pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning to Solve the Min-Max Mixed-Shelves Picker-Routing Problem via Hierarchical and Parallel Decoding
Authors: Laurin Luttmann, Lin Xie
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Navigate, Sequential Decision Making

The Mixed-Shelves Picker Routing Problem (MSPRP) is a fundamental challenge in warehouse logistics, where pickers must navigate a mixed-shelves environment to retrieve SKUs efficiently. Traditional heuristics and optimization-based approaches struggle with scalability, while recent machine learning methods often rely on sequential decision-making, leading to high solution latency and suboptimal agent coordination. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical and parallel decoding approach for solving the min-max variant of the MSPRP via multi-agent reinforcement learning. While our approach generates a joint distribution over agent actions, allowing for fast decoding and effective picker coordination, our method introduces a sequential action selection to avoid conflicts in the multi-dimensional action space. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance in both solution quality and inference speed, particularly for large-scale and out-of-distribution instances. Our code is publicly available at http://github.com/LTluttmann/marl4msprp.
Cooperative Multi-Agent Planning with Adaptive Skill Synthesis
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Wenshuai Zhao, Joni Pajarinen
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Starcraft

Despite much progress in training distributed artificial intelligence (AI), building cooperative multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces challenges in sample efficiency, interpretability, and transferability. Unlike traditional learning-based methods that require extensive interaction with the environment, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in zero-shot planning and complex reasoning. However, existing LLM-based approaches heavily rely on text-based observations and struggle with the non-Markovian nature of multi-agent interactions under partial observability. We present COMPASS, a novel multi-agent architecture that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with a dynamic skill library and structured communication for decentralized closed-loop decision-making. The skill library, bootstrapped from demonstrations, evolves via planner-guided tasks to enable adaptive strategies. COMPASS propagates entity information through multi-hop communication under partial observability. Evaluations on the improved StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMACv2) demonstrate COMPASS's strong performance against state-of-the-art MARL baselines across both symmetric and asymmetric scenarios. Notably, in the symmetric Protoss 5v5 task, COMPASS achieved a 57\% win rate, representing a 30 percentage point advantage over QMIX (27\%). Project page can be found at https://stellar-entremet-1720bb.netlify.app/.
Evaluating and Improving Graph-based Explanation Methods for Multi-Agent Coordination
Authors: Siva Kailas, Shalin Jain, Harish Ravichandar
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), developed by the graph learning community, have been adopted and shown to be highly effective in multi-robot and multi-agent learning. Inspired by this successful cross-pollination, we investigate and characterize the suitability of existing GNN explanation methods for explaining multi-agent coordination. We find that these methods have the potential to identify the most-influential communication channels that impact the team's behavior. Informed by our initial analyses, we propose an attention entropy regularization term that renders GAT-based policies more amenable to existing graph-based explainers. Intuitively, minimizing attention entropy incentivizes agents to limit their attention to the most influential or impactful agents, thereby easing the challenge faced by the explainer. We theoretically ground this intuition by showing that minimizing attention entropy increases the disparity between the explainer-generated subgraph and its complement. Evaluations across three tasks and three team sizes i) provides insights into the effectiveness of existing explainers, and ii) demonstrates that our proposed regularization consistently improves explanation quality without sacrificing task performance.
A Scoresheet for Explainable AI
Authors: Michael Winikoff, John Thangarajah, Sebastian Rodriguez
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00

Explainability is important for the transparency of autonomous and intelligent systems and for helping to support the development of appropriate levels of trust. There has been considerable work on developing approaches for explaining systems and there are standards that specify requirements for transparency. However, there is a gap: the standards are too high-level and do not adequately specify requirements for explainability. This paper develops a scoresheet that can be used to specify explainability requirements or to assess the explainability aspects provided for particular applications. The scoresheet is developed by considering the requirements of a range of stakeholders and is applicable to Multiagent Systems as well as other AI technologies. We also provide guidance for how to use the scoresheet and illustrate its generality and usefulness by applying it to a range of applications.
Can't See the Forest for the Trees: Benchmarking Multimodal Safety Awareness for Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Xiaoyuan Liu, Kuiyi Gao, Jen-tse Huang, Youliang Yuan, Pinjia He, Shuai Wang, Zhaopeng Tu
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded the capabilities of traditional language models by enabling interaction through both text and images. However, ensuring the safety of these models remains a significant challenge, particularly in accurately identifying whether multimodal content is safe or unsafe-a capability we term safety awareness. In this paper, we introduce MMSafeAware, the first comprehensive multimodal safety awareness benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs across 29 safety scenarios with 1500 carefully curated image-prompt pairs. MMSafeAware includes both unsafe and over-safety subsets to assess models abilities to correctly identify unsafe content and avoid over-sensitivity that can hinder helpfulness. Evaluating nine widely used MLLMs using MMSafeAware reveals that current models are not sufficiently safe and often overly sensitive; for example, GPT-4V misclassifies 36.1% of unsafe inputs as safe and 59.9% of benign inputs as unsafe. We further explore three methods to improve safety awareness-prompting-based approaches, visual contrastive decoding, and vision-centric reasoning fine-tuning-but find that none achieve satisfactory performance. Our findings highlight the profound challenges in developing MLLMs with robust safety awareness, underscoring the need for further research in this area. All the code and data will be publicly available to facilitate future research.
ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations
Authors: Bowen Jiang, Yuan Yuan, Xinyi Bai, Zhuoqun Hao, Alyson Yin, Yaojie Hu, Wenyu Liao, Lyle Ungar, Camillo J. Taylor
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Segmentation

This work demonstrates that diffusion models can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. Visual text rendering remains a significant challenge. While recent methods condition diffusion on glyphs, it is impossible to retrieve exact font annotations from large-scale, real-world datasets, which prevents user-specified font control. To address this, we propose a data-driven solution that integrates the conditional diffusion model with a text segmentation model, utilizing segmentation masks to capture and represent fonts in pixel space in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the need for any ground-truth labels and enabling users to customize text rendering with any multilingual font of their choice. The experiment provides a proof of concept of our algorithm in zero-shot text and font editing across diverse fonts and languages, providing valuable insights for the community and industry toward achieving generalized visual text rendering.
Video Soundtrack Generation by Aligning Emotions and Temporal Boundaries
Authors: Serkan Sulun, Paula Viana, Matthew E. P. Davies
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

We introduce EMSYNC, a video-based symbolic music generation model that aligns music with a video's emotional content and temporal boundaries. It follows a two-stage framework, where a pretrained video emotion classifier extracts emotional features, and a conditional music generator produces MIDI sequences guided by both emotional and temporal cues. We introduce boundary offsets, a novel temporal conditioning mechanism that enables the model to anticipate and align musical chords with scene cuts. Unlike existing models, our approach retains event-based encoding, ensuring fine-grained timing control and expressive musical nuances. We also propose a mapping scheme to bridge the video emotion classifier, which produces discrete emotion categories, with the emotion-conditioned MIDI generator, which operates on continuous-valued valence-arousal inputs. In subjective listening tests, EMSYNC outperforms state-of-the-art models across all subjective metrics, for music theory-aware participants as well as the general listeners.
Interpretable Concept-based Deep Learning Framework for Multimodal Human Behavior Modeling
Authors: Xinyu Li, Marwa Mahmoud
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Concept Alignment, Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition

In the contemporary era of intelligent connectivity, Affective Computing (AC), which enables systems to recognize, interpret, and respond to human behavior states, has become an integrated part of many AI systems. As one of the most critical components of responsible AI and trustworthiness in all human-centered systems, explainability has been a major concern in AC. Particularly, the recently released EU General Data Protection Regulation requires any high-risk AI systems to be sufficiently interpretable, including biometric-based systems and emotion recognition systems widely used in the affective computing field. Existing explainable methods often compromise between interpretability and performance. Most of them focus only on highlighting key network parameters without offering meaningful, domain-specific explanations to the stakeholders. Additionally, they also face challenges in effectively co-learning and explaining insights from multimodal data sources. To address these limitations, we propose a novel and generalizable framework, namely the Attention-Guided Concept Model (AGCM), which provides learnable conceptual explanations by identifying what concepts that lead to the predictions and where they are observed. AGCM is extendable to any spatial and temporal signals through multimodal concept alignment and co-learning, empowering stakeholders with deeper insights into the model's decision-making process. We validate the efficiency of AGCM on well-established Facial Expression Recognition benchmark datasets while also demonstrating its generalizability on more complex real-world human behavior understanding applications.
E2LVLM:Evidence-Enhanced Large Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection
Authors: Junjie Wu, Yumeng Fu, Nan Yu, Guohong Fu
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Misinformation, Reranking

Recent studies in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive advancements in multimodal Out-of-Context (OOC) misinformation detection, discerning whether an authentic image is wrongly used in a claim. Despite their success, the textual evidence of authentic images retrieved from the inverse search is directly transmitted to LVLMs, leading to inaccurate or false information in the decision-making phase. To this end, we present E2LVLM, a novel evidence-enhanced large vision-language model by adapting textual evidence in two levels. First, motivated by the fact that textual evidence provided by external tools struggles to align with LVLMs inputs, we devise a reranking and rewriting strategy for generating coherent and contextually attuned content, thereby driving the aligned and effective behavior of LVLMs pertinent to authentic images. Second, to address the scarcity of news domain datasets with both judgment and explanation, we generate a novel OOC multimodal instruction-following dataset by prompting LVLMs with informative content to acquire plausible explanations. Further, we develop a multimodal instruction-tuning strategy with convincing explanations for beyond detection. This scheme contributes to E2LVLM for multimodal OOC misinformation detection and explanation. A multitude of experiments demonstrate that E2LVLM achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods, and also provides compelling rationales for judgments.
Accelerated Gradient-based Design Optimization Via Differentiable Physics-Informed Neural Operator: A Composites Autoclave Processing Case Study
Authors: Janak M. Patel, Milad Ramezankhani, Anirudh Deodhar, Dagnachew Birru
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Simulation and optimization are crucial for advancing the engineering design of complex systems and processes. Traditional optimization methods require substantial computational time and effort due to their reliance on resource-intensive simulations, such as finite element analysis, and the complexity of rigorous optimization algorithms. Data-agnostic AI-based surrogate models, such as Physics-Informed Neural Operators (PINOs), offer a promising alternative to these conventional simulations, providing drastically reduced inference time, unparalleled data efficiency, and zero-shot super-resolution capability. However, the predictive accuracy of these models is often constrained to small, low-dimensional design spaces or systems with relatively simple dynamics. To address this, we introduce a novel Physics-Informed DeepONet (PIDON) architecture, which extends the capabilities of conventional neural operators to effectively model the nonlinear behavior of complex engineering systems across high-dimensional design spaces and a wide range of dynamic design configurations. This new architecture outperforms existing SOTA models, enabling better predictions across broader design spaces. Leveraging PIDON's differentiability, we integrate a gradient-based optimization approach using the Adam optimizer to efficiently determine optimal design variables. This forms an end-to-end gradient-based optimization framework that accelerates the design process while enhancing scalability and efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in the optimization of aerospace-grade composites curing processes achieving a 3x speedup in obtaining optimal design variables compared to gradient-free methods. Beyond composites processing, the proposed model has the potential to be used as a scalable and efficient optimization tool for broader applications in advanced engineering and digital twin systems.
Learning the Exact Time Integration Algorithm for Initial Value Problems by Randomized Neural Networks
Authors: Suchuan Dong, Naxian Ni
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00

We present a method leveraging extreme learning machine (ELM) type randomized neural networks (NNs) for learning the exact time integration algorithm for initial value problems (IVPs). The exact time integration algorithm for non-autonomous systems can be represented by an algorithmic function in higher dimensions, which satisfies an associated system of partial differential equations with corresponding boundary conditions. Our method learns the algorithmic function by solving this associated system using ELM with a physics informed approach. The trained ELM network serves as the learned algorithm and can be used to solve the IVP with arbitrary initial data or step sizes from some domain. When the right hand side of the non-autonomous system exhibits a periodicity with respect to any of its arguments, while the solution itself to the problem is not periodic, we show that the algorithmic function is either periodic, or when it is not, satisfies a well-defined relation for different periods. This property can greatly simplify the algorithm learning in many problems. We consider explicit and implicit NN formulations, leading to explicit or implicit time integration algorithms, and discuss how to train the ELM network by the nonlinear least squares method. Extensive numerical experiments with benchmark problems, including non-stiff, stiff and chaotic systems, show that the learned NN algorithm produces highly accurate solutions in long-time simulations, with its time-marching errors decreasing nearly exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom in the neural network. We compare extensively the computational performance (accuracy vs.~cost) between the current NN algorithm and the leading traditional time integration algorithms. The learned NN algorithm is computationally competitive, markedly outperforming the traditional algorithms in many problems.
Weighted quantization using MMD: From mean field to mean shift via gradient flows
Authors: Ayoub Belhadji, Daniel Sharp, Youssef Marzouk
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Quantization

Approximating a probability distribution using a set of particles is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics, with applications including clustering and quantization. Formally, we seek a weighted mixture of Dirac measures that best approximates the target distribution. While much existing work relies on the Wasserstein distance to quantify approximation errors, maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has received comparatively less attention, especially when allowing for variable particle weights. We argue that a Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao gradient flow is well-suited for designing quantizations optimal under MMD. We show that a system of interacting particles satisfying a set of ODEs discretizes this flow. We further derive a new fixed-point algorithm called mean shift interacting particles (MSIP). We show that MSIP extends the classical mean shift algorithm, widely used for identifying modes in kernel density estimators. Moreover, we show that MSIP can be interpreted as preconditioned gradient descent and that it acts as a relaxation of Lloyd's algorithm for clustering. Our unification of gradient flows, mean shift, and MMD-optimal quantization yields algorithms that are more robust than state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated via high-dimensional and multi-modal numerical experiments.
Optimal lower Lipschitz bounds for ReLU layers, saturation, and phase retrieval
Authors: Daniel Freeman, Daniel Haider
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The injectivity of ReLU layers in neural networks, the recovery of vectors from clipped or saturated measurements, and (real) phase retrieval in $\mathbb{R}^n$ allow for a similar problem formulation and characterization using frame theory. In this paper, we revisit all three problems with a unified perspective and derive lower Lipschitz bounds for ReLU layers and clipping which are analogous to the previously known result for phase retrieval and are optimal up to a constant factor.
A Unified Modeling Framework for Automated Penetration Testing
Authors: Yunfei Wang, Shixuan Liu, Wenhao Wang, Changling Zhou, Chao Zhang, Jiandong Jin, Cheng Zhu
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

The integration of artificial intelligence into automated penetration testing (AutoPT) has highlighted the necessity of simulation modeling for the training of intelligent agents, due to its cost-efficiency and swift feedback capabilities. Despite the proliferation of AutoPT research, there is a recognized gap in the availability of a unified framework for simulation modeling methods. This paper presents a systematic review and synthesis of existing techniques, introducing MDCPM to categorize studies based on literature objectives, network simulation complexity, dependency of technical and tactical operations, and scenario feedback and variation. To bridge the gap in unified method for multi-dimensional and multi-level simulation modeling, dynamic environment modeling, and the scarcity of public datasets, we introduce AutoPT-Sim, a novel modeling framework that based on policy automation and encompasses the combination of all sub dimensions. AutoPT-Sim offers a comprehensive approach to modeling network environments, attackers, and defenders, transcending the constraints of static modeling and accommodating networks of diverse scales. We publicly release a generated standard network environment dataset and the code of Network Generator. By integrating publicly available datasets flexibly, support is offered for various simulation modeling levels focused on policy automation in MDCPM and the network generator help researchers output customized target network data by adjusting parameters or fine-tuning the network generator.
Graph Neural Network-based Spectral Filtering Mechanism for Imbalance Classification in Network Digital Twin
Authors: Abubakar Isah, Ibrahim Aliyu, Sulaiman Muhammad Rashid, Jaehyung Park, Minsoo Hahn, Jinsul Kim
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, imbalanced classification, Representation Learning

Graph neural networks are gaining attention in fifth-generation (5G) core network digital twins, which are data-driven complex systems with numerous components. Analyzing these data can be challenging due to rare failure types, leading to imbalanced classification in multiclass settings. Digital twins of 5G networks increasingly employ graph classification as the main method for identifying failure types. However, the skewed distribution of failure occurrences is a significant class-imbalance problem that prevents practical graph data mining. Previous studies have not sufficiently addressed this complex problem. This paper, proposes class-Fourier GNN (CF-GNN) that introduces a class-oriented spectral filtering mechanism to ensure precise classification by estimating a unique spectral filter for each class. This work employs eigenvalue and eigenvector spectral filtering to capture and adapt to variations in minority classes, ensuring accurate class-specific feature discrimination, and adept at graph representation learning for complex local structures among neighbors in an end-to-end setting. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CF-GNN could help create new techniques for enhancing classifiers and investigate the characteristics of the multiclass imbalanced data in a network digital twin system.