pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Anomaly-Aware Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for Graph Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yunhui Liu, Jiashun Cheng, Yiqing Lin, Qizhuo Xie, Jia Li, Fugee Tsung, Hongzhi Yin, Tao Zheng, Jianhua Zhao, Tieke He
Date: 2025-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has garnered increasing attention in recent years, yet remains challenging due to two key factors: (1) label scarcity stemming from the high cost of annotations and (2) homophily disparity at node and class levels. In this paper, we introduce Anomaly-Aware Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning (APF), a targeted and effective framework to mitigate the above challenges in GAD. In the pre-training stage, APF incorporates node-specific subgraphs selected via the Rayleigh Quotient, a label-free anomaly metric, into the learning objective to enhance anomaly awareness. It further introduces two learnable spectral polynomial filters to jointly learn dual representations that capture both general semantics and subtle anomaly cues. During fine-tuning, a gated fusion mechanism adaptively integrates pre-trained representations across nodes and dimensions, while an anomaly-aware regularization loss encourages abnormal nodes to preserve more anomaly-relevant information. Furthermore, we theoretically show that APF tends to achieve linear separability under mild conditions. Comprehensive experiments on 10 benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of APF in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines.
Dynamic Fisher-weighted Model Merging via Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Sanwoo Lee, Jiahao Liu, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yunfang Wu
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

The fine-tuning of pre-trained language models has resulted in the widespread availability of task-specific models. Model merging offers an efficient way to create multi-task models by combining these fine-tuned models at the parameter level, without the need for training data or joint training on multiple datasets. Existing merging approaches typically involve scaling the parameters model-wise or integrating parameter importance parameter-wise. Both approaches exhibit their own weaknesses, leading to a notable performance gap compared to multi-task fine-tuning. In this paper, we unify these seemingly distinct strategies into a more general merging framework, and introduce Dynamic Fisher-weighted Merging (DF-Merge). Specifically, candidate models are associated with a set of coefficients that linearly scale their fine-tuned parameters. Bayesian optimization is applied to dynamically adjust these coefficients, aiming to maximize overall performance on validation sets. Each iteration of this process integrates parameter importance based on the Fisher information conditioned by the coefficients. Experimental results show that DF-Merge outperforms strong baselines across models of different sizes and a variety of tasks. Our analysis shows that the effectiveness of DF-Merge arises from the unified view of merging and that near-optimal performance is achievable in a few iterations, even with minimal validation data.
Parameter-Efficient Checkpoint Merging via Metrics-Weighted Averaging
Authors: Shi Jie Yu, Sehyun Choi
Date: 2025-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Checkpoint merging is a technique for combining multiple model snapshots into a single superior model, potentially reducing training time for large language models. This paper explores checkpoint merging in the context of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), where only small adapter modules (e.g. LoRA) are trained. We propose Metrics-Weighted Averaging (MWA), a simple yet effective method to merge model checkpoints by weighting their parameters according to performance metrics. In particular, we investigate weighting by training loss and by training steps, under the intuition that lower-loss or later-step checkpoints are more valuable. We introduce a formula with a penalty factor to adjust weight distribution, requiring only one hyperparameter regardless of the number of checkpoints. Experiments on three fine-tuning tasks (mathematical reasoning, preference alignment, and general instruction tuning) show that MWA consistently produces merged models that outperform the naive uniform average of checkpoints. Notably, loss-weighted merging often yields the best results, delivering up to 5% higher task accuracy than the baseline uniform merge and even surpassing the final individual checkpoint's performance. These findings validate checkpoint merging for PEFT and demonstrate that a metric-driven weighting heuristic can efficiently boost model performance with minimal computational overhead.
Eye2Eye: A Simple Approach for Monocular-to-Stereo Video Synthesis
Authors: Michal Geyer, Omer Tov, Linyi Jin, Richard Tucker, Inbar Mosseri, Tali Dekel, Noah Snavely
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Disparity Estimation, Transparent objects, Video Generation

The rising popularity of immersive visual experiences has increased interest in stereoscopic 3D video generation. Despite significant advances in video synthesis, creating 3D videos remains challenging due to the relative scarcity of 3D video data. We propose a simple approach for transforming a text-to-video generator into a video-to-stereo generator. Given an input video, our framework automatically produces the video frames from a shifted viewpoint, enabling a compelling 3D effect. Prior and concurrent approaches for this task typically operate in multiple phases, first estimating video disparity or depth, then warping the video accordingly to produce a second view, and finally inpainting the disoccluded regions. This approach inherently fails when the scene involves specular surfaces or transparent objects. In such cases, single-layer disparity estimation is insufficient, resulting in artifacts and incorrect pixel shifts during warping. Our work bypasses these restrictions by directly synthesizing the new viewpoint, avoiding any intermediate steps. This is achieved by leveraging a pre-trained video model's priors on geometry, object materials, optics, and semantics, without relying on external geometry models or manually disentangling geometry from the synthesis process. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach in complex, real-world scenarios featuring diverse object materials and compositions. See videos on https://video-eye2eye.github.io
Naturally Computed Scale Invariance in the Residual Stream of ResNet18
Authors: André Longon
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

An important capacity in visual object recognition is invariance to image-altering variables which leave the identity of objects unchanged, such as lighting, rotation, and scale. How do neural networks achieve this? Prior mechanistic interpretability research has illuminated some invariance-building circuitry in InceptionV1, but the results are limited and networks with different architectures have remained largely unexplored. This work investigates ResNet18 with a particular focus on its residual stream, an architectural component which InceptionV1 lacks. We observe that many convolutional channels in intermediate blocks exhibit scale invariant properties, computed by the element-wise residual summation of scale equivariant representations: the block input's smaller-scale copy with the block pre-sum output's larger-scale copy. Through subsequent ablation experiments, we attempt to causally link these neural properties with scale-robust object recognition behavior. Our tentative findings suggest how the residual stream computes scale invariance and its possible role in behavior. Code is available at: https://github.com/cest-andre/residual-stream-interp
Representation Learning for Tabular Data: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Jun-Peng Jiang, Si-Yang Liu, Hao-Run Cai, Qile Zhou, Han-Jia Ye
Date: 2025-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Survey

Tabular data, structured as rows and columns, is among the most prevalent data types in machine learning classification and regression applications. Models for learning from tabular data have continuously evolved, with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) recently demonstrating promising results through their capability of representation learning. In this survey, we systematically introduce the field of tabular representation learning, covering the background, challenges, and benchmarks, along with the pros and cons of using DNNs. We organize existing methods into three main categories according to their generalization capabilities: specialized, transferable, and general models. Specialized models focus on tasks where training and evaluation occur within the same data distribution. We introduce a hierarchical taxonomy for specialized models based on the key aspects of tabular data -- features, samples, and objectives -- and delve into detailed strategies for obtaining high-quality feature- and sample-level representations. Transferable models are pre-trained on one or more datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on downstream tasks, leveraging knowledge acquired from homogeneous or heterogeneous sources, or even cross-modalities such as vision and language. General models, also known as tabular foundation models, extend this concept further, allowing direct application to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. We group these general models based on the strategies used to adapt across heterogeneous datasets. Additionally, we explore ensemble methods, which integrate the strengths of multiple tabular models. Finally, we discuss representative extensions of tabular learning, including open-environment tabular machine learning, multimodal learning with tabular data, and tabular understanding. More information can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/LAMDA-Tabular/Tabular-Survey.
MMInference: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context VLMs via Modality-Aware Permutation Sparse Attention
Authors: Yucheng Li, Huiqiang Jiang, Chengruidong Zhang, Qianhui Wu, Xufang Luo, Surin Ahn, Amir H. Abdi, Dongsheng Li, Jianfeng Gao, Yuqing Yang, Lili Qiu
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The integration of long-context capabilities with visual understanding unlocks unprecedented potential for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the quadratic attention complexity during the pre-filling phase remains a significant obstacle to real-world deployment. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MMInference (Multimodality Million tokens Inference), a dynamic sparse attention method that accelerates the prefilling stage for long-context multi-modal inputs. First, our analysis reveals that the temporal and spatial locality of video input leads to a unique sparse pattern, the Grid pattern. Simultaneously, VLMs exhibit markedly different sparse distributions across different modalities. We introduce a permutation-based method to leverage the unique Grid pattern and handle modality boundary issues. By offline search the optimal sparse patterns for each head, MMInference constructs the sparse distribution dynamically based on the input. We also provide optimized GPU kernels for efficient sparse computations. Notably, MMInference integrates seamlessly into existing VLM pipelines without any model modifications or fine-tuning. Experiments on multi-modal benchmarks-including Video QA, Captioning, VisionNIAH, and Mixed-Modality NIAH-with state-of-the-art long-context VLMs (LongVila, LlavaVideo, VideoChat-Flash, Qwen2.5-VL) show that MMInference accelerates the pre-filling stage by up to 8.3x at 1M tokens while maintaining accuracy. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/MMInference.
Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection with Spatial-Frequency Collaborative Learning and Hierarchical Cross-Modal Fusion
Authors: Mengyu Qiao, Runze Tian, Yang Wang
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

The rapid evolution of deep generative models poses a critical challenge to deepfake detection, as detectors trained on forgery-specific artifacts often suffer significant performance degradation when encountering unseen forgeries. While existing methods predominantly rely on spatial domain analysis, frequency domain operations are primarily limited to feature-level augmentation, leaving frequency-native artifacts and spatial-frequency interactions insufficiently exploited. To address this limitation, we propose a novel detection framework that integrates multi-scale spatial-frequency analysis for universal deepfake detection. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a local spectral feature extraction pipeline that combines block-wise discrete cosine transform with cascaded multi-scale convolutions to capture subtle spectral artifacts; (2) a global spectral feature extraction pipeline utilizing scale-invariant differential accumulation to identify holistic forgery distribution patterns; and (3) a multi-stage cross-modal fusion mechanism that incorporates shallow-layer attention enhancement and deep-layer dynamic modulation to model spatial-frequency interactions. Extensive evaluations on widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods in both accuracy and generalizability.
RGB-D Tracking via Hierarchical Modality Aggregation and Distribution Network
Authors: Boyue Xu, Yi Xu, Ruichao Hou, Jia Bei, Tongwei Ren, Gangshan Wu
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00

The integration of dual-modal features has been pivotal in advancing RGB-Depth (RGB-D) tracking. However, current trackers are less efficient and focus solely on single-level features, resulting in weaker robustness in fusion and slower speeds that fail to meet the demands of real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel network, denoted as HMAD (Hierarchical Modality Aggregation and Distribution), which addresses these challenges. HMAD leverages the distinct feature representation strengths of RGB and depth modalities, giving prominence to a hierarchical approach for feature distribution and fusion, thereby enhancing the robustness of RGB-D tracking. Experimental results on various RGB-D datasets demonstrate that HMAD achieves state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, real-world experiments further validate HMAD's capacity to effectively handle a spectrum of tracking challenges in real-time scenarios.
SonarT165: A Large-scale Benchmark and STFTrack Framework for Acoustic Object Tracking
Authors: Yunfeng Li, Bo wang, Jiahao Wan, Xueyi Wu, Ye Li
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Object Tracking

Underwater observation systems typically integrate optical cameras and imaging sonar systems. When underwater visibility is insufficient, only sonar systems can provide stable data, which necessitates exploration of the underwater acoustic object tracking (UAOT) task. Previous studies have explored traditional methods and Siamese networks for UAOT. However, the absence of a unified evaluation benchmark has significantly constrained the value of these methods. To alleviate this limitation, we propose the first large-scale UAOT benchmark, SonarT165, comprising 165 square sequences, 165 fan sequences, and 205K high-quality annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that SonarT165 reveals limitations in current state-of-the-art SOT trackers. To address these limitations, we propose STFTrack, an efficient framework for acoustic object tracking. It includes two novel modules, a multi-view template fusion module (MTFM) and an optimal trajectory correction module (OTCM). The MTFM module integrates multi-view feature of both the original image and the binary image of the dynamic template, and introduces a cross-attention-like layer to fuse the spatio-temporal target representations. The OTCM module introduces the acoustic-response-equivalent pixel property and proposes normalized pixel brightness response scores, thereby suppressing suboptimal matches caused by inaccurate Kalman filter prediction boxes. To further improve the model feature, STFTrack introduces a acoustic image enhancement method and a Frequency Enhancement Module (FEM) into its tracking pipeline. Comprehensive experiments show the proposed STFTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/SonarT165.
OptimAI: Optimization from Natural Language Using LLM-Powered AI Agents
Authors: Raghav Thind, Youran Sun, Ling Liang, Haizhao Yang
Date: 2025-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Optimization plays a vital role in scientific research and practical applications. However, formulating a concrete optimization problem described in natural language into a mathematical form and selecting a suitable solver to solve the problem requires substantial domain expertise. We introduce OptimAI, a framework for solving Optimization problems described in natural language by leveraging LLM-powered AI agents, and achieve superior performance over current state-of-the-art methods. Our framework is built upon the following key roles: (1) a formulator that translates natural language problem descriptions into precise mathematical formulations; (2) a planner that constructs a high-level solution strategy prior to execution; and (3) a coder and a code critic capable of interacting with the environment and reflecting on outcomes to refine future actions. Ablation studies confirm that all roles are essential; removing the planner or code critic results in $5.8\times$ and $3.1\times$ drops in productivity, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce UCB-based debug scheduling to dynamically switch between alternative plans, yielding an additional $3.3\times$ productivity gain. Our design emphasizes multi-agent collaboration, and our experiments confirm that combining diverse models leads to performance gains. Our approach attains 88.1% accuracy on the NLP4LP dataset and 82.3% on the Optibench dataset, reducing error rates by 58% and 52%, respectively, over prior best results.
M-Prometheus: A Suite of Open Multilingual LLM Judges
Authors: José Pombal, Dongkeun Yoon, Patrick Fernandes, Ian Wu, Seungone Kim, Ricardo Rei, Graham Neubig, André F. T. Martins
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Model Selection

The use of language models for automatically evaluating long-form text (LLM-as-a-judge) is becoming increasingly common, yet most LLM judges are optimized exclusively for English, with strategies for enhancing their multilingual evaluation capabilities remaining largely unexplored in the current literature. This has created a disparity in the quality of automatic evaluation methods for non-English languages, ultimately hindering the development of models with better multilingual capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-Prometheus, a suite of open-weight LLM judges ranging from 3B to 14B parameters that can provide both direct assessment and pairwise comparison feedback on multilingual outputs. M-Prometheus models outperform state-of-the-art open LLM judges on multilingual reward benchmarks spanning more than 20 languages, as well as on literary machine translation (MT) evaluation covering 4 language pairs. Furthermore, M-Prometheus models can be leveraged at decoding time to significantly improve generated outputs across all 3 tested languages, showcasing their utility for the development of better multilingual models. Lastly, through extensive ablations, we identify the key factors for obtaining an effective multilingual judge, including backbone model selection and training on natively multilingual feedback data instead of translated data. We release our models, training dataset, and code.
Multimodal Conditioned Diffusive Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Chen Su, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Diffusion models achieve remarkable success in processing images and text, and have been extended to special domains such as time series forecasting (TSF). Existing diffusion-based approaches for TSF primarily focus on modeling single-modality numerical sequences, overlooking the rich multimodal information in time series data. To effectively leverage such information for prediction, we propose a multimodal conditioned diffusion model for TSF, namely, MCD-TSF, to jointly utilize timestamps and texts as extra guidance for time series modeling, especially for forecasting. Specifically, Timestamps are combined with time series to establish temporal and semantic correlations among different data points when aggregating information along the temporal dimension. Texts serve as supplementary descriptions of time series' history, and adaptively aligned with data points as well as dynamically controlled in a classifier-free manner. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets across eight domains demonstrate that the proposed MCD-TSF model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
TarDiff: Target-Oriented Diffusion Guidance for Synthetic Electronic Health Record Time Series Generation
Authors: Bowen Deng, Chang Xu, Hao Li, Yuhao Huang, Min Hou, Jiang Bian
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation, Time Series, Time Series Generation

Synthetic Electronic Health Record (EHR) time-series generation is crucial for advancing clinical machine learning models, as it helps address data scarcity by providing more training data. However, most existing approaches focus primarily on replicating statistical distributions and temporal dependencies of real-world data. We argue that fidelity to observed data alone does not guarantee better model performance, as common patterns may dominate, limiting the representation of rare but important conditions. This highlights the need for generate synthetic samples to improve performance of specific clinical models to fulfill their target outcomes. To address this, we propose TarDiff, a novel target-oriented diffusion framework that integrates task-specific influence guidance into the synthetic data generation process. Unlike conventional approaches that mimic training data distributions, TarDiff optimizes synthetic samples by quantifying their expected contribution to improving downstream model performance through influence functions. Specifically, we measure the reduction in task-specific loss induced by synthetic samples and embed this influence gradient into the reverse diffusion process, thereby steering the generation towards utility-optimized data. Evaluated on six publicly available EHR datasets, TarDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by up to 20.4% in AUPRC and 18.4% in AUROC. Our results demonstrate that TarDiff not only preserves temporal fidelity but also enhances downstream model performance, offering a robust solution to data scarcity and class imbalance in healthcare analytics.
ToF-Splatting: Dense SLAM using Sparse Time-of-Flight Depth and Multi-Frame Integration
Authors: Andrea Conti, Matteo Poggi, Valerio Cambareri, Martin R. Oswald, Stefano Mattoccia
Date: 2025-04-23 00:00:00

Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors provide efficient active depth sensing at relatively low power budgets; among such designs, only very sparse measurements from low-resolution sensors are considered to meet the increasingly limited power constraints of mobile and AR/VR devices. However, such extreme sparsity levels limit the seamless usage of ToF depth in SLAM. In this work, we propose ToF-Splatting, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting-based SLAM pipeline tailored for using effectively very sparse ToF input data. Our approach improves upon the state of the art by introducing a multi-frame integration module, which produces dense depth maps by merging cues from extremely sparse ToF depth, monocular color, and multi-view geometry. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real sparse ToF datasets demonstrate the viability of our approach, as it achieves state-of-the-art tracking and mapping performances on reference datasets.