pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Feature Representation Transferring to Lightweight Models via Perception Coherence
Authors: Hai-Vy Nguyen, Fabrice Gamboa, Sixin Zhang, Reda Chhaibi, Serge Gratton, Thierry Giaccone
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a method for transferring feature representation to lightweight student models from larger teacher models. We mathematically define a new notion called \textit{perception coherence}. Based on this notion, we propose a loss function, which takes into account the dissimilarities between data points in feature space through their ranking. At a high level, by minimizing this loss function, the student model learns to mimic how the teacher model \textit{perceives} inputs. More precisely, our method is motivated by the fact that the representational capacity of the student model is weaker than the teacher model. Hence, we aim to develop a new method allowing for a better relaxation. This means that, the student model does not need to preserve the absolute geometry of the teacher one, while preserving global coherence through dissimilarity ranking. Our theoretical insights provide a probabilistic perspective on the process of feature representation transfer. Our experiments results show that our method outperforms or achieves on-par performance compared to strong baseline methods for representation transferring.
Optimal Transport for Machine Learners
Authors: Gabriel Peyré
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

Optimal Transport is a foundational mathematical theory that connects optimization, partial differential equations, and probability. It offers a powerful framework for comparing probability distributions and has recently become an important tool in machine learning, especially for designing and evaluating generative models. These course notes cover the fundamental mathematical aspects of OT, including the Monge and Kantorovich formulations, Brenier's theorem, the dual and dynamic formulations, the Bures metric on Gaussian distributions, and gradient flows. It also introduces numerical methods such as linear programming, semi-discrete solvers, and entropic regularization. Applications in machine learning include topics like training neural networks via gradient flows, token dynamics in transformers, and the structure of GANs and diffusion models. These notes focus primarily on mathematical content rather than deep learning techniques.
JAEGER: Dual-Level Humanoid Whole-Body Controller
Authors: Ziluo Ding, Haobin Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Zhenguo Sun, Yu Zhang, Xiaojie Niu, Ming Yang, Weishuai Zeng, Xinrun Xu, Zongqing Lu
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

This paper presents JAEGER, a dual-level whole-body controller for humanoid robots that addresses the challenges of training a more robust and versatile policy. Unlike traditional single-controller approaches, JAEGER separates the control of the upper and lower bodies into two independent controllers, so that they can better focus on their distinct tasks. This separation alleviates the dimensionality curse and improves fault tolerance. JAEGER supports both root velocity tracking (coarse-grained control) and local joint angle tracking (fine-grained control), enabling versatile and stable movements. To train the controller, we utilize a human motion dataset (AMASS), retargeting human poses to humanoid poses through an efficient retargeting network, and employ a curriculum learning approach. This method performs supervised learning for initialization, followed by reinforcement learning for further exploration. We conduct our experiments on two humanoid platforms and demonstrate the superiority of our approach against state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and real environments.
TAROT: Towards Essentially Domain-Invariant Robustness with Theoretical Justification
Authors: Dongyoon Yang, Jihu Lee, Yongdai Kim
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization

Robust domain adaptation against adversarial attacks is a critical research area that aims to develop models capable of maintaining consistent performance across diverse and challenging domains. In this paper, we derive a new generalization bound for robust risk on the target domain using a novel divergence measure specifically designed for robust domain adaptation. Building upon this, we propose a new algorithm named TAROT, which is designed to enhance both domain adaptability and robustness. Through extensive experiments, TAROT not only surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and robustness but also significantly enhances domain generalization and scalability by effectively learning domain-invariant features. In particular, TAROT achieves superior performance on the challenging DomainNet dataset, demonstrating its ability to learn domain-invariant representations that generalize well across different domains, including unseen ones. These results highlight the broader applicability of our approach in real-world domain adaptation scenarios.
Two-Stage Random Alternation Framework for One-Shot Pansharpening
Authors: Haorui Chen, Zeyu Ren, Jiaxuan Ren, Ran Ran, Jinliang Shao, Jie Huang, LiangJian Deng
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Pansharpening

Deep learning has substantially advanced pansharpening, achieving impressive fusion quality. However, a prevalent limitation is that conventional deep learning models, which typically rely on training datasets, often exhibit suboptimal generalization to unseen real-world image pairs. This restricts their practical utility when faced with real-world scenarios not included in the training datasets. To overcome this, we introduce a two-stage random alternating framework (TRA-PAN) that performs instance-specific optimization for any given Multispectral(MS)/Panchromatic(PAN) pair, ensuring robust and high-quality fusion. TRA-PAN effectively integrates strong supervision constraints from reduced-resolution images with the physical characteristics of the full-resolution images. The first stage introduces a pre-training procedure, which includes Degradation-Aware Modeling (DAM) to capture spectral degradation mappings, alongside a warm-up procedure designed to reduce training time and mitigate the adverse effects of reduced-resolution data. The second stage employs Random Alternation Optimization (RAO), randomly alternating between reduced- and full-resolution images to refine the fusion model progressively. This adaptive, per-instance optimization strategy, operating in a one-shot manner for each MS/PAN pair, yields superior high-resolution multispectral images. Experimental results demonstrate that TRA-PAN outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in quantitative metrics and visual quality in real-world scenarios, underscoring its enhanced practical applicability and robustness.
MacRAG: Compress, Slice, and Scale-up for Multi-Scale Adaptive Context RAG
Authors: Woosang Lim, Zekun Li, Gyuwan Kim, Sungyoung Ji, HyeonJung Kim, Kyuri Choi, Jin Hyuk Lim, Kyungpyo Park, William Yang Wang
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Long-context large language models (LC LLMs) combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) hold strong potential for complex multi-hop and large-document tasks. However, existing RAG systems often suffer from imprecise retrieval, incomplete context coverage under constrained windows, and fragmented information from suboptimal context construction. We introduce Multi-scale Adaptive Context RAG (MacRAG), a hierarchical RAG framework that compresses and partitions documents into coarse-to-fine granularities, then adaptively merges relevant contexts through real-time chunk- and document-level expansions. By initiating with finest-level retrieval and progressively incorporating broader, higher-level context, MacRAG constructs effective query-specific long contexts, optimizing both precision and coverage. Evaluations on challenging LongBench expansions of HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and Musique confirm MacRAG consistently surpasses baseline RAG pipelines in single- and multi-step generation using Llama-3.1-8B, Gemini-1.5-pro, and GPT-4o. Our results establish MacRAG as an efficient, scalable solution for real-world long-context, multi-hop reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leezekun/MacRAG.
Quadrupedal Robot Skateboard Mounting via Reverse Curriculum Learning
Authors: Danil Belov, Artem Erkhov, Elizaveta Pestova, Ilya Osokin, Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Pavel Osinenko
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

The aim of this work is to enable quadrupedal robots to mount skateboards using Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning. Although prior work has demonstrated skateboarding for quadrupeds that are already positioned on the board, the initial mounting phase still poses a significant challenge. A goal-oriented methodology was adopted, beginning with the terminal phases of the task and progressively increasing the complexity of the problem definition to approximate the desired objective. The learning process was initiated with the skateboard rigidly fixed within the global coordinate frame and the robot positioned directly above it. Through gradual relaxation of these initial conditions, the learned policy demonstrated robustness to variations in skateboard position and orientation, ultimately exhibiting a successful transfer to scenarios involving a mobile skateboard. The code, trained models, and reproducible examples are available at the following link: https://github.com/dancher00/quadruped-skateboard-mounting
dcFCI: Robust Causal Discovery Under Latent Confounding, Unfaithfulness, and Mixed Data
Authors: Adèle H. Ribeiro, Dominik Heider
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference

Causal discovery is central to inferring causal relationships from observational data. In the presence of latent confounding, algorithms such as Fast Causal Inference (FCI) learn a Partial Ancestral Graph (PAG) representing the true model's Markov Equivalence Class. However, their correctness critically depends on empirical faithfulness, the assumption that observed (in)dependencies perfectly reflect those of the underlying causal model, which often fails in practice due to limited sample sizes. To address this, we introduce the first nonparametric score to assess a PAG's compatibility with observed data, even with mixed variable types. This score is both necessary and sufficient to characterize structural uncertainty and distinguish between distinct PAGs. We then propose data-compatible FCI (dcFCI), the first hybrid causal discovery algorithm to jointly address latent confounding, empirical unfaithfulness, and mixed data types. dcFCI integrates our score into an (Anytime)FCI-guided search that systematically explores, ranks, and validates candidate PAGs. Experiments on synthetic and real-world scenarios demonstrate that dcFCI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, often recovering the true PAG even in small and heterogeneous datasets. Examining top-ranked PAGs further provides valuable insights into structural uncertainty, supporting more robust and informed causal reasoning and decision-making.
ProFashion: Prototype-guided Fashion Video Generation with Multiple Reference Images
Authors: Xianghao Kong, Qiaosong Qi, Yuanbin Wang, Anyi Rao, Biaolong Chen, Aixi Zhang, Si Liu, Hao Jiang
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Generation

Fashion video generation aims to synthesize temporally consistent videos from reference images of a designated character. Despite significant progress, existing diffusion-based methods only support a single reference image as input, severely limiting their capability to generate view-consistent fashion videos, especially when there are different patterns on the clothes from different perspectives. Moreover, the widely adopted motion module does not sufficiently model human body movement, leading to sub-optimal spatiotemporal consistency. To address these issues, we propose ProFashion, a fashion video generation framework leveraging multiple reference images to achieve improved view consistency and temporal coherency. To effectively leverage features from multiple reference images while maintaining a reasonable computational cost, we devise a Pose-aware Prototype Aggregator, which selects and aggregates global and fine-grained reference features according to pose information to form frame-wise prototypes, which serve as guidance in the denoising process. To further enhance motion consistency, we introduce a Flow-enhanced Prototype Instantiator, which exploits the human keypoint motion flow to guide an extra spatiotemporal attention process in the denoiser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ProFashion, we extensively evaluate our method on the MRFashion-7K dataset we collected from the Internet. ProFashion also outperforms previous methods on the UBC Fashion dataset.
TACFN: Transformer-based Adaptive Cross-modal Fusion Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Feng Liu, Ziwang Fu, Yunlong Wang, Qijian Zheng
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, feature selection, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

The fusion technique is the key to the multimodal emotion recognition task. Recently, cross-modal attention-based fusion methods have demonstrated high performance and strong robustness. However, cross-modal attention suffers from redundant features and does not capture complementary features well. We find that it is not necessary to use the entire information of one modality to reinforce the other during cross-modal interaction, and the features that can reinforce a modality may contain only a part of it. To this end, we design an innovative Transformer-based Adaptive Cross-modal Fusion Network (TACFN). Specifically, for the redundant features, we make one modality perform intra-modal feature selection through a self-attention mechanism, so that the selected features can adaptively and efficiently interact with another modality. To better capture the complementary information between the modalities, we obtain the fused weight vector by splicing and use the weight vector to achieve feature reinforcement of the modalities. We apply TCAFN to the RAVDESS and IEMOCAP datasets. For fair comparison, we use the same unimodal representations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed fusion method. The experimental results show that TACFN brings a significant performance improvement compared to other methods and reaches the state-of-the-art. All code and models could be accessed from https://github.com/shuzihuaiyu/TACFN.
Online Feedback Efficient Active Target Discovery in Partially Observable Environments
Authors: Anindya Sarkar, Binglin Ji, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

In various scientific and engineering domains, where data acquisition is costly, such as in medical imaging, environmental monitoring, or remote sensing, strategic sampling from unobserved regions, guided by prior observations, is essential to maximize target discovery within a limited sampling budget. In this work, we introduce Diffusion-guided Active Target Discovery (DiffATD), a novel method that leverages diffusion dynamics for active target discovery. DiffATD maintains a belief distribution over each unobserved state in the environment, using this distribution to dynamically balance exploration-exploitation. Exploration reduces uncertainty by sampling regions with the highest expected entropy, while exploitation targets areas with the highest likelihood of discovering the target, indicated by the belief distribution and an incrementally trained reward model designed to learn the characteristics of the target. DiffATD enables efficient target discovery in a partially observable environment within a fixed sampling budget, all without relying on any prior supervised training. Furthermore, DiffATD offers interpretability, unlike existing black-box policies that require extensive supervised training. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies across diverse domains, including medical imaging and remote sensing, we show that DiffATD performs significantly better than baselines and competitively with supervised methods that operate under full environmental observability.
Improving Generalization of Medical Image Registration Foundation Model
Authors: Jing Hu, Kaiwei Yu, Hongjiang Xian, Shu Hu, Xin Wang
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Deformable registration is a fundamental task in medical image processing, aiming to achieve precise alignment by establishing nonlinear correspondences between images. Traditional methods offer good adaptability and interpretability but are limited by computational efficiency. Although deep learning approaches have significantly improved registration speed and accuracy, they often lack flexibility and generalizability across different datasets and tasks. In recent years, foundation models have emerged as a promising direction, leveraging large and diverse datasets to learn universal features and transformation patterns for image registration, thus demonstrating strong cross-task transferability. However, these models still face challenges in generalization and robustness when encountering novel anatomical structures, varying imaging conditions, or unseen modalities. To address these limitations, this paper incorporates Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) into foundation models to enhance their generalization and robustness in medical image registration. By optimizing the flatness of the loss landscape, SAM improves model stability across diverse data distributions and strengthens its ability to handle complex clinical scenarios. Experimental results show that foundation models integrated with SAM achieve significant improvements in cross-dataset registration performance, offering new insights for the advancement of medical image registration technology. Our code is available at https://github.com/Promise13/fm_sam}{https://github.com/Promise13/fm\_sam.
PRUNE: A Patching Based Repair Framework for Certifiable Unlearning of Neural Networks
Authors: Xuran Li, Jingyi Wang, Xiaohan Yuan, Peixin Zhang, Zhan Qin, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

It is often desirable to remove (a.k.a. unlearn) a specific part of the training data from a trained neural network model. A typical application scenario is to protect the data holder's right to be forgotten, which has been promoted by many recent regulation rules. Existing unlearning methods involve training alternative models with remaining data, which may be costly and challenging to verify from the data holder or a thirdparty auditor's perspective. In this work, we provide a new angle and propose a novel unlearning approach by imposing carefully crafted "patch" on the original neural network to achieve targeted "forgetting" of the requested data to delete. Specifically, inspired by the research line of neural network repair, we propose to strategically seek a lightweight minimum "patch" for unlearning a given data point with certifiable guarantee. Furthermore, to unlearn a considerable amount of data points (or an entire class), we propose to iteratively select a small subset of representative data points to unlearn, which achieves the effect of unlearning the whole set. Extensive experiments on multiple categorical datasets demonstrates our approach's effectiveness, achieving measurable unlearning while preserving the model's performance and being competitive in efficiency and memory consumption compared to various baseline methods.
A Point-Based Algorithm for Distributional Reinforcement Learning in Partially Observable Domains
Authors: Larry Preuett III
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Distributional Reinforcement Learning

In many real-world planning tasks, agents must tackle uncertainty about the environment's state and variability in the outcomes of any chosen policy. We address both forms of uncertainty as a first step toward safer algorithms in partially observable settings. Specifically, we extend Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL)-which models the entire return distribution for fully observable domains-to Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), allowing an agent to learn the distribution of returns for each conditional plan. Concretely, we introduce new distributional Bellman operators for partial observability and prove their convergence under the supremum p-Wasserstein metric. We also propose a finite representation of these return distributions via psi-vectors, generalizing the classical alpha-vectors in POMDP solvers. Building on this, we develop Distributional Point-Based Value Iteration (DPBVI), which integrates psi-vectors into a standard point-based backup procedure-bridging DistRL and POMDP planning. By tracking return distributions, DPBVI naturally enables risk-sensitive control in domains where rare, high-impact events must be carefully managed. We provide source code to foster further research in robust decision-making under partial observability.
Text-to-CadQuery: A New Paradigm for CAD Generation with Scalable Large Model Capabilities
Authors: Haoyang Xie, Feng Ju
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning

Computer-aided design (CAD) is fundamental to modern engineering and manufacturing, but creating CAD models still requires expert knowledge and specialized software. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) open up the possibility of generative CAD, where natural language is directly translated into parametric 3D models. However, most existing methods generate task-specific command sequences that pretrained models cannot directly handle. These sequences must be converted into CAD representations such as CAD vectors before a 3D model can be produced, which requires training models from scratch and adds unnecessary complexity. To tackle this issue, we propose generating CadQuery code directly from text, leveraging the strengths of pretrained LLMs to produce 3D models without intermediate representations, using this Python-based scripting language. Since LLMs already excel at Python generation and spatial reasoning, fine-tuning them on Text-to-CadQuery data proves highly effective. Given that these capabilities typically improve with scale, we hypothesize that larger models will perform better after fine-tuning. To enable this, we augment the Text2CAD dataset with 170,000 CadQuery annotations. We fine-tune six open-source LLMs of varying sizes and observe consistent improvements. Our best model achieves a top-1 exact match of 69.3%, up from 58.8%, and reduces Chamfer Distance by 48.6%. Project page: https://github.com/Text-to-CadQuery/Text-to-CadQuery.
Dual Alignment Maximin Optimization for Offline Model-based RL
Authors: Chi Zhou, Wang Luo, Haoran Li, Congying Han, Tiande Guo, ZiCheng Zhang
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00

Offline reinforcement learning agents face significant deployment challenges due to the synthetic-to-real distribution mismatch. While most prior research has focused on improving the fidelity of synthetic sampling and incorporating off-policy mechanisms, the directly integrated paradigm often fails to ensure consistent policy behavior in biased models and underlying environmental dynamics, which inherently arise from discrepancies between behavior and learning policies. In this paper, we first shift the focus from model reliability to policy discrepancies while optimizing for expected returns, and then self-consistently incorporate synthetic data, deriving a novel actor-critic paradigm, Dual Alignment Maximin Optimization (DAMO). It is a unified framework to ensure both model-environment policy consistency and synthetic and offline data compatibility. The inner minimization performs dual conservative value estimation, aligning policies and trajectories to avoid out-of-distribution states and actions, while the outer maximization ensures that policy improvements remain consistent with inner value estimates. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that DAMO effectively ensures model and policy alignments, achieving competitive performance across diverse benchmark tasks.