pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improved visual-information-driven model for crowd simulation and its modular application
Authors: Xuanwen Liang, Jiayu Chen, Eric Wai Ming Lee, Wei Xie
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00

Data-driven crowd simulation models offer advantages in enhancing the accuracy and realism of simulations, and improving their generalizability is essential for promoting application. Current data-driven approaches are primarily designed for a single scenario, with very few models validated across more than two scenarios. It is still an open question to develop data-driven crowd simulation models with strong generalizibility. We notice that the key to addressing this challenge lies in effectively and accurately capturing the core common influential features that govern pedestrians' navigation across diverse scenarios. Particularly, we believe that visual information is one of the most dominant influencing features. In light of this, this paper proposes a data-driven model incorporating a refined visual information extraction method and exit cues to enhance generalizability. The proposed model is examined on four common fundamental modules: bottleneck, corridor, corner and T-junction. The evaluation results demonstrate that our model performs excellently across these scenarios, aligning with pedestrian movement in real-world experiments, and significantly outperforms the classical knowledge-driven model. Furthermore, we introduce a modular approach to apply our proposed model in composite scenarios, and the results regarding trajectories and fundamental diagrams indicate that our simulations closely match real-world patterns in the composite scenario. The research outcomes can provide inspiration for the development of data-driven crowd simulation models with high generalizability and advance the application of data-driven approaches.This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.
Kaleidoscope: In-language Exams for Massively Multilingual Vision Evaluation
Authors: Israfel Salazar, Manuel Fernández Burda, Shayekh Bin Islam, Arshia Soltani Moakhar, Shivalika Singh, Fabian Farestam, Angelika Romanou, Danylo Boiko, Dipika Khullar, Mike Zhang, Dominik Krzemiński, Jekaterina Novikova, Luísa Shimabucoro, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Rishabh Maheshwary, Sharad Duwal, Alfonso Amayuelas, Swati Rajwal, Jebish Purbey, Ahmed Ruby, Nicholas Popovič, Marek Suppa, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala, Olga Tsymboi, Maksim Kostritsya, Bardia Soltani Moakhar, Gabriel da Costa Merlin, Otávio Ferracioli Coletti, Maral Jabbari Shiviari, MohammadAmin farahani fard, Silvia Fernandez, María Grandury, Dmitry Abulkhanov, Drishti Sharma, Andre Guarnier de Mitri, Leticia Bossatto Marchezi, Setayesh Heydari, Johan Obando-Ceron, Nazar Kohut, Beyza Ermis, Desmond Elliott, Enzo Ferrante, Sara Hooker, Marzieh Fadaee
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

The evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) has mainly relied on English-language benchmarks, leaving significant gaps in both multilingual and multicultural coverage. While multilingual benchmarks have expanded, both in size and languages, many rely on translations of English datasets, failing to capture cultural nuances. In this work, we propose Kaleidoscope, as the most comprehensive exam benchmark to date for the multilingual evaluation of vision-language models. Kaleidoscope is a large-scale, in-language multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across diverse languages and visual inputs. Kaleidoscope covers 18 languages and 14 different subjects, amounting to a total of 20,911 multiple-choice questions. Built through an open science collaboration with a diverse group of researchers worldwide, Kaleidoscope ensures linguistic and cultural authenticity. We evaluate top-performing multilingual vision-language models and find that they perform poorly on low-resource languages and in complex multimodal scenarios. Our results highlight the need for progress on culturally inclusive multimodal evaluation frameworks.
OLAF: An Open Life Science Analysis Framework for Conversational Bioinformatics Powered by Large Language Models
Authors: Dylan Riffle, Nima Shirooni, Cody He, Manush Murali, Sovit Nayak, Rishikumar Gopalan, Diego Gonzalez Lopez
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization

OLAF (Open Life Science Analysis Framework) is an open-source platform that enables researchers to perform bioinformatics analyses using natural language. By combining large language models (LLMs) with a modular agent-pipe-router architecture, OLAF generates and executes bioinformatics code on real scientific data, including formats like .h5ad. The system includes an Angular front end and a Python/Firebase backend, allowing users to run analyses such as single-cell RNA-seq workflows, gene annotation, and data visualization through a simple web interface. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, OLAF integrates code execution, data handling, and scientific libraries in a reproducible, user-friendly environment. It is designed to lower the barrier to computational biology for non-programmers and support transparent, AI-powered life science research.
From Stability to Inconsistency: A Study of Moral Preferences in LLMs
Authors: Monika Jotautaite, Mary Phuong, Chatrik Singh Mangat, Maria Angelica Martinez
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate into our daily lives, it becomes crucial to understand their implicit biases and moral tendencies. To address this, we introduce a Moral Foundations LLM dataset (MFD-LLM) grounded in Moral Foundations Theory, which conceptualizes human morality through six core foundations. We propose a novel evaluation method that captures the full spectrum of LLMs' revealed moral preferences by answering a range of real-world moral dilemmas. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art models have remarkably homogeneous value preferences, yet demonstrate a lack of consistency.
Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent LLM Strategies for Automated Student Reflection Assessment
Authors: Gen Li, Li Chen, Cheng Tang, Valdemar Švábenský, Daisuke Deguchi, Takayoshi Yamashita, Atsushi Shimada
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

We explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated assessment of open-text student reflections and prediction of academic performance. Traditional methods for evaluating reflections are time-consuming and may not scale effectively in educational settings. In this work, we employ LLMs to transform student reflections into quantitative scores using two assessment strategies (single-agent and multi-agent) and two prompting techniques (zero-shot and few-shot). Our experiments, conducted on a dataset of 5,278 reflections from 377 students over three academic terms, demonstrate that the single-agent with few-shot strategy achieves the highest match rate with human evaluations. Furthermore, models utilizing LLM-assessed reflection scores outperform baselines in both at-risk student identification and grade prediction tasks. These findings suggest that LLMs can effectively automate reflection assessment, reduce educators' workload, and enable timely support for students who may need additional assistance. Our work emphasizes the potential of integrating advanced generative AI technologies into educational practices to enhance student engagement and academic success.
Mind the Gap: Evaluating Vision Systems in Small Data Applications
Authors: Samuel Stevens, S M Rayeed, Jenna Kline
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

The practical application of AI tools for specific computer vision tasks relies on the "small-data regime" of hundreds to thousands of labeled samples. This small-data regime is vital for applications requiring expensive expert annotations, such as ecological monitoring, medical diagnostics or industrial quality control. We find, however, that computer vision research has ignored the small data regime as evaluations increasingly focus on zero- and few-shot learning. We use the Natural World Tasks (NeWT) benchmark to compare multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and vision-only methods across varying training set sizes. MLLMs exhibit early performance plateaus, while vision-only methods improve throughout the small-data regime, with performance gaps widening beyond 10 training examples. We provide the first comprehensive comparison between these approaches in small-data contexts and advocate for explicit small-data evaluations in AI research to better bridge theoretical advances with practical deployments.
Extending Cox Proportional Hazards Model with Symbolic Non-Linear Log-Risk Functions for Survival Analysis
Authors: Jiaxiang Cheng, Guoqiang Hu
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Survival Analysis

The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model has been widely applied in survival analysis to estimate relative risks across different subjects given multiple covariates. Traditional CPH models rely on a linear combination of covariates weighted with coefficients as the log-risk function, which imposes a strong and restrictive assumption, limiting generalization. Recent deep learning methods enable non-linear log-risk functions. However, they often lack interpretability due to the end-to-end training mechanisms. The implementation of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) offers new possibilities for extending the CPH model with fully transparent and symbolic non-linear log-risk functions. In this paper, we introduce Generalized Cox Proportional Hazards (GCPH) model, a novel method for survival analysis that leverages KAN to enable a non-linear mapping from covariates to survival outcomes in a fully symbolic manner. GCPH maintains the interpretability of traditional CPH models while allowing for the estimation of non-linear log-risk functions. Experiments conducted on both synthetic data and various public benchmarks demonstrate that GCPH achieves competitive performance in terms of prediction accuracy and exhibits superior interpretability compared to current state-of-the-art methods.
LoRI: Reducing Cross-Task Interference in Multi-Task Low-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Juzheng Zhang, Jiacheng You, Ashwinee Panda, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Continual Learning, Mathematical Reasoning, Natural Language Understanding, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Safety Alignment

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it still incurs notable overhead and suffers from parameter interference in multi-task scenarios. We propose LoRA with Reduced Interference (LoRI), a simple yet effective approach that freezes the projection matrices $A$ as random projections and sparsifies the matrices $B$ using task-specific masks. This design substantially reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining strong task performance. Moreover, LoRI minimizes cross-task interference in adapter merging by leveraging the orthogonality between adapter subspaces, and supports continual learning by using sparsity to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across natural language understanding, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and safety alignment tasks demonstrate that LoRI outperforms full fine-tuning and existing PEFT methods, while using up to 95% fewer trainable parameters than LoRA. In multi-task experiments, LoRI enables effective adapter merging and continual learning with reduced cross-task interference. Code is available at: https://github.com/juzhengz/LoRI
Hodge Laplacians and Hodge Diffusion Maps
Authors: Alvaro Almeida Gomez, Jorge Duque Franco
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

We introduce Hodge Diffusion Maps, a novel manifold learning algorithm designed to analyze and extract topological information from high-dimensional data-sets. This method approximates the exterior derivative acting on differential forms, thereby providing an approximation of the Hodge Laplacian operator. Hodge Diffusion Maps extend existing non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques, including vector diffusion maps, as well as the theories behind diffusion maps and Laplacian Eigenmaps. Our approach captures higher-order topological features of the data-set by projecting it into lower-dimensional Euclidean spaces using the Hodge Laplacian. We develop a theoretical framework to estimate the approximation error of the exterior derivative, based on sample points distributed over a real manifold. Numerical experiments support and validate the proposed methodology.
Automating quantum feature map design via large language models
Authors: Kenya Sakka, Kosuke Mitarai, Keisuke Fujii
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

Quantum feature maps are a key component of quantum machine learning, encoding classical data into quantum states to exploit the expressive power of high-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Despite their theoretical promise, designing quantum feature maps that offer practical advantages over classical methods remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose an agentic system that autonomously generates, evaluates, and refines quantum feature maps using large language models. The system consists of five component: Generation, Storage, Validation, Evaluation, and Review. Using these components, it iteratively improves quantum feature maps. Experiments on the MNIST dataset show that it can successfully discover and refine feature maps without human intervention. The best feature map generated outperforms existing quantum baselines and achieves competitive accuracy compared to classical kernels across MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10. Our approach provides a framework for exploring dataset-adaptive quantum features and highlights the potential of LLM-driven automation in quantum algorithm design.
RASMD: RGB And SWIR Multispectral Driving Dataset for Robust Perception in Adverse Conditions
Authors: Youngwan Jin, Michal Kovac, Yagiz Nalcakan, Hyeongjin Ju, Hanbin Song, Sanghyeop Yeo, Shiho Kim
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image-to-Image Translation, object-detection, Object Detection, Translation

Current autonomous driving algorithms heavily rely on the visible spectrum, which is prone to performance degradation in adverse conditions like fog, rain, snow, glare, and high contrast. Although other spectral bands like near-infrared (NIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR) can enhance vision perception in such situations, they have limitations and lack large-scale datasets and benchmarks. Short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging offers several advantages over NIR and LWIR. However, no publicly available large-scale datasets currently incorporate SWIR data for autonomous driving. To address this gap, we introduce the RGB and SWIR Multispectral Driving (RASMD) dataset, which comprises 100,000 synchronized and spatially aligned RGB-SWIR image pairs collected across diverse locations, lighting, and weather conditions. In addition, we provide a subset for RGB-SWIR translation and object detection annotations for a subset of challenging traffic scenarios to demonstrate the utility of SWIR imaging through experiments on both object detection and RGB-to-SWIR image translation. Our experiments show that combining RGB and SWIR data in an ensemble framework significantly improves detection accuracy compared to RGB-only approaches, particularly in conditions where visible-spectrum sensors struggle. We anticipate that the RASMD dataset will advance research in multispectral imaging for autonomous driving and robust perception systems.
Alice: Proactive Learning with Teacher's Demonstrations for Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Authors: Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Yi R., Fung, Paul Pu Liang, Heng Ji
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Reasoning, Transfer Learning

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) present a key challenge of maintaining effective human oversight. Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) offers a promising framework for supervising increasingly capable LLMs using weaker ones. Traditional W2SG methods rely on passive learning, where a weak teacher provides noisy demonstrations to train a strong student. This hinders students from employing their knowledge during training and reaching their full potential. In this work, we introduce Alice (pro{A}ctive {l}earning w{i}th tea{c}her's D{e}monstrations), a framework that leverages complementary knowledge between teacher and student to enhance the learning process.We probe the knowledge base of the teacher model by eliciting their uncertainty, and then use these insights together with teachers' responses as demonstrations to guide student models in self-generating improved responses for supervision. In addition, for situations with significant capability gaps between teacher and student models, we introduce cascade Alice, which employs a hierarchical training approach where weak teachers initially supervise intermediate models, who then guide stronger models in sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the W2SG performance, yielding substantial improvements in three key tasks compared to the original W2SG: knowledge-based reasoning (+4.0%), mathematical reasoning (+22.62%), and logical reasoning (+12.11%). This highlights the effectiveness of our new W2SG paradigm that enables more robust knowledge transfer and supervision outcome.
SAD-Net: a full spectral self-attention detail enhancement network for single image dehazing
Authors: Qingjun Niu， Kun Wu， Jialu Zhang， Zhenqi Han， Lizhuang Liu
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Scientific Reports 2025 4
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Single-image dehazing technology plays a significant role in video surveillance and intelligent 
transportation. However, existing dehazing methods using vanilla convolution only extract features 
in the temporal domain and lack the ability to capture multi-directional information. To address the 
aforementioned issues, we design a new full spectral attention-based detail enhancement dehazing 
network, named SAD-Net. SAD-Net adopts a U-Net-like structure and integrates Spectral Detail 
Enhancement Convolution (SDEC) and Frequency-Guided Attention (FGA). SDEC combines wavelet 
transform and difference convolution(DC) to enhance high-frequency features while preserving low
frequency information. FGA detects haze-induced discrepancies and fine-tunes feature modulation. 
Experimental results show that SAD-Net outperforms six other dehazing networks on the Dense-Haze, 
NH-Haze, RESIDE and I-Haze datasets. Specifically, it increases the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) 
to 17.16 dB on the Dense-Haze dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. 
Additionally, SAD-Net achieves excellent dehazing performance on an external dataset without any 
prior training.
Probability Estimation and Scheduling Optimization for Battery Swap Stations via LRU-Enhanced Genetic Algorithm and Dual-Factor Decision System
Authors: Anzhen Li, Shufan Qing, Xiaochang Li, Rui Mao, Mingchen Feng
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Decision Making, global-optimization, Scheduling

To address the challenges of limited Battery Swap Stations datasets, high operational costs, and fluctuating user charging demand, this research proposes a probability estimation model based on charging pile data and constructs nine scenario-specific battery swap demand datasets. In addition, this study combines Least Recently Used strategy with Genetic Algorithm and incorporates a guided search mechanism, which effectively enhances the global optimization capability. Thus, a dual-factor decision-making based charging schedule optimization system is constructed. Experimental results show that the constructed datasets exhibit stable trend characteristics, adhering to 24-hour and 168-hour periodicity patterns, with outlier ratios consistently below 3.26%, confirming data validity. Compared to baseline, the improved algorithm achieves better fitness individuals in 80% of test regions under the same iterations. When benchmarked against immediate swap-and-charge strategy, our algorithm achieves a peak cost reduction of 13.96%. Moreover, peak user satisfaction reaches 98.57%, while the average iteration time remains below 0.6 seconds, demonstrating good computational efficiency. The complete datasets and optimization algorithm are open-sourced at https://github.com/qingshufan/GA-EVLRU.
MMLA: Multi-Environment, Multi-Species, Low-Altitude Aerial Footage Dataset
Authors: Jenna Kline, Samuel Stevens, Guy Maalouf, Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean, Dat Nguyen Ngoc, Majid Mirmehdi, David Guerin, Tilo Burghardt, Elzbieta Pastucha, Blair Costelloe, Matthew Watson, Thomas Richardson, Ulrik Pagh Schultz Lundquist
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

Real-time wildlife detection in drone imagery is critical for numerous applications, including animal ecology, conservation, and biodiversity monitoring. Low-altitude drone missions are effective for collecting fine-grained animal movement and behavior data, particularly if missions are automated for increased speed and consistency. However, little work exists on evaluating computer vision models on low-altitude aerial imagery and generalizability across different species and settings. To fill this gap, we present a novel multi-environment, multi-species, low-altitude aerial footage (MMLA) dataset. MMLA consists of drone footage collected across three diverse environments: Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and The Wilds Conservation Center in Ohio, which includes five species: Plains zebras, Grevy's zebras, giraffes, onagers, and African Painted Dogs. We comprehensively evaluate three YOLO models (YOLOv5m, YOLOv8m, and YOLOv11m) for detecting animals. Results demonstrate significant performance disparities across locations and species-specific detection variations. Our work highlights the importance of evaluating detection algorithms across different environments for robust wildlife monitoring applications using drones.
A Reinforcement Learning Method for Environments with Stochastic Variables: Post-Decision Proximal Policy Optimization with Dual Critic Networks
Authors: Leonardo Kanashiro Felizardo, Edoardo Fadda, Paolo Brandimarte, Emilio Del-Moral-Hernandez, Mariá Cristina Vasconcelos Nascimento
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents Post-Decision Proximal Policy Optimization (PDPPO), a novel variation of the leading deep reinforcement learning method, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The PDPPO state transition process is divided into two steps: a deterministic step resulting in the post-decision state and a stochastic step leading to the next state. Our approach incorporates post-decision states and dual critics to reduce the problem's dimensionality and enhance the accuracy of value function estimation. Lot-sizing is a mixed integer programming problem for which we exemplify such dynamics. The objective of lot-sizing is to optimize production, delivery fulfillment, and inventory levels in uncertain demand and cost parameters. This paper evaluates the performance of PDPPO across various environments and configurations. Notably, PDPPO with a dual critic architecture achieves nearly double the maximum reward of vanilla PPO in specific scenarios, requiring fewer episode iterations and demonstrating faster and more consistent learning across different initializations. On average, PDPPO outperforms PPO in environments with a stochastic component in the state transition. These results support the benefits of using a post-decision state. Integrating this post-decision state in the value function approximation leads to more informed and efficient learning in high-dimensional and stochastic environments.