pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generative Artificial Intelligence-Supported Pentesting: A Comparison between Claude Opus, GPT-4, and Copilot
Authors: Antonio López Martínez, Alejandro Cano, Antonio Ruiz-Martínez
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has brought a significant change to our society. GenAI can be applied across numerous fields, with particular relevance in cybersecurity. Among the various areas of application, its use in penetration testing (pentesting) or ethical hacking processes is of special interest. In this paper, we have analyzed the potential of leading generic-purpose GenAI tools-Claude Opus, GPT-4 from ChatGPT, and Copilot-in augmenting the penetration testing process as defined by the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES). Our analysis involved evaluating each tool across all PTES phases within a controlled virtualized environment. The findings reveal that, while these tools cannot fully automate the pentesting process, they provide substantial support by enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in specific tasks. Notably, all tools demonstrated utility; however, Claude Opus consistently outperformed the others in our experimental scenarios.
Compact Bayesian Neural Networks via pruned MCMC sampling
Authors: Ratneel Deo, Scott Sisson, Jody M. Webster, Rohitash Chandra
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning, Uncertainty Quantification, Variational Inference

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer robust uncertainty quantification in model predictions, but training them presents a significant computational challenge. This is mainly due to the problem of sampling multimodal posterior distributions using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and variational inference algorithms. Moreover, the number of model parameters scales exponentially with additional hidden layers, neurons, and features in the dataset. Typically, a significant portion of these densely connected parameters are redundant and pruning a neural network not only improves portability but also has the potential for better generalisation capabilities. In this study, we address some of the challenges by leveraging MCMC sampling with network pruning to obtain compact probabilistic models having removed redundant parameters. We sample the posterior distribution of model parameters (weights and biases) and prune weights with low importance, resulting in a compact model. We ensure that the compact BNN retains its ability to estimate uncertainty via the posterior distribution while retaining the model training and generalisation performance accuracy by adapting post-pruning resampling. We evaluate the effectiveness of our MCMC pruning strategy on selected benchmark datasets for regression and classification problems through empirical result analysis. We also consider two coral reef drill-core lithology classification datasets to test the robustness of the pruning model in complex real-world datasets. We further investigate if refining compact BNN can retain any loss of performance. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of training and pruning BNNs using MCMC whilst retaining generalisation performance with over 75% reduction in network size. This paves the way for developing compact BNN models that provide uncertainty estimates for real-world applications.
Patent Novelty Assessment Accelerating Innovation and Patent Prosecution
Authors: Kapil Kashyap, Sean Fargose, Gandhar Dhonde, Aditya Mishra
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technological innovation, safeguarding intellectual property rights through patents is crucial for fostering progress and stimulating research and development investments. This report introduces a ground-breaking Patent Novelty Assessment and Claim Generation System, meticulously crafted to dissect the inventive aspects of intellectual property and simplify access to extensive patent claim data. Addressing a crucial gap in academic institutions, our system provides college students and researchers with an intuitive platform to navigate and grasp the intricacies of patent claims, particularly tailored for the nuances of Chinese patents. Unlike conventional analysis systems, our initiative harnesses a proprietary Chinese API to ensure unparalleled precision and relevance. The primary challenge lies in the complexity of accessing and comprehending diverse patent claims, inhibiting effective innovation upon existing ideas. Our solution aims to overcome these barriers by offering a bespoke approach that seamlessly retrieves comprehensive claim information, finely tuned to the specifics of the Chinese patent landscape. By equipping users with efficient access to comprehensive patent claim information, our transformative platform seeks to ignite informed exploration and innovation in the ever-evolving domain of intellectual property. Its envisioned impact transcends individual colleges, nurturing an environment conducive to research and development while deepening the understanding of patented concepts within the academic community.
The Einstein Test: Towards a Practical Test of a Machine's Ability to Exhibit Superintelligence
Authors: David Benrimoh, Nace Mikus, Ariel Rosenfeld
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00

Creative and disruptive insights (CDIs), such as the development of the theory of relativity, have punctuated human history, marking pivotal shifts in our intellectual trajectory. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked debates over whether state of the art models possess the capacity to generate CDIs. We argue that the ability to create CDIs should be regarded as a significant feature of machine superintelligence (SI).To this end, we propose a practical test to evaluate whether an approach to AI targeting SI can yield novel insights of this kind. We propose the Einstein test: given the data available prior to the emergence of a known CDI, can an AI independently reproduce that insight (or one that is formally equivalent)? By achieving such a milestone, a machine can be considered to at least match humanity's past top intellectual achievements, and therefore to have the potential to surpass them.
An Empirical Study of Deep Reinforcement Learning in Continuing Tasks
Authors: Yi Wan, Dmytro Korenkevych, Zheqing Zhu
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In reinforcement learning (RL), continuing tasks refer to tasks where the agent-environment interaction is ongoing and can not be broken down into episodes. These tasks are suitable when environment resets are unavailable, agent-controlled, or predefined but where all rewards-including those beyond resets-are critical. These scenarios frequently occur in real-world applications and can not be modeled by episodic tasks. While modern deep RL algorithms have been extensively studied and well understood in episodic tasks, their behavior in continuing tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we provide an empirical study of several well-known deep RL algorithms using a suite of continuing task testbeds based on Mujoco and Atari environments, highlighting several key insights concerning continuing tasks. Using these testbeds, we also investigate the effectiveness of a method for improving temporal-difference-based RL algorithms in continuing tasks by centering rewards, as introduced by Naik et al. (2024). While their work primarily focused on this method in conjunction with Q-learning, our results extend their findings by demonstrating that this method is effective across a broader range of algorithms, scales to larger tasks, and outperforms two other reward-centering approaches.
Why are we living the age of AI applications right now? The long innovation path from AI's birth to a child's bedtime magic
Authors: Tapio Pitkäranta
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00

Today a four-year-old child who does not know how to read or write can now create bedtime stories with graphical illustrations and narrated audio, using AI tools that seamlessly transform speech into text, generate visuals, and convert text back into speech in a natural and engaging manner. This remarkable example demonstrates why we are living in the age of AI applications. This paper examines contemporary leading AI applications and traces their historical development, highlighting the major advancements that have enabled their realization. Five key factors are identified: 1) The evolution of computational hardware (CPUs and GPUs), enabling the training of complex AI models 2) The vast digital archives provided by the World Wide Web, which serve as a foundational data resource for AI systems 3) The ubiquity of mobile computing, with smartphones acting as powerful, accessible small computers in the hands of billions 4) The rise of industrial-scale cloud infrastructures, offering elastic computational power for AI training and deployment 5) Breakthroughs in AI research, including neural networks, backpropagation, and the "Attention is All You Need" framework, which underpin modern AI capabilities. These innovations have elevated AI from solving narrow tasks to enabling applications like ChatGPT that are adaptable for numerous use cases, redefining human-computer interaction. By situating these developments within a historical context, the paper highlights the critical milestones that have made AI's current capabilities both possible and widely accessible, offering profound implications for society.
Risk-Averse Finetuning of Large Language Models
Authors: Sapana Chaudhary, Ujwal Dinesha, Dileep Kalathil, Srinivas Shakkottai
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00

We consider the challenge of mitigating the generation of negative or toxic content by the Large Language Models (LLMs) in response to certain prompts. We propose integrating risk-averse principles into LLM fine-tuning to minimize the occurrence of harmful outputs, particularly rare but significant events. By optimizing the risk measure of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), our methodology trains LLMs to exhibit superior performance in avoiding toxic outputs while maintaining effectiveness in generative tasks. Empirical evaluations on sentiment modification and toxicity mitigation tasks demonstrate the efficacy of risk-averse reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) in promoting a safer and more constructive online discourse environment.
MedGrad E-CLIP: Enhancing Trust and Transparency in AI-Driven Skin Lesion Diagnosis
Authors: Sadia Kamal, Tim Oates
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lesion Detection, Medical Image Analysis

As deep learning models gain attraction in medical data, ensuring transparent and trustworthy decision-making is essential. In skin cancer diagnosis, while advancements in lesion detection and classification have improved accuracy, the black-box nature of these methods poses challenges in understanding their decision processes, leading to trust issues among physicians. This study leverages the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model, trained on different skin lesion datasets, to capture meaningful relationships between visual features and diagnostic criteria terms. To further enhance transparency, we propose a method called MedGrad E-CLIP, which builds on gradient-based E-CLIP by incorporating a weighted entropy mechanism designed for complex medical imaging like skin lesions. This approach highlights critical image regions linked to specific diagnostic descriptions. The developed integrated pipeline not only classifies skin lesions by matching corresponding descriptions but also adds an essential layer of explainability developed especially for medical data. By visually explaining how different features in an image relates to diagnostic criteria, this approach demonstrates the potential of advanced vision-language models in medical image analysis, ultimately improving transparency, robustness, and trust in AI-driven diagnostic systems.
Defect Detection Network In PCB Circuit Devices Based on GAN Enhanced YOLOv11
Authors: Jiayi Huang, Feiyun Zhao, Lieyang Chen
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Defect Detection, Generative Adversarial Network

This study proposes an advanced method for surface defect detection in printed circuit boards (PCBs) using an improved YOLOv11 model enhanced with a generative adversarial network (GAN). The approach focuses on identifying six common defect types: missing hole, rat bite, open circuit, short circuit, burr, and virtual welding. By employing GAN to generate synthetic defect images, the dataset is augmented with diverse and realistic patterns, improving the model's ability to generalize, particularly for complex and infrequent defects like burrs. The enhanced YOLOv11 model is evaluated on a PCB defect dataset, demonstrating significant improvements in accuracy, recall, and robustness, especially when dealing with defects in complex environments or small targets. This research contributes to the broader field of electronic design automation (EDA), where efficient defect detection is a crucial step in ensuring high-quality PCB manufacturing. By integrating advanced deep learning techniques, this approach enhances the automation and precision of defect detection, reducing reliance on manual inspection and accelerating design-to-production workflows. The findings underscore the importance of incorporating GAN-based data augmentation and optimized detection architectures in EDA processes, providing valuable insights for improving reliability and efficiency in PCB defect detection within industrial applications.
A Foundational Generative Model for Breast Ultrasound Image Analysis
Authors: Haojun Yu, Youcheng Li, Nan Zhang, Zihan Niu, Xuantong Gong, Yanwen Luo, Haotian Ye, Siyu He, Quanlin Wu, Wangyan Qin, Mengyuan Zhou, Jie Han, Jia Tao, Ziwei Zhao, Di Dai, Di He, Dong Wang, Binghui Tang, Ling Huo, James Zou, Qingli Zhu, Yong Wang, LiWei Wang
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Prognosis

Foundational models have emerged as powerful tools for addressing various tasks in clinical settings. However, their potential development to breast ultrasound analysis remains untapped. In this paper, we present BUSGen, the first foundational generative model specifically designed for breast ultrasound image analysis. Pretrained on over 3.5 million breast ultrasound images, BUSGen has acquired extensive knowledge of breast structures, pathological features, and clinical variations. With few-shot adaptation, BUSGen can generate repositories of realistic and informative task-specific data, facilitating the development of models for a wide range of downstream tasks. Extensive experiments highlight BUSGen's exceptional adaptability, significantly exceeding real-data-trained foundational models in breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and prognosis. In breast cancer early diagnosis, our approach outperformed all board-certified radiologists (n=9), achieving an average sensitivity improvement of 16.5% (P-value<0.0001). Additionally, we characterized the scaling effect of using generated data which was as effective as the collected real-world data for training diagnostic models. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrated that our approach improved the generalization ability of downstream models. Importantly, BUSGen protected patient privacy by enabling fully de-identified data sharing, making progress forward in secure medical data utilization. An online demo of BUSGen is available at https://aibus.bio.
Transfer Learning of Tabular Data by Finetuning Large Language Models
Authors: Shourav B. Rabbani, Ibna Kowsar, Manar D. Samad
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

Despite the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, deep learning has yet to achieve much success with tabular data due to heterogeneous feature space and limited sample sizes without viable transfer learning. The new era of generative AI, powered by large language models (LLM), brings unprecedented learning opportunities to diverse data and domains. This paper investigates the effectiveness of an LLM application programming interface (API) and transfer learning of LLM in tabular data classification. LLM APIs respond to input text prompts with tokenized data and instructions, whereas transfer learning finetunes an LLM for a target classification task. This paper proposes an end-to-end finetuning of LLM to demonstrate cross-data transfer learning on ten benchmark data sets when large pre-trained tabular data models do not exist to facilitate transfer learning. The proposed LLM finetuning method outperforms state-of-the-art machine and deep learning methods on tabular data with less than ten features - a standard feature size for tabular data sets. The transfer learning approach uses a fraction of the computational cost of other deep learning or API-based solutions while ensuring competitive or superior classification performance.
LarvSeg: Exploring Image Classification Data For Large Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Category-wise Attentive Classifier
Authors: Haojun Yu, Di Dai, Ziwei Zhao, Di He, Han Hu, LiWei Wang
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Scaling up the vocabulary of semantic segmentation models is extremely challenging because annotating large-scale mask labels is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Recently, language-guided segmentation models have been proposed to address this challenge. However, their performance drops significantly when applied to out-of-distribution categories. In this paper, we propose a new large vocabulary semantic segmentation framework, called LarvSeg. Different from previous works, LarvSeg leverages image classification data to scale the vocabulary of semantic segmentation models as large-vocabulary classification datasets usually contain balanced categories and are much easier to obtain. However, for classification tasks, the category is image-level, while for segmentation we need to predict the label at pixel level. To address this issue, we first propose a general baseline framework to incorporate image-level supervision into the training process of a pixel-level segmentation model, making the trained network perform semantic segmentation on newly introduced categories in the classification data. We then observe that a model trained on segmentation data can group pixel features of categories beyond the training vocabulary. Inspired by this finding, we design a category-wise attentive classifier to apply supervision to the precise regions of corresponding categories to improve the model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LarvSeg significantly improves the large vocabulary semantic segmentation performance, especially in the categories without mask labels. For the first time, we provide a 21K-category semantic segmentation model with the help of ImageNet21K. The code is available at https://github.com/HaojunYu1998/large_voc_seg.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Mental Illnesses in Arabic Context
Authors: Noureldin Zahran, Aya E. Fouda, Radwa J. Hanafy, Mohammed E. Fouda
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Diagnostic, Few-Shot Learning, Instruction Following, Model Selection, Multi-class Classification, Prompt Engineering, severity prediction

Mental health disorders pose a growing public health concern in the Arab world, emphasizing the need for accessible diagnostic and intervention tools. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach, but their application in Arabic contexts faces challenges including limited labeled datasets, linguistic complexity, and translation biases. This study comprehensively evaluates 8 LLMs, including general multi-lingual models, as well as bi-lingual ones, on diverse mental health datasets (such as AraDepSu, Dreaddit, MedMCQA), investigating the impact of prompt design, language configuration (native Arabic vs. translated English, and vice versa), and few-shot prompting on diagnostic performance. We find that prompt engineering significantly influences LLM scores mainly due to reduced instruction following, with our structured prompt outperforming a less structured variant on multi-class datasets, with an average difference of 14.5\%. While language influence on performance was modest, model selection proved crucial: Phi-3.5 MoE excelled in balanced accuracy, particularly for binary classification, while Mistral NeMo showed superior performance in mean absolute error for severity prediction tasks. Few-shot prompting consistently improved performance, with particularly substantial gains observed for GPT-4o Mini on multi-class classification, boosting accuracy by an average factor of 1.58. These findings underscore the importance of prompt optimization, multilingual analysis, and few-shot learning for developing culturally sensitive and effective LLM-based mental health tools for Arabic-speaking populations.
What Is a Counterfactual Cause in Action Theories?
Authors: Daxin Liu, Vaishak Belle
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Since the proposal by Halpern and Pearl, reasoning about actual causality has gained increasing attention in artificial intelligence, ranging from domains such as model-checking and verification to reasoning about actions and knowledge. More recently, Batusov and Soutchanski proposed a notion of actual achievement cause in the situation calculus, amongst others, they can determine the cause of quantified effects in a given action history. While intuitively appealing, this notion of cause is not defined in a counterfactual perspective. In this paper, we propose a notion of cause based on counterfactual analysis. In the context of action history, we show that our notion of cause generalizes naturally to a notion of achievement cause. We analyze the relationship between our notion of the achievement cause and the achievement cause by Batusov and Soutchanski. Finally, we relate our account of cause to Halpern and Pearl's account of actual causality. Particularly, we note some nuances in applying a counterfactual viewpoint to disjunctive goals, a common thorn to definitions of actual causes.
SPAM: Spike-Aware Adam with Momentum Reset for Stable LLM Training
Authors: Tianjin Huang, Ziquan Zhu, Gaojie Jin, Lu Liu, Zhangyang Wang, Shiwei Liu
Date: 2025-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Forecasting

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse tasks, yet their training remains highly resource-intensive and susceptible to critical challenges such as training instability. A predominant source of this instability stems from gradient and loss spikes, which disrupt the learning process, often leading to costly interventions like checkpoint recovery and experiment restarts, further amplifying inefficiencies. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation into gradient spikes observed during LLM training, revealing their prevalence across multiple architectures and datasets. Our analysis shows that these spikes can be up to $1000\times$ larger than typical gradients, substantially deteriorating model performance. To address this issue, we propose Spike-Aware Adam with Momentum Reset SPAM, a novel optimizer designed to counteract gradient spikes through momentum reset and spike-aware gradient clipping. Extensive experiments, including both pre-training and fine-tuning, demonstrate that SPAM consistently surpasses Adam and its variants across various tasks, including (1) LLM pre-training from 60M to 1B, (2) 4-bit LLM pre-training,(3) reinforcement learning, and (4) Time Series Forecasting. Additionally, SPAM facilitates memory-efficient training by enabling sparse momentum, where only a subset of momentum terms are maintained and updated. When operating under memory constraints, SPAM outperforms state-of-the-art memory-efficient optimizers such as GaLore and Adam-Mini. Our work underscores the importance of mitigating gradient spikes in LLM training and introduces an effective optimization strategy that enhances both training stability and resource efficiency at scale. Code is available at https://github.com/TianjinYellow/SPAM-Optimizer.git