pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Do Larger Language Models Imply Better Reasoning? A Pretraining Scaling Law for Reasoning
Authors: Xinyi Wang, Shawn Tan, Mingyu Jin, William Yang Wang, Rameswar Panda, Yikang Shen
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Memorization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks requiring complex reasoning. However, the effects of scaling on their reasoning abilities remain insufficiently understood. In this paper, we introduce a synthetic multihop reasoning environment designed to closely replicate the structure and distribution of real-world large-scale knowledge graphs. Our reasoning task involves completing missing edges in the graph, which requires advanced multi-hop reasoning and mimics real-world reasoning scenarios. To evaluate this, we pretrain language models (LMs) from scratch solely on triples from the incomplete graph and assess their ability to infer the missing edges. Interestingly, we observe that overparameterization can impair reasoning performance due to excessive memorization. We investigate different factors that affect this U-shaped loss curve, including graph structure, model size, and training steps. To predict the optimal model size for a specific knowledge graph, we find an empirical scaling that linearly maps the knowledge graph search entropy to the optimal model size. This work provides new insights into the relationship between scaling and reasoning in LLMs, shedding light on possible ways to optimize their performance for reasoning tasks.
Improved Compact Genetic Algorithms with Efficient Caching
Authors: Prasanta Dutta, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

Compact Genetic Algorithms (cGAs) are condensed variants of classical Genetic Algorithms (GAs) that use a probability vector representation of the population instead of the complete population. cGAs have been shown to significantly reduce the number of function evaluations required while producing outcomes similar to those of classical GAs. However, cGAs have a tendency to repeatedly generate the same chromosomes as they approach convergence, resulting in unnecessary evaluations of identical chromosomes. This article introduces the concept of caching in cGAs as a means of avoiding redundant evaluations of the same chromosomes. Our proposed approach operates equivalently to cGAs, but enhances the algorithm's time efficiency by reducing the number of function evaluations. We also present a data structure for efficient cache maintenance to ensure low overhead. The proposed caching approach has an asymptotically constant time complexity on average. The proposed method further generalizes the caching mechanism with higher selection pressure for elitism-based cGAs. We conduct a rigorous analysis based on experiments on benchmark optimization problems using two well-known cache replacement strategies. The results demonstrate that caching significantly reduces the number of function evaluations required while maintaining the same level of performance accuracy.
Low Rank Factorizations are Indirect Encodings for Deep Neuroevolution
Authors: Jack Garbus, Jordan Pollack
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Deep neuroevolution is a highly scalable alternative to reinforcement learning due to its unique ability to encode network updates in a small number of bytes. Recent insights from traditional deep learning indicate high-dimensional models possess intrinsic, low-rank structure. In this work, we introduce low-rank, factorized neuroevolution: an indirect encoding through which we can search a small space of low-rank factors that enforce underlying structure across a network's weights. We compare our approach with non-factorized networks of similar and smaller size to understand how much performance can be attributed to the smaller search space. We evaluate our method on a language modeling task using transformers, as well as continuous and discrete vision-based reinforcement learning tasks. Our study shows that low-rank, factorized neuroevolution outperforms or is competitive with non-factorized neuroevolution, performing notably well on language modeling. Our results also suggest deleterious factorized mutations have a stronger negative impact on performance than deleterious non-factorized mutations, which significantly reduces the runtime on environments with early termination for bad performers. More broadly, these results show how we can use insights from backpropgation-based methods to enhance neuroevolution
Heterogeneous Resource Allocation for Ensuring End-to-End Quality of Service in Multi-hop Integrated Access and Backhaul Network
Authors: Shuaifeng Zhang
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00

Faced with increasing network traffic demands, cell dense deployment is one of significant means to utilize spectrum resources efficiently to improve network capacity. Multi-hop integrated access and backhaul (IAB) architectures have emerged as a cost-effective solution for network densification. Meanwhile, dynamic time division duplex (D-TDD) is a promising solution to adapt to highly dynamic scenarios with asymmetric uplink and downlink traffic. Thus, dynamic resource allocation between backhaul and access links and high spectral efficiency under ensuring reliable transmission are two key objectives of IAB research. However, due to huge solution space, there are some challenges in multi-hop IAB with D-TDD if only an integrated optimization problem (IOP) is considered. To handle these challenges, we decompose the IOP into sub-problems to reduce the solution space. To tackle these sub-problems, we formulate them separately as the non-cooperative games and design the corresponding utility functions to guarantee the existence of Nash equilibrium solutions. Also, to achieve the system-wide solution, we propose a single-leader heterogeneous multi-follower Stackelberg-game-based resource allocation scheme, which can combine the solving results of all the sub-problems to get the IOP approximate solution. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve throughput performance while meeting spectrum energy efficiency constraints.
Computer Vision and Deep Learning for 4D Augmented Reality
Authors: Karthik Shivashankar
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Mixed Reality

The prospect of 4D video in Extended Reality (XR) platform is huge and exciting, it opens a whole new way of human computer interaction and the way we perceive the reality and consume multimedia. In this thesis, we have shown that feasibility of rendering 4D video in Microsoft mixed reality platform. This enables us to port any 3D performance capture from CVSSP into XR product like the HoloLens device with relative ease. However, if the 3D model is too complex and is made up of millions of vertices, the data bandwidth required to port the model is a severe limitation with the current hardware and communication system. Therefore, in this project we have also developed a compact representation of both shape and appearance of the 4d video sequence using deep learning models to effectively learn the compact representation of 4D video sequence and reconstruct it without affecting the shape and appearance of the video sequence.
OpenFACADES: An Open Framework for Architectural Caption and Attribute Data Enrichment via Street View Imagery
Authors: Xiucheng Liang, Jinheng Xie, Tianhong Zhao, Rudi Stouffs, Filip Biljecki
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Building properties, such as height, usage, and material composition, play a crucial role in spatial data infrastructures, supporting applications such as energy simulation, risk assessment, and environmental modeling. Despite their importance, comprehensive and high-quality building attribute data remain scarce in many urban areas. Recent advances have enabled the extraction and tagging of objective building attributes using remote sensing and street-level imagery. However, establishing a method and pipeline that integrates diverse open datasets, acquires holistic building imagery at scale, and infers comprehensive building attributes remains a significant challenge. Among the first, this study bridges the gaps by introducing OpenFACADES, an open framework that leverages multimodal crowdsourced data to enrich building profiles with both objective attributes and semantic descriptors through multimodal large language models. Our methodology proceeds in three major steps. First, we integrate street-level image metadata from Mapillary with OpenStreetMap geometries via isovist analysis, effectively identifying images that provide suitable vantage points for observing target buildings. Second, we automate the detection of building facades in panoramic imagery and tailor a reprojection approach to convert objects into holistic perspective views that approximate real-world observation. Third, we introduce an innovative approach that harnesses and systematically investigates the capabilities of open-source large vision-language models (VLMs) for multi-attribute prediction and open-vocabulary captioning in building-level analytics, leveraging a globally sourced dataset of 30,180 labeled images from seven cities. Evaluation shows that fine-tuned VLM excel in multi-attribute inference, outperforming single-attribute computer vision models and zero-shot ChatGPT-4o.
UAC: Uncertainty-Aware Calibration of Neural Networks for Gesture Detection
Authors: Farida Al Haddad, Yuxin Wang, Malcolm Mielle
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition

Artificial intelligence has the potential to impact safety and efficiency in safety-critical domains such as construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. For example, using sensor data from wearable devices, such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), human gestures can be detected while maintaining privacy, thereby ensuring that safety protocols are followed. However, strict safety requirements in these domains have limited the adoption of AI, since accurate calibration of predicted probabilities and robustness against out-of-distribution (OOD) data is necessary. This paper proposes UAC (Uncertainty-Aware Calibration), a novel two-step method to address these challenges in IMU-based gesture recognition. First, we present an uncertainty-aware gesture network architecture that predicts both gesture probabilities and their associated uncertainties from IMU data. This uncertainty is then used to calibrate the probabilities of each potential gesture. Second, an entropy-weighted expectation of predictions over multiple IMU data windows is used to improve accuracy while maintaining correct calibration. Our method is evaluated using three publicly available IMU datasets for gesture detection and is compared to three state-of-the-art calibration methods for neural networks: temperature scaling, entropy maximization, and Laplace approximation. UAC outperforms existing methods, achieving improved accuracy and calibration in both OOD and in-distribution scenarios. Moreover, we find that, unlike our method, none of the state-of-the-art methods significantly improve the calibration of IMU-based gesture recognition models. In conclusion, our work highlights the advantages of uncertainty-aware calibration of neural networks, demonstrating improvements in both calibration and accuracy for gesture detection using IMU data.
Morpheus: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning of Video Generative Models with Real Physical Experiments
Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Daniil Cherniavskii, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Antonios Tragoudaras, Antonios Vozikis, Thijmen Nijdam, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Mark Bodracska, Nicu Sebe, Efstratios Gavves
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Physical Commonsense Reasoning, Video Generation

Recent advances in image and video generation raise hopes that these models possess world modeling capabilities, the ability to generate realistic, physically plausible videos. This could revolutionize applications in robotics, autonomous driving, and scientific simulation. However, before treating these models as world models, we must ask: Do they adhere to physical conservation laws? To answer this, we introduce Morpheus, a benchmark for evaluating video generation models on physical reasoning. It features 80 real-world videos capturing physical phenomena, guided by conservation laws. Since artificial generations lack ground truth, we assess physical plausibility using physics-informed metrics evaluated with respect to infallible conservation laws known per physical setting, leveraging advances in physics-informed neural networks and vision-language foundation models. Our findings reveal that even with advanced prompting and video conditioning, current models struggle to encode physical principles despite generating aesthetically pleasing videos. All data, leaderboard, and code are open-sourced at our project page.
VARGPT-v1.1: Improve Visual Autoregressive Large Unified Model via Iterative Instruction Tuning and Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xianwei Zhuang, Yuxin Xie, Yufan Deng, Dongchao Yang, Liming Liang, Jinghan Ru, Yuguo Yin, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Instruction Following

In this work, we present VARGPT-v1.1, an advanced unified visual autoregressive model that builds upon our previous framework VARGPT. The model preserves the dual paradigm of next-token prediction for visual understanding and next-scale generation for image synthesis. Specifically, VARGPT-v1.1 integrates: (1) a novel training strategy combining iterative visual instruction tuning with reinforcement learning through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), (2) an expanded training corpus containing 8.3M visual-generative instruction pairs, (3) an upgraded language model backbone using Qwen2, (4) enhanced image generation resolution, and (5) emergent image editing capabilities without architectural modifications. These advancements enable VARGPT-v1.1 to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multimodal understanding and text-to-image instruction-following tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in both comprehension and generation metrics. Notably, through visual instruction tuning, the model acquires image editing functionality while maintaining architectural consistency with its predecessor, revealing the potential for unified visual understanding, generation, and editing. Our findings suggest that well-designed unified visual autoregressive models can effectively adopt flexible training strategies from large language models (LLMs), exhibiting promising scalability. The codebase and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/VARGPT-family/VARGPT-v1.1.
DiSRT-In-Bed: Diffusion-Based Sim-to-Real Transfer Framework for In-Bed Human Mesh Recovery
Authors: Jing Gao, Ce Zheng, Laszlo A. Jeni, Zackory Erickson
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Human Mesh Recovery

In-bed human mesh recovery can be crucial and enabling for several healthcare applications, including sleep pattern monitoring, rehabilitation support, and pressure ulcer prevention. However, it is difficult to collect large real-world visual datasets in this domain, in part due to privacy and expense constraints, which in turn presents significant challenges for training and deploying deep learning models. Existing in-bed human mesh estimation methods often rely heavily on real-world data, limiting their ability to generalize across different in-bed scenarios, such as varying coverings and environmental settings. To address this, we propose a Sim-to-Real Transfer Framework for in-bed human mesh recovery from overhead depth images, which leverages large-scale synthetic data alongside limited or no real-world samples. We introduce a diffusion model that bridges the gap between synthetic data and real data to support generalization in real-world in-bed pose and body inference scenarios. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating significant improvements in robustness and adaptability across diverse healthcare scenarios.
Comprehensive Relighting: Generalizable and Consistent Monocular Human Relighting and Harmonization
Authors: Junying Wang, Jingyuan Liu, Xin Sun, Krishna Kumar Singh, Zhixin Shu, He Zhang, Jimei Yang, Nanxuan Zhao, Tuanfeng Y. Wang, Simon S. Chen, Ulrich Neumann, Jae Shin Yoon
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

This paper introduces Comprehensive Relighting, the first all-in-one approach that can both control and harmonize the lighting from an image or video of humans with arbitrary body parts from any scene. Building such a generalizable model is extremely challenging due to the lack of dataset, restricting existing image-based relighting models to a specific scenario (e.g., face or static human). To address this challenge, we repurpose a pre-trained diffusion model as a general image prior and jointly model the human relighting and background harmonization in the coarse-to-fine framework. To further enhance the temporal coherence of the relighting, we introduce an unsupervised temporal lighting model that learns the lighting cycle consistency from many real-world videos without any ground truth. In inference time, our temporal lighting module is combined with the diffusion models through the spatio-temporal feature blending algorithms without extra training; and we apply a new guided refinement as a post-processing to preserve the high-frequency details from the input image. In the experiments, Comprehensive Relighting shows a strong generalizability and lighting temporal coherence, outperforming existing image-based human relighting and harmonization methods.
HALO: Human-Aligned End-to-end Image Retargeting with Layered Transformations
Authors: Yiran Xu, Siqi Xie, Zhuofang Li, Harris Shadmany, Yinxiao Li, Luciano Sbaiz, Miaosen Wang, Junjie Ke, Jose Lezama, Hang Qi, Han Zhang, Jesse Berent, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Irfan Essa, Jia-Bin Huang, Feng Yang
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retargeting

Image retargeting aims to change the aspect-ratio of an image while maintaining its content and structure with less visual artifacts. Existing methods still generate many artifacts or fail to maintain original content or structure. To address this, we introduce HALO, an end-to-end trainable solution for image retargeting. Since humans are more sensitive to distortions in salient areas than non-salient areas of an image, HALO decomposes the input image into salient/non-salient layers and applies different wrapping fields to different layers. To further minimize the structure distortion in the output images, we propose perceptual structure similarity loss which measures the structure similarity between input and output images and aligns with human perception. Both quantitative results and a user study on the RetargetMe dataset show that HALO achieves SOTA. Especially, our method achieves an 18.4% higher user preference compared to the baselines on average.
VIP: Video Inpainting Pipeline for Real World Human Removal
Authors: Huiming Sun, Yikang Li, Kangning Yang, Ruineng Li, Daitao Xing, Yangbo Xie, Lan Fu, Kaiyu Zhang, Ming Chen, Jiaming Ding, Jiang Geng, Jie Cai, Zibo Meng, Chiuman Ho
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Inpainting

Inpainting for real-world human and pedestrian removal in high-resolution video clips presents significant challenges, particularly in achieving high-quality outcomes, ensuring temporal consistency, and managing complex object interactions that involve humans, their belongings, and their shadows. In this paper, we introduce VIP (Video Inpainting Pipeline), a novel promptless video inpainting framework for real-world human removal applications. VIP enhances a state-of-the-art text-to-video model with a motion module and employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for progressive denoising in the latent space. Additionally, we implement an efficient human-and-belongings segmentation for precise mask generation. Sufficient experimental results demonstrate that VIP achieves superior temporal consistency and visual fidelity across diverse real-world scenarios, surpassing state-of-the-art methods on challenging datasets. Our key contributions include the development of the VIP pipeline, a reference frame integration technique, and the Dual-Fusion Latent Segment Refinement method, all of which address the complexities of inpainting in long, high-resolution video sequences.
Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy in Disentangling Representation and Adaptation Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Joel Sol, Shadi Alijani, Homayoun Najjaran
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This paper introduces DRANet-SWD, an extension of existing work that disentangles content and style representations of images for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). The approach builds upon DRANet by incorporating the sliced Wasserstein discrepancy (SWD) as a style loss instead of the traditional Gram matrix loss. The potential advantages of SWD over the Gram matrix loss for capturing style variations in domain adaptation are investigated. Experiments using digit classification datasets and driving scenario segmentation validate the method, demonstrating that DRANet-SWD enhances performance. Results indicate that SWD provides a more robust statistical comparison of feature distributions, leading to better style adaptation. These findings highlight the effectiveness of SWD in refining feature alignment and improving domain adaptation tasks across these benchmarks. Our code can be found here.
Attention-Aware Multi-View Pedestrian Tracking
Authors: Reef Alturki, Adrian Hilton, Jean-yves Guillemaut
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Pedestrian Detection

In spite of the recent advancements in multi-object tracking, occlusion poses a significant challenge. Multi-camera setups have been used to address this challenge by providing a comprehensive coverage of the scene. Recent multi-view pedestrian detection models have highlighted the potential of an early-fusion strategy, projecting feature maps of all views to a common ground plane or the Bird's Eye View (BEV), and then performing detection. This strategy has been shown to improve both detection and tracking performance. However, the perspective transformation results in significant distortion on the ground plane, affecting the robustness of the appearance features of the pedestrians. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel model that incorporates attention mechanisms in a multi-view pedestrian tracking scenario. Our model utilizes an early-fusion strategy for detection, and a cross-attention mechanism to establish robust associations between pedestrians in different frames, while efficiently propagating pedestrian features across frames, resulting in a more robust feature representation for each pedestrian. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models, with an IDF1 score of $96.1\%$ on Wildtrack dataset, and $85.7\%$ on MultiviewX dataset.