pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Chain-of-Modality: Learning Manipulation Programs from Multimodal Human Videos with Vision-Language-Models
Authors: Chen Wang, Fei Xia, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Ruohan Zhang, C. Karen Liu, Li Fei-Fei, Jie Tan, Jacky Liang
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Learning to perform manipulation tasks from human videos is a promising approach for teaching robots. However, many manipulation tasks require changing control parameters during task execution, such as force, which visual data alone cannot capture. In this work, we leverage sensing devices such as armbands that measure human muscle activities and microphones that record sound, to capture the details in the human manipulation process, and enable robots to extract task plans and control parameters to perform the same task. To achieve this, we introduce Chain-of-Modality (CoM), a prompting strategy that enables Vision Language Models to reason about multimodal human demonstration data -- videos coupled with muscle or audio signals. By progressively integrating information from each modality, CoM refines a task plan and generates detailed control parameters, enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks based on a single multimodal human video prompt. Our experiments show that CoM delivers a threefold improvement in accuracy for extracting task plans and control parameters compared to baselines, with strong generalization to new task setups and objects in real-world robot experiments. Videos and code are available at https://chain-of-modality.github.io
Adaptive AI decision interface for autonomous electronic material discovery
Authors: Yahao Dai, Henry Chan, Aikaterini Vriza, Fredrick Kim, Yunfei Wang, Wei Liu, Naisong Shan, Jing Xu, Max Weires, Yukun Wu, Zhiqiang Cao, C. Suzanne Miller, Ralu Divan, Xiaodan Gu, Chenhui Zhu, Sihong Wang, Jie Xu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

AI-powered autonomous experimentation (AI/AE) can accelerate materials discovery but its effectiveness for electronic materials is hindered by data scarcity from lengthy and complex design-fabricate-test-analyze cycles. Unlike experienced human scientists, even advanced AI algorithms in AI/AE lack the adaptability to make informative real-time decisions with limited datasets. Here, we address this challenge by developing and implementing an AI decision interface on our AI/AE system. The central element of the interface is an AI advisor that performs real-time progress monitoring, data analysis, and interactive human-AI collaboration for actively adapting to experiments in different stages and types. We applied this platform to an emerging type of electronic materials-mixed ion-electron conducting polymers (MIECPs) -- to engineer and study the relationships between multiscale morphology and properties. Using organic electrochemical transistors (OECT) as the testing-bed device for evaluating the mixed-conducting figure-of-merit -- the product of charge-carrier mobility and the volumetric capacitance ({\mu}C*), our adaptive AI/AE platform achieved a 150% increase in {\mu}C* compared to the commonly used spin-coating method, reaching 1,275 F cm-1 V-1 s-1 in just 64 autonomous experimental trials. A study of 10 statistically selected samples identifies two key structural factors for achieving higher volumetric capacitance: larger crystalline lamellar spacing and higher specific surface area, while also uncovering a new polymer polymorph in this material.
On the Definition of Robustness and Resilience of AI Agents for Real-time Congestion Management
Authors: Timothy Tjhay, Ricardo J. Bessa, Jose Paulos
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act defines robustness, resilience, and security requirements for high-risk sectors but lacks detailed methodologies for assessment. This paper introduces a novel framework for quantitatively evaluating the robustness and resilience of reinforcement learning agents in congestion management. Using the AI-friendly digital environment Grid2Op, perturbation agents simulate natural and adversarial disruptions by perturbing the input of AI systems without altering the actual state of the environment, enabling the assessment of AI performance under various scenarios. Robustness is measured through stability and reward impact metrics, while resilience quantifies recovery from performance degradation. The results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in identifying vulnerabilities and improving AI robustness and resilience for critical applications.
SAR Object Detection with Self-Supervised Pretraining and Curriculum-Aware Sampling
Authors: Yasin Almalioglu, Andrzej Kucik, Geoffrey French, Dafni Antotsiou, Alexander Adam, Cedric Archambeau
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Disaster Response, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Object detection in satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery holds immense potential in tasks such as urban monitoring and disaster response. However, the inherent complexities of SAR data and the scarcity of annotations present significant challenges in the advancement of object detection in this domain. Notably, the detection of small objects in satellite-borne SAR images poses a particularly intricate problem, because of the technology's relatively low spatial resolution and inherent noise. Furthermore, the lack of large labelled SAR datasets hinders the development of supervised deep learning-based object detection models. In this paper, we introduce TRANSAR, a novel self-supervised end-to-end vision transformer-based SAR object detection model that incorporates masked image pre-training on an unlabeled SAR image dataset that spans more than $25,700$ km\textsuperscript{2} ground area. Unlike traditional object detection formulation, our approach capitalises on auxiliary binary semantic segmentation, designed to segregate objects of interest during the post-tuning, especially the smaller ones, from the background. In addition, to address the innate class imbalance due to the disproportion of the object to the image size, we introduce an adaptive sampling scheduler that dynamically adjusts the target class distribution during training based on curriculum learning and model feedback. This approach allows us to outperform conventional supervised architecture such as DeepLabv3 or UNet, and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning-based arhitectures such as DPT, SegFormer or UperNet, as shown by extensive evaluations on benchmark SAR datasets.
Enhanced Pruning Strategy for Multi-Component Neural Architectures Using Component-Aware Graph Analysis
Authors: Ganesh Sundaram, Jonas Ulmen, Daniel Görges
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Deep neural networks (DNNs) deliver outstanding performance, but their complexity often prohibits deployment in resource-constrained settings. Comprehensive structured pruning frameworks based on parameter dependency analysis reduce model size with specific regard to computational performance. When applying them to Multi-Component Neural Architectures (MCNAs), they risk network integrity by removing large parameter groups. We introduce a component-aware pruning strategy, extending dependency graphs to isolate individual components and inter-component flows. This creates smaller, targeted pruning groups that conserve functional integrity. Demonstrated effectively on a control task, our approach achieves greater sparsity and reduced performance degradation, opening a path for optimizing complex, multi-component DNNs efficiently.
Recursive Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Paul Ghanem, Michael Potter, Owen Howell, Pau Closas, Alireza Ramezani, Deniz Erdogmus, Tales Imbiriba
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Inferring an adversary's goals from exhibited behavior is crucial for counterplanning and non-cooperative multi-agent systems in domains like cybersecurity, military, and strategy games. Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) methods based on maximum entropy principles show promise in recovering adversaries' goals but are typically offline, require large batch sizes with gradient descent, and rely on first-order updates, limiting their applicability in real-time scenarios. We propose an online Recursive Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (RDIRL) approach to recover the cost function governing the adversary actions and goals. Specifically, we minimize an upper bound on the standard Guided Cost Learning (GCL) objective using sequential second-order Newton updates, akin to the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), leading to a fast (in terms of convergence) learning algorithm. We demonstrate that RDIRL is able to recover cost and reward functions of expert agents in standard and adversarial benchmark tasks. Experiments on benchmark tasks show that our proposed approach outperforms several leading IRL algorithms.
Non-Uniform Class-Wise Coreset Selection: Characterizing Category Difficulty for Data-Efficient Transfer Learning
Authors: Hanyu Zhang, Zhen Xing, Wenxuan Yang, Chenxi Ma, Weimin Tan, Bo Yan
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Transfer Learning

As transfer learning models and datasets grow larger, efficient adaptation and storage optimization have become critical needs. Coreset selection addresses these challenges by identifying and retaining the most informative samples, constructing a compact subset for target domain training. However, current methods primarily rely on instance-level difficulty assessments, overlooking crucial category-level characteristics and consequently under-representing minority classes. To overcome this limitation, we propose Non-Uniform Class-Wise Coreset Selection (NUCS), a novel framework that integrates both class-level and instance-level criteria. NUCS automatically allocates data selection budgets for each class based on intrinsic category difficulty and adaptively selects samples within optimal difficulty ranges. By explicitly incorporating category-specific insights, our approach achieves a more balanced and representative coreset, addressing key shortcomings of prior methods. Comprehensive theoretical analysis validates the rationale behind adaptive budget allocation and sample selection, while extensive experiments across 14 diverse datasets and model architectures demonstrate NUCS's consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior accuracy and computational efficiency. Notably, on CIFAR100 and Food101, NUCS matches full-data training accuracy while retaining just 30% of samples and reducing computation time by 60%. Our work highlights the importance of characterizing category difficulty in coreset selection, offering a robust and data-efficient solution for transfer learning.
WildFireCan-MMD: A Multimodal Dataset for Classification of User-Generated Content During Wildfires in Canada
Authors: Braeden Sherritt, Isar Nejadgholi, Marzieh Amini
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Disaster Response

Rapid information access is vital during wildfires, yet traditional data sources are slow and costly. Social media offers real-time updates, but extracting relevant insights remains a challenge. We present WildFireCan-MMD, a new multimodal dataset of X posts from recent Canadian wildfires, annotated across twelve key themes. Evaluating both vision-language models and custom-trained classifiers, we show that while zero-shot prompting offers quick deployment, even simple trained models outperform them when labelled data is available. Our best-performing transformer-based fine-tuned model reaches 83% f-score, outperforming gpt4 by 23%. As a use case, we demonstrate how this model can be used to uncover trends during wildfires. Our findings highlight the enduring importance of tailored datasets and task-specific training. Importantly, such datasets should be localized, as disaster response requirements vary across regions and contexts.
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training
Authors: Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jiajie Xu, Jia Zhu, Hao Chen, Yao Zhao, Sirui Han, Xiaofang Zhou
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on multi-domain datasets, where domain sampling strategies significantly impact model performance due to varying domain importance across downstream tasks. Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. In this paper, we present Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling (DIDS). To ensure intra-domain consistency, a gradient clustering algorithm is proposed to group training data based on their learning effects, where a proxy language model and dimensionality reduction are employed to reduce computational overhead. To accurately measure domain impact, we develop a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) guided metric that quantifies how domain-specific parameter updates affect the model's output distributions on downstream tasks, with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, to determine optimal sampling ratios, DIDS combines both the FIM-guided domain impact assessment and loss learning trajectories that indicate domain-specific potential, while accounting for diminishing marginal returns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIDS achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency.
Neural Ganglion Sensors: Learning Task-specific Event Cameras Inspired by the Neural Circuit of the Human Retina
Authors: Haley M. So, Gordon Wetzstein
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Inspired by the data-efficient spiking mechanism of neurons in the human eye, event cameras were created to achieve high temporal resolution with minimal power and bandwidth requirements by emitting asynchronous, per-pixel intensity changes rather than conventional fixed-frame rate images. Unlike retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the human eye, however, which integrate signals from multiple photoreceptors within a receptive field to extract spatio-temporal features, conventional event cameras do not leverage local spatial context when deciding which events to fire. Moreover, the eye contains around 20 different kinds of RGCs operating in parallel, each attuned to different features or conditions. Inspired by this biological design, we introduce Neural Ganglion Sensors, an extension of traditional event cameras that learns task-specific spatio-temporal retinal kernels (i.e., RGC "events"). We evaluate our design on two challenging tasks: video interpolation and optical flow. Our results demonstrate that our biologically inspired sensing improves performance relative to conventional event cameras while reducing overall event bandwidth. These findings highlight the promise of RGC-inspired event sensors for edge devices and other low-power, real-time applications requiring efficient, high-resolution visual streams.
ICAS: IP Adapter and ControlNet-based Attention Structure for Multi-Subject Style Transfer Optimization
Authors: Fuwei Liu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Generating multi-subject stylized images remains a significant challenge due to the ambiguity in defining style attributes (e.g., color, texture, atmosphere, and structure) and the difficulty in consistently applying them across multiple subjects. Although recent diffusion-based text-to-image models have achieved remarkable progress, existing methods typically rely on computationally expensive inversion procedures or large-scale stylized datasets. Moreover, these methods often struggle with maintaining multi-subject semantic fidelity and are limited by high inference costs. To address these limitations, we propose ICAS (IP-Adapter and ControlNet-based Attention Structure), a novel framework for efficient and controllable multi-subject style transfer. Instead of full-model tuning, ICAS adaptively fine-tunes only the content injection branch of a pre-trained diffusion model, thereby preserving identity-specific semantics while enhancing style controllability. By combining IP-Adapter for adaptive style injection with ControlNet for structural conditioning, our framework ensures faithful global layout preservation alongside accurate local style synthesis. Furthermore, ICAS introduces a cyclic multi-subject content embedding mechanism, which enables effective style transfer under limited-data settings without the need for extensive stylized corpora. Extensive experiments show that ICAS achieves superior performance in structure preservation, style consistency, and inference efficiency, establishing a new paradigm for multi-subject style transfer in real-world applications.
Scaling Laws for Data-Efficient Visual Transfer Learning
Authors: Wenxuan Yang, Qingqu Wei, Chenxi Ma, Weimin Tan, Bo Yan
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Current scaling laws for visual AI models focus predominantly on large-scale pretraining, leaving a critical gap in understanding how performance scales for data-constrained downstream tasks. To address this limitation, this paper establishes the first practical framework for data-efficient scaling laws in visual transfer learning, addressing two fundamental questions: 1) How do scaling behaviors shift when downstream tasks operate with limited data? 2) What governs the efficacy of knowledge distillation under such constraints? Through systematic analysis of vision tasks across data regimes (1K-1M samples), we propose the distillation boundary theory, revealing a critical turning point in distillation efficiency: 1) Distillation superiority: In data-scarce conditions, distilled models significantly outperform their non-distillation counterparts, efficiently leveraging inherited knowledge to compensate for limited training samples. 2) Pre-training dominance: As pre-training data increases beyond a critical threshold, non-distilled models gradually surpass distilled versions, suggesting diminishing returns from knowledge inheritance when sufficient task-specific data becomes available. Empirical validation across various model scales (2.5M to 38M parameters) and data volumes demonstrate these performance inflection points, with error difference curves transitioning from positive to negative values at critical data thresholds, confirming our theoretical predictions. This work redefines scaling laws for data-limited regimes, bridging the knowledge gap between large-scale pretraining and practical downstream adaptation, addressing a critical barrier to understanding vision model scaling behaviors and optimizing computational resource allocation.
Harmony: A Unified Framework for Modality Incremental Learning
Authors: Yaguang Song, Xiaoshan Yang, Dongmei Jiang, YaoWei Wang, Changsheng Xu
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning

Incremental learning aims to enable models to continuously acquire knowledge from evolving data streams while preserving previously learned capabilities. While current research predominantly focuses on unimodal incremental learning and multimodal incremental learning where the modalities are consistent, real-world scenarios often present data from entirely new modalities, posing additional challenges. This paper investigates the feasibility of developing a unified model capable of incremental learning across continuously evolving modal sequences. To this end, we introduce a novel paradigm called Modality Incremental Learning (MIL), where each learning stage involves data from distinct modalities. To address this task, we propose a novel framework named Harmony, designed to achieve modal alignment and knowledge retention, enabling the model to reduce the modal discrepancy and learn from a sequence of distinct modalities, ultimately completing tasks across multiple modalities within a unified framework. Our approach introduces the adaptive compatible feature modulation and cumulative modal bridging. Through constructing historical modal features and performing modal knowledge accumulation and alignment, the proposed components collaboratively bridge modal differences and maintain knowledge retention, even with solely unimodal data available at each learning phase.These components work in concert to establish effective modality connections and maintain knowledge retention, even when only unimodal data is available at each learning stage. Extensive experiments on the MIL task demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing incremental learning methods, validating its effectiveness in MIL scenarios.
Sustainability via LLM Right-sizing
Authors: Jennifer Haase, Finn Klessascheck, Jan Mendling, Sebastian Pokutta
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly embedded in organizational workflows. This has raised concerns over their energy consumption, financial costs, and data sovereignty. While performance benchmarks often celebrate cutting-edge models, real-world deployment decisions require a broader perspective: when is a smaller, locally deployable model "good enough"? This study offers an empirical answer by evaluating eleven proprietary and open-weight LLMs across ten everyday occupational tasks, including summarizing texts, generating schedules, and drafting emails and proposals. Using a dual-LLM-based evaluation framework, we automated task execution and standardized evaluation across ten criteria related to output quality, factual accuracy, and ethical responsibility. Results show that GPT-4o delivers consistently superior performance but at a significantly higher cost and environmental footprint. Notably, smaller models like Gemma-3 and Phi-4 achieved strong and reliable results on most tasks, suggesting their viability in contexts requiring cost-efficiency, local deployment, or privacy. A cluster analysis revealed three model groups -- premium all-rounders, competent generalists, and limited but safe performers -- highlighting trade-offs between quality, control, and sustainability. Significantly, task type influenced model effectiveness: conceptual tasks challenged most models, while aggregation and transformation tasks yielded better performances. We argue for a shift from performance-maximizing benchmarks to task- and context-aware sufficiency assessments that better reflect organizational priorities. Our approach contributes a scalable method to evaluate AI models through a sustainability lens and offers actionable guidance for responsible LLM deployment in practice.
KFinEval-Pilot: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Korean Financial Language Understanding
Authors: Bokwang Hwang, Seonkyu Lim, Taewoong Kim, Yongjae Geun, Sunghyun Bang, SoHyun Park, Jihyun Park, Myeonggyu Lee, Jinwoo Lee, Yerin Kim, Jinsun Yoo, Jingyeong Hong, Jina Park, Yongchan Kim, Suhyun Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Yiseul Lee, Yejee Kang, Chanhyuk Yoon, Chansu Lee, Heeyewon Jeong, Jiyeon Lee, Seonhye Gu, Hyebin Kang, Yousang Cho, Hangyeol Yoo, Kyungtae Lim
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Legal Reasoning

We introduce KFinEval-Pilot, a benchmark suite specifically designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in the Korean financial domain. Addressing the limitations of existing English-centric benchmarks, KFinEval-Pilot comprises over 1,000 curated questions across three critical areas: financial knowledge, legal reasoning, and financial toxicity. The benchmark is constructed through a semi-automated pipeline that combines GPT-4-generated prompts with expert validation to ensure domain relevance and factual accuracy. We evaluate a range of representative LLMs and observe notable performance differences across models, with trade-offs between task accuracy and output safety across different model families. These results highlight persistent challenges in applying LLMs to high-stakes financial applications, particularly in reasoning and safety. Grounded in real-world financial use cases and aligned with the Korean regulatory and linguistic context, KFinEval-Pilot serves as an early diagnostic tool for developing safer and more reliable financial AI systems.