pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Agent-as-a-Service based on Agent Network
Authors: Yuhan Zhu, Haojie Liu, Jian Wang, Bing Li, Zikang Yin, Yefei Liao
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Mathematical Reasoning

The rise of large model-based AI agents has spurred interest in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for their capabilities in decision-making, collaboration, and adaptability. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) addresses tool invocation and data exchange challenges via a unified protocol, it lacks support for organizing agent-level collaboration. To bridge this gap, we propose Agent-as-a-Service based on Agent Network (AaaS-AN), a service-oriented paradigm grounded in the Role-Goal-Process-Service (RGPS) standard. AaaS-AN unifies the entire agent lifecycle, including construction, integration, interoperability, and networked collaboration, through two core components: (1) a dynamic Agent Network, which models agents and agent groups as vertexes that self-organize within the network based on task and role dependencies; (2) service-oriented agents, incorporating service discovery, registration, and interoperability protocols. These are orchestrated by a Service Scheduler, which leverages an Execution Graph to enable distributed coordination, context tracking, and runtime task management. We validate AaaS-AN on mathematical reasoning and application-level code generation tasks, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, we constructed a MAS based on AaaS-AN containing agent groups, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) workflows, and MCP servers over 100 agent services. We also release a dataset containing 10,000 long-horizon multi-agent workflows to facilitate future research on long-chain collaboration in MAS.
Optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Analysis of Hyperparameter Impact on Performance and Efficiency
Authors: Adel Ammar, Anis Koubaa, Omer Nacar, Wadii Boulila
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, RAG, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Semantic Segmentation

Large language models achieve high task performance yet often hallucinate or rely on outdated knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses these gaps by coupling generation with external search. We analyse how hyperparameters influence speed and quality in RAG systems, covering Chroma and Faiss vector stores, chunking policies, cross-encoder re-ranking, and temperature, and we evaluate six metrics: faithfulness, answer correctness, answer relevancy, context precision, context recall, and answer similarity. Chroma processes queries 13% faster, whereas Faiss yields higher retrieval precision, revealing a clear speed-accuracy trade-off. Naive fixed-length chunking with small windows and minimal overlap outperforms semantic segmentation while remaining the quickest option. Re-ranking provides modest gains in retrieval quality yet increases runtime by roughly a factor of 5, so its usefulness depends on latency constraints. These results help practitioners balance computational cost and accuracy when tuning RAG systems for transparent, up-to-date responses. Finally, we re-evaluate the top configurations with a corrective RAG workflow and show that their advantages persist when the model can iteratively request additional evidence. We obtain a near-perfect context precision (99%), which demonstrates that RAG systems can achieve extremely high retrieval accuracy with the right combination of hyperparameters, with significant implications for applications where retrieval quality directly impacts downstream task performance, such as clinical decision support in healthcare.
A Survey of 3D Reconstruction with Event Cameras: From Event-based Geometry to Neural 3D Rendering
Authors: Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou, Langyi Chen, Haodong Chen, Ying Zhou, Vera Chung, Qiang Qu
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Neural Rendering, Survey

Event cameras have emerged as promising sensors for 3D reconstruction due to their ability to capture per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously. Unlike conventional frame-based cameras, they produce sparse and temporally rich data streams, which enable more accurate 3D reconstruction and open up the possibility of performing reconstruction in extreme environments such as high-speed motion, low light, or high dynamic range scenes. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive review focused exclusively on 3D reconstruction using event cameras. The survey categorises existing works into three major types based on input modality - stereo, monocular, and multimodal systems, and further classifies them by reconstruction approach, including geometry-based, deep learning-based, and recent neural rendering techniques such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting. Methods with a similar research focus were organised chronologically into the most subdivided groups. We also summarise public datasets relevant to event-based 3D reconstruction. Finally, we highlight current research limitations in data availability, evaluation, representation, and dynamic scene handling, and outline promising future research directions. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive reference and a roadmap for future developments in event-driven 3D reconstruction.
Hakim: Farsi Text Embedding Model
Authors: Mehran Sarmadi, Morteza Alikhani, Erfan Zinvandi, Zahra Pourbahman
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Natural Language Understanding, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Recent advancements in text embedding have significantly improved natural language understanding across many languages, yet Persian remains notably underrepresented in large-scale embedding research. In this paper, we present Hakim, a novel state-of-the-art Persian text embedding model that achieves a 8.5% performance improvement over existing approaches on the FaMTEB benchmark, outperforming all previously developed Persian language models. As part of this work, we introduce three new datasets - Corpesia, Pairsia-sup, and Pairsia-unsup - to support supervised and unsupervised training scenarios. Additionally, Hakim is designed for applications in chatbots and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, particularly addressing retrieval tasks that require incorporating message history within these systems. We also propose a new baseline model built on the BERT architecture. Our language model consistently achieves higher accuracy across various Persian NLP tasks, while the RetroMAE-based model proves particularly effective for textual information retrieval applications. Together, these contributions establish a new foundation for advancing Persian language understanding.
Explaining Autonomous Vehicles with Intention-aware Policy Graphs
Authors: Sara Montese, Victor Gimenez-Abalos, Atia Cortés, Ulises Cortés, Sergio Alvarez-Napagao
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making

The potential to improve road safety, reduce human driving error, and promote environmental sustainability have enabled the field of autonomous driving to progress rapidly over recent decades. The performance of autonomous vehicles has significantly improved thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly Deep Learning. Nevertheless, the opacity of their decision-making, rooted in the use of accurate yet complex AI models, has created barriers to their societal trust and regulatory acceptance, raising the need for explainability. We propose a post-hoc, model-agnostic solution to provide teleological explanations for the behaviour of an autonomous vehicle in urban environments. Building on Intention-aware Policy Graphs, our approach enables the extraction of interpretable and reliable explanations of vehicle behaviour in the nuScenes dataset from global and local perspectives. We demonstrate the potential of these explanations to assess whether the vehicle operates within acceptable legal boundaries and to identify possible vulnerabilities in autonomous driving datasets and models.
ConDiSim: Conditional Diffusion Models for Simulation Based Inference
Authors: Mayank Nautiyal, Andreas Hellander, Prashant Singh
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Denoising

We present a conditional diffusion model - ConDiSim, for simulation-based inference of complex systems with intractable likelihoods. ConDiSim leverages denoising diffusion probabilistic models to approximate posterior distributions, consisting of a forward process that adds Gaussian noise to parameters, and a reverse process learning to denoise, conditioned on observed data. This approach effectively captures complex dependencies and multi-modalities within posteriors. ConDiSim is evaluated across ten benchmark problems and two real-world test problems, where it demonstrates effective posterior approximation accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency and stability in model training. ConDiSim offers a robust and extensible framework for simulation-based inference, particularly suitable for parameter inference workflows requiring fast inference methods.
Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: When Goal-Gradient Importance Meets Dynamic Skipping
Authors: Ren Zhuang, Ben Wang, Shuifa Sun
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, GSM8K, Math

Large Language Models leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for complex tasks, but their reasoning traces are often excessively verbose and inefficient, leading to significant computational costs and latency. Current CoT compression techniques typically rely on generic importance metrics and static compression rates, which may inadvertently remove functionally critical tokens or fail to adapt to varying reasoning complexity. To overcome these limitations, we propose Adaptive GoGI-Skip, a novel framework learning dynamic CoT compression via supervised fine-tuning. This approach introduces two synergistic innovations: (1) Goal-Gradient Importance (GoGI), a novel metric accurately identifying functionally relevant tokens by measuring the gradient influence of their intermediate representations on the final answer loss, and (2) Adaptive Dynamic Skipping (ADS), a mechanism dynamically regulating the compression rate based on runtime model uncertainty while ensuring local coherence through an adaptive N-token constraint. To our knowledge, this is the first work unifying a goal-oriented, gradient-based importance metric with dynamic, uncertainty-aware skipping for CoT compression. Trained on compressed MATH data, Adaptive GoGI-Skip demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization across diverse reasoning benchmarks including AIME, GPQA, and GSM8K. It achieves substantial efficiency gains - reducing CoT token counts by over 45% on average and delivering 1.6-2.0 times inference speedups - while maintaining high reasoning accuracy. Notably, it significantly outperforms existing baselines by preserving accuracy even at high effective compression rates, advancing the state of the art in the CoT reasoning efficiency-accuracy trade-off.
Adaptive Diffusion Policy Optimization for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Huiyun Jiang, Zhuang Yang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent studies have shown the great potential of diffusion models in improving reinforcement learning (RL) by modeling complex policies, expressing a high degree of multi-modality, and efficiently handling high-dimensional continuous control tasks. However, there is currently limited research on how to optimize diffusion-based polices (e.g., Diffusion Policy) fast and stably. In this paper, we propose an Adam-based Diffusion Policy Optimization (ADPO), a fast algorithmic framework containing best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based polices in robotic control tasks using the adaptive gradient descent method in RL. Adaptive gradient method is less studied in training RL, let alone diffusion-based policies. We confirm that ADPO outperforms other diffusion-based RL methods in terms of overall effectiveness for fine-tuning on standard robotic tasks. Concretely, we conduct extensive experiments on standard robotic control tasks to test ADPO, where, particularly, six popular diffusion-based RL methods are provided as benchmark methods. Experimental results show that ADPO acquires better or comparable performance than the baseline methods. Finally, we systematically analyze the sensitivity of multiple hyperparameters in standard robotics tasks, providing guidance for subsequent practical applications. Our video demonstrations are released in https://github.com/Timeless-lab/ADPO.git.
Non-contact Vital Signs Detection in Dynamic Environments
Authors: Shuai Sun, Chong-Xi Liang, Chengwei Ye, Huanzhen Zhang, Kangsheng Wang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00

Accurate phase demodulation is critical for vital sign detection using millimeter-wave radar. However, in complex environments, time-varying DC offsets and phase imbalances can severely degrade demodulation performance. To address this, we propose a novel DC offset calibration method alongside a Hilbert and Differential Cross-Multiply (HADCM) demodulation algorithm. The approach estimates time-varying DC offsets from neighboring signal peaks and valleys, then employs both differential forms and Hilbert transforms of the I/Q channel signals to extract vital sign information. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method maintains robust performance under low signal-to-noise ratios. Compared to existing demodulation techniques, it offers more accurate signal recovery in challenging scenarios and effectively suppresses noise interference.
Learning Like Humans: Advancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities via Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning and Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation
Authors: Enci Zhang, Xingang Yan, Wei Lin, Tianxiang Zhang, Qianchun Lu
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Mathematical Reasoning

Despite impressive progress in areas like mathematical reasoning, large language models still face significant challenges in consistently solving complex problems. Drawing inspiration from key human learning strategies, we propose two novel strategies to enhance the capability of large language models to solve these complex problems. First, Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning (ADCL) is a novel curriculum learning strategy that tackles the Difficulty Shift phenomenon (i.e., a model's perception of problem difficulty dynamically changes during training) by periodically re-estimating difficulty within upcoming data batches to maintain alignment with the model's evolving capabilities. Second, Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation (EGSR) is a novel reinforcement learning strategy that bridges the gap between imitation learning and pure exploration by guiding models to reformulate expert solutions within their own conceptual framework, rather than relying on direct imitation, fostering deeper understanding and knowledge assimilation. Extensive experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, using Qwen2.5-7B as the base model, demonstrate that these human-inspired strategies synergistically and significantly enhance performance. Notably, their combined application improves performance over the standard Zero-RL baseline by 10% on the AIME24 benchmark and 16.6% on AIME25.
Modeling Unseen Environments with Language-guided Composable Causal Components in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinyue Wang, Biwei Huang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) remains a significant challenge, especially when agents encounter novel environments with unseen dynamics. Drawing inspiration from human compositional reasoning -- where known components are reconfigured to handle new situations -- we introduce World Modeling with Compositional Causal Components (WM3C). This novel framework enhances RL generalization by learning and leveraging compositional causal components. Unlike previous approaches focusing on invariant representation learning or meta-learning, WM3C identifies and utilizes causal dynamics among composable elements, facilitating robust adaptation to new tasks. Our approach integrates language as a compositional modality to decompose the latent space into meaningful components and provides theoretical guarantees for their unique identification under mild assumptions. Our practical implementation uses a masked autoencoder with mutual information constraints and adaptive sparsity regularization to capture high-level semantic information and effectively disentangle transition dynamics. Experiments on numerical simulations and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that WM3C significantly outperforms existing methods in identifying latent processes, improving policy learning, and generalizing to unseen tasks.
STORYANCHORS: Generating Consistent Multi-Scene Story Frames for Long-Form Narratives
Authors: Bo wang, Haoyang Huang, Zhiying Lu, Fengyuan Liu, Guoqing Ma, Jianlong Yuan, Yuan Zhang, Nan Duan, Daxin Jiang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Form

This paper introduces StoryAnchors, a unified framework for generating high-quality, multi-scene story frames with strong temporal consistency. The framework employs a bidirectional story generator that integrates both past and future contexts to ensure temporal consistency, character continuity, and smooth scene transitions throughout the narrative. Specific conditions are introduced to distinguish story frame generation from standard video synthesis, facilitating greater scene diversity and enhancing narrative richness. To further improve generation quality, StoryAnchors integrates Multi-Event Story Frame Labeling and Progressive Story Frame Training, enabling the model to capture both overarching narrative flow and event-level dynamics. This approach supports the creation of editable and expandable story frames, allowing for manual modifications and the generation of longer, more complex sequences. Extensive experiments show that StoryAnchors outperforms existing open-source models in key areas such as consistency, narrative coherence, and scene diversity. Its performance in narrative consistency and story richness is also on par with GPT-4o. Ultimately, StoryAnchors pushes the boundaries of story-driven frame generation, offering a scalable, flexible, and highly editable foundation for future research.
FAD: Frequency Adaptation and Diversion for Cross-domain Few-shot Learning
Authors: Ruixiao Shi, Fu Feng, Yucheng Xie, Jing Wang, Xin Geng
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, FAD, Few-Shot Learning

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) requires models to generalize from limited labeled samples under significant distribution shifts. While recent methods enhance adaptability through lightweight task-specific modules, they operate solely in the spatial domain and overlook frequency-specific variations that are often critical for robust transfer. We observe that spatially similar images across domains can differ substantially in their spectral representations, with low and high frequencies capturing complementary semantic information at coarse and fine levels. This indicates that uniform spatial adaptation may overlook these spectral distinctions, thus constraining generalization. To address this, we introduce Frequency Adaptation and Diversion (FAD), a frequency-aware framework that explicitly models and modulates spectral components. At its core is the Frequency Diversion Adapter, which transforms intermediate features into the frequency domain using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), partitions them into low, mid, and high-frequency bands via radial masks, and reconstructs each band using inverse DFT (IDFT). Each frequency band is then adapted using a dedicated convolutional branch with a kernel size tailored to its spectral scale, enabling targeted and disentangled adaptation across frequencies. Extensive experiments on the Meta-Dataset benchmark demonstrate that FAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen domains, validating the utility of frequency-domain representations and band-wise adaptation for improving generalization in CD-FSL.
SHAP-based Explanations are Sensitive to Feature Representation
Authors: Hyunseung Hwang, Andrew Bell, Joao Fonseca, Venetia Pliatsika, Julia Stoyanovich, Steven Euijong Whang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Local feature-based explanations are a key component of the XAI toolkit. These explanations compute feature importance values relative to an ``interpretable'' feature representation. In tabular data, feature values themselves are often considered interpretable. This paper examines the impact of data engineering choices on local feature-based explanations. We demonstrate that simple, common data engineering techniques, such as representing age with a histogram or encoding race in a specific way, can manipulate feature importance as determined by popular methods like SHAP. Notably, the sensitivity of explanations to feature representation can be exploited by adversaries to obscure issues like discrimination. While the intuition behind these results is straightforward, their systematic exploration has been lacking. Previous work has focused on adversarial attacks on feature-based explainers by biasing data or manipulating models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating that explainers can be misled by standard, seemingly innocuous data engineering techniques.
An Identifiable Cost-Aware Causal Decision-Making Framework Using Counterfactual Reasoning
Authors: Ruichu Cai, Xi Chen, Jie Qiao, Zijian Li, Yuequn Liu, Wei Chen, Keli Zhang, Jiale Zheng
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Decision Making

Decision making under abnormal conditions is a critical process that involves evaluating the current state and determining the optimal action to restore the system to a normal state at an acceptable cost. However, in such scenarios, existing decision-making frameworks highly rely on reinforcement learning or root cause analysis, resulting in them frequently neglecting the cost of the actions or failing to incorporate causal mechanisms adequately. By relaxing the existing causal decision framework to solve the necessary cause, we propose a minimum-cost causal decision (MiCCD) framework via counterfactual reasoning to address the above challenges. Emphasis is placed on making counterfactual reasoning processes identifiable in the presence of a large amount of mixed anomaly data, as well as finding the optimal intervention state in a continuous decision space. Specifically, it formulates a surrogate model based on causal graphs, using abnormal pattern clustering labels as supervisory signals. This enables the approximation of the structural causal model among the variables and lays a foundation for identifiable counterfactual reasoning. With the causal structure approximated, we then established an optimization model based on counterfactual estimation. The Sequential Least Squares Programming (SLSQP) algorithm is further employed to optimize intervention strategies while taking costs into account. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets reveal that MiCCD outperforms conventional methods across multiple metrics, including F1-score, cost efficiency, and ranking quality(nDCG@k values), thus validating its efficacy and broad applicability.