pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generalizable, real-time neural decoding with hybrid state-space models
Authors: Avery Hee-Woon Ryoo, Nanda H. Krishna, Ximeng Mao, Mehdi Azabou, Eva L. Dyer, Matthew G. Perich, Guillaume Lajoie
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, State Space Models

Real-time decoding of neural activity is central to neuroscience and neurotechnology applications, from closed-loop experiments to brain-computer interfaces, where models are subject to strict latency constraints. Traditional methods, including simple recurrent neural networks, are fast and lightweight but often struggle to generalize to unseen data. In contrast, recent Transformer-based approaches leverage large-scale pretraining for strong generalization performance, but typically have much larger computational requirements and are not always suitable for low-resource or real-time settings. To address these shortcomings, we present POSSM, a novel hybrid architecture that combines individual spike tokenization via a cross-attention module with a recurrent state-space model (SSM) backbone to enable (1) fast and causal online prediction on neural activity and (2) efficient generalization to new sessions, individuals, and tasks through multi-dataset pretraining. We evaluate POSSM's decoding performance and inference speed on intracortical decoding of monkey motor tasks, and show that it extends to clinical applications, namely handwriting and speech decoding in human subjects. Notably, we demonstrate that pretraining on monkey motor-cortical recordings improves decoding performance on the human handwriting task, highlighting the exciting potential for cross-species transfer. In all of these tasks, we find that POSSM achieves decoding accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art Transformers, at a fraction of the inference cost (up to 9x faster on GPU). These results suggest that hybrid SSMs are a promising approach to bridging the gap between accuracy, inference speed, and generalization when training neural decoders for real-time, closed-loop applications.
Blink of an eye: a simple theory for feature localization in generative models
Authors: Marvin Li, Aayush Karan, Sitan Chen
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large language models can exhibit unexpected behavior in the blink of an eye. In a recent computer use demo, a language model switched from coding to Googling pictures of Yellowstone, and these sudden shifts in behavior have also been observed in reasoning patterns and jailbreaks. This phenomenon is not unique to autoregressive models: in diffusion models, key features of the final output are decided in narrow ``critical windows'' of the generation process. In this work we develop a simple, unifying theory to explain this phenomenon using the formalism of stochastic localization samplers. We show that it emerges generically as the generation process localizes to a sub-population of the distribution it models. While critical windows have been studied at length in diffusion models, existing theory heavily relies on strong distributional assumptions and the particulars of Gaussian diffusion. In contrast to existing work our theory (1) applies to autoregressive and diffusion models; (2) makes no distributional assumptions; (3) quantitatively improves previous bounds even when specialized to diffusions; and (4) requires basic tools and no stochastic calculus or statistical-physics-based machinery. We also identify an intriguing connection to the all-or-nothing phenomenon from statistical inference. Finally, we validate our predictions empirically for LLMs and find that critical windows often coincide with failures in problem solving for various math and reasoning benchmarks.
Training-Free Constrained Generation With Stable Diffusion Models
Authors: Stefano Zampini, Jacob Christopher, Luca Oneto, Davide Anguita, Ferdinando Fioretto
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00

Stable diffusion models represent the state-of-the-art in data synthesis across diverse domains and hold transformative potential for applications in science and engineering, e.g., by facilitating the discovery of novel solutions and simulating systems that are computationally intractable to model explicitly. While there is increasing effort to incorporate physics-based constraints into generative models, existing techniques are either limited in their applicability to latent diffusion frameworks or lack the capability to strictly enforce domain-specific constraints. To address this limitation this paper proposes a novel integration of stable diffusion models with constrained optimization frameworks, enabling the generation of outputs satisfying stringent physical and functional requirements. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through material design experiments requiring adherence to precise morphometric properties, challenging inverse design tasks involving the generation of materials inducing specific stress-strain responses, and copyright-constrained content generation tasks.
General Intelligence Requires Reward-based Pretraining
Authors: Seungwook Han, Jyothish Pari, Samuel J. Gershman, Pulkit Agrawal
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive real-world utility, exemplifying artificial useful intelligence (AUI). However, their ability to reason adaptively and robustly -- the hallmarks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- remains fragile. While LLMs seemingly succeed in commonsense reasoning, programming, and mathematics, they struggle to generalize algorithmic understanding across novel contexts. Our experiments with algorithmic tasks in esoteric programming languages reveal that LLM's reasoning overfits to the training data and is limited in its transferability. We hypothesize that the core issue underlying such limited transferability is the coupling of reasoning and knowledge in LLMs. To transition from AUI to AGI, we propose disentangling knowledge and reasoning through three key directions: (1) pretaining to reason using RL from scratch as an alternative to the widely used next-token prediction pretraining, (2) using a curriculum of synthetic tasks to ease the learning of a reasoning prior for RL that can then be transferred to natural language tasks, and (3) learning more generalizable reasoning functions using a small context window to reduce exploiting spurious correlations between tokens. Such a reasoning system coupled with a trained retrieval system and a large external memory bank as a knowledge store can overcome several limitations of existing architectures at learning to reason in novel scenarios.
CLARIFY: Contrastive Preference Reinforcement Learning for Untangling Ambiguous Queries
Authors: Ni Mu, Hao Hu, Xiao Hu, Yiqin Yang, Bo Xu, Qing-Shan Jia
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses explicit reward engineering by inferring reward functions from human preference comparisons, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, humans often struggle to label a clear preference between similar segments, reducing label efficiency and limiting PbRL's real-world applicability. To address this, we propose an offline PbRL method: Contrastive LeArning for ResolvIng Ambiguous Feedback (CLARIFY), which learns a trajectory embedding space that incorporates preference information, ensuring clearly distinguished segments are spaced apart, thus facilitating the selection of more unambiguous queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLARIFY outperforms baselines in both non-ideal teachers and real human feedback settings. Our approach not only selects more distinguished queries but also learns meaningful trajectory embeddings.
OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models
Authors: Etash Guha, Ryan Marten, Sedrick Keh, Negin Raoof, Georgios Smyrnis, Hritik Bansal, Marianna Nezhurina, Jean Mercat, Trung Vu, Zayne Sprague, Ashima Suvarna, Benjamin Feuer, Liangyu Chen, Zaid Khan, Eric Frankel, Sachin Grover, Caroline Choi, Niklas Muennighoff, Shiye Su, Wanjia Zhao, John Yang, Shreyas Pimpalgaonkar, Kartik Sharma, Charlie Cheng-Jie Ji, Yichuan Deng, Sarah Pratt, Vivek Ramanujan, Jon Saad-Falcon, Jeffrey Li, Achal Dave, Alon Albalak, Kushal Arora, Blake Wulfe, Chinmay Hegde, Greg Durrett, Sewoong Oh, Mohit Bansal, Saadia Gabriel, Aditya Grover, Kai-Wei Chang, Vaishaal Shankar, Aaron Gokaslan, Mike A. Merrill, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Yejin Choi, Jenia Jitsev, Reinhard Heckel, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Ludwig Schmidt
Date: 2025-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Reasoning models have made rapid progress on many benchmarks involving math, code, and science. Yet, there are still many open questions about the best training recipes for reasoning since state-of-the-art models often rely on proprietary datasets with little to no public information available. To address this, the goal of the OpenThoughts project is to create open-source datasets for training reasoning models. After initial explorations, our OpenThoughts2-1M dataset led to OpenThinker2-32B, the first model trained on public reasoning data to match DeepSeek-R1-Distill-32B on standard reasoning benchmarks such as AIME and LiveCodeBench. We then improve our dataset further by systematically investigating each step of our data generation pipeline with 1,000+ controlled experiments, which led to OpenThoughts3. Scaling the pipeline to 1.2M examples and using QwQ-32B as teacher yields our OpenThoughts3-7B model, which achieves state-of-the-art results: 53% on AIME 2025, 51% on LiveCodeBench 06/24-01/25, and 54% on GPQA Diamond - improvements of 15.3, 17.2, and 20.5 percentage points compared to the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B. All of our datasets and models are available on https://openthoughts.ai.
UniSim: A Unified Simulator for Time-Coarsened Dynamics of Biomolecules
Authors: Ziyang Yu, Wenbing Huang, Yang Liu
Date: 2025-05-20 00:00:00

Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations are essential for understanding the atomic-level behavior of molecular systems, giving insights into their transitions and interactions. However, classical MD techniques are limited by the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, while recent deep learning-based improvements have mostly focused on single-domain molecules, lacking transferability to unfamiliar molecular systems. Therefore, we propose \textbf{Uni}fied \textbf{Sim}ulator (UniSim), which leverages cross-domain knowledge to enhance the understanding of atomic interactions. First, we employ a multi-head pretraining approach to learn a unified atomic representation model from a large and diverse set of molecular data. Then, based on the stochastic interpolant framework, we learn the state transition patterns over long timesteps from MD trajectories, and introduce a force guidance module for rapidly adapting to different chemical environments. Our experiments demonstrate that UniSim achieves highly competitive performance across small molecules, peptides, and proteins.
Quantum-Inspired Genetic Optimization for Patient Scheduling in Radiation Oncology
Authors: Akira SaiToh, Arezoo Modiri, Amit Sawant, Robabeh Rahimi
Date: 2025-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Among the genetic algorithms generally used for optimization problems in the recent decades, quantum-inspired variants are known for fast and high-fitness convergence and small resource requirement. Here the application to the patient scheduling problem in proton therapy is reported. Quantum chromosomes are tailored to possess the superposed data of patient IDs and gantry statuses. Selection and repair strategies are also elaborated for reliable convergence to a clinically feasible schedule although the employed model is not complex. Clear advantage in population size is shown over the classical counterpart in our numerical results for both a medium-size test case and a large-size practical problem instance. It is, however, observed that program run time is rather long for the large-size practical case, which is due to the limitation of classical emulation and demands the forthcoming true quantum computation. Our results also revalidate the stability of the conventional classical genetic algorithm.
NEAT and HyperNEAT based Design for Soft Actuator Controllers
Authors: Hugo Alcaraz-Herrera, Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas, Igor Balaz, Andrew Adamatzky
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Since soft robotics are composed of compliant materials, they perform better than conventional rigid robotics in specific fields, such as medical applications. However, the field of soft robotics is fairly new, and the design process of their morphology and their controller strategies has not yet been thoroughly studied. Consequently, here, an automated design method for the controller of soft actuators based on Neuroevolution is proposed. Specifically, the suggested techniques employ Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) and Hypercube-based NEAT (HyperNEAT) to generate the synchronization profile of the components of a simulated soft actuator by employing Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs). As a baseline methodology, a Standard Genetic Algorithm (SGA) was used. Moreover, to test the robustness of the proposed methodologies, both high- and low-performing morphologies of soft actuators were utilized as testbeds. Moreover, the use of an affluent and a more limited set of activation functions for the Neuroevolution targets was tested throughout the experiments. The results support the hypothesis that Neuroevolution based methodologies are more appropriate for designing controllers that align with both types of morphologies. In specific, NEAT performed better for all different scenarios tested and produced more simplistic networks that are easier to implement in real life applications.
Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation with Implicit Motion-Audio Entanglement
Authors: Xinjie Li, Ziyi Chen, Xinlu Yu, Iek-Heng Chu, Peng Chang, Jing Xiao
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Motion Generation, Video Generation

    Co-speech gestures are essential to non-verbal communication, enhancing both the naturalness and effectiveness of human interaction. Although recent methods have made progress in generating co-speech gesture videos, many rely on strong visual controls, such as pose images or TPS keypoint movements, which often lead to artifacts like blurry hands and distorted fingers. In response to these challenges, we present the Implicit Motion-Audio Entanglement (IMAE) method for co-speech gesture video generation. IMAE strengthens audio control by entangling implicit motion parameters, including pose and expression, with audio inputs. Our method utilizes a two-branch framework that combines an audio-to-motion generation branch with a video diffusion branch, enabling realistic gesture generation without requiring additional inputs during inference. To improve training efficiency, we propose a two-stage slow-fast training strategy that balances memory constraints while facilitating the learning of meaningful gestures from long frame sequences.Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics.
Dynamic Content Prediction with Motion-aware Priors for Blind Face Video Restoration
Authors: Lianxin Xie, Bingbing Zheng, Si Wu, Hau San Wong
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration, Video Restoration

    Blind Face Video Restoration (BFVR) focuses on reconstructing high-quality facial image sequences from degraded video inputs. The main challenge is address unknown degradations, while maintaining temporal consistency across frames. Current blind face restoration methods are primarily designed for images, and directly applying these approaches to BFVR will encounter a significant drop in restoration performance. In this work, we proposed Dynamic Content Prediction with Motion-aware Priors, referred to as DCP-MP. We develop a motion-aware semantic dictionary by encoding the semantic information of high-quality videos into discrete elements, and capturing the motion information in terms of element relationships, which are derived from the dynamic temporal changes within videos. For the purpose of utilizing dictionary to represent the degraded video, we train a temporal-aware element predictor, conditioned on degraded content, to learn the prediction of discrete elements in dictionary. The predicted elements will be refined, conditioned on motion information captured by the motion-aware semantic dictionary, to enhance temporal coherence. To alleviate deviation from the original structure information, we propose a conditional structure feature correction module that corrects the features flowing from the encoder to the generator. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our design components and demonstrate the superior performance of DCP-MP in synthesizing high-quality video.
Watermarking One for All: A Robust Watermarking Scheme Against Partial Image Theft
Authors: Gaozhi Liu, Silu Cao, Zhenxing Qian, Xinpeng Zhang, Sheng Li, Wanli Peng
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: All

    The proliferation of digital images on the Internet has provided unprecedented convenience, but also poses significant risks of malicious theft and misuse. Digital watermarking has long been researched as an effective tool for copyright protection. However, it often falls short when addressing partial image theft, a common yet little-researched issue in practical applications. Most existing schemes typically require the entire image as input to extract watermarks. However, in practice, malicious users often steal only a portion of the image to create new content. The stolen portion can have arbitrary shape or content, being fused with a new background and may have undergone geometric transformations, making it challenging for current methods to extract correctly. To address the issues above, we propose WOFA (Watermarking One for All), a robust watermarking scheme against partial image theft. First of all, we define the entire process of partial image theft and construct a dataset accordingly. To gain robustness against partial image theft, we then design a comprehensive distortion layer that incorporates the process of partial image theft and several common distortions in channel. For easier network convergence, we employ a multi-level network structure on the basis of the commonly used embedder-distortion layer-extractor architecture and adopt a progressive training strategy. Abundant experiments demonstrate that our superior performance in the scenario of partial image theft, offering a more reliable solution for protecting digital images against unauthorized use in practical use.
VEU-Bench: Towards Comprehensive Understanding of Video Editing
Authors: Bozheng Li, Yongliang Wu, Yi Lu, Jiashuo Yu, Licheng Tang, Jiawang Cao, Wenqing Zhu, Yuyang Sun, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Video Editing, Video Understanding

    Widely shared videos on the internet are often edited. Recently, although Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) have made great progress in general video understanding tasks, their capabilities in video editing understanding (VEU) tasks remain unexplored. To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce VEU-Bench (Video Editing Understanding Benchmark), a comprehensive benchmark that categorizes video editing components across various dimensions, from intra-frame features like shot size to inter-shot attributes such as cut types and transitions. Unlike previous video editing understanding benchmarks that focus mainly on editing element classification, VEU-Bench encompasses 19 fine-grained tasks across three stages: recognition, reasoning, and judging. To enhance the annotation of VEU automatically, we built an annotation pipeline integrated with an ontology-based knowledge base. Through extensive experiments with 11 state-of-the-art Vid-LLMs, our findings reveal that current Vid-LLMs face significant challenges in VEU tasks, with some performing worse than random choice. To alleviate this issue, we develop Oscars(Named after the Academy Awards.), a VEU expert model fine-tuned on the curated VEU-Bench dataset. It outperforms existing open-source Vid-LLMs on VEU-Bench by over 28.3% in accuracy and achieves performance comparable to commercial models like GPT-4o. We also demonstrate that incorporating VEU data significantly enhances the performance of Vid-LLMs on general video understanding benchmarks, with an average improvement of 8.3% across nine reasoning tasks. The code and data will be made available.
STEREO: A Two-Stage Framework for Adversarially Robust Concept Erasing from Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Koushik Srivatsan, Fahad Shamshad, Muzammal Naseer, Vishal M. Patel, Karthik Nandakumar
Date: 2025-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

    The rapid proliferation of large-scale text-to-image diffusion (T2ID) models has raised serious concerns about their potential misuse in generating harmful content.  Although numerous methods have been proposed for erasing undesired concepts from T2ID models, they often provide a false sense of security; concept-erased models (CEMs) can still be manipulated via adversarial attacks to regenerate the erased concept. While a few robust concept erasure methods based on adversarial training have emerged recently, they compromise on utility (generation quality for benign concepts) to achieve robustness and/or remain vulnerable to advanced embedding space attacks. These limitations stem from the failure of robust CEMs to thoroughly search for blind spots in the embedding space. To bridge this gap, we propose STEREO, a novel two-stage framework that employs adversarial training as a first step rather than the only step for robust concept erasure. In the first stage, STEREO employs adversarial training as a vulnerability identification mechanism to search thoroughly enough. In the second robustly erase once stage, STEREO introduces an anchor-concept-based compositional objective to robustly erase the target concept in a single fine-tuning stage, while minimizing the degradation of model utility. We benchmark STEREO against seven state-of-the-art concept erasure methods, demonstrating its superior robustness to both white-box and black-box attacks, while largely preserving utility.