pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VoxAging: Continuously Tracking Speaker Aging with a Large-Scale Longitudinal Dataset in English and Mandarin
Authors: Zhiqi Ai, Meixuan Bao, Zhiyong Chen, Zhi Yang, Xinnuo Li, Shugong Xu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

The performance of speaker verification systems is adversely affected by speaker aging. However, due to challenges in data collection, particularly the lack of sustained and large-scale longitudinal data for individuals, research on speaker aging remains difficult. In this paper, we present VoxAging, a large-scale longitudinal dataset collected from 293 speakers (226 English speakers and 67 Mandarin speakers) over several years, with the longest time span reaching 17 years (approximately 900 weeks). For each speaker, the data were recorded at weekly intervals. We studied the phenomenon of speaker aging and its effects on advanced speaker verification systems, analyzed individual speaker aging processes, and explored the impact of factors such as age group and gender on speaker aging research.
REWIND: Speech Time Reversal for Enhancing Speaker Representations in Diffusion-based Voice Conversion
Authors: Ishan D. Biyani, Nirmesh J. Shah, Ashishkumar P. Gudmalwar, Pankaj Wasnik, Rajiv R. Shah
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Speaker Identification, Voice Conversion

Speech time reversal refers to the process of reversing the entire speech signal in time, causing it to play backward. Such signals are completely unintelligible since the fundamental structures of phonemes and syllables are destroyed. However, they still retain tonal patterns that enable perceptual speaker identification despite losing linguistic content. In this paper, we propose leveraging speaker representations learned from time reversed speech as an augmentation strategy to enhance speaker representation. Notably, speaker and language disentanglement in voice conversion (VC) is essential to accurately preserve a speaker's unique vocal traits while minimizing interference from linguistic content. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated in the context of state-of-the-art diffusion-based VC models. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly improves speaker similarity-related scores while maintaining high speech quality.
Music's Multimodal Complexity in AVQA: Why We Need More than General Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Wenhao You, Xingjian Diao, Chunhui Zhang, Keyi Kong, Weiyi Wu, Zhongyu Ouyang, Chiyu Ma, Tingxuan Wu, Noah Wei, Zong Ke, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-visual Question Answering, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

While recent Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit impressive capabilities for general multimodal tasks, specialized domains like music necessitate tailored approaches. Music Audio-Visual Question Answering (Music AVQA) particularly underscores this, presenting unique challenges with its continuous, densely layered audio-visual content, intricate temporal dynamics, and the critical need for domain-specific knowledge. Through a systematic analysis of Music AVQA datasets and methods, this position paper identifies that specialized input processing, architectures incorporating dedicated spatial-temporal designs, and music-specific modeling strategies are critical for success in this domain. Our study provides valuable insights for researchers by highlighting effective design patterns empirically linked to strong performance, proposing concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors, and aiming to establish a robust foundation for advancing multimodal musical understanding. This work is intended to inspire broader attention and further research, supported by a continuously updated anonymous GitHub repository of relevant papers: https://github.com/xid32/Survey4MusicAVQA.
Towards Pretraining Robust ASR Foundation Model with Acoustic-Aware Data Augmentation
Authors: Dancheng Liu, Amir Nassereldine, Chenhui Xu, JinJun Xiong
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, Diversity, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Whisper's robust performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) is often attributed to its massive 680k-hour training set, an impractical scale for most researchers. In this work, we examine how linguistic and acoustic diversity in training data affect the robustness of the ASR model and reveal that transcription generalization is primarily driven by acoustic variation rather than linguistic richness. We find that targeted acoustic augmentation methods could significantly improve the generalization ability of ASR models, reducing word-error rates by up to 19.24 percent on unseen datasets when training on the 960-hour Librispeech dataset. These findings highlight strategic acoustically focused data augmentation as a promising alternative to massive datasets for building robust ASR models, offering a potential solution to future foundation ASR models when massive human speech data is lacking.
What Changed? Detecting and Evaluating Instruction-Guided Image Edits with Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Davide Bucciarelli, Federico Betti, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Nicu Sebe, Rita Cucchiara
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model

Instruction-based image editing models offer increased personalization opportunities in generative tasks. However, properly evaluating their results is challenging, and most of the existing metrics lag in terms of alignment with human judgment and explainability. To tackle these issues, we introduce DICE (DIfference Coherence Estimator), a model designed to detect localized differences between the original and the edited image and to assess their relevance to the given modification request. DICE consists of two key components: a difference detector and a coherence estimator, both built on an autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) and trained using a strategy that leverages self-supervision, distillation from inpainting networks, and full supervision. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate each stage of our pipeline, comparing different MLLMs within the proposed framework. We demonstrate that DICE effectively identifies coherent edits, effectively evaluating images generated by different editing models with a strong correlation with human judgment. We publicly release our source code, models, and data.
FastCache: Fast Caching for Diffusion Transformer Through Learnable Linear Approximation
Authors: Dong Liu, Jiayi Zhang, YiFan Li, Yanxuan Yu, Ben Lengerich, Ying Nian Wu
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) are powerful generative models but remain computationally intensive due to their iterative structure and deep transformer stacks. To alleviate this inefficiency, we propose FastCache, a hidden-state-level caching and compression framework that accelerates DiT inference by exploiting redundancy within the model's internal representations. FastCache introduces a dual strategy: (1) a spatial-aware token selection mechanism that adaptively filters redundant tokens based on hidden state saliency, and (2) a transformer-level cache that reuses latent activations across timesteps when changes are statistically insignificant. These modules work jointly to reduce unnecessary computation while preserving generation fidelity through learnable linear approximation. Theoretical analysis shows that FastCache maintains bounded approximation error under a hypothesis-testing-based decision rule. Empirical evaluations across multiple DiT variants demonstrate substantial reductions in latency and memory usage, with best generation output quality compared to other cache methods, as measured by FID and t-FID. Code implementation of FastCache is available on GitHub at https://github.com/NoakLiu/FastCache-xDiT.
PADAM: Parallel averaged Adam reduces the error for stochastic optimization in scientific machine learning
Authors: Arnulf Jentzen, Julian Kranz, Adrian Riekert
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

Averaging techniques such as Ruppert--Polyak averaging and exponential movering averaging (EMA) are powerful approaches to accelerate optimization procedures of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods such as the popular ADAM optimizer. However, depending on the specific optimization problem under consideration, the type and the parameters for the averaging need to be adjusted to achieve the smallest optimization error. In this work we propose an averaging approach, which we refer to as parallel averaged ADAM (PADAM), in which we compute parallely different averaged variants of ADAM and during the training process dynamically select the variant with the smallest optimization error. A central feature of this approach is that this procedure requires no more gradient evaluations than the usual ADAM optimizer as each of the averaged trajectories relies on the same underlying ADAM trajectory and thus on the same underlying gradients. We test the proposed PADAM optimizer in 13 stochastic optimization and deep neural network (DNN) learning problems and compare its performance with known optimizers from the literature such as standard SGD, momentum SGD, Adam with and without EMA, and ADAMW. In particular, we apply the compared optimizers to physics-informed neural network, deep Galerkin, deep backward stochastic differential equation and deep Kolmogorov approximations for boundary value partial differential equation problems from scientific machine learning, as well as to DNN approximations for optimal control and optimal stopping problems. In nearly all of the considered examples PADAM achieves, sometimes among others and sometimes exclusively, essentially the smallest optimization error. This work thus strongly suggest to consider PADAM for scientific machine learning problems and also motivates further research for adaptive averaging procedures within the training of DNNs.
Locking-Free Training of Physics-Informed Neural Network for Solving Nearly Incompressible Elasticity Equations
Authors: Josef Dick, Seungchan Ko, Kassem Mustapha, SangHyeon Park
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

Due to divergence instability, the accuracy of low-order conforming finite element methods for nearly incompressible homogeneous elasticity equations deteriorates as the Lam\'e coefficient $\lambda\to\infty$, or equivalently as the Poisson ratio $\nu\to1/2$. This phenomenon, known as locking or non-robustness, remains not fully understood despite extensive investigation. In this paper, we propose a robust method based on a fundamentally different, machine-learning-driven approach. Leveraging recently developed Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), we address the numerical solution of linear elasticity equations governing nearly incompressible materials. The core idea of our method is to appropriately decompose the given equations to alleviate the extreme imbalance in the coefficients, while simultaneously solving both the forward and inverse problems to recover the solutions of the decomposed systems as well as the associated external conditions. Through various numerical experiments, including constant, variable and parametric Lam\'e coefficients, we illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology.
Recurrent Neural Operators: Stable Long-Term PDE Prediction
Authors: Zaijun Ye, Chen-Song Zhang, Wansheng Wang
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning, Prediction

Neural operators have emerged as powerful tools for learning solution operators of partial differential equations. However, in time-dependent problems, standard training strategies such as teacher forcing introduce a mismatch between training and inference, leading to compounding errors in long-term autoregressive predictions. To address this issue, we propose Recurrent Neural Operators (RNOs)-a novel framework that integrates recurrent training into neural operator architectures. Instead of conditioning each training step on ground-truth inputs, RNOs recursively apply the operator to their own predictions over a temporal window, effectively simulating inference-time dynamics during training. This alignment mitigates exposure bias and enhances robustness to error accumulation. Theoretically, we show that recurrent training can reduce the worst-case exponential error growth typical of teacher forcing to linear growth. Empirically, we demonstrate that recurrently trained Multigrid Neural Operators significantly outperform their teacher-forced counterparts in long-term accuracy and stability on standard benchmarks. Our results underscore the importance of aligning training with inference dynamics for robust temporal generalization in neural operator learning.
Semi-Explicit Neural DAEs: Learning Long-Horizon Dynamical Systems with Algebraic Constraints
Authors: Avik Pal, Alan Edelman, Christopher Rackauckas
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00

Despite the promise of scientific machine learning (SciML) in combining data-driven techniques with mechanistic modeling, existing approaches for incorporating hard constraints in neural differential equations (NDEs) face significant limitations. Scalability issues and poor numerical properties prevent these neural models from being used for modeling physical systems with complicated conservation laws. We propose Manifold-Projected Neural ODEs (PNODEs), a method that explicitly enforces algebraic constraints by projecting each ODE step onto the constraint manifold. This framework arises naturally from semi-explicit differential-algebraic equations (DAEs), and includes both a robust iterative variant and a fast approximation requiring a single Jacobian factorization. We further demonstrate that prior works on relaxation methods are special cases of our approach. PNODEs consistently outperform baselines across six benchmark problems achieving a mean constraint violation error below $10^{-10}$. Additionally, PNODEs consistently achieve lower runtime compared to other methods for a given level of error tolerance. These results show that constraint projection offers a simple strategy for learning physically consistent long-horizon dynamics.
Wideband RF Radiance Field Modeling Using Frequency-embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Zechen Li, Lanqing Yang, Yiheng Bian, Hao Pan, Yongjian Fu, Yezhou Wang, Yi-Chao Chen, Guangtao Xue, Ju Ren
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, SSIM

This paper presents an innovative frequency-embedded 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) algorithm for wideband radio-frequency (RF) radiance field modeling, offering an advancement over the existing works limited to single-frequency modeling. Grounded in fundamental physics, we uncover the complex relationship between EM wave propagation behaviors and RF frequencies. Inspired by this, we design an EM feature network with attenuation and radiance modules to learn the complex relationships between RF frequencies and the key properties of each 3D Gaussian, specifically the attenuation factor and RF signal intensity. By training the frequency-embedded 3DGS model, we can efficiently reconstruct RF radiance fields at arbitrary unknown frequencies within a given 3D environment. Finally, we propose a large-scale power angular spectrum (PAS) dataset containing 50000 samples ranging from 1 to 100 GHz in 6 indoor environments, and conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. Our approach achieves an average Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) up to 0.72, and a significant improvement up to 17.8% compared to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods trained on individual test frequencies. Additionally, our method achieves an SSIM of 0.70 without prior training on these frequencies, which represents only a 2.8% performance drop compared to models trained with full PAS data. This demonstrates our model's capability to estimate PAS at unknown frequencies. For related code and datasets, please refer to https://github.com/sim-2-real/Wideband3DGS.
Fog Intelligence for Network Anomaly Detection
Authors: Kai Yang, Hui Ma, Shaoyu Dou
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Cloud Computing, Management, Privacy Preserving

Anomalies are common in network system monitoring. When manifested as network threats to be mitigated, service outages to be prevented, and security risks to be ameliorated, detecting such anomalous network behaviors becomes of great importance. However, the growing scale and complexity of the mobile communication networks, as well as the ever-increasing amount and dimensionality of the network surveillance data, make it extremely difficult to monitor a mobile network and discover abnormal network behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning allow for obtaining near-optimal solutions to complicated decision-making problems with many sources of uncertainty that cannot be accurately characterized by traditional mathematical models. However, most machine learning algorithms are centralized, which renders them inapplicable to a large-scale distributed wireless networks with tens of millions of mobile devices. In this article, we present fog intelligence, a distributed machine learning architecture that enables intelligent wireless network management. It preserves the advantage of both edge processing and centralized cloud computing. In addition, the proposed architecture is scalable, privacy-preserving, and well suited for intelligent management of a distributed wireless network.
MetaSTNet: Multimodal Meta-learning for Cellular Traffic Conformal Prediction
Authors: Hui Ma, Kai Yang
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Meta-Learning, Network Congestion Control, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, Traffic Prediction

Network traffic prediction techniques have attracted much attention since they are valuable for network congestion control and user experience improvement. While existing prediction techniques can achieve favorable performance when there is sufficient training data, it remains a great challenge to make accurate predictions when only a small amount of training data is available. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning model, entitled MetaSTNet, based on a multimodal meta-learning framework. It is an end-to-end network architecture that trains the model in a simulator and transfers the meta-knowledge to a real-world environment, which can quickly adapt and obtain accurate predictions on a new task with only a small amount of real-world training data. In addition, we further employ cross conformal prediction to assess the calibrated prediction intervals. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of MetaSTNet.
Diagnosing and Resolving Cloud Platform Instability with Multi-modal RAG LLMs
Authors: Yifan Wang, Kenneth P. Birman
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG

Today's cloud-hosted applications and services are complex systems, and a performance or functional instability can have dozens or hundreds of potential root causes. Our hypothesis is that by combining the pattern matching capabilities of modern AI tools with a natural multi-modal RAG LLM interface, problem identification and resolution can be simplified. ARCA is a new multi-modal RAG LLM system that targets this domain. Step-wise evaluations show that ARCA outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.
CPINN-ABPI: Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Accurate Power Estimation in MPSoCs
Authors: Mohamed R. Elshamy, Mehdi Elahi, Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, CPU, GPU

Efficient thermal and power management in modern multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) demands accurate power consumption estimation. One of the state-of-the-art approaches, Alternative Blind Power Identification (ABPI), theoretically eliminates the dependence on steady-state temperatures, addressing a major shortcoming of previous approaches. However, ABPI performance has remained unverified in actual hardware implementations. In this study, we conduct the first empirical validation of ABPI on commercial hardware using the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX platform. Our findings reveal that, while ABPI provides computational efficiency and independence from steady-state temperature, it exhibits considerable accuracy deficiencies in real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Custom Physics-Informed Neural Networks (CPINNs) with the underlying thermal model of ABPI. Our approach employs a specialized loss function that harmonizes physical principles with data-driven learning, complemented by multi-objective genetic algorithm optimization to balance estimation accuracy and computational cost. In experimental validation, CPINN-ABPI achieves a reduction of 84.7\% CPU and 73.9\% GPU in the mean absolute error (MAE) relative to ABPI, with the weighted mean absolute percentage error (WMAPE) improving from 47\%--81\% to $\sim$12\%. The method maintains real-time performance with 195.3~$\mu$s of inference time, with similar 85\%--99\% accuracy gains across heterogeneous SoCs.
R2R: Efficiently Navigating Divergent Reasoning Paths with Small-Large Model Token Routing
Authors: Tianyu Fu, Yi Ge, Yichen You, Enshu Liu, Zhihang Yuan, Guohao Dai, Shengen Yan, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive reasoning capabilities at the cost of substantial inference overhead, posing substantial deployment challenges. Although distilled Small Language Models (SLMs) significantly enhance efficiency, their performance suffers as they fail to follow LLMs' reasoning paths. Luckily, we reveal that only a small fraction of tokens genuinely diverge reasoning paths between LLMs and SLMs. Most generated tokens are either identical or exhibit neutral differences, such as minor variations in abbreviations or expressions. Leveraging this insight, we introduce **Roads to Rome (R2R)**, a neural token routing method that selectively utilizes LLMs only for these critical, path-divergent tokens, while leaving the majority of token generation to the SLM. We also develop an automatic data generation pipeline that identifies divergent tokens and generates token-level routing labels to train the lightweight router. We apply R2R to combine R1-1.5B and R1-32B models from the DeepSeek family, and evaluate on challenging math, coding, and QA benchmarks. With an average activated parameter size of 5.6B, R2R surpasses the average accuracy of R1-7B by 1.6x, outperforming even the R1-14B model. Compared to R1-32B, it delivers a 2.8x wall-clock speedup with comparable performance, advancing the Pareto frontier of test-time scaling efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/R2R.
LEGO-Compiler: Enhancing Neural Compilation Through Translation Composability
Authors: Shuoming Zhang, Jiacheng Zhao, Chunwei Xia, Zheng Wang, Yunji Chen, Xiaobing Feng, Huimin Cui
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, Translation

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize how we design and implement compilers and code translation tools. However, existing LLMs struggle to handle long and complex programs. We introduce LEGO-Compiler, a novel neural compilation system that leverages LLMs to translate high-level languages into assembly code. Our approach centers on three key innovations: LEGO translation, which decomposes the input program into manageable blocks; breaking down the complex compilation process into smaller, simpler verifiable steps by organizing it as a verifiable LLM workflow by external tests; and a feedback mechanism for self-correction. Supported by formal proofs of translation composability, LEGO-Compiler demonstrates high accuracy on multiple datasets, including over 99% on ExeBench and 97.9% on industrial-grade AnsiBench. Additionally, LEGO-Compiler has also acheived near one order-of-magnitude improvement on compilable code size scalability. This work opens new avenues for applying LLMs to system-level tasks, complementing traditional compiler technologies.