pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Dual-use Dilemma in LLMs: Do Empowering Ethical Capacities Make a Degraded Utility?
Authors: Yiyi Zhang, Xingyu Chen, Kexin Chen, Yuyang Du, Xilin Dang, Pheng-Ann Heng
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Question Answering, Triplet

Recent years have witnessed extensive efforts to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, alongside growing attention to their ethical implications. However, a critical challenge remains largely overlooked: LLMs must balance between rejecting harmful requests for safety and accommodating legitimate ones for utility. This paper presents a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) based alignment framework that achieves better overall performance by addressing this ethical-utility trade-off, using chemical domain applications as a proof-of-concept. Our alignment pipeline starts with a GPT-assisted three-phase data generation scheme, in which we create LibraChemQA, a chemical question-answering dataset comprising 31.6k triplet instances. By incorporating an innovative balanced seed in the data generation process, our framework systematically considers both legitimate and illegitimate requests. The framework also introduces a rephrasing mechanism for efficient data augmentation that enhances the model's chemical comprehension. We further develop a novel hybrid evaluation scheme with LLM judges for precise assessment of both safety and utility. Experimental results demonstrate our model's substantial improvements in overall performance where both safety and utility are considered - our resulting model, LibraChem, outperforms leading LLMs including Claude-3, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-3 by margins of 13.44%, 7.16%, and 7.10% respectively on our released benchmark.
All-in-One Image Compression and Restoration
Authors: Huimin Zeng, Jiacheng Li, Ziqiang Zheng, Zhiwei Xiong
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Compression, Image Restoration

Visual images corrupted by various types and levels of degradations are commonly encountered in practical image compression. However, most existing image compression methods are tailored for clean images, therefore struggling to achieve satisfying results on these images. Joint compression and restoration methods typically focus on a single type of degradation and fail to address a variety of degradations in practice. To this end, we propose a unified framework for all-in-one image compression and restoration, which incorporates the image restoration capability against various degradations into the process of image compression. The key challenges involve distinguishing authentic image content from degradations, and flexibly eliminating various degradations without prior knowledge. Specifically, the proposed framework approaches these challenges from two perspectives: i.e., content information aggregation, and degradation representation aggregation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the following merits of our model: 1) superior rate-distortion (RD) performance on various degraded inputs while preserving the performance on clean data; 2) strong generalization ability to real-world and unseen scenarios; 3) higher computing efficiency over compared methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZeldaM1/All-in-one.
Boosting Knowledge Graph-based Recommendations through Confidence-Aware Augmentation with Large Language Models
Authors: Rui Cai, Chao Wang, Qianyi Cai, Dazhong Shen, Hui Xiong
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Explanation Generation, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graph-based recommendations have gained significant attention due to their ability to leverage rich semantic relationships. However, constructing and maintaining Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is resource-intensive, and the accuracy of KGs can suffer from noisy, outdated, or irrelevant triplets. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to improve the quality and relevance of KGs for recommendation tasks. Despite this, integrating LLMs into KG-based systems presents challenges, such as efficiently augmenting KGs, addressing hallucinations, and developing effective joint learning methods. In this paper, we propose the Confidence-aware KG-based Recommendation Framework with LLM Augmentation (CKG-LLMA), a novel framework that combines KGs and LLMs for recommendation task. The framework includes: (1) an LLM-based subgraph augmenter for enriching KGs with high-quality information, (2) a confidence-aware message propagation mechanism to filter noisy triplets, and (3) a dual-view contrastive learning method to integrate user-item interactions and KG data. Additionally, we employ a confidence-aware explanation generation process to guide LLMs in producing realistic explanations for recommendations. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CKG-LLMA across multiple public datasets.
Large Language Model as Universal Retriever in Industrial-Scale Recommender System
Authors: Junguang Jiang, Yanwen Huang, Bin Liu, Xiaoyu Kong, Xinhang Li, Ziru Xu, Han Zhu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

In real-world recommender systems, different retrieval objectives are typically addressed using task-specific datasets with carefully designed model architectures. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can function as universal retrievers, capable of handling multiple objectives within a generative retrieval framework. To model complex user-item relationships within generative retrieval, we propose multi-query representation. To address the challenge of extremely large candidate sets in industrial recommender systems, we introduce matrix decomposition to boost model learnability, discriminability, and transferability, and we incorporate probabilistic sampling to reduce computation costs. Finally, our Universal Retrieval Model (URM) can adaptively generate a set from tens of millions of candidates based on arbitrary given objective while keeping the latency within tens of milliseconds. Applied to industrial-scale data, URM outperforms expert models elaborately designed for different retrieval objectives on offline experiments and significantly improves the core metric of online advertising platform by $3\%$.
Intent Representation Learning with Large Language Model for Recommendation
Authors: Yu Wang, Lei Sang, Yi Zhang, Yiwen Zhang
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Intent-based recommender systems have garnered significant attention for uncovering latent fine-grained preferences. Intents, as underlying factors of interactions, are crucial for improving recommendation interpretability. Most methods define intents as learnable parameters updated alongside interactions. However, existing frameworks often overlook textual information (e.g., user reviews, item descriptions), which is crucial for alleviating the sparsity of interaction intents. Exploring these multimodal intents, especially the inherent differences in representation spaces, poses two key challenges: i) How to align multimodal intents and effectively mitigate noise issues; ii) How to extract and match latent key intents across modalities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic framework, Intent Representation Learning with Large Language Model (IRLLRec), which leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct multimodal intents and enhance recommendations. Specifically, IRLLRec employs a dual-tower architecture to learn multimodal intent representations. Next, we propose pairwise and translation alignment to eliminate inter-modal differences and enhance robustness against noisy input features. Finally, to better match textual and interaction-based intents, we employ momentum distillation to perform teacher-student learning on fused intent representations. Empirical evaluations on three datasets show that our IRLLRec framework outperforms baselines.Code available at https://github.com/wangyu0627/IRLLRec.
Contrastive Learning for Cold Start Recommendation with Adaptive Feature Fusion
Authors: Jiacheng Hu, Tai An, Zidong Yu, Junliang Du, Yuanshuai Luo
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, feature selection, Recommendation Systems

This paper proposes a cold start recommendation model that integrates contrastive learning, aiming to solve the problem of performance degradation of recommendation systems in cold start scenarios due to the scarcity of user and item interaction data. The model dynamically adjusts the weights of key features through an adaptive feature selection module and effectively integrates user attributes, item meta-information, and contextual features by combining a multimodal feature fusion mechanism, thereby improving recommendation performance. In addition, the model introduces a contrastive learning mechanism to enhance the robustness and generalization ability of feature representation by constructing positive and negative sample pairs. Experiments are conducted on the MovieLens-1M dataset. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms mainstream recommendation methods such as Matrix Factorization, LightGBM, DeepFM, and AutoRec in terms of HR, NDCG, MRR, and Recall, especially in cold start scenarios. Ablation experiments further verify the key role of each module in improving model performance, and the learning rate sensitivity analysis shows that a moderate learning rate is crucial to the optimization effect of the model. This study not only provides a new solution to the cold start problem but also provides an important reference for the application of contrastive learning in recommendation systems. In the future, this model is expected to play a role in a wider range of scenarios, such as real-time recommendation and cross-domain recommendation.
FE-UNet: Frequency Domain Enhanced U-Net with Segment Anything Capability for Versatile Image Segmentation
Authors: Guohao Huo, Ruiting Dai, Ling Shao, Hao Tang
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation is a critical task in visual understanding. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are predisposed to capture high-frequency features in images, while Transformers exhibit a contrasting focus on low-frequency features. In this paper, we experimentally quantify the contrast sensitivity function of CNNs and compare it with that of the human visual system, informed by the seminal experiments of Mannos and Sakrison. Leveraging these insights, we propose the Wavelet-Guided Spectral Pooling Module (WSPM) to enhance and balance image features across the frequency domain. To further emulate the human visual system, we introduce the Frequency Domain Enhanced Receptive Field Block (FE-RFB), which integrates WSPM to extract enriched features from the frequency domain. Building on these innovations, we develop FE-UNet, a model that utilizes SAM2 as its backbone and incorporates Hiera-Large as a pre-trained block, designed to enhance generalization capabilities while ensuring high segmentation accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that FE-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse tasks, including marine animal and polyp segmentation, underscoring its versatility and effectiveness.
Fine, I'll Merge It Myself: A Multi-Fidelity Framework for Automated Model Merging
Authors: Guinan Su, Jonas Geiping
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00

Reasoning capabilities represent a critical frontier for large language models (LLMs), but developing them requires extensive proprietary datasets and computational resources. One way to efficiently supplement capabilities with is by model merging, which offers a promising alternative by combining multiple models without retraining. However, current merging approaches rely on manually-designed strategies for merging hyperparameters, limiting the exploration of potential model combinations and requiring significant human effort. We propose an Automated Model Merging Framework that enables fine-grained exploration of merging strategies while reducing costs through multi-fidelity approximations. We support both single and multi-objective optimization and introduce two novel search spaces: layerwise fusion (LFS) and depth-wise integration (DIS). Evaluating across a number of benchmarks, we find that the search autonomously finds 1) Merges that further boost single-objective performance, even on tasks the model has already been finetuned on, and 2) Merges that optimize multi-objective frontiers across tasks. Effective merges are found with limited compute, e.g. within less than 500 search steps.
A Multi-Task Learning Approach to Linear Multivariate Forecasting
Authors: Liran Nochumsohn, Hedi Zisling, Omri Azencot
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Accurate forecasting of multivariate time series data is important in many engineering and scientific applications. Recent state-of-the-art works ignore the inter-relations between variates, using their model on each variate independently. This raises several research questions related to proper modeling of multivariate data. In this work, we propose to view multivariate forecasting as a multi-task learning problem, facilitating the analysis of forecasting by considering the angle between task gradients and their balance. To do so, we analyze linear models to characterize the behavior of tasks. Our analysis suggests that tasks can be defined by grouping similar variates together, which we achieve via a simple clustering that depends on correlation-based similarities. Moreover, to balance tasks, we scale gradients with respect to their prediction error. Then, each task is solved with a linear model within our MTLinear framework. We evaluate our approach on challenging benchmarks in comparison to strong baselines, and we show it obtains on-par or better results on multivariate forecasting problems. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/azencot-group/MTLinear
Sundial: A Family of Highly Capable Time Series Foundation Models
Authors: Yong liu, Guo Qin, Zhiyuan Shi, Zhi Chen, Caiyin Yang, Xiangdong Huang, Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng Long
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Time Series

We introduce Sundial, a family of native, flexible, and scalable time series foundation models. To predict the next-patch's distribution, we propose a TimeFlow Loss based on flow-matching, which facilitates native pre-training of Transformers on time series without discrete tokenization. Conditioned on arbitrary-length time series, our model is pre-trained without specifying any prior distribution and can generate multiple probable predictions, achieving flexibility in representation learning beyond using parametric densities. Towards time series foundation models, we leverage minimal but crucial adaptations of Transformers and curate TimeBench with 1 trillion time points, comprising mostly real-world datasets and synthetic data. By mitigating mode collapse through TimeFlow Loss, we pre-train a family of Sundial models on TimeBench, which exhibit unprecedented model capacity and generalization performance on zero-shot forecasting. In addition to presenting good scaling behavior, Sundial achieves new state-of-the-art on both point forecasting and probabilistic forecasting benchmarks. We believe that Sundial's pioneering generative paradigm will facilitate a wide variety of forecasting scenarios.
TopoCL: Topological Contrastive Learning for Time Series
Authors: Namwoo Kim, Hyungryul Baik, Yoonjin Yoon
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Representation Learning, Time Series, Transfer Learning

Universal time series representation learning is challenging but valuable in real-world applications such as classification, anomaly detection, and forecasting. Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has been actively explored to tackle time series representation. However, a key challenge is that the data augmentation process in CL can distort seasonal patterns or temporal dependencies, inevitably leading to a loss of semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose Topological Contrastive Learning for time series (TopoCL). TopoCL mitigates such information loss by incorporating persistent homology, which captures the topological characteristics of data that remain invariant under transformations. In this paper, we treat the temporal and topological properties of time series data as distinct modalities. Specifically, we compute persistent homology to construct topological features of time series data, representing them in persistence diagrams. We then design a neural network to encode these persistent diagrams. Our approach jointly optimizes CL within the time modality and time-topology correspondence, promoting a comprehensive understanding of both temporal semantics and topological properties of time series. We conduct extensive experiments on four downstream tasks-classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and transfer learning. The results demonstrate that TopoCL achieves state-of-the-art performance.
General Time-series Model for Universal Knowledge Representation of Multivariate Time-Series data
Authors: Cheng He, Xu Huang, Gangwei Jiang, Zhaoyi Li, Defu Lian, Hong Xie, Enhong Chen, Xijie Liang, Zengrong Zheng
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Imputation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Universal knowledge representation is a central problem for multivariate time series(MTS) foundation models and yet remains open. This paper investigates this problem from the first principle and it makes four folds of contributions. First, a new empirical finding is revealed: time series with different time granularities (or corresponding frequency resolutions) exhibit distinct joint distributions in the frequency domain. This implies a crucial aspect of learning universal knowledge, one that has been overlooked by previous studies. Second, a novel Fourier knowledge attention mechanism is proposed to enable learning time granularity-aware representations from both the temporal and frequency domains. Third, an autoregressive blank infilling pre-training framework is incorporated to time series analysis for the first time, leading to a generative tasks agnostic pre-training strategy. To this end, we develop the General Time-series Model (GTM), a unified MTS foundation model that addresses the limitation of contemporary time series models, which often require token, pre-training, or model-level customizations for downstream tasks adaption. Fourth, extensive experiments show that GTM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across all generative tasks, including long-term forecasting, anomaly detection, and imputation.
CAPE: Covariate-Adjusted Pre-Training for Epidemic Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Zewen Liu, Juntong Ni, Max S. Y. Lau, Wei Jin
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of epidemic infection trajectories is crucial for safeguarding public health. However, limited data availability during emerging outbreaks and the complex interaction between environmental factors and disease dynamics present significant challenges for effective forecasting. In response, we introduce CAPE, a novel epidemic pre-training framework designed to harness extensive disease datasets from diverse regions and integrate environmental factors directly into the modeling process for more informed decision-making on downstream diseases. Based on a covariate adjustment framework, CAPE utilizes pre-training combined with hierarchical environment contrasting to identify universal patterns across diseases while estimating latent environmental influences. We have compiled a diverse collection of epidemic time series datasets and validated the effectiveness of CAPE under various evaluation scenarios, including full-shot, few-shot, zero-shot, cross-location, and cross-disease settings, where it outperforms the leading baseline by an average of 9.9% in full-shot and 14.3% in zero-shot settings. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Efficient Knowledge Feeding to Language Models: A Novel Integrated Encoder-Decoder Architecture
Authors: S Santosh Kumar, Rishi Gottimukkala, Supriya Devidutta, Karthikeyan S
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, In-Context Learning, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This paper introduces a novel approach to efficiently feeding knowledge to language models (LLMs) during prediction by integrating retrieval and generation processes within a unified framework. While the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model addresses gaps in LLMs' training data and knowledge limits, it is hindered by token limit restrictions and dependency on the retrieval system's accuracy. Our proposed architecture incorporates in-context vectors (ICV) to overcome these challenges. ICV recasts in-context learning by using latent embeddings of LLMs to create a vector that captures essential task information. This vector is then used to shift the latent states of the LLM, enhancing the generation process without adding demonstration examples to the prompt. ICV directly integrates information into the model, enabling it to process this information more effectively. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that ICV outperforms standard in-context learning and fine-tuning across question-answering, information retrieval, and other tasks. This approach mitigates the limitations of current RAG models and offers a more robust solution for handling extensive and diverse datasets. Despite leveraging a fraction of the parameters, our ICV-enhanced model achieves competitive performance against models like LLaMA-3, Gemma, and Phi-3, significantly reducing computational costs and memory requirements. ICV reduces prompt length, is easy to control, surpasses token limitations, and is computationally efficient compared to fine-tuning.
M+: Extending MemoryLLM with Scalable Long-Term Memory
Authors: Yu Wang, Dmitry Krotov, Yuanzhe Hu, Yifan Gao, Wangchunshu Zhou, Julian McAuley, Dan Gutfreund, Rogerio Feris, Zexue He
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, GPU, Long-Context Understanding, Text Generation

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with latent-space memory has attracted increasing attention as they can extend the context window of existing language models. However, retaining information from the distant past remains a challenge. For example, MemoryLLM (Wang et al., 2024a), as a representative work with latent-space memory, compresses past information into hidden states across all layers, forming a memory pool of 1B parameters. While effective for sequence lengths up to 16k tokens, it struggles to retain knowledge beyond 20k tokens. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing M+, a memory-augmented model based on MemoryLLM that significantly enhances long-term information retention. M+ integrates a long-term memory mechanism with a co-trained retriever, dynamically retrieving relevant information during text generation. We evaluate M+ on diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding and knowledge retention tasks. Experimental results show that M+ significantly outperforms MemoryLLM and recent strong baselines, extending knowledge retention from under 20k to over 160k tokens with similar GPU memory overhead.