pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Novel Multi-Task Teacher-Student Architecture with Self-Supervised Pretraining for 48-Hour Vasoactive-Inotropic Trend Analysis in Sepsis Mortality Prediction
Authors: Houji Jin, Negin Ashrafi, Kamiar Alaei, Elham Pishgar, Greg Placencia, Maryam Pishgar
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: ICU Mortality, Mortality Prediction

Sepsis is a major cause of ICU mortality, where early recognition and effective interventions are essential for improving patient outcomes. However, the vasoactive-inotropic score (VIS) varies dynamically with a patient's hemodynamic status, complicated by irregular medication patterns, missing data, and confounders, making sepsis prediction challenging. To address this, we propose a novel Teacher-Student multitask framework with self-supervised VIS pretraining via a Masked Autoencoder (MAE). The teacher model performs mortality classification and severity-score regression, while the student distills robust time-series representations, enhancing adaptation to heterogeneous VIS data. Compared to LSTM-based methods, our approach achieves an AUROC of 0.82 on MIMIC-IV 3.0 (9,476 patients), outperforming the baseline (0.74). SHAP analysis revealed that SOFA score (0.147) had the greatest impact on ICU mortality, followed by LODS (0.033), single marital status (0.031), and Medicaid insurance (0.023), highlighting the role of sociodemographic factors. SAPSII (0.020) also contributed significantly. These findings suggest that both clinical and social factors should be considered in ICU decision-making. Our novel multitask and distillation strategies enable earlier identification of high-risk patients, improving prediction accuracy and disease management, offering new tools for ICU decision support.
In-context learning of evolving data streams with tabular foundational models
Authors: Afonso Lourenço, João Gama, Eric P. Xing, Goreti Marreiros
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Meta-Learning

State-of-the-art data stream mining in supervised classification has traditionally relied on ensembles of incremental decision trees. However, the emergence of large tabular models, i.e., transformers designed for structured numerical data, marks a significant paradigm shift. These models move beyond traditional weight updates, instead employing in-context learning through prompt tuning. By using on-the-fly sketches to summarize unbounded streaming data, one can feed this information into a pre-trained model for efficient processing. This work bridges advancements from both areas, highlighting how transformers' implicit meta-learning abilities, pre-training on drifting natural data, and reliance on context optimization directly address the core challenges of adaptive learning in dynamic environments. Exploring real-time model adaptation, this research demonstrates that TabPFN, coupled with a simple sliding memory strategy, consistently outperforms ensembles of Hoeffding trees across all non-stationary benchmarks. Several promising research directions are outlined in the paper. The authors urge the community to explore these ideas, offering valuable opportunities to advance in-context stream learning.
Fair Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis: Challenges and Perspectives
Authors: Dilermando Queiroz, Anderson Carlos, André Anjos, Lilian Berton
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Medical Image Analysis, Self-Supervised Learning

Ensuring equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare demands systems that make unbiased decisions across all demographic groups, bridging technical innovation with ethical principles. Foundation Models (FMs), trained on vast datasets through self-supervised learning, enable efficient adaptation across medical imaging tasks while reducing dependency on labeled data. These models demonstrate potential for enhancing fairness, though significant challenges remain in achieving consistent performance across demographic groups. Our review indicates that effective bias mitigation in FMs requires systematic interventions throughout all stages of development. While previous approaches focused primarily on model-level bias mitigation, our analysis reveals that fairness in FMs requires integrated interventions throughout the development pipeline, from data documentation to deployment protocols. This comprehensive framework advances current knowledge by demonstrating how systematic bias mitigation, combined with policy engagement, can effectively address both technical and institutional barriers to equitable AI in healthcare. The development of equitable FMs represents a critical step toward democratizing advanced healthcare technologies, particularly for underserved populations and regions with limited medical infrastructure and computational resources.
Characterizing Structured versus Unstructured Environments based on Pedestrians' and Vehicles' Motion Trajectories
Authors: Mahsa Golchoubian, Moojan Ghafurian, Nasser Lashgarian Azad, Kerstin Dautenhahn
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory behaviours of pedestrians and vehicles operating close to each other can be different in unstructured compared to structured environments. These differences in the motion behaviour are valuable to be considered in the trajectory prediction algorithm of an autonomous vehicle. However, the available datasets on pedestrians' and vehicles' trajectories that are commonly used as benchmarks for trajectory prediction have not been classified based on the nature of their environment. On the other hand, the definitions provided for unstructured and structured environments are rather qualitative and hard to be used for justifying the type of a given environment. In this paper, we have compared different existing datasets based on a couple of extracted trajectory features, such as mean speed and trajectory variability. Through K-means clustering and generalized linear models, we propose more quantitative measures for distinguishing the two different types of environments. Our results show that features such as trajectory variability, stop fraction and density of pedestrians are different among the two environmental types and can be used to classify the existing datasets.
Improving LLM General Preference Alignment via Optimistic Online Mirror Descent
Authors: Yuheng Zhang, Dian Yu, Tao Ge, Linfeng Song, Zhichen Zeng, Haitao Mi, Nan Jiang, Dong Yu
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Many existing alignment approaches rely on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which assumes the existence of a ground-truth reward for each prompt-response pair. However, this assumption can be overly restrictive when modeling complex human preferences. In this paper, we drop the BT model assumption and study LLM alignment under general preferences, formulated as a two-player game. Drawing on theoretical insights from learning in games, we integrate optimistic online mirror descent into our alignment framework to approximate the Nash policy. Theoretically, we demonstrate that our approach achieves an $O(T^{-1})$ bound on the duality gap, improving upon the previous $O(T^{-1/2})$ result. More importantly, we implement our method and show through experiments that it outperforms state-of-the-art RLHF algorithms across multiple representative benchmarks.
Sarang at DEFACTIFY 4.0: Detecting AI-Generated Text Using Noised Data and an Ensemble of DeBERTa Models
Authors: Avinash Trivedi, Sangeetha Sivanesan
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Hate Speech Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Detection

This paper presents an effective approach to detect AI-generated text, developed for the Defactify 4.0 shared task at the fourth workshop on multimodal fact checking and hate speech detection. The task consists of two subtasks: Task-A, classifying whether a text is AI generated or human written, and Task-B, classifying the specific large language model that generated the text. Our team (Sarang) achieved the 1st place in both tasks with F1 scores of 1.0 and 0.9531, respectively. The methodology involves adding noise to the dataset to improve model robustness and generalization. We used an ensemble of DeBERTa models to effectively capture complex patterns in the text. The result indicates the effectiveness of our noise-driven and ensemble-based approach, setting a new standard in AI-generated text detection and providing guidance for future developments.
Toward Agentic AI: Generative Information Retrieval Inspired Intelligent Communications and Networking
Authors: Ruichen Zhang, Shunpu Tang, Yinqiu Liu, Dusit Niyato, Zehui Xiong, Sumei Sun, Shiwen Mao, Zhu Han
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval

The increasing complexity and scale of modern telecommunications networks demand intelligent automation to enhance efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Agentic AI has emerged as a key paradigm for intelligent communications and networking, enabling AI-driven agents to perceive, reason, decide, and act within dynamic networking environments. However, effective decision-making in telecom applications, such as network planning, management, and resource allocation, requires integrating retrieval mechanisms that support multi-hop reasoning, historical cross-referencing, and compliance with evolving 3GPP standards. This article presents a forward-looking perspective on generative information retrieval-inspired intelligent communications and networking, emphasizing the role of knowledge acquisition, processing, and retrieval in agentic AI for telecom systems. We first provide a comprehensive review of generative information retrieval strategies, including traditional retrieval, hybrid retrieval, semantic retrieval, knowledge-based retrieval, and agentic contextual retrieval. We then analyze their advantages, limitations, and suitability for various networking scenarios. Next, we present a survey about their applications in communications and networking. Additionally, we introduce an agentic contextual retrieval framework to enhance telecom-specific planning by integrating multi-source retrieval, structured reasoning, and self-reflective validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves answer accuracy, explanation consistency, and retrieval efficiency compared to traditional and semantic retrieval methods. Finally, we outline future research directions.
Graphy'our Data: Towards End-to-End Modeling, Exploring and Generating Report from Raw Data
Authors: Longbin Lai, Changwei Luo, Yunkai Lou, Mingchen Ju, Zhengyi Yang
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and autonomous AI agent workflows. Yet, when faced with large sets of unstructured documents requiring progressive exploration, analysis, and synthesis, such as conducting literature survey, existing approaches often fall short. We address this challenge -- termed Progressive Document Investigation -- by introducing Graphy, an end-to-end platform that automates data modeling, exploration and high-quality report generation in a user-friendly manner. Graphy comprises an offline Scrapper that transforms raw documents into a structured graph of Fact and Dimension nodes, and an online Surveyor that enables iterative exploration and LLM-driven report generation. We showcase a pre-scrapped graph of over 50,000 papers -- complete with their references -- demonstrating how Graphy facilitates the literature-survey scenario. The demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/uM4nzkAdGlM.
Utilizing Social Media Analytics to Detect Trends in Saudi Arabias Evolving Market
Authors: Kanwal Aalijah
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

Saudi Arabia faced a swift economic growth and societal transformation under Vision 2030. This offers a unique opportunity to track emerging trends in the region, which will ultimately pave the way for new business and investment possibilities. This paper explores how AI and social media analytics can identify and track trends across sectors such as construction, food and beverage, tourism, technology, and entertainment thereby helping the businesses make informed decisions. By leveraging a tailored AI-driven methodology, we analyzed millions of social media posts each month, classifying discussions and calculating scores to track the trends. The approach not only uncovered the emerging trends but also shows diminishing trends. Our methodology is able to predict the emergence and growth of trends by utilizing social media data. This approach has potential for adaptation in other regions. Ultimately, our findings highlight how ongoing, AI-powered trend analysis can enable more effective, data-informed business and development strategies in an increasingly dynamic environment.
CORAL: Learning Consistent Representations across Multi-step Training with Lighter Speculative Drafter
Authors: Yepeng Weng, Dianwen Mei, Huishi Qiu, Xujie Chen, Li Liu, Jiang Tian, Zhongchao shi
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by leveraging a lightweight speculative draft model. However, existing designs suffers in performance due to misalignment between training and inference. Recent methods have tried to solve this issue by adopting a multi-step training strategy, but the complex inputs of different training steps make it harder for the draft model to converge. To address this, we propose CORAL, a novel framework that improves both accuracy and efficiency in speculative drafting. CORAL introduces Cross-Step Representation Alignment, a method that enhances consistency across multiple training steps, significantly improving speculative drafting performance. Additionally, we identify the LM head as a major bottleneck in the inference speed of the draft model. We introduce a weight-grouping mechanism that selectively activates a subset of LM head parameters during inference, substantially reducing the latency of the draft model. We evaluate CORAL on three LLM families and three benchmark datasets, achieving speedup ratios of 2.50x-4.07x, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as EAGLE-2 and HASS. Our results demonstrate that CORAL effectively mitigates training-inference misalignment and delivers significant speedup for modern LLMs with large vocabularies.
DBudgetKV: Dynamic Budget in KV Cache Compression for Ensuring Optimal Performance
Authors: Xuanfan Ni, Liyan Xu, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Mo Yu, Lemao Liu, Fandong Meng, Jie zhou, Piji Li
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

To alleviate memory burden during inference of large language models (LLMs), numerous studies have focused on compressing the KV cache by exploring aspects such as attention sparsity. However, these techniques often require a pre-defined cache budget; as the optimal budget varies with different input lengths and task types, it limits their practical deployment accepting open-domain instructions. To address this limitation, we propose a new KV cache compression objective: to always ensure the full-cache performance regardless of specific inputs, while maximizing KV cache pruning as much as possible. To achieve this goal, we introduce a novel KV cache compression method dubbed DBudgetKV, which features an attention-based metric to signal when the remaining KV cache is unlikely to match the full-cache performance, then halting the pruning process. Empirical evaluation spanning diverse context lengths, task types, and model sizes suggests that our method achieves lossless KV pruning effectively and robustly, exceeding 25% compression ratio on average. Furthermore, our method is easy to integrate within LLM inference, not only optimizing memory space, but also showing reduced inference time compared to existing methods.
ReFocus: Reinforcing Mid-Frequency and Key-Frequency Modeling for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Guoqi Yu, Yaoming Li, Juncheng Wang, XIAOYU GUO, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Tong Yang, Shujun Wang
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Recent advancements have progressively incorporated frequency-based techniques into deep learning models, leading to notable improvements in accuracy and efficiency for time series analysis tasks. However, the Mid-Frequency Spectrum Gap in the real-world time series, where the energy is concentrated at the low-frequency region while the middle-frequency band is negligible, hinders the ability of existing deep learning models to extract the crucial frequency information. Additionally, the shared Key-Frequency in multivariate time series, where different time series share indistinguishable frequency patterns, is rarely exploited by existing literature. This work introduces a novel module, Adaptive Mid-Frequency Energy Optimizer, based on convolution and residual learning, to emphasize the significance of mid-frequency bands. We also propose an Energy-based Key-Frequency Picking Block to capture shared Key-Frequency, which achieves superior inter-series modeling performance with fewer parameters. A novel Key-Frequency Enhanced Training strategy is employed to further enhance Key-Frequency modeling, where spectral information from other channels is randomly introduced into each channel. Our approach advanced multivariate time series forecasting on the challenging Traffic, ECL, and Solar benchmarks, reducing MSE by 4%, 6%, and 5% compared to the previous SOTA iTransformer. Code is available at this GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Levi-Ackman/ReFocus.
Zero-shot Load Forecasting for Integrated Energy Systems: A Large Language Model-based Framework with Multi-task Learning
Authors: Jiaheng Li, Donghe Li, Ye Yang, Huan Xi, Yu Xiao, Li Sun, Dou An, Qingyu Yang
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Load Forecasting, Multi-Task Learning

The growing penetration of renewable energy sources in power systems has increased the complexity and uncertainty of load forecasting, especially for integrated energy systems with multiple energy carriers. Traditional forecasting methods heavily rely on historical data and exhibit limited transferability across different scenarios, posing significant challenges for emerging applications in smart grids and energy internet. This paper proposes the TSLLM-Load Forecasting Mechanism, a novel zero-shot load forecasting framework based on large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. The framework consists of three key components: a data preprocessing module that handles multi-source energy load data, a time series prompt generation module that bridges the semantic gap between energy data and LLMs through multi-task learning and similarity alignment, and a prediction module that leverages pre-trained LLMs for accurate forecasting. The framework's effectiveness was validated on a real-world dataset comprising load profiles from 20 Australian solar-powered households, demonstrating superior performance in both conventional and zero-shot scenarios. In conventional testing, our method achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.4163 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.3760, outperforming existing approaches by at least 8\%. In zero-shot prediction experiments across 19 households, the framework maintained consistent accuracy with a total MSE of 11.2712 and MAE of 7.6709, showing at least 12\% improvement over current methods. The results validate the framework's potential for accurate and transferable load forecasting in integrated energy systems, particularly beneficial for renewable energy integration and smart grid applications.
Char-mander Use mBackdoor! A Study of Cross-lingual Backdoor Attacks in Multilingual LLMs
Authors: Himanshu Beniwal, Sailesh Panda, Birudugadda Srivibhav, Mayank Singh
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer

We explore \textbf{C}ross-lingual \textbf{B}ackdoor \textbf{AT}tacks (X-BAT) in multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs), revealing how backdoors inserted in one language can automatically transfer to others through shared embedding spaces. Using toxicity classification as a case study, we demonstrate that attackers can compromise multilingual systems by poisoning data in a single language, with rare and high-occurring tokens serving as specific, effective triggers. Our findings expose a critical vulnerability that influences the model's architecture, resulting in a concealed backdoor effect during the information flow. Our code and data are publicly available https://github.com/himanshubeniwal/X-BAT.
Culture-TRIP: Culturally-Aware Text-to-Image Generation with Iterative Prompt Refinement
Authors: Suchae Jeong, Inseong Choi, Youngsik Yun, Jihie Kim
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-Image models, including Stable Diffusion, have significantly improved in generating images that are highly semantically aligned with the given prompts. However, existing models may fail to produce appropriate images for the cultural concepts or objects that are not well known or underrepresented in western cultures, such as `hangari' (Korean utensil). In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Culturally-Aware Text-to-Image Generation with Iterative Prompt Refinement (Culture-TRIP), which refines the prompt in order to improve the alignment of the image with such culture nouns in text-to-image models. Our approach (1) retrieves cultural contexts and visual details related to the culture nouns in the prompt and (2) iteratively refines and evaluates the prompt based on a set of cultural criteria and large language models. The refinement process utilizes the information retrieved from Wikipedia and the Web. Our user survey, conducted with 66 participants from eight different countries demonstrates that our proposed approach enhances the alignment between the images and the prompts. In particular, C-TRIP demonstrates improved alignment between the generated images and underrepresented culture nouns. Resource can be found at https://shane3606.github.io/Culture-TRIP.
MambaFlow: A Novel and Flow-guided State Space Model for Scene Flow Estimation
Authors: Jiehao Luo, Jintao Cheng, Xiaoyu Tang, Qingwen Zhang, Bohuan Xue, Rui Fan
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, Mamba, Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation aims to predict 3D motion from consecutive point cloud frames, which is of great interest in autonomous driving field. Existing methods face challenges such as insufficient spatio-temporal modeling and inherent loss of fine-grained feature during voxelization. However, the success of Mamba, a representative state space model (SSM) that enables global modeling with linear complexity, provides a promising solution. In this paper, we propose MambaFlow, a novel scene flow estimation network with a mamba-based decoder. It enables deep interaction and coupling of spatio-temporal features using a well-designed backbone. Innovatively, we steer the global attention modeling of voxel-based features with point offset information using an efficient Mamba-based decoder, learning voxel-to-point patterns that are used to devoxelize shared voxel representations into point-wise features. To further enhance the model's generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios, we propose a novel scene-adaptive loss function that automatically adapts to different motion patterns.Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark demonstrate that MambaFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time inference speed among existing works, enabling accurate flow estimation in real-world urban scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/MambaFlow.