pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From Motion to Meaning: Biomechanics-Informed Neural Network for Explainable Cardiovascular Disease Identification
Authors: Comte Valentin, Gemma Piella, Mario Ceresa, Miguel A. Gonzalez Ballester
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Explainable artificial intelligence, feature selection, Image Registration

Cardiac diseases are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, which requires accurate and timely diagnostic strategies. In this study, we introduce an innovative approach that combines deep learning image registration with physics-informed regularization to predict the biomechanical properties of moving cardiac tissues and extract features for disease classification. We utilize the energy strain formulation of Neo-Hookean material to model cardiac tissue deformations, optimizing the deformation field while ensuring its physical and biomechanical coherence. This explainable approach not only improves image registration accuracy, but also provides insights into the underlying biomechanical processes of the cardiac tissues. Evaluation on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset achieved Dice scores of 0.945 for the left ventricular cavity, 0.908 for the right ventricular cavity, and 0.905 for the myocardium. Subsequently, we estimate the local strains within the moving heart and extract a detailed set of features used for cardiovascular disease classification. We evaluated five classification algorithms, Logistic Regression, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest, and Nearest Neighbour, and identified the most relevant features using a feature selection algorithm. The best performing classifier obtained a classification accuracy of 98% in the training set and 100% in the test set of the ACDC dataset. By integrating explainable artificial intelligence, this method empowers clinicians with a transparent understanding of the model's predictions based on cardiac mechanics, while also significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of cardiac disease diagnosis, paving the way for more personalized and effective patient care.
Vers un cadre ontologique pour la gestion des comp{é}tences : {à} des fins de formation, de recrutement, de m{é}tier, ou de recherches associ{é}es
Authors: Ngoc Luyen Le, Marie-Hélène Abel, Bertrand Laforge
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The rapid transformation of the labor market, driven by technological advancements and the digital economy, requires continuous competence development and constant adaptation. In this context, traditional competence management systems lack interoperability, adaptability, and semantic understanding, making it difficult to align individual competencies with labor market needs and training programs. This paper proposes an ontology-based framework for competence management, enabling a structured representation of competencies, occupations, and training programs. By leveraging ontological models and semantic reasoning, this framework aims to enhance the automation of competence-to-job matching, the personalization of learning recommendations, and career planning. This study discusses the design, implementation, and potential applications of the framework, focusing on competence training programs, job searching, and finding competent individuals.
Efficient Training of Large-Scale AI Models Through Federated Mixture-of-Experts: A System-Level Approach
Authors: Xiaobing Chen, Boyang Zhang, Xiangwei Zhou, Mingxuan Sun, Shuai Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Geoffrey Ye Li
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning, Mixture-of-Experts

The integration of Federated Learning (FL) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) presents a compelling pathway for training more powerful, large-scale artificial intelligence models (LAMs) on decentralized data while preserving privacy. However, efficient federated training of these complex MoE-structured LAMs is hindered by significant system-level challenges, particularly in managing the interplay between heterogeneous client resources and the sophisticated coordination required for numerous specialized experts. This article highlights a critical, yet underexplored concept: the absence of robust quantitative strategies for dynamic client-expert alignment that holistically considers varying client capacities and the imperative for system-wise load balancing. Specifically, we propose a conceptual system design for intelligent client-expert alignment that incorporates dynamic fitness scoring, global expert load monitoring, and client capacity profiling. By tackling these systemic issues, we can unlock more scalable, efficient, and robust training mechanisms {with fewer communication rounds for convergence}, paving the way for the widespread deployment of large-scale federated MoE-structured LAMs in edge computing with ultra-high communication efficiency.
LLMs are Introvert
Authors: Litian Zhang, XiaoMing Zhang, Bingyu Yan, Ziyi Zhou, Bo Zhang, Zhenyu Guan, Xi Zhang, Chaozhuo Li
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Dynamics, Misinformation, Stance Detection

The exponential growth of social media and generative AI has transformed information dissemination, fostering connectivity but also accelerating the spread of misinformation. Understanding information propagation dynamics and developing effective control strategies is essential to mitigate harmful content. Traditional models, such as SIR, provide basic insights but inadequately capture the complexities of online interactions. Advanced methods, including attention mechanisms and graph neural networks, enhance accuracy but typically overlook user psychology and behavioral dynamics. Large language models (LLMs), with their human-like reasoning, offer new potential for simulating psychological aspects of information spread. We introduce an LLM-based simulation environment capturing agents' evolving attitudes, emotions, and responses. Initial experiments, however, revealed significant gaps between LLM-generated behaviors and authentic human dynamics, especially in stance detection and psychological realism. A detailed evaluation through Social Information Processing Theory identified major discrepancies in goal-setting and feedback evaluation, stemming from the lack of emotional processing in standard LLM training. To address these issues, we propose the Social Information Processing-based Chain of Thought (SIP-CoT) mechanism enhanced by emotion-guided memory. This method improves the interpretation of social cues, personalization of goals, and evaluation of feedback. Experimental results confirm that SIP-CoT-enhanced LLM agents more effectively process social information, demonstrating behaviors, attitudes, and emotions closer to real human interactions. In summary, this research highlights critical limitations in current LLM-based propagation simulations and demonstrates how integrating SIP-CoT and emotional memory significantly enhances the social intelligence and realism of LLM agents.
Generative Head-Mounted Camera Captures for Photorealistic Avatars
Authors: Shaojie Bai, Seunghyeon Seo, Yida Wang, Chenghui Li, Owen Wang, Te-Li Wang, Tianyang Ma, Jason Saragih, Shih-En Wei, Nojun Kwak, Hyung Jun Kim
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Enabling photorealistic avatar animations in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) has been challenging because of the difficulty of obtaining ground truth state of faces. It is physically impossible to obtain synchronized images from head-mounted cameras (HMC) sensing input, which has partial observations in infrared (IR), and an array of outside-in dome cameras, which have full observations that match avatars' appearance. Prior works relying on analysis-by-synthesis methods could generate accurate ground truth, but suffer from imperfect disentanglement between expression and style in their personalized training. The reliance of extensive paired captures (HMC and dome) for the same subject makes it operationally expensive to collect large-scale datasets, which cannot be reused for different HMC viewpoints and lighting. In this work, we propose a novel generative approach, Generative HMC (GenHMC), that leverages large unpaired HMC captures, which are much easier to collect, to directly generate high-quality synthetic HMC images given any conditioning avatar state from dome captures. We show that our method is able to properly disentangle the input conditioning signal that specifies facial expression and viewpoint, from facial appearance, leading to more accurate ground truth. Furthermore, our method can generalize to unseen identities, removing the reliance on the paired captures. We demonstrate these breakthroughs by both evaluating synthetic HMC images and universal face encoders trained from these new HMC-avatar correspondences, which achieve better data efficiency and state-of-the-art accuracy.
Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks on Financial Reporting via Maximum Violated Multi-Objective Attack
Authors: Edward Raff, Karen Kukla, Michel Benaroch, Joseph Comprix
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00

Bad actors, primarily distressed firms, have the incentive and desire to manipulate their financial reports to hide their distress and derive personal gains. As attackers, these firms are motivated by potentially millions of dollars and the availability of many publicly disclosed and used financial modeling frameworks. Existing attack methods do not work on this data due to anti-correlated objectives that must both be satisfied for the attacker to succeed. We introduce Maximum Violated Multi-Objective (MVMO) attacks that adapt the attacker's search direction to find $20\times$ more satisfying attacks compared to standard attacks. The result is that in $\approx50\%$ of cases, a company could inflate their earnings by 100-200%, while simultaneously reducing their fraud scores by 15%. By working with lawyers and professional accountants, we ensure our threat model is realistic to how such frauds are performed in practice.
pFedMMA: Personalized Federated Fine-Tuning with Multi-Modal Adapter for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Sajjad Ghiasvand, Mahnoosh Alizadeh, Ramtin Pedarsani
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable generalization in zero- and few-shot settings, but adapting them efficiently to decentralized, heterogeneous data remains a challenge. While prompt tuning has emerged as a popular parameter-efficient approach in personalized federated learning, existing methods often sacrifice generalization in favor of personalization, struggling particularly on unseen classes or domains. In this work, we propose pFedMMA, the first personalized federated learning framework that leverages multi-modal adapters for vision-language tasks. Each adapter contains modality-specific up- and down-projection layers alongside a globally shared projection that aligns cross-modal features. Our asymmetric optimization strategy allows clients to locally adapt to personalized data distributions while collaboratively training the shared projection to improve global generalization. This design is also communication-efficient, as only the shared component is exchanged during rounds. Through extensive experiments across eleven datasets, including domain- and label-shift scenarios, we show that pFedMMA achieves state-of-the-art trade-offs between personalization and generalization, outperforming recent federated prompt tuning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/sajjad-ucsb/pFedMMA.
Blind Targeting: Personalization under Third-Party Privacy Constraints
Authors: Anya Shchetkina
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Privacy Preserving

Major advertising platforms recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers' access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to a dataset, which is further protected by adding differentially private noise. This paper studies whether and how advertisers can design effective targeting policies within these restrictive privacy preserving data environments. To achieve this, I develop a probabilistic machine learning method based on Bayesian optimization, which facilitates dynamic data exploration. Since Bayesian optimization was designed to sample points from a function to find its maximum, it is not applicable to aggregate queries and to targeting. Therefore, I introduce two innovations: (i) integral updating of posteriors which allows to select the best regions of the data to query rather than individual points and (ii) a targeting-aware acquisition function that dynamically selects the most informative regions for the targeting task. I identify the conditions of the dataset and privacy environment that necessitate the use of such a "smart" querying strategy. I apply the strategic querying method to the Criteo AI Labs dataset for uplift modeling (Diemert et al., 2018) that contains visit and conversion data from 14M users. I show that an intuitive benchmark strategy only achieves 33% of the non-privacy-preserving targeting potential in some cases, while my strategic querying method achieves 97-101% of that potential, and is statistically indistinguishable from Causal Forest (Athey et al., 2019): a state-of-the-art non-privacy-preserving machine learning targeting method.
SMART: Simulated Students Aligned with Item Response Theory for Question Difficulty Prediction
Authors: Alexander Scarlatos, Nigel Fernandez, Christopher Ormerod, Susan Lottridge, Andrew Lan
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00

Item (question) difficulties play a crucial role in educational assessments, enabling accurate and efficient assessment of student abilities and personalization to maximize learning outcomes. Traditionally, estimating item difficulties can be costly, requiring real students to respond to items, followed by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to get item difficulty estimates. This approach cannot be applied to the cold-start setting for previously unseen items either. In this work, we present SMART (Simulated Students Aligned with IRT), a novel method for aligning simulated students with instructed ability, which can then be used in simulations to predict the difficulty of open-ended items. We achieve this alignment using direct preference optimization (DPO), where we form preference pairs based on how likely responses are under a ground-truth IRT model. We perform a simulation by generating thousands of responses, evaluating them with an LLM-based scoring model, and fit the resulting data to an IRT model to obtain item difficulty estimates. Through extensive experiments on a real-world student response dataset, we show that SMART outperforms other item difficulty prediction methods by leveraging its improved ability alignment.
A Federated Learning-based Lightweight Network with Zero Trust for UAV Authentication
Authors: Hao Zhang, Fuhui Zhou, Wei Wang, Qihui Wu, Chau Yuen
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being integrated into next-generation networks to enhance communication coverage and network capacity. However, the dynamic and mobile nature of UAVs poses significant security challenges, including jamming, eavesdropping, and cyber-attacks. To address these security challenges, this paper proposes a federated learning-based lightweight network with zero trust for enhancing the security of UAV networks. A novel lightweight spectrogram network is proposed for UAV authentication and rejection, which can effectively authenticate and reject UAVs based on spectrograms. Experiments highlight LSNet's superior performance in identifying both known and unknown UAV classes, demonstrating significant improvements over existing benchmarks in terms of accuracy, model compactness, and storage requirements. Notably, LSNet achieves an accuracy of over $80\%$ for known UAV types and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) of $0.7$ for unknown types when trained with all five clients. Further analyses explore the impact of varying the number of clients and the presence of unknown UAVs, reinforcing the practical applicability and effectiveness of our proposed framework in real-world FL scenarios.
The Extended SONICOM HRTF Dataset and Spatial Audio Metrics Toolbox
Authors: Katarina C. Poole, Julie Meyer, Vincent Martin, Rapolas Daugintis, Nils Marggraf-Turley, Jack Webb, Ludovic Pirard, Nicola La Magna, Oliver Turvey, Lorenzo Picinali
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00

Headphone-based spatial audio uses head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) to simulate real-world acoustic environments. HRTFs are unique to everyone, due to personal morphology, shaping how sound waves interact with the body before reaching the eardrums. Here we present the extended SONICOM HRTF dataset which expands on the previous version released in 2023. The total number of measured subjects has now been increased to 300, with demographic information for a subset of the participants, providing context for the dataset's population and relevance. The dataset incorporates synthesised HRTFs for 200 of the 300 subjects, generated using Mesh2HRTF, alongside pre-processed 3D scans of the head and ears, optimised for HRTF synthesis. This rich dataset facilitates rapid and iterative optimisation of HRTF synthesis algorithms, allowing the automatic generation of large data. The optimised scans enable seamless morphological modifications, providing insights into how anatomical changes impact HRTFs, and the larger sample size enhances the effectiveness of machine learning approaches. To support analysis, we also introduce the Spatial Audio Metrics (SAM) Toolbox, a Python package designed for efficient analysis and visualisation of HRTF data, offering customisable tools for advanced research. Together, the extended dataset and toolbox offer a comprehensive resource for advancing personalised spatial audio research and development.
Interest Networks (iNETs) for Cities: Cross-Platform Insights and Urban Behavior Explanations
Authors: Gustavo H. Santos, Myriam Delgado, Thiago H. Silva
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) provide a rich foundation for modeling urban behavior through iNETs (Interest Networks), which capture how user interests are distributed throughout urban spaces. This study compares iNETs across platforms (Google Places and Foursquare) and spatial granularities, showing that coarser levels reveal more consistent cross-platform patterns, while finer granularities expose subtle, platform-specific behaviors. Our analysis finds that, in general, user interest is primarily shaped by geographic proximity and venue similarity, while socioeconomic and political contexts play a lesser role. Building on these insights, we develop a multi-level, explainable recommendation system that predicts high-interest urban regions for different user types. The model adapts to behavior profiles -- such as explorers, who are driven by proximity, and returners, who prefer familiar venues -- and provides natural-language explanations using explainable AI (XAI) techniques. To support our approach, we introduce h3-cities, a tool for multi-scale spatial analysis, and release a public demo for interactively exploring personalized urban recommendations. Our findings contribute to urban mobility research by providing scalable, context-aware, and interpretable recommendation systems.
High Order Collaboration-Oriented Federated Graph Neural Network for Accurate QoS Prediction
Authors: Zehuan Chen, Xiangwei Lai
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Graph Neural Network, Prediction

Predicting Quality of Service (QoS) data crucial for cloud service selection, where user privacy is a critical concern. Federated Graph Neural Networks (FGNNs) can perform QoS data prediction as well as maintaining user privacy. However, existing FGNN-based QoS predictors commonly implement on-device training on scattered explicit user-service graphs, thereby failing to utilize the implicit user-user interactions. To address this issue, this study proposes a high order collaboration-oriented federated graph neural network (HC-FGNN) to obtain accurate QoS prediction with privacy preservation. Concretely, it magnifies the explicit user-service graphs following the principle of attention mechanism to obtain the high order collaboration, which reflects the implicit user-user interactions. Moreover, it utilizes a lightweight-based message aggregation way to improve the computational efficiency. The extensive experiments on two QoS datasets from real application indicate that the proposed HC-FGNN possesses the advantages of high prediction accurate and privacy protection.
Kalman Filter Aided Federated Koopman Learning
Authors: Yutao Chen, Wei Chen
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Real-time control and estimation are pivotal for applications such as industrial automation and future healthcare. The realization of this vision relies heavily on efficient interactions with nonlinear systems. Therefore, Koopman learning, which leverages the power of deep learning to linearize nonlinear systems, has been one of the most successful examples of mitigating the complexity inherent in nonlinearity. However, the existing literature assumes access to accurate system states and abundant high-quality data for Koopman analysis, which is usually impractical in real-world scenarios. To fill this void, this paper considers the case where only observations of the system are available and where the observation data is insufficient to accomplish an independent Koopman analysis. To this end, we propose Kalman Filter aided Federated Koopman Learning (KF-FedKL), which pioneers the combination of Kalman filtering and federated learning with Koopman analysis. By doing so, we can achieve collaborative linearization with privacy guarantees. Specifically, we employ a straightforward yet efficient loss function to drive the training of a deep Koopman network for linearization. To obtain system information devoid of individual information from observation data, we leverage the unscented Kalman filter and the unscented Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother. To achieve collaboration between clients, we adopt the federated learning framework and develop a modified FedAvg algorithm to orchestrate the collaboration. A convergence analysis of the proposed framework is also presented. Finally, through extensive numerical simulations, we showcase the performance of KF-FedKL under various situations.
FedPall: Prototype-based Adversarial and Collaborative Learning for Federated Learning with Feature Drift
Authors: Yong Zhang, Feng Liang, Guanghu Yuan, Min Yang, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a global model in the centralized server with data from multiple parties while preserving privacy. However, data heterogeneity can significantly degrade the performance of the global model when each party uses datasets from different sources to train a local model, thereby affecting personalized local models. Among various cases of data heterogeneity, feature drift, feature space difference among parties, is prevalent in real-life data but remains largely unexplored. Feature drift can distract feature extraction learning in clients and thus lead to poor feature extraction and classification performance. To tackle the problem of feature drift in FL, we propose FedPall, an FL framework that utilizes prototype-based adversarial learning to unify feature spaces and collaborative learning to reinforce class information within the features. Moreover, FedPall leverages mixed features generated from global prototypes and local features to enhance the global classifier with classification-relevant information from a global perspective. Evaluation results on three representative feature-drifted datasets demonstrate FedPall's consistently superior performance in classification with feature-drifted data in the FL scenario.