pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Flexible Selective Inference with Flow-based Transport Maps
Authors: Sifan Liu, Snigdha Panigrahi
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00

Data-carving methods perform selective inference by conditioning the distribution of data on the observed selection event. However, existing data-carving approaches typically require an analytically tractable characterization of the selection event. This paper introduces a new method that leverages tools from flow-based generative modeling to approximate a potentially complex conditional distribution, even when the underlying selection event lacks an analytical description -- take, for example, the data-adaptive tuning of model parameters. The key idea is to learn a transport map that pushes forward a simple reference distribution to the conditional distribution given selection. This map is efficiently learned via a normalizing flow, without imposing any further restrictions on the nature of the selection event. Through extensive numerical experiments on both simulated and real data, we demonstrate that this method enables flexible selective inference by providing: (i) valid p-values and confidence sets for adaptively selected hypotheses and parameters, (ii) a closed-form expression for the conditional density function, enabling likelihood-based and quantile-based inference, and (iii) adjustments for intractable selection steps that can be easily integrated with existing methods designed to account for the tractable steps in a selection procedure involving multiple steps.
Projection Pursuit Density Ratio Estimation
Authors: Meilin Wang, Wei Huang, Mingming Gong, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Density Ratio Estimation

Density ratio estimation (DRE) is a paramount task in machine learning, for its broad applications across multiple domains, such as covariate shift adaptation, causal inference, independence tests and beyond. Parametric methods for estimating the density ratio possibly lead to biased results if models are misspecified, while conventional non-parametric methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality when the dimension of data is large. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for DRE based on the projection pursuit (PP) approximation. The proposed method leverages PP to mitigate the impact of high dimensionality while retaining the model flexibility needed for the accuracy of DRE. We establish the consistency and the convergence rate for the proposed estimator. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing alternatives in various applications.
Score Matching With Missing Data
Authors: Josh Givens, Song Liu, Henry W J Reeve
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00

Score matching is a vital tool for learning the distribution of data with applications across many areas including diffusion processes, energy based modelling, and graphical model estimation. Despite all these applications, little work explores its use when data is incomplete. We address this by adapting score matching (and its major extensions) to work with missing data in a flexible setting where data can be partially missing over any subset of the coordinates. We provide two separate score matching variations for general use, an importance weighting (IW) approach, and a variational approach. We provide finite sample bounds for our IW approach in finite domain settings and show it to have especially strong performance in small sample lower dimensional cases. Complementing this, we show our variational approach to be strongest in more complex high-dimensional settings which we demonstrate on graphical model estimation tasks on both real and simulated data.
Label-shift robust federated feature screening for high-dimensional classification
Authors: Qi Qin, Erbo Li, Xingxiang Li, Yifan Sun, Wu Wang, Chen Xu
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Federated Learning

Distributed and federated learning are important tools for high-dimensional classification of large datasets. To reduce computational costs and overcome the curse of dimensionality, feature screening plays a pivotal role in eliminating irrelevant features during data preprocessing. However, data heterogeneity, particularly label shifting across different clients, presents significant challenges for feature screening. This paper introduces a general framework that unifies existing screening methods and proposes a novel utility, label-shift robust federated feature screening (LR-FFS), along with its federated estimation procedure. The framework facilitates a uniform analysis of methods and systematically characterizes their behaviors under label shift conditions. Building upon this framework, LR-FFS leverages conditional distribution functions and expectations to address label shift without adding computational burdens and remains robust against model misspecification and outliers. Additionally, the federated procedure ensures computational efficiency and privacy protection while maintaining screening effectiveness comparable to centralized processing. We also provide a false discovery rate (FDR) control method for federated feature screening. Experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate LR-FFS's superior performance across diverse client environments, including those with varying class distributions, sample sizes, and missing categorical data.
Bayesian Data Sketching for Varying Coefficient Regression Models
Authors: Rajarshi Guhaniyogi, Laura Baracaldo, Sudipto Banerjee
Date: 2025-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Dimensionality Reduction, regression

Varying coefficient models are popular for estimating nonlinear regression functions in functional data models. Their Bayesian variants have received limited attention in large data applications, primarily due to prohibitively slow posterior computations using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. We introduce Bayesian data sketching for varying coefficient models to obviate computational challenges presented by large sample sizes. To address the challenges of analyzing large data, we compress the functional response vector and predictor matrix by a random linear transformation to achieve dimension reduction and conduct inference on the compressed data. Our approach distinguishes itself from several existing methods for analyzing large functional data in that it requires neither the development of new models or algorithms, nor any specialized computational hardware while delivering fully model-based Bayesian inference. Well-established methods and algorithms for varying coefficient regression models can be applied to the compressed data.
Large Neighborhood and Hybrid Genetic Search for Inventory Routing Problems
Authors: Jingyi Zhao, Claudia Archetti, Tuan Anh Pham, Thibaut Vidal
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

The inventory routing problem (IRP) focuses on jointly optimizing inventory and distribution operations from a supplier to retailers over multiple days. Compared to other problems from the vehicle routing family, the interrelations between inventory and routing decisions render IRP optimization more challenging and call for advanced solution techniques. A few studies have focused on developing large neighborhood search approaches for this class of problems, but this remains a research area with vast possibilities due to the challenges related to the integration of inventory and routing decisions. In this study, we advance this research area by developing a new large neighborhood search operator tailored for the IRP. Specifically, the operator optimally removes and reinserts all visits to a specific retailer while minimizing routing and inventory costs. We propose an efficient tailored dynamic programming algorithm that exploits preprocessing and acceleration strategies. The operator is used to build an effective local search routine, and included in a state-of-the-art routing algorithm, i.e., Hybrid Genetic Search (HGS). Through extensive computational experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting heuristic algorithm leads to solutions of unmatched quality up to this date, especially on large-scale benchmark instances.
Causal Discovery in Dynamic Fading Wireless Networks
Authors: Oluwaseyi Giwa
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference

Dynamic causal discovery in wireless networks is essential due to evolving interference, fading, and mobility, which complicate traditional static causal models. This paper addresses causal inference challenges in dynamic fading wireless environments by proposing a sequential regression-based algorithm with a novel application of the NOTEARS acyclicity constraint, enabling efficient online updates. We derive theoretical lower and upper bounds on the detection delay required to identify structural changes, explicitly quantifying their dependence on network size, noise variance, and fading severity. Monte Carlo simulations validate these theoretical results, demonstrating linear increases in detection delay with network size, quadratic growth with noise variance, and inverse-square dependence on the magnitude of structural changes. Our findings provide rigorous theoretical insights and practical guidelines for designing robust online causal inference mechanisms to maintain network reliability under nonstationary wireless conditions.
Mutual-Supervised Learning for Sequential-to-Parallel Code Translation
Authors: Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Shuo Wang, Li Ding, Guangli Li, Yuanbo Wen, Shuoming Zhang, Ruiyuan Xu, Jin Qin, Jiaming Guo, Chenxi Wang, Ling Li, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, GPU, Translation

The rise of GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) has driven the widespread adoption of parallel programming models such as CUDA. Yet, the inherent complexity of parallel programming creates a demand for the automated sequential-to-parallel approaches. However, data scarcity poses a significant challenge for machine learning-based sequential-to-parallel code translation. Although recent back-translation methods show promise, they still fail to ensure functional equivalence in the translated code. In this paper, we propose a novel Mutual-Supervised Learning (MSL) framework for sequential-to-parallel code translation to address the functional equivalence issue. MSL consists of two models, a Translator and a Tester. Through an iterative loop consisting of Co-verify and Co-evolve steps, the Translator and the Tester mutually generate data for each other and improve collectively. The Tester generates unit tests to verify and filter functionally equivalent translated code, thereby evolving the Translator, while the Translator generates translated code as augmented input to evolve the Tester. Experimental results demonstrate that MuSL significantly enhances the performance of the base model: when applied to Qwen2.5-Coder, it not only improves Pass@1 by up to 28.91% and boosts Tester performance by 68.90%, but also outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method CodeRosetta by 1.56 and 6.92 in BLEU and CodeBLEU scores, while achieving performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1. Our code is available at https://github.com/kcxain/musl.
Efficient Speech Enhancement via Embeddings from Pre-trained Generative Audioencoders
Authors: Xingwei Sun, Heinrich Dinkel, Yadong Niu, Linzhang Wang, Junbo Zhang, Jian Luan
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Recent research has delved into speech enhancement (SE) approaches that leverage audio embeddings from pre-trained models, diverging from time-frequency masking or signal prediction techniques. This paper introduces an efficient and extensible SE method. Our approach involves initially extracting audio embeddings from noisy speech using a pre-trained audioencoder, which are then denoised by a compact encoder network. Subsequently, a vocoder synthesizes the clean speech from denoised embeddings. An ablation study substantiates the parameter efficiency of the denoise encoder with a pre-trained audioencoder and vocoder. Experimental results on both speech enhancement and speaker fidelity demonstrate that our generative audioencoder-based SE system outperforms models utilizing discriminative audioencoders. Furthermore, subjective listening tests validate that our proposed system surpasses an existing state-of-the-art SE model in terms of perceptual quality.
GLAP: General contrastive audio-text pretraining across domains and languages
Authors: Heinrich Dinkel, Zhiyong Yan, Tianzi Wang, Yongqing Wang, Xingwei Sun, Yadong Niu, Jizhong Liu, Gang Li, Junbo Zhang, Jian Luan
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: AudioCaps, Keyword Spotting, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is a widely-used method to bridge the gap between audio and text domains. Current CLAP methods enable sound and music retrieval in English, ignoring multilingual spoken content. To address this, we introduce general language audio pretraining (GLAP), which expands CLAP with multilingual and multi-domain abilities. GLAP demonstrates its versatility by achieving competitive performance on standard audio-text retrieval benchmarks like Clotho and AudioCaps, while significantly surpassing existing methods in speech retrieval and classification tasks. Additionally, GLAP achieves strong results on widely used sound-event zero-shot benchmarks, while simultaneously outperforming previous methods on speech content benchmarks. Further keyword spotting evaluations across 50 languages emphasize GLAP's advanced multilingual capabilities. Finally, multilingual sound and music understanding is evaluated across four languages. Checkpoints and Source: https://github.com/xiaomi-research/dasheng-glap.
TO-GATE: Clarifying Questions and Summarizing Responses with Trajectory Optimization for Eliciting Human Preference
Authors: Yulin Dou, Jiangming Liu
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

Large language models (LLMs) can effectively elicit human preferences through multi-turn dialogue. Complex tasks can be accomplished through iterative clarifying questions and final responses generated by an LLM acting as a questioner (STaR-GATE; Andukuri et al., 2024}). However, existing approaches based on self-taught reasoning struggle to identify optimal dialogue trajectories and avoid irrelevant questions to the tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TO-GATE, a novel framework that enhances question generation through trajectory optimization, which consists of two key components: a clarification resolver that generates optimal questioning trajectories, and a summarizer that ensures task-aligned final responses. The trajectory optimization enables the model to produce effective elicitation questions and summary responses tailored to specific tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TO-GATE significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving a 9.32% improvement on standard preference elicitation tasks.
Enabling On-Device Medical AI Assistants via Input-Driven Saliency Adaptation
Authors: Uttej Kallakurik, Edward Humes, Rithvik Jonna, Xiaomin Lin, Tinoosh Mohsenin
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MedQA, Quantization, Raspberry Pi 5

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significant impact on the healthcare scenarios but remain prohibitively large for deployment in real-time, resource-constrained environments such as edge devices. In this work, we introduce a novel medical assistant system, optimized through our general-purpose compression framework, which tailors Large Language Models (LLMs) for deployment in specialized domains. By measuring neuron saliency on domain-specific data, our method can aggressively prune irrelevant neurons, reducing model size while preserving performance. Following pruning, we apply post-training quantization to further reduce the memory footprint, and evaluate the compressed model across medical benchmarks including MedMCQA, MedQA, and PubMedQA. We also deploy the 50\% compressed Gemma and the 67\% compressed LLaMA3 models on Jetson Orin Nano (18.7W peak) and Raspberry Pi 5 (6.3W peak), achieving real-time, energy-efficient inference under hardware constraints.
How Difficulty-Aware Staged Reinforcement Learning Enhances LLMs' Reasoning Capabilities: A Preliminary Experimental Study
Authors: Yunjie Ji, Sitong Zhao, Xiaoyu Tian, Haotian Wang, Shuaiting Chen, Yiping Peng, Han Zhao, Xiangang Li
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with efficiency and scalability remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence research. This paper presents a rigorous experimental investigation into how difficulty-aware staged reinforcement learning (RL) strategies can substantially improve LLM reasoning performance. Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate that strategically selecting training data according to well-defined difficulty levels markedly enhances RL optimization. Moreover, we introduce a staged training methodology, progressively exposing models to increasingly challenging tasks, further amplifying reasoning capabilities. Our findings reveal significant cross-domain benefits when simultaneously training models on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Notably, our proposed approach enables a 1.5B parameter model to achieve an accuracy of 42.3\% on the AIME-2024 benchmark, 89.5\% on the MATH-500 benchmark. These results underscore the efficacy of our method in advancing the reasoning proficiency of LLMs. We will open-source our datasets on GitHub and Hugging Face.
Influence Functions for Data Attribution in Linear System Identification and LQR Control
Authors: Jiachen Li, Shihao Li, Jiamin Xu, Soovadeep Bakshi, Dongmei Chen
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00

Understanding the influence of individual training data points is crucial for developing reliable machine learning-based control systems. However, conventional methods like leave-one-out retraining are computationally infeasible for large datasets. This paper introduces a framework using influence functions to efficiently approximate the impact of removing specific training trajectories on both learned system dynamics and downstream control performance. We formulate two influence functions(IF): IF1, which estimates the effect on the predictive accuracy of a learned linear dynamics model, and IF2, which quantifies the subsequent impact on the cost of a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) controller designed using these learned dynamics. These involve tracing sensitivities through the Discrete Algebraic Riccati Equation (DARE) solution. We empirically validate our approach on simulated linear systems analogous to robotic manipulators. Results show strong positive correlations between influence predictions and ground truth changes obtained via retraining. Our framework provides a computationally tractable method for data attribution.
Benchmarking Object Detectors under Real-World Distribution Shifts in Satellite Imagery
Authors: Sara Al-Emadi, Yin Yang, Ferda Ofli
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Benchmarking, Humanitarian, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object detectors have achieved remarkable performance in many applications; however, these deep learning models are typically designed under the i.i.d. assumption, meaning they are trained and evaluated on data sampled from the same (source) distribution. In real-world deployment, however, target distributions often differ from source data, leading to substantial performance degradation. Domain Generalisation (DG) seeks to bridge this gap by enabling models to generalise to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data without access to target distributions during training, enhancing robustness to unseen conditions. In this work, we examine the generalisability and robustness of state-of-the-art object detectors under real-world distribution shifts, focusing particularly on spatial domain shifts. Despite the need, a standardised benchmark dataset specifically designed for assessing object detection under realistic DG scenarios is currently lacking. To address this, we introduce Real-World Distribution Shifts (RWDS), a suite of three novel DG benchmarking datasets that focus on humanitarian and climate change applications. These datasets enable the investigation of domain shifts across (i) climate zones and (ii) various disasters and geographic regions. To our knowledge, these are the first DG benchmarking datasets tailored for object detection in real-world, high-impact contexts. We aim for these datasets to serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness and generalisation of future object detection models. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/RWGAI/RWDS.
Vision Matters: Simple Visual Perturbations Can Boost Multimodal Math Reasoning
Authors: Yuting Li, Lai Wei, Kaipeng Zheng, Jingyuan Huang, Linghe Kong, Lichao Sun, Weiran Huang
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Visual Reasoning

Despite the rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), they have largely overlooked the importance of visual processing. In a simple yet revealing experiment, we interestingly find that language-only models, when provided with image captions, can achieve comparable or even better performance than MLLMs that consume raw visual inputs. This suggests that current MLLMs may generate accurate visual descriptions but fail to effectively integrate them during reasoning. Motivated by this, we propose a simple visual perturbation framework that enhances perceptual robustness without requiring algorithmic modifications or additional training data. Our approach introduces three targeted perturbations: distractor concatenation, dominance-preserving mixup, and random rotation, that can be easily integrated into existing post-training pipelines including SFT, DPO, and GRPO. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets, we demonstrate consistent improvements in mathematical reasoning performance, with gains comparable to those achieved through algorithmic changes. Additionally, we achieve competitive performance among open-source 7B RL-tuned models by training Qwen2.5-VL-7B with visual perturbation. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we analyze the effectiveness of different perturbation strategies, revealing that each perturbation type contributes uniquely to different aspects of visual reasoning. Our findings highlight the critical role of visual perturbation in multimodal mathematical reasoning: better reasoning begins with better seeing. Our code is available at https://github.com/YutingLi0606/Vision-Matters.