pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Hierarchical Fine-Grained Feature Mapping Driven by Feature Contribution for Molecular Odor Prediction
Authors: Hong Xin Xie, Jian De Sun, Fan Fu Xue, Zi Fei Han, Shan Shan Feng, Qi Chen
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Prediction

Molecular odor prediction is the process of using a molecule's structure to predict its smell. While accurate prediction remains challenging, AI models can suggest potential odors. Existing methods, however, often rely on basic descriptors or handcrafted fingerprints, which lack expressive power and hinder effective learning. Furthermore, these methods suffer from severe class imbalance, limiting the training effectiveness of AI models. To address these challenges, we propose a Feature Contribution-driven Hierarchical Multi-Feature Mapping Network (HMFNet). Specifically, we introduce a fine-grained, Local Multi-Hierarchy Feature Extraction module (LMFE) that performs deep feature extraction at the atomic level, capturing detailed features crucial for odor prediction. To enhance the extraction of discriminative atomic features, we integrate a Harmonic Modulated Feature Mapping (HMFM). This module dynamically learns feature importance and frequency modulation, improving the model's capability to capture relevant patterns. Additionally, a Global Multi-Hierarchy Feature Extraction module (GMFE) is designed to learn global features from the molecular graph topology, enabling the model to fully leverage global information and enhance its discriminative power for odor prediction. To further mitigate the issue of class imbalance, we propose a Chemically-Informed Loss (CIL). Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves performance across various deep learning models, highlighting its potential to advance molecular structure representation and accelerate the development of AI-driven technologies.
Why Compress What You Can Generate? When GPT-4o Generation Ushers in Image Compression Fields
Authors: Yixin Gao, Xiaohan Pan, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Image Generation, Prompt Engineering

The rapid development of AIGC foundation models has revolutionized the paradigm of image compression, which paves the way for the abandonment of most pixel-level transform and coding, compelling us to ask: why compress what you can generate if the AIGC foundation model is powerful enough to faithfully generate intricate structure and fine-grained details from nothing more than some compact descriptors, i.e., texts, or cues. Fortunately, recent GPT-4o image generation of OpenAI has achieved impressive cross-modality generation, editing, and design capabilities, which motivates us to answer the above question by exploring its potential in image compression fields. In this work, we investigate two typical compression paradigms: textual coding and multimodal coding (i.e., text + extremely low-resolution image), where all/most pixel-level information is generated instead of compressing via the advanced GPT-4o image generation function. The essential challenge lies in how to maintain semantic and structure consistency during the decoding process. To overcome this, we propose a structure raster-scan prompt engineering mechanism to transform the image into textual space, which is compressed as the condition of GPT-4o image generation. Extensive experiments have shown that the combination of our designed structural raster-scan prompts and GPT-4o's image generation function achieved the impressive performance compared with recent multimodal/generative image compression at ultra-low bitrate, further indicating the potential of AIGC generation in image compression fields.
Enhancing Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Video Object Tracking with Dynamic Memory Prediction
Authors: Zihan Zhou, Changrui Dai, Aibo Song, Xiaolin Fang
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Object, Object Tracking, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Tracking

Successful video analysis relies on accurate recognition of pixels across frames, and frame reconstruction methods based on video correspondence learning are popular due to their efficiency. Existing frame reconstruction methods, while efficient, neglect the value of direct involvement of multiple reference frames for reconstruction and decision-making aspects, especially in complex situations such as occlusion or fast movement. In this paper, we introduce a Dynamic Memory Prediction (DMP) framework that innovatively utilizes multiple reference frames to concisely and directly enhance frame reconstruction. Its core component is a Reference Frame Memory Engine that dynamically selects frames based on object pixel features to improve tracking accuracy. In addition, a Bidirectional Target Prediction Network is built to utilize multiple reference frames to improve the robustness of the model. Through experiments, our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised techniques on two fine-grained video object tracking tasks: object segmentation and keypoint tracking.
Emotion Recognition in Contemporary Dance Performances Using Laban Movement Analysis
Authors: Muhammad Turab, Philippe Colantoni, Damien Muselet, Alain Tremeau
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

This paper presents a novel framework for emotion recognition in contemporary dance by improving existing Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) feature descriptors and introducing robust, novel descriptors that capture both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the movement. Our approach extracts expressive characteristics from 3D keypoints data of professional dancers performing contemporary dance under various emotional states, and trains multiple classifiers, including Random Forests and Support Vector Machines. Additionally, we provide in-depth explanation of features and their impact on model predictions using explainable machine learning methods. Overall, our study improves emotion recognition in contemporary dance and offers promising applications in performance analysis, dance training, and human--computer interaction, with a highest accuracy of 96.85\%.
Adept: Annotation-Denoising Auxiliary Tasks with Discrete Cosine Transform Map and Keypoint for Human-Centric Pretraining
Authors: Weizhen He, Yunfeng Yan, Shixiang Tang, Yiheng Deng, Yangyang Zhong, Pengxin Luo, Donglian Qi
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Denoising, Human Parsing, Pose Estimation

Human-centric perception is the core of diverse computer vision tasks and has been a long-standing research focus. However, previous research studied these human-centric tasks individually, whose performance is largely limited to the size of the public task-specific datasets. Recent human-centric methods leverage the additional modalities, e.g., depth, to learn fine-grained semantic information, which limits the benefit of pretraining models due to their sensitivity to camera views and the scarcity of RGB-D data on the Internet. This paper improves the data scalability of human-centric pretraining methods by discarding depth information and exploring semantic information of RGB images in the frequency space by Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). We further propose new annotation denoising auxiliary tasks with keypoints and DCT maps to enforce the RGB image extractor to learn fine-grained semantic information of human bodies. Our extensive experiments show that when pretrained on large-scale datasets (COCO and AIC datasets) without depth annotation, our model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods by +0.5 mAP on COCO, +1.4 PCKh on MPII and -0.51 EPE on Human3.6M for pose estimation, by +4.50 mIoU on Human3.6M for human parsing, by -3.14 MAE on SHA and -0.07 MAE on SHB for crowd counting, by +1.1 F1 score on SHA and +0.8 F1 score on SHA for crowd localization, and by +0.1 mAP on Market1501 and +0.8 mAP on MSMT for person ReID. We also validate the effectiveness of our method on MPII+NTURGBD datasets
CE-NPBG: Connectivity Enhanced Neural Point-Based Graphics for Novel View Synthesis in Autonomous Driving Scenes
Authors: Mohammad Altillawi, Fengyi Shen, Liudi Yang, Sai Manoj Prakhya, Ziyuan Liu
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Novel View Synthesis

Current point-based approaches encounter limitations in scalability and rendering quality when using large 3D point cloud maps because using them directly for novel view synthesis (NVS) leads to degraded visualizations. We identify the primary issue behind these low-quality renderings as a visibility mismatch between geometry and appearance, stemming from using these two modalities together. To address this problem, we present CE-NPBG, a new approach for novel view synthesis (NVS) in large-scale autonomous driving scenes. Our method is a neural point-based technique that leverages two modalities: posed images (cameras) and synchronized raw 3D point clouds (LiDAR). We first employ a connectivity relationship graph between appearance and geometry, which retrieves points from a large 3D point cloud map observed from the current camera perspective and uses them for rendering. By leveraging this connectivity, our method significantly improves rendering quality and enhances run-time and scalability by using only a small subset of points from the large 3D point cloud map. Our approach associates neural descriptors with the points and uses them to synthesize views. To enhance the encoding of these descriptors and elevate rendering quality, we propose a joint adversarial and point rasterization training. During training, we pair an image-synthesizer network with a multi-resolution discriminator. At inference, we decouple them and use the image-synthesizer to generate novel views. We also integrate our proposal into the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting work to highlight its benefits for improved rendering and scalability.
Unsupervised 2D-3D lifting of non-rigid objects using local constraints
Authors: Shalini Maiti, Lourdes Agapito, Benjamin Graham
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00

For non-rigid objects, predicting the 3D shape from 2D keypoint observations is ill-posed due to occlusions, and the need to disentangle changes in viewpoint and changes in shape. This challenge has often been addressed by embedding low-rank constraints into specialized models. These models can be hard to train, as they depend on finding a canonical way of aligning observations, before they can learn detailed geometry. These constraints have limited the reconstruction quality. We show that generic, high capacity models, trained with an unsupervised loss, allow for more accurate predicted shapes. In particular, applying low-rank constraints to localized subsets of the full shape allows the high capacity to be suitably constrained. We reduce the state-of-the-art reconstruction error on the S-Up3D dataset by over 70%.
Federated Adapter on Foundation Models: An Out-Of-Distribution Approach
Authors: Yiyuan Yang, Guodong Long, Tianyi Zhou, Qinghua Lu, Shanshan Ye, Jing Jiang
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Privacy Preserving

As foundation models gain prominence, Federated Foundation Models (FedFM) have emerged as a privacy-preserving approach to collaboratively fine-tune models in federated learning (FL) frameworks using distributed datasets across clients. A key challenge for FedFM, given the versatile nature of foundation models, is addressing out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, where unseen tasks or clients may exhibit distribution shifts leading to suboptimal performance. Although numerous studies have explored OOD generalization in conventional FL, these methods are inadequate for FedFM due to the challenges posed by large parameter scales and increased data heterogeneity. To address these, we propose FedOA, which employs adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for efficacy and introduces personalized adapters with feature distance-based regularization to align distributions and guarantee OOD generalization for each client. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the conventional aggregated global model in FedFM inherently retains OOD generalization capabilities, and our proposed method enhances the personalized model's OOD generalization through regularization informed by the global model, with proven convergence under general non-convex settings. Empirically, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on benchmark datasets across various NLP tasks.
Scalable Unit Harmonization in Medical Informatics Using Bi-directional Transformers and Bayesian-Optimized BM25 and Sentence Embedding Retrieval
Authors: Jordi de la Torre
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Information Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

Objective: To develop and evaluate a scalable methodology for harmonizing inconsistent units in large-scale clinical datasets, addressing a key barrier to data interoperability. Materials and Methods: We designed a novel unit harmonization system combining BM25, sentence embeddings, Bayesian optimization, and a bidirectional transformer based binary classifier for retrieving and matching laboratory test entries. The system was evaluated using the Optum Clinformatics Datamart dataset (7.5 billion entries). We implemented a multi-stage pipeline: filtering, identification, harmonization proposal generation, automated re-ranking, and manual validation. Performance was assessed using Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and other standard information retrieval metrics. Results: Our hybrid retrieval approach combining BM25 and sentence embeddings (MRR: 0.8833) significantly outperformed both lexical-only (MRR: 0.7985) and embedding-only (MRR: 0.5277) approaches. The transformer-based reranker further improved performance (absolute MRR improvement: 0.10), bringing the final system MRR to 0.9833. The system achieved 83.39\% precision at rank 1 and 94.66\% recall at rank 5. Discussion: The hybrid architecture effectively leverages the complementary strengths of lexical and semantic approaches. The reranker addresses cases where initial retrieval components make errors due to complex semantic relationships in medical terminology. Conclusion: Our framework provides an efficient, scalable solution for unit harmonization in clinical datasets, reducing manual effort while improving accuracy. Once harmonized, data can be reused seamlessly in different analyses, ensuring consistency across healthcare systems and enabling more reliable multi-institutional studies and meta-analyses.
Constructing an Optimal Behavior Basis for the Option Keyboard
Authors: Lucas N. Alegre, Ana L. C. Bazzan, André Barreto, Bruno C. da Silva
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00

Multi-task reinforcement learning aims to quickly identify solutions for new tasks with minimal or no additional interaction with the environment. Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) addresses this by combining a set of base policies to produce a new one that is at least as good -- though not necessarily optimal -- as any individual base policy. Optimality can be ensured, particularly in the linear-reward case, via techniques that compute a Convex Coverage Set (CCS). However, these are computationally expensive and do not scale to complex domains. The Option Keyboard (OK) improves upon GPI by producing policies that are at least as good -- and often better. It achieves this through a learned meta-policy that dynamically combines base policies. However, its performance critically depends on the choice of base policies. This raises a key question: is there an optimal set of base policies -- an optimal behavior basis -- that enables zero-shot identification of optimal solutions for any linear tasks? We solve this open problem by introducing a novel method that efficiently constructs such an optimal behavior basis. We show that it significantly reduces the number of base policies needed to ensure optimality in new tasks. We also prove that it is strictly more expressive than a CCS, enabling particular classes of non-linear tasks to be solved optimally. We empirically evaluate our technique in challenging domains and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, increasingly so as task complexity increases.
CICADA: Cross-Domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation in Multivariate Time Series
Authors: Tian Lan, YiFei Gao, Yimeng Lu, Chen Zhang
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Meta-Learning, Mixture-of-Experts, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in applications across industries. However, existing methods face significant challenges due to data distributional shifts across different domains, which are exacerbated by the non-stationarity of time series over time. Existing models fail to generalize under multiple heterogeneous source domains and emerging unseen new target domains. To fill the research gap, we introduce CICADA (Cross-domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation), with four key innovations: (1) a mixture of experts (MOE) framework that captures domain-agnostic anomaly features with high flexibility and interpretability; (2) a novel selective meta-learning mechanism to prevent negative transfer between dissimilar domains, (3) an adaptive expansion algorithm for emerging heterogeneous domain expansion, and (4) a hierarchical attention structure that quantifies expert contributions during fusion to enhance interpretability further.Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that CICADA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both cross-domain detection performance and interpretability.
A simple and effective approach for body part recognition on CT scans based on projection estimation
Authors: Franko Hrzic, Mohammadreza Movahhedi, Ophelie Lavoie-Gagne, Ata Kiapour
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

It is well known that machine learning models require a high amount of annotated data to obtain optimal performance. Labelling Computed Tomography (CT) data can be a particularly challenging task due to its volumetric nature and often missing and$/$or incomplete associated meta-data. Even inspecting one CT scan requires additional computer software, or in the case of programming languages $-$ additional programming libraries. This study proposes a simple, yet effective approach based on 2D X-ray-like estimation of 3D CT scans for body region identification. Although body region is commonly associated with the CT scan, it often describes only the focused major body region neglecting other anatomical regions present in the observed CT. In the proposed approach, estimated 2D images were utilized to identify 14 distinct body regions, providing valuable information for constructing a high-quality medical dataset. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it was compared against 2.5D, 3D and foundation model (MI2) based approaches. Our approach outperformed the others, where it came on top with statistical significance and F1-Score for the best-performing model EffNet-B0 of 0.980 $\pm$ 0.016 in comparison to the 0.840 $\pm$ 0.114 (2.5D DenseNet-161), 0.854 $\pm$ 0.096 (3D VoxCNN), and 0.852 $\pm$ 0.104 (MI2 foundation model). The utilized dataset comprised three different clinical centers and counted 15,622 CT scans (44,135 labels).
A Generalized Meta Federated Learning Framework with Theoretical Convergence Guarantees
Authors: Mohammad Vahid Jamali, Hamid Saber, Jung Hyun Bae
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Meta federated learning (FL) is a personalized variant of FL, where multiple agents collaborate on training an initial shared model without exchanging raw data samples. The initial model should be trained in a way that current or new agents can easily adapt it to their local datasets after one or a few fine-tuning steps, thus improving the model personalization. Conventional meta FL approaches minimize the average loss of agents on the local models obtained after one step of fine-tuning. In practice, agents may need to apply several fine-tuning steps to adapt the global model to their local data, especially under highly heterogeneous data distributions across agents. To this end, we present a generalized framework for the meta FL by minimizing the average loss of agents on their local model after any arbitrary number $\nu$ of fine-tuning steps. For this generalized framework, we present a variant of the well-known federated averaging (FedAvg) algorithm and conduct a comprehensive theoretical convergence analysis to characterize the convergence speed as well as behavior of the meta loss functions in both the exact and approximated cases. Our experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate superior accuracy and faster convergence for the proposed scheme compared to conventional approaches.
Large-scale visual SLAM for in-the-wild videos
Authors: Shuo Sun, Torsten Sattler, Malcolm Mielle, Achim J. Lilienthal, Martin Magnusson
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D Scene Reconstruction, Camera Pose Estimation, NeRF, Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry

Accurate and robust 3D scene reconstruction from casual, in-the-wild videos can significantly simplify robot deployment to new environments. However, reliable camera pose estimation and scene reconstruction from such unconstrained videos remains an open challenge. Existing visual-only SLAM methods perform well on benchmark datasets but struggle with real-world footage which often exhibits uncontrolled motion including rapid rotations and pure forward movements, textureless regions, and dynamic objects. We analyze the limitations of current methods and introduce a robust pipeline designed to improve 3D reconstruction from casual videos. We build upon recent deep visual odometry methods but increase robustness in several ways. Camera intrinsics are automatically recovered from the first few frames using structure-from-motion. Dynamic objects and less-constrained areas are masked with a predictive model. Additionally, we leverage monocular depth estimates to regularize bundle adjustment, mitigating errors in low-parallax situations. Finally, we integrate place recognition and loop closure to reduce long-term drift and refine both intrinsics and pose estimates through global bundle adjustment. We demonstrate large-scale contiguous 3D models from several online videos in various environments. In contrast, baseline methods typically produce locally inconsistent results at several points, producing separate segments or distorted maps. In lieu of ground-truth pose data, we evaluate map consistency, execution time and visual accuracy of re-rendered NeRF models. Our proposed system establishes a new baseline for visual reconstruction from casual uncontrolled videos found online, demonstrating more consistent reconstructions over longer sequences of in-the-wild videos than previously achieved.