pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments
Authors: Florian Bordes, Quentin Garrido, Justine T Kao, Adina Williams, Michael Rabbat, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the original IntPhys benchmark, IntPhys 2 focuses on four core principles related to macroscopic objects: Permanence, Immutability, Spatio-Temporal Continuity, and Solidity. These conditions are inspired by research into intuitive physical understanding emerging during early childhood. IntPhys 2 offers a comprehensive suite of tests, based on the violation of expectation framework, that challenge models to differentiate between possible and impossible events within controlled and diverse virtual environments. Alongside the benchmark, we provide performance evaluations of several state-of-the-art models. Our findings indicate that while these models demonstrate basic visual understanding, they face significant challenges in grasping intuitive physics across the four principles in complex scenes, with most models performing at chance levels (50%), in stark contrast to human performance, which achieves near-perfect accuracy. This underscores the gap between current models and human-like intuitive physics understanding, highlighting the need for advancements in model architectures and training methodologies.
Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment
Authors: Tomas Peterka, Matyas Bohacek
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Misinformation

Out-of-context and misattributed imagery is the leading form of media manipulation in today's misinformation and disinformation landscape. The existing methods attempting to detect this practice often only consider whether the semantics of the imagery corresponds to the text narrative, missing manipulation so long as the depicted objects or scenes somewhat correspond to the narrative at hand. To tackle this, we introduce News Media Provenance Dataset, a dataset of news articles with provenance-tagged images. We formulate two tasks on this dataset, location of origin relevance (LOR) and date and time of origin relevance (DTOR), and present baseline results on six large language models (LLMs). We identify that, while the zero-shot performance on LOR is promising, the performance on DTOR hinders, leaving room for specialized architectures and future work.
Bridging Continuous-time LQR and Reinforcement Learning via Gradient Flow of the Bellman Error
Authors: Armin Gießler, Albertus Johannes Malan, Sören Hohmann
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the optimal feedback gain of the infinite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem via an ordinary differential equation. We introduce a novel continuous-time Bellman error, derived from the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which quantifies the suboptimality of stabilizing policies and is parametrized in terms of the feedback gain. We analyze its properties, including its effective domain, smoothness, coerciveness and show the existence of a unique stationary point within the stability region. Furthermore, we derive a closed-form gradient expression of the Bellman error that induces a gradient flow. This converges to the optimal feedback and generates a unique trajectory which exclusively comprises stabilizing feedback policies. Additionally, this work advances interesting connections between LQR theory and Reinforcement Learning (RL) by redefining suboptimality of the Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE) as a Bellman error, adapting a state-independent formulation, and leveraging Lyapunov equations to overcome the infinite-horizon challenge. We validate our method in a simulation and compare it to the state of the art.
From Judgment to Interference: Early Stopping LLM Harmful Outputs via Streaming Content Monitoring
Authors: Yang Li, Qiang Sheng, Yehan Yang, Xueyao Zhang, Juan Cao
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

Though safety alignment has been applied to most large language models (LLMs), LLM service providers generally deploy a subsequent moderation as the external safety guardrail in real-world products. Existing moderators mainly practice a conventional full detection, which determines the harmfulness based on the complete LLM output, causing high service latency. Recent works pay more attention to partial detection where moderators oversee the generation midway and early stop the output if harmfulness is detected, but they directly apply moderators trained with the full detection paradigm to incomplete outputs, introducing a training-inference gap that lowers the performance. In this paper, we explore how to form a data-and-model solution that natively supports partial detection. For the data, we construct FineHarm, a dataset consisting of 29K prompt-response pairs with fine-grained annotations to provide reasonable supervision for token-level training. Then, we propose the streaming content monitor, which is trained with dual supervision of response- and token-level labels and can follow the output stream of LLM to make a timely judgment of harmfulness. Experiments show that SCM gains 0.95+ in macro F1 score that is comparable to full detection, by only seeing the first 18% of tokens in responses on average. Moreover, the SCM can serve as a pseudo-harmfulness annotator for improving safety alignment and lead to a higher harmlessness score than DPO.
Multiverse: Your Language Models Secretly Decide How to Parallelize and Merge Generation
Authors: Xinyu Yang, Yuwei An, Hongyi Liu, Tianqi Chen, Beidi Chen
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Autoregressive Large Language Models (AR-LLMs) frequently exhibit implicit parallelism in sequential generation. Inspired by this, we introduce Multiverse, a new generative model that enables natively parallel generation. Multiverse internalizes a MapReduce paradigm, generating automatically through three stages: (i) a Map stage for adaptive task decomposition, (ii) a Process stage for parallel subtask execution, and (iii) a Reduce stage for lossless result synthesis. Next, we build a real-world Multiverse reasoning model with co-design of data, algorithm, and system, enabling rapid and seamless transfer from frontier AR-LLMs. Starting from sequential reasoning chains, we create Multiverse 1K by converting them into structured training data using an automated LLM-assisted pipeline, avoiding costly human annotations. Algorithmically, we design Multiverse Attention to separate parallel reasoning steps while keeping compatibility with causal attention for efficient training. Systematically, we implement Multiverse Engine to enable parallel inference. It features a dedicated scheduler that dynamically switches between sequential and parallel generation, triggered directly by the model. After a 3-hour fine-tuning with 1K examples, our Multiverse-32B stands as the only open-sourced non-AR model achieving performance on par with leading AR-LLMs of the same scale, evidenced by AIME24 & 25 scores of 54% and 46%, respectively. Moreover, our budget control experiments show that Multiverse-32B exhibits superior scaling, outperforming AR-LLMs by 1.87% on average using the same context length. Such scaling further leads to practical efficiency gain, achieving up to 2x speedup across varying batch sizes. We have open-sourced the entire Multiverse ecosystem, including data, model weights, engine, supporting tools, as well as complete data curation prompts and detailed training and evaluation recipes.
PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants
Authors: Zheng Zhao, Clara Vania, Subhradeep Kayal, Naila Khan, Shay B. Cohen, Emine Yilmaz
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced conversational AI assistants. However, systematically evaluating how well these assistants apply personalization--adapting to individual user preferences while completing tasks--remains challenging. Existing personalization benchmarks focus on chit-chat, non-conversational tasks, or narrow domains, failing to capture the complexities of personalized task-oriented assistance. To address this, we introduce PersonaLens, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating personalization in task-oriented AI assistants. Our benchmark features diverse user profiles equipped with rich preferences and interaction histories, along with two specialized LLM-based agents: a user agent that engages in realistic task-oriented dialogues with AI assistants, and a judge agent that employs the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm to assess personalization, response quality, and task success. Through extensive experiments with current LLM assistants across diverse tasks, we reveal significant variability in their personalization capabilities, providing crucial insights for advancing conversational AI systems.
How much is too much? Measuring divergence from Benford's Law with the Equivalent Contamination Proportion (ECP)
Authors: Manuel Cano-Rodriguez
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Conformity with Benford's Law is widely used to detect irregularities in numerical datasets, particularly in accounting, finance, and economics. However, the statistical tools commonly used for this purpose (such as Chi-squared, MAD, or KS) suffer from three key limitations: sensitivity to sample size, lack of interpretability of their scale, and the absence of a common metric that allows for comparison across different statistics. This paper introduces the Equivalent Contamination Proportion (ECP) to address these issues. Defined as the proportion of contamination in a hypothetical Benford-conforming sample such that the expected value of the divergence statistic matches the one observed in the actual data, the ECP provides a continuous and interpretable measure of deviation (ranging from 0 to 1), is robust to sample size, and offers consistent results across different divergence statistics under mild conditions. Closed-form and simulation-based methods are developed for estimating the ECP, and, through a retrospective analysis of three influential studies, it is shown how the ECP can complement the information provided by traditional divergence statistics and enhance the interpretation of results.
UmbraTTS: Adapting Text-to-Speech to Environmental Contexts with Flow Matching
Authors: Neta Glazer, Aviv Navon, Yael Segal, Aviv Shamsian, Hilit Segev, Asaf Buchnick, Menachem Pirchi, Gil Hetz, Joseph Keshet
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) have enabled highly natural speech synthesis, yet integrating speech with complex background environments remains challenging. We introduce UmbraTTS, a flow-matching based TTS model that jointly generates both speech and environmental audio, conditioned on text and acoustic context. Our model allows fine-grained control over background volume and produces diverse, coherent, and context-aware audio scenes. A key challenge is the lack of data with speech and background audio aligned in natural context. To overcome the lack of paired training data, we propose a self-supervised framework that extracts speech, background audio, and transcripts from unannotated recordings. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UmbraTTS significantly outperformed existing baselines, producing natural, high-quality, environmentally aware audios.
Large Language Models for Toxic Language Detection in Low-Resource Balkan Languages
Authors: Amel Muminovic, Amela Kadric Muminovic
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Online toxic language causes real harm, especially in regions with limited moderation tools. In this study, we evaluate how large language models handle toxic comments in Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, languages with limited labeled data. We built and manually labeled a dataset of 4,500 YouTube and TikTok comments drawn from videos across diverse categories, including music, politics, sports, modeling, influencer content, discussions of sexism, and general topics. Four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4.1, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Opus) were tested in two modes: zero-shot and context-augmented. We measured precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy and false positive rates. Including a short context snippet raised recall by about 0.12 on average and improved F1 score by up to 0.10, though it sometimes increased false positives. The best balance came from Gemini in context-augmented mode, reaching an F1 score of 0.82 and accuracy of 0.82, while zero-shot GPT-4.1 led on precision and had the lowest false alarms. We show how adding minimal context can improve toxic language detection in low-resource settings and suggest practical strategies such as improved prompt design and threshold calibration. These results show that prompt design alone can yield meaningful gains in toxicity detection for underserved Balkan language communities.
EditInspector: A Benchmark for Evaluation of Text-Guided Image Edits
Authors: Ron Yosef, Moran Yanuka, Yonatan Bitton, Dani Lischinski
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Artifact Detection, Caption Generation, Common Sense Reasoning, text-guided-image-editing

Text-guided image editing, fueled by recent advancements in generative AI, is becoming increasingly widespread. This trend highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to verify text-guided edits and assess their quality. To address this need, we introduce EditInspector, a novel benchmark for evaluation of text-guided image edits, based on human annotations collected using an extensive template for edit verification. We leverage EditInspector to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art (SoTA) vision and language models in assessing edits across various dimensions, including accuracy, artifact detection, visual quality, seamless integration with the image scene, adherence to common sense, and the ability to describe edit-induced changes. Our findings indicate that current models struggle to evaluate edits comprehensively and frequently hallucinate when describing the changes. To address these challenges, we propose two novel methods that outperform SoTA models in both artifact detection and difference caption generation.
When Detection Fails: The Power of Fine-Tuned Models to Generate Human-Like Social Media Text
Authors: Hillary Dawkins, Kathleen C. Fraser, Svetlana Kiritchenko
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Detecting AI-generated text is a difficult problem to begin with; detecting AI-generated text on social media is made even more difficult due to the short text length and informal, idiosyncratic language of the internet. It is nonetheless important to tackle this problem, as social media represents a significant attack vector in online influence campaigns, which may be bolstered through the use of mass-produced AI-generated posts supporting (or opposing) particular policies, decisions, or events. We approach this problem with the mindset and resources of a reasonably sophisticated threat actor, and create a dataset of 505,159 AI-generated social media posts from a combination of open-source, closed-source, and fine-tuned LLMs, covering 11 different controversial topics. We show that while the posts can be detected under typical research assumptions about knowledge of and access to the generating models, under the more realistic assumption that an attacker will not release their fine-tuned model to the public, detectability drops dramatically. This result is confirmed with a human study. Ablation experiments highlight the vulnerability of various detection algorithms to fine-tuned LLMs. This result has implications across all detection domains, since fine-tuning is a generally applicable and realistic LLM use case.
SAFE: Multitask Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Models
Authors: Qiao Gu, Yuanliang Ju, Shengxiang Sun, Igor Gilitschenski, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina, Florian Shkurti
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Vision-Language-Action

While vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown promising robotic behaviors across a diverse set of manipulation tasks, they achieve limited success rates when deployed on novel tasks out-of-the-box. To allow these policies to safely interact with their environments, we need a failure detector that gives a timely alert such that the robot can stop, backtrack, or ask for help. However, existing failure detectors are trained and tested only on one or a few specific tasks, while VLAs require the detector to generalize and detect failures also in unseen tasks and novel environments. In this paper, we introduce the multitask failure detection problem and propose SAFE, a failure detector for generalist robot policies such as VLAs. We analyze the VLA feature space and find that VLAs have sufficient high-level knowledge about task success and failure, which is generic across different tasks. Based on this insight, we design SAFE to learn from VLA internal features and predict a single scalar indicating the likelihood of task failure. SAFE is trained on both successful and failed rollouts, and is evaluated on unseen tasks. SAFE is compatible with different policy architectures. We test it on OpenVLA, $\pi_0$, and $\pi_0$-FAST in both simulated and real-world environments extensively. We compare SAFE with diverse baselines and show that SAFE achieves state-of-the-art failure detection performance and the best trade-off between accuracy and detection time using conformal prediction. More qualitative results can be found at https://vla-safe.github.io/.
Attention Head Embeddings with Trainable Deep Kernels for Hallucination Detection in LLMs
Authors: Rodion Oblovatny, Alexandra Bazarova, Alexey Zaytsev
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

We present a novel approach for detecting hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) by analyzing the probabilistic divergence between prompt and response hidden-state distributions. Counterintuitively, we find that hallucinated responses exhibit smaller deviations from their prompts compared to grounded responses, suggesting that hallucinations often arise from superficial rephrasing rather than substantive reasoning. Leveraging this insight, we propose a model-intrinsic detection method that uses distributional distances as principled hallucination scores, eliminating the need for external knowledge or auxiliary models. To enhance sensitivity, we employ deep learnable kernels that automatically adapt to capture nuanced geometric differences between distributions. Our approach outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks. The method remains competitive even without kernel training, offering a robust, scalable solution for hallucination detection.
Text-Aware Image Restoration with Diffusion Models
Authors: Jaewon Min, Jin Hyeon Kim, Paul Hyunbin Cho, Jaeeun Lee, JiHye Park, Minkyu Park, Sangpil Kim, Hyunhee Park, Seungryong Kim
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Hallucination, Image Restoration, Text Spotting

Image restoration aims to recover degraded images. However, existing diffusion-based restoration methods, despite great success in natural image restoration, often struggle to faithfully reconstruct textual regions in degraded images. Those methods frequently generate plausible but incorrect text-like patterns, a phenomenon we refer to as text-image hallucination. In this paper, we introduce Text-Aware Image Restoration (TAIR), a novel restoration task that requires the simultaneous recovery of visual contents and textual fidelity. To tackle this task, we present SA-Text, a large-scale benchmark of 100K high-quality scene images densely annotated with diverse and complex text instances. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task diffusion framework, called TeReDiff, that integrates internal features from diffusion models into a text-spotting module, enabling both components to benefit from joint training. This allows for the extraction of rich text representations, which are utilized as prompts in subsequent denoising steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art restoration methods, achieving significant gains in text recognition accuracy. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/TAIR/
A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs
Authors: Benno Krojer, Mojtaba Komeili, Candace Ross, Quentin Garrido, Koustuv Sinha, Nicolas Ballas, Mahmoud Assran
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

Existing benchmarks for assessing the spatio-temporal understanding and reasoning abilities of video language models are susceptible to score inflation due to the presence of shortcut solutions based on superficial visual or textual cues. This paper mitigates the challenges in accurately assessing model performance by introducing the Minimal Video Pairs (MVP) benchmark, a simple shortcut-aware video QA benchmark for assessing the physical understanding of video language models. The benchmark is comprised of 55K high-quality multiple-choice video QA examples focusing on physical world understanding. Examples are curated from nine video data sources, spanning first-person egocentric and exocentric videos, robotic interaction data, and cognitive science intuitive physics benchmarks. To mitigate shortcut solutions that rely on superficial visual or textual cues and biases, each sample in MVP has a minimal-change pair -- a visually similar video accompanied by an identical question but an opposing answer. To answer a question correctly, a model must provide correct answers for both examples in the minimal-change pair; as such, models that solely rely on visual or textual biases would achieve below random performance. Human performance on MVP is 92.9\%, while the best open-source state-of-the-art video-language model achieves 40.2\% compared to random performance at 25\%.
ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jiazhi Yang, Kashyap Chitta, Shenyuan Gao, Long Chen, Yuqian Shao, Xiaosong Jia, Hongyang Li, Andreas Geiger, Xiangyu Yue, Li Chen
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NavSim

How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow hazardous or non-expert behaviors, which are rare in such data. This limitation restricts their applicability to tasks such as policy evaluation. In this work, we address this challenge by enriching real-world human demonstrations with diverse non-expert data collected from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA), and building a controllable world model trained on this heterogeneous corpus. Starting with a video generator featuring a diffusion transformer architecture, we devise several strategies to effectively integrate conditioning signals and improve prediction controllability and fidelity. The resulting model, ReSim, enables Reliable Simulation of diverse open-world driving scenarios under various actions, including hazardous non-expert ones. To close the gap between high-fidelity simulation and applications that require reward signals to judge different actions, we introduce a Video2Reward module that estimates a reward from ReSim's simulated future. Our ReSim paradigm achieves up to 44% higher visual fidelity, improves controllability for both expert and non-expert actions by over 50%, and boosts planning and policy selection performance on NAVSIM by 2% and 25%, respectively.