pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Question-Answering for Skill-based learning using Knowledge-based AI and Generative AI
Authors: Rahul K. Dass, Rochan H. Madhusudhana, Erin C. Deye, Shashank Verma, Timothy A. Bydlon, Grace Brazil, Ashok K. Goel
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Supporting learners' understanding of taught skills in online settings is a longstanding challenge. While exercises and chat-based agents can evaluate understanding in limited contexts, this challenge is magnified when learners seek explanations that delve into procedural knowledge (how things are done) and reasoning (why things happen). We hypothesize that an intelligent agent's ability to understand and explain learners' questions about skills can be significantly enhanced using the TMK (Task-Method-Knowledge) model, a Knowledge-based AI framework. We introduce Ivy, an intelligent agent that leverages an LLM and iterative refinement techniques to generate explanations that embody teleological, causal, and compositional principles. Our initial evaluation demonstrates that this approach goes beyond the typical shallow responses produced by an agent with access to unstructured text, thereby substantially improving the depth and relevance of feedback. This can potentially ensure learners develop a comprehensive understanding of skills crucial for effective problem-solving in online environments.
Bottleneck Identification in Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling via Constraint Relaxation
Authors: Lukáš Nedbálek, Antonín Novák
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Scheduling

In realistic production scenarios, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) tools often require manual intervention by production planners, as the system works with incomplete information, resulting in suboptimal schedules. Often, the preferable solution is not found just because of the too-restrictive constraints specifying the optimization problem, representing bottlenecks in the schedule. To provide computer-assisted support for decision-making, we aim to automatically identify bottlenecks in the given schedule while linking them to the particular constraints to be relaxed. In this work, we address the problem of reducing the tardiness of a particular project in an obtained schedule in the resource-constrained project scheduling problem by relaxing constraints related to identified bottlenecks. We develop two methods for this purpose. The first method adapts existing approaches from the job shop literature and utilizes them for so-called untargeted relaxations. The second method identifies potential improvements in relaxed versions of the problem and proposes targeted relaxations. Surprisingly, the untargeted relaxations result in improvements comparable to the targeted relaxations.
Boosting Universal LLM Reward Design through the Heuristic Reward Observation Space Evolution
Authors: Zen Kit Heng, Zimeng Zhao, Tianhao Wu, Yuanfei Wang, Mingdong Wu, Yangang Wang, Hao Dong
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as promising tools for automated reinforcement learning (RL) reward design, owing to their robust capabilities in commonsense reasoning and code generation. By engaging in dialogues with RL agents, LLMs construct a Reward Observation Space (ROS) by selecting relevant environment states and defining their internal operations. However, existing frameworks have not effectively leveraged historical exploration data or manual task descriptions to iteratively evolve this space. In this paper, we propose a novel heuristic framework that enhances LLM-driven reward design by evolving the ROS through a table-based exploration caching mechanism and a text-code reconciliation strategy. Our framework introduces a state execution table, which tracks the historical usage and success rates of environment states, overcoming the Markovian constraint typically found in LLM dialogues and facilitating more effective exploration. Furthermore, we reconcile user-provided task descriptions with expert-defined success criteria using structured prompts, ensuring alignment in reward design objectives. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark RL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework. Code and video demos are available at jingjjjjjie.github.io/LLM2Reward.
Generative Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things Computing: A Systematic Survey
Authors: Fabrizio Mangione, Claudio Savaglio, Giancarlo Fortino
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) within the Internet of Things (IoT) is garnering considerable interest. This growing attention stems from the continuous evolution and widespread adoption they are both having individually, enough to spontaneously reshape numerous sectors, including Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Smart Cities. Hence, their increasing popularity has catalyzed further extensive research for understanding the potential of the duo GenAI-IoT, how they interplay, and to which extent their synergy can innovate the state-of-the-art in their individual scenarios. However, despite the increasing prominence of GenAI for IoT Computing, much of the existing research remains focused on specific, narrowly scoped applications. This fragmented approach highlights the need for a more comprehensive analysis of the potential, challenges, and implications of GenAI integration within the broader IoT ecosystem. This survey exactly aims to address this gap by providing a holistic overview of the opportunities, issues, and considerations arising from the convergence of these mainstream paradigms. Our contribution is realized through a systematic literature review following the PRISMA methodology. A comparison framework is presented, and well-defined research questions are outlined to comprehensively explore the past, present, and future directions of GenAI integration with IoT Computing, offering valuable insights for both experts and newcomers.
Enhancing Large Language Models through Neuro-Symbolic Integration and Ontological Reasoning
Authors: Ruslan Idelfonso Magana Vsevolodovna, Marco Monti
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in natural language processing but suffer from inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies known as hallucinations. This compromises their reliability, especially in domains requiring factual accuracy. We propose a neuro-symbolic approach integrating symbolic ontological reasoning and machine learning methods to enhance the consistency and reliability of LLM outputs. Our workflow utilizes OWL ontologies, a symbolic reasoner (e.g., HermiT) for consistency checking, and a lightweight machine learning model (logistic regression) for mapping natural language statements into logical forms compatible with the ontology. When inconsistencies between LLM outputs and the ontology are detected, the system generates explanatory feedback to guide the LLM towards a corrected, logically coherent response in an iterative refinement loop. We present a working Python prototype demonstrating this pipeline. Experimental results in a defined domain suggest significant improvements in semantic coherence and factual accuracy of LLM outputs, showcasing the potential of combining LLM fluency with the rigor of formal semantics.
Genetic Programming with Reinforcement Learning Trained Transformer for Real-World Dynamic Scheduling Problems
Authors: Xian Chen, Rong Qu, Jing Dong, Ruibin Bai, Yaochu Jin
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Dynamic scheduling in real-world environments often struggles to adapt to unforeseen disruptions, making traditional static scheduling methods and human-designed heuristics inadequate. This paper introduces an innovative approach that combines Genetic Programming (GP) with a Transformer trained through Reinforcement Learning (GPRT), specifically designed to tackle the complexities of dynamic scheduling scenarios. GPRT leverages the Transformer to refine heuristics generated by GP while also seeding and guiding the evolution of GP. This dual functionality enhances the adaptability and effectiveness of the scheduling heuristics, enabling them to better respond to the dynamic nature of real-world tasks. The efficacy of this integrated approach is demonstrated through a practical application in container terminal truck scheduling, where the GPRT method outperforms traditional GP, standalone Transformer methods, and other state-of-the-art competitors. The key contribution of this research is the development of the GPRT method, which showcases a novel combination of GP and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to produce robust and efficient scheduling solutions. Importantly, GPRT is not limited to container port truck scheduling; it offers a versatile framework applicable to various dynamic scheduling challenges. Its practicality, coupled with its interpretability and ease of modification, makes it a valuable tool for diverse real-world scenarios.
Deceptive Automated Interpretability: Language Models Coordinating to Fool Oversight Systems
Authors: Simon Lermen, Mateusz Dziemian, Natalia Pérez-Campanero Antolín
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

We demonstrate how AI agents can coordinate to deceive oversight systems using automated interpretability of neural networks. Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as our experimental framework, we show that language models (Llama, DeepSeek R1, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet) can generate deceptive explanations that evade detection. Our agents employ steganographic methods to hide information in seemingly innocent explanations, successfully fooling oversight models while achieving explanation quality comparable to reference labels. We further find that models can scheme to develop deceptive strategies when they believe the detection of harmful features might lead to negative consequences for themselves. All tested LLM agents were capable of deceiving the overseer while achieving high interpretability scores comparable to those of reference labels. We conclude by proposing mitigation strategies, emphasizing the critical need for robust understanding and defenses against deception.
Independence Is Not an Issue in Neurosymbolic AI
Authors: Håkan Karlsson Faronius, Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

A popular approach to neurosymbolic AI is to take the output of the last layer of a neural network, e.g. a softmax activation, and pass it through a sparse computation graph encoding certain logical constraints one wishes to enforce. This induces a probability distribution over a set of random variables, which happen to be conditionally independent of each other in many commonly used neurosymbolic AI models. Such conditionally independent random variables have been deemed harmful as their presence has been observed to co-occur with a phenomenon dubbed deterministic bias, where systems learn to deterministically prefer one of the valid solutions from the solution space over the others. We provide evidence contesting this conclusion and show that the phenomenon of deterministic bias is an artifact of improperly applying neurosymbolic AI.
2D-Curri-DPO: Two-Dimensional Curriculum Learning for Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: Mengyang Li, Zhong Zhang
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization

Aligning large language models with human preferences is crucial for their safe deployment. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback, traditional DPO methods are limited by their reliance on single preference pairs. Recent work like Curriculum-DPO integrates multiple pairs using a one-dimensional difficulty curriculum based on pairwise distinguishability (PD), but overlooks the complexity of the input prompt itself. To address this, we propose 2D-Curri-DPO, a novel framework employing a two-dimensional curriculum that jointly models Prompt Complexity (PC) and Pairwise Distinguishability. This framework introduces dual difficulty metrics to quantify prompt semantic complexity and response preference clarity, defines a curriculum strategy space encompassing multiple selectable strategies for task adaptation, and incorporates a KL-divergence-based adaptive mechanism for dynamic reference model updates to enhance training stability. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that 2D-Curri-DPO significantly outperforms standard DPO and prior curriculum methods across multiple benchmarks, including MT-Bench, Vicuna Bench, and WizardLM. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging test sets like UltraFeedback. Ablation studies confirm the benefits of the 2D structure and adaptive mechanisms, while analysis provides guidance for strategy selection. These findings demonstrate that effective alignment requires modeling both prompt complexity and pairwise distinguishability, establishing adaptive, multi-dimensional curriculum learning as a powerful and interpretable new paradigm for preference-based language model optimization.
We Are All Creators: Generative AI, Collective Knowledge, and the Path Towards Human-AI Synergy
Authors: Jordi Linares-Pellicer, Juan Izquierdo-Domenech, Isabel Ferri-Molla, Carlos Aliaga-Torro
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Generative AI presents a profound challenge to traditional notions of human uniqueness, particularly in creativity. Fueled by neural network based foundation models, these systems demonstrate remarkable content generation capabilities, sparking intense debates about authorship, copyright, and intelligence itself. This paper argues that generative AI represents an alternative form of intelligence and creativity, operating through mathematical pattern synthesis rather than biological understanding or verbatim replication. The fundamental differences between artificial and biological neural networks reveal AI learning as primarily statistical pattern extraction from vast datasets crystallized forms of collective human knowledge scraped from the internet. This perspective complicates copyright theft narratives and highlights practical challenges in attributing AI outputs to individual sources. Rather than pursuing potentially futile legal restrictions, we advocate for human AI synergy. By embracing generative AI as a complementary tool alongside human intuition, context, and ethical judgment, society can unlock unprecedented innovation, democratize creative expression, and address complex challenges. This collaborative approach, grounded in realistic understanding of AIs capabilities and limitations, offers the most promising path forward. Additionally, recognizing these models as products of collective human knowledge raises ethical questions about accessibility ensuring equitable access to these tools could prevent widening societal divides and leverage their full potential for collective benefit.
PAYADOR: A Minimalist Approach to Grounding Language Models on Structured Data for Interactive Storytelling and Role-playing Games
Authors: Santiago Góngora, Luis Chiruzzo, Gonzalo Méndez, Pablo Gervás
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Every time an Interactive Storytelling (IS) system gets a player input, it is facing the world-update problem. Classical approaches to this problem consist in mapping that input to known preprogrammed actions, what can severely constrain the free will of the player. When the expected experience has a strong focus on improvisation, like in Role-playing Games (RPGs), this problem is critical. In this paper we present PAYADOR, a different approach that focuses on predicting the outcomes of the actions instead of representing the actions themselves. To implement this approach, we ground a Large Language Model to a minimal representation of the fictional world, obtaining promising results. We make this contribution open-source, so it can be adapted and used for other related research on unleashing the co-creativity power of RPGs.
A Balanced Approach of Rapid Genetic Exploration and Surrogate Exploitation for Hyperparameter Optimization
Authors: Chul Kim, Inwhee Joe
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Hyperparameter Optimization

This paper proposes a new method for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) that balances exploration and exploitation. While evolutionary algorithms (EAs) show promise in HPO, they often struggle with effective exploitation. To address this, we integrate a linear surrogate model into a genetic algorithm (GA), allowing for smooth integration of multiple strategies. This combination improves exploitation performance, achieving an average improvement of 1.89 percent (max 6.55 percent, min -3.45 percent) over existing HPO methods.
TALE: A Tool-Augmented Framework for Reference-Free Evaluation of Large Language Models
Authors: Sher Badshah, Ali Emami, Hassan Sajjad
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world, autonomous applications, relying on static, pre-annotated references for evaluation poses significant challenges in cost, scalability, and completeness. We propose Tool-Augmented LLM Evaluation (TALE), a framework to assess LLM outputs without predetermined ground-truth answers. Unlike conventional metrics that compare to fixed references or depend solely on LLM-as-a-judge knowledge, TALE employs an agent with tool-access capabilities that actively retrieves and synthesizes external evidence. It iteratively generates web queries, collects information, summarizes findings, and refines subsequent searches through reflection. By shifting away from static references, TALE aligns with free-form question-answering tasks common in real-world scenarios. Experimental results on multiple free-form QA benchmarks show that TALE not only outperforms standard reference-based metrics for measuring response accuracy but also achieves substantial to near-perfect agreement with human evaluations. TALE enhances the reliability of LLM evaluations in real-world, dynamic scenarios without relying on static references.
On the Temporal Question-Answering Capabilities of Large Language Models Over Anonymized Data
Authors: Alfredo Garrachón Ruiz, Tomás de la Rosa, Daniel Borrajo
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

The applicability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in temporal reasoning tasks over data that is not present during training is still a field that remains to be explored. In this paper we work on this topic, focusing on structured and semi-structured anonymized data. We not only develop a direct LLM pipeline, but also compare various methodologies and conduct an in-depth analysis. We identified and examined seventeen common temporal reasoning tasks in natural language, focusing on their algorithmic components. To assess LLM performance, we created the \textit{Reasoning and Answering Temporal Ability} dataset (RATA), featuring semi-structured anonymized data to ensure reliance on reasoning rather than on prior knowledge. We compared several methodologies, involving SoTA techniques such as Tree-of-Thought, self-reflexion and code execution, tuned specifically for this scenario. Our results suggest that achieving scalable and reliable solutions requires more than just standalone LLMs, highlighting the need for integrated approaches.
NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmark
Authors: Vladislav Mikhailov, Tita Enstad, David Samuel, Hans Christian Farsethås, Andrey Kutuzov, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

This paper introduces NorEval, a new and comprehensive evaluation suite for large-scale standardized benchmarking of Norwegian generative language models (LMs). NorEval consists of 24 high-quality human-created datasets -- of which five are created from scratch. In contrast to existing benchmarks for Norwegian, NorEval covers a broad spectrum of task categories targeting Norwegian language understanding and generation, establishes human baselines, and focuses on both of the official written standards of the Norwegian language: Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk. All our datasets and a collection of over 100 human-written prompts are integrated into LM Evaluation Harness, ensuring flexible and reproducible evaluation. We describe the NorEval design and present the results of benchmarking 19 open-source pre-trained and instruction-tuned LMs for Norwegian in various scenarios. Our benchmark, evaluation framework, and annotation materials are publicly available.
The KL3M Data Project: Copyright-Clean Training Resources for Large Language Models
Authors: Michael J Bommarito II, Jillian Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

Practically all large language models have been pre-trained on data that is subject to global uncertainty related to copyright infringement and breach of contract. This creates potential risk for users and developers due to this uncertain legal status. The KL3M Data Project directly confronts this critical issue by introducing the largest comprehensive training data pipeline that minimizes risks related to copyright or breach of contract. The foundation of this project is a corpus of over 132 million documents and trillions of tokens spanning 16 different sources that have been verified to meet the strict copyright and licensing protocol detailed herein. We are releasing the entire pipeline, including 1) the source code to acquire and process these documents, 2) the original document formats with associated provenance and metadata, 3) extracted content in a standardized format, 4) pre-tokenized representations of the documents, and 5) various mid- and post-train resources such as question-answer, summarization, conversion, drafting, classification, prediction, and conversational data. All of these resources are freely available to the public on S3, Hugging Face, and GitHub under CC-BY terms. We are committed to continuing this project in furtherance of a more ethical, legal, and sustainable approach to the development and use of AI models.
Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs
Authors: Yichun Yin, Wenyong Huang, Kaikai Song, Yehui Tang, Xueyu Wu, Wei Guo, Peng Guo, Yaoyuan Wang, Xiaojun Meng, Yasheng Wang, Dong Li, Can Chen, Dandan Tu, Yin Li, Fisher Yu, Ruiming Tang, Yunhe Wang, Baojun Wang, Bin Wang, Bo wang, Boxiao Liu, Changzheng Zhang, Duyu Tang, Fei Mi, Hui Jin, Jiansheng Wei, Jiarui Qin, Jinpeng Li, Jun Zhao, Liqun Deng, Lin Li, Minghui Xu, Naifu Zhang, Nianzu Zheng, Qiang Li, Rongju Ruan, Shengjun Cheng, Tianyu Guo, wei he, Wei Li, Weiwen Liu, Wulong Liu, Xinyi Dai, Yonghan Dong, Yu Pan, Yue Li, YuFei Wang, YuJun Li, Yunsheng Ni, Zhe Liu, Zhenhe Zhang, Zhicheng Liu
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.