pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Decoder Architectures for Learned Sparse Retrieval
Authors: Jingfen Qiao, Thong Nguyen, Evangelos Kanoulas, Andrew Yates
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Retrieval

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) has traditionally focused on small-scale encoder-only transformer architectures. With the advent of large-scale pre-trained language models, their capability to generate sparse representations for retrieval tasks across different transformer-based architectures, including encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the effectiveness of LSR across these architectures, exploring various sparse representation heads and model scales. Our results highlight the limitations of using large language models to create effective sparse representations in zero-shot settings, identifying challenges such as inappropriate term expansions and reduced performance due to the lack of expansion. We find that the encoder-decoder architecture with multi-tokens decoding approach achieves the best performance among the three backbones. While the decoder-only model performs worse than the encoder-only model, it demonstrates the potential to outperform when scaled to a high number of parameters.
Distributed Time-Varying Gaussian Regression via Kalman Filtering
Authors: Nicola Taddei, Riccardo Maggioni, Jaap Eising, Giulia De Pasquale, Florian Dorfler
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We consider the problem of learning time-varying functions in a distributed fashion, where agents collect local information to collaboratively achieve a shared estimate. This task is particularly relevant in control applications, whenever real-time and robust estimation of dynamic cost/reward functions in safety critical settings has to be performed. In this paper, we,adopt a finite-dimensional approximation of a Gaussian Process, corresponding to a Bayesian linear regression in an appropriate feature space, and propose a new algorithm, DistKP, to track the time-varying coefficients via a distributed Kalman filter. The proposed method works for arbitrary kernels and under weaker assumptions on the time-evolution of the function to learn compared to the literature. We validate our results using a simulation example in which a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) learns a dynamically changing wind field.
Quadratic Interest Network for Multimodal Click-Through Rate Prediction
Authors: Honghao Li, Hanwei Li, Jing Zhang, Yi Zhang, Ziniu Yu, Lei Sang, Yiwen Zhang
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Multimodal Recommendation, Prediction, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning, Task 2

Multimodal click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a key technique in industrial recommender systems. It leverages heterogeneous modalities such as text, images, and behavioral logs to capture high-order feature interactions between users and items, thereby enhancing the system's understanding of user interests and its ability to predict click behavior. The primary challenge in this field lies in effectively utilizing the rich semantic information from multiple modalities while satisfying the low-latency requirements of online inference in real-world applications. To foster progress in this area, the Multimodal CTR Prediction Challenge Track of the WWW 2025 EReL@MIR Workshop formulates the problem into two tasks: (1) Task 1 of Multimodal Item Embedding: this task aims to explore multimodal information extraction and item representation learning methods that enhance recommendation tasks; and (2) Task 2 of Multimodal CTR Prediction: this task aims to explore what multimodal recommendation model can effectively leverage multimodal embedding features and achieve better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model for Task 2, named Quadratic Interest Network (QIN) for Multimodal CTR Prediction. Specifically, QIN employs adaptive sparse target attention to extract multimodal user behavior features, and leverages Quadratic Neural Networks to capture high-order feature interactions. As a result, QIN achieved an AUC of 0.9798 on the leaderboard and ranked second in the competition. The model code, training logs, hyperparameter configurations, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/salmon1802/QIN.
Event triggered optimal formation control for nonlinear multi-agent systems under Denial-of-Service attacks
Authors: Jianqiang Zhang, Kaijun Yang
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

This paper investigates the optimal formation control problem of a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems(MASs) under Denial-of-Service(DoS) attacks. We design the optimal formation control law using an event-triggered control scheme to achieve formation objectives under DoS attacks. Critic neural network (NN)-based approach is employed to achieve the optimal control policy under DoS attacks. Event-triggered mechanism is introduced to ensure the saving of control resources. Additionally, Lyapunov stability theory is utilized to demonstrate that the local neighborhood formation error exhibits exponential stability and the estimation error of weights are uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, the effectiveness of the control algorithm is validated through matlab simulations. The results indicate that under DoS attacks, the nonlinear MAS successfully achieves the desired formation for the MAS.
A novel real-time aeroelastic hybrid simulation system of section model wind tunnel testing based on adaptive extended Kalman filter
Authors: Wenkai Du, Guangzhong Gao, Suhan Li, Bo Fu, Jiawu Li, Ledong Zhu
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00

Elastically-supported section model tests are the most basic experimental technique in wind engineering, where helical springs are commonly employed to simulate the two-degree-of-freedom low-order modal motions of flexible structures. However, the traditional technique has intrinsic limitations in accurately modeling nonlinear structural behaviors and accurate adjustments of nonlinear structural damping. This study proposes a novel Real-Time Aeroelastic Hybrid Simulation system for section model wind tunnel tests by integrating an active control algorithm of adaptive Kalman filter. The proposed system enables the simulation of nonlinear heave-transverse-torsion coupled vibrations of a section model under the action of the oncoming wind. The structural properties, i.g. mass, damping and stiffness, are numerically simulated via an active control system, and the aerodynamic forces are physically modelled via the model-wind interaction in the wind tunnel. To validate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed RTAHS system, a MATLAB/Simulink-FLUENT/UDF co-simulation framework is developed. Numerical verification results indicate that the proposed algorithm effectively estimates the motion responses in both linear and nonlinear scenarios.
Unsupervised Corpus Poisoning Attacks in Continuous Space for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Yongkang Li, Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Simon Lupart, Evangelos Kanoulas
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper concerns corpus poisoning attacks in dense information retrieval, where an adversary attempts to compromise the ranking performance of a search algorithm by injecting a small number of maliciously generated documents into the corpus. Our work addresses two limitations in the current literature. First, attacks that perform adversarial gradient-based word substitution search do so in the discrete lexical space, while retrieval itself happens in the continuous embedding space. We thus propose an optimization method that operates in the embedding space directly. Specifically, we train a perturbation model with the objective of maintaining the geometric distance between the original and adversarial document embeddings, while also maximizing the token-level dissimilarity between the original and adversarial documents. Second, it is common for related work to have a strong assumption that the adversary has prior knowledge about the queries. In this paper, we focus on a more challenging variant of the problem where the adversary assumes no prior knowledge about the query distribution (hence, unsupervised). Our core contribution is an adversarial corpus attack that is fast and effective. We present comprehensive experimental results on both in- and out-of-domain datasets, focusing on two related tasks: a top-1 attack and a corpus poisoning attack. We consider attacks under both a white-box and a black-box setting. Notably, our method can generate successful adversarial examples in under two minutes per target document; four times faster compared to the fastest gradient-based word substitution methods in the literature with the same hardware. Furthermore, our adversarial generation method generates text that is more likely to occur under the distribution of natural text (low perplexity), and is therefore more difficult to detect.
Adaptive Field Effect Planner for Safe Interactive Autonomous Driving on Curved Roads
Authors: Qinghao Li, Zhen Tian, Xiaodan Wang, Jinming Yang, ZhiHao Lin
Date: 2025-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Navigate, Trajectory Planning

Autonomous driving has garnered significant attention for its potential to improve safety, traffic efficiency, and user convenience. However, the dynamic and complex nature of interactive driving poses significant challenges, including the need to navigate non-linear road geometries, handle dynamic obstacles, and meet stringent safety and comfort requirements. Traditional approaches, such as artificial potential fields (APF), often fall short in addressing these complexities independently, necessitating the development of integrated and adaptive frameworks. This paper presents a novel approach to autonomous vehicle navigation that integrates artificial potential fields, Frenet coordinates, and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO). A dynamic risk field, adapted from traditional APF, is proposed to ensure interactive safety by quantifying risks and dynamically adjusting lane-changing intentions based on surrounding vehicle behavior. Frenet coordinates are utilized to simplify trajectory planning on non-straight roads, while an enhanced quintic polynomial trajectory generator ensures smooth and comfortable path transitions. Additionally, an IPSO algorithm optimizes trajectory selection in real time, balancing safety and user comfort within a feasible input range. The proposed framework is validated through extensive simulations and real-world scenarios, demonstrating its ability to navigate complex traffic environments, maintain safety margins, and generate smooth, dynamically feasible trajectories.
Replication and Exploration of Generative Retrieval over Dynamic Corpora
Authors: Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Ma, Weiwei Sun, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Maarten de Rijke, Zhaochun Ren
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm in information retrieval (IR). However, most existing GR models are developed and evaluated using a static document collection, and their performance in dynamic corpora where document collections evolve continuously is rarely studied. In this paper, we first reproduce and systematically evaluate various representative GR approaches over dynamic corpora. Through extensive experiments, we reveal that existing GR models with \textit{text-based} docids show superior generalization to unseen documents. We observe that the more fine-grained the docid design in the GR model, the better its performance over dynamic corpora, surpassing BM25 and even being comparable to dense retrieval methods. While GR models with \textit{numeric-based} docids show high efficiency, their performance drops significantly over dynamic corpora. Furthermore, our experiments find that the underperformance of numeric-based docids is partly due to their excessive tendency toward the initial document set, which likely results from overfitting on the training set. We then conduct an in-depth analysis of the best-performing GR methods. We identify three critical advantages of text-based docids in dynamic corpora: (i) Semantic alignment with language models' pretrained knowledge, (ii) Fine-grained docid design, and (iii) High lexical diversity. Building on these insights, we finally propose a novel multi-docid design that leverages both the efficiency of numeric-based docids and the effectiveness of text-based docids, achieving improved performance in dynamic corpus without requiring additional retraining. Our work offers empirical evidence for advancing GR methods over dynamic corpora and paves the way for developing more generalized yet efficient GR models in real-world search engines.
Proactive Radio Resource Allocation for 6G In-Factory Subnetworks
Authors: Hossam Farag, Mohamed Ragab, Gilberto Berardinelli, Cedomir Stefanovic
Date: 2025-04-20 00:00:00

6G In-Factory Subnetworks (InF-S) have recently been introduced as short-range, low-power radio cells installed in robots and production modules to support the strict requirements of modern control systems. Information freshness, characterized by the Age of Information (AoI), is crucial to guarantee the stability and accuracy of the control loop in these systems. However, achieving strict AoI performance poses significant challenges considering the limited resources and the high dynamic environment of InF-S. In this work, we introduce a proactive radio resource allocation approach to minimize the AoI violation probability. The proposed approach adopts a decentralized learning framework using Bayesian Ridge Regression (BRR) to predict the future AoI by actively learning the system dynamics. Based on the predicted AoI value, radio resources are proactively allocated to minimize the probability of AoI exceeding a predefined threshold, hence enhancing the reliability and accuracy of the control loop. The conducted simulation results prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach to improve the AoI performance where a reduction of 98% is achieved in the AoI violation probability compared to relevant baseline methods.
Synergizing RAG and Reasoning: A Systematic Review
Authors: Yunfan Gao, Yun Xiong, Yijie Zhong, Yuxi Bi, Ming Xue, Haofen Wang
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), particularly in reasoning capabilities, have propelled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to unprecedented levels. By synergizing retrieval mechanisms with advanced reasoning, LLMs can now tackle increasingly complex problems. This paper presents a systematic review of the collaborative interplay between RAG and reasoning, clearly defining "reasoning" within the RAG context. It construct a comprehensive taxonomy encompassing multi-dimensional collaborative objectives, representative paradigms, and technical implementations, and analyze the bidirectional synergy methods. Additionally, we critically evaluate current limitations in RAG assessment, including the absence of intermediate supervision for multi-step reasoning and practical challenges related to cost-risk trade-offs. To bridge theory and practice, we provide practical guidelines tailored to diverse real-world applications. Finally, we identify promising research directions, such as graph-based knowledge integration, hybrid model collaboration, and RL-driven optimization. Overall, this work presents a theoretical framework and practical foundation to advance RAG systems in academia and industry, fostering the next generation of RAG solutions.
Online Optimal Parameter Compensation method of High-dimensional PID Controller for Robust stability
Authors: Zimao Sheng, Hong'an Yang
Date: 2025-04-20 00:00:00

Classical PID control is widely applied in an engineering system, with parameter regulation relying on a method like Trial - Error Tuning or the Ziegler - Nichols rule, mainly for a Single - Input Single - Output (SISO) system. However, the industrial nonlinear Multiple - Input Multiple - Output (MIMO) system demands a high - robustness PID controller due to strong state coupling, external disturbances, and faults. Existing research on PID parameter regulation for a nonlinear uncertain MIMO system has a significant drawback: it's limited to a specific system type, the control mechanism for a MIMO nonlinear system under disturbances is unclear, the MIMO PID controller over - relies on decoupled control, and lacks dynamic parameter compensation. This paper theoretically analyzes a high - dimensional PID controller for a disturbed nonlinear MIMO system, providing a condition for online dynamic parameter regulation to ensure robust stability. By transforming the parameter regulation into a two - stage minimum eigenvalue problem (EVP) solvable via the interior point method, it enables efficient online tuning. The experiment proves that the designed dynamic compensation algorithm can achieve online robust stability of system errors considering multi - channel input coupling, addressing the key limitation in the field.
Beyond Whole Dialogue Modeling: Contextual Disentanglement for Conversational Recommendation
Authors: Guojia An, Jie Zou, Jiwei Wei, Chaoning Zhang, Fuming Sun, Yang Yang
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference, Disentanglement, Prompt Learning, Recommendation Systems, Response Generation

Conversational recommender systems aim to provide personalized recommendations by analyzing and utilizing contextual information related to dialogue. However, existing methods typically model the dialogue context as a whole, neglecting the inherent complexity and entanglement within the dialogue. Specifically, a dialogue comprises both focus information and background information, which mutually influence each other. Current methods tend to model these two types of information mixedly, leading to misinterpretation of users' actual needs, thereby lowering the accuracy of recommendations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel model to introduce contextual disentanglement for improving conversational recommender systems, named DisenCRS. The proposed model DisenCRS employs a dual disentanglement framework, including self-supervised contrastive disentanglement and counterfactual inference disentanglement, to effectively distinguish focus information and background information from the dialogue context under unsupervised conditions. Moreover, we design an adaptive prompt learning module to automatically select the most suitable prompt based on the specific dialogue context, fully leveraging the power of large language models. Experimental results on two widely used public datasets demonstrate that DisenCRS significantly outperforms existing conversational recommendation models, achieving superior performance on both item recommendation and response generation tasks.
Quantum-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Power Grid Security Assessment
Authors: Benjamin M. Peter, Mert Korkali
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Navigate, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The increasingly challenging task of maintaining power grid security requires innovative solutions. Novel approaches using reinforcement learning (RL) agents have been proposed to help grid operators navigate the massive decision space and nonlinear behavior of these complex networks. However, applying RL to power grid security assessment, specifically for combinatorially troublesome contingency analysis problems, has proven difficult to scale. The integration of quantum computing into these RL frameworks helps scale by improving computational efficiency and boosting agent proficiency by leveraging quantum advantages in action exploration and model-based interdependence. To demonstrate a proof-of-concept use of quantum computing for RL agent training and simulation, we propose a hybrid agent that runs on quantum hardware using IBM's Qiskit Runtime. We also provide detailed insight into the construction of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for generating relevant quantum output. This agent's proficiency at maintaining grid stability is demonstrated relative to a benchmark model without quantum enhancement using N-k contingency analysis. Additionally, we offer a comparative assessment of the training procedures for RL models integrated with a quantum backend.
Soft and Hard Scaled Relative Graphs for Nonlinear Feedback Stability
Authors: Chao Chen, Sei Zhen Khong, Rodolphe Sepulchre
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00

This paper presents input-output stability analysis of nonlinear feedback systems based on the notion of soft and hard scaled relative graphs (SRGs). The soft and hard SRGs acknowledge the distinction between incremental positivity and incremental passivity and reconcile them from a graphical perspective. The essence of our proposed analysis is that the separation of soft/hard SRGs of two open-loop systems on the complex plane guarantees closed-loop stability. The main results generalize an existing soft SRG separation theorem for bounded open-loop systems which was proved based on interconnection properties of soft SRGs under a chordal assumption. By comparison, our analysis does not require this chordal assumption and applies to possibly unbounded open-loop systems.
Graphical Dominance Analysis for Linear Systems: A Frequency-Domain Approach
Authors: Chao Chen, Thomas Chaffey, Rodolphe Sepulchre
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00

We propose a frequency-domain approach to dominance analysis for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) linear time-invariant systems. The dominance of a MIMO system is defined to be the number of its poles in the open right half-plane. Our approach is graphical: we define a frequency-wise notion of the recently-introduced scaled graph of a MIMO system plotted in a complex plane. The scaled graph provides a bound of the eigenloci of the system, which can be viewed as a robust MIMO extension of the classical Nyquist plot. Our main results characterize sufficient conditions for quantifying the dominance of a closed-loop system based upon separation of scaled graphs of two open-loop systems in a frequency-wise manner. The results reconcile existing small gain, small phase and passivity theorems for feedback dominance analysis.