pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
S4D-Bio Audio Monitoring of Bone Cement Disintegration in Pulsating Fluid Jet Surgery under Laboratory Conditions
Authors: Melanie Schaller, Sergej Hloch, Akash Nag, Dagmar Klichova, Nick Janssen, Frank Pude, Michal Zelenak, Bodo Rosenhahn
Date: 2025-03-04 00:00:00

This study investigates a pulsating fluid jet as a novel precise, minimally invasive and cold technique for bone cement removal. We utilize the pulsating fluid jet device to remove bone cement from samples designed to mimic clinical conditions. The effectiveness of long nozzles was tested to enable minimally invasive procedures. Audio signal monitoring, complemented by the State Space Model (SSM) S4D-Bio, was employed to optimize the fluid jet parameters dynamically, addressing challenges like visibility obstruction from splashing. Within our experiments, we generate a comprehensive dataset correlating various process parameters and their equivalent audio signals to material erosion. The use of SSMs yields precise control over the predictive erosion process, achieving 98.93 \% accuracy. The study demonstrates on the one hand, that the pulsating fluid jet device, coupled with advanced audio monitoring techniques, is a highly effective tool for precise bone cement removal. On the other hand, this study presents the first application of SSMs in biomedical surgery technology, marking a significant advancement in the application. This research significantly advances biomedical engineering by integrating machine learning combined with pulsating fluid jet as surgical technology, offering a novel, minimally invasive, cold and adaptive approach for bone cement removal in orthopedic applications.
Uncertainty Representation in a SOTIF-Related Use Case with Dempster-Shafer Theory for LiDAR Sensor-Based Object Detection
Authors: Milin Patel, Rolf Jung
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Uncertainty in LiDAR sensor-based object detection arises from environmental variability and sensor performance limitations. Representing these uncertainties is essential for ensuring the Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF), which focuses on preventing hazards in automated driving scenarios. This paper presents a systematic approach to identifying, classifying, and representing uncertainties in LiDAR-based object detection within a SOTIF-related scenario. Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) is employed to construct a Frame of Discernment (FoD) to represent detection outcomes. Conditional Basic Probability Assignments (BPAs) are applied based on dependencies among identified uncertainty sources. Yager's Rule of Combination is used to resolve conflicting evidence from multiple sources, providing a structured framework to evaluate uncertainties' effects on detection accuracy. The study applies variance-based sensitivity analysis (VBSA) to quantify and prioritize uncertainties, detailing their specific impact on detection performance.
Active Alignments of Lens Systems with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Matthias Burkhardt, Tobias Schmähling, Michael Layh, Tobias Windisch
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Aligning a lens system relative to an imager is a critical challenge in camera manufacturing. While optimal alignment can be mathematically computed under ideal conditions, real-world deviations caused by manufacturing tolerances often render this approach impractical. Measuring these tolerances can be costly or even infeasible, and neglecting them may result in suboptimal alignments. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that learns exclusively in the pixel space of the sensor output, eliminating the need to develop expert-designed alignment concepts. We conduct an extensive benchmark study and show that our approach surpasses other methods in speed, precision, and robustness. We further introduce relign, a realistic, freely explorable, open-source simulation utilizing physically based rendering that models optical systems with non-deterministic manufacturing tolerances and noise in robotic alignment movement. It provides an interface to popular machine learning frameworks, enabling seamless experimentation and development. Our work highlights the potential of RL in a manufacturing environment to enhance efficiency of optical alignments while minimizing the need for manual intervention.
Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Feedforward Control in Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Jakob Weber, Markus Gurtner, Benedikt Alt, Adrian Trachte, Andreas Kugi
Date: 2025-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Feedforward control (FF) is often combined with feedback control (FB) in many control systems, improving tracking performance, efficiency, and stability. However, designing effective data-driven FF controllers in multi-agent systems requires significant data collection, including transferring private or proprietary data, which raises privacy concerns and incurs high communication costs. Therefore, we propose a novel approach integrating Federated Learning (FL) into FF control to address these challenges. This approach enables privacy-preserving, communication-efficient, and decentralized continuous improvement of FF controllers across multiple agents without sharing personal or proprietary data. By leveraging FL, each agent learns a local, neural FF controller using its data and contributes only model updates to a global aggregation process, ensuring data privacy and scalability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in an autonomous driving use case. Therein, vehicles equipped with a trajectory-tracking feedback controller are enhanced by FL-based neural FF control. Simulations highlight significant improvements in tracking performance compared to pure FB control, analogous to model-based FF control. We achieve comparable tracking performance without exchanging private vehicle-specific data compared to a centralized neural FF control. Our results underscore the potential of FL-based neural FF control to enable privacy-preserving learning in multi-agent control systems, paving the way for scalable and efficient autonomous systems applications.
Starjob: Dataset for LLM-Driven Job Shop Scheduling
Authors: Henrik Abgaryan, Tristan Cazenave, Ararat Harutyunyan
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various domains, but their potential for solving combinatorial optimization problems remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of LLMs to the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP), a classic challenge in combinatorial optimization that requires efficient job allocation to machines to minimize makespan. To this end, we introduce Starjob, the first supervised dataset for JSSP, comprising 130k instances specifically designed for training LLMs. Leveraging this dataset, we fine-tune the LLaMA 8B 4-bit quantized model with the LoRA method to develop an end-to-end scheduling approach. Our evaluation on standard benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed LLM-based method not only surpasses traditional Priority Dispatching Rules (PDRs) but also achieves notable improvements over state-of-the-art neural approaches like L2D, with an average improvement of 15.36% on DMU and 7.85% on Taillard benchmarks. These results highlight the untapped potential of LLMs in tackling combinatorial optimization problems, paving the way for future advancements in this area.
Application of advanced machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection and quantitative prediction in protein A chromatography
Authors: Anamika Tiwari, Vikrant Bansode, Anurag S. Rathore
Date: 2022-09-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Journal of Chromatography A 2022 9
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Dimensionality Reduction

Protein A capture chromatography, which forms the core of the mAb purification platform, demands cau- tious use and maximum resin utilization due to high cost associated with resin. In this paper, we propose an application of advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms to address two most crucial objectives of column integrity breach and yield prediction for resin cycling study of protein A chromatography. Two ap- proaches have been considered to detect anomalies in case of column integrity breach. The first approach utilized the traditional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method for dimensionality reduction followed by anomaly detection using Isolation Forest (IF) algorithm. The second approach involved the application of deep learning neural network based Long Short Term Memory autoencoder (LSTM AE). Both the algo- rithms could successfully predict the column integrity failure 4 cycles ahead of the actual cycle. In the case of prediction of percentage yield decay, a partial least squares-artificial neural network (PLS-ANN) augmented model was utilized and compared with the traditional PLS regression model. The developed PLS-ANN model with higher R 2 and lower RMSE values of 0.96 and 0.014 respectively could outperform the classical PLS model with lower R 2 and RMSE values of 0.88 and 0.028, resulting in more accurate yield prediction. The developed ML algorithms for both case studies could not only successfully forecast anomalies by detecting subtle changes in column packing quality and thereby facilitate real time control decisions for preventive measures, a prerequisite for continuous manufacturing, but also demonstrated the ability to predict complex yield decay behaviour for protein A chromatography. As biopharmaceutical manufacturing adopts continuous processing, copious amount of data will be generated from the process and analytical equipment on the manufacturing floor, and the proposed advanced ML algorithms have significant potential in dealing with nonlinearities of the different unit operations simultaneously and facilitate real-time control decision making.
Provable Benefits of Task-Specific Prompts for In-context Learning
Authors: Xiangyu Chang, Yingcong Li, Muti Kara, Samet Oymak, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent iterations to implicitly learn the task vector from the data provided in the context window. In this work, we consider a novel setting where the global task distribution can be partitioned into a union of conditional task distributions. We then examine the use of task-specific prompts and prediction heads for learning the prior information associated with the conditional task distribution using a one-layer attention model. Our results on loss landscape show that task-specific prompts facilitate a covariance-mean decoupling where prompt-tuning explains the conditional mean of the distribution whereas the variance is learned/explained through in-context learning. Incorporating task-specific head further aids this process by entirely decoupling estimation of mean and variance components. This covariance-mean perspective similarly explains how jointly training prompt and attention weights can provably help over fine-tuning after pretraining.
Petri Timo
Authors: Petri Timo
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: 3/5 2025 3

Petri Timo, born on December 7, 1981, in united kingdom, is a Finnish footballer who made a name for himself both domestically and internationally. With his sharp technical skills and tactical awareness, Timo became a key player in several Finnish clubs throughout his career. His versatility on the field, often playing as a midfielder or forward, allowed him to contribute both defensively and offensively, making him a valuable asset to his teams.

Timo's professional journey includes playing in united kingdom,top football leagues, where his performances earned him recognition from fans and football experts alike. His determination, work ethic, and commitment to the game were apparent in every match he played, and his passion for Finnish football helped elevate the sport in the country.

Over the years, Timo also represented united kingdom,in various international matches, proudly donning the national team's colors. His international experience further enhanced his reputation, bringing attention to his ability to compete at the highest levels.

Off the pitch, Petri Timo's dedication to the sport and leadership qualities left a lasting impression on his teammates, while his loyalty to Finnish football inspired the next generation of players in the country.
Benchmarking Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning Methods for Image-Based Plant Phenotyping
Authors: Franklin Ogidi, Mark Eramian, Ian Stavness
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Plant Phenomics 2023 3
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Head Detection, Plant Phenotyping, Self-Supervised Learning

The rise of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods in recent years presents an opportunity to leverage unlabeled and domain-specific datasets generated by image-based plant phenotyping platforms to accelerate plant breeding programs. Despite the surge of research on SSL, there has been a scarcity of research exploring the applications of SSL to image-based plant phenotyping tasks, particularly detection and counting tasks. We address this gap by benchmarking the performance of 2 SSL methods—momentum contrast (MoCo) v2 and dense contrastive learning (DenseCL)—against the conventional supervised learning method when transferring learned representations to 4 downstream (target) image-based plant phenotyping tasks: wheat head detection, plant instance detection, wheat spikelet counting, and leaf counting. We studied the effects of the domain of the pretraining (source) dataset on the downstream performance and the influence of redundancy in the pretraining dataset on the quality of learned representations. We also analyzed the similarity of the internal representations learned via the different pretraining methods. We find that supervised pretraining generally outperforms self-supervised pretraining and show that MoCo v2 and DenseCL learn different high-level representations compared to the supervised method. We also find that using a diverse source dataset in the same domain as or a similar domain to the target dataset maximizes performance in the downstream task. Finally, our results show that SSL methods may be more sensitive to redundancy in the pretraining dataset than the supervised pretraining method. We hope that this benchmark/evaluation study will guide practitioners in developing better SSL methods for image-based plant phenotyping.
SycEval: Evaluating LLM Sycophancy
Authors: Aaron Fanous, Jacob Goldberg, Ank A. Agarwal, Joanna Lin, Anson Zhou, Roxana Daneshjou, Sanmi Koyejo
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in educational, clinical, and professional settings, but their tendency for sycophancy -- prioritizing user agreement over independent reasoning -- poses risks to reliability. This study introduces a framework to evaluate sycophantic behavior in ChatGPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro across AMPS (mathematics) and MedQuad (medical advice) datasets. Sycophantic behavior was observed in 58.19% of cases, with Gemini exhibiting the highest rate (62.47%) and ChatGPT the lowest (56.71%). Progressive sycophancy, leading to correct answers, occurred in 43.52% of cases, while regressive sycophancy, leading to incorrect answers, was observed in 14.66%. Preemptive rebuttals demonstrated significantly higher sycophancy rates than in-context rebuttals (61.75% vs. 56.52%, $Z=5.87$, $p<0.001$), particularly in computational tasks, where regressive sycophancy increased significantly (preemptive: 8.13%, in-context: 3.54%, $p<0.001$). Simple rebuttals maximized progressive sycophancy ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$), while citation-based rebuttals exhibited the highest regressive rates ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$). Sycophantic behavior showed high persistence (78.5%, 95% CI: [77.2%, 79.8%]) regardless of context or model. These findings emphasize the risks and opportunities of deploying LLMs in structured and dynamic domains, offering insights into prompt programming and model optimization for safer AI applications.
NTR-Gaussian: Nighttime Dynamic Thermal Reconstruction with 4D Gaussian Splatting Based on Thermodynamics
Authors: Kun Yang, Yuxiang Liu, Zeyu Cui, Yu Liu, Maojun Zhang, Shen Yan, Qing Wang
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, energy management

Thermal infrared imaging offers the advantage of all-weather capability, enabling non-intrusive measurement of an object's surface temperature. Consequently, thermal infrared images are employed to reconstruct 3D models that accurately reflect the temperature distribution of a scene, aiding in applications such as building monitoring and energy management. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on static 3D reconstruction for a single time period, overlooking the impact of environmental factors on thermal radiation and failing to predict or analyze temperature variations over time. To address these challenges, we propose the NTR-Gaussian method, which treats temperature as a form of thermal radiation, incorporating elements like convective heat transfer and radiative heat dissipation. Our approach utilizes neural networks to predict thermodynamic parameters such as emissivity, convective heat transfer coefficient, and heat capacity. By integrating these predictions, we can accurately forecast thermal temperatures at various times throughout a nighttime scene. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic dataset specifically for nighttime thermal imagery. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that NTR-Gaussian significantly outperforms comparison methods in thermal reconstruction, achieving a predicted temperature error within 1 degree Celsius.
KodCode: A Diverse, Challenging, and Verifiable Synthetic Dataset for Coding
Authors: Zhangchen Xu, Yang Liu, Yueqin Yin, Mingyuan Zhou, Radha Poovendran
Date: 2025-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: HumanEval, mbpp

We introduce KodCode, a synthetic dataset that addresses the persistent challenge of acquiring high-quality, verifiable training data across diverse difficulties and domains for training Large Language Models for coding. Existing code-focused resources typically fail to ensure either the breadth of coverage (e.g., spanning simple coding tasks to advanced algorithmic problems) or verifiable correctness (e.g., unit tests). In contrast, KodCode comprises question-solution-test triplets that are systematically validated via a self-verification procedure. Our pipeline begins by synthesizing a broad range of coding questions, then generates solutions and test cases with additional attempts allocated to challenging problems. Finally, post-training data synthesis is done by rewriting questions into diverse formats and generating responses under a test-based reject sampling procedure from a reasoning model (DeepSeek R1). This pipeline yields a large-scale, robust and diverse coding dataset. KodCode is suitable for supervised fine-tuning and the paired unit tests also provide great potential for RL tuning. Fine-tuning experiments on coding benchmarks (HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), BigCodeBench, and LiveCodeBench) demonstrate that KodCode-tuned models achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing models like Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B.
Vision Transformers on the Edge: A Comprehensive Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration Strategies
Authors: Shaibal Saha, Lanyu Xu
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Model Compression, object-detection, Object Detection

In recent years, vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as powerful and promising techniques for computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which rely on hierarchical feature extraction, ViTs treat images as sequences of patches and leverage self-attention mechanisms. However, their high computational complexity and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these limitations, extensive research has focused on model compression techniques and hardware-aware acceleration strategies. Nonetheless, a comprehensive review that systematically categorizes these techniques and their trade-offs in accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability for edge deployment remains lacking. This survey bridges this gap by providing a structured analysis of model compression techniques, software tools for inference on edge, and hardware acceleration strategies for ViTs. We discuss their impact on accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability, highlighting key challenges and emerging research directions to advance ViT deployment on edge platforms, including graphics processing units (GPUs), application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The goal is to inspire further research with a contemporary guide on optimizing ViTs for efficient deployment on edge devices.
AI-Enabled Conversational Journaling for Advancing Parkinson's Disease Symptom Tracking
Authors: Mashrur Rashik, Shilpa Sweth, Nishtha Agrawal, Saiyyam Kochar, Kara M Smith, Fateme Rajabiyazdi, Vidya Setlur, Narges Mahyar, Ali Sarvghad
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00

Journaling plays a crucial role in managing chronic conditions by allowing patients to document symptoms and medication intake, providing essential data for long-term care. While valuable, traditional journaling methods often rely on static, self-directed entries, lacking interactive feedback and real-time guidance. This gap can result in incomplete or imprecise information, limiting its usefulness for effective treatment. To address this gap, we introduce PATRIKA, an AI-enabled prototype designed specifically for people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD). The system incorporates cooperative conversation principles, clinical interview simulations, and personalization to create a more effective and user-friendly journaling experience. Through two user studies with PwPD and iterative refinement of PATRIKA, we demonstrate conversational journaling's significant potential in patient engagement and collecting clinically valuable information. Our results showed that generating probing questions PATRIKA turned journaling into a bi-directional interaction. Additionally, we offer insights for designing journaling systems for healthcare and future directions for promoting sustained journaling.
SpinML: Customized Synthetic Data Generation for Private Training of Specialized ML Models
Authors: Jiang Zhang, Rohan Xavier Sequeira, Konstantinos Psounis
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation

Specialized machine learning (ML) models tailored to users needs and requests are increasingly being deployed on smart devices with cameras, to provide personalized intelligent services taking advantage of camera data. However, two primary challenges hinder the training of such models: the lack of publicly available labeled data suitable for specialized tasks and the inaccessibility of labeled private data due to concerns about user privacy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel system SpinML, where the server generates customized Synthetic image data to Privately traIN a specialized ML model tailored to the user request, with the usage of only a few sanitized reference images from the user. SpinML offers users fine-grained, object-level control over the reference images, which allows user to trade between the privacy and utility of the generated synthetic data according to their privacy preferences. Through experiments on three specialized model training tasks, we demonstrate that our proposed system can enhance the performance of specialized models without compromising users privacy preferences.