pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
K-Edit: Language Model Editing with Contextual Knowledge Awareness
Authors: Elan Markowitz, Anil Ramakrishna, Ninareh Mehrabi, Charith Peris, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Editing, Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering

As the world changes, we need to be able to update our models and correct false information without costly retraining. Knowledge-based model editing enables precise modifications to the weights of large language models in order to modify the information encoded within. Recent approaches have seen success in enabling recall of edited information for thousands of edits at once. However, these approaches fail to produce edits that account for associated contextual information. We present K-Edit, an effective approach to generating contextually consistent knowledge edits. By using knowledge graphs, which maintain contextual consistency when an edge is edited, we are able to generate additional \textit{contextual edits} that ensure consistency of related information in the language model. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in multi-hop question answering while maintaining the general effectiveness and scalability of model edits.
Self-Explaining Hypergraph Neural Networks for Diagnosis Prediction
Authors: Leisheng Yu, Yanxiao Cai, Minxing Zhang, Xia Hu
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction

The burgeoning volume of electronic health records (EHRs) has enabled deep learning models to excel in predictive healthcare. However, for high-stakes applications such as diagnosis prediction, model interpretability remains paramount. Existing deep learning diagnosis prediction models with intrinsic interpretability often assign attention weights to every past diagnosis or hospital visit, providing explanations lacking flexibility and succinctness. In this paper, we introduce SHy, a self-explaining hypergraph neural network model, designed to offer personalized, concise and faithful explanations that allow for interventions from clinical experts. By modeling each patient as a unique hypergraph and employing a message-passing mechanism, SHy captures higher-order disease interactions and extracts distinct temporal phenotypes as personalized explanations. It also addresses the incompleteness of the EHR data by accounting for essential false negatives in the original diagnosis record. A qualitative case study and extensive quantitative evaluations on two real-world EHR datasets demonstrate the superior predictive performance and interpretability of SHy over existing state-of-the-art models.
Simulations of Common Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Algorithms for Image Classification
Authors: Ahmad Chaddad, Yihang Wu, Yuchen Jiang, Ahmed Bouridane, Christian Desrosiers
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Traditional machine learning assumes that training and test sets are derived from the same distribution; however, this assumption does not always hold in practical applications. This distribution disparity can lead to severe performance drops when the trained model is used in new data sets. Domain adaptation (DA) is a machine learning technique that aims to address this problem by reducing the differences between domains. This paper presents simulation-based algorithms of recent DA techniques, mainly related to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labels are available only in the source domain. Our study compares these techniques with public data sets and diverse characteristics, highlighting their respective strengths and drawbacks. For example, Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based DA (SSRT) achieved the highest accuracy (91.6\%) in the office-31 data set during our simulations, however, the accuracy dropped to 72.4\% in the Office-Home data set when using limited batch sizes. In addition to improving the reader's comprehension of recent techniques in DA, our study also highlights challenges and upcoming directions for research in this domain. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/Domain_Adaptation.
Superpose Singular Features for Model Merging
Authors: Haiquan Qiu, You Wu, Quanming Yao
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Model merging is a critical technique for combining the capabilities of multiple fine-tuned models without requiring additional training. While existing methods treat parameters as vectors, they overlook the intrinsic structure of linear transformation matrices - the core components that comprise the majority of model parameters. These matrices are fundamental to neural networks, mapping input representations to output features through linear combinations. Motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, we introduce task matrix and propose to Superpose Features from Task Matrix (SFTM), a novel approach that superposes features from individual task models into a merged model. SFTM employs singular value decomposition to identify feature bases of linear transformation matrices and solves a linear system to optimally combine them while preserving input-output mappings from individual task models. Extensive experiments on vision transformers and language models demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior performance and enhanced out-of-distribution generalization.
Occlusion-aware Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration via Unsupervised Neural Deformation Correntropy
Authors: Mingyang Zhao, Gaofeng Meng, Dong-Ming Yan
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration, Scene Understanding

Non-rigid alignment of point clouds is crucial for scene understanding, reconstruction, and various computer vision and robotics tasks. Recent advancements in implicit deformation networks for non-rigid registration have significantly reduced the reliance on large amounts of annotated training data. However, existing state-of-the-art methods still face challenges in handling occlusion scenarios. To address this issue, this paper introduces an innovative unsupervised method called Occlusion-Aware Registration (OAR) for non-rigidly aligning point clouds. The key innovation of our method lies in the utilization of the adaptive correntropy function as a localized similarity measure, enabling us to treat individual points distinctly. In contrast to previous approaches that solely minimize overall deviations between two shapes, we combine unsupervised implicit neural representations with the maximum correntropy criterion to optimize the deformation of unoccluded regions. This effectively avoids collapsed, tearing, and other physically implausible results. Moreover, we present a theoretical analysis and establish the relationship between the maximum correntropy criterion and the commonly used Chamfer distance, highlighting that the correntropy-induced metric can be served as a more universal measure for point cloud analysis. Additionally, we introduce locally linear reconstruction to ensure that regions lacking correspondences between shapes still undergo physically natural deformations. Our method achieves superior or competitive performance compared to existing approaches, particularly when dealing with occluded geometries. We also demonstrate the versatility of our method in challenging tasks such as large deformations, shape interpolation, and shape completion under occlusion disturbances.
Raising the Bar in Graph OOD Generalization: Invariant Learning Beyond Explicit Environment Modeling
Authors: Xu Shen, Yixin Liu, Yili Wang, Rui Miao, YiWei Dai, Shirui Pan, Xin Wang
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization has emerged as a critical challenge in graph learning, as real-world graph data often exhibit diverse and shifting environments that traditional models fail to generalize across. A promising solution to address this issue is graph invariant learning (GIL), which aims to learn invariant representations by disentangling label-correlated invariant subgraphs from environment-specific subgraphs. However, existing GIL methods face two major challenges: (1) the difficulty of capturing and modeling diverse environments in graph data, and (2) the semantic cliff, where invariant subgraphs from different classes are difficult to distinguish, leading to poor class separability and increased misclassifications. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel method termed Multi-Prototype Hyperspherical Invariant Learning (MPHIL), which introduces two key innovations: (1) hyperspherical invariant representation extraction, enabling robust and highly discriminative hyperspherical invariant feature extraction, and (2) multi-prototype hyperspherical classification, which employs class prototypes as intermediate variables to eliminate the need for explicit environment modeling in GIL and mitigate the semantic cliff issue. Derived from the theoretical framework of GIL, we introduce two novel objective functions: the invariant prototype matching loss to ensure samples are matched to the correct class prototypes, and the prototype separation loss to increase the distinction between prototypes of different classes in the hyperspherical space. Extensive experiments on 11 OOD generalization benchmark datasets demonstrate that MPHIL achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods across graph data from various domains and with different distribution shifts.
Reading Your Heart: Learning ECG Words and Sentences via Pre-training ECG Language Model
Authors: Jiarui Jin, Haoyu Wang, Hongyan Li, Jun Li, JiaHui Pan, Shenda Hong
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Representation Learning, Rhythm, Self-Supervised Learning

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is essential for the clinical diagnosis of arrhythmias and other heart diseases, but deep learning methods based on ECG often face limitations due to the need for high-quality annotations. Although previous ECG self-supervised learning (eSSL) methods have made significant progress in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they typically treat ECG signals as ordinary time-series data, segmenting the signals using fixed-size and fixed-step time windows, which often ignore the form and rhythm characteristics and latent semantic relationships in ECG signals. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective on ECG signals, treating heartbeats as words and rhythms as sentences. Based on this perspective, we first designed the QRS-Tokenizer, which generates semantically meaningful ECG sentences from the raw ECG signals. Building on these, we then propose HeartLang, a novel self-supervised learning framework for ECG language processing, learning general representations at form and rhythm levels. Additionally, we construct the largest heartbeat-based ECG vocabulary to date, which will further advance the development of ECG language processing. We evaluated HeartLang across six public ECG datasets, where it demonstrated robust competitiveness against other eSSL methods. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/HeartLang.
A Mathematics Framework of Artificial Shifted Population Risk and Its Further Understanding Related to Consistency Regularization
Authors: Xiliang Yang, Shenyang Deng, Shicong Liu, Yuanchi Suo, Wing. W. Y NG, Jianjun Zhang
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, imbalanced classification

Data augmentation is an important technique in training deep neural networks as it enhances their ability to generalize and remain robust. While data augmentation is commonly used to expand the sample size and act as a consistency regularization term, there is a lack of research on the relationship between them. To address this gap, this paper introduces a more comprehensive mathematical framework for data augmentation. Through this framework, we establish that the expected risk of the shifted population is the sum of the original population risk and a gap term, which can be interpreted as a consistency regularization term. The paper also provides a theoretical understanding of this gap, highlighting its negative effects on the early stages of training. We also propose a method to mitigate these effects. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments using same data augmentation techniques and computing resources under several scenarios, including standard training, out-of-distribution, and imbalanced classification. The results demonstrate that our methods surpass compared methods under all scenarios in terms of generalization ability and convergence stability. We provide our code implementation at the following link: https://github.com/ydlsfhll/ASPR.
Rule-Bottleneck Reinforcement Learning: Joint Explanation and Decision Optimization for Resource Allocation with Language Agents
Authors: Mauricio Tec, Guojun Xiong, Haichuan Wang, Francesca Dominici, Milind Tambe
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is remarkably effective in addressing sequential resource allocation problems in domains such as healthcare, public policy, and resource management. However, deep RL policies often lack transparency and adaptability, challenging their deployment alongside human decision-makers. In contrast, Language Agents, powered by large language models (LLMs), provide human-understandable reasoning but may struggle with effective decision making. To bridge this gap, we propose Rule-Bottleneck Reinforcement Learning (RBRL), a novel framework that jointly optimizes decision and explanations. At each step, RBRL generates candidate rules with an LLM, selects among them using an attention-based RL policy, and determines the environment action with an explanation via chain-of-thought reasoning. The RL rule selection is optimized using the environment rewards and an explainability metric judged by the LLM. Evaluations in real-world scenarios highlight RBRL's competitive performance with deep RL and efficiency gains over LLM fine-tuning. A survey further confirms the enhanced quality of its explanations.
BalanceBenchmark: A Survey for Imbalanced Learning
Authors: Shaoxuan Xu, Menglu Cui, Chengxiang Huang, Hongfa Wang, DiHu
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Multimodal learning has gained attention for its capacity to integrate information from different modalities. However, it is often hindered by the multimodal imbalance problem, where certain modality dominates while others remain underutilized. Although recent studies have proposed various methods to alleviate this problem, they lack comprehensive and fair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically categorize various mainstream multimodal imbalance algorithms into four groups based on the strategies they employ to mitigate imbalance. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, we introduce BalanceBenchmark, a benchmark including multiple widely used multidimensional datasets and evaluation metrics from three perspectives: performance, imbalance degree, and complexity. To ensure fair comparisons, we have developed a modular and extensible toolkit that standardizes the experimental workflow across different methods. Based on the experiments using BalanceBenchmark, we have identified several key insights into the characteristics and advantages of different method groups in terms of performance, balance degree and computational complexity. We expect such analysis could inspire more efficient approaches to address the imbalance problem in the future, as well as foundation models. The code of the toolkit is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BalanceBenchmark.
On Vanishing Gradients, Over-Smoothing, and Over-Squashing in GNNs: Bridging Recurrent and Graph Learning
Authors: Álvaro Arroyo, Alessio Gravina, Benjamin Gutteridge, Federico Barbero, Claudio Gallicchio, Xiaowen Dong, Michael Bronstein, Pierre Vandergheynst
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are models that leverage the graph structure to transmit information between nodes, typically through the message-passing operation. While widely successful, this approach is well known to suffer from the over-smoothing and over-squashing phenomena, which result in representational collapse as the number of layers increases and insensitivity to the information contained at distant and poorly connected nodes, respectively. In this paper, we present a unified view of these problems through the lens of vanishing gradients, using ideas from linear control theory for our analysis. We propose an interpretation of GNNs as recurrent models and empirically demonstrate that a simple state-space formulation of a GNN effectively alleviates over-smoothing and over-squashing at no extra trainable parameter cost. Further, we show theoretically and empirically that (i) GNNs are by design prone to extreme gradient vanishing even after a few layers; (ii) Over-smoothing is directly related to the mechanism causing vanishing gradients; (iii) Over-squashing is most easily alleviated by a combination of graph rewiring and vanishing gradient mitigation. We believe our work will help bridge the gap between the recurrent and graph neural network literature and will unlock the design of new deep and performant GNNs.
Breaking Down the Hierarchy: A New Approach to Leukemia Classification
Authors: Ibraheem Hamdi, Hosam El-Gendy, Ahmed Sharshar, Mohamed Saeed, Muhammad Ridzuan, Shahrukh K. Hashmi, Naveed Syed, Imran Mirza, Shakir Hussain, Amira Mahmoud Abdalla, Mohammad Yaqub
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

The complexities inherent to leukemia, multifaceted cancer affecting white blood cells, pose considerable diagnostic and treatment challenges, primarily due to reliance on laborious morphological analyses and expert judgment that are susceptible to errors. Addressing these challenges, this study presents a refined, comprehensive strategy leveraging advanced deep-learning techniques for the classification of leukemia subtypes. We commence by developing a hierarchical label taxonomy, paving the way for differentiating between various subtypes of leukemia. The research further introduces a novel hierarchical approach inspired by clinical procedures capable of accurately classifying diverse types of leukemia alongside reactive and healthy cells. An integral part of this study involves a meticulous examination of the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) as classifiers. The proposed method exhibits an impressive success rate, achieving approximately 90\% accuracy across all leukemia subtypes, as substantiated by our experimental results. A visual representation of the experimental findings is provided to enhance the model's explainability and aid in understanding the classification process.
Automatic Quality Assessment of First Trimester Crown-Rump-Length Ultrasound Images
Authors: Sevim Cengiz, Ibraheem Hamdi, Mohammad Yaqub
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00

Fetal gestational age (GA) is vital clinical information that is estimated during pregnancy in order to assess fetal growth. This is usually performed by measuring the crown-rump-length (CRL) on an ultrasound image in the Dating scan which is then correlated with fetal age and growth trajectory. A major issue when performing the CRL measurement is ensuring that the image is acquired at the correct view, otherwise it could be misleading. Although clinical guidelines specify the criteria for the correct CRL view, sonographers may not regularly adhere to such rules. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based solution that is able to verify the adherence of a CRL image to clinical guidelines in order to assess image quality and facilitate accurate estimation of GA. We first segment out important fetal structures then use the localized structures to perform a clinically-guided mapping that verifies the adherence of criteria. The segmentation method combines the benefits of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Vision Transformer (ViT) to segment fetal structures in ultrasound images and localize important fetal landmarks. For segmentation purposes, we compare our proposed work with UNet and show that our CNN/ViT-based method outperforms an optimized version of UNet. Furthermore, we compare the output of the mapping with classification CNNs when assessing the clinical criteria and the overall acceptability of CRL images. We show that the proposed mapping is not only explainable but also more accurate than the best performing classification CNNs.
Do Deepfake Detectors Work in Reality?
Authors: Simiao Ren, Hengwei Xu, Tsang Ng, Kidus Zewde, Shengkai Jiang, Ramini Desai, Disha Patil, Ning-Yau Cheng, Yining Zhou, Ragavi Muthukrishnan
Date: 2025-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Super-Resolution

Deepfakes, particularly those involving faceswap-based manipulations, have sparked significant societal concern due to their increasing realism and potential for misuse. Despite rapid advancements in generative models, detection methods have not kept pace, creating a critical gap in defense strategies. This disparity is further amplified by the disconnect between academic research and real-world applications, which often prioritize different objectives and evaluation criteria. In this study, we take a pivotal step toward bridging this gap by presenting a novel observation: the post-processing step of super-resolution, commonly employed in real-world scenarios, substantially undermines the effectiveness of existing deepfake detection methods. To substantiate this claim, we introduce and publish the first real-world faceswap dataset, collected from popular online faceswap platforms. We then qualitatively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art deepfake detectors on real-world deepfakes, revealing that their accuracy approaches the level of random guessing. Furthermore, we quantitatively demonstrate the significant performance degradation caused by common post-processing techniques. By addressing this overlooked challenge, our study underscores a critical avenue for enhancing the robustness and practical applicability of deepfake detection methods in real-world settings.
CoLA: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Low-Rank Activation
Authors: Ziyue Liu, Ruijie Zhang, Zhengyang Wang, Zi Yang, Paul Hovland, Bogdan Nicolae, Franck Cappello, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: CoLA

The full-size MLPs and the projection layers in attention introduce tremendous model sizes of large language models (LLMs), imposing extremely demanding needs of computational resources in the pre-training stage. However, we empirically observe that the activations of pre-trained LLMs exhibit low-rank property. Motivated by such observations, we propose CoLA and its memory-efficient implementation, CoLA-M, to replace these full-size layers with compute-efficient auto-encoders that naturally enforce low-rank activations throughout training. This fundamental architectural change eliminates the activation redundancy and significantly boosts model capacity and training efficiency. Experiments on LLaMA models with 60 million to 7 billion parameters show that CoLA reduces the computing cost by $\bf 2\pmb{\times}$ and improves training throughput by $\bf 1.86\pmb{\times}$ while maintaining full-rank level performance. CoLA-M further squeezes memory cost without sacrificing throughput, offering a pre-training approach with collectively superior parameter, computing, and memory efficiency. The LLMs produced are also $\bf 2\pmb{\times}$ smaller, enabling faster inference with lower memory cost on resource-constrained platforms.