pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From Play to Replay: Composed Video Retrieval for Temporally Fine-Grained Videos
Authors: Animesh Gupta, Jay Parmar, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR), Contrastive Learning, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) retrieves a target video given a query video and a modification text describing the intended change. Existing CoVR benchmarks emphasize appearance shifts or coarse event changes and therefore do not test the ability to capture subtle, fast-paced temporal differences. We introduce TF-CoVR, the first large-scale benchmark dedicated to temporally fine-grained CoVR. TF-CoVR focuses on gymnastics and diving and provides 180K triplets drawn from FineGym and FineDiving. Previous CoVR benchmarks focusing on temporal aspect, link each query to a single target segment taken from the same video, limiting practical usefulness. In TF-CoVR, we instead construct each <query, modification> pair by prompting an LLM with the label differences between clips drawn from different videos; every pair is thus associated with multiple valid target videos (3.9 on average), reflecting real-world tasks such as sports-highlight generation. To model these temporal dynamics we propose TF-CoVR-Base, a concise two-stage training framework: (i) pre-train a video encoder on fine-grained action classification to obtain temporally discriminative embeddings; (ii) align the composed query with candidate videos using contrastive learning. We conduct the first comprehensive study of image, video, and general multimodal embedding (GME) models on temporally fine-grained composed retrieval in both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. On TF-CoVR, TF-CoVR-Base improves zero-shot mAP@50 from 5.92 (LanguageBind) to 7.51, and after fine-tuning raises the state-of-the-art from 19.83 to 25.82.
WiNGPT-3.0 Technical Report
Authors: Boqin Zhuang, Chenxiao Song, Huitong Lu, Jiacheng Qiao, Mingqian Liu, Mingxing Yu, Ping Hong, Rui Li, Xiaoxia Song, Xiangjun Xu, Xu Chen, Yaoyao Ma, Yujie Gao
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, MedQA, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant limitations, notably in structured, interpretable, and verifiable medical reasoning, alongside practical deployment challenges related to computational resources and data privacy. This report focused on the development of WiNGPT-3.0, the 32-billion parameter LLMs, engineered with the objective of enhancing its capacity for medical reasoning and exploring its potential for effective integration within healthcare IT infrastructures. The broader aim is to advance towards clinically applicable models. The approach involved a multi-stage training pipeline tailored for general, medical, and clinical reasoning. This pipeline incorporated supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging curated Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) datasets, auxiliary reward models, and an evidence-based diagnostic chain simulation. WiNGPT-3.0 demonstrated strong performance: specific model variants achieved scores of 66.6 on MedCalc and 87.1 on MedQA-USMLE. Furthermore, targeted training improved performance on a clinical reasoning task from a baseline score of 58.1 to 62.5. These findings suggest that reinforcement learning, even when applied with a limited dataset of only a few thousand examples, can enhance medical reasoning accuracy. Crucially, this demonstration of RL's efficacy with limited data and computation paves the way for more trustworthy and practically deployable LLMs within clinical workflows and health information infrastructures.
Sparse Autoencoders, Again?
Authors: Yin Lu, Tong He, Xuening Zhu, David Wipf
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Is there really much more to say about sparse autoencoders (SAEs)? Autoencoders in general, and SAEs in particular, represent deep architectures that are capable of modeling low-dimensional latent structure in data. Such structure could reflect, among other things, correlation patterns in large language model activations, or complex natural image manifolds. And yet despite the wide-ranging applicability, there have been relatively few changes to SAEs beyond the original recipe from decades ago, namely, standard deep encoder/decoder layers trained with a classical/deterministic sparse regularizer applied within the latent space. One possible exception is the variational autoencoder (VAE), which adopts a stochastic encoder module capable of producing sparse representations when applied to manifold data. In this work we formalize underappreciated weaknesses with both canonical SAEs, as well as analogous VAEs applied to similar tasks, and propose a hybrid alternative model that circumvents these prior limitations. In terms of theoretical support, we prove that global minima of our proposed model recover certain forms of structured data spread across a union of manifolds. Meanwhile, empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets substantiate the efficacy of our approach in accurately estimating underlying manifold dimensions and producing sparser latent representations without compromising reconstruction error. In general, we are able to exceed the performance of equivalent-capacity SAEs and VAEs, as well as recent diffusion models where applicable, within domains such as images and language model activation patterns.
SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training
Authors: Jianyi Wang, Shanchuan Lin, Zhijie Lin, Yuxi Ren, Meng Wei, Zongsheng Yue, Shangchen Zhou, Hao Chen, Yang Zhao, Ceyuan Yang, Xuefeng Xiao, Chen Change Loy, Lu Jiang
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Video Restoration

Recent advances in diffusion-based video restoration (VR) demonstrate significant improvement in visual quality, yet yield a prohibitive computational cost during inference. While several distillation-based approaches have exhibited the potential of one-step image restoration, extending existing approaches to VR remains challenging and underexplored, particularly when dealing with high-resolution video in real-world settings. In this work, we propose a one-step diffusion-based VR model, termed as SeedVR2, which performs adversarial VR training against real data. To handle the challenging high-resolution VR within a single step, we introduce several enhancements to both model architecture and training procedures. Specifically, an adaptive window attention mechanism is proposed, where the window size is dynamically adjusted to fit the output resolutions, avoiding window inconsistency observed under high-resolution VR using window attention with a predefined window size. To stabilize and improve the adversarial post-training towards VR, we further verify the effectiveness of a series of losses, including a proposed feature matching loss without significantly sacrificing training efficiency. Extensive experiments show that SeedVR2 can achieve comparable or even better performance compared with existing VR approaches in a single step.
Just Enough Thinking: Efficient Reasoning with Adaptive Length Penalties Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Violet Xiang, Chase Blagden, Rafael Rafailov, Nathan Lile, Sang Truong, Chelsea Finn, Nick Haber
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve higher performance on challenging reasoning tasks by generating more tokens at inference time, but this verbosity often wastes computation on easy problems. Existing solutions, including supervised finetuning on shorter traces, user-controlled budgets, or RL with uniform penalties, either require data curation, manual configuration, or treat all problems alike regardless of difficulty. We introduce Adaptive Length Penalty (ALP), a reinforcement learning objective tailoring generation length to per-prompt solve rate. During training, ALP monitors each prompt's online solve rate through multiple rollouts and adds a differentiable penalty whose magnitude scales inversely with that rate, so confident (easy) prompts incur a high cost for extra tokens while hard prompts remain unhindered. Posttraining DeepScaleR-1.5B with ALP cuts average token usage by 50\% without significantly dropping performance. Relative to fixed-budget and uniform penalty baselines, ALP redistributes its reduced budget more intelligently by cutting compute on easy prompts and reallocating saved tokens to difficult ones, delivering higher accuracy on the hardest problems with higher cost.
GOLFer: Smaller LM-Generated Documents Hallucination Filter & Combiner for Query Expansion in Information Retrieval
Authors: Lingyuan Liu, Mengxiang Zhang
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Information Retrieval

Large language models (LLMs)-based query expansion for information retrieval augments queries with generated hypothetical documents with LLMs. However, its performance relies heavily on the scale of the language models (LMs), necessitating larger, more advanced LLMs. This approach is costly, computationally intensive, and often has limited accessibility. To address these limitations, we introduce GOLFer - Smaller LMs-Generated Documents Hallucination Filter & Combiner - a novel method leveraging smaller open-source LMs for query expansion. GOLFer comprises two modules: a hallucination filter and a documents combiner. The former detects and removes non-factual and inconsistent sentences in generated documents, a common issue with smaller LMs, while the latter combines the filtered content with the query using a weight vector to balance their influence. We evaluate GOLFer alongside dominant LLM-based query expansion methods on three web search and ten low-resource datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that GOLFer consistently outperforms other methods using smaller LMs, and maintains competitive performance against methods using large-size LLMs, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Exp4Fuse: A Rank Fusion Framework for Enhanced Sparse Retrieval using Large Language Model-based Query Expansion
Authors: Lingyuan Liu, Mengxiang Zhang
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in generating hypothetical documents for query expansion, thereby enhancing information retrieval performance. However, the efficacy of this method is highly dependent on the quality of the generated documents, which often requires complex prompt strategies and the integration of advanced dense retrieval techniques. This can be both costly and computationally intensive. To mitigate these limitations, we explore the use of zero-shot LLM-based query expansion to improve sparse retrieval, particularly for learned sparse retrievers. We introduce a novel fusion ranking framework, Exp4Fuse, which enhances the performance of sparse retrievers through an indirect application of zero-shot LLM-based query expansion. Exp4Fuse operates by simultaneously considering two retrieval routes-one based on the original query and the other on the LLM-augmented query. It then generates two ranked lists using a sparse retriever and fuses them using a modified reciprocal rank fusion method. We conduct extensive evaluations of Exp4Fuse against leading LLM-based query expansion methods and advanced retrieval techniques on three MS MARCO-related datasets and seven low-resource datasets. Experimental results reveal that Exp4Fuse not only surpasses existing LLM-based query expansion methods in enhancing sparse retrievers but also, when combined with advanced sparse retrievers, achieves SOTA results on several benchmarks. This highlights the superior performance and effectiveness of Exp4Fuse in improving query expansion for sparse retrieval.
Underground Root Tuber Sensing via a Wi-Fi Mesh Network
Authors: Said Elhadi, Tao Wang, Yang Zhao
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: SenSys 2025 5
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

We demonstrate a non-invasive Wi-Fi sensing system that uses channel state information (CSI) data and deep neural network (DNN) models to reconstruct the cross-section images of potato tubers underground. 
We design a Wi-Fi mesh network that can leverage both the space and frequency diversities of the wireless network. We apply a multi-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) model to perform data-driven image reconstruction. We have performed extensive experiments to build a Wi-Fi potato sensing dataset, and our demo and experimental evaluations show that the Wi-Fi system outperforms the state-of-the-art root tuber wireless sensing system in terms of image quality and estimation accuracy.
FlashDMoE: Fast Distributed MoE in a Single Kernel
Authors: Osayamen Jonathan Aimuyo, Byungsoo Oh, Rachee Singh
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, CPU, GPU, Mixture-of-Experts, Scheduling

The computational sparsity of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enables sub-linear growth in compute cost as model size increases, thus offering a scalable path to training massive neural networks. However, existing implementations suffer from \emph{low GPU utilization}, \emph{significant latency overhead}, and a fundamental \emph{inability to leverage task locality}, primarily due to CPU-managed scheduling, host-initiated communication, and frequent kernel launches. To overcome these limitations, we develop FlashDMoE, a fully GPU-resident MoE operator that fuses expert computation and inter-GPU communication into a \emph{single persistent GPU kernel}. FlashDMoE enables fine-grained pipelining of dispatch, compute, and combine phases, eliminating launch overheads and reducing idle gaps. Unlike existing work, FlashDMoE obviates bulk-synchronous collectives for one-sided, device-initiated, inter-GPU (R)DMA transfers, thus unlocking \emph{payload efficiency}, where we eliminate bloated or redundant network payloads in sparsely activated layers. When evaluated on a single 8-H100 GPU node with MoE models having up to 128 experts and 16K token sequences, FlashDMoE achieves up to \textbf{9}$\times$ higher GPU utilization, \textbf{6}$\times$ lower latency, \textbf{5.7}$\times$ higher throughput, and \textbf{4}$\times$ better overlap efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines, despite using FP32 while baselines use FP16. FlashDMoE demonstrates that principled GPU kernel-hardware co-design is key to unlocking the performance ceiling of large-scale distributed ML workloads.
OGGSplat: Open Gaussian Growing for Generalizable Reconstruction with Expanded Field-of-View
Authors: Yanbo Wang, Ziyi Wang, Wenzhao Zheng, Jie zhou, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Reconstructing semantic-aware 3D scenes from sparse views is a challenging yet essential research direction, driven by the demands of emerging applications such as virtual reality and embodied AI. Existing per-scene optimization methods require dense input views and incur high computational costs, while generalizable approaches often struggle to reconstruct regions outside the input view cone. In this paper, we propose OGGSplat, an open Gaussian growing method that expands the field-of-view in generalizable 3D reconstruction. Our key insight is that the semantic attributes of open Gaussians provide strong priors for image extrapolation, enabling both semantic consistency and visual plausibility. Specifically, once open Gaussians are initialized from sparse views, we introduce an RGB-semantic consistent inpainting module applied to selected rendered views. This module enforces bidirectional control between an image diffusion model and a semantic diffusion model. The inpainted regions are then lifted back into 3D space for efficient and progressive Gaussian parameter optimization. To evaluate our method, we establish a Gaussian Outpainting (GO) benchmark that assesses both semantic and generative quality of reconstructed open-vocabulary scenes. OGGSplat also demonstrates promising semantic-aware scene reconstruction capabilities when provided with two view images captured directly from a smartphone camera.
IMPersona: Evaluating Individual Level LM Impersonation
Authors: Quan Shi, Carlos E. Jimenez, Stephen Dong, Brian Seo, Caden Yao, Adam Kelch, Karthik Narasimhan
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

As language models achieve increasingly human-like capabilities in conversational text generation, a critical question emerges: to what extent can these systems simulate the characteristics of specific individuals? To evaluate this, we introduce IMPersona, a framework for evaluating LMs at impersonating specific individuals' writing style and personal knowledge. Using supervised fine-tuning and a hierarchical memory-inspired retrieval system, we demonstrate that even modestly sized open-source models, such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, can achieve impersonation abilities at concerning levels. In blind conversation experiments, participants (mis)identified our fine-tuned models with memory integration as human in 44.44% of interactions, compared to just 25.00% for the best prompting-based approach. We analyze these results to propose detection methods and defense strategies against such impersonation attempts. Our findings raise important questions about both the potential applications and risks of personalized language models, particularly regarding privacy, security, and the ethical deployment of such technologies in real-world contexts.
Neurosymbolic Association Rule Mining from Tabular Data
Authors: Erkan Karabulut, Paul Groth, Victoria Degeler
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is the task of mining patterns among data features in the form of logical rules, with applications across a myriad of domains. However, high-dimensional datasets often result in an excessive number of rules, increasing execution time and negatively impacting downstream task performance. Managing this rule explosion remains a central challenge in ARM research. To address this, we introduce Aerial+, a novel neurosymbolic ARM method. Aerial+ leverages an under-complete autoencoder to create a neural representation of the data, capturing associations between features. It extracts rules from this neural representation by exploiting the model's reconstruction mechanism. Extensive evaluations on five datasets against seven baselines demonstrate that Aerial+ achieves state-of-the-art results by learning more concise, high-quality rule sets with full data coverage. When integrated into rule-based interpretable machine learning models, Aerial+ significantly reduces execution time while maintaining or improving accuracy.
GARG-AML against Smurfing: A Scalable and Interpretable Graph-Based Framework for Anti-Money Laundering
Authors: Bruno Deprez, Bart Baesens, Tim Verdonck, Wouter Verbeke
Date: 2025-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Fraud Detection, Network Embedding

Money laundering poses a significant challenge as it is estimated to account for 2%-5% of the global GDP. This has compelled regulators to impose stringent controls on financial institutions. One prominent laundering method for evading these controls, called smurfing, involves breaking up large transactions into smaller amounts. Given the complexity of smurfing schemes, which involve multiple transactions distributed among diverse parties, network analytics has become an important anti-money laundering tool. However, recent advances have focused predominantly on black-box network embedding methods, which has hindered their adoption in businesses. In this paper, we introduce GARG-AML, a novel graph-based method that quantifies smurfing risk through a single interpretable metric derived from the structure of the second-order transaction network of each individual node in the network. Unlike traditional methods, GARG-AML strikes an effective balance among computational efficiency, detection power and transparency, which enables its integration into existing AML workflows. To enhance its capabilities, we combine the GARG-AML score calculation with different tree-based methods and also incorporate the scores of the node's neighbours. An experimental evaluation on large-scale synthetic and open-source networks demonstrate that the GARG-AML outperforms the current state-of-the-art smurfing detection methods. By leveraging only the adjacency matrix of the second-order neighbourhood and basic network features, this work highlights the potential of fundamental network properties towards advancing fraud detection.
Unifying Appearance Codes and Bilateral Grids for Driving Scene Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Nan Wang, Yuantao Chen, Lixing Xiao, Weiqing Xiao, Bohan Li, Zhaoxi Chen, Chongjie Ye, Shaocong Xu, Saining Zhang, Ziyang Yan, Pierre Merriaux, Lei Lei, Tianfan Xue, Hao Zhao
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NeRF, Neural Rendering

Neural rendering techniques, including NeRF and Gaussian Splatting (GS), rely on photometric consistency to produce high-quality reconstructions. However, in real-world scenarios, it is challenging to guarantee perfect photometric consistency in acquired images. Appearance codes have been widely used to address this issue, but their modeling capability is limited, as a single code is applied to the entire image. Recently, the bilateral grid was introduced to perform pixel-wise color mapping, but it is difficult to optimize and constrain effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale bilateral grid that unifies appearance codes and bilateral grids. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves geometric accuracy in dynamic, decoupled autonomous driving scene reconstruction, outperforming both appearance codes and bilateral grids. This is crucial for autonomous driving, where accurate geometry is important for obstacle avoidance and control. Our method shows strong results across four datasets: Waymo, NuScenes, Argoverse, and PandaSet. We further demonstrate that the improvement in geometry is driven by the multi-scale bilateral grid, which effectively reduces floaters caused by photometric inconsistency.
A-DARTS: Stable Model Selection for Data Repair in Time Series
Authors: Mourad Khayati, Guillaume Chacun, Zakhar Tymchenko, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE 41st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2025 5
Tasks: AutoML, Imputation, Missing Values, Model Selection, Time Series

Time series often present gaps in the data. This phenomenon, also called missing values, is so prevalent that a cottage industry of missing-value imputation algorithms exists, each with different capabilities and efficacy/efficiency tradeoffs. So far, however, there has been no way to accurately select the most appropriate approach among all algorithms, given a new time series requiring imputation. In this paper, we introduce a new configuration-free system, A-DARTS (for Automated DAta Repair in Time Series), to automatically select the best imputation technique for a given faulty time series. A-DARTS's recommendation engine is trained via an iterative process that carefully learns the behavior of imputation algorithms using an extensive dataset of time series that we curated. The selection process is made efficient by several new pruning techniques, particularly adjusted to time series data. Applications that manipulate time series can now easily embed A-DARTS's recommendation engine and impute data on the fly. Our experiments show that our system picks, on average, the best imputation algorithm 20% more frequently than the best-in-class AutoML technique. Moreover, it produces stable recommendations across datasets by incurring 2.5x less error variance, eliminating the stability issue observed in all state-of-the-art methods we tested.