pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Scaling Law for LoRA Base on Mutual Information Upper Bound
Authors: Jing Zhang, Hui Gao, Peng Zhang, Shuzhen Sun, Chang Yang, Yuexian Hou
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge

LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is a widely used model fine-tuning method. In fine-tuning, the law among model performance, model parameters, and data complexity has been a focal issue in the field. Existing methods often leverage external metrics (such as cross-entropy or perplexity) to evaluate model performance. In the fine-tuning process for large models, two types of knowledge are typically involved: the frozen, general knowledge acquired by the model during pre-training and the new knowledge learned through the LoRA module from the current data. Generally, the less LoRA's learned knowledge relies on the large model, the more it captures the specific knowledge of new data, thereby enhancing its adaptability to new tasks. However, external metrics do not readily capture the dependency relationship between these two types of knowledge. Therefore, we designed an internal metric based on the Mutual Information Upper Bound (MIUB) theory to investigate the scaling law of large-model LoRA fine-tuning. In our experiments, we validated this approach on benchmark datasets, using the Llama3-8B and Phi3-3B models. The results show that the proposed MIUB metric aligns more accurately and stably with the scaling law of LoRA fine-tuning compared to cross-entropy and perplexity.
Large language models for artificial general intelligence (AGI): A survey of foundational principles and approaches
Authors: Alhassan Mumuni, Fuseini Mumuni
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language-Action

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.
Geometry Restoration and Dewarping of Camera-Captured Document Images
Authors: Valery Istomin, Oleg Pereziabov, Ilya Afanasyev
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

This research focuses on developing a method for restoring the topology of digital images of paper documents captured by a camera, using algorithms for detection, segmentation, geometry restoration, and dewarping. Our methodology employs deep learning (DL) for document outline detection, followed by computer vision (CV) to create a topological 2D grid using cubic polynomial interpolation and correct nonlinear distortions by remapping the image. Using classical CV methods makes the document topology restoration process more efficient and faster, as it requires significantly fewer computational resources and memory. We developed a new pipeline for automatic document dewarping and reconstruction, along with a framework and annotated dataset to demonstrate its efficiency. Our experiments confirm the promise of our methodology and its superiority over existing benchmarks (including mobile apps and popular DL solutions, such as RectiNet, DocGeoNet, and DocTr++) both visually and in terms of document readability via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and geometry restoration metrics. This paves the way for creating high-quality digital copies of paper documents and enhancing the efficiency of OCR systems. Project page: https://github.com/HorizonParadox/DRCCBI
Co-Activation Graph Analysis of Safety-Verified and Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies
Authors: Dennis Gross, Helge Spieker
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies can demonstrate unsafe behaviors and are challenging to interpret. To address these challenges, we combine RL policy model checking--a technique for determining whether RL policies exhibit unsafe behaviors--with co-activation graph analysis--a method that maps neural network inner workings by analyzing neuron activation patterns--to gain insight into the safe RL policy's sequential decision-making. This combination lets us interpret the RL policy's inner workings for safe decision-making. We demonstrate its applicability in various experiments.
PRMBench: A Fine-grained and Challenging Benchmark for Process-Level Reward Models
Authors: Mingyang Song, Zhaochen Su, Xiaoye Qu, Jiawei Zhou, Yu Cheng
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial for complex reasoning and decision-making tasks, where each intermediate step plays an important role in the reasoning process. Since language models are prone to various types of errors during the reasoning process, PRMs are required to possess nuanced capabilities for detecting various implicit error types in real-world scenarios. However, current benchmarks primarily focus on step correctness, failing to evaluate PRMs' performance systematically. To address this gap, we introduce PRMBench, a process-level benchmark specifically designed to assess the fine-grained error detection capabilities of PRMs. PRMBench comprises 6,216 carefully designed problems and 83,456 step-level labels, evaluating models across multiple dimensions, including simplicity, soundness, and sensitivity. In our experiments on 15 models, spanning both open-source PRMs and closed-source large language models prompted as critic models, we uncover significant weaknesses in current PRMs. These findings underscore the challenges inherent in process-level evaluation and highlight key directions for future research. We hope PRMBench can be a robust bench for advancing research on PRM evaluation and development.
From Models to Network Topologies: A Topology Inference Attack in Decentralized Federated Learning
Authors: Chao Feng, Yuanzhe Gao, Alberto Huertas Celdran, Gerome Bovet, Burkhard Stiller
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Inference Attack, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) is widely recognized as a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm due to its model-sharing mechanism that avoids direct data exchange. Nevertheless, model training leaves exploitable traces that can be used to infer sensitive information. In Decentralized FL (DFL), the topology, defining how participants are connected, plays a crucial role in shaping the model's privacy, robustness, and convergence. However, the topology introduces an unexplored vulnerability: attackers can exploit it to infer participant relationships and launch targeted attacks. This work uncovers the hidden risks of DFL topologies by proposing a novel Topology Inference Attack that infers the topology solely from model behavior. A taxonomy of topology inference attacks is introduced, categorizing them by the attacker's capabilities and knowledge. Practical attack strategies are designed for various scenarios, and experiments are conducted to identify key factors influencing attack success. The results demonstrate that analyzing only the model of each node can accurately infer the DFL topology, highlighting a critical privacy risk in DFL systems. These findings offer valuable insights for improving privacy preservation in DFL environments.
LangFair: A Python Package for Assessing Bias and Fairness in Large Language Model Use Cases
Authors: Dylan Bouchard, Mohit Singh Chauhan, David Skarbrevik, Viren Bajaj, Zeya Ahmad
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been observed to exhibit bias in numerous ways, potentially creating or worsening outcomes for specific groups identified by protected attributes such as sex, race, sexual orientation, or age. To help address this gap, we introduce LangFair, an open-source Python package that aims to equip LLM practitioners with the tools to evaluate bias and fairness risks relevant to their specific use cases. The package offers functionality to easily generate evaluation datasets, comprised of LLM responses to use-case-specific prompts, and subsequently calculate applicable metrics for the practitioner's use case. To guide in metric selection, LangFair offers an actionable decision framework.
Personalized Fashion Recommendation with Image Attributes and Aesthetics Assessment
Authors: Chongxian Chen, Fan Mo, Xin Fan, Hayato Yamana
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Personalized fashion recommendation is a difficult task because 1) the decisions are highly correlated with users' aesthetic appetite, which previous work frequently overlooks, and 2) many new items are constantly rolling out that cause strict cold-start problems in the popular identity (ID)-based recommendation methods. These new items are critical to recommend because of trend-driven consumerism. In this work, we aim to provide more accurate personalized fashion recommendations and solve the cold-start problem by converting available information, especially images, into two attribute graphs focusing on optimized image utilization and noise-reducing user modeling. Compared with previous methods that separate image and text as two components, the proposed method combines image and text information to create a richer attributes graph. Capitalizing on the advancement of large language and vision models, we experiment with extracting fine-grained attributes efficiently and as desired using two different prompts. Preliminary experiments on the IQON3000 dataset have shown that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy compared with baselines.
Through-The-Mask: Mask-based Motion Trajectories for Image-to-Video Generation
Authors: Guy Yariv, Yuval Kirstain, Amit Zohar, Shelly Sheynin, Yaniv Taigman, Yossi Adi, Sagie Benaim, Adam Polyak
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image to Video Generation, Object, Video Generation

We consider the task of Image-to-Video (I2V) generation, which involves transforming static images into realistic video sequences based on a textual description. While recent advancements produce photorealistic outputs, they frequently struggle to create videos with accurate and consistent object motion, especially in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage compositional framework that decomposes I2V generation into: (i) An explicit intermediate representation generation stage, followed by (ii) A video generation stage that is conditioned on this representation. Our key innovation is the introduction of a mask-based motion trajectory as an intermediate representation, that captures both semantic object information and motion, enabling an expressive but compact representation of motion and semantics. To incorporate the learned representation in the second stage, we utilize object-level attention objectives. Specifically, we consider a spatial, per-object, masked-cross attention objective, integrating object-specific prompts into corresponding latent space regions and a masked spatio-temporal self-attention objective, ensuring frame-to-frame consistency for each object. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks with multi-object and high-motion scenarios and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal coherence, motion realism, and text-prompt faithfulness. Additionally, we introduce \benchmark, a new challenging benchmark for single-object and multi-object I2V generation, and demonstrate our method's superiority on this benchmark. Project page is available at https://guyyariv.github.io/TTM/.
Survival Analysis Revisited: Understanding and Unifying Poisson, Exponential, and Cox Models in Fall Risk Analysis
Authors: Tianhua Chen
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Survival Analysis

This paper explores foundational and applied aspects of survival analysis, using fall risk assessment as a case study. It revisits key time-related probability distributions and statistical methods, including logistic regression, Poisson regression, Exponential regression, and the Cox Proportional Hazards model, offering a unified perspective on their relationships within the survival analysis framework. A contribution of this work is the step-by-step derivation and clarification of the relationships among these models, particularly demonstrating that Poisson regression in the survival context is a specific case of the Cox model. These insights address gaps in understanding and reinforce the simplicity and interpretability of survival models. The paper also emphasizes the practical utility of survival analysis by connecting theoretical insights with real-world applications. In the context of fall detection, it demonstrates how these models can simultaneously predict fall risk, analyze contributing factors, and estimate time-to-event outcomes within a single streamlined framework. In contrast, advanced deep learning methods often require complex post-hoc interpretation and separate training for different tasks particularly when working with structured numerical data. This highlights the enduring relevance of classical statistical frameworks and makes survival models especially valuable in healthcare settings, where explainability and robustness are critical. By unifying foundational concepts and offering a cohesive perspective on time-to-event analysis, this work serves as an accessible resource for understanding survival models and applying them effectively to diverse analytical challenges.
To Analyze and Regulate Human-in-the-loop Learning for Congestion Games
Authors: Hongbo Li, Lingjie Duan
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00

In congestion games, selfish users behave myopically to crowd to the shortest paths, and the social planner designs mechanisms to regulate such selfish routing through information or payment incentives. However, such mechanism design requires the knowledge of time-varying traffic conditions and it is the users themselves to learn and report past road experiences to the social planner (e.g., Waze or Google Maps). When congestion games meet mobile crowdsourcing, it is critical to incentivize selfish users to explore non-shortest paths in the best exploitation-exploration trade-off. First, we consider a simple but fundamental parallel routing network with one deterministic path and multiple stochastic paths for users with an average arrival probability $\lambda$. We prove that the current myopic routing policy (widely used in Waze and Google Maps) misses both exploration (when strong hazard belief) and exploitation (when weak hazard belief) as compared to the social optimum. Due to the myopic policy's under-exploration, we prove that the caused price of anarchy (PoA) is larger than \(\frac{1}{1-\rho^{\frac{1}{\lambda}}}\), which can be arbitrarily large as discount factor \(\rho\rightarrow1\). To mitigate such huge efficiency loss, we propose a novel selective information disclosure (SID) mechanism: we only reveal the latest traffic information to users when they intend to over-explore stochastic paths upon arrival, while hiding such information when they want to under-explore. We prove that our mechanism successfully reduces PoA to be less than~\(2\). Besides the parallel routing network, we further extend our mechanism and PoA results to any linear path graphs with multiple intermediate nodes.
Single-Channel Distance-Based Source Separation for Mobile GPU in Outdoor and Indoor Environments
Authors: Hanbin Bae, Byungjun Kang, Jiwon Kim, Jaeyong Hwang, Hosang Sung, Hoon-Young Cho
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

This study emphasizes the significance of exploring distance-based source separation (DSS) in outdoor environments. Unlike existing studies that primarily focus on indoor settings, the proposed model is designed to capture the unique characteristics of outdoor audio sources. It incorporates advanced techniques, including a two-stage conformer block, a linear relation-aware self-attention (RSA), and a TensorFlow Lite GPU delegate. While the linear RSA may not capture physical cues as explicitly as the quadratic RSA, the linear RSA enhances the model's context awareness, leading to improved performance on the DSS that requires an understanding of physical cues in outdoor and indoor environments. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model overcomes the limitations of existing approaches and considerably enhances energy efficiency and real-time inference speed on mobile devices.
Piano Transcription by Hierarchical Language Modeling with Pretrained Roll-based Encoders
Authors: Dichucheng Li, Yongyi Zang, Qiuqiang Kong
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Music Transcription

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT), aiming to get musical notes from raw audio, typically uses frame-level systems with piano-roll outputs or language model (LM)-based systems with note-level predictions. However, frame-level systems require manual thresholding, while the LM-based systems struggle with long sequences. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method combining pre-trained roll-based encoders with an LM decoder to leverage the strengths of both methods. Besides, our approach employs a hierarchical prediction strategy, first predicting onset and pitch, then velocity, and finally offset. The hierarchical prediction strategy reduces computational costs by breaking down long sequences into different hierarchies. Evaluated on two benchmark roll-based encoders, our method outperforms traditional piano-roll outputs 0.01 and 0.022 in onset-offset-velocity F1 score, demonstrating its potential as a performance-enhancing plug-in for arbitrary roll-based music transcription encoder.
Quantization Meets Reasoning: Exploring LLM Low-Bit Quantization Degradation for Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Zhen Li, Yupeng Su, Runming Yang, Zhongwei Xie, Ngai Wong, Hongxia Yang
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Quantization

Large language models have achieved significant advancements in complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, such as MATH. However, their substantial computational requirements present challenges for practical deployment. Model quantization has emerged as an effective strategy to reduce memory usage and computational costs by employing lower precision and bit-width representations. In this study, we systematically evaluate the impact of quantization on mathematical reasoning tasks. We introduce a multidimensional evaluation framework that qualitatively assesses specific capability dimensions and conduct quantitative analyses on the step-by-step outputs of various quantization methods. Our results demonstrate that quantization differentially affects numerical computation and reasoning planning abilities, identifying key areas where quantized models experience performance degradation.
Putnam's Critical and Explanatory Tendencies Interpreted from a Machine Learning Perspective
Authors: Sheldon Z. Soudin
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

Making sense of theory choice in normal and across extraordinary science is central to philosophy of science. The emergence of machine learning models has the potential to act as a wrench in the gears of current debates. In this paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the main movements that lead to and came out of Putnam's critical and explanatory tendency distinction, argue for the biconditional necessity of the tendencies, and conceptualize that wrench through a machine learning interpretation of my claim.
Analyzing Fine-tuning Representation Shift for Multimodal LLMs Steering alignment
Authors: Pegah Khayatan, Mustafa Shukor, Jayneel Parekh, Matthieu Cord
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00

Multimodal LLMs have reached remarkable levels of proficiency in understanding multimodal inputs, driving extensive research to develop increasingly powerful models. However, much less attention has been paid to understanding and explaining the underlying mechanisms of these models. Most existing explainability research examines these models only in their final states, overlooking the dynamic representational shifts that occur during training. In this work, we systematically analyze the evolution of hidden state representations to reveal how fine-tuning alters the internal structure of a model to specialize in new multimodal tasks. Using a concept-based approach, we map hidden states to interpretable visual and textual concepts, enabling us to trace changes in encoded concepts across modalities as training progresses. We also demonstrate the use of shift vectors to capture these concepts changes. These shift vectors allow us to recover fine-tuned concepts by shifting those in the original model. Finally, we explore the practical impact of our findings on model steering, showing that we can adjust multimodal LLMs behaviors without any training, such as modifying answer types, captions style, or biasing the model toward specific responses. Our work sheds light on how multimodal representations evolve through fine-tuning and offers a new perspective for interpreting model adaptation in multimodal tasks. The code for this project is publicly available at https://github.com/mshukor/xl-vlms.
Quality Estimation based Feedback Training for Improving Pronoun Translation
Authors: Harshit Dhankhar, Baban Gain, Asif Ekbal, Yogesh Mani Tripathi
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Pronoun translation is a longstanding challenge in neural machine translation (NMT), often requiring inter-sentential context to ensure linguistic accuracy. To address this, we introduce ProNMT, a novel framework designed to enhance pronoun and overall translation quality in context-aware machine translation systems. ProNMT leverages Quality Estimation (QE) models and a unique Pronoun Generation Likelihood-Based Feedback mechanism to iteratively fine-tune pre-trained NMT models without relying on extensive human annotations. The framework combines QE scores with pronoun-specific rewards to guide training, ensuring improved handling of linguistic nuances. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant gains in pronoun translation accuracy and general translation quality across multiple metrics. ProNMT offers an efficient, scalable, and context-aware approach to improving NMT systems, particularly in translating context-dependent elements like pronouns.