pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PairBench: A Systematic Framework for Selecting Reliable Judge VLMs
Authors: Aarash Feizi, Sai Rajeswar, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Reihaneh Rabbany, Spandana Gella, Valentina Zantedeschi, João Monteiro
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

As large vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators, understanding their ability to effectively compare data pairs as instructed in the prompt becomes essential. To address this, we present PairBench, a low-cost framework that systematically evaluates VLMs as customizable similarity tools across various modalities and scenarios. Through PairBench, we introduce four metrics that represent key desiderata of similarity scores: alignment with human annotations, consistency for data pairs irrespective of their order, smoothness of similarity distributions, and controllability through prompting. Our analysis demonstrates that no model, whether closed- or open-source, is superior on all metrics; the optimal choice depends on an auto evaluator's desired behavior (e.g., a smooth vs. a sharp judge), highlighting risks of widespread adoption of VLMs as evaluators without thorough assessment. For instance, the majority of VLMs struggle with maintaining symmetric similarity scores regardless of order. Additionally, our results show that the performance of VLMs on the metrics in PairBench closely correlates with popular benchmarks, showcasing its predictive power in ranking models.
Round Attention: A Novel Round-Level Attention Mechanism to Accelerate LLM Inference
Authors: Yaohua Tang, Zhicheng Hu, Kun Cheng, Fan Mo, Qiheng Lv, Hua Wang, Zhi Chen
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The increasing context window size in large language models (LLMs) has improved their ability to handle complex, long-text tasks. However, as the conversation rounds continue, it is required to store a large amount of KV cache in GPU memory, which significantly affects the efficiency and even availability of the model serving systems. This paper analyzes dialogue data from real users and discovers that the LLM inference manifests a watershed layer, after which the distribution of round-level attention shows notable similarity. We propose Round Attention, a novel round-level attention mechanism that only recalls and computes the KV cache of the most relevant rounds. The experiments show that our method saves 55\% memory usage without compromising model performance.
HiFi-KPI: A Dataset for Hierarchical KPI Extraction from Earnings Filings
Authors: Rasmus Aavang, Giovanni Rizzi, Rasmus Bøggild, Alexandre Iolov, Mike Zhang, Johannes Bjerva
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that public companies file financial reports tagging numbers with the machine readable inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL) standard. However, the highly complex and highly granular taxonomy defined by iXBRL limits label transferability across domains. In this paper, we introduce the Hierarchical Financial Key Performance Indicator (HiFi-KPI) dataset, designed to facilitate numerical KPI extraction at specified levels of granularity from unstructured financial text. Our approach organizes a 218,126-label hierarchy using a taxonomy based grouping method, investigating which taxonomy layer provides the most meaningful structure. HiFi-KPI comprises ~1.8M paragraphs and ~5M entities, each linked to a label in the iXBRL-specific calculation and presentation taxonomies. We provide baselines using encoder-based approaches and structured extraction using Large Language Models (LLMs). To simplify LLM inference and evaluation, we additionally release HiFi-KPI Lite, a manually curated subset with four expert-mapped labels. We publicly release all artifacts.
Enhancing RWKV-based Language Models for Long-Sequence Text Generation
Authors: Xinghan Pan
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

This paper introduces an enhanced RWKV architecture with adaptive temporal gating mechanisms for improved long-context language modeling. We propose two principal innovations: (1) a position-aware convolutional shift operator that captures local syntactic patterns while preserving global coherence, and (2) a neurally-gated information routing mechanism that dynamically regulates inter-token information flow. Through comprehensive experiments on text generation tasks, our enhanced model demonstrates superior performance compared to the baseline RWKV, achieving 96.5 relative improvement in ROUGE-L scores with only 2.95 increased inference latency. Ablation studies validate the individual contributions of each component, while linguistic analysis reveals the model's adaptive attention to syntactic boundaries and entity coherence. The proposed modifications maintain RWKV's linear computational complexity while significantly enhancing its contextual modeling capabilities, establishing new state-of-the-art performance for recurrent-style architectures in long-form text generation.
Active Large Language Model-based Knowledge Distillation for Session-based Recommendation
Authors: Yingpeng Du, Zhu Sun, Ziyan Wang, Haoyan Chua, Jie Zhang, Yew-Soon Ong
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Session-Based Recommendations

Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising way for accurate session-based recommendation (SBR), but they demand substantial computational time and memory. Knowledge distillation (KD)-based methods can alleviate these issues by transferring the knowledge to a small student, which trains a student based on the predictions of a cumbersome teacher. However, these methods encounter difficulties for \textit{LLM-based KD in SBR}. 1) It is expensive to make LLMs predict for all instances in KD. 2) LLMs may make ineffective predictions for some instances in KD, e.g., incorrect predictions for hard instances or similar predictions as existing recommenders for easy instances. In this paper, we propose an active LLM-based KD method in SBR, contributing to sustainable AI. To efficiently distill knowledge from LLMs with limited cost, we propose to extract a small proportion of instances predicted by LLMs. Meanwhile, for a more effective distillation, we propose an active learning strategy to extract instances that are as effective as possible for KD from a theoretical view. Specifically, we first formulate gains based on potential effects (e.g., effective, similar, and incorrect predictions by LLMs) and difficulties (e.g., easy or hard to fit) of instances for KD. Then, we propose to maximize the minimal gains of distillation to find the optimal selection policy for active learning, which can largely avoid extracting ineffective instances in KD. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for SBR.
Entire-Space Variational Information Exploitation for Post-Click Conversion Rate Prediction
Authors: Ke Fei, Xinyue Zhang, Jingjing Li
Date: 2024-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Recommendation Systems, Selection bias

In recommender systems, post-click conversion rate (CVR) estimation is an essential task to model user preferences for items and estimate the value of recommendations. Sample selection bias (SSB) and data sparsity (DS) are two persistent challenges for post-click conversion rate (CVR) estimation. Currently, entire-space approaches that exploit unclicked samples through knowledge distillation are promising to mitigate SSB and DS simultaneously. Existing methods use non-conversion, conversion, or adaptive conversion predictors to generate pseudo labels for unclicked samples. However, they fail to consider the unbiasedness and information limitations of these pseudo labels. Motivated by such analysis, we propose an entire-space variational information exploitation framework (EVI) for CVR prediction. First, EVI uses a conditional entire-space CVR teacher to generate unbiased pseudo labels. Then, it applies variational information exploitation and logit distillation to transfer non-click space information to the target CVR estimator. We conduct extensive offline experiments on six large-scale datasets. EVI demonstrated a 2.25\% average improvement compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
Image Fusion for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Wangyu Wu, Siqi Song, Xianglin Qiu, Xiaowei Huang, Fei Ma, Jimin Xiao
Date: 2024-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to predict future user interactions based on historical interactions across multiple domains. The key challenge in CDSR is effectively capturing cross-domain user preferences by fully leveraging both intra-sequence and inter-sequence item interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Image Fusion for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (IFCDSR), which incorporates item image information to better capture visual preferences. Our approach integrates a frozen CLIP model to generate image embeddings, enriching original item embeddings with visual data from both intra-sequence and inter-sequence interactions. Additionally, we employ a multiple attention layer to capture cross-domain interests, enabling joint learning of single-domain and cross-domain user preferences. To validate the effectiveness of IFCDSR, we re-partitioned four e-commerce datasets and conducted extensive experiments. Results demonstrate that IFCDSR significantly outperforms existing methods.
Developing an Artificial Intelligence Tool for Personalized Breast Cancer Treatment Plans based on the NCCN Guidelines
Authors: Abdul M. Mohammed, Iqtidar Mansoor, Sarah Blythe, Dennis Trujillo
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Cancer treatments require personalized approaches based on a patient's clinical condition, medical history, and evidence-based guidelines. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) provides frequently updated, complex guidelines through visuals like flowcharts and diagrams, which can be time consuming for oncologists to stay current with treatment protocols. This study presents an AI (Artificial Intelligence)-driven methodology to accurately automate treatment regimens following NCCN guidelines for breast cancer patients. We proposed two AI-driven methods: Agentic-RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and Graph-RAG. Agentic-RAG used a three-step Large Language Model (LLM) process to select clinical titles from NCCN guidelines, retrieve matching JSON content, and iteratively refine recommendations based on insufficiency checks. Graph-RAG followed a Microsoft-developed framework with proprietary prompts, where JSON data was converted to text via an LLM, summarized, and mapped into graph structures representing key treatment relationships. Final recommendations were generated by querying relevant graph summaries. Both were evaluated using a set of patient descriptions, each with four associated questions. As shown in Table 1, Agentic RAG achieved a 100% adherence (24/24) with no hallucinations or incorrect treatments. Graph-RAG had 95.8% adherence (23/24) with one incorrect treatment and no hallucinations. Chat GPT-4 showed 91.6% adherence (22/24) with two wrong treatments and no hallucinations. Both Agentic RAG and Graph-RAG provided detailed treatment recommendations with accurate references to relevant NCCN document page numbers.
Disentangling Popularity and Quality: An Edge Classification Approach for Fair Recommendation
Authors: Nemat Gholinejad, Mostafa Haghir Chehreghani
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Classification, Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven to be an effective tool for enhancing the performance of recommender systems. However, these systems often suffer from popularity bias, leading to an unfair advantage for frequently interacted items, while overlooking high-quality but less popular items. In this paper, we propose a GNN-based recommendation model that disentangles popularity and quality to address this issue. Our approach introduces an edge classification technique to differentiate between popularity bias and genuine quality disparities among items. Furthermore, it uses cost-sensitive learning to adjust the misclassification penalties, ensuring that underrepresented yet relevant items are not unfairly disregarded. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in fairness metrics by approximately 2-74%, while maintaining competitive accuracy, with only minor variations compared to state-of-the-art methods.
EMK-KEN: A High-Performance Approach for Assessing Knowledge Value in Citation Network
Authors: Zehui Qu, Chengzhi Liu, Hanwen Cui, Xianping Yu
Date: 2025-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba

With the explosive growth of academic literature, effectively evaluating the knowledge value of literature has become quite essential. However, most of the existing methods focus on modeling the entire citation network, which is structurally complex and often suffers from long sequence dependencies when dealing with text embeddings. Thus, they might have low efficiency and poor robustness in different fields. To address these issues, a novel knowledge evaluation method is proposed, called EMK-KEN. The model consists of two modules. Specifically, the first module utilizes MetaFP and Mamba to capture semantic features of node metadata and text embeddings to learn contextual representations of each paper. The second module utilizes KAN to further capture the structural information of citation networks in order to learn the differences in different fields of networks. Extensive experiments based on ten benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors in effectiveness and robustness.
A Survey on Multimodal Recommender Systems: Recent Advances and Future Directions
Authors: Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Shuo Yang, Jinze Li, Wei Wang, Xiping Hu, Steven Hoi, Edith Ngai
Date: 2025-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Acquiring valuable data from the rapidly expanding information on the internet has become a significant concern, and recommender systems have emerged as a widely used and effective tool for helping users discover items of interest. The essence of recommender systems lies in their ability to predict users' ratings or preferences for various items and subsequently recommend the most relevant ones based on historical interaction data and publicly available information. With the advent of diverse multimedia services, including text, images, video, and audio, humans can perceive the world through multiple modalities. Consequently, a recommender system capable of understanding and interpreting different modal data can more effectively refer to individual preferences. Multimodal Recommender Systems (MRS) not only capture implicit interaction information across multiple modalities but also have the potential to uncover hidden relationships between these modalities. The primary objective of this survey is to comprehensively review recent research advancements in MRS and to analyze the models from a technical perspective. Specifically, we aim to summarize the general process and main challenges of MRS from a technical perspective. We then introduce the existing MRS models by categorizing them into four key areas: Feature Extraction, Encoder, Multimodal Fusion, and Loss Function. Finally, we further discuss potential future directions for developing and enhancing MRS. This survey serves as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners in MRS field, providing insights into the current state of MRS technology and identifying areas for future research. We hope to contribute to developing a more sophisticated and effective multimodal recommender system. To access more details of this paper, we open source a repository: https://github.com/Jinfeng-Xu/Awesome-Multimodal-Recommender-Systems.
Making Sense of Data in the Wild: Data Analysis Automation at Scale
Authors: Mara Graziani, Malina Molnar, Irina Espejo Morales, Joris Cadow-Gossweiler, Teodoro Laino
Date: 2025-01-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diversity, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Synthetic Data Generation

As the volume of publicly available data continues to grow, researchers face the challenge of limited diversity in benchmarking machine learning tasks. Although thousands of datasets are available in public repositories, the sheer abundance often complicates the search for suitable data, leaving many valuable datasets underexplored. This situation is further amplified by the fact that, despite longstanding advocacy for improving data curation quality, current solutions remain prohibitively time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines intelligent agents with retrieval augmented generation to automate data analysis, dataset curation and indexing at scale. Our system leverages multiple agents to analyze raw, unstructured data across public repositories, generating dataset reports and interactive visual indexes that can be easily explored. We demonstrate that our approach results in more detailed dataset descriptions, higher hit rates and greater diversity in dataset retrieval tasks. Additionally, we show that the dataset reports generated by our method can be leveraged by other machine learning models to improve the performance on specific tasks, such as improving the accuracy and realism of synthetic data generation. By streamlining the process of transforming raw data into machine-learning-ready datasets, our approach enables researchers to better utilize existing data resources.
Open-Source Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Retrieving Accurate Medication Insights from Formularies for African Healthcare Workers
Authors: Axum AI, :, J. Owoyemi, S. Abubakar, A. Owoyemi, T. O. Togunwa, F. C. Madubuko, S. Oyatoye, Z. Oyetolu, K. Akyea, A. O. Mohammed, A. Adebakin
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Decision Making, Hallucination, Prompt Engineering, RAG, Response Generation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Accessing accurate medication insights is vital for enhancing patient safety, minimizing errors, and supporting clinical decision-making. However, healthcare professionals in Africa often rely on manual and time-consuming processes to retrieve drug information, exacerbated by limited access to pharmacists due to brain drain and healthcare disparities. This paper presents "Drug Insights," an open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot designed to streamline medication lookup for healthcare workers in Africa. By leveraging a corpus of Nigerian pharmaceutical data and advanced AI technologies, including Pinecone databases and GPT models, the system delivers accurate, context-specific responses with minimal hallucination. The chatbot integrates prompt engineering and S-BERT evaluation to optimize retrieval and response generation. Preliminary tests, including pharmacist feedback, affirm the tool's potential to improve drug information access while highlighting areas for enhancement, such as UI/UX refinement and extended corpus integration.
Visual Zero-Shot E-Commerce Product Attribute Value Extraction
Authors: Jiaying Gong, Ming Cheng, Hongda Shen, Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche, Janet Jenq, Hoda Eldardiry
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect Extraction, Attribute, Attribute Value Extraction, Decoder, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Existing zero-shot product attribute value (aspect) extraction approaches in e-Commerce industry rely on uni-modal or multi-modal models, where the sellers are asked to provide detailed textual inputs (product descriptions) for the products. However, manually providing (typing) the product descriptions is time-consuming and frustrating for the sellers. Thus, we propose a cross-modal zero-shot attribute value generation framework (ViOC-AG) based on CLIP, which only requires product images as the inputs. ViOC-AG follows a text-only training process, where a task-customized text decoder is trained with the frozen CLIP text encoder to alleviate the modality gap and task disconnection. During the zero-shot inference, product aspects are generated by the frozen CLIP image encoder connected with the trained task-customized text decoder. OCR tokens and outputs from a frozen prompt-based LLM correct the decoded outputs for out-of-domain attribute values. Experiments show that ViOC-AG significantly outperforms other fine-tuned vision-language models for zero-shot attribute value extraction.
Inference Computation Scaling for Feature Augmentation in Recommendation Systems
Authors: Weihao Liu, Zhaocheng Du, Haiyuan Zhao, Wenbo Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Jun Xu
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Recommendation Systems, Specificity

Large language models have become a powerful method for feature augmentation in recommendation systems. However, existing approaches relying on quick inference often suffer from incomplete feature coverage and insufficient specificity in feature descriptions, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained user preferences and undermining overall performance. Motivated by the recent success of inference scaling in math and coding tasks, we explore whether scaling inference can address these limitations and enhance feature quality. Our experiments show that scaling inference leads to significant improvements in recommendation performance, with a 12% increase in NDCG@10. The gains can be attributed to two key factors: feature quantity and specificity. In particular, models using extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generate a greater number of detailed and precise features, offering deeper insights into user preferences and overcoming the limitations of quick inference. We further investigate the factors influencing feature quantity, revealing that model choice and search strategy play critical roles in generating a richer and more diverse feature set. This is the first work to apply inference scaling to feature augmentation in recommendation systems, bridging advances in reasoning tasks to enhance personalized recommendation.
Joint Similarity Item Exploration and Overlapped User Guidance for Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Weiming Liu, Chaochao Chen, Jiahe Xu, Xinting Liao, Fan Wang, Xiaolin Zheng, Zhihui Fu, Ruiguang Pei, Jun Wang
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been widely investigated for solving long-standing data sparsity problem via knowledge sharing across domains. In this paper, we focus on the Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Recommendation (MMCDR) problem where different items have multi-modal information while few users are overlapped across domains. MMCDR is particularly challenging in two aspects: fully exploiting diverse multi-modal information within each domain and leveraging useful knowledge transfer across domains. However, previous methods fail to cluster items with similar characteristics while filtering out inherit noises within different modalities, hurdling the model performance. What is worse, conventional CDR models primarily rely on overlapped users for domain adaptation, making them ill-equipped to handle scenarios where the majority of users are non-overlapped. To fill this gap, we propose Joint Similarity Item Exploration and Overlapped User Guidance (SIEOUG) for solving the MMCDR problem. SIEOUG first proposes similarity item exploration module, which not only obtains pair-wise and group-wise item-item graph knowledge, but also reduces irrelevant noise for multi-modal modeling. Then SIEOUG proposes user-item collaborative filtering module to aggregate user/item embeddings with the attention mechanism for collaborative filtering. Finally SIEOUG proposes overlapped user guidance module with optimal user matching for knowledge sharing across domains. Our empirical study on Amazon dataset with several different tasks demonstrates that SIEOUG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models under the MMCDR setting.