pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Intelligence via Trial and Error
Authors: Jingtao Zhan, Jiahao Zhao, Jiayu Li, Yiqun Liu, Bo Zhang, Qingyao Ai, Jiaxin Mao, Hongning Wang, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

Intelligence is a crucial trait for species to find solutions within a limited number of trial-and-error attempts. Building on this idea, we introduce Survival Game as a framework to evaluate intelligence based on the number of failed attempts in a trial-and-error process. Fewer failures indicate higher intelligence. When the expectation and variance of failure counts are both finite, it signals the ability to consistently find solutions to new challenges, which we define as the Autonomous Level of intelligence. Using Survival Game, we comprehensively evaluate existing AI systems. Our results show that while AI systems achieve the Autonomous Level in simple tasks, they are still far from it in more complex tasks, such as vision, search, recommendation, and language. While scaling current AI technologies might help, this would come at an astronomical cost. Projections suggest that achieving the Autonomous Level for general tasks would require $10^{26}$ parameters. To put this into perspective, loading such a massive model requires so many H100 GPUs that their total value is $10^{7}$ times that of Apple Inc.'s market value. Even with Moore's Law, supporting such a parameter scale would take $70$ years. This staggering cost highlights the complexity of human tasks and the inadequacies of current AI technologies. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical analysis of Survival Game and its experimental results. Our findings suggest that human tasks possess a criticality property. As a result, Autonomous Level requires a deep understanding of the task's underlying mechanisms. Current AI systems, however, do not fully grasp these mechanisms and instead rely on superficial mimicry, making it difficult for them to reach an autonomous level. We believe Survival Game can not only guide the future development of AI but also offer profound insights into human intelligence.
Fuzzy Speculative Decoding for a Tunable Accuracy-Runtime Tradeoff
Authors: Maximilian Holsman, Yukun Huang, Bhuwan Dhingra
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

Speculative Decoding (SD) enforces strict distributional equivalence to the target model, limiting potential speed ups as distributions of near-equivalence achieve comparable outcomes in many cases. Furthermore, enforcing distributional equivalence means that users are unable to trade deviations from the target model distribution for further inference speed gains. To address these limitations, we introduce Fuzzy Speculative Decoding (FSD) - a decoding algorithm that generalizes SD by accepting candidate tokens purely based on the divergences between the target and draft model distributions. By allowing for controlled divergence from the target model, FSD enables users to flexibly trade generation quality for inference speed. Across several benchmarks, our method is able to achieve significant runtime improvements of over 5 tokens per second faster than SD at only an approximate 2% absolute reduction in benchmark accuracy. In many cases, FSD is even able to match SD benchmark accuracy at over 2 tokens per second faster, demonstrating that distributional equivalence is not necessary to maintain target model performance.
MV-MATH: Evaluating Multimodal Math Reasoning in Multi-Visual Contexts
Authors: Peijie Wang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Fei Yin, Xin Yang, Dekang Ran, Cheng-Lin Liu
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Multiple-choice

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in mathematical reasoning within visual contexts across various datasets. However, most existing multimodal math benchmarks are limited to single-visual contexts, which diverges from the multi-visual scenarios commonly encountered in real-world mathematical applications. To address this gap, we introduce MV-MATH: a meticulously curated dataset of 2,009 high-quality mathematical problems. Each problem integrates multiple images interleaved with text, derived from authentic K-12 scenarios, and enriched with detailed annotations. MV-MATH includes multiple-choice, free-form, and multi-step questions, covering 11 subject areas across 3 difficulty levels, and serves as a comprehensive and rigorous benchmark for assessing MLLMs' mathematical reasoning in multi-visual contexts. Through extensive experimentation, we observe that MLLMs encounter substantial challenges in multi-visual math tasks, with a considerable performance gap relative to human capabilities on MV-MATH. Furthermore, we analyze the performance and error patterns of various models, providing insights into MLLMs' mathematical reasoning capabilities within multi-visual settings.
GAMED: Knowledge Adaptive Multi-Experts Decoupling for Multimodal Fake News Detection
Authors: Lingzhi Shen, Yunfei Long, Xiaohao Cai, Imran Razzak, Guanming Chen, Kang Liu, Shoaib Jameel
Date: 2024-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection

Multimodal fake news detection often involves modelling heterogeneous data sources, such as vision and language. Existing detection methods typically rely on fusion effectiveness and cross-modal consistency to model the content, complicating understanding how each modality affects prediction accuracy. Additionally, these methods are primarily based on static feature modelling, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic changes and relationships between different data modalities. This paper develops a significantly novel approach, GAMED, for multimodal modelling, which focuses on generating distinctive and discriminative features through modal decoupling to enhance cross-modal synergies, thereby optimizing overall performance in the detection process. GAMED leverages multiple parallel expert networks to refine features and pre-embed semantic knowledge to improve the experts' ability in information selection and viewpoint sharing. Subsequently, the feature distribution of each modality is adaptively adjusted based on the respective experts' opinions. GAMED also introduces a novel classification technique to dynamically manage contributions from different modalities, while improving the explainability of decisions. Experimental results on the Fakeddit and Yang datasets demonstrate that GAMED performs better than recently developed state-of-the-art models. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/slz0925/GAMED.
Learning to Learn Weight Generation via Local Consistency Diffusion
Authors: Yunchuan Guan, Yu Liu, Ke Zhou, Zhiqi Shen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei LI
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Transfer Learning

Diffusion-based algorithms have emerged as promising techniques for weight generation. However, existing solutions are limited by two challenges: generalizability and local target assignment. The former arises from the inherent lack of cross-task transferability in existing single-level optimization methods, limiting the model's performance on new tasks. The latter lies in existing research modeling only global optimal weights, neglecting the supervision signals in local target weights. Moreover, naively assigning local target weights causes local-global inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose Mc-Di, which integrates the diffusion algorithm with meta-learning for better generalizability. Furthermore, we extend the vanilla diffusion into a local consistency diffusion algorithm. Our theory and experiments demonstrate that it can learn from local targets while maintaining consistency with the global optima. We validate Mc-Di's superior accuracy and inference efficiency in tasks that require frequent weight updates, including transfer learning, few-shot learning, domain generalization, and large language model adaptation.
On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents
Authors: Zhuoshi Pan, Qianhui Wu, Huiqiang Jiang, Xufang Luo, Hao Cheng, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Response Generation, Retrieval, Segmentation

To deliver coherent and personalized experiences in long-term conversations, existing approaches typically perform retrieval augmented response generation by constructing memory banks from conversation history at either the turn-level, session-level, or through summarization techniques.In this paper, we present two key findings: (1) The granularity of memory unit matters: turn-level, session-level, and summarization-based methods each exhibit limitations in both memory retrieval accuracy and the semantic quality of the retrieved content. (2) Prompt compression methods, such as LLMLingua-2, can effectively serve as a denoising mechanism, enhancing memory retrieval accuracy across different granularities. Building on these insights, we propose SeCom, a method that constructs the memory bank at segment level by introducing a conversation segmentation model that partitions long-term conversations into topically coherent segments, while applying compression based denoising on memory units to enhance memory retrieval. Experimental results show that SeCom exhibits a significant performance advantage over baselines on long-term conversation benchmarks LOCOMO and Long-MT-Bench+. Additionally, the proposed conversation segmentation method demonstrates superior performance on dialogue segmentation datasets such as DialSeg711, TIAGE, and SuperDialSeg.
Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework
Authors: Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used more and more extensively for automated evaluation in various scenarios. Previous studies have attempted to fine-tune open-source LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of powerful proprietary models, such as GPT-4. However, these methods are largely limited to text-based analyses under predefined general criteria, resulting in reduced adaptability for unseen instructions and demonstrating instability in evaluating adherence to quantitative and structural constraints. To address these limitations, we propose a novel evaluation framework, ARJudge, that adaptively formulates evaluation criteria and synthesizes both text-based and code-driven analyses to evaluate LLM responses. ARJudge consists of two components: a fine-tuned Analyzer that generates multi-faceted evaluation analyses and a tuning-free Refiner that combines and refines all analyses to make the final judgment. We construct a Composite Analysis Corpus that integrates tasks for evaluation criteria generation alongside text-based and code-driven analysis generation to train the Analyzer. Our results demonstrate that ARJudge outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluators in effectiveness and robustness. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance of multi-faceted evaluation and code-driven analyses in enhancing evaluation capabilities.
GraphBridge: Towards Arbitrary Transfer Learning in GNNs
Authors: Li Ju, Xingyi Yang, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are conventionally trained on a per-domain, per-task basis. It creates a significant barrier in transferring the acquired knowledge to different, heterogeneous data setups. This paper introduces GraphBridge, a novel framework to enable knowledge transfer across disparate tasks and domains in GNNs, circumventing the need for modifications to task configurations or graph structures. Specifically, GraphBridge allows for the augmentation of any pre-trained GNN with prediction heads and a bridging network that connects the input to the output layer. This architecture not only preserves the intrinsic knowledge of the original model but also supports outputs of arbitrary dimensions. To mitigate the negative transfer problem, GraphBridge merges the source model with a concurrently trained model, thereby reducing the source bias when applied to the target domain. Our method is thoroughly evaluated across diverse transfer learning scenarios, including Graph2Graph, Node2Node, Graph2Node, and graph2point-cloud. Empirical validation, conducted over 16 datasets representative of these scenarios, confirms the framework's capacity for task- and domain-agnostic transfer learning within graph-like data, marking a significant advancement in the field of GNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/jujulili888/GraphBridge.
Causality Is Key to Understand and Balance Multiple Goals in Trustworthy ML and Foundation Models
Authors: Ruta Binkyte, Ivaxi Sheth, Zhijing Jin, Mohammad Havaei, Bernhard Schölkopf, Mario Fritz
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Navigate

Ensuring trustworthiness in machine learning (ML) systems is crucial as they become increasingly embedded in high-stakes domains. This paper advocates for integrating causal methods into machine learning to navigate the trade-offs among key principles of trustworthy ML, including fairness, privacy, robustness, accuracy, and explainability. While these objectives should ideally be satisfied simultaneously, they are often addressed in isolation, leading to conflicts and suboptimal solutions. Drawing on existing applications of causality in ML that successfully align goals such as fairness and accuracy or privacy and robustness, this paper argues that a causal approach is essential for balancing multiple competing objectives in both trustworthy ML and foundation models. Beyond highlighting these trade-offs, we examine how causality can be practically integrated into ML and foundation models, offering solutions to enhance their reliability and interpretability. Finally, we discuss the challenges, limitations, and opportunities in adopting causal frameworks, paving the way for more accountable and ethically sound AI systems.
The PanAf-FGBG Dataset: Understanding the Impact of Backgrounds in Wildlife Behaviour Recognition
Authors: Otto Brookes, Maksim Kukushkin, Majid Mirmehdi, Colleen Stephens, Paula Dieguez, Thurston C. Hicks, Sorrel Jones, Kevin Lee, Maureen S. McCarthy, Amelia Meier, Emmanuelle Normand, Erin G. Wessling, Roman M. Wittig, Kevin Langergraber, Klaus Zuberbühler, Lukas Boesch, Thomas Schmid, Mimi Arandjelovic, Hjalmar Kühl, Tilo Burghardt
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Computer vision analysis of camera trap video footage is essential for wildlife conservation, as captured behaviours offer some of the earliest indicators of changes in population health. Recently, several high-impact animal behaviour datasets and methods have been introduced to encourage their use; however, the role of behaviour-correlated background information and its significant effect on out-of-distribution generalisation remain unexplored. In response, we present the PanAf-FGBG dataset, featuring 20 hours of wild chimpanzee behaviours, recorded at over 350 individual camera locations. Uniquely, it pairs every video with a chimpanzee (referred to as a foreground video) with a corresponding background video (with no chimpanzee) from the same camera location. We present two views of the dataset: one with overlapping camera locations and one with disjoint locations. This setup enables, for the first time, direct evaluation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions, and for the impact of backgrounds on behaviour recognition models to be quantified. All clips come with rich behavioural annotations and metadata including unique camera IDs and detailed textual scene descriptions. Additionally, we establish several baselines and present a highly effective latent-space normalisation technique that boosts out-of-distribution performance by +5.42% mAP for convolutional and +3.75% mAP for transformer-based models. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis on the role of backgrounds in out-of-distribution behaviour recognition, including the so far unexplored impact of background durations (i.e., the count of background frames within foreground videos).
ECLeKTic: a Novel Challenge Set for Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Omer Goldman, Uri Shaham, Dan Malkin, Sivan Eiger, Avinatan Hassidim, Yossi Matias, Joshua Maynez, Adi Mayrav Gilady, Jason Riesa, Shruti Rijhwani, Laura Rimell, Idan Szpektor, Reut Tsarfaty, Matan Eyal
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Transfer Learning

To achieve equitable performance across languages, multilingual large language models (LLMs) must be able to abstract knowledge beyond the language in which it was acquired. However, the current literature lacks reliable ways to measure LLMs' capability of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. To that end, we present ECLeKTic, a multilingual closed-book QA (CBQA) dataset that Evaluates Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in a simple, black-box manner. We detected information with uneven coverage across languages by controlling for presence and absence of Wikipedia articles in 12 languages. We generated knowledge-seeking questions in a source language, for which the answer appears in a relevant Wikipedia article and translated them to all other 11 languages, for which the respective Wikipedias lack equivalent articles. Assuming that Wikipedia reflects the prominent knowledge in the LLM's training data, to solve ECLeKTic's CBQA task the model is required to transfer knowledge between languages. Experimenting with 8 LLMs, we show that SOTA models struggle to effectively share knowledge across, languages even if they can predict the answer well for queries in the same language the knowledge was acquired in.
Foundation Models -- A Panacea for Artificial Intelligence in Pathology?
Authors: Nita Mulliqi, Anders Blilie, Xiaoyi Ji, Kelvin Szolnoky, Henrik Olsson, Sol Erika Boman, Matteo Titus, Geraldine Martinez Gonzalez, Julia Anna Mielcarz, Masi Valkonen, Einar Gudlaugsson, Svein R. Kjosavik, José Asenjo, Marcello Gambacorta, Paolo Libretti, Marcin Braun, Radzislaw Kordek, Roman Łowicki, Kristina Hotakainen, Päivi Väre, Bodil Ginnerup Pedersen, Karina Dalsgaard Sørensen, Benedicte Parm Ulhøi, Pekka Ruusuvuori, Brett Delahunt, Hemamali Samaratunga, Toyonori Tsuzuki, Emilius A. M. Janssen, Lars Egevad, Martin Eklund, Kimmo Kartasalo
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, whole slide images

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in pathology has evolved from aiding diagnostics to uncovering predictive morphological patterns in whole slide images (WSIs). Recently, foundation models (FMs) leveraging self-supervised pre-training have been widely advocated as a universal solution for diverse downstream tasks. However, open questions remain about their clinical applicability and generalization advantages over end-to-end learning using task-specific (TS) models. Here, we focused on AI with clinical-grade performance for prostate cancer diagnosis and Gleason grading. We present the largest validation of AI for this task, using over 100,000 core needle biopsies from 7,342 patients across 15 sites in 11 countries. We compared two FMs with a fully end-to-end TS model in a multiple instance learning framework. Our findings challenge assumptions that FMs universally outperform TS models. While FMs demonstrated utility in data-scarce scenarios, their performance converged with - and was in some cases surpassed by - TS models when sufficient labeled training data were available. Notably, extensive task-specific training markedly reduced clinically significant misgrading, misdiagnosis of challenging morphologies, and variability across different WSI scanners. Additionally, FMs used up to 35 times more energy than the TS model, raising concerns about their sustainability. Our results underscore that while FMs offer clear advantages for rapid prototyping and research, their role as a universal solution for clinically applicable medical AI remains uncertain. For high-stakes clinical applications, rigorous validation and consideration of task-specific training remain critically important. We advocate for integrating the strengths of FMs and end-to-end learning to achieve robust and resource-efficient AI pathology solutions fit for clinical use.
Memory-Free and Parallel Computation for Quantized Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Dehao Zhang, Shuai Wang, Yichen Xiao, Wenjie Wei, Yimeng Shan, Malu Zhang, Yang Yang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Quantization

Quantized Spiking Neural Networks (QSNNs) offer superior energy efficiency and are well-suited for deployment on resource-limited edge devices. However, limited bit-width weight and membrane potential result in a notable performance decline. In this study, we first identify a new underlying cause for this decline: the loss of historical information due to the quantized membrane potential. To tackle this issue, we introduce a memory-free quantization method that captures all historical information without directly storing membrane potentials, resulting in better performance with less memory requirements. To further improve the computational efficiency, we propose a parallel training and asynchronous inference framework that greatly increases training speed and energy efficiency. We combine the proposed memory-free quantization and parallel computation methods to develop a high-performance and efficient QSNN, named MFP-QSNN. Extensive experiments show that our MFP-QSNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on various static and neuromorphic image datasets, requiring less memory and faster training speeds. The efficiency and efficacy of the MFP-QSNN highlight its potential for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing.
Estimation of total body fat using symbolic regression and evolutionary algorithms
Authors: Jose-Manuel Muñoz, Odin Morón-García, J. Ignacio Hidalgo, Omar Costilla-Reyes
Date: 2025-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, regression, Symbolic Regression

Body fat percentage is an increasingly popular alternative to Body Mass Index to measure overweight and obesity, offering a more accurate representation of body composition. In this work, we evaluate three evolutionary computation techniques, Grammatical Evolution, Context-Free Grammar Genetic Programming, and Dynamic Structured Grammatical Evolution, to derive an interpretable mathematical expression to estimate the percentage of body fat that are also accurate. Our primary objective is to obtain a model that balances accuracy with explainability, making it useful for clinical and health applications. We compare the performance of the three variants on a public anthropometric dataset and compare the results obtained with the QLattice framework. Experimental results show that grammatical evolution techniques can obtain competitive results in performance and interpretability.