pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Self-Improving Coding Agent
Authors: Maxime Robeyns, Martin Szummer, Laurence Aitchison
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

We demonstrate that an LLM coding agent, equipped with basic coding tools, can autonomously edit itself, and thereby improve its performance on benchmark tasks. We find performance gains from 17% to 53% on a random subset of SWE Bench Verified, with additional performance gains on LiveCodeBench, as well as synthetically generated agent benchmarks. Our work represents an advancement in the automated and open-ended design of agentic systems, and provides a reference agent framework for those seeking to post-train LLMs on tool use and other agentic tasks.
A Genetic Fuzzy-Enabled Framework on Robotic Manipulation for In-Space Servicing
Authors: Nathan Steffen, Wilhelm Louw, Nicholas Ernest, Timothy Arnett, Kelly Cohen
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Automation of robotic systems for servicing in cislunar space is becoming extremely important as the number of satellites in orbit increases. Safety is critical in performing satellite maintenance, so the control techniques utilized must be trusted in addition to being highly efficient. In this work, Genetic Fuzzy Trees are combined with the widely used LQR control scheme via Thales' TrUE AI Toolkit to create a trusted and efficient controller for a two-degree-of-freedom planar robotic manipulator that would theoretically be used to perform satellite maintenance. It was found that Genetic Fuzzy-LQR is 18.5% more performant than optimal LQR on average, and that it is incredibly robust to uncertainty.
M$^2$AD: Multi-Sensor Multi-System Anomaly Detection through Global Scoring and Calibrated Thresholding
Authors: Sarah Alnegheimish, Zelin He, Matthew Reimherr, Akash Chandrayan, Abhinav Pradhan, Luca D'Angelo
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

With the widespread availability of sensor data across industrial and operational systems, we frequently encounter heterogeneous time series from multiple systems. Anomaly detection is crucial for such systems to facilitate predictive maintenance. However, most existing anomaly detection methods are designed for either univariate or single-system multivariate data, making them insufficient for these complex scenarios. To address this, we introduce M$^2$AD, a framework for unsupervised anomaly detection in multivariate time series data from multiple systems. M$^2$AD employs deep models to capture expected behavior under normal conditions, using the residuals as indicators of potential anomalies. These residuals are then aggregated into a global anomaly score through a Gaussian Mixture Model and Gamma calibration. We theoretically demonstrate that this framework can effectively address heterogeneity and dependencies across sensors and systems. Empirically, M$^2$AD outperforms existing methods in extensive evaluations by 21% on average, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on a large-scale real-world case study on 130 assets in Amazon Fulfillment Centers. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/sarahmish/M2AD.
Position: Bayesian Statistics Facilitates Stakeholder Participation in Evaluation of Generative AI
Authors: Yanan Long
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Decision Making, Fairness, Position, Uncertainty Quantification

The evaluation of Generative AI (GenAI) systems plays a critical role in public policy and decision-making, yet existing methods are often limited by reliance on benchmark-driven, point-estimate comparisons that fail to capture uncertainty and broader societal impacts. This paper argues for the use of Bayesian statistics as a principled framework to address these challenges. Bayesian methods enable the integration of domain expertise through prior elicitation, allow for continuous learning from new data, and provide robust uncertainty quantification via posterior inference. We demonstrate how Bayesian inference can be applied to GenAI evaluation, particularly in incorporating stakeholder perspectives to enhance fairness, transparency, and reliability. Furthermore, we discuss Bayesian workflows as an iterative process for model validation and refinement, ensuring robust assessments of GenAI systems in dynamic, real-world contexts.
Integrating Symbolic Execution into the Fine-Tuning of Code-Generating LLMs
Authors: Marina Sakharova, Abhinav Anand, Mira Mezini
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in modern software development, enhancing productivity and accelerating development. This paper aims to investigate the fine-tuning of code-generating LLMs using Reinforcement Learning and Direct Preference Optimization, further improving their performance. To achieve this, we enhance the training data for the reward model with the help of symbolic execution techniques, ensuring more comprehensive and objective data. With symbolic execution, we create a custom dataset that better captures the nuances in code evaluation. Our reward models, fine-tuned on this dataset, demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline, CodeRL, in estimating the quality of generated code. Our code-generating LLMs, trained with the help of reward model feedback, achieve similar results compared to the CodeRL benchmark.
A Causal Convolutional Low-rank Representation Model for Imputation of Water Quality Data
Authors: Xin Liao, Bing Yang, Tan Dongli, Cai Yu
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Missing Values

The monitoring of water quality is a crucial part of environmental protection, and a large number of monitors are widely deployed to monitor water quality. Due to unavoidable factors such as data acquisition breakdowns, sensors and communication failures, water quality monitoring data suffers from missing values over time, resulting in High-Dimensional and Sparse (HDS) Water Quality Data (WQD). The simple and rough filling of the missing values leads to inaccurate results and affects the implementation of relevant measures. Therefore, this paper proposes a Causal convolutional Low-rank Representation (CLR) model for imputing missing WQD to improve the completeness of the WQD, which employs a two-fold idea: a) applying causal convolutional operation to consider the temporal dependence of the low-rank representation, thus incorporating temporal information to improve the imputation accuracy; and b) implementing a hyperparameters adaptation scheme to automatically adjust the best hyperparameters during model training, thereby reducing the tedious manual adjustment of hyper-parameters. Experimental studies on three real-world water quality datasets demonstrate that the proposed CLR model is superior to some of the existing state-of-the-art imputation models in terms of imputation accuracy and time cost, as well as indicating that the proposed model provides more reliable decision support for environmental monitoring.
Compute-Optimal LLMs Provably Generalize Better With Scale
Authors: Marc Finzi, Sanyam Kapoor, Diego Granziol, Anming Gu, Christopher De Sa, J. Zico Kolter, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Quantization

Why do larger language models generalize better? To investigate this question, we develop generalization bounds on the pretraining objective of large language models (LLMs) in the compute-optimal regime, as described by the Chinchilla scaling laws. We introduce a novel, fully empirical Freedman-type martingale concentration inequality that tightens existing bounds by accounting for the variance of the loss function. This generalization bound can be decomposed into three interpretable components: the number of parameters per token, the loss variance, and the quantization error at a fixed bitrate. As compute-optimal language models are scaled up, the number of parameters per data point remains constant; however, both the loss variance and the quantization error decrease, implying that larger models should have smaller generalization gaps. We examine why larger models tend to be more quantizable from an information theoretic perspective, showing that the rate at which they can integrate new information grows more slowly than their capacity on the compute-optimal frontier. From these findings we produce a scaling law for the generalization gap, with bounds that become predictably stronger with scale.
Support Evaluation for the TREC 2024 RAG Track: Comparing Human versus LLM Judges
Authors: Nandan Thakur, Ronak Pradeep, Shivani Upadhyay, Daniel Campos, Nick Craswell, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to generate answers with citations from source documents containing "ground truth", thereby reducing system hallucinations. A crucial factor in RAG evaluation is "support", whether the information in the cited documents supports the answer. To this end, we conducted a large-scale comparative study of 45 participant submissions on 36 topics to the TREC 2024 RAG Track, comparing an automatic LLM judge (GPT-4o) against human judges for support assessment. We considered two conditions: (1) fully manual assessments from scratch and (2) manual assessments with post-editing of LLM predictions. Our results indicate that for 56% of the manual from-scratch assessments, human and GPT-4o predictions match perfectly (on a three-level scale), increasing to 72% in the manual with post-editing condition. Furthermore, by carefully analyzing the disagreements in an unbiased study, we found that an independent human judge correlates better with GPT-4o than a human judge, suggesting that LLM judges can be a reliable alternative for support assessment. To conclude, we provide a qualitative analysis of human and GPT-4o errors to help guide future iterations of support assessment.
Zero-Shot, But at What Cost? Unveiling the Hidden Overhead of MILS's LLM-CLIP Framework for Image Captioning
Authors: Yassir Benhammou, Alessandro Tiberio, Gabriel Trautmann, Suman Kalyan
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

MILS (Multimodal Iterative LLM Solver) is a recently published framework that claims "LLMs can see and hear without any training" by leveraging an iterative, LLM-CLIP based approach for zero-shot image captioning. While this MILS approach demonstrates good performance, our investigation reveals that this success comes at a hidden, substantial computational cost due to its expensive multi-step refinement process. In contrast, alternative models such as BLIP-2 and GPT-4V achieve competitive results through a streamlined, single-pass approach. We hypothesize that the significant overhead inherent in MILS's iterative process may undermine its practical benefits, thereby challenging the narrative that zero-shot performance can be attained without incurring heavy resource demands. This work is the first to expose and quantify the trade-offs between output quality and computational cost in MILS, providing critical insights for the design of more efficient multimodal models.
Breast density in MRI: an AI-based quantification and relationship to assessment in mammography
Authors: Yaqian Chen, Lin Li, Hanxue Gu, Haoyu Dong, Derek L. Nguyen, Allan D. Kirk, Maciej A. Mazurowski, E. Shelley Hwang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Mammographic breast density is a well-established risk factor for breast cancer. Recently there has been interest in breast MRI as an adjunct to mammography, as this modality provides an orthogonal and highly quantitative assessment of breast tissue. However, its 3D nature poses analytic challenges related to delineating and aggregating complex structures across slices. Here, we applied an in-house machine-learning algorithm to assess breast density on normal breasts in three MRI datasets. Breast density was consistent across different datasets (0.104 - 0.114). Analysis across different age groups also demonstrated strong consistency across datasets and confirmed a trend of decreasing density with age as reported in previous studies. MR breast density was correlated with mammographic breast density, although some notable differences suggest that certain breast density components are captured only on MRI. Future work will determine how to integrate MR breast density with current tools to improve future breast cancer risk prediction.
Synergistic Weak-Strong Collaboration by Aligning Preferences
Authors: Yizhu Jiao, Xuchao Zhang, Zhaoyang Wang, Yubo Ma, Zhun Deng, Rujia Wang, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Jiawei Han, Huaxiu Yao
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in general reasoning yet struggle with specialized tasks requiring proprietary or domain-specific knowledge. Fine-tuning large models for every niche application is often infeasible due to black-box constraints and high computational overhead. To address this, we propose a collaborative framework that pairs a specialized weak model with a general strong model. The weak model, tailored to specific domains, produces initial drafts and background information, while the strong model leverages its advanced reasoning to refine these drafts, extending LLMs' capabilities to critical yet specialized tasks. To optimize this collaboration, we introduce a collaborative feedback to fine-tunes the weak model, which quantifies the influence of the weak model's contributions in the collaboration procedure and establishes preference pairs to guide preference tuning of the weak model. We validate our framework through experiments on three domains. We find that the collaboration significantly outperforms each model alone by leveraging complementary strengths. Moreover, aligning the weak model with the collaborative preference further enhances overall performance.
Existing Industry Practice for the EU AI Act's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice Safety and Security Measures
Authors: Lily Stelling, Mick Yang, Rokas Gipiškis, Leon Staufer, Ze Shen Chin, Siméon Campos, Michael Chen
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

This report provides a detailed comparison between the measures proposed in the EU AI Act's General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice (Third Draft) and current practices adopted by leading AI companies. As the EU moves toward enforcing binding obligations for GPAI model providers, the Code of Practice will be key to bridging legal requirements with concrete technical commitments. Our analysis focuses on the draft's Safety and Security section which is only relevant for the providers of the most advanced models (Commitments II.1-II.16) and excerpts from current public-facing documents quotes that are relevant to each individual measure. We systematically reviewed different document types - including companies' frontier safety frameworks and model cards - from over a dozen companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. This report is not meant to be an indication of legal compliance nor does it take any prescriptive viewpoint about the Code of Practice or companies' policies. Instead, it aims to inform the ongoing dialogue between regulators and GPAI model providers by surfacing evidence of precedent.
An Efficient Aerial Image Detection with Variable Receptive Fields
Authors: Liu Wenbin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Aerial object detection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) faces critical challenges including sub-10px targets, dense occlusions, and stringent computational constraints. Existing detectors struggle to balance accuracy and efficiency due to rigid receptive fields and redundant architectures. To address these limitations, we propose Variable Receptive Field DETR (VRF-DETR), a transformer-based detector incorporating three key components: 1) Multi-Scale Context Fusion (MSCF) module that dynamically recalibrates features through adaptive spatial attention and gated multi-scale fusion, 2) Gated Convolution (GConv) layer enabling parameter-efficient local-context modeling via depthwise separable operations and dynamic gating, and 3) Gated Multi-scale Fusion (GMCF) Bottleneck that hierarchically disentangles occluded objects through cascaded global-local interactions. Experiments on VisDrone2019 demonstrate VRF-DETR achieves 51.4\% mAP\textsubscript{50} and 31.8\% mAP\textsubscript{50:95} with only 13.5M parameters. This work establishes a new efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier for UAV-based detection tasks.
Landmark-Free Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Registration in Laparoscopic Liver Resection
Authors: Jun Zhou, Bingchen Gao, Kai Wang, Jialun Pei, Pheng-Ann Heng, Jing Qin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Self-Supervised Learning

Liver registration by overlaying preoperative 3D models onto intraoperative 2D frames can assist surgeons in perceiving the spatial anatomy of the liver clearly for a higher surgical success rate. Existing registration methods rely heavily on anatomical landmark-based workflows, which encounter two major limitations: 1) ambiguous landmark definitions fail to provide efficient markers for registration; 2) insufficient integration of intraoperative liver visual information in shape deformation modeling. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a landmark-free preoperative-to-intraoperative registration framework utilizing effective self-supervised learning, termed \ourmodel. This framework transforms the conventional 3D-2D workflow into a 3D-3D registration pipeline, which is then decoupled into rigid and non-rigid registration subtasks. \ourmodel~first introduces a feature-disentangled transformer to learn robust correspondences for recovering rigid transformations. Further, a structure-regularized deformation network is designed to adjust the preoperative model to align with the intraoperative liver surface. This network captures structural correlations through geometry similarity modeling in a low-rank transformer network. To facilitate the validation of the registration performance, we also construct an in-vivo registration dataset containing liver resection videos of 21 patients, called \emph{P2I-LReg}, which contains 346 keyframes that provide a global view of the liver together with liver mask annotations and calibrated camera intrinsic parameters. Extensive experiments and user studies on both synthetic and in-vivo datasets demonstrate the superiority and potential clinical applicability of our method.
Behavioral Universe Network (BUN): A Behavioral Information-Based Framework for Complex Systems
Authors: Wei Zhou, Ailiya Borjigin, Cong He
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Modern digital ecosystems feature complex, dynamic interactions among autonomous entities across diverse domains. Traditional models often separate agents and objects, lacking a unified foundation to capture their interactive behaviors. This paper introduces the Behavioral Universe Network (BUN), a theoretical framework grounded in the Agent-Interaction-Behavior (AIB) formalism. BUN treats subjects (active agents), objects (resources), and behaviors (operations) as first-class entities, all governed by a shared Behavioral Information Base (BIB). We detail the AIB core concepts and demonstrate how BUN leverages information-driven triggers, semantic enrichment, and adaptive rules to coordinate multi-agent systems. We highlight key benefits: enhanced behavior analysis, strong adaptability, and cross-domain interoperability. We conclude by positioning BUN as a promising foundation for next-generation digital governance and intelligent applications.
C2RUST-BENCH: A Minimized, Representative Dataset for C-to-Rust Transpilation Evaluation
Authors: Melih Sirlanci, Carter Yagemann, Zhiqiang Lin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Vulnerability Detection

Despite the effort in vulnerability detection over the last two decades, memory safety vulnerabilities continue to be a critical problem. Recent reports suggest that the key solution is to migrate to memory-safe languages. To this end, C-to-Rust transpilation becomes popular to resolve memory-safety issues in C programs. Recent works propose C-to-Rust transpilation frameworks; however, a comprehensive evaluation dataset is missing. Although one solution is to put together a large enough dataset, this increases the analysis time in automated frameworks as well as in manual efforts for some cases. In this work, we build a method to select functions from a large set to construct a minimized yet representative dataset to evaluate the C-to-Rust transpilation. We propose C2RUST-BENCH that contains 2,905 functions, which are representative of C-to-Rust transpilation, selected from 15,503 functions of real-world programs.
KGMEL: Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Multimodal Entity Linking
Authors: Juyeon Kim, Geon Lee, Taeuk Kim, Kijung Shin
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Knowledge Graphs, Reranking

Entity linking (EL) aligns textual mentions with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base, facilitating various applications such as semantic search and question answering. Recent advances in multimodal entity linking (MEL) have shown that combining text and images can reduce ambiguity and improve alignment accuracy. However, most existing MEL methods overlook the rich structural information available in the form of knowledge-graph (KG) triples. In this paper, we propose KGMEL, a novel framework that leverages KG triples to enhance MEL. Specifically, it operates in three stages: (1) Generation: Produces high-quality triples for each mention by employing vision-language models based on its text and images. (2) Retrieval: Learns joint mention-entity representations, via contrastive learning, that integrate text, images, and (generated or KG) triples to retrieve candidate entities for each mention. (3) Reranking: Refines the KG triples of the candidate entities and employs large language models to identify the best-matching entity for the mention. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KGMEL outperforms existing methods. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/KGMEL.
EasyEdit2: An Easy-to-use Steering Framework for Editing Large Language Models
Authors: Ziwen Xu, Shuxun Wang, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Mengru Wang, Xinle Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

In this paper, we introduce EasyEdit2, a framework designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. EasyEdit2 supports a wide range of test-time interventions, including safety, sentiment, personality, reasoning patterns, factuality, and language features. Unlike its predecessor, EasyEdit2 features a new architecture specifically designed for seamless model steering. It comprises key modules such as the steering vector generator and the steering vector applier, which enable automatic generation and application of steering vectors to influence the model's behavior without modifying its parameters. One of the main advantages of EasyEdit2 is its ease of use-users do not need extensive technical knowledge. With just a single example, they can effectively guide and adjust the model's responses, making precise control both accessible and efficient. Empirically, we report model steering performance across different LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of these techniques. We have released the source code on GitHub at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit along with a demonstration notebook. In addition, we provide a demo video at https://zjunlp.github.io/project/EasyEdit2/video for a quick introduction.