pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Genetic AI: Evolutionary Games for ab initio dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Philipp Wissgott
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

We introduce Genetic AI, a novel method for multi-objective optimization without external parameters or predefined weights. The method can be applied to all problems that can be formulated in matrix form and allows for a data-less training of AI models. Without employing predefined rules or training data, Genetic AI first converts the input data into genes and organisms. In a simulation from first principles, these genes and organisms compete for fitness, where their behavior is governed by universal evolutionary strategies. We present four evolutionary strategies: Dominant, Altruistic, Balanced and Selfish and show how a linear combination can be employed in a fully self-consistent evolutionary game. Investigating fitness and evolutionary stable equilibriums, Genetic AI helps solving optimization problems with a set of predefined, discrete solutions that change dynamically. We show the universality of the approach on two decision problems.
Characterizing User Behavior: The Interplay Between Mobility Patterns and Mobile Traffic
Authors: Anne Josiane Kouam, Aline Carneiro Viana, Mariano G. Beiró, Leo Ferres, Luca Pappalardo
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Mobile devices have become essential for capturing human activity, and eXtended Data Records (XDRs) offer rich opportunities for detailed user behavior modeling, which is useful for designing personalized digital services. Previous studies have primarily focused on aggregated mobile traffic and mobility analyses, often neglecting individual-level insights. This paper introduces a novel approach that explores the dependency between traffic and mobility behaviors at the user level. By analyzing 13 individual features that encompass traffic patterns and various mobility aspects, we enhance the understanding of how these behaviors interact. Our advanced user modeling framework integrates traffic and mobility behaviors over time, allowing for fine-grained dependencies while maintaining population heterogeneity through user-specific signatures. Furthermore, we develop a Markov model that infers traffic behavior from mobility and vice versa, prioritizing significant dependencies while addressing privacy concerns. Using a week-long XDR dataset from 1,337,719 users across several provinces in Chile, we validate our approach, demonstrating its robustness and applicability in accurately inferring user behavior and matching mobility and traffic profiles across diverse urban contexts.
Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Authors: Bhaskar Mitra
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This paper is a provocation for the role of computer-mediated information access in our emancipatory struggles. We define emancipatory information retrieval as the study and development of information access methods that challenge various forms of human oppression, and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis. The term "emancipatory" here signifies the moral concerns of universal humanization of all peoples and the elimination of oppression to create the conditions under which we can collectively flourish. To develop an emancipatory research agenda for information retrieval (IR), in this paper we speculate about the practices that the community can adopt, enumerate some of the projects that the field should undertake, and discuss provocations to spark new ideas and directions for research. We challenge the field of IR research to embrace humanistic values and commit to universal emancipation and social justice. We also invite scholars from fields such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, social sciences, humanities, democratic theory, and critical theory, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists to join us in realizing this transformation. In this process, we must both imagine post-oppressive worlds, and reimagine the role of IR in that world and in the journey that leads us there.
A Zero-Shot Generalization Framework for LLM-Driven Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Yunzhe Li, Junting Wang, Hari Sundaram, Zhining Liu
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation, Transfer Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

Zero-shot cross-domain sequential recommendation (ZCDSR) enables predictions in unseen domains without the need for additional training or fine-tuning, making it particularly valuable in data-sparse environments where traditional models struggle. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved ZCDSR by leveraging rich pretrained representations to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer. However, a key challenge persists: domain semantic bias, which arises from variations in vocabulary and content focus across domains. This misalignment leads to inconsistencies in item embeddings and hinders generalization. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework designed to enhance LLM-based ZCDSR by improving cross-domain alignment at both the item and sequential levels. At the item level, we introduce a generalization loss that promotes inter-domain compactness by aligning embeddings of similar items across domains while maintaining intra-domain diversity to preserve unique item characteristics. This prevents embeddings from becoming overly generic while ensuring effective transferability. At the sequential level, we develop a method for transferring user behavioral patterns by clustering user sequences in the source domain and applying attention-based aggregation for target domain inference. This dynamic adaptation of user embeddings allows effective zero-shot recommendations without requiring target-domain interactions. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets and domains demonstrate that our framework significantly improves sequential recommendation performance in the ZCDSR setting. By mitigating domain bias and enhancing the transferability of sequential patterns, our method provides a scalable and robust approach for achieving more effective zero-shot recommendations across domains.
Collaborative Diffusion Model for Recommender System
Authors: Gyuseok Lee, Yaochen Zhu, Hwanjo Yu, Yao Zhou, Jundong Li
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, model, Recommendation Systems

Diffusion-based recommender systems (DR) have gained increasing attention for their advanced generative and denoising capabilities. However, existing DR face two central limitations: (i) a trade-off between enhancing generative capacity via noise injection and retaining the loss of personalized information. (ii) the underutilization of rich item-side information. To address these challenges, we present a Collaborative Diffusion model for Recommender System (CDiff4Rec). Specifically, CDiff4Rec generates pseudo-users from item features and leverages collaborative signals from both real and pseudo personalized neighbors identified through behavioral similarity, thereby effectively reconstructing nuanced user preferences. Experimental results on three public datasets show that CDiff4Rec outperforms competitors by effectively mitigating the loss of personalized information through the integration of item content and collaborative signals.
Are Representation Disentanglement and Interpretability Linked in Recommendation Models? A Critical Review and Reproducibility Study
Authors: Ervin Dervishaj, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Disentanglement, Recommendation Systems

Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations has been closely tied to enhancing the representation intepretability of Recommender Systems (RSs). This has been achieved by making the representation of individual features more distinctly separated, so that it is easier to attribute the contribution of features to the model's predictions. However, such advantages in interpretability and feature attribution have mainly been explored qualitatively. Moreover, the effect of disentanglement on the model's recommendation performance has been largely overlooked. In this work, we reproduce the recommendation performance, representation disentanglement and representation interpretability of five well-known recommendation models on four RS datasets. We quantify disentanglement and investigate the link of disentanglement with recommendation effectiveness and representation interpretability. While several existing work in RSs have proposed disentangled representations as a gateway to improved effectiveness and interpretability, our findings show that disentanglement is not necessarily related to effectiveness but is closely related to representation interpretability. Our code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/edervishaj/disentanglement-interpretability-recsys.
Hierarchical Multi-field Representations for Two-Stage E-commerce Retrieval
Authors: Niklas Freymuth, Dong Liu, Thomas Ricatte, Saab Mansour
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Dense retrieval methods typically target unstructured text data represented as flat strings. However, e-commerce catalogs often include structured information across multiple fields, such as brand, title, and description, which contain important information potential for retrieval systems. We present Cascading Hierarchical Attention Retrieval Model (CHARM), a novel framework designed to encode structured product data into hierarchical field-level representations with progressively finer detail. Utilizing a novel block-triangular attention mechanism, our method captures the interdependencies between product fields in a specified hierarchy, yielding field-level representations and aggregated vectors suitable for fast and efficient retrieval. Combining both representations enables a two-stage retrieval pipeline, in which the aggregated vectors support initial candidate selection, while more expressive field-level representations facilitate precise fine-tuning for downstream ranking. Experiments on publicly available large-scale e-commerce datasets demonstrate that CHARM matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis highlights the framework's ability to align different queries with appropriate product fields, enhancing retrieval accuracy and explainability.
An Attention-Locating Algorithm for Eliminating Background Effects in Fine-grained Visual Classification
Authors: Yueting Huang, Zhenzhe Hechen, Mingliang Zhou, Zhengguo Li, Sam Kwong
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2025 1
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, Specificity

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is a challenging task characterized by interclass similarity and intraclass diversity and has broad application prospects. Recently, several methods have adopted the vision Transformer (ViT) in FGVC tasks since the data specificity of the multihead self-attention (MSA) mechanism in ViT is beneficial for extracting discriminative feature representations. However, these works focus on integrating feature dependencies at a high level, which leads to the model being easily disturbed by low-level background information. To address this issue, we propose a fine-grained attention-locating vision Transformer (FAL-ViT) and an attention selection module (ASM). First, FAL-ViT contains a two-stage framework to identify crucial regions effectively within images and enhance features by strategically reusing parameters. Second, the ASM accurately locates important target regions via the natural scores of the MSA, extracting finer low-level features to offer more comprehensive information through position mapping. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that FAL-ViT outperforms the other methods in terms of performance, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yueting-Huang/FAL-ViT.
Examining the Impact of Income Inequality and Gender on School Completion in Malaysia: A Machine Learning Approach Utilizing Malaysia's Public Sector Open Data
Authors: Muhammad Sukri Bin Ramli
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

This study examines the relationship between income inequality, gender, and school completion rates in Malaysia using machine learning techniques. The dataset utilized is from the Malaysia's Public Sector Open Data Portal, covering the period 2016-2022. The analysis employs various machine learning techniques, including K-means clustering, ARIMA modeling, Random Forest regression, and Prophet for time series forecasting. These models are used to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies in the data, and to predict future school completion rates. Key findings reveal significant disparities in school completion rates across states, genders, and income levels. The analysis also identifies clusters of states with similar completion rates, suggesting potential regional factors influencing educational outcomes. Furthermore, time series forecasting models accurately predict future completion rates, highlighting the importance of ongoing monitoring and intervention strategies. The study concludes with recommendations for policymakers and educators to address the observed disparities and improve school completion rates in Malaysia. These recommendations include targeted interventions for specific states and demographic groups, investment in early childhood education, and addressing the impact of income inequality on educational opportunities. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the factors influencing school completion in Malaysia and provide valuable insights for policymakers and educators to develop effective strategies to improve educational outcomes.
Blind Document Image Quality Prediction Based on Modification of Quality Aware Clustering Method Integrating a Patch Selection Strategy
Authors: Alireza Alaei, Donatello Conte, Maxime Martineau, Romain Raveaux
Date: 2018-05-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Expert Systems with Applications 2018 5
Tasks: Document Image Quality Assessment, Image Forgery Detection, Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

The quality of document images has direct impacts on the performance of document image processing systems. Document Image Quality Assessment (DIQA) is, therefore, of fundamental importance to a numerous document processing applications. As manual quality assessment is almost impossible for a huge volume of document images generated in day-to-day life, it is critical to develop intelligent machine operated methods to estimate the quality of document images. In this paper, a blind document image quality assessment method is proposed to deal with the problem of DIQA in real scenarios, as reference images are not always available. To estimate the quality of a document image, the document is rst sampled into a set of patches. The extracted patches are then ltered out based on their level of foreground information using a patch selection strategy. For every selected patch, a cluster assignment is then performed to obtain its quality from a quality aware bag of visual words constructed using k-means clustering. An average pooling is nally employed to estimate the quality of the input document image. To evaluate the proposed method, a dataset composed of document images and three scene image datasets were considered for experimentation. The results obtained from the proposed method demonstrate the eectiveness of the proposed DIQA method. These achievements in applied computational intelligence, expert and decision support systems make a good foundation for creating practical tools to automate document image forgery detection, and archiving process.
MINDSTORES: Memory-Informed Neural Decision Synthesis for Task-Oriented Reinforcement in Embodied Systems
Authors: Anirudh Chari, Suraj Reddy, Aditya Tiwari, Richard Lian, Brian Zhou
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities as zero-shot planners for embodied agents, their inability to learn from experience and build persistent mental models limits their robustness in complex open-world environments like Minecraft. We introduce MINDSTORES, an experience-augmented planning framework that enables embodied agents to build and leverage mental models through natural interaction with their environment. Drawing inspiration from how humans construct and refine cognitive mental models, our approach extends existing zero-shot LLM planning by maintaining a database of past experiences that informs future planning iterations. The key innovation is representing accumulated experiences as natural language embeddings of (state, task, plan, outcome) tuples, which can then be efficiently retrieved and reasoned over by an LLM planner to generate insights and guide plan refinement for novel states and tasks. Through extensive experiments in the MineDojo environment, a simulation environment for agents in Minecraft that provides low-level controls for Minecraft, we find that MINDSTORES learns and applies its knowledge significantly better than existing memory-based LLM planners while maintaining the flexibility and generalization benefits of zero-shot approaches, representing an important step toward more capable embodied AI systems that can learn continuously through natural experience.
Ontological analysis of proactive life event services
Authors: Kuldar Taveter
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Life event service is a direct digital public service provided jointly by several governmental institutions so that a person can fulfill all the obligations and use all the rights that arise due to a particular event or situation in personal life. Life event service consolidates several public services related to the same life event into one service for the service consumer. This paper presents an ontological analysis of life event services, which is based on the works by Guarino, Guizzardi, Nardi, Wagner, and others. The purpose of the ontological analysis is to understand the meanings of life event, proactive public service based on life event, and other related notions. This kind of ontological analysis is crucial because for implementing the hardware and software architectures of e-government and digital public services, it is essential to agree upon the precise meanings of the underlying terms.
Analysis of LLMs vs Human Experts in Requirements Engineering
Authors: Cory Hymel, Hiroe Johnson
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

The majority of research around Large Language Models (LLM) application to software development has been on the subject of code generation. There is little literature on LLMs' impact on requirements engineering (RE), which deals with the process of developing and verifying the system requirements. Within RE, there is a subdiscipline of requirements elicitation, which is the practice of discovering and documenting requirements for a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders. In this analysis, we compare LLM's ability to elicit requirements of a software system, as compared to that of a human expert in a time-boxed and prompt-boxed study. We found LLM-generated requirements were evaluated as more aligned (+1.12) than human-generated requirements with a trend of being more complete (+10.2%). Conversely, we found users tended to believe that solutions they perceived as more aligned had been generated by human experts. Furthermore, while LLM-generated documents scored higher and performed at 720x the speed, their cost was, on average, only 0.06% that of a human expert. Overall, these findings indicate that LLMs will play an increasingly important role in requirements engineering by improving requirements definitions, enabling more efficient resource allocation, and reducing overall project timelines.
Objective Metrics for Human-Subjects Evaluation in Explainable Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Balint Gyevnar, Mark Towers
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Explanation is a fundamentally human process. Understanding the goal and audience of the explanation is vital, yet existing work on explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) routinely does not consult humans in their evaluations. Even when they do, they routinely resort to subjective metrics, such as confidence or understanding, that can only inform researchers of users' opinions, not their practical effectiveness for a given problem. This paper calls on researchers to use objective human metrics for explanation evaluations based on observable and actionable behaviour to build more reproducible, comparable, and epistemically grounded research. To this end, we curate, describe, and compare several objective evaluation methodologies for applying explanations to debugging agent behaviour and supporting human-agent teaming, illustrating our proposed methods using a novel grid-based environment. We discuss how subjective and objective metrics complement each other to provide holistic validation and how future work needs to utilise standardised benchmarks for testing to enable greater comparisons between research.
SHARPIE: A Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning and Human-AI Interaction Experiments
Authors: Hüseyin Aydın, Kevin Godin-Dubois, Libio Goncalvez Braz, Floris den Hengst, Kim Baraka, Mustafa Mert Çelikok, Andreas Sauter, Shihan Wang, Frans A. Oliehoek
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a general approach for modeling and training AI agents, including human-AI interaction scenarios. In this paper, we propose SHARPIE (Shared Human-AI Reinforcement Learning Platform for Interactive Experiments) to address the need for a generic framework to support experiments with RL agents and humans. Its modular design consists of a versatile wrapper for RL environments and algorithm libraries, a participant-facing web interface, logging utilities, deployment on popular cloud and participant recruitment platforms. It empowers researchers to study a wide variety of research questions related to the interaction between humans and RL agents, including those related to interactive reward specification and learning, learning from human feedback, action delegation, preference elicitation, user-modeling, and human-AI teaming. The platform is based on a generic interface for human-RL interactions that aims to standardize the field of study on RL in human contexts.
An Empirical Game-Theoretic Analysis of Autonomous Cyber-Defence Agents
Authors: Gregory Palmer, Luke Swaby, Daniel J. B. Harrold, Matthew Stewart, Alex Hiles, Chris Willis, Ian Miles, Sara Farmer
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

The recent rise in increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks raises the need for robust and resilient autonomous cyber-defence (ACD) agents. Given the variety of cyber-attack tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) employed, learning approaches that can return generalisable policies are desirable. Meanwhile, the assurance of ACD agents remains an open challenge. We address both challenges via an empirical game-theoretic analysis of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches for ACD using the principled double oracle (DO) algorithm. This algorithm relies on adversaries iteratively learning (approximate) best responses against each others' policies; a computationally expensive endeavour for autonomous cyber operations agents. In this work we introduce and evaluate a theoretically-sound, potential-based reward shaping approach to expedite this process. In addition, given the increasing number of open-source ACD-DRL approaches, we extend the DO formulation to allow for multiple response oracles (MRO), providing a framework for a holistic evaluation of ACD approaches.