervised approaches, such as deep neural networks, have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional unsupervised methods. With extensive training, these approaches have the potential to overcome the challenges posed by diverse real-life acoustic environments. In this light, this paper introduces a novel neural framework that incorporates a robust frontend into ASR systems in both clean and noisy environments. Utilizing the Aurora-2 speech database, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of an acoustic feature set for Mel-frequency, employing the approach of transfer learning based on Residual neural network (ResNet). The experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in recognition accuracy compared to convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. They achieved accuracies of 98.94% in clean and 91.21% in noisy mode.
Skill-based Safe Reinforcement Learning with Risk Planning
Authors: Hanping Zhang, Yuhong Guo
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure safety when an RL agent conducts learning by interacting with real-world environments where improper actions can induce high costs or lead to severe consequences. In this paper, we propose a novel Safe Skill Planning (SSkP) approach to enhance effective safe RL by exploiting auxiliary offline demonstration data. SSkP involves a two-stage process. First, we employ PU learning to learn a skill risk predictor from the offline demonstration data. Then, based on the learned skill risk predictor, we develop a novel risk planning process to enhance online safe RL and learn a risk-averse safe policy efficiently through interactions with the online RL environment, while simultaneously adapting the skill risk predictor to the environment. We conduct experiments in several benchmark robotic simulation environments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art safe RL methods.
Adapting Probabilistic Risk Assessment for AI
Authors: Anna Katariina Wisakanto, Joe Rogero, Avyay M. Casheekar, Richard Mallah
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Modern general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems present an urgent risk management challenge, as their rapidly evolving capabilities and potential for catastrophic harm outpace our ability to reliably assess their risks. Current methods often rely on selective testing and undocumented assumptions about risk priorities, frequently failing to make a serious attempt at assessing the set of pathways through which Al systems pose direct or indirect risks to society and the biosphere. This paper introduces the probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for AI framework, adapting established PRA techniques from high-reliability industries (e.g., nuclear power, aerospace) for the new challenges of advanced AI. The framework guides assessors in identifying potential risks, estimating likelihood and severity, and explicitly documenting evidence, underlying assumptions, and analyses at appropriate granularities. The framework's implementation tool synthesizes the results into a risk report card with aggregated risk estimates from all assessed risks. This systematic approach integrates three advances: (1) Aspect-oriented hazard analysis provides systematic hazard coverage guided by a first-principles taxonomy of AI system aspects (e.g. capabilities, domain knowledge, affordances); (2) Risk pathway modeling analyzes causal chains from system aspects to societal impacts using bidirectional analysis and incorporating prospective techniques; and (3) Uncertainty management employs scenario decomposition, reference scales, and explicit tracing protocols to structure credible projections with novelty or limited data. Additionally, the framework harmonizes diverse assessment methods by integrating evidence into comparable, quantified absolute risk estimates for critical decisions. We have implemented this as a workbook tool for AI developers, evaluators, and regulators, available on the project website.
Don't be lazy: CompleteP enables compute-efficient deep transformers
Authors: Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Lorenzo Noci, Mufan Li, Blake Bordelon, Shane Bergsma, Cengiz Pehlevan, Boris Hanin, Joel Hestness
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00

We study compute efficiency of LLM training when using different parameterizations, i.e., rules for adjusting model and optimizer hyperparameters (HPs) as model size changes. Some parameterizations fail to transfer optimal base HPs (such as learning rate) across changes in model depth, requiring practitioners to either re-tune these HPs as they scale up (expensive), or accept sub-optimal training when re-tuning is prohibitive. Even when they achieve HP transfer, we develop theory to show parameterizations may still exist in the lazy learning regime where layers learn only features close to their linearization, preventing effective use of depth and nonlinearity. Finally, we identify and adopt the parameterization we call CompleteP that achieves both depth-wise HP transfer and non-lazy learning in all layers. CompleteP enables a wider range of model width/depth ratios to remain compute-efficient, unlocking shapes better suited for different hardware settings and operational contexts. Moreover, CompleteP enables 12-34% compute efficiency improvements over the prior state-of-the-art.
Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight
Authors: Joshua Engels, David D. Baek, Subhash Kantamneni, Max Tegmark
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Scalable oversight, the process by which weaker AI systems supervise stronger ones, has been proposed as a key strategy to control future superintelligent systems. However, it is still unclear how scalable oversight itself scales. To address this gap, we propose a framework that quantifies the probability of successful oversight as a function of the capabilities of the overseer and the system being overseen. Specifically, our framework models oversight as a game between capability-mismatched players; the players have oversight-specific Elo scores that are a piecewise-linear function of their general intelligence, with two plateaus corresponding to task incompetence and task saturation. We validate our framework with a modified version of the game Nim and then apply it to four oversight games: Mafia, Debate, Backdoor Code and Wargames. For each game, we find scaling laws that approximate how domain performance depends on general AI system capability. We then build on our findings in a theoretical study of Nested Scalable Oversight (NSO), a process in which trusted models oversee untrusted stronger models, which then become the trusted models in the next step. We identify conditions under which NSO succeeds and derive numerically (and in some cases analytically) the optimal number of oversight levels to maximize the probability of oversight success. We also apply our theory to our four oversight games, where we find that NSO success rates at a general Elo gap of 400 are 13.5% for Mafia, 51.7% for Debate, 10.0% for Backdoor Code, and 9.4% for Wargames; these rates decline further when overseeing stronger systems.
Understanding and Mitigating Risks of Generative AI in Financial Services
Authors: Sebastian Gehrmann, Claire Huang, Xian Teng, Sergei Yurovski, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Chirag S. Patel, Arjun Bhorkar, Naveen Thomas, John Doucette, David Rosenberg, Mark Dredze, David Rabinowitz
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Red Teaming

To responsibly develop Generative AI (GenAI) products, it is critical to define the scope of acceptable inputs and outputs. What constitutes a "safe" response is an actively debated question. Academic work puts an outsized focus on evaluating models by themselves for general purpose aspects such as toxicity, bias, and fairness, especially in conversational applications being used by a broad audience. In contrast, less focus is put on considering sociotechnical systems in specialized domains. Yet, those specialized systems can be subject to extensive and well-understood legal and regulatory scrutiny. These product-specific considerations need to be set in industry-specific laws, regulations, and corporate governance requirements. In this paper, we aim to highlight AI content safety considerations specific to the financial services domain and outline an associated AI content risk taxonomy. We compare this taxonomy to existing work in this space and discuss implications of risk category violations on various stakeholders. We evaluate how existing open-source technical guardrail solutions cover this taxonomy by assessing them on data collected via red-teaming activities. Our results demonstrate that these guardrails fail to detect most of the content risks we discuss.
Multimodal and Multiview Deep Fusion for Autonomous Marine Navigation
Authors: Dimitrios Dagdilelis, Panagiotis Grigoriadis, Roberto Galeazzi
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

We propose a cross attention transformer based method for multimodal sensor fusion to build a birds eye view of a vessels surroundings supporting safer autonomous marine navigation. The model deeply fuses multiview RGB and long wave infrared images with sparse LiDAR point clouds. Training also integrates X band radar and electronic chart data to inform predictions. The resulting view provides a detailed reliable scene representation improving navigational accuracy and robustness. Real world sea trials confirm the methods effectiveness even in adverse weather and complex maritime settings.
Always Tell Me The Odds: Fine-grained Conditional Probability Estimation
Authors: Liaoyaqi Wang, Zhengping Jiang, Anqi Liu, Benjamin Van Durme
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00

We present a state-of-the-art model for fine-grained probability estimation of propositions conditioned on context. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their reasoning capabilities, particularly on well-defined tasks with complete information. However, LLMs continue to struggle with making accurate and well-calibrated probabilistic predictions under uncertainty or partial information. While incorporating uncertainty into model predictions often boosts performance, obtaining reliable estimates of that uncertainty remains understudied. In particular, LLM probability estimates tend to be coarse and biased towards more frequent numbers. Through a combination of human and synthetic data creation and assessment, scaling to larger models, and better supervision, we propose a set of strong and precise probability estimation models. We conduct systematic evaluations across tasks that rely on conditional probability estimation and show that our approach consistently outperforms existing fine-tuned and prompting-based methods by a large margin.
PIPA: A Unified Evaluation Protocol for Diagnosing Interactive Planning Agents
Authors: Takyoung Kim, Janvijay Singh, Shuhaib Mehri, Emre Can Acikgoz, Sagnik Mukherjee, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Sumuk Shashidhar, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Response Generation, Task Planning

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in instruction-following and context-understanding lead to the era of agents with numerous applications. Among these, task planning agents have become especially prominent in realistic scenarios involving complex internal pipelines, such as context understanding, tool management, and response generation. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate agent performance based on task completion as a proxy for overall effectiveness. We hypothesize that merely improving task completion is misaligned with maximizing user satisfaction, as users interact with the entire agentic process and not only the end result. To address this gap, we propose PIPA, a unified evaluation protocol that conceptualizes the behavioral process of interactive task planning agents within a partially observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) paradigm. The proposed protocol offers a comprehensive assessment of agent performance through a set of atomic evaluation criteria, allowing researchers and practitioners to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses within the agent's decision-making pipeline. Our analyses show that agents excel in different behavioral stages, with user satisfaction shaped by both outcomes and intermediate behaviors. We also highlight future directions, including systems that leverage multiple agents and the limitations of user simulators in task planning.
AI Awareness
Authors: Xiaojian Li, Haoyuan Shi, Rongwu Xu, Wei Xu
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about increasingly capable systems that demonstrate remarkable abilities in reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving. These advancements have prompted a renewed examination of AI awareness, not as a philosophical question of consciousness, but as a measurable, functional capacity. In this review, we explore the emerging landscape of AI awareness, which includes meta-cognition (the ability to represent and reason about its own state), self-awareness (recognizing its own identity, knowledge, limitations, inter alia), social awareness (modeling the knowledge, intentions, and behaviors of other agents), and situational awareness (assessing and responding to the context in which it operates). First, we draw on insights from cognitive science, psychology, and computational theory to trace the theoretical foundations of awareness and examine how the four distinct forms of AI awareness manifest in state-of-the-art AI. Next, we systematically analyze current evaluation methods and empirical findings to better understand these manifestations. Building on this, we explore how AI awareness is closely linked to AI capabilities, demonstrating that more aware AI agents tend to exhibit higher levels of intelligent behaviors. Finally, we discuss the risks associated with AI awareness, including key topics in AI safety, alignment, and broader ethical concerns. AI awareness is a double-edged sword: it improves general capabilities, i.e., reasoning, safety, while also raises concerns around misalignment and societal risks, demanding careful oversight as AI capabilities grow. On the whole, our interdisciplinary review provides a roadmap for future research and aims to clarify the role of AI awareness in the ongoing development of intelligent machines.
TEMPURA: Temporal Event Masked Prediction and Understanding for Reasoning in Action
Authors: Jen-Hao Cheng, Vivian Wang, Huayu Wang, Huapeng Zhou, Yi-Hao Peng, Hou-I Liu, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Kuang-Ming Chen, Cheng-Yen Yang, Wenhao Chai, Yi-Ling Chen, Vibhav Vineet, Qin Cai, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dense Captioning, Highlight Detection, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Video Understanding

Understanding causal event relationships and achieving fine-grained temporal grounding in videos remain challenging for vision-language models. Existing methods either compress video tokens to reduce temporal resolution, or treat videos as unsegmented streams, which obscures fine-grained event boundaries and limits the modeling of causal dependencies. We propose TEMPURA (Temporal Event Masked Prediction and Understanding for Reasoning in Action), a two-stage training framework that enhances video temporal understanding. TEMPURA first applies masked event prediction reasoning to reconstruct missing events and generate step-by-step causal explanations from dense event annotations, drawing inspiration from effective infilling techniques. TEMPURA then learns to perform video segmentation and dense captioning to decompose videos into non-overlapping events with detailed, timestamp-aligned descriptions. We train TEMPURA on VER, a large-scale dataset curated by us that comprises 1M training instances and 500K videos with temporally aligned event descriptions and structured reasoning steps. Experiments on temporal grounding and highlight detection benchmarks demonstrate that TEMPURA outperforms strong baseline models, confirming that integrating causal reasoning with fine-grained temporal segmentation leads to improved video understanding.
Evolution of AI in Education: Agentic Workflows
Authors: Firuz Kamalov, David Santandreu Calonge, Linda Smail, Dilshod Azizov, Dimple R. Thadani, Theresa Kwong, Amara Atif
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed various aspects of education, with large language models (LLMs) driving advancements in automated tutoring, assessment, and content generation. However, conventional LLMs are constrained by their reliance on static training data, limited adaptability, and lack of reasoning. To address these limitations and foster more sustainable technological practices, AI agents have emerged as a promising new avenue for educational innovation. In this review, we examine agentic workflows in education according to four major paradigms: reflection, planning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration. We critically analyze the role of AI agents in education through these key design paradigms, exploring their advantages, applications, and challenges. To illustrate the practical potential of agentic systems, we present a proof-of-concept application: a multi-agent framework for automated essay scoring. Preliminary results suggest this agentic approach may offer improved consistency compared to stand-alone LLMs. Our findings highlight the transformative potential of AI agents in educational settings while underscoring the need for further research into their interpretability, trustworthiness, and sustainable impact on pedagogical impact.
Artificial Intelligence health advice accuracy varies across languages and contexts
Authors: Prashant Garg, Thiemo Fetzer
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00

Using basic health statements authorized by UK and EU registers and 9,100 journalist-vetted public-health assertions on topics such as abortion, COVID-19 and politics from sources ranging from peer-reviewed journals and government advisories to social media and news across the political spectrum, we benchmark six leading large language models from in 21 languages, finding that, despite high accuracy on English-centric textbook claims, performance falls in multiple non-European languages and fluctuates by topic and source, highlighting the urgency of comprehensive multilingual, domain-aware validation before deploying AI in global health communication.
AI Ethics and Social Norms: Exploring ChatGPT's Capabilities From What to How
Authors: Omid Veisi, Sasan Bahrami, Roman Englert, Claudia Müller
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Using LLMs in healthcare, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Social Computing requires the examination of ethical and social norms to ensure safe incorporation into human life. We conducted a mixed-method study, including an online survey with 111 participants and an interview study with 38 experts, to investigate the AI ethics and social norms in ChatGPT as everyday life tools. This study aims to evaluate whether ChatGPT in an empirical context operates following ethics and social norms, which is critical for understanding actions in industrial and academic research and achieving machine ethics. The findings of this study provide initial insights into six important aspects of AI ethics, including bias, trustworthiness, security, toxicology, social norms, and ethical data. Significant obstacles related to transparency and bias in unsupervised data collection methods are identified as ChatGPT's ethical concerns.
Enhancing ML Model Interpretability: Leveraging Fine-Tuned Large Language Models for Better Understanding of AI
Authors: Jonas Bokstaller, Julia Altheimer, Julian Dormehl, Alina Buss, Jasper Wiltfang, Johannes Schneider, Maximilian Röglinger
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Across various sectors applications of eXplainableAI (XAI) gained momentum as the increasing black-boxedness of prevailing Machine Learning (ML) models became apparent. In parallel, Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly developed in their abilities to understand human language and complex patterns. By combining both, this paper presents a novel reference architecture for the interpretation of XAI through an interactive chatbot powered by a fine-tuned LLM. We instantiate the reference architecture in the context of State-of-Health (SoH) prediction for batteries and validate its design in multiple evaluation and demonstration rounds. The evaluation indicates that the implemented prototype enhances the human interpretability of ML, especially for users with less experience with XAI.