pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IncepFormerNet: A multi-scale multi-head attention network for SSVEP classification
Authors: Yan Huang, Yongru Chen, Lei Cao, Yongnian Cao, Xuechun yang, Yilin Dong, Tianyu Liu
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, SSVEP

In recent years, deep learning (DL) models have shown outstanding performance in EEG classification tasks, particularly in Steady-State Visually Evoked Potential(SSVEP)-based Brain-Computer-Interfaces(BCI)systems. DL methods have been successfully applied to SSVEP-BCI. This study proposes a new model called IncepFormerNet, which is a hybrid of the Inception and Transformer architectures. IncepFormerNet adeptly extracts multi-scale temporal information from time series data using parallel convolution kernels of varying sizes, accurately capturing the subtle variations and critical features within SSVEP signals.Furthermore, the model integrates the multi-head attention mechanism from the Transformer architecture, which not only provides insights into global dependencies but also significantly enhances the understanding and representation of complex patterns.Additionally, it takes advantage of filter bank techniques to extract features based on the spectral characteristics of SSVEP data. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conducted experiments on two public datasets, . The experimental results show that IncepFormerNet achieves an accuracy of 87.41 on Dataset 1 and 71.97 on Dataset 2 using a 1.0-second time window. To further verify the superiority of the proposed model, we compared it with other deep learning models, and the results indicate that our method achieves significantly higher accuracy than the others.The source codes in this work are available at: https://github.com/CECNL/SSVEP-DAN.
Towards a perturbation-based explanation for medical AI as differentiable programs
Authors: Takeshi Abe, Yoshiyuki Asai
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Recent advancement in machine learning algorithms reaches a point where medical devices can be equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) models for diagnostic support and routine automation in clinical settings. In medicine and healthcare, there is a particular demand for sufficient and objective explainability of the outcome generated by AI models. However, AI models are generally considered as black boxes due to their complexity, and the computational process leading to their response is often opaque. Although several methods have been proposed to explain the behavior of models by evaluating the importance of each feature in discrimination and prediction, they may suffer from biases and opacities arising from the scale and sampling protocol of the dataset used for training or testing. To overcome the shortcomings of existing methods, we explore an alternative approach to provide an objective explanation of AI models that can be defined independently of the learning process and does not require additional data. As a preliminary study for this direction of research, this work examines a numerical availability of the Jacobian matrix of deep learning models that measures how stably a model responses against small perturbations added to the input. The indicator, if available, are calculated from a trained AI model for a given target input. This is a first step towards a perturbation-based explanation, which will assist medical practitioners in understanding and interpreting the response of the AI model in its clinical application.
Enhancing Cognition and Explainability of Multimodal Foundation Models with Self-Synthesized Data
Authors: Yucheng Shi, Quanzheng Li, Jin Sun, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Visual Recognition, Pneumonia Detection, Visual Reasoning

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown impressive capabilities in a wide range of visual tasks. However, they often struggle with fine-grained visual reasoning, failing to identify domain-specific objectives and provide justifiable explanations for their predictions. To address this, we propose a novel visual rejection sampling framework to improve the cognition and explainability of LMMs using self-synthesized data. Specifically, visual fine-tuning requires images, queries, and target answers. Our approach begins by synthesizing interpretable answers that include human-verifiable visual features. These features are based on expert-defined concepts, carefully selected based on their alignment with the image content. After each round of fine-tuning, we apply a reward model-free filtering mechanism to select the highest-quality interpretable answers for the next round of tuning. This iterative process of data synthesis and fine-tuning progressively improves the model's ability to generate accurate and reasonable explanations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving both the accuracy and explainability of specialized visual classification tasks.
EfficientPose 6D: Scalable and Efficient 6D Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Zixuan Fang, Thomas Pöllabauer, Tristan Wirth, Sarah Berkei, Volker Knauthe, Arjan Kuijper
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Computational Efficiency, Pose Estimation

In industrial applications requiring real-time feedback, such as quality control and robotic manipulation, the demand for high-speed and accurate pose estimation remains critical. Despite advances improving speed and accuracy in pose estimation, finding a balance between computational efficiency and accuracy poses significant challenges in dynamic environments. Most current algorithms lack scalability in estimation time, especially for diverse datasets, and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods are often too slow. This study focuses on developing a fast and scalable set of pose estimators based on GDRNPP to meet or exceed current benchmarks in accuracy and robustness, particularly addressing the efficiency-accuracy trade-off essential in real-time scenarios. We propose the AMIS algorithm to tailor the utilized model according to an application-specific trade-off between inference time and accuracy. We further show the effectiveness of the AMIS-based model choice on four prominent benchmark datasets (LM-O, YCB-V, T-LESS, and ITODD).
Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization for Networked Black-Box Systems: A Path to Greener Profits and Smarter Designs
Authors: Akshay Kudva, Wei-Ting Tang, Joel A. Paulson
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Navigate

Designing modern industrial systems requires balancing several competing objectives, such as profitability, resilience, and sustainability, while accounting for complex interactions between technological, economic, and environmental factors. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) methods are commonly used to navigate these tradeoffs, but selecting the appropriate algorithm to tackle these problems is often unclear, particularly when system representations vary from fully equation-based (white-box) to entirely data-driven (black-box) models. While grey-box MOO methods attempt to bridge this gap, they typically impose rigid assumptions on system structure, requiring models to conform to the underlying structural assumptions of the solver rather than the solver adapting to the natural representation of the system of interest. In this chapter, we introduce a unifying approach to grey-box MOO by leveraging network representations, which provide a general and flexible framework for modeling interconnected systems as a series of function nodes that share various inputs and outputs. Specifically, we propose MOBONS, a novel Bayesian optimization-inspired algorithm that can efficiently optimize general function networks, including those with cyclic dependencies, enabling the modeling of feedback loops, recycle streams, and multi-scale simulations - features that existing methods fail to capture. Furthermore, MOBONS incorporates constraints, supports parallel evaluations, and preserves the sample efficiency of Bayesian optimization while leveraging network structure for improved scalability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MOBONS through two case studies, including one related to sustainable process design. By enabling efficient MOO under general graph representations, MOBONS has the potential to significantly enhance the design of more profitable, resilient, and sustainable engineering systems.
A Finite Sample Analysis of Distributional TD Learning with Linear Function Approximation
Authors: Yang Peng, Kaicheng Jin, Liangyu Zhang, Zhihua Zhang
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributional Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The aim of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a discounted Markov decision process for a given policy {\pi}. Previous works on statistical analysis of distributional TD learning mainly focus on the tabular case. In contrast, we first consider the linear function approximation setting and derive sharp finite-sample rates. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the sample complexity of linear distributional TD learning matches that of classic linear TD learning. This implies that, with linear function approximation, learning the full distribution of the return from streaming data is no more difficult than learning its expectation (value function). To derive tight sample complexity bounds, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the linear-categorical Bellman equation and employ the exponential stability arguments for products of random matrices. Our results provide new insights into the statistical efficiency of distributional reinforcement learning algorithms.
Bayesian SegNet for Semantic Segmentation with Improved Interpretation of Microstructural Evolution During Irradiation of Materials
Authors: Marjolein Oostrom, Alex Hagen, Nicole LaHaye, Karl Pazdernik
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

Understanding the relationship between the evolution of microstructures of irradiated LiAlO2 pellets and tritium diffusion, retention and release could improve predictions of tritium-producing burnable absorber rod performance. Given expert-labeled segmented images of irradiated and unirradiated pellets, we trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to segment images into defect, grain, and boundary classes. Qualitative microstructural information was calculated from these segmented images to facilitate the comparison of unirradiated and irradiated pellets. We tested modifications to improve the sensitivity of the model, including incorporating meta-data into the model and utilizing uncertainty quantification. The predicted segmentation was similar to the expert-labeled segmentation for most methods of microstructural qualification, including pixel proportion, defect area, and defect density. Overall, the high performance metrics for the best models for both irradiated and unirradiated images shows that utilizing neural network models is a viable alternative to expert-labeled images.
Evaluating Sakana's AI Scientist for Autonomous Research: Wishful Thinking or an Emerging Reality Towards 'Artificial Research Intelligence' (ARI)?
Authors: Joeran Beel, Min-Yen Kan, Moritz Baumgart
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

A major step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Super Intelligence is AI's ability to autonomously conduct research - what we term Artificial Research Intelligence (ARI). If machines could generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and write research papers without human intervention, it would transform science. Sakana recently introduced the 'AI Scientist', claiming to conduct research autonomously, i.e. they imply to have achieved what we term Artificial Research Intelligence (ARI). The AI Scientist gained much attention, but a thorough independent evaluation has yet to be conducted. Our evaluation of the AI Scientist reveals critical shortcomings. The system's literature reviews produced poor novelty assessments, often misclassifying established concepts (e.g., micro-batching for stochastic gradient descent) as novel. It also struggles with experiment execution: 42% of experiments failed due to coding errors, while others produced flawed or misleading results. Code modifications were minimal, averaging 8% more characters per iteration, suggesting limited adaptability. Generated manuscripts were poorly substantiated, with a median of five citations, most outdated (only five of 34 from 2020 or later). Structural errors were frequent, including missing figures, repeated sections, and placeholder text like 'Conclusions Here'. Some papers contained hallucinated numerical results. Despite these flaws, the AI Scientist represents a leap forward in research automation. It generates full research manuscripts with minimal human input, challenging expectations of AI-driven science. Many reviewers might struggle to distinguish its work from human researchers. While its quality resembles a rushed undergraduate paper, its speed and cost efficiency are unprecedented, producing a full paper for USD 6 to 15 with 3.5 hours of human involvement, far outpacing traditional researchers.
Efficient AI in Practice: Training and Deployment of Efficient LLMs for Industry Applications
Authors: Kayhan Behdin, Yun Dai, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Aman Gupta, Qingquan Song, Shao Tang, Hejian Sang, Gregory Dexter, Sirou Zhu, Siyu Zhu, Tejas Dharamsi, Maziar Sanjabi, Vignesh Kothapalli, Hamed Firooz, Zhoutong Fu, Yihan Cao, Pin-Lun Hsu, Fedor Borisyuk, Zhipeng Wang, Rahul Mazumder, Natesh Pillai, Luke Simon
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of industrial applications, from search and recommendations to generative tasks. Although scaling laws indicate that larger models generally yield better generalization and performance, their substantial computational requirements often render them impractical for many real-world scenarios at scale. In this paper, we present methods and insights for training small language models (SLMs) that deliver high performance and efficiency in deployment. We focus on two key techniques: (1) knowledge distillation and (2) model compression via quantization and pruning. These approaches enable SLMs to retain much of the quality of their larger counterparts while significantly reducing training, serving costs, and latency. We detail the impact of these techniques on a variety of use cases at a large professional social network platform and share deployment lessons - including hardware optimization strategies that enhance speed and throughput for both predictive and reasoning-based applications.
CrossFuse: Learning Infrared and Visible Image Fusion by Cross-Sensor Top-K Vision Alignment and Beyond
Authors: Yukai Shi, Cidan Shi, Zhipeng Weng, Yin Tian, Xiaoyu Xian, Liang Lin
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Infrared And Visible Image Fusion, Self-Supervised Learning

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is increasingly applied in critical fields such as video surveillance and autonomous driving systems. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based fusion methods. However, these models frequently encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) scenes in real-world applications, which severely impact their performance and reliability. Therefore, addressing the challenge of OOD data is crucial for the safe deployment of these models in open-world environments. Unlike existing research, our focus is on the challenges posed by OOD data in real-world applications and on enhancing the robustness and generalization of models. In this paper, we propose an infrared-visible fusion framework based on Multi-View Augmentation. For external data augmentation, Top-k Selective Vision Alignment is employed to mitigate distribution shifts between datasets by performing RGB-wise transformations on visible images. This strategy effectively introduces augmented samples, enhancing the adaptability of the model to complex real-world scenarios. Additionally, for internal data augmentation, self-supervised learning is established using Weak-Aggressive Augmentation. This enables the model to learn more robust and general feature representations during the fusion process, thereby improving robustness and generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance and robustness across various conditions and environments. Our approach significantly enhances the reliability and stability of IVIF tasks in practical applications.
Generalization Error of $f$-Divergence Stabilized Algorithms via Duality
Authors: Francisco Daunas, Iñaki Esnaola, Samir M. Perlaza, Gholamali Aminian
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

The solution to empirical risk minimization with $f$-divergence regularization (ERM-$f$DR) is extended to constrained optimization problems, establishing conditions for equivalence between the solution and constraints. A dual formulation of ERM-$f$DR is introduced, providing a computationally efficient method to derive the normalization function of the ERM-$f$DR solution. This dual approach leverages the Legendre-Fenchel transform and the implicit function theorem, enabling explicit characterizations of the generalization error for general algorithms under mild conditions, and another for ERM-$f$DR solutions.
Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Robust to Reflective Surface Leveraged by Triplet Mining
Authors: Wonhyeok Choi, Kyumin Hwang, Wei Peng, Minwoo Choi, Sunghoon Im
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Knowledge Distillation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Triplet

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SSMDE) aims to predict the dense depth map of a monocular image, by learning depth from RGB image sequences, eliminating the need for ground-truth depth labels. Although this approach simplifies data acquisition compared to supervised methods, it struggles with reflective surfaces, as they violate the assumptions of Lambertian reflectance, leading to inaccurate training on such surfaces. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel training strategy for an SSMDE by leveraging triplet mining to pinpoint reflective regions at the pixel level, guided by the camera geometry between different viewpoints. The proposed reflection-aware triplet mining loss specifically penalizes the inappropriate photometric error minimization on the localized reflective regions while preserving depth accuracy in non-reflective areas. We also incorporate a reflection-aware knowledge distillation method that enables a student model to selectively learn the pixel-level knowledge from reflective and non-reflective regions. This results in robust depth estimation across areas. Evaluation results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method effectively enhances depth quality on reflective surfaces and outperforms state-of-the-art SSMDE baselines.
Confidence Estimation via Sequential Likelihood Mixing
Authors: Johannes Kirschner, Andreas Krause, Michele Meziu, Mojmir Mutny
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

We present a universal framework for constructing confidence sets based on sequential likelihood mixing. Building upon classical results from sequential analysis, we provide a unifying perspective on several recent lines of work, and establish fundamental connections between sequential mixing, Bayesian inference and regret inequalities from online estimation. The framework applies to any realizable family of likelihood functions and allows for non-i.i.d. data and anytime validity. Moreover, the framework seamlessly integrates standard approximate inference techniques, such as variational inference and sampling-based methods, and extends to misspecified model classes, while preserving provable coverage guarantees. We illustrate the power of the framework by deriving tighter confidence sequences for classical settings, including sequential linear regression and sparse estimation, with simplified proofs.
Internal Incoherency Scores for Constraint-based Causal Discovery Algorithms
Authors: Sofia Faltenbacher, jonas Wahl, Rebecca Herman, Jakob Runge
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Causal discovery aims to infer causal graphs from observational or experimental data. Methods such as the popular PC algorithm are based on conditional independence testing and utilize enabling assumptions, such as the faithfulness assumption, for their inferences. In practice, these assumptions, as well as the functional assumptions inherited from the chosen conditional independence test, are typically taken as a given and not further tested for their validity on the data. In this work, we propose internal coherency scores that allow testing for assumption violations and finite sample errors, whenever detectable without requiring ground truth or further statistical tests. We provide a complete classification of erroneous results, including a distinction between detectable and undetectable errors, and prove that the detectable erroneous results can be measured by our scores. We illustrate our coherency scores on the PC algorithm with simulated and real-world datasets, and envision that testing for internal coherency can become a standard tool in applying constraint-based methods, much like a suite of tests is used to validate the assumptions of classical regression analysis.
Multi-Objective Causal Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Shriya Bhatija, Paul-David Zuercher, Jakob Thumm, Thomas Bohné
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Decision Making

In decision-making problems, the outcome of an intervention often depends on the causal relationships between system components and is highly costly to evaluate. In such settings, causal Bayesian optimization (CBO) can exploit the causal relationships between the system variables and sequentially perform interventions to approach the optimum with minimal data. Extending CBO to the multi-outcome setting, we propose Multi-Objective Causal Bayesian Optimization (MO-CBO), a paradigm for identifying Pareto-optimal interventions within a known multi-target causal graph. We first derive a graphical characterization for potentially optimal sets of variables to intervene upon. Showing that any MO-CBO problem can be decomposed into several traditional multi-objective optimization tasks, we then introduce an algorithm that sequentially balances exploration across these tasks using relative hypervolume improvement. The proposed method will be validated on both synthetic and real-world causal graphs, demonstrating its superiority over traditional (non-causal) multi-objective Bayesian optimization in settings where causal information is available.