pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedRE: Robust and Effective Federated Learning with Privacy Preference
Authors: Tianzhe Xiao, Yichen Li, Yu Zhou, Yining Qi, Yi Liu, Wei Wang, Haozhao Wang, Yi Wang, Ruixuan Li
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Despite Federated Learning (FL) employing gradient aggregation at the server for distributed training to prevent the privacy leakage of raw data, private information can still be divulged through the analysis of uploaded gradients from clients. Substantial efforts have been made to integrate local differential privacy (LDP) into the system to achieve a strict privacy guarantee. However, existing methods fail to take practical issues into account by merely perturbing each sample with the same mechanism while each client may have their own privacy preferences on privacy-sensitive information (PSI), which is not uniformly distributed across the raw data. In such a case, excessive privacy protection from private-insensitive information can additionally introduce unnecessary noise, which may degrade the model performance. In this work, we study the PSI within data and develop FedRE, that can simultaneously achieve robustness and effectiveness benefits with LDP protection. More specifically, we first define PSI with regard to the privacy preferences of each client. Then, we optimize the LDP by allocating less privacy budget to gradients with higher PSI in a layer-wise manner, thus providing a stricter privacy guarantee for PSI. Furthermore, to mitigate the performance degradation caused by LDP, we design a parameter aggregation mechanism based on the distribution of the perturbed information. We conducted experiments with text tamper detection on T-SROIE and DocTamper datasets, and FedRE achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Fairness Perceptions in Regression-based Predictive Models
Authors: Mukund Telukunta, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla, Morgan Stuart, Casey Canfield
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, regression

Regression-based predictive analytics used in modern kidney transplantation is known to inherit biases from training data. This leads to social discrimination and inefficient organ utilization, particularly in the context of a few social groups. Despite this concern, there is limited research on fairness in regression and its impact on organ utilization and placement. This paper introduces three novel divergence-based group fairness notions: (i) independence, (ii) separation, and (iii) sufficiency to assess the fairness of regression-based analytics tools. In addition, fairness preferences are investigated from crowd feedback, in order to identify a socially accepted group fairness criterion for evaluating these tools. A total of 85 participants were recruited from the Prolific crowdsourcing platform, and a Mixed-Logit discrete choice model was used to model fairness feedback and estimate social fairness preferences. The findings clearly depict a strong preference towards the separation and sufficiency fairness notions, and that the predictive analytics is deemed fair with respect to gender and race groups, but unfair in terms of age groups.
Physics-informed solution reconstruction in elasticity and heat transfer using the explicit constraint force method
Authors: Conor Rowan, Kurt Maute, Alireza Doostan
Date: 2025-05-08 00:00:00

One use case of ``physics-informed neural networks'' (PINNs) is solution reconstruction, which aims to estimate the full-field state of a physical system from sparse measurements. Parameterized governing equations of the system are used in tandem with the measurements to regularize the regression problem. However, in real-world solution reconstruction problems, the parameterized governing equation may be inconsistent with the physical phenomena that give rise to the measurement data. We show that due to assuming consistency between the true and parameterized physics, PINNs-based approaches may fail to satisfy three basic criteria of interpretability, robustness, and data consistency. As we argue, these criteria ensure that (i) the quality of the reconstruction can be assessed, (ii) the reconstruction does not depend strongly on the choice of physics loss, and (iii) that in certain situations, the physics parameters can be uniquely recovered. In the context of elasticity and heat transfer, we demonstrate how standard formulations of the physics loss and techniques for constraining the solution to respect the measurement data lead to different ``constraint forces" -- which we define as additional source terms arising from the constraints -- and that these constraint forces can significantly influence the reconstructed solution. To avoid the potentially substantial influence of the choice of physics loss and method of constraint enforcement on the reconstructed solution, we propose the ``explicit constraint force method'' (ECFM) to gain control of the source term introduced by the constraint. We then show that by satisfying the criteria of interpretability, robustness, and data consistency, this approach leads to more predictable and customizable reconstructions from noisy measurement data, even when the parameterization of the missing physics is inconsistent with the measured system.
HiPerRAG: High-Performance Retrieval Augmented Generation for Scientific Insights
Authors: Ozan Gokdemir, Carlo Siebenschuh, Alexander Brace, Azton Wells, Brian Hsu, Kyle Hippe, Priyanka V. Setty, Aswathy Ajith, J. Gregory Pauloski, Varuni Sastry, Sam Foreman, Huihuo Zheng, Heng Ma, Bharat Kale, Nicholas Chia, Thomas Gibbs, Michael E. Papka, Thomas Brettin, Francis J. Alexander, Anima Anandkumar, Ian Foster, Rick Stevens, Venkatram Vishwanath, Arvind Ramanathan
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Contrastive Learning, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The volume of scientific literature is growing exponentially, leading to underutilized discoveries, duplicated efforts, and limited cross-disciplinary collaboration. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a way to assist scientists by improving the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing this influx of information. However, scaling RAG to handle millions of articles introduces significant challenges, including the high computational costs associated with parsing documents and embedding scientific knowledge, as well as the algorithmic complexity of aligning these representations with the nuanced semantics of scientific content. To address these issues, we introduce HiPerRAG, a RAG workflow powered by high performance computing (HPC) to index and retrieve knowledge from more than 3.6 million scientific articles. At its core are Oreo, a high-throughput model for multimodal document parsing, and ColTrast, a query-aware encoder fine-tuning algorithm that enhances retrieval accuracy by using contrastive learning and late-interaction techniques. HiPerRAG delivers robust performance on existing scientific question answering benchmarks and two new benchmarks introduced in this work, achieving 90% accuracy on SciQ and 76% on PubMedQA-outperforming both domain-specific models like PubMedGPT and commercial LLMs such as GPT-4. Scaling to thousands of GPUs on the Polaris, Sunspot, and Frontier supercomputers, HiPerRAG delivers million document-scale RAG workflows for unifying scientific knowledge and fostering interdisciplinary innovation.
Comparative Study of Generative Models for Early Detection of Failures in Medical Devices
Authors: Binesh Sadanandan, Bahareh Arghavani Nobar, Vahid Behzadan
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

The medical device industry has significantly advanced by integrating sophisticated electronics like microchips and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to enhance the safety and usability of life-saving devices. These complex electro-mechanical systems, however, introduce challenging failure modes that are not easily detectable with conventional methods. Effective fault detection and mitigation become vital as reliance on such electronics grows. This paper explores three generative machine learning-based approaches for fault detection in medical devices, leveraging sensor data from surgical staplers,a class 2 medical device. Historically considered low-risk, these devices have recently been linked to an increasing number of injuries and fatalities. The study evaluates the performance and data requirements of these machine-learning approaches, highlighting their potential to enhance device safety.
Steerable Scene Generation with Post Training and Inference-Time Search
Authors: Nicholas Pfaff, Hongkai Dai, Sergey Zakharov, Shun Iwase, Russ Tedrake
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Generation

Training robots in simulation requires diverse 3D scenes that reflect the specific challenges of downstream tasks. However, scenes that satisfy strict task requirements, such as high-clutter environments with plausible spatial arrangement, are rare and costly to curate manually. Instead, we generate large-scale scene data using procedural models that approximate realistic environments for robotic manipulation, and adapt it to task-specific goals. We do this by training a unified diffusion-based generative model that predicts which objects to place from a fixed asset library, along with their SE(3) poses. This model serves as a flexible scene prior that can be adapted using reinforcement learning-based post training, conditional generation, or inference-time search, steering generation toward downstream objectives even when they differ from the original data distribution. Our method enables goal-directed scene synthesis that respects physical feasibility and scales across scene types. We introduce a novel MCTS-based inference-time search strategy for diffusion models, enforce feasibility via projection and simulation, and release a dataset of over 44 million SE(3) scenes spanning five diverse environments. Website with videos, code, data, and model weights: https://steerable-scene-generation.github.io/
Guide your favorite protein sequence generative model
Authors: Junhao Xiong, Hunter Nisonoff, Maria Lukarska, Ishan Gaur, Luke M. Oltrogge, David F. Savage, Jennifer Listgarten
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Generative machine learning models on sequences are transforming protein engineering. However, no principled framework exists for conditioning these models on auxiliary information, such as experimental data, in a plug-and-play manner. Herein, we present ProteinGuide -- a principled and general method for conditioning -- by unifying a broad class of protein generative models under a single framework. We demonstrate the applicability of ProteinGuide by guiding two protein generative models, ProteinMPNN and ESM3, to generate amino acid and structure token sequences, conditioned on several user-specified properties such as enhanced stability, enzyme classes, and CATH-labeled folds. We also used ProteinGuide with inverse folding models and our own experimental assay to design adenine base editor sequences for high activity.
Robust ML Auditing using Prior Knowledge
Authors: Jade Garcia Bourrée, Augustin Godinot, Martijn de Vos, Milos Vujasinovic, Sayan Biswas, Gilles Tredan, Erwan Le Merrer, Anne-Marie Kermarrec
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The rapid adoption of ML decision-making systems across products and services has led to a set of regulations on how such systems should behave and be built. Among all the technical challenges to enforcing these regulations, one crucial, yet under-explored problem is the risk of manipulation while these systems are being audited for fairness. This manipulation occurs when a platform deliberately alters its answers to a regulator to pass an audit without modifying its answers to other users. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to manipulation-proof auditing by taking into account the auditor's prior knowledge of the task solved by the platform. We first demonstrate that regulators must not rely on public priors (e.g. a public dataset), as platforms could easily fool the auditor in such cases. We then formally establish the conditions under which an auditor can prevent audit manipulations using prior knowledge about the ground truth. Finally, our experiments with two standard datasets exemplify the maximum level of unfairness a platform can hide before being detected as malicious. Our formalization and generalization of manipulation-proof auditing with a prior opens up new research directions for more robust fairness audits.
Prediction via Shapley Value Regression
Authors: Amr AlKhatib, Roman Bresson, Henrik Boström, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Prediction, regression

Shapley values have several desirable, theoretically well-supported, properties for explaining black-box model predictions. Traditionally, Shapley values are computed post-hoc, leading to additional computational cost at inference time. To overcome this, a novel method, called ViaSHAP, is proposed, that learns a function to compute Shapley values, from which the predictions can be derived directly by summation. Two approaches to implement the proposed method are explored; one based on the universal approximation theorem and the other on the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. Results from a large-scale empirical investigation are presented, showing that ViaSHAP using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks performs on par with state-of-the-art algorithms for tabular data. It is also shown that the explanations of ViaSHAP are significantly more accurate than the popular approximator FastSHAP on both tabular data and images.
Primal-dual algorithm for contextual stochastic combinatorial optimization
Authors: Louis Bouvier, Thibault Prunet, Vincent Leclère, Axel Parmentier
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Imitation Learning, Stochastic Optimization

This paper introduces a novel approach to contextual stochastic optimization, integrating operations research and machine learning to address decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional methods often fail to leverage contextual information, which underscores the necessity for new algorithms. In this study, we utilize neural networks with combinatorial optimization layers to encode policies. Our goal is to minimize the empirical risk, which is estimated from past data on uncertain parameters and contexts. To that end, we present a surrogate learning problem and a generic primal-dual algorithm that is applicable to various combinatorial settings in stochastic optimization. Our approach extends classic Fenchel-Young loss results and introduces a new regularization method using sparse perturbations on the distribution simplex. This allows for tractable updates in the original space and can accommodate diverse objective functions. We demonstrate the linear convergence of our algorithm under certain conditions and provide a bound on the non-optimality of the resulting policy in terms of the empirical risk. Experiments on a contextual stochastic minimum weight spanning tree problem show that our algorithm is efficient and scalable, achieving performance comparable to imitation learning of solutions computed using an expensive Lagrangian-based heuristic.
SetONet: A Deep Set-based Operator Network for Solving PDEs with permutation invariant variable input sampling
Authors: Stepan Tretiakov, Xingjian Li, Krishna Kumar
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

Neural operators, particularly the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), have shown promise in learning mappings between function spaces for solving differential equations. However, standard DeepONet requires input functions to be sampled at fixed locations, limiting its applicability in scenarios with variable sensor configurations, missing data, or irregular grids. We introduce the Set Operator Network (SetONet), a novel architecture that integrates Deep Sets principles into the DeepONet framework to address this limitation. The core innovation lies in the SetONet branch network, which processes the input function as an unordered \emph{set} of location-value pairs. This design ensures permutation invariance with respect to the input points, making SetONet inherently robust to variations in the number and locations of sensors. SetONet learns richer, spatially-aware input representations by explicitly processing spatial coordinates and function values. We demonstrate SetONet's effectiveness on several benchmark problems, including derivative/anti-derivative operators, 1D Darcy flow, and 2D elasticity. Results show that SetONet successfully learns operators under variable input sampling conditions where standard DeepONet fails. Furthermore, SetONet is architecturally robust to sensor drop-off; unlike standard DeepONet, which requires methods like interpolation to function with missing data. Notably, SetONet can achieve comparable or improved accuracy over DeepONet on fixed grids, particularly for nonlinear problems, likely due to its enhanced input representation. SetONet provides a flexible and robust extension to the neural operator toolkit, significantly broadening the applicability of operator learning to problems with variable or incomplete input data.
Conformal Prediction with Corrupted Labels: Uncertain Imputation and Robust Re-weighting
Authors: Shai Feldman, Stephen Bates, Yaniv Romano
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Imputation, Missing Labels, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

We introduce a framework for robust uncertainty quantification in situations where labeled training data are corrupted, through noisy or missing labels. We build on conformal prediction, a statistical tool for generating prediction sets that cover the test label with a pre-specified probability. The validity of conformal prediction, however, holds under the i.i.d assumption, which does not hold in our setting due to the corruptions in the data. To account for this distribution shift, the privileged conformal prediction (PCP) method proposed leveraging privileged information (PI) -- additional features available only during training -- to re-weight the data distribution, yielding valid prediction sets under the assumption that the weights are accurate. In this work, we analyze the robustness of PCP to inaccuracies in the weights. Our analysis indicates that PCP can still yield valid uncertainty estimates even when the weights are poorly estimated. Furthermore, we introduce uncertain imputation (UI), a new conformal method that does not rely on weight estimation. Instead, we impute corrupted labels in a way that preserves their uncertainty. Our approach is supported by theoretical guarantees and validated empirically on both synthetic and real benchmarks. Finally, we show that these techniques can be integrated into a triply robust framework, ensuring statistically valid predictions as long as at least one underlying method is valid.
Characterizing and Efficiently Accelerating Multimodal Generation Model Inference
Authors: Yejin Lee, Anna Sun, Basil Hosmer, Bilge Acun, Can Balioglu, Changhan Wang, Charles David Hernandez, Christian Puhrsch, Daniel Haziza, Driss Guessous, Francisco Massa, Jacob Kahn, Jeffrey Wan, Jeremy Reizenstein, Jiaqi Zhai, Joe Isaacson, Joel Schlosser, Juan Pino, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Leonid Shamis, Linjian Ma, Min-Jae Hwang, Mingda Chen, Mostafa Elhoushi, Pedro Rodriguez, Ram Pasunuru, Scott Yih, Sravya Popuri, Xing Liu, Carole-Jean Wu
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, multimodal generation

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is revolutionizing the computing industry. Not only its applications have broadened to various sectors but also poses new system design and optimization opportunities. The technology is capable of understanding and responding in multiple modalities. However, the advanced capability currently comes with significant system resource demands. To sustainably scale generative AI capabilities to billions of users in the world, inference must be fast and efficient. This paper pinpoints key system design and optimization opportunities by characterizing a family of emerging multi-modal generation models on real systems. Auto-regressive token generation is a critical latency performance bottleneck, typically dominated by GPU idle time. In addition to memory-intensive attention across the generative AI models, linear operations constitute significant inference latency due to the feed forward networks in Transformer-based models. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optimization levers, spanning from applications to system software and hardware, set a 3.88x better baseline.
Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards
Authors: Yuxin Zhang, Meihao Fan, Ju Fan, Mingyang Yi, Yuyu Luo, Jian Tan, Guoliang Li
Date: 2025-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved performance on the Text-to-SQL task by leveraging their powerful reasoning capabilities. To enhance accuracy during the reasoning process, external Process Reward Models (PRMs) can be introduced during training and inference to provide fine-grained supervision. However, if misused, PRMs may distort the reasoning trajectory and lead to suboptimal or incorrect SQL generation. To address this challenge, we propose Reward-SQL, a framework that systematically explores how to incorporate PRMs into the Text-to-SQL reasoning process effectively. Our approach follows a "cold start, then PRM supervision" paradigm. Specifically, we first train the model to decompose SQL queries into structured stepwise reasoning chains using common table expressions (Chain-of-CTEs), establishing a strong and interpretable reasoning baseline. Then, we investigate four strategies for integrating PRMs, and find that combining PRM as an online training signal (e.g.,GRPO) with PRM-guided inference (e.g., best-of-N sampling) yields the best results. Empirically, on the BIRD benchmark, Reward-SQL enables models supervised by PRM (7B) to achieve a 13.1% performance gain across various guidance strategies. Notably, our GRPO-aligned policy model based on Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct achieves 68.9% accuracy on the BIRD development set, outperforming all baseline methods under the same model size. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Reward-SQL in leveraging reward-based supervision for Text-to-SQL reasoning.