pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ReLayout: Integrating Relation Reasoning for Content-aware Layout Generation with Multi-modal Large Language Models
Authors: Jiaxu Tian, Xuehui Yu, Yaoxing Wang, Pan Wang, Guangqian Guo, Shan Gao
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Generation

Content-aware layout aims to arrange design elements appropriately on a given canvas to convey information effectively. Recently, the trend for this task has been to leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate layouts automatically, achieving remarkable performance. However, existing LLM-based methods fail to adequately interpret spatial relationships among visual themes and design elements, leading to structural and diverse problems in layout generation. To address this issue, we introduce ReLayout, a novel method that leverages relation-CoT to generate more reasonable and aesthetically coherent layouts by fundamentally originating from design concepts. Specifically, we enhance layout annotations by introducing explicit relation definitions, such as region, salient, and margin between elements, with the goal of decomposing the layout into smaller, structured, and recursive layouts, thereby enabling the generation of more structured layouts. Furthermore, based on these defined relationships, we introduce a layout prototype rebalance sampler, which defines layout prototype features across three dimensions and quantifies distinct layout styles. This sampler addresses uniformity issues in generation that arise from data bias in the prototype distribution balance process. Extensive experimental results verify that ReLayout outperforms baselines and can generate structural and diverse layouts that are more aligned with human aesthetics and more explainable.
Skywork-R1V3 Technical Report
Authors: Wei Shen, Jiangbo Pei, Yi Peng, Xuchen Song, Yang Liu, Jian Peng, Haofeng Sun, Yunzhuo Hao, Peiyu Wang, Yahui Zhou
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Mathematical Reasoning, Multimodal Reasoning, Visual Reasoning

We introduce Skywork-R1V3, an advanced, open-source vision-language model (VLM) that pioneers a new approach to visual reasoning. Its key innovation lies in effectively transferring reasoning skills from text-only Large Language Models (LLMs) to visual tasks. The strong performance of Skywork-R1V3 primarily stems from our elaborate post-training RL framework, which effectively activates and enhances the model's reasoning ability, without the need for additional continue pre-training. Through this framework, we further uncover the fundamental role of the connector module in achieving robust cross-modal alignment for multimodal reasoning models. In addition, we introduce a unique indicator of reasoning capability, the entropy of critical reasoning tokens, which has proven highly effective for checkpoint selection during RL training. Skywork-R1V3 achieves state-of-the-art results on MMMU, significantly improving from 64.3% to 76.0%. This performance matches entry-level human capabilities. Remarkably, our RL-powered post-training approach enables even the 38B parameter model to rival top closed-source VLMs. The implementation successfully transfers mathematical reasoning to other subject-related reasoning tasks. We also include an analysis of curriculum learning and reinforcement finetuning strategies, along with a broader discussion on multimodal reasoning. Skywork-R1V3 represents a significant leap in multimodal reasoning, showcasing RL as a powerful engine for advancing open-source VLM capabilities.
Unsupervised multi-source domain adaptation for person re-identification via feature fusion and pseudo-label refinement
Authors: Qing Tian, Yao Cheng, Sizhen He, Jixin Sun
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Comput. Electr. Eng 2024 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Person Re-Identification, Pseudo Label, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The objective of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for person re-identification (re-ID) is to associate person in images captured from heterogeneous camera perspectives. Currently, mainstream UDA methods for person re-ID are mainly conducted in single-source and single-target domain scenarios. Moreover, most of these methods do not take the repercussions of pseudo-label noise on model performance into consideration. Therefore, we put forward an unsupervised multi-source domain adaptation (UMDA) method for person re-ID via feature fusion and pseudo-label refinement. Firstly, our method is designed for scenarios where there exist several source domains and only one target domain. We suggest using feature fusion techniques to minimize the domain disparity among the source domains, and employ pseudo-label refinement techniques to ameliorate the ramifications of label noise on model predictions. To substantiate the effectiveness of the recommended methodology, we carry out a succession of experiments on multiple datasets. The advantage and preeminence of our proposed method can be manifested by the experimental outcomes.
Enhancing Scientific Visual Question Answering through Multimodal Reasoning and Ensemble Modeling
Authors: Prahitha Movva, Naga Harshita Marupaka
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Multimodal Reasoning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Technical reports and articles often contain valuable information in the form of semi-structured data like charts, and figures. Interpreting these and using the information from them is essential for downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Current approaches to visual question answering often struggle with the precision required for scientific data interpretation, particularly in handling numerical values, multi-step reasoning over visual elements, and maintaining consistency between visual observation and textual reasoning. We present our approach to the SciVQA 2025 shared task, focusing on answering visual and non-visual questions grounded in scientific figures from scholarly articles. We conducted a series of experiments using models with 5B to 8B parameters. Our strongest individual model, InternVL3, achieved ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L F1 scores of \textbf{0.740} and a BERTScore of \textbf{0.983} on the SciVQA test split. We also developed an ensemble model with multiple vision language models (VLMs). Through error analysis on the validation split, our ensemble approach improved performance compared to most individual models, though InternVL3 remained the strongest standalone performer. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of prompt optimization, chain-of-thought reasoning and ensemble modeling in improving the model's ability in visual question answering.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-Regional Scenes Person Re-identification
Authors: Mao Yanmei, Li Huafeng, Zhang Yafei
Date: 2023-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ 2023 3
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification, Style Transfer, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In large-scale surveillance systems, the absence of positive cross-camera pedestrian samples in cross-regional scenes poses a limitation on the performance of person re-identification models. To tackle this challenge, an unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification method incorporating multi-granularity feature mining and domain-invariant feature learning is proposed. The method comprises a multi-granularity feature learning module and a domain distribution alignment module. Within the multi-granularity feature learning module, global discriminant features of pedestrians are extracted through global features learning. To further enhance the discriminative features of pedestrians, a local consistency feature learning module is proposed to strengthen interactions among local features. Through the learning of both global and local features, the network is encouraged to extract multi-granularity discriminative features, thereby elevating the performance of the person re-identification model. Additionally, this study incorporates a domain distribution alignment module, conducting style transfer to construct positive samples with diverse styles across cameras for target domain. This not only addresses the issue of the lack of positive samples across cameras in cross-regional scenes but also enhances the domain adaptation capabilities of the model. Extensive experiments conducted on the Market-1501, DukeMTMC, CUHK03 and MSMT17 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art person re-identification methods.
ModelCitizens:Representing Community Voices in Online Safety
Authors: Ashima Suvarna, Christina Chance, Hamid Palangi, Sophie Hao, Thomas Hartvigsen, Saadia Gabriel
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00

Automatic toxic language detection is critical for creating safe, inclusive online spaces. However, it is a highly subjective task, with perceptions of toxic language shaped by community norms and lived experience. Existing toxicity detection models are typically trained on annotations that collapse diverse annotator perspectives into a single ground truth, erasing important context-specific notions of toxicity such as reclaimed language. To address this, we introduce MODELCITIZENS, a dataset of 6.8K social media posts and 40K toxicity annotations across diverse identity groups. To capture the role of conversational context on toxicity, typical of social media posts, we augment MODELCITIZENS posts with LLM-generated conversational scenarios. State-of-the-art toxicity detection tools (e.g. OpenAI Moderation API, GPT-o4-mini) underperform on MODELCITIZENS, with further degradation on context-augmented posts. Finally, we release LLAMACITIZEN-8B and GEMMACITIZEN-12B, LLaMA- and Gemma-based models finetuned on MODELCITIZENS, which outperform GPT-o4-mini by 5.5% on in-distribution evaluations. Our findings highlight the importance of community-informed annotation and modeling for inclusive content moderation.
EC-Flow: Enabling Versatile Robotic Manipulation from Action-Unlabeled Videos via Embodiment-Centric Flow
Authors: Yixiang Chen, Peiyan Li, Yan Huang, Jiabing Yang, Kehan Chen, Liang Wang
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deformable Object Manipulation, Imitation Learning, Object

Current language-guided robotic manipulation systems often require low-level action-labeled datasets for imitation learning. While object-centric flow prediction methods mitigate this issue, they remain limited to scenarios involving rigid objects with clear displacement and minimal occlusion. In this work, we present Embodiment-Centric Flow (EC-Flow), a framework that directly learns manipulation from action-unlabeled videos by predicting embodiment-centric flow. Our key insight is that incorporating the embodiment's inherent kinematics significantly enhances generalization to versatile manipulation scenarios, including deformable object handling, occlusions, and non-object-displacement tasks. To connect the EC-Flow with language instructions and object interactions, we further introduce a goal-alignment module by jointly optimizing movement consistency and goal-image prediction. Moreover, translating EC-Flow to executable robot actions only requires a standard robot URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) file to specify kinematic constraints across joints, which makes it easy to use in practice. We validate EC-Flow on both simulation (Meta-World) and real-world tasks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance in occluded object handling (62% improvement), deformable object manipulation (45% improvement), and non-object-displacement tasks (80% improvement) than prior state-of-the-art object-centric flow methods. For more information, see our project website at https://ec-flow1.github.io .
Beyond Appearance: Geometric Cues for Robust Video Instance Segmentation
Authors: Quanzhu Niu, Yikang Zhou, Shihao Chen, Tao Zhang, Shunping Ji
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Instance Segmentation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation, Video Understanding

Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) fundamentally struggles with pervasive challenges including object occlusions, motion blur, and appearance variations during temporal association. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces geometric awareness to enhance VIS robustness by strategically leveraging monocular depth estimation. We systematically investigate three distinct integration paradigms. Expanding Depth Channel (EDC) method concatenates the depth map as input channel to segmentation networks; Sharing ViT (SV) designs a uniform ViT backbone, shared between depth estimation and segmentation branches; Depth Supervision (DS) makes use of depth prediction as an auxiliary training guide for feature learning. Though DS exhibits limited effectiveness, benchmark evaluations demonstrate that EDC and SV significantly enhance the robustness of VIS. When with Swin-L backbone, our EDC method gets 56.2 AP, which sets a new state-of-the-art result on OVIS benchmark. This work conclusively establishes depth cues as critical enablers for robust video understanding.
Adaptive Cross-Domain Learning for Generalizable Person Re-Identification
Authors: Pengyi Zhang, Huanzhang Dou, Yunlong Yu, Xi Li
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2022 10
Tasks: Generalizable Person Re-identification, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain Generalizable Person Re-Identification (DG-ReID) is a more practical ReID task that is trained from multiple source domains and tested on the unseen target domains. Most existing methods are challenged for dealing with the shared and specific characteristics among different domains, which is called the domain conflict problem. To address this problem, we present an Adaptive Cross-domain Learning (ACL) framework equipped with a CrOss-Domain Embedding Block (CODE-Block) to maintain a common feature space for capturing both the domain-invariant and the domain-specific features, while dynamically mining the relations across different domains. Moreover, our model adaptively adjusts the architecture to focus on learning the corresponding features of a single domain at a time without interference from the biased features of other domains. Specifically, the CODE-Block is composed of two complementary branches, a dynamic branch for extracting domain-adaptive features and a static branch for extracting the domain-invariant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on the popular benchmarks. Under Protocol-2, our method outperforms previous SOTA by 7.8% and 7.6% in terms of mAP and rank-1 accuracy.
S$^2$Edit: Text-Guided Image Editing with Precise Semantic and Spatial Control
Authors: Xudong Liu, Zikun Chen, Ruowei Jiang, Ziyi Wu, Kejia Yin, Han Zhao, Parham Aarabi, Igor Gilitschenski
Date: 2025-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: text-guided-image-editing

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality generation and manipulation of images guided by texts, as well as concept learning from images. However, naive applications of existing methods to editing tasks that require fine-grained control, e.g., face editing, often lead to suboptimal solutions with identity information and high-frequency details lost during the editing process, or irrelevant image regions altered due to entangled concepts. In this work, we propose S$^2$Edit, a novel method based on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model that enables personalized editing with precise semantic and spatial control. We first fine-tune our model to embed the identity information into a learnable text token. During fine-tuning, we disentangle the learned identity token from attributes to be edited by enforcing an orthogonality constraint in the textual feature space. To ensure that the identity token only affects regions of interest, we apply object masks to guide the cross-attention maps. At inference time, our method performs localized editing while faithfully preserving the original identity with semantically disentangled and spatially focused identity token learned. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of S$^2$Edit over state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Additionally, we showcase several compositional image editing applications of S$^2$Edit such as makeup transfer.
Dual-Level Viewpoint-Learning for Cross-Domain Vehicle Re-Identification
Authors: Zhou R, Wang Q, Cao L, Xu J, Zhu X, Xiong X, Zhang H, Zhong Y
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: Electronics 2024 5
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Vehicle Re-Identification

The definition of vehicle viewpoint annotations is ambiguous due to human subjective judgment, which makes the cross-domain vehicle re-identification methods unable to learn the viewpoint invariance features during source domain pre-training. This will further lead to cross-view misalignment in downstream target domain tasks. To solve the above challenges, this paper presents a dual-level viewpoint-learning framework that contains an angle invariance pre-training method and a meta-orientation adaptation learning strategy. The dual-level viewpoint-annotation proposal is first designed to concretely redefine the vehicle viewpoint from two aspects (i.e., angle-level and orientation-level). An angle invariance pre-training method is then proposed to preserve identity similarity and difference across the cross-view; this consists of a part-level pyramidal network and an angle bias metric loss. Under the supervision of angle bias metric loss, the part-level pyramidal network, as the backbone, learns the subtle differences of vehicles from different angle-level viewpoints. Finally, a meta-orientation adaptation learning strategy is designed to extend the generalization ability of the re-identification model to the unseen orientation-level viewpoints. Simultaneously, the proposed meta-learning strategy enforces meta-orientation training and meta-orientation testing according to the orientation-level viewpoints in the target domain. Extensive experiments on public vehicle re-identification datasets demonstrate that the proposed method combines the redefined dual-level viewpoint-information and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in alleviating viewpoint variations.
Investigating Quantum Feature Maps in Quantum Support Vector Machines for Lung Cancer Classification
Authors: My Youssef El Hafidi, Achraf Toufah, Mohamed Achraf Kadim
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Diagnostic, Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Quantum Machine Learning, Specificity

In recent years, quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising intersection between quantum physics and artificial intelligence, particularly in domains requiring advanced pattern recognition such as healthcare. This study investigates the effectiveness of Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), which leverage quantum mechanical phenomena like superposition and entanglement to construct high-dimensional Hilbert spaces for data classification. Focusing on lung cancer diagnosis, a concrete and critical healthcare application, we analyze how different quantum feature maps influence classification performance. Using a real-world dataset of 309 patient records with significant class imbalance (39 non-cancer vs. 270 cancer cases), we constructed six balanced subsets for robust evaluation. QSVM models were implemented using Qiskit and executed on the qasm simulator, employing three distinct quantum feature maps: ZFeatureMap, ZZFeatureMap, and PauliFeatureMap. Performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score. Results show that the PauliFeatureMap consistently outperformed the others, achieving perfect classification in three subsets and strong performance overall. These findings demonstrate how quantum computational principles can be harnessed to enhance diagnostic capabilities, reinforcing the importance of physics-based modeling in emerging AI applications within healthcare.
SDAFE: A Dual-filter Stable Diffusion Data Augmentation Method for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Minghao Zhao, Yifei Chen, Jiahao Lyu, Shuangli Du, Zhiyong Lv, Lin Wang
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICASSP 2025-2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025 4
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expressions are a powerful medium for conveying emotions. In facial expression recognition (FER) field, the difficulty of collecting specific expressions often leads to class imbalance in mainstream datasets, significantly reducing the classification accuracy of deep neural networks. To address these issues, we propose a stable-diffusion-based augmentation method for facial expression (SDAFE) that resolves class imbalance problems and enhances data generation quality through cross-modal label guidance. By leveraging the neutrality of neutral faces, we generate additional expressions to balance the dataset classes. We introduce a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) filter to ensure the high quality of the generated images and a cosine similarity cross-modal filter based on CLIP encoders to ensure that the content of the generated images accurately aligns with their labels. Furthermore, we introduce a novel model, FERNeXt, which demonstrates outstanding performance in FER tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art accuracy on the FER2013 dataset and achieving strong results on the RAF-DB and NHFI datasets. Subsequently, the performance of several models across different datasets significantly improves through the use of SDAFE in our experiments.
Predictive Maintenance Optimization for Smart Vending Machines Using IoT and Machine Learning
Authors: Md. Nisharul Hasan
Date: 2025-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Scheduling

The increasing proliferation of vending machines in public and commercial environments has placed a growing emphasis on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Traditional maintenance approaches either reactive or time-based preventive are limited in their ability to preempt machine failures, leading to unplanned downtimes and elevated service costs. This research presents a novel predictive maintenance framework tailored for vending machines by leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning (ML) algorithms. The proposed system continuously monitors machine components and operating conditions in real time and applies predictive models to forecast failures before they occur. This enables timely maintenance scheduling, minimizing downtime and extending machine lifespan. The framework was validated through simulated fault data and performance evaluation using classification algorithms. Results show a significant improvement in early fault detection and a reduction in redundant service interventions. The findings indicate that predictive maintenance systems, when integrated into vending infrastructure, can transform operational efficiency and service reliability.
Exploring Gender Bias Beyond Occupational Titles
Authors: Ahmed Sabir, Rajesh Sharama
Date: 2025-07-03 00:00:00

In this work, we investigate the correlation between gender and contextual biases, focusing on elements such as action verbs, object nouns, and particularly on occupations. We introduce a novel dataset, GenderLexicon, and a framework that can estimate contextual bias and its related gender bias. Our model can interpret the bias with a score and thus improve the explainability of gender bias. Also, our findings confirm the existence of gender biases beyond occupational stereotypes. To validate our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct evaluations on five diverse datasets, including a Japanese dataset.