pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Estimating Online Influence Needs Causal Modeling! Counterfactual Analysis of Social Media Engagement
Authors: Lin Tian, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Date: 2025-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, counterfactual, Misinformation

Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail to capture the causal mechanisms by which external temporal signals trigger engagement. We introduce a novel joint treatment-outcome framework that leverages existing sequential models to simultaneously adapt to both policy timing and engagement effects. Our approach adapts causal inference techniques from healthcare to estimate Average Treatment Effects (ATE) within the sequential nature of social media interactions, tackling challenges from external confounding signals. Through our experiments on real-world misinformation and disinformation datasets, we show that our models outperform existing benchmarks by 15--22% in predicting engagement across diverse counterfactual scenarios, including exposure adjustment, timing shifts, and varied intervention durations. Case studies on 492 social media users show our causal effect measure aligns strongly with the gold standard in influence estimation, the expert-based empirical influence.
Dynamic-I2V: Exploring Image-to-Video Generaion Models via Multimodal LLM
Authors: Peng Liu, Xiaoming Ren, Fengkai Liu, Qingsong Xie, Quanlong Zheng, Yanhao Zhang, Haonan Lu, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to Video Generation, Video Generation

Recent advancements in image-to-video (I2V) generation have shown promising performance in conventional scenarios. However, these methods still encounter significant challenges when dealing with complex scenes that require a deep understanding of nuanced motion and intricate object-action relationships. To address these challenges, we present Dynamic-I2V, an innovative framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to jointly encode visual and textual conditions for a diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture. By leveraging the advanced multimodal understanding capabilities of MLLMs, our model significantly improves motion controllability and temporal coherence in synthesized videos. The inherent multimodality of Dynamic-I2V further enables flexible support for diverse conditional inputs, extending its applicability to various downstream generation tasks. Through systematic analysis, we identify a critical limitation in current I2V benchmarks: a significant bias towards favoring low-dynamic videos, stemming from an inadequate balance between motion complexity and visual quality metrics. To resolve this evaluation gap, we propose DIVE - a novel assessment benchmark specifically designed for comprehensive dynamic quality measurement in I2V generation. In conclusion, extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm that Dynamic-I2V attains state-of-the-art performance in image-to-video generation, particularly revealing significant improvements of 42.5%, 7.9%, and 11.8% in dynamic range, controllability, and quality, respectively, as assessed by the DIVE metric in comparison to existing methods.
HunyuanVideo-Avatar: High-Fidelity Audio-Driven Human Animation for Multiple Characters
Authors: Yi Chen, Sen Liang, Zixiang Zhou, Ziyao Huang, Yifeng Ma, Junshu Tang, Qin Lin, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Animation

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in audio-driven human animation. However, critical challenges remain in (i) generating highly dynamic videos while preserving character consistency, (ii) achieving precise emotion alignment between characters and audio, and (iii) enabling multi-character audio-driven animation. To address these challenges, we propose HunyuanVideo-Avatar, a multimodal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT)-based model capable of simultaneously generating dynamic, emotion-controllable, and multi-character dialogue videos. Concretely, HunyuanVideo-Avatar introduces three key innovations: (i) A character image injection module is designed to replace the conventional addition-based character conditioning scheme, eliminating the inherent condition mismatch between training and inference. This ensures the dynamic motion and strong character consistency; (ii) An Audio Emotion Module (AEM) is introduced to extract and transfer the emotional cues from an emotion reference image to the target generated video, enabling fine-grained and accurate emotion style control; (iii) A Face-Aware Audio Adapter (FAA) is proposed to isolate the audio-driven character with latent-level face mask, enabling independent audio injection via cross-attention for multi-character scenarios. These innovations empower HunyuanVideo-Avatar to surpass state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and a newly proposed wild dataset, generating realistic avatars in dynamic, immersive scenarios.
Grounding Bodily Awareness in Visual Representations for Efficient Policy Learning
Authors: Junlin Wang, Zhiyun Lin
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Learning effective visual representations for robotic manipulation remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex body dynamics involved in action execution. In this paper, we study how visual representations that carry body-relevant cues can enable efficient policy learning for downstream robotic manipulation tasks. We present $\textbf{I}$nter-token $\textbf{Con}$trast ($\textbf{ICon}$), a contrastive learning method applied to the token-level representations of Vision Transformers (ViTs). ICon enforces a separation in the feature space between agent-specific and environment-specific tokens, resulting in agent-centric visual representations that embed body-specific inductive biases. This framework can be seamlessly integrated into end-to-end policy learning by incorporating the contrastive loss as an auxiliary objective. Our experiments show that ICon not only improves policy performance across various manipulation tasks but also facilitates policy transfer across different robots. The project website: https://github.com/HenryWJL/icon
Progressive Limb-Aware Virtual Try-On
Authors: Xiaoyu Han, Shengping Zhang, Qinglin Liu, Zonglin Li, Chenyang Wang
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Human Parsing, Virtual Try-on

Existing image-based virtual try-on methods directly transfer specific clothing to a human image without utilizing clothing attributes to refine the transferred clothing geometry and textures, which causes incomplete and blurred clothing appearances. In addition, these methods usually mask the limb textures of the input for the clothing-agnostic person representation, which results in inaccurate predictions for human limb regions (i.e., the exposed arm skin), especially when transforming between long-sleeved and short-sleeved garments. To address these problems, we present a progressive virtual try-on framework, named PL-VTON, which performs pixel-level clothing warping based on multiple attributes of clothing and embeds explicit limb-aware features to generate photo-realistic try-on results. Specifically, we design a Multi-attribute Clothing Warping (MCW) module that adopts a two-stage alignment strategy based on multiple attributes to progressively estimate pixel-level clothing displacements. A Human Parsing Estimator (HPE) is then introduced to semantically divide the person into various regions, which provides structural constraints on the human body and therefore alleviates texture bleeding between clothing and limb regions. Finally, we propose a Limb-aware Texture Fusion (LTF) module to estimate high-quality details in limb regions by fusing textures of the clothing and the human body with the guidance of explicit limb-aware features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art virtual try-on methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/xyhanHIT/PL-VTON.
Align Beyond Prompts: Evaluating World Knowledge Alignment in Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Wenchao Zhang, Jiahe Tian, Runze He, Jizhong Han, Jiao Dai, Miaomiao Feng, Wei Mi, Xiaodan Zhang
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, World Knowledge

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generation models have advanced significantly, enabling the creation of high-fidelity images from textual prompts. However, existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on the explicit alignment between generated images and prompts, neglecting the alignment with real-world knowledge beyond prompts. To address this gap, we introduce Align Beyond Prompts (ABP), a comprehensive benchmark designed to measure the alignment of generated images with real-world knowledge that extends beyond the explicit user prompts. ABP comprises over 2,000 meticulously crafted prompts, covering real-world knowledge across six distinct scenarios. We further introduce ABPScore, a metric that utilizes existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to assess the alignment between generated images and world knowledge beyond prompts, which demonstrates strong correlations with human judgments. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 8 popular T2I models using ABP, we find that even state-of-the-art models, such as GPT-4o, face limitations in integrating simple real-world knowledge into generated images. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a training-free strategy within ABP, named Inference-Time Knowledge Injection (ITKI). By applying this strategy to optimize 200 challenging samples, we achieved an improvement of approximately 43% in ABPScore. The dataset and code are available in https://github.com/smile365317/ABP.
A Survey of LLM $\times$ DATA
Authors: Xuanhe Zhou, Junxuan He, Wei Zhou, Haodong Chen, Zirui Tang, Haoyu Zhao, Xin Tong, Guoliang Li, Youmin Chen, Jun Zhou, Zhaojun Sun, Binyuan Hui, Shuo Wang, Conghui He, Zhiyuan Liu, Jingren Zhou, Fan Wu
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Management, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Survey

The integration of large language model (LLM) and data management (DATA) is rapidly redefining both domains. In this survey, we comprehensively review the bidirectional relationships. On the one hand, DATA4LLM, spanning large-scale data processing, storage, and serving, feeds LLMs with high quality, diversity, and timeliness of data required for stages like pre-training, post-training, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows: (i) Data processing for LLMs includes scalable acquisition, deduplication, filtering, selection, domain mixing, and synthetic augmentation; (ii) Data Storage for LLMs focuses on efficient data and model formats, distributed and heterogeneous storage hierarchies, KV-cache management, and fault-tolerant checkpointing; (iii) Data serving for LLMs tackles challenges in RAG (e.g., knowledge post-processing), LLM inference (e.g., prompt compression, data provenance), and training strategies (e.g., data packing and shuffling). On the other hand, in LLM4DATA, LLMs are emerging as general-purpose engines for data management. We review recent advances in (i) data manipulation, including automatic data cleaning, integration, discovery; (ii) data analysis, covering reasoning over structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and (iii) system optimization (e.g., configuration tuning, query rewriting, anomaly diagnosis), powered by LLM techniques like retrieval-augmented prompting, task-specialized fine-tuning, and multi-agent collaboration.
BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Behavioural Change
Authors: Manuela González-González, Soufiane Belharbi, Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Masoumeh Sharafi, Muhammad Haseeb Aslam, Marco Pedersoli, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Simon L Bacon, Eric Granger
Date: 2025-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recognizing complex emotions linked to ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) can play a critical role in the personalization and effectiveness of digital behaviour change interventions. These subtle and conflicting emotions are manifested by a discord between multiple modalities, such as facial and vocal expressions, and body language. Although experts can be trained to identify A/H, integrating them into digital interventions is costly and less effective. Automatic learning systems provide a cost-effective alternative that can adapt to individual users, and operate seamlessly within real-time, and resource-limited environments. However, there are currently no datasets available for the design of ML models to recognize A/H. This paper introduces a first Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) dataset collected for subject-based multimodal recognition of A/H in videos. It contains videos from 224 participants captured across 9 provinces in Canada, with different age, and ethnicity. Through our web platform, we recruited participants to answer 7 questions, some of which were designed to elicit A/H while recording themselves via webcam with microphone. BAH amounts to 1,118 videos for a total duration of 8.26 hours with 1.5 hours of A/H. Our behavioural team annotated timestamp segments to indicate where A/H occurs, and provide frame- and video-level annotations with the A/H cues. Video transcripts and their timestamps are also included, along with cropped and aligned faces in each frame, and a variety of participants meta-data. We include results baselines for BAH at frame- and video-level recognition in multi-modal setups, in addition to zero-shot prediction, and for personalization using unsupervised domain adaptation. The limited performance of baseline models highlights the challenges of recognizing A/H in real-world videos. The data, code, and pretrained weights are available.
Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance via Dynamic Low-Confidence Masking
Authors: Pengxiang Li, Shilin Yan, Joey Tsai, Renrui Zhang, Ruichuan An, Ziyu Guo, Xiaowei Gao
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) significantly enhances controllability in generative models by interpolating conditional and unconditional predictions. However, standard CFG often employs a static unconditional input, which can be suboptimal for iterative generation processes where model uncertainty varies dynamically. We introduce Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance (A-CFG), a novel method that tailors the unconditional input by leveraging the model's instantaneous predictive confidence. At each step of an iterative (masked) diffusion language model, A-CFG identifies tokens in the currently generated sequence for which the model exhibits low confidence. These tokens are temporarily re-masked to create a dynamic, localized unconditional input. This focuses CFG's corrective influence precisely on areas of ambiguity, leading to more effective guidance. We integrate A-CFG into a state-of-the-art masked diffusion language model and demonstrate its efficacy. Experiments on diverse language generation benchmarks show that A-CFG yields substantial improvements over standard CFG, achieving, for instance, a 3.9 point gain on GPQA. Our work highlights the benefit of dynamically adapting guidance mechanisms to model uncertainty in iterative generation.
JailBound: Jailbreaking Internal Safety Boundaries of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Jiaxin Song, Yixu Wang, Jie Li, Rui Yu, Yan Teng, Xingjun Ma, Yingchun Wang
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive performance, yet the integration of powerful vision encoders has significantly broadened their attack surface, rendering them increasingly susceptible to jailbreak attacks. However, lacking well-defined attack objectives, existing jailbreak methods often struggle with gradient-based strategies prone to local optima and lacking precise directional guidance, and typically decouple visual and textual modalities, thereby limiting their effectiveness by neglecting crucial cross-modal interactions. Inspired by the Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) framework, we posit that VLMs encode safety-relevant information within their internal fusion-layer representations, revealing an implicit safety decision boundary in the latent space. This motivates exploiting boundary to steer model behavior. Accordingly, we propose JailBound, a novel latent space jailbreak framework comprising two stages: (1) Safety Boundary Probing, which addresses the guidance issue by approximating decision boundary within fusion layer's latent space, thereby identifying optimal perturbation directions towards the target region; and (2) Safety Boundary Crossing, which overcomes the limitations of decoupled approaches by jointly optimizing adversarial perturbations across both image and text inputs. This latter stage employs an innovative mechanism to steer the model's internal state towards policy-violating outputs while maintaining cross-modal semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on six diverse VLMs demonstrate JailBound's efficacy, achieves 94.32% white-box and 67.28% black-box attack success averagely, which are 6.17% and 21.13% higher than SOTA methods, respectively. Our findings expose a overlooked safety risk in VLMs and highlight the urgent need for more robust defenses. Warning: This paper contains potentially sensitive, harmful and offensive content.
THiNK: Can Large Language Models Think-aloud?
Authors: Yongan Yu, Mengqian Wu, Yiran Lin, Nikki G. Lobczowski
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00

Assessing higher-order thinking skills in large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, especially in tasks that go beyond surface-level accuracy. In this work, we propose THiNK (Testing Higher-order Notion of Knowledge), a multi-agent, feedback-driven evaluation framework grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy. THiNK frames reasoning assessment as an iterative task of problem generation, critique, and revision, encouraging LLMs to think-aloud through step-by-step reflection and refinement. This enables a systematic evaluation of both lower-order (e.g., remember, understand) and higher-order (e.g., evaluate, create) thinking skills. We apply THiNK to seven state-of-the-art LLMs and perform a detailed cognitive analysis of their outputs. Results reveal that while models reliably perform lower-order categories well, they struggle with applying knowledge in realistic contexts and exhibit limited abstraction. Structured feedback loops significantly improve reasoning performance, particularly in higher-order thinking. Qualitative evaluations further confirm that THiNK-guided outputs better align with domain logic and problem structure. The code of our framework provides a scalable methodology for probing and enhancing LLM reasoning, offering new directions for evaluation grounded in learning science, which is available at our GitHub repository.
CrossRF: A Domain-Invariant Deep Learning Approach for RF Fingerprinting
Authors: Fahrettin Emin Tiras, Hayriye Serra Altinoluk
Date: 2025-05-21 00:00:00

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting offers a promising approach for drone identification and security, although it suffers from significant performance degradation when operating on different transmission channels. This paper presents CrossRF, a domain-invariant deep learning approach that addresses the problem of cross-channel RF fingerprinting for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) identification. Our approach aims to minimize the domain gap between different RF channels by using adversarial learning to train a more robust model that maintains consistent identification performance despite channel variations. We validate our approach using the UAVSig dataset, comprising real-world over-the-air RF signals from identical drone models operating across several frequency channels, ensuring that the findings correspond to real-world scenarios. The experimental results show CrossRF's efficiency, achieving up to 99.03% accuracy when adapting from Channel 3 to Channel 4, compared to only 26.39% using conventional methods. The model maintains robust performance in more difficult multi-channel scenarios (87.57% accuracy adapting from Channels 1,3 to 2,4) and achieves 89.45% accuracy with 0.9 precision for controller classification. These results confirm CrossRF's ability to significantly reduce performance degradation due to cross-channel variations while maintaining high identification accuracy with minimal training data requirements, making it particularly suitable for practical drone security applications.
PM-KVQ: Progressive Mixed-precision KV Cache Quantization for Long-CoT LLMs
Authors: Tengxuan Liu, Shiyao Li, Jiayi Yang, Tianchen Zhao, Feng Zhou, Xiaohui Song, Guohao Dai, Shengen Yan, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang
Date: 2025-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Recently, significant progress has been made in developing reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, this long-CoT reasoning process imposes substantial memory overhead due to the large Key-Value (KV) Cache memory overhead. Post-training KV Cache quantization has emerged as a promising compression technique and has been extensively studied in short-context scenarios. However, directly applying existing methods to long-CoT LLMs causes significant performance degradation due to the following two reasons: (1) Large cumulative error: Existing methods fail to adequately leverage available memory, and they directly quantize the KV Cache during each decoding step, leading to large cumulative quantization error. (2) Short-context calibration: Due to Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE), the use of short-context data during calibration fails to account for the distribution of less frequent channels in the Key Cache, resulting in performance loss. We propose Progressive Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization (PM-KVQ) for long-CoT LLMs to address the above issues in two folds: (1) To reduce cumulative error, we design a progressive quantization strategy to gradually lower the bit-width of KV Cache in each block. Then, we propose block-wise memory allocation to assign a higher bit-width to more sensitive transformer blocks. (2) To increase the calibration length without additional overhead, we propose a new calibration strategy with positional interpolation that leverages short calibration data with positional interpolation to approximate the data distribution of long-context data. Extensive experiments on 7B-70B long-CoT LLMs show that PM-KVQ improves reasoning benchmark performance by up to 8% over SOTA baselines under the same memory budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/PM-KVQ.
TUNA: Comprehensive Fine-grained Temporal Understanding Evaluation on Dense Dynamic Videos
Authors: Fanheng Kong, Jingyuan Zhang, Hongzhi Zhang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Linhao Yu, Xingguang Ji, Yu Tian, Victoria W., Fuzheng Zhang
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Video Understanding

Videos are unique in their integration of temporal elements, including camera, scene, action, and attribute, along with their dynamic relationships over time. However, existing benchmarks for video understanding often treat these properties separately or narrowly focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. To address this, we introduce TUNA, a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos, with two complementary tasks: captioning and QA. Our TUNA features diverse video scenarios and dynamics, assisted by interpretable and robust evaluation criteria. We evaluate several leading models on our benchmark, providing fine-grained performance assessments across various dimensions. This evaluation reveals key challenges in video temporal understanding, such as limited action description, inadequate multi-subject understanding, and insensitivity to camera motion, offering valuable insights for improving video understanding models. The data and code are available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/TUNA.