pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring energy consumption of AI frameworks on a 64-core RV64 Server CPU
Authors: Giulio Malenza, Francesco Targa, Adriano Marques Garcia, Marco Aldinucci, Robert Birke
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

In today's era of rapid technological advancement, artificial intelligence (AI) applications require large-scale, high-performance, and data-intensive computations, leading to significant energy demands. Addressing this challenge necessitates a combined approach involving both hardware and software innovations. Hardware manufacturers are developing new, efficient, and specialized solutions, with the RISC-V architecture emerging as a prominent player due to its open, extensible, and energy-efficient instruction set architecture (ISA). Simultaneously, software developers are creating new algorithms and frameworks, yet their energy efficiency often remains unclear. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark analysis of machine learning (ML) applications on the 64-core SOPHON SG2042 RISC-V architecture. We specifically analyze the energy consumption of deep learning inference models across three leading AI frameworks: PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, and TensorFlow. Our findings show that frameworks using the XNNPACK back-end, such as ONNX Runtime and TensorFlow, consume less energy compared to PyTorch, which is compiled with the native OpenBLAS back-end.
Efficient Calibration for RRAM-based In-Memory Computing using DoRA
Authors: Weirong Dong, Kai Zhou, Zhen Kong, Quan Cheng, Junkai Huang, Zhengke Yang, Masanori Hashimoto, Longyang Lin
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00

Resistive In-Memory Computing (RIMC) offers ultra-efficient computation for edge AI but faces accuracy degradation due to RRAM conductance drift over time. Traditional retraining methods are limited by RRAM's high energy consumption, write latency, and endurance constraints. We propose a DoRA-based calibration framework that restores accuracy by compensating influential weights with minimal calibration parameters stored in SRAM, leaving RRAM weights untouched. This eliminates in-field RRAM writes, ensuring energy-efficient, fast, and reliable calibration. Experiments on RIMC-based ResNet50 (ImageNet-1K) demonstrate 69.53% accuracy restoration using just 10 calibration samples while updating only 2.34% of parameters.
A Survey of Circuit Foundation Model: Foundation AI Models for VLSI Circuit Design and EDA
Authors: Wenji Fang, Jing Wang, Yao Lu, Shang Liu, Yuchao Wu, Yuzhe ma, Zhiyao Xie
Date: 2025-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven electronic design automation (EDA) techniques have been extensively explored for VLSI circuit design applications. Most recently, foundation AI models for circuits have emerged as a new technology trend. Unlike traditional task-specific AI solutions, these new AI models are developed through two stages: 1) self-supervised pre-training on a large amount of unlabeled data to learn intrinsic circuit properties; and 2) efficient fine-tuning for specific downstream applications, such as early-stage design quality evaluation, circuit-related context generation, and functional verification. This new paradigm brings many advantages: model generalization, less reliance on labeled circuit data, efficient adaptation to new tasks, and unprecedented generative capability. In this paper, we propose referring to AI models developed with this new paradigm as circuit foundation models (CFMs). This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the latest progress in circuit foundation models, unprecedentedly covering over 130 relevant works. Over 90% of our introduced works were published in or after 2022, indicating that this emerging research trend has attracted wide attention in a short period. In this survey, we propose to categorize all existing circuit foundation models into two primary types: 1) encoder-based methods performing general circuit representation learning for predictive tasks; and 2) decoder-based methods leveraging large language models (LLMs) for generative tasks. For our introduced works, we cover their input modalities, model architecture, pre-training strategies, domain adaptation techniques, and downstream design applications. In addition, this paper discussed the unique properties of circuits from the data perspective. These circuit properties have motivated many works in this domain and differentiated them from general AI techniques.
Learning to erase quantum states: thermodynamic implications of quantum learning theory
Authors: Haimeng Zhao, Yuzhen Zhang, John Preskill
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

The energy cost of erasing quantum states depends on our knowledge of the states. We show that learning algorithms can acquire such knowledge to erase many copies of an unknown state at the optimal energy cost. This is proved by showing that learning can be made fully reversible and has no fundamental energy cost itself. With simple counting arguments, we relate the energy cost of erasing quantum states to their complexity, entanglement, and magic. We further show that the constructed erasure protocol is computationally efficient when learning is efficient. Conversely, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we prove that the optimal energy cost cannot be achieved efficiently in general. These results also enable efficient work extraction based on learning. Together, our results establish a concrete connection between quantum learning theory and thermodynamics, highlighting the physical significance of learning processes and enabling efficient learning-based protocols for thermodynamic tasks.
Nonlocal techniques for the analysis of deep ReLU neural network approximations
Authors: Cornelia Schneider, Mario Ullrich, Jan Vybiral
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00

Recently, Daubechies, DeVore, Foucart, Hanin, and Petrova introduced a system of piece-wise linear functions, which can be easily reproduced by artificial neural networks with the ReLU activation function and which form a Riesz basis of $L_2([0,1])$. This work was generalized by two of the authors to the multivariate setting. We show that this system serves as a Riesz basis also for Sobolev spaces $W^s([0,1]^d)$ and Barron classes ${\mathbb B}^s([0,1]^d)$ with smoothness $0<s<1$. We apply this fact to re-prove some recent results on the approximation of functions from these classes by deep neural networks. Our proof method avoids using local approximations and allows us to track also the implicit constants as well as to show that we can avoid the curse of dimension. Moreover, we also study how well one can approximate Sobolev and Barron functions by ANNs if only function values are known.
Provable Failure of Language Models in Learning Majority Boolean Logic via Gradient Descent
Authors: Bo Chen, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Jiahao Zhang
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning

Recent advancements in Transformer-based architectures have led to impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing tasks, with models such as GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini demonstrating human-level reasoning abilities. However, despite their high performance, concerns remain about the inherent limitations of these models, especially when it comes to learning basic logical functions. While complexity-theoretic analyses indicate that Transformers can represent simple logic functions (e.g., $\mathsf{AND}$, $\mathsf{OR}$, and majority gates) by its nature of belonging to the $\mathsf{TC}^0$ class, these results assume ideal parameter settings and do not account for the constraints imposed by gradient descent-based training methods. In this work, we investigate whether Transformers can truly learn simple majority functions when trained using gradient-based methods. We focus on a simplified variant of the Transformer architecture and consider both $n=\mathrm{poly}(d)$ and $n=\exp(\Omega(d))$ number of training samples, where each sample is a $d$-size binary string paired with the output of a basic majority function. Our analysis demonstrates that even after $\mathrm{poly}(d)$ gradient queries, the generalization error of the Transformer model still remains substantially large, growing exponentially with $d$. This work highlights fundamental optimization challenges in training Transformers for the simplest logical reasoning tasks and provides new insights into their theoretical limitations.
Ineffectiveness for Search and Undecidability of PCSP Meta-Problems
Authors: Alberto Larrauri
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00

It is an open question whether the search and decision versions of promise CSPs are equivalent. Most known algorithms for PCSPs solve only their \emph{decision} variant, and it is unknown whether they can be adapted to solve \emph{search} as well. The main approaches, called BLP, AIP and BLP+AIP, handle a PCSP by finding a solution to a relaxation of some integer program. We prove that rounding those solutions to a proper search certificate can be as hard as any problem in the class TFNP. In other words, these algorithms are ineffective for search. Building on the algebraic approach to PCSPs, we find sufficient conditions that imply ineffectiveness for search. Our tools are tailored to algorithms that are characterized by minions in a suitable way, and can also be used to prove undecidability results for meta-problems. This way, we show that the families of templates solvable via BLP, AIP, and BLP+AIP are undecidable. Using the same techniques we also analyze several algebraic conditions that are known to guarantee the tractability of finite-template CSPs. We prove that several meta-problems related to cyclic polymorphims and WNUs are undecidable for PCSPs. In particular, there is no algorithm deciding whether a finite PCSP template (1) admits cyclic a polymorphism, (2) admits a WNU.
Have Large Language Models Learned to Reason? A Characterization via 3-SAT Phase Transition
Authors: Rishi Hazra, Gabriele Venturato, Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires, Luc De Raedt
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been touted as AI models possessing advanced reasoning abilities. In theory, autoregressive LLMs with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can perform more serial computations to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, recent studies suggest that, despite this capacity, LLMs do not truly learn to reason but instead fit on statistical features. To study the reasoning capabilities in a principled fashion, we adopt a computational theory perspective and propose an experimental protocol centered on 3-SAT -- the prototypical NP-complete problem lying at the core of logical reasoning and constraint satisfaction tasks. Specifically, we examine the phase transitions in random 3-SAT and characterize the reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs by varying the inherent hardness of the problem instances. By comparing DeepSeek R1 with other LLMs, our findings reveal two key insights (1) LLM accuracy drops significantly on harder instances, suggesting all current models struggle when statistical shortcuts are unavailable (2) Unlike other LLMs, R1 shows signs of having learned the underlying reasoning. Following a principled experimental protocol, our study moves beyond the benchmark-driven evidence often found in LLM reasoning research. Our findings highlight important gaps and suggest clear directions for future research.
Dual Engines of Thoughts: A Depth-Breadth Integration Framework for Open-Ended Analysis
Authors: Fei-Hsuan Yu, Yun-Cheng Chou, Teng-Ruei Chen
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

We propose the Dual Engines of Thoughts (DEoT), an analytical framework for comprehensive open-ended reasoning. While traditional reasoning frameworks primarily focus on finding "the best answer" or "the correct answer" for single-answer problems, DEoT is specifically designed for "open-ended questions," enabling both broader and deeper analytical exploration. The framework centers on three key components: a Base Prompter for refining user queries, a Solver Agent that orchestrates task decomposition, execution, and validation, and a Dual-Engine System consisting of a Breadth Engine (to explore diverse impact factors) and a Depth Engine (to perform deep investigations). This integrated design allows DEoT to balance wide-ranging coverage with in-depth analysis, and it is highly customizable, enabling users to adjust analytical parameters and tool configurations based on specific requirements. Experimental results show that DEoT excels in addressing complex, multi-faceted questions, achieving a total win rate of 77-86% compared to existing reasoning models, thus highlighting its effectiveness in real-world applications.
Benchmarking Image Embeddings for E-Commerce: Evaluating Off-the Shelf Foundation Models, Fine-Tuning Strategies and Practical Trade-offs
Authors: Urszula Czerwinska, Cenk Bircanoglu, Jeremy Chamoux
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Transfer Learning

We benchmark foundation models image embeddings for classification and retrieval in e-Commerce, evaluating their suitability for real-world applications. Our study spans embeddings from pre-trained convolutional and transformer models trained via supervised, self-supervised, and text-image contrastive learning. We assess full fine-tuning and transfer learning (top-tuning) on six diverse e-Commerce datasets: fashion, consumer goods, cars, food, and retail. Results show full fine-tuning consistently performs well, while text-image and self-supervised embeddings can match its performance with less training. While supervised embeddings remain stable across architectures, SSL and contrastive embeddings vary significantly, often benefiting from top-tuning. Top-tuning emerges as an efficient alternative to full fine-tuning, reducing computational costs. We also explore cross-tuning, noting its impact depends on dataset characteristics. Our findings offer practical guidelines for embedding selection and fine-tuning strategies, balancing efficiency and performance.
MLPROP -- an open interactive web interface for thermophysical property prediction with machine learning
Authors: Marco Hoffmann, Thomas Specht, Nicolas Hayer, Hans Hasse, Fabian Jirasek
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Property Prediction

Machine learning (ML) enables the development of powerful methods for predicting thermophysical properties with unprecedented scope and accuracy. However, technical barriers like cumbersome implementation in established workflows hinder their application in practice. With MLPROP, we provide an interactive web interface for directly applying advanced ML methods to predict thermophysical properties without requiring ML expertise, thereby substantially increasing the accessibility of novel models. MLPROP currently includes models for predicting the vapor pressure of pure components (GRAPPA), activity coefficients and vapor-liquid equilibria in binary mixtures (UNIFAC 2.0, mod. UNIFAC 2.0, and HANNA), and a routine to fit NRTL parameters to the model predictions. MLPROP will be continuously updated and extended and is accessible free of charge via https://ml-prop.mv.rptu.de/. MLPROP removes the barrier to learning and experimenting with new ML-based methods for predicting thermophysical properties. The source code of all models is available as open source, which allows integration into existing workflows.
Physics-aware generative models for turbulent fluid flows through energy-consistent stochastic interpolants
Authors: Nikolaj T. Mücke, Benjamin Sanderse
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in domains such as text, image, and video synthesis. In this work, we explore the application of generative models to fluid dynamics, specifically for turbulence simulation, where classical numerical solvers are computationally expensive. We propose a novel stochastic generative model based on stochastic interpolants, which enables probabilistic forecasting while incorporating physical constraints such as energy stability and divergence-freeness. Unlike conventional stochastic generative models, which are often agnostic to underlying physical laws, our approach embeds energy consistency by making the parameters of the stochastic interpolant learnable coefficients. We evaluate our method on a benchmark turbulence problem - Kolmogorov flow - demonstrating superior accuracy and stability over state-of-the-art alternatives such as autoregressive conditional diffusion models (ACDMs) and PDE-Refiner. Furthermore, we achieve stable results for significantly longer roll-outs than standard stochastic interpolants. Our results highlight the potential of physics-aware generative models in accelerating and enhancing turbulence simulations while preserving fundamental conservation properties.
Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Option Hedging
Authors: Andrei Neagu, Frédéric Godin, Leila Kosseim
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Sequential Decision Making

Dynamic hedging is a financial strategy that consists in periodically transacting one or multiple financial assets to offset the risk associated with a correlated liability. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been used to find optimal solutions to dynamic hedging problems by framing them as sequential decision-making problems. However, most previous work assesses the performance of only one or two DRL algorithms, making an objective comparison across algorithms difficult. In this paper, we compare the performance of eight DRL algorithms in the context of dynamic hedging; Monte Carlo Policy Gradient (MCPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), along with four variants of Deep Q-Learning (DQL) and two variants of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Two of these variants represent a novel application to the task of dynamic hedging. In our experiments, we use the Black-Scholes delta hedge as a baseline and simulate the dataset using a GJR-GARCH(1,1) model. Results show that MCPG, followed by PPO, obtain the best performance in terms of the root semi-quadratic penalty. Moreover, MCPG is the only algorithm to outperform the Black-Scholes delta hedge baseline with the allotted computational budget, possibly due to the sparsity of rewards in our environment.
GraphPINE: Graph Importance Propagation for Interpretable Drug Response Prediction
Authors: Yoshitaka Inoue, Tianfan Fu, Augustin Luna
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Response Prediction, Graph Neural Network, Prediction

Explainability is necessary for many tasks in biomedical research. Recent explainability methods have focused on attention, gradient, and Shapley value. These do not handle data with strong associated prior knowledge and fail to constrain explainability results based on known relationships between predictive features. We propose GraphPINE, a graph neural network (GNN) architecture leveraging domain-specific prior knowledge to initialize node importance optimized during training for drug response prediction. Typically, a manual post-prediction step examines literature (i.e., prior knowledge) to understand returned predictive features. While node importance can be obtained for gradient and attention after prediction, node importance from these methods lacks complementary prior knowledge; GraphPINE seeks to overcome this limitation. GraphPINE differs from other GNN gating methods by utilizing an LSTM-like sequential format. We introduce an importance propagation layer that unifies 1) updates for feature matrix and node importance and 2) uses GNN-based graph propagation of feature values. This initialization and updating mechanism allows for informed feature learning and improved graph representation. We apply GraphPINE to cancer drug response prediction using drug screening and gene data collected for over 5,000 gene nodes included in a gene-gene graph with a drug-target interaction (DTI) graph for initial importance. The gene-gene graph and DTIs were obtained from curated sources and weighted by article count discussing relationships between drugs and genes. GraphPINE achieves a PR-AUC of 0.894 and ROC-AUC of 0.796 across 952 drugs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GraphPINE-40DE.
Scaling Graph Neural Networks for Particle Track Reconstruction
Authors: Alok Tripathy, Alina Lazar, Xiangyang Ju, Paolo Calafiura, Katherine Yelick, Aydin Buluc
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Classification, GPU

Particle track reconstruction is an important problem in high-energy physics (HEP), necessary to study properties of subatomic particles. Traditional track reconstruction algorithms scale poorly with the number of particles within the accelerator. The Exa.TrkX project, to alleviate this computational burden, introduces a pipeline that reduces particle track reconstruction to edge classification on a graph, and uses graph neural networks (GNNs) to produce particle tracks. However, this GNN-based approach is memory-prohibitive and skips graphs that would exceed GPU memory. We introduce improvements to the Exa.TrkX pipeline to train on samples of input particle graphs, and show that these improvements generalize to higher precision and recall. In addition, we adapt performance optimizations, introduced for GNN training, to fit our augmented Exa.TrkX pipeline. These optimizations provide a $2\times$ speedup over our baseline implementation in PyTorch Geometric.
SECQUE: A Benchmark for Evaluating Real-World Financial Analysis Capabilities
Authors: Noga Ben Yoash, Meni Brief, Oded Ovadia, Gil Shenderovitz, Moshik Mishaeli, Rachel Lemberg, Eitam Sheetrit
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Financial Analysis

We introduce SECQUE, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in financial analysis tasks. SECQUE comprises 565 expert-written questions covering SEC filings analysis across four key categories: comparison analysis, ratio calculation, risk assessment, and financial insight generation. To assess model performance, we develop SECQUE-Judge, an evaluation mechanism leveraging multiple LLM-based judges, which demonstrates strong alignment with human evaluations. Additionally, we provide an extensive analysis of various models' performance on our benchmark. By making SECQUE publicly available, we aim to facilitate further research and advancements in financial AI.
SolRPDS: A Dataset for Analyzing Rug Pulls in Solana Decentralized Finance
Authors: Abdulrahman Alhaidari, Bhavani Kalal, Balaji Palanisamy, Shamik Sural
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00

Rug pulls in Solana have caused significant damage to users interacting with Decentralized Finance (DeFi). A rug pull occurs when developers exploit users' trust and drain liquidity from token pools on Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), leaving users with worthless tokens. Although rug pulls in Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) have gained attention recently, analysis of rug pulls in Solana remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we introduce SolRPDS (Solana Rug Pull Dataset), the first public rug pull dataset derived from Solana's transactions. We examine approximately four years of DeFi data (2021-2024) that covers suspected and confirmed tokens exhibiting rug pull patterns. The dataset, derived from 3.69 billion transactions, consists of 62,895 suspicious liquidity pools. The data is annotated for inactivity states, which is a key indicator, and includes several detailed liquidity activities such as additions, removals, and last interaction as well as other attributes such as inactivity periods and withdrawn token amounts, to help identify suspicious behavior. Our preliminary analysis reveals clear distinctions between legitimate and fraudulent liquidity pools and we found that 22,195 tokens in the dataset exhibit rug pull patterns during the examined period. SolRPDS can support a wide range of future research on rug pulls including the development of data-driven and heuristic-based solutions for real-time rug pull detection and mitigation.