pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Learning-Based Ansatz Satisfying Boundary Conditions in Variational Problems
Authors: Rafael Florencio, Julio Guerrero
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Recently, innovative adaptations of the Ritz Method incorporating deep learning have been developed, known as the Deep Ritz Method. This approach employs a neural network as the test function for variational problems. However, the neural network does not inherently satisfy the boundary conditions of the variational problem. To resolve this issue, the Deep Ritz Method introduces a penalty term into the functional of the variational problem, which can lead to misleading results during the optimization process. In this work, an ansatz is proposed that inherently satisfies the boundary conditions of the variational problem. The results demonstrate that the proposed ansatz not only eliminates misleading outcomes but also reduces complexity while maintaining accuracy, showcasing its practical effectiveness in addressing variational problems.
Grounded in Context: Retrieval-Based Method for Hallucination Detection
Authors: Assaf Gerner, Netta Madvil, Nadav Barak, Alex Zaikman, Jonatan Liberman, Liron Hamra, Rotem Brazilay, Shay Tsadok, Yaron Friedman, Neal Harow, Noam Bresler, Shir Chorev, Philip Tannor
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Natural Language Inference, RAG, Retrieval

Despite advancements in grounded content generation, production Large Language Models (LLMs) based applications still suffer from hallucinated answers. We present "Grounded in Context" - Deepchecks' hallucination detection framework, designed for production-scale long-context data and tailored to diverse use cases, including summarization, data extraction, and RAG. Inspired by RAG architecture, our method integrates retrieval and Natural Language Inference (NLI) models to predict factual consistency between premises and hypotheses using an encoder-based model with only a 512-token context window. Our framework identifies unsupported claims with an F1 score of 0.83 in RAGTruth's response-level classification task, matching methods that trained on the dataset, and outperforming all comparable frameworks using similar-sized models.
Embedding principle of homogeneous neural network for classification problem
Authors: Jiahan Zhang, Yaoyu Zhang, Tao Luo
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Understanding the convergence points and optimization landscape of neural networks is crucial, particularly for homogeneous networks where Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the associated maximum-margin problem often characterize solutions. This paper investigates the relationship between such KKT points across networks of different widths generated via neuron splitting. We introduce and formalize the \textbf{KKT point embedding principle}, establishing that KKT points of a homogeneous network's max-margin problem ($P_{\Phi}$) can be embedded into the KKT points of a larger network's problem ($P_{\tilde{\Phi}}$) via specific linear isometric transformations corresponding to neuron splitting. We rigorously prove this principle holds for neuron splitting in both two-layer and deep homogeneous networks. Furthermore, we connect this static embedding to the dynamics of gradient flow training with smooth losses. We demonstrate that trajectories initiated from appropriately mapped points remain mapped throughout training and that the resulting $\omega$-limit sets of directions are correspondingly mapped ($T(L(\theta(0))) = L(\boldsymbol{\eta}(0))$), thereby preserving the alignment with KKT directions dynamically when directional convergence occurs. Our findings offer insights into the effects of network width, parameter redundancy, and the structural connections between solutions found via optimization in homogeneous networks of varying sizes.
Training Latent Diffusion Models with Interacting Particle Algorithms
Authors: Tim Y. J. Wang, Juan Kuntz, O. Deniz Akyildiz
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

We introduce a novel particle-based algorithm for end-to-end training of latent diffusion models. We reformulate the training task as minimizing a free energy functional and obtain a gradient flow that does so. By approximating the latter with a system of interacting particles, we obtain the algorithm, which we underpin it theoretically by providing error guarantees. The novel algorithm compares favorably in experiments with previous particle-based methods and variational inference analogues.
It Takes a Graph to Know a Graph: Rewiring for Homophily with a Reference Graph
Authors: Harel Mendelman, Haggai Maron, Ronen Talmon
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at analyzing graph-structured data but struggle on heterophilic graphs, where connected nodes often belong to different classes. While this challenge is commonly addressed with specialized GNN architectures, graph rewiring remains an underexplored strategy in this context. We provide theoretical foundations linking edge homophily, GNN embedding smoothness, and node classification performance, motivating the need to enhance homophily. Building on this insight, we introduce a rewiring framework that increases graph homophily using a reference graph, with theoretical guarantees on the homophily of the rewired graph. To broaden applicability, we propose a label-driven diffusion approach for constructing a homophilic reference graph from node features and training labels. Through extensive simulations, we analyze how the homophily of both the original and reference graphs influences the rewired graph homophily and downstream GNN performance. We evaluate our method on 11 real-world heterophilic datasets and show that it outperforms existing rewiring techniques and specialized GNNs for heterophilic graphs, achieving improved node classification accuracy while remaining efficient and scalable to large graphs.
Engineering application of physics-informed neural networks for Saint-Venant torsion
Authors: Su Yeong Jo, SangHyeon Park, Seungchan Ko, Jongcheon Park, HoSung Kim, Sangseung Lee, Joongoo Jeon
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

The Saint-Venant torsion theory is a classical theory for analyzing the torsional behavior of structural components, and it remains critically important in modern computational design workflows. Conventional numerical methods, including the finite element method (FEM), typically rely on mesh-based approaches to obtain approximate solutions. However, these methods often require complex and computationally intensive techniques to overcome the limitations of approximation, leading to significant increases in computational cost. The objective of this study is to develop a series of novel numerical methods based on physics-informed neural networks (PINN) for solving the Saint-Venant torsion equations. Utilizing the expressive power and the automatic differentiation capability of neural networks, the PINN can solve partial differential equations (PDEs) along with boundary conditions without the need for intricate computational techniques. First, a PINN solver was developed to compute the torsional constant for bars with arbitrary cross-sectional geometries. This was followed by the development of a solver capable of handling cases with sharp geometric transitions; variable-scaling PINN (VS-PINN). Finally, a parametric PINN was constructed to address the limitations of conventional single-instance PINN. The results from all three solvers showed good agreement with reference solutions, demonstrating their accuracy and robustness. Each solver can be selectively utilized depending on the specific requirements of torsional behavior analysis.
Neural Thermodynamics I: Entropic Forces in Deep and Universal Representation Learning
Authors: Liu Ziyin, Yizhou Xu, Isaac Chuang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Representation Learning

With the rapid discovery of emergent phenomena in deep learning and large language models, explaining and understanding their cause has become an urgent need. Here, we propose a rigorous entropic-force theory for understanding the learning dynamics of neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Building on the theory of parameter symmetries and an entropic loss landscape, we show that representation learning is crucially governed by emergent entropic forces arising from stochasticity and discrete-time updates. These forces systematically break continuous parameter symmetries and preserve discrete ones, leading to a series of gradient balance phenomena that resemble the equipartition property of thermal systems. These phenomena, in turn, (a) explain the universal alignment of neural representations between AI models and lead to a proof of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, and (b) reconcile the seemingly contradictory observations of sharpness- and flatness-seeking behavior of deep learning optimization. Our theory and experiments demonstrate that a combination of entropic forces and symmetry breaking is key to understanding emergent phenomena in deep learning.
Efficient Optimization with Orthogonality Constraint: a Randomized Riemannian Submanifold Method
Authors: Andi Han, Pierre-Louis Poirion, Akiko Takeda
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Riemannian optimization, Stochastic Optimization

Optimization with orthogonality constraints frequently arises in various fields such as machine learning. Riemannian optimization offers a powerful framework for solving these problems by equipping the constraint set with a Riemannian manifold structure and performing optimization intrinsically on the manifold. This approach typically involves computing a search direction in the tangent space and updating variables via a retraction operation. However, as the size of the variables increases, the computational cost of the retraction can become prohibitively high, limiting the applicability of Riemannian optimization to large-scale problems. To address this challenge and enhance scalability, we propose a novel approach that restricts each update on a random submanifold, thereby significantly reducing the per-iteration complexity. We introduce two sampling strategies for selecting the random submanifolds and theoretically analyze the convergence of the proposed methods. We provide convergence results for general nonconvex functions and functions that satisfy Riemannian Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition as well as for stochastic optimization settings. Additionally, we demonstrate how our approach can be generalized to quotient manifolds derived from the orthogonal manifold. Extensive experiments verify the benefits of the proposed method, across a wide variety of problems.
Trustworthy Image Super-Resolution via Generative Pseudoinverse
Authors: Andreas Floros, Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli, Pier Luigi Dragotti
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

We consider the problem of trustworthy image restoration, taking the form of a constrained optimization over the prior density. To this end, we develop generative models for the task of image super-resolution that respect the degradation process and that can be made asymptotically consistent with the low-resolution measurements, outperforming existing methods by a large margin in that respect.
Early Prediction of In-Hospital ICU Mortality Using Innovative First-Day Data: A Review
Authors: Han Wang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: ICU Admission, ICU Mortality

The intensive care unit (ICU) manages critically ill patients, many of whom face a high risk of mortality. Early and accurate prediction of in-hospital mortality within the first 24 hours of ICU admission is crucial for timely clinical interventions, resource optimization, and improved patient outcomes. Traditional scoring systems, while useful, often have limitations in predictive accuracy and adaptability. Objective: This review aims to systematically evaluate and benchmark innovative methodologies that leverage data available within the first day of ICU admission for predicting in-hospital mortality. We focus on advancements in machine learning, novel biomarker applications, and the integration of diverse data types.
OSS-Bench: Benchmark Generator for Coding LLMs
Authors: Yuancheng Jiang, Roland Yap, Zhenkai Liang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

In light of the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants, LLM-assisted development has become increasingly prevalent, creating an urgent need for robust evaluation of generated code quality. Existing benchmarks often require extensive manual effort to create static datasets, rely on indirect or insufficiently challenging tasks, depend on non-scalable ground truth, or neglect critical low-level security evaluations, particularly memory-safety issues. In this work, we introduce OSS-Bench, a benchmark generator that automatically constructs large-scale, live evaluation tasks from real-world open-source software. OSS-Bench replaces functions with LLM-generated code and evaluates them using three natural metrics: compilability, functional correctness, and memory safety, leveraging robust signals like compilation failures, test-suite violations, and sanitizer alerts as ground truth. In our evaluation, the benchmark, instantiated as OSS-Bench(php) and OSS-Bench(sql), profiles 17 diverse LLMs, revealing insights such as intra-family behavioral patterns and inconsistencies between model size and performance. Our results demonstrate that OSS-Bench mitigates overfitting by leveraging the evolving complexity of OSS and highlights LLMs' limited understanding of low-level code security via extended fuzzing experiments. Overall, OSS-Bench offers a practical and scalable framework for benchmarking the real-world coding capabilities of LLMs.
Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs
Authors: Chaolong Ying, Yingqi Ruan, Xuemin Chen, Yaomin Wang, Tianshu Yu
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Similarity

The Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem is a crucial challenge with significant implications in domains such as biology and chemistry. Traditional approaches, which include transformations into max-clique and search-based algorithms, suffer from scalability issues when dealing with larger instances. This paper introduces ``Neural Graduated Assignment'' (NGA), a simple, scalable, unsupervised-training-based method that addresses these limitations by drawing inspiration from the classical Graduated Assignment (GA) technique. Central to NGA is stacking of neural components that closely resemble the GA process, but with the reparameterization of learnable temperature into higher dimension. We further theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of NGA, showing its design leads to fast convergence, better exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and ability to escape local optima. Extensive experiments across MCES computation, graph similarity estimation, and graph retrieval tasks reveal that NGA not only significantly improves computation time and scalability on large instances but also enhances performance compared to existing methodologies. The introduction of NGA marks a significant advancement in the computation of MCES and offers insights into other assignment problems.
GraphFLEx: Structure Learning Framework for Large Expanding Graphs
Authors: Mohit Kataria, Nikita Malik, Sandeep Kumar, Jayadeva
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Neural Network, Graph structure learning

Graph structure learning is a core problem in graph-based machine learning, essential for uncovering latent relationships and ensuring model interpretability. However, most existing approaches are ill-suited for large-scale and dynamically evolving graphs, as they often require complete re-learning of the structure upon the arrival of new nodes and incur substantial computational and memory costs. In this work, we propose GraphFLEx: a unified and scalable framework for Graph Structure Learning in Large and Expanding Graphs. GraphFLEx mitigates the scalability bottlenecks by restricting edge formation to structurally relevant subsets of nodes identified through a combination of clustering and coarsening techniques. This dramatically reduces the search space and enables efficient, incremental graph updates. The framework supports 48 flexible configurations by integrating diverse choices of learning paradigms, coarsening strategies, and clustering methods, making it adaptable to a wide range of graph settings and learning objectives. Extensive experiments across 26 diverse datasets and Graph Neural Network architectures demonstrate that GraphFLEx achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved scalability.
Efficient Federated Class-Incremental Learning of Pre-Trained Models via Task-agnostic Low-rank Residual Adaptation
Authors: Feng Yu, Jia Hu, Geyong Min
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Transfer Learning

Federated Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (FedPEFT) reduces communication and computation costs in federated fine-tuning of pre-trained models by updating only a small subset of model parameters. However, existing approaches assume static data distributions, failing to adequately address real-world scenarios where new classes continually emerge, particularly in Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL). FCIL faces two key challenges: catastrophic forgetting and performance degradation caused by non-IID data across clients. Unlike current methods that maintain separate task-specific components or suffer from aggregation noise during parameter aggregation, we propose Federated Task-agnostic Low-rank Residual Adaptation (Fed-TaLoRA), a novel parameter-efficient approach for fine-tuning in resource-constrained FCIL scenarios. Specifically, we fine-tune only shared task-agnostic LoRA parameters across sequential tasks, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while enabling efficient knowledge transfer among clients. Based on a theoretical analysis of aggregation, we develop a novel residual weight update mechanism that ensures accurate knowledge consolidation with minimal overhead. Our methodological innovations are attributed to three key strategies: task-agnostic adaptation, post-aggregation model calibration, and strategic placement of LoRA modules. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fed-TaLoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in diverse data heterogeneity scenarios while substantially reducing resource requirements.
SenseFlow: A Physics-Informed and Self-Ensembling Iterative Framework for Power Flow Estimation
Authors: Zhen Zhao, Wenqi Huang, Zicheng Wang, Jiaxuan Hou, Peng Li, Lei Bai
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Power flow estimation plays a vital role in ensuring the stability and reliability of electrical power systems, particularly in the context of growing network complexities and renewable energy integration. However, existing studies often fail to adequately address the unique characteristics of power systems, such as the sparsity of network connections and the critical importance of the unique Slack node, which poses significant challenges in achieving high-accuracy estimations. In this paper, we present SenseFlow, a novel physics-informed and self-ensembling iterative framework that integrates two main designs, the Physics-Informed Power Flow Network (FlowNet) and Self-Ensembling Iterative Estimation (SeIter), to carefully address the unique properties of the power system and thereby enhance the power flow estimation. Specifically, SenseFlow enforces the FlowNet to gradually predict high-precision voltage magnitudes and phase angles through the iterative SeIter process. On the one hand, FlowNet employs the Virtual Node Attention and Slack-Gated Feed-Forward modules to facilitate efficient global-local communication in the face of network sparsity and amplify the influence of the Slack node on angle predictions, respectively. On the other hand, SeIter maintains an exponential moving average of FlowNet's parameters to create a robust ensemble model that refines power state predictions throughout the iterative fitting process. Experimental results demonstrate that SenseFlow outperforms existing methods, providing a promising solution for high-accuracy power flow estimation across diverse grid configurations.
BOLT: Block-Orthonormal Lanczos for Trace estimation of matrix functions
Authors: Kingsley Yeon, Promit Ghosal, Mihai Anitescu
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: subspace methods

Efficient matrix trace estimation is essential for scalable computation of log-determinants, matrix norms, and distributional divergences. In many large-scale applications, the matrices involved are too large to store or access in full, making even a single matrix-vector (mat-vec) product infeasible. Instead, one often has access only to small subblocks of the matrix or localized matrix-vector products on restricted index sets. Hutch++ achieves optimal convergence rate but relies on randomized SVD and assumes full mat-vec access, making it difficult to apply in these constrained settings. We propose the Block-Orthonormal Stochastic Lanczos Quadrature (BOLT), which matches Hutch++ accuracy with a simpler implementation based on orthonormal block probes and Lanczos iterations. BOLT builds on the Stochastic Lanczos Quadrature (SLQ) framework, which combines random probing with Krylov subspace methods to efficiently approximate traces of matrix functions, and performs better than Hutch++ in near flat-spectrum regimes. To address memory limitations and partial access constraints, we introduce Subblock SLQ, a variant of BOLT that operates only on small principal submatrices. As a result, this framework yields a proxy KL divergence estimator and an efficient method for computing the Wasserstein-2 distance between Gaussians - both compatible with low-memory and partial-access regimes. We provide theoretical guarantees and demonstrate strong empirical performance across a range of high-dimensional settings.
$K$-MSHC: Unmasking Minimally Sufficient Head Circuits in Large Language Models with Experiments on Syntactic Classification Tasks
Authors: Pratim Chowdhary
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Understanding which neural components drive specific capabilities in mid-sized language models ($\leq$10B parameters) remains a key challenge. We introduce the $(\bm{K}, \epsilon)$-Minimum Sufficient Head Circuit ($K$-MSHC), a methodology to identify minimal sets of attention heads crucial for classification tasks as well as Search-K-MSHC, an efficient algorithm for discovering these circuits. Applying our Search-K-MSHC algorithm to Gemma-9B, we analyze three syntactic task families: grammar acceptability, arithmetic verification, and arithmetic word problems. Our findings reveal distinct task-specific head circuits, with grammar tasks predominantly utilizing early layers, word problems showing pronounced activity in both shallow and deep regions, and arithmetic verification demonstrating a more distributed pattern across the network. We discover non-linear circuit overlap patterns, where different task pairs share computational components at varying levels of importance. While grammar and arithmetic share many "weak" heads, arithmetic and word problems share more consistently critical "strong" heads. Importantly, we find that each task maintains dedicated "super-heads" with minimal cross-task overlap, suggesting that syntactic and numerical competencies emerge from specialized yet partially reusable head circuits.