pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TRACED: Transition-aware Regret Approximation with Co-learnability for Environment Design
Authors: Geonwoo Cho, Jaegyun Im, JIhwan Lee, Hojun Yi, Sejin Kim, Sundong Kim
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

Generalizing deep reinforcement learning agents to unseen environments remains a significant challenge. One promising solution is Unsupervised Environment Design (UED), a co-evolutionary framework in which a teacher adaptively generates tasks with high learning potential, while a student learns a robust policy from this evolving curriculum. Existing UED methods typically measure learning potential via regret, the gap between optimal and current performance, approximated solely by value-function loss. Building on these approaches, we introduce the transition prediction error as an additional term in our regret approximation. To capture how training on one task affects performance on others, we further propose a lightweight metric called co-learnability. By combining these two measures, we present Transition-aware Regret Approximation with Co-learnability for Environment Design (TRACED). Empirical evaluations show that TRACED yields curricula that improve zero-shot generalization across multiple benchmarks while requiring up to 2x fewer environment interactions than strong baselines. Ablation studies confirm that the transition prediction error drives rapid complexity ramp-up and that co-learnability delivers additional gains when paired with the transition prediction error. These results demonstrate how refined regret approximation and explicit modeling of task relationships can be leveraged for sample-efficient curriculum design in UED.
New Insights on Unfolding and Fine-tuning Quantum Federated Learning
Authors: Shanika Iroshi Nanayakkara, Shiva Raj Pokhrel
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Federated Learning

Client heterogeneity poses significant challenges to the performance of Quantum Federated Learning (QFL). To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach leveraging deep unfolding, which enables clients to autonomously optimize hyperparameters, such as learning rates and regularization factors, based on their specific training behavior. This dynamic adaptation mitigates overfitting and ensures robust optimization in highly heterogeneous environments where standard aggregation methods often fail. Our framework achieves approximately 90% accuracy, significantly outperforming traditional methods, which typically yield around 55% accuracy, as demonstrated through real-time training on IBM quantum hardware and Qiskit Aer simulators. By developing self adaptive fine tuning, the proposed method proves particularly effective in critical applications such as gene expression analysis and cancer detection, enhancing diagnostic precision and predictive modeling within quantum systems. Our results are attributed to convergence-aware, learnable optimization steps intrinsic to the deep unfolded framework, which maintains the generalization. Hence, this study addresses the core limitations of conventional QFL, streamlining its applicability to any complex challenges such as healthcare and genomic research.
Elucidated Rolling Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Weather Forecasting
Authors: Salva Rühling Cachay, Miika Aittala, Karsten Kreis, Noah Brenowitz, Arash Vahdat, Morteza Mardani, Rose Yu
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Weather Forecasting

Diffusion models are a powerful tool for probabilistic forecasting, yet most applications in high-dimensional chaotic systems predict future snapshots one-by-one. This common approach struggles to model complex temporal dependencies and fails to explicitly account for the progressive growth of uncertainty inherent to such systems. While rolling diffusion frameworks, which apply increasing noise to forecasts at longer lead times, have been proposed to address this, their integration with state-of-the-art, high-fidelity diffusion techniques remains a significant challenge. We tackle this problem by introducing Elucidated Rolling Diffusion Models (ERDM), the first framework to successfully unify a rolling forecast structure with the principled, performant design of Elucidated Diffusion Models (EDM). To do this, we adapt the core EDM components-its noise schedule, network preconditioning, and Heun sampler-to the rolling forecast setting. The success of this integration is driven by three key contributions: (i) a novel loss weighting scheme that focuses model capacity on the mid-range forecast horizons where determinism gives way to stochasticity; (ii) an efficient initialization strategy using a pre-trained EDM for the initial window; and (iii) a bespoke hybrid sequence architecture for robust spatiotemporal feature extraction under progressive denoising. On 2D Navier-Stokes simulations and ERA5 global weather forecasting at 1.5^\circ resolution, ERDM consistently outperforms key diffusion-based baselines, including conditional autoregressive EDM. ERDM offers a flexible and powerful general framework for tackling diffusion-based sequence generation problems where modeling escalating uncertainty is paramount. Code is available at: https://github.com/salvaRC/erdm
Automated Generation of Diverse Courses of Actions for Multi-Agent Operations using Binary Optimization and Graph Learning
Authors: Prithvi Poddar, Ehsan Tarkesh Esfahani, Karthik Dantu, Souma Chowdhury
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Disaster Response, Diversity, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network

Operations in disaster response, search \& rescue, and military missions that involve multiple agents demand automated processes to support the planning of the courses of action (COA). Moreover, traverse-affecting changes in the environment (rain, snow, blockades, etc.) may impact the expected performance of a COA, making it desirable to have a pool of COAs that are diverse in task distributions across agents. Further, variations in agent capabilities, which could be human crews and/or autonomous systems, present practical opportunities and computational challenges to the planning process. This paper presents a new theoretical formulation and computational framework to generate such diverse pools of COAs for operations with soft variations in agent-task compatibility. Key to the problem formulation is a graph abstraction of the task space and the pool of COAs itself to quantify its diversity. Formulating the COAs as a centralized multi-robot task allocation problem, a genetic algorithm is used for (order-ignoring) allocations of tasks to each agent that jointly maximize diversity within the COA pool and overall compatibility of the agent-task mappings. A graph neural network is trained using a policy gradient approach to then perform single agent task sequencing in each COA, which maximizes completion rates adaptive to task features. Our tests of the COA generation process in a simulated environment demonstrate significant performance gain over a random walk baseline, small optimality gap in task sequencing, and execution time of about 50 minutes to plan up to 20 COAs for 5 agent/100 task operations.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning and Value Optimization for Challenging Quadruped Locomotion
Authors: Jeremiah Coholich, Muhammad Ali Murtaza, Seth Hutchinson, Zsolt Kira
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level policy (LLP). The LLP is trained using an on-policy actor-critic RL algorithm and is given footstep placements as goals. We propose an HLP that does not require any additional training or environment samples and instead operates via an online optimization process over the learned value function of the LLP. We demonstrate the benefits of this framework by comparing it with an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) approach. We observe improvements in its ability to achieve higher rewards with fewer collisions across an array of different terrains, including terrains more difficult than any encountered during training.
Learning Bilateral Team Formation in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Koorosh Moslemi, Chi-Guhn Lee
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Team formation and the dynamics of team-based learning have drawn significant interest in the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, existing studies primarily focus on unilateral groupings, predefined teams, or fixed-population settings, leaving the effects of algorithmic bilateral grouping choices in dynamic populations underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a framework for learning two-sided team formation in dynamic multi-agent systems. Through this study, we gain insight into what algorithmic properties in bilateral team formation influence policy performance and generalization. We validate our approach using widely adopted multi-agent scenarios, demonstrating competitive performance and improved generalization in most scenarios.
Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models
Authors: Ankur Garg, Xuemin Yu, Hassan Sajjad, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Quantization

Uncovering emergent concepts across transformer layers remains a significant challenge because the residual stream linearly mixes and duplicates information, obscuring how features evolve within large language models. Current research efforts primarily inspect neural representations at single layers, thereby overlooking this cross-layer superposition and the redundancy it introduces. These representations are typically either analyzed directly for activation patterns or passed to probing classifiers that map them to a limited set of predefined concepts. To address these limitations, we propose \gls{clvqvae}, a framework that uses vector quantization to map representations across layers and in the process collapse duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach uniquely combines top-$k$ temperature-based sampling during quantization with EMA codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining code-book diversity. We further enhance the framework with scaled-spherical k-means++ for codebook initialization, which clusters by directional similarity rather than magnitude, better aligning with semantic structure in word embedding space.
LSH-DynED: A Dynamic Ensemble Framework with LSH-Based Undersampling for Evolving Multi-Class Imbalanced Classification
Authors: Soheil Abadifard, Fazli Can
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: imbalanced classification

The classification of imbalanced data streams, which have unequal class distributions, is a key difficulty in machine learning, especially when dealing with multiple classes. While binary imbalanced data stream classification tasks have received considerable attention, only a few studies have focused on multi-class imbalanced data streams. Effectively managing the dynamic imbalance ratio is a key challenge in this domain. This study introduces a novel, robust, and resilient approach to address these challenges by integrating Locality Sensitive Hashing with Random Hyperplane Projections (LSH-RHP) into the Dynamic Ensemble Diversification (DynED) framework. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first application of LSH-RHP for undersampling in the context of imbalanced non-stationary data streams. The proposed method undersamples the majority classes by utilizing LSH-RHP, provides a balanced training set, and improves the ensemble's prediction performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 23 real-world and ten semi-synthetic datasets and compare LSH-DynED with 15 state-of-the-art methods. The results reveal that LSH-DynED outperforms other approaches in terms of both Kappa and mG-Mean effectiveness measures, demonstrating its capability in dealing with multi-class imbalanced non-stationary data streams. Notably, LSH-DynED performs well in large-scale, high-dimensional datasets with considerable class imbalances and demonstrates adaptation and robustness in real-world circumstances. To motivate our design, we review existing methods for imbalanced data streams, outline key challenges, and offer guidance for future work. For the reproducibility of our results, we have made our implementation available on GitHub.
GNN's Uncertainty Quantification using Self-Distillation
Authors: Hirad Daneshvar, Reza Samavi
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Uncertainty Quantification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance in the healthcare domain. However, what remained challenging is quantifying the predictive uncertainty of GNNs, which is an important aspect of trustworthiness in clinical settings. While Bayesian and ensemble methods can be used to quantify uncertainty, they are computationally expensive. Additionally, the disagreement metric used by ensemble methods to compute uncertainty cannot capture the diversity of models in an ensemble network. In this paper, we propose a novel method, based on knowledge distillation, to quantify GNNs' uncertainty more efficiently and with higher precision. We apply self-distillation, where the same network serves as both the teacher and student models, thereby avoiding the need to train several networks independently. To ensure the impact of self-distillation, we develop an uncertainty metric that captures the diverse nature of the network by assigning different weights to each GNN classifier. We experimentally evaluate the precision, performance, and ability of our approach in distinguishing out-of-distribution data on two graph datasets: MIMIC-IV and Enzymes. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively capture the predictive uncertainty of the model while having performance similar to that of the MC Dropout and ensemble methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/tailabTMU/UQ_GNN.
Robust Robotic Exploration and Mapping Using Generative Occupancy Map Synthesis
Authors: Lorin Achey, Alec Reed, Brendan Crowe, Bradley Hayes, Christoffer Heckman
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00

We present a novel approach for enhancing robotic exploration by using generative occupancy mapping. We introduce SceneSense, a diffusion model designed and trained for predicting 3D occupancy maps given partial observations. Our proposed approach probabilistically fuses these predictions into a running occupancy map in real-time, resulting in significant improvements in map quality and traversability. We implement SceneSense onboard a quadruped robot and validate its performance with real-world experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. In these experiments, we show that occupancy maps enhanced with SceneSense predictions better represent our fully observed ground truth data (24.44% FID improvement around the robot and 75.59% improvement at range). We additionally show that integrating SceneSense-enhanced maps into our robotic exploration stack as a "drop-in" map improvement, utilizing an existing off-the-shelf planner, results in improvements in robustness and traversability time. Finally we show results of full exploration evaluations with our proposed system in two dissimilar environments and find that locally enhanced maps provide more consistent exploration results than maps constructed only from direct sensor measurements.
Beyond Autocomplete: Designing CopilotLens Towards Transparent and Explainable AI Coding Agents
Authors: Runlong Ye, Zeling Zhang, Boushra Almazroua, Michael Liut
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, Decision Making

AI-powered code assistants are widely used to generate code completions, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, these tools typically present suggestions without explaining their rationale, leaving their decision-making process inscrutable. This opacity hinders developers' ability to critically evaluate the output, form accurate mental models, and build calibrated trust in the system. To address this, we introduce CopilotLens, a novel interactive framework that reframes code completion from a simple suggestion into a transparent, explainable event. CopilotLens operates as an explanation layer that reveals the AI agent's "thought process" through a dynamic two-level interface, surfacing everything from its reconstructed high-level plans to the specific codebase context influencing the code. This paper presents the design and rationale of CopilotLens, offering a concrete framework for building future agentic code assistants that prioritize clarity of reasoning over speed of suggestion, thereby fostering deeper comprehension and more robust human-AI collaboration.
A Modular Multitask Reasoning Framework Integrating Spatio-temporal Models and LLMs
Authors: Kethmi Hirushini Hettige, Jiahao Ji, Cheng Long, Shili Xiang, Gao Cong, Jingyuan Wang
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Natural Language Queries

Spatio-temporal data mining plays a pivotal role in informed decision making across diverse domains. However, existing models are often restricted to narrow tasks, lacking the capacity for multi-task inference and complex long-form reasoning that require generation of in-depth, explanatory outputs. These limitations restrict their applicability to real-world, multi-faceted decision scenarios. In this work, we introduce STReason, a novel framework that integrates the reasoning strengths of large language models (LLMs) with the analytical capabilities of spatio-temporal models for multi-task inference and execution. Without requiring task-specific finetuning, STReason leverages in-context learning to decompose complex natural language queries into modular, interpretable programs, which are then systematically executed to generate both solutions and detailed rationales. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we construct a new benchmark dataset and propose a unified evaluation framework with metrics specifically designed for long-form spatio-temporal reasoning. Experimental results show that STReason significantly outperforms advanced LLM baselines across all metrics, particularly excelling in complex, reasoning-intensive spatio-temporal scenarios. Human evaluations further validate STReason's credibility and practical utility, demonstrating its potential to reduce expert workload and broaden the applicability to real-world spatio-temporal tasks. We believe STReason provides a promising direction for developing more capable and generalizable spatio-temporal reasoning systems.
SACL: Understanding and Combating Textual Bias in Code Retrieval with Semantic-Augmented Reranking and Localization
Authors: Dhruv Gupta, Gayathri Ganesh Lakshmy, Yiqing Xie
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, mbpp, Reranking, Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation (RACG) is a critical technique for enhancing code generation by retrieving relevant information. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of code retrieval by systematically masking specific features while preserving code functionality. Our discoveries include: (1) although trained on code, current retrievers heavily rely on surface-level textual features (e.g., docstrings, identifier names), and (2) they exhibit a strong bias towards well-documented code, even if the documentation is irrelevant.Based on our discoveries, we propose SACL, a framework that enriches textual information and reduces bias by augmenting code or structural knowledge with semantic information. Extensive experiments show that SACL substantially improves code retrieval (e.g., by 12.8% / 9.4% / 7.0% Recall@1 on HumanEval / MBPP / SWE-Bench-Lite), which also leads to better code generation performance (e.g., by 4.88% Pass@1 on HumanEval).
MIRAGE: A Benchmark for Multimodal Information-Seeking and Reasoning in Agricultural Expert-Guided Conversations
Authors: Vardhan Dongre, Chi Gui, Shubham Garg, Hooshang Nayyeri, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Vikram S. Adve
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: World Knowledge

We introduce MIRAGE, a new benchmark for multimodal expert-level reasoning and decision-making in consultative interaction settings. Designed for the agriculture domain, MIRAGE captures the full complexity of expert consultations by combining natural user queries, expert-authored responses, and image-based context, offering a high-fidelity benchmark for evaluating models on grounded reasoning, clarification strategies, and long-form generation in a real-world, knowledge-intensive domain. Grounded in over 35,000 real user-expert interactions and curated through a carefully designed multi-step pipeline, MIRAGE spans diverse crop health, pest diagnosis, and crop management scenarios. The benchmark includes more than 7,000 unique biological entities, covering plant species, pests, and diseases, making it one of the most taxonomically diverse benchmarks available for vision-language models, grounded in the real world. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on well-specified user inputs and closed-set taxonomies, MIRAGE features underspecified, context-rich scenarios with open-world settings, requiring models to infer latent knowledge gaps, handle rare entities, and either proactively guide the interaction or respond. Project Page: https://mirage-benchmark.github.io
BrokenVideos: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-Grained Artifact Localization in AI-Generated Videos
Authors: Jiahao Lin, Weixuan Peng, Bojia Zi, Yifeng Gao, Xianbiao Qi, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Artifact Detection, Benchmarking, Video Generation

Recent advances in deep generative models have led to significant progress in video generation, yet the fidelity of AI-generated videos remains limited. Synthesized content often exhibits visual artifacts such as temporally inconsistent motion, physically implausible trajectories, unnatural object deformations, and local blurring that undermine realism and user trust. Accurate detection and spatial localization of these artifacts are crucial for both automated quality control and for guiding the development of improved generative models. However, the research community currently lacks a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for artifact localization in AI generated videos. Existing datasets either restrict themselves to video or frame level detection or lack the fine-grained spatial annotations necessary for evaluating localization methods. To address this gap, we introduce BrokenVideos, a benchmark dataset of 3,254 AI-generated videos with meticulously annotated, pixel-level masks highlighting regions of visual corruption. Each annotation is validated through detailed human inspection to ensure high quality ground truth. Our experiments show that training state of the art artifact detection models and multi modal large language models (MLLMs) on BrokenVideos significantly improves their ability to localize corrupted regions. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that BrokenVideos establishes a critical foundation for benchmarking and advancing research on artifact localization in generative video models. The dataset is available at: https://broken-video-detection-datetsets.github.io/Broken-Video-Detection-Datasets.github.io/.