pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MAQInstruct: Instruction-based Unified Event Relation Extraction
Authors: Jun Xu, Mengshu Sun, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Relation Extraction, Multi-class Classification, Relation, Relation Extraction

Extracting event relations that deviate from known schemas has proven challenging for previous methods based on multi-class classification, MASK prediction, or prototype matching. Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance through instruction tuning. Nevertheless, in the task of event relation extraction, instruction-based methods face several challenges: there are a vast number of inference samples, and the relations between events are non-sequential. To tackle these challenges, we present an improved instruction-based event relation extraction framework named MAQInstruct. Firstly, we transform the task from extracting event relations using given event-event instructions to selecting events using given event-relation instructions, which reduces the number of samples required for inference. Then, by incorporating a bipartite matching loss, we reduce the dependency of the instruction-based method on the generation sequence. Our experimental results demonstrate that MAQInstruct significantly improves the performance of event relation extraction across multiple LLMs.
Beyond Prompt Content: Enhancing LLM Performance via Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimization
Authors: Yuanye Liu, Jiahang Xu, Li Lyna Zhang, Qi Chen, Xuan Feng, Yang Chen, Zhongxin Guo, Yuqing Yang, Peng Cheng
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant capability across various tasks, with their real-world effectiveness often driven by prompt design. While recent research has focused on optimizing prompt content, the role of prompt formatting, a critical but often overlooked dimension, has received limited systematic investigation. In this paper, we introduce Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimization (CFPO), an innovative methodology that jointly optimizes both prompt content and formatting through an iterative refinement process. CFPO leverages natural language mutations to explore content variations and employs a dynamic format exploration strategy that systematically evaluates diverse format options. Our extensive evaluations across multiple tasks and open-source LLMs demonstrate that CFPO demonstrates measurable performance improvements compared to content-only optimization methods. This highlights the importance of integrated content-format optimization and offers a practical, model-agnostic approach to enhancing LLM performance. Code is available at https://github.com/HenryLau7/CFPO.
Multi-task Online Learning for Probabilistic Load Forecasting
Authors: Onintze Zaballa, Verónica Álvarez, Santiago Mazuelas
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Load Forecasting, Management, Multi-Task Learning

Load forecasting is essential for the efficient, reliable, and cost-effective management of power systems. Load forecasting performance can be improved by learning the similarities among multiple entities (e.g., regions, buildings). Techniques based on multi-task learning obtain predictions by leveraging consumption patterns from the historical load demand of multiple entities and their relationships. However, existing techniques cannot effectively assess inherent uncertainties in load demand or account for dynamic changes in consumption patterns. This paper proposes a multi-task learning technique for online and probabilistic load forecasting. This technique provides accurate probabilistic predictions for the loads of multiple entities by leveraging their dynamic similarities. The method's performance is evaluated using datasets that register the load demand of multiple entities and contain diverse and dynamic consumption patterns. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly enhance the effectiveness of current multi-task learning approaches across a wide variety of load consumption scenarios.
ADI finite difference schemes for the Heston-Hull-White PDE
Authors: Tinne Haentjens, Karel J. in 't Hout
Date: 2011-11-17 00:00:00

In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) time discretization schemes in the numerical solution of the three-dimensional Heston-Hull-White partial differential equation, which is semidiscretized by applying finite difference schemes on nonuniform spatial grids. We consider the Heston-Hull-White model with arbitrary correlation factors, with time-dependent mean-reversion levels, with short and long maturities, for cases where the Feller condition is satisfied and for cases where it is not. In addition, both European-style call options and up-and-out call options are considered. It is shown through extensive tests that ADI schemes, with a proper choice of their parameters, perform very well in all situations - in terms of stability, accuracy and efficiency.
LayerTracer: Cognitive-Aligned Layered SVG Synthesis via Diffusion Transformer
Authors: Yiren Song, Danze Chen, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

Generating cognitive-aligned layered SVGs remains challenging due to existing methods' tendencies toward either oversimplified single-layer outputs or optimization-induced shape redundancies. We propose LayerTracer, a diffusion transformer based framework that bridges this gap by learning designers' layered SVG creation processes from a novel dataset of sequential design operations. Our approach operates in two phases: First, a text-conditioned DiT generates multi-phase rasterized construction blueprints that simulate human design workflows. Second, layer-wise vectorization with path deduplication produces clean, editable SVGs. For image vectorization, we introduce a conditional diffusion mechanism that encodes reference images into latent tokens, guiding hierarchical reconstruction while preserving structural integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate LayerTracer's superior performance against optimization-based and neural baselines in both generation quality and editability, effectively aligning AI-generated vectors with professional design cognition.
VidSketch: Hand-drawn Sketch-Driven Video Generation with Diffusion Control
Authors: Lifan Jiang, Shuang Chen, Boxi Wu, Xiaotong Guan, Jiahui Zhang
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

With the advancement of generative artificial intelligence, previous studies have achieved the task of generating aesthetic images from hand-drawn sketches, fulfilling the public's needs for drawing. However, these methods are limited to static images and lack the ability to control video animation generation using hand-drawn sketches. To address this gap, we propose VidSketch, the first method capable of generating high-quality video animations directly from any number of hand-drawn sketches and simple text prompts, bridging the divide between ordinary users and professional artists. Specifically, our method introduces a Level-Based Sketch Control Strategy to automatically adjust the guidance strength of sketches during the generation process, accommodating users with varying drawing skills. Furthermore, a TempSpatial Attention mechanism is designed to enhance the spatiotemporal consistency of generated video animations, significantly improving the coherence across frames. You can find more detailed cases on our official website.
Physics-Guided Foundation Model for Scientific Discovery: An Application to Aquatic Science
Authors: Runlong Yu, Chonghao Qiu, Robert Ladwig, Paul Hanson, Yiqun Xie, Xiaowei Jia
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: scientific discovery

Physics-guided machine learning (PGML) has become a prevalent approach in studying scientific systems due to its ability to integrate scientific theories for enhancing machine learning (ML) models. However, most PGML approaches are tailored to isolated and relatively simple tasks, which limits their applicability to complex systems involving multiple interacting processes and numerous influencing features. In this paper, we propose a \textit{\textbf{P}hysics-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{F}oundation \textbf{M}odel (\textbf{PGFM})} that combines pre-trained ML models and physics-based models and leverages their complementary strengths to improve the modeling of multiple coupled processes. To effectively conduct pre-training, we construct a simulated environmental system that encompasses a wide range of influencing features and various simulated variables generated by physics-based models. The model is pre-trained in this system to adaptively select important feature interactions guided by multi-task objectives. We then fine-tune the model for each specific task using true observations, while maintaining consistency with established physical theories, such as the principles of mass and energy conservation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology in modeling water temperature and dissolved oxygen dynamics in real-world lakes. The proposed PGFM is also broadly applicable to a range of scientific fields where physics-based models are being used.
Do we really have to filter out random noise in pre-training data for language models?
Authors: Jinghan Ru, Yuxin Xie, Xianwei Zhuang, Yuguo Yin, Zhihui Guo, Zhiming Liu, Qianli Ren, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Web-scale pre-training datasets are the cornerstone of LLMs' success. However, text data curated from the Internet inevitably contains random noise caused by decoding errors or unregulated web content. In contrast to previous works that focus on low quality or synthetic data, our study \textbf{provides the first systematic investigation of such random noise through a cohesive ``What-Why-How'' framework.} Surprisingly, we observed that the resulting increase in the loss of next-token prediction (NTP) was significantly lower than the proportion of random noise even when the model was scaled up to 2.7B. We provide a theoretical justification for this phenomenon, which also elucidates the success of multilingual models and can be applied to multimodal models. On the other hand, experiments show that the model's performance in downstream tasks is not based solely on the NTP loss, which means that random noise may result in degraded downstream performance. To address the potential adverse effects, we introduce a novel plug-and-play Local Gradient Matching loss, which explicitly enhances the denoising capability of the downstream task head by aligning the gradient of normal and perturbed features without requiring knowledge of the model's parameters. Additional experiments on 8 language and 14 vision benchmarks further validate its effectiveness.
Efficient Adaptive Label Refinement for Label Noise Learning
Authors: Wenzhen Zhang, Debo Cheng, Guangquan Lu, Bo Zhou, Jiaye Li, Shichao Zhang
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00

Deep neural networks are highly susceptible to overfitting noisy labels, which leads to degraded performance. Existing methods address this issue by employing manually defined criteria, aiming to achieve optimal partitioning in each iteration to avoid fitting noisy labels while thoroughly learning clean samples. However, this often results in overly complex and difficult-to-train models. To address this issue, we decouple the tasks of avoiding fitting incorrect labels and thoroughly learning clean samples and propose a simple yet highly applicable method called Adaptive Label Refinement (ALR). First, inspired by label refurbishment techniques, we update the original hard labels to soft labels using the model's predictions to reduce the risk of fitting incorrect labels. Then, by introducing the entropy loss, we gradually `harden' the high-confidence soft labels, guiding the model to better learn from clean samples. This approach is simple and efficient, requiring no prior knowledge of noise or auxiliary datasets, making it more accessible compared to existing methods. We validate ALR's effectiveness through experiments on benchmark datasets with artificial label noise (CIFAR-10/100) and real-world datasets with inherent noise (ANIMAL-10N, Clothing1M, WebVision). The results show that ALR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Blackout DIFUSCO
Authors: Jun Pyo Seo
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Scheduling, Traveling Salesman Problem

This study explores the integration of Blackout Diffusion into the DIFUSCO framework for combinatorial optimization, specifically targeting the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Inspired by the success of discrete-time diffusion models (D3PM) in maintaining structural integrity, we extend the paradigm to a continuous-time framework, leveraging the unique properties of Blackout Diffusion. Continuous-time modeling introduces smoother transitions and refined control, hypothesizing enhanced solution quality over traditional discrete methods. We propose three key improvements to enhance the diffusion process. First, we transition from a discrete-time-based model to a continuous-time framework, providing a more refined and flexible formulation. Second, we refine the observation time scheduling to ensure a smooth and linear transformation throughout the diffusion process, allowing for a more natural progression of states. Finally, building upon the second improvement, we further enhance the reverse process by introducing finer time slices in regions that are particularly challenging for the model, thereby improving accuracy and stability in the reconstruction phase. Although the experimental results did not exceed the baseline performance, they demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in balancing simplicity and complexity, offering new insights into diffusion-based combinatorial optimization. This work represents the first application of Blackout Diffusion to combinatorial optimization, providing a foundation for further advancements in this domain. * The code is available for review at https://github.com/Giventicket/BlackoutDIFUSCO.
Aerial Reliable Collaborative Communications for Terrestrial Mobile Users via Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Geng Sun, Jian Xiao, Jiahui Li, Jiacheng Wang, Jiawen Kang, Dusit Niyato, Shiwen Mao
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as the potential aerial base stations (BSs) to improve terrestrial communications. However, the limited onboard energy and antenna power of a UAV restrict its communication range and transmission capability. To address these limitations, this work employs collaborative beamforming through a UAV-enabled virtual antenna array to improve transmission performance from the UAV to terrestrial mobile users, under interference from non-associated BSs and dynamic channel conditions. Specifically, we introduce a memory-based random walk model to more accurately depict the mobility patterns of terrestrial mobile users. Following this, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) focused on maximizing the transmission rate while minimizing the flight energy consumption of the UAV swarm. Given the NP-hard nature of the formulated MOP and the highly dynamic environment, we transform this problem into a multi-objective Markov decision process and propose an improved evolutionary multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm. Specifically, this algorithm introduces an evolutionary learning approach to obtain the approximate Pareto set for the formulated MOP. Moreover, the algorithm incorporates a long short-term memory network and hyper-sphere-based task selection method to discern the movement patterns of terrestrial mobile users and improve the diversity of the obtained Pareto set. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively generates a diverse range of non-dominated policies and outperforms existing methods. Additional simulations demonstrate the scalability and robustness of the proposed CB-based method under different system parameters and various unexpected circumstances.
Structure-preserving contrastive learning for spatial time series
Authors: Yiru Jiao, Sander van Cranenburgh, Simeon Calvert, Hans van Lint
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Time Series, Time Series Classification, Traffic Prediction

The effectiveness of neural network models largely relies on learning meaningful latent patterns from data, where self-supervised learning of informative representations can enhance model performance and generalisability. However, self-supervised representation learning for spatially characterised time series, which are ubiquitous in transportation domain, poses unique challenges due to the necessity of maintaining fine-grained spatio-temporal similarities in the latent space. In this study, we introduce two structure-preserving regularisers for the contrastive learning of spatial time series: one regulariser preserves the topology of similarities between instances, and the other preserves the graph geometry of similarities across spatial and temporal dimensions. To balance the contrastive learning objective and the need for structure preservation, we propose a dynamic weighting mechanism that adaptively manages this trade-off and stabilises training. We validate the proposed method through extensive experiments, including multivariate time series classification to demonstrate its general applicability, as well as macroscopic and microscopic traffic prediction to highlight its particular usefulness in encoding traffic interactions. Across all tasks, our method preserves the similarity structures more effectively and improves state-of-the-art task performances. This method can be integrated with an arbitrary neural network model and is particularly beneficial for time series data with spatial or geographical features. Furthermore, our findings suggest that well-preserved similarity structures in the latent space indicate more informative and useful representations. This provides insights to design more effective neural networks for data-driven transportation research. Our code is made openly accessible with all resulting data at https://github.com/yiru-jiao/spclt
ELMTEX: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Structured Clinical Information Extraction. A Case Study on Clinical Reports
Authors: Aynur Guluzade, Naguib Heiba, Zeyd Boukhers, Florim Hamiti, Jahid Hasan Polash, Yehya Mohamad, Carlos A Velasco
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00

Europe's healthcare systems require enhanced interoperability and digitalization, driving a demand for innovative solutions to process legacy clinical data. This paper presents the results of our project, which aims to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract structured information from unstructured clinical reports, focusing on patient history, diagnoses, treatments, and other predefined categories. We developed a workflow with a user interface and evaluated LLMs of varying sizes through prompting strategies and fine-tuning. Our results show that fine-tuned smaller models match or surpass larger counterparts in performance, offering efficiency for resource-limited settings. A new dataset of 60,000 annotated English clinical summaries and 24,000 German translations was validated with automated and manual checks. The evaluations used ROUGE, BERTScore, and entity-level metrics. The work highlights the approach's viability and outlines future improvements.
Training Language Models for Social Deduction with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Bidipta Sarkar, Warren Xia, C. Karen Liu, Dorsa Sadigh
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Communicating in natural language is a powerful tool in multi-agent settings, as it enables independent agents to share information in partially observable settings and allows zero-shot coordination with humans. However, most prior works are limited as they either rely on training with large amounts of human demonstrations or lack the ability to generate natural and useful communication strategies. In this work, we train language models to have productive discussions about their environment in natural language without any human demonstrations. We decompose the communication problem into listening and speaking. Our key idea is to leverage the agent's goal to predict useful information about the world as a dense reward signal that guides communication. Specifically, we improve a model's listening skills by training them to predict information about the environment based on discussions, and we simultaneously improve a model's speaking skills with multi-agent reinforcement learning by rewarding messages based on their influence on other agents. To investigate the role and necessity of communication in complex social settings, we study an embodied social deduction game based on Among Us, where the key question to answer is the identity of an adversarial imposter. We analyze emergent behaviors due to our technique, such as accusing suspects and providing evidence, and find that it enables strong discussions, doubling the win rates compared to standard RL. We release our code and models at https://socialdeductionllm.github.io/
Kolmogorov-Arnold Fourier Networks
Authors: Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Kaitong Cai, Keze Wang
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.