pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PromptTAD: Object-Prompt Enhanced Traffic Anomaly Detection
Authors: Hao Qiu, Xiaobo Yang, and Xiaojin Gong
Date: 2025-05-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2025 5
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Object, Online Video Anomaly Detection

Ego-centric Traffic Anomaly Detection (TAD) aims to identify abnormal events in videos captured by dashboard-mounted cameras in vehicles. Compared to anomaly detection in roadside surveillance videos, ego-centric TAD poses greater challenges due to the dynamic backgrounds caused by vehicle motion. Previous frame-level methods are often vulnerable to interference from these dynamic backgrounds and struggle to detect small objects located at a distance or off-center. To address these challenges, we propose an object-prompt enhanced method that integrates detected traffic objects into a frame-level TAD framework. Our approach introduces an object-prompt scheme comprising an object prompt encoder, along with two cross-attention-based aggregation modules: an instance-wise aggregation module for fusing information between object instances and the scene, and a relation-wise aggregation module for capturing relationships inter-objects. Additionally, we design an instance-level loss to supervise anomaly detection at the object level. Our method effectively mitigates interference from dynamic backgrounds, improves the detection of distant or off-center anomalies, and enables precise spatial localization of anomalies. Experimental results on the DoTA and DADA-2000 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
The Impact of Research and Development (R&D) Expenditures on the Value Added in the Agricultural Sector of Iran
Authors: Soheil Hataminia, Tania Khosravi
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

In this study, the impact of research and development (R&D) expenditures on the value added of the agricultural sector in Iran was investigated for the period 1971-2021. For data analysis, the researchers utilized the ARDL econometric model and EViews software. The results indicated that R&D expenditures, both in the short and long run, have a significant positive effect on the value added in the agricultural sector. The estimated elasticity coefficient for R&D expenditures in the short run was 0.45 and in the long run was 0.35, indicating that with a 1 percent increase in research and development expenditures, the value added in the agricultural sector would increase by 0.45 percent in the short run and by 0.35 percent in the long run. Moreover, variables such as capital stock, number of employees in the agricultural sector, and working days also had a significant and positive effect on the value added in the agricultural sector.
LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learners
Authors: Junhao Zheng, Xidi Cai, Qiuke Li, Duzhen Zhang, Zhongzhi Li, Yingying Zhang, Le Song, Qianli Ma
Date: 2025-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Lifelong learning

Lifelong learning is essential for intelligent agents operating in dynamic environments. Current large language model (LLM)-based agents, however, remain stateless and unable to accumulate or transfer knowledge over time. Existing benchmarks treat agents as static systems and fail to evaluate lifelong learning capabilities. We present LifelongAgentBench, the first unified benchmark designed to systematically assess the lifelong learning ability of LLM agents. It provides skill-grounded, interdependent tasks across three interactive environments, Database, Operating System, and Knowledge Graph, with automatic label verification, reproducibility, and modular extensibility. Extensive experiments reveal that conventional experience replay has limited effectiveness for LLM agents due to irrelevant information and context length constraints. We further introduce a group self-consistency mechanism that significantly improves lifelong learning performance. We hope LifelongAgentBench will advance the development of adaptive, memory-capable LLM agents.
A Comparative Study of Large Language Models and Human Personality Traits
Authors: Wang Jiaqi, Wang Bo, Guo fa, Cheng Cheng, Yang Li
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like capabilities in language comprehension and generation, becoming active participants in social and cognitive domains. This study investigates whether LLMs exhibit personality-like traits and how these traits compare with human personality, focusing on the applicability of conventional personality assessment tools. A behavior-based approach was used across three empirical studies. Study 1 examined test-retest stability and found that LLMs show higher variability and are more input-sensitive than humans, lacking long-term stability. Based on this, we propose the Distributed Personality Framework, conceptualizing LLM traits as dynamic and input-driven. Study 2 analyzed cross-variant consistency in personality measures and found LLMs' responses were highly sensitive to item wording, showing low internal consistency compared to humans. Study 3 explored personality retention during role-playing, showing LLM traits are shaped by prompt and parameter settings. These findings suggest that LLMs express fluid, externally dependent personality patterns, offering insights for constructing LLM-specific personality frameworks and advancing human-AI interaction. This work contributes to responsible AI development and extends the boundaries of personality psychology in the age of intelligent systems.
Sentiment Analysis in Software Engineering: Evaluating Generative Pre-trained Transformers
Authors: KM Khalid Saifullah, Faiaz Azmain, Habiba Hye
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in understanding developer interactions, issue resolutions, and project dynamics within software engineering (SE). While traditional SE-specific sentiment analysis tools have made significant strides, they often fail to account for the nuanced and context-dependent language inherent to the domain. This study systematically evaluates the performance of bidirectional transformers, such as BERT, against generative pre-trained transformers, specifically GPT-4o-mini, in SE sentiment analysis. Using datasets from GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Jira, we benchmark the models' capabilities with fine-tuned and default configurations. The results reveal that fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini performs comparable to BERT and other bidirectional models on structured and balanced datasets like GitHub and Jira, achieving macro-averaged F1-scores of 0.93 and 0.98, respectively. However, on linguistically complex datasets with imbalanced sentiment distributions, such as Stack Overflow, the default GPT-4o-mini model exhibits superior generalization, achieving an accuracy of 85.3\% compared to the fine-tuned model's 13.1\%. These findings highlight the trade-offs between fine-tuning and leveraging pre-trained models for SE tasks. The study underscores the importance of aligning model architectures with dataset characteristics to optimize performance and proposes directions for future research in refining sentiment analysis tools tailored to the SE domain.
Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks for Document Layout Analysis in Public Affairs
Authors: Miguel Lopez-Duran, Julian Fierrez, Aythami Morales, Ruben Tolosana, Oscar Delgado-Mohatar, Alvaro Ortigosa
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Document Layout Analysis, Feature Engineering, graph construction, Graph Neural Network

The automatic analysis of document layouts in digital-born PDF documents remains a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous arrangement of textual and nontextual elements and the imprecision of the textual metadata in the Portable Document Format. In this work, we benchmark Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures for the task of fine-grained layout classification of text blocks from digital native documents. We introduce two graph construction structures: a k-closest-neighbor graph and a fully connected graph, and generate node features via pre-trained text and vision models, thus avoiding manual feature engineering. Three experimental frameworks are evaluated: single-modality (text or visual), concatenated multimodal, and dual-branch multimodal. We evaluated four foundational GNN models and compared them with the baseline. Our experiments are specifically conducted on a rich dataset of public affairs documents that includes more than 20 sources (e.g., regional and national-level official gazettes), 37K PDF documents, with 441K pages in total. Our results demonstrate that GraphSAGE operating on the k-closest-neighbor graph in a dual-branch configuration achieves the highest per-class and overall accuracy, outperforming the baseline in some sources. These findings confirm the importance of local layout relationships and multimodal fusion exploited through GNNs for the analysis of native digital document layouts.
QUADS: QUAntized Distillation Framework for Efficient Speech Language Understanding
Authors: Subrata Biswas, Mohammad Nur Hossain Khan, Bashima Islam
Date: 2025-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems must balance performance and efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Existing methods apply distillation and quantization separately, leading to suboptimal compression as distillation ignores quantization constraints. We propose QUADS, a unified framework that optimizes both through multi-stage training with a pre-tuned model, enhancing adaptability to low-bit regimes while maintaining accuracy. QUADS achieves 71.13\% accuracy on SLURP and 99.20\% on FSC, with only minor degradations of up to 5.56\% compared to state-of-the-art models. Additionally, it reduces computational complexity by 60--73$\times$ (GMACs) and model size by 83--700$\times$, demonstrating strong robustness under extreme quantization. These results establish QUADS as a highly efficient solution for real-world, resource-constrained SLU applications.
Stochastic Fractional Neural Operators: A Symmetrized Approach to Modeling Turbulence in Complex Fluid Dynamics
Authors: Rômulo Damasclin Chaves dos Santos, Jorge Henrique de Oliveira Sales
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00

In this work, we introduce a new class of neural network operators designed to handle problems where memory effects and randomness play a central role. In this work, we introduce a new class of neural network operators designed to handle problems where memory effects and randomness play a central role. These operators merge symmetrized activation functions, Caputo-type fractional derivatives, and stochastic perturbations introduced via It\^o type noise. The result is a powerful framework capable of approximating functions that evolve over time with both long-term memory and uncertain dynamics. We develop the mathematical foundations of these operators, proving three key theorems of Voronovskaya type. These results describe the asymptotic behavior of the operators, their convergence in the mean-square sense, and their consistency under fractional regularity assumptions. All estimates explicitly account for the influence of the memory parameter $\alpha$ and the noise level $\sigma$. As a practical application, we apply the proposed theory to the fractional Navier-Stokes equations with stochastic forcing, a model often used to describe turbulence in fluid flows with memory. Our approach provides theoretical guarantees for the approximation quality and suggests that these neural operators can serve as effective tools in the analysis and simulation of complex systems. By blending ideas from neural networks, fractional calculus, and stochastic analysis, this research opens new perspectives for modeling turbulent phenomena and other multiscale processes where memory and randomness are fundamental. The results lay the groundwork for hybrid learning-based methods with strong analytical backing.
The Evolution of Alpha in Finance Harnessing Human Insight and LLM Agents
Authors: Mohammad Rubyet Islam
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Representation Learning

The pursuit of alpha returns that exceed market benchmarks has undergone a profound transformation, evolving from intuition-driven investing to autonomous, AI powered systems. This paper introduces a comprehensive five stage taxonomy that traces this progression across manual strategies, statistical models, classical machine learning, deep learning, and agentic architectures powered by large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior surveys focused narrowly on modeling techniques, this review adopts a system level lens, integrating advances in representation learning, multimodal data fusion, and tool augmented LLM agents. The strategic shift from static predictors to contextaware financial agents capable of real time reasoning, scenario simulation, and cross modal decision making is emphasized. Key challenges in interpretability, data fragility, governance, and regulatory compliance areas critical to production deployment are examined. The proposed taxonomy offers a unified framework for evaluating maturity, aligning infrastructure, and guiding the responsible development of next generation alpha systems.
The Energy Cost of Reasoning: Analyzing Energy Usage in LLMs with Test-time Compute
Authors: Yunho Jin, Gu-Yeon Wei, David Brooks
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven significant advancements, yet it faces diminishing returns and escalating energy demands. This work introduces test-time compute (TTC)-allocating additional computational resources during inference-as a compelling complement to conventional scaling strategies. Specifically, we investigate whether employing TTC can achieve superior accuracy-energy trade-offs compared to simply increasing model size. Our empirical analysis reveals that TTC surpasses traditional model scaling in accuracy/energy efficiency, with notable gains in tasks demanding complex reasoning rather than mere factual recall. Further, we identify a critical interaction between TTC performance and output sequence length, demonstrating that strategically adjusting compute resources at inference time according to query complexity can substantially enhance efficiency. Our findings advocate for TTC as a promising direction, enabling more sustainable, accurate, and adaptable deployment of future language models without incurring additional pretraining costs.
Leveraging Multivariate Long-Term History Representation for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Huiliang Zhang, Di wu, Arnaud Zinflou, Stephane Dellacherie, Mouhamadou Makhtar Dione, Benoit Boulet
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting has a wide range of applications in both industry and academia. Recent advances in Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network (STGNN) have achieved great progress in modelling spatial-temporal correlations. Limited by computational complexity, most STGNNs for MTS forecasting focus primarily on short-term and local spatial-temporal dependencies. Although some recent methods attempt to incorporate univariate history into modeling, they still overlook crucial long-term spatial-temporal similarities and correlations across MTS, which are essential for accurate forecasting. To fill this gap, we propose a framework called the Long-term Multivariate History Representation (LMHR) Enhanced STGNN for MTS forecasting. Specifically, a Long-term History Encoder (LHEncoder) is adopted to effectively encode the long-term history into segment-level contextual representations and reduce point-level noise. A non-parametric Hierarchical Representation Retriever (HRetriever) is designed to include the spatial information in the long-term spatial-temporal dependency modelling and pick out the most valuable representations with no additional training. A Transformer-based Aggregator (TAggregator) selectively fuses the sparsely retrieved contextual representations based on the ranking positional embedding efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that LMHR outperforms typical STGNNs by 10.72% on the average prediction horizons and state-of-the-art methods by 4.12% on several real-world datasets. Additionally, it consistently improves prediction accuracy by 9.8% on the top 10% of rapidly changing patterns across the datasets.
Time Series Similarity Score Functions to Monitor and Interact with the Training and Denoising Process of a Time Series Diffusion Model applied to a Human Activity Recognition Dataset based on IMUs
Authors: Heiko Oppel, Andreas Spilz, Michael Munz
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Denoising, Human Activity Recognition, Time Series

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models are able to generate synthetic sensor signals. The training process of such a model is controlled by a loss function which measures the difference between the noise that was added in the forward process and the noise that was predicted by the diffusion model. This enables the generation of realistic data. However, the randomness within the process and the loss function itself makes it difficult to estimate the quality of the data. Therefore, we examine multiple similarity metrics and adapt an existing metric to overcome this issue by monitoring the training and synthetisation process using those metrics. The adapted metric can even be fine-tuned on the input data to comply with the requirements of an underlying classification task. We were able to significantly reduce the amount of training epochs without a performance reduction in the classification task. An optimized training process not only saves resources, but also reduces the time for training generative models.
Communication-Efficient Diffusion Denoising Parallelization via Reuse-then-Predict Mechanism
Authors: Kunyun Wang, Bohan Li, Kai Yu, Minyi Guo, Jieru Zhao
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Synthesis, Denoising

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models across various modalities, including image, video, and audio synthesis. However, their deployment is often limited by significant inference latency, primarily due to the inherently sequential nature of the denoising process. While existing parallelization strategies attempt to accelerate inference by distributing computation across multiple devices, they typically incur high communication overhead, hindering deployment on commercial hardware. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ParaStep}, a novel parallelization method based on a reuse-then-predict mechanism that parallelizes diffusion inference by exploiting similarity between adjacent denoising steps. Unlike prior approaches that rely on layer-wise or stage-wise communication, ParaStep employs lightweight, step-wise communication, substantially reducing overhead. ParaStep achieves end-to-end speedups of up to \textbf{3.88}$\times$ on SVD, \textbf{2.43}$\times$ on CogVideoX-2b, and \textbf{6.56}$\times$ on AudioLDM2-large, while maintaining generation quality. These results highlight ParaStep as a scalable and communication-efficient solution for accelerating diffusion inference, particularly in bandwidth-constrained environments.
Quaff: Quantized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning under Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis
Authors: Hong Huang, Dapeng Wu
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have made exciting achievements across various domains, yet their deployment on resource-constrained personal devices remains hindered by the prohibitive computational and memory demands of task-specific fine-tuning. While quantization offers a pathway to efficiency, existing methods struggle to balance performance and overhead, either incurring high computational/memory costs or failing to address activation outliers, a critical bottleneck in quantized fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (OSSH): During fine-tuning, certain activation outlier channels retain stable spatial positions across training iterations. Building on OSSH, we propose Quaff, a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for LLMs, optimizing low-precision activation representations through targeted momentum scaling. Quaff dynamically suppresses outliers exclusively in invariant channels using lightweight operations, eliminating full-precision weight storage and global rescaling while reducing quantization errors. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks validate OSSH and demonstrate Quaff's efficacy. Specifically, on the GPQA reasoning benchmark, Quaff achieves a 1.73x latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning while improving accuracy by 0.6% on the Phi-3 model, reconciling the triple trade-off between efficiency, performance, and deployability. By enabling consumer-grade GPU fine-tuning (e.g., RTX 2080 Super) without sacrificing model utility, Quaff democratizes personalized LLM deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/Little0o0/Quaff.git.
Explainable Prediction of the Mechanical Properties of Composites with CNNs
Authors: Varun Raaghav, Dimitrios Bikos, Antonio Rago, Francesca Toni, Maria Charalambides
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Composites are amongst the most important materials manufactured today, as evidenced by their use in countless applications. In order to establish the suitability of composites in specific applications, finite element (FE) modelling, a numerical method based on partial differential equations, is the industry standard for assessing their mechanical properties. However, FE modelling is exceptionally costly from a computational viewpoint, a limitation which has led to efforts towards applying AI models to this task. However, in these approaches: the chosen model architectures were rudimentary, feed-forward neural networks giving limited accuracy; the studies focus on predicting elastic mechanical properties, without considering material strength limits; and the models lacked transparency, hindering trustworthiness by users. In this paper, we show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) equipped with methods from explainable AI (XAI) can be successfully deployed to solve this problem. Our approach uses customised CNNs trained on a dataset we generate using transverse tension tests in FE modelling to predict composites' mechanical properties, i.e., Young's modulus and yield strength. We show empirically that our approach achieves high accuracy, outperforming a baseline, ResNet-34, in estimating the mechanical properties. We then use SHAP and Integrated Gradients, two post-hoc XAI methods, to explain the predictions, showing that the CNNs use the critical geometrical features that influence the composites' behaviour, thus allowing engineers to verify that the models are trustworthy by representing the science of composites.