pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spiking World Model with Multi-Compartment Neurons for Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yinqian Sun, Feifei Zhao, Mingyang Lv, Yi Zeng
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant research attention in algorithm design and perception applications. However, their potential in the decision-making domain, particularly in model-based reinforcement learning, remains underexplored. The difficulty lies in the need for spiking neurons with long-term temporal memory capabilities, as well as network optimization that can integrate and learn information for accurate predictions. The dynamic dendritic information integration mechanism of biological neurons brings us valuable insights for addressing these challenges. In this study, we propose a multi-compartment neuron model capable of nonlinearly integrating information from multiple dendritic sources to dynamically process long sequential inputs. Based on this model, we construct a Spiking World Model (Spiking-WM), to enable model-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with SNNs. We evaluated our model using the DeepMind Control Suite, demonstrating that Spiking-WM outperforms existing SNN-based models and achieves performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN)-based world models employing Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). Furthermore, we assess the long-term memory capabilities of the proposed model in speech datasets, including SHD, TIMIT, and LibriSpeech 100h, showing that our multi-compartment neuron model surpasses other SNN-based architectures in processing long sequences. Our findings underscore the critical role of dendritic information integration in shaping neuronal function, emphasizing the importance of cooperative dendritic processing in enhancing neural computation.
Aerial Secure Collaborative Communications under Eavesdropper Collusion in Low-altitude Economy: A Generative Swarm Intelligent Approach
Authors: Jiahui Li, Geng Sun, Qingqing Wu, Shuang Liang, Jiacheng Wang, Dusit Niyato, Dong In Kim
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

In this work, we aim to introduce distributed collaborative beamforming (DCB) into AAV swarms and handle the eavesdropper collusion by controlling the corresponding signal distributions. Specifically, we consider a two-way DCB-enabled aerial communication between two AAV swarms and construct these swarms as two AAV virtual antenna arrays. Then, we minimize the two-way known secrecy capacity and maximum sidelobe level to avoid information leakage from the known and unknown eavesdroppers, respectively. Simultaneously, we also minimize the energy consumption of AAVs when constructing virtual antenna arrays. Due to the conflicting relationships between secure performance and energy efficiency, we consider these objectives by formulating a multi-objective optimization problem, which is NP-hard and with a large number of decision variables. Accordingly, we design a novel generative swarm intelligence (GenSI) framework to solve the problem with less overhead, which contains a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE)-based generative method and a proposed powerful swarm intelligence algorithm. In this framework, CVAE can collect expert solutions obtained by the swarm intelligence algorithm in other environment states to explore characteristics and patterns, thereby directly generating high-quality initial solutions in new environment factors for the swarm intelligence algorithm to search solution space efficiently. Simulation results show that the proposed swarm intelligence algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art baseline algorithms, and the GenSI can achieve similar optimization results by using far fewer iterations than the ordinary swarm intelligence algorithm. Experimental tests demonstrate that introducing the CVAE mechanism achieves a 58.7% reduction in execution time, which enables the deployment of GenSI even on AAV platforms with limited computing power.
Impact of Surrogate Model Accuracy on Performance and Model Management Strategy in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithms
Authors: Yuki Hanawa, Tomohiro Harada, Yukiya Miura
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Management, model

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been proposed to solve expensive optimization problems. Although SAEAs use surrogate models that approximate the evaluations of solutions using machine learning techniques, prior research has not adequately investigated the impact of surrogate model accuracy on search performance and model management strategy in SAEAs. This study analyzes how surrogate model accuracy affects search performance and model management strategies. For this purpose, we construct a pseudo-surrogate model with adjustable prediction accuracy to ensure fair comparisons across different model management strategies. We compared three model management strategies: (1) pre-selection (PS), (2) individual-based (IB), and (3) generation-based (GB) on standard benchmark problems with a baseline model that does not use surrogates. The experimental results reveal that a higher surrogate model accuracy improves the search performance. However, the impact varies according to the strategy used. Specifically, PS demonstrates a clear trend of improved performance as the estimation accuracy increases, whereas IB and GB exhibit robust performance when the accuracy surpasses a certain threshold. In model strategy comparisons, GB exhibits superior performance across a broad range of prediction accuracies, IB outperforms it at lower accuracies, and PS outperforms it at higher accuracies. The findings of this study clarify guidelines for selecting appropriate model management strategies based on the surrogate model accuracy.
Range and Angle Estimation with Spiking Neural Resonators for FMCW Radar
Authors: Nico Reeb, Javier Lopez-Randulfe, Robin Dietrich, Alois C. Knoll
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Automotive radar systems face the challenge of managing high sampling rates and large data bandwidth while complying with stringent real-time and energy efficiency requirements. The growing complexity of autonomous vehicles further intensifies these requirements. Neuromorphic computing offers promising solutions because of its inherent energy efficiency and parallel processing capacity. This research presents a novel spiking neuron model for signal processing of frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars that outperforms the state-of-the-art spectrum analysis algorithms in latency and data bandwidth. These spiking neural resonators are based on the resonate-and-fire neuron model and optimized to dynamically process raw radar data while simultaneously emitting an output in the form of spikes. We designed the first neuromorphic neural network consisting of these spiking neural resonators that estimates range and angle from FMCW radar data. We evaluated the range-angle maps on simulated datasets covering multiple scenarios and compared the results with a state-of-the-art pipeline for radar processing. The proposed neuron model significantly reduces the processing latency compared to traditional frequency analysis algorithms, such as the Fourier transformation (FT), which needs to sample and store entire data frames before processing. The evaluations demonstrate that these spiking neural resonators achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy while emitting spikes simultaneously to processing and transmitting only 0.02 % of the data compared to a float-32 FT. The results showcase the potential for neuromorphic signal processing for FMCW radar systems and pave the way for designing neuromorphic radar sensors.
Convergence of energy-based learning in linear resistive networks
Authors: Anne-Men Huijzer, Thomas Chaffey, Bart Besselink, Henk J. van Waarde
Date: 2025-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Energy-based learning algorithms are alternatives to backpropagation and are well-suited to distributed implementations in analog electronic devices. However, a rigorous theory of convergence is lacking. We make a first step in this direction by analysing a particular energy-based learning algorithm, Contrastive Learning, applied to a network of linear adjustable resistors. It is shown that, in this setup, Contrastive Learning is equivalent to projected gradient descent on a convex function, for any step size, giving a guarantee of convergence for the algorithm.
An Improved NSGA-II with local search for multi-objective energy-efficient flowshop scheduling problem
Authors: Vigneshwar Pesaru, Venkataramanaiah Saddikuti
Date: 2025-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

There has been an increasing concern to reduce the energy consumption in manufacturing and other industries. Energy consumption in manufacturing industries is directly related to efficient schedules. The contribution of this paper includes: i) a permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFLSP) mathematical model by considering energy consumed by each machine in the system. ii) an improved non-dominated sorted genetic algorithm with Taguchi method with further incorporating local search (NSGA-II_LS) is proposed for the multi-objective PFLSP model. iii) solved 90 benchmarks problems of Taillard (1993) for the minimisation of flowtime (FT) and energy consumption (EC). The performance of the proposed NSGA_LS algorithm is evaluated on the benchmark problems selected from the published literature Li et. al, (2018). From these results, it is noted that the proposed algorithm performed better on both the objectives i.e., FT and EC minimization in 5 out of 9 cases. On FT objective our algorithm performed better in 8 out of 9 cases and on EC objective 5 out of 9 cases. Overall, the proposed algorithm achieved 47% and 15.44% average improvement in FT and EC minimization respectively on the benchmark problems. From the results of 90 benchmark problems, it is observed that average difference in FT and EC between two solutions is decreasing as the problem size increases from 5 machines to 10 machines with an exception in one case. Further, it is observed that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better as the problem size increases in both jobs and machines. These results can act as standard solutions for further research.
Towards net-zero manufacturing: carbon-aware scheduling for GHG emissions reduction
Authors: Andrea Mencaroni, Pieter Leyman, Birger Raa, Stijn De Vuyst, Dieter Claeys
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Detailed scheduling has traditionally been optimized for the reduction of makespan and manufacturing costs. However, growing awareness of environmental concerns and increasingly stringent regulations are pushing manufacturing towards reducing the carbon footprint of its operations. Scope 2 emissions, which are the indirect emissions related to the production and consumption of grid electricity, are in fact estimated to be responsible for more than one-third of the global GHG emissions. In this context, carbon-aware scheduling can serve as a powerful way to reduce manufacturing's carbon footprint by considering the time-dependent carbon intensity of the grid and the availability of on-site renewable electricity. This study introduces a carbon-aware permutation flow-shop scheduling model designed to reduce scope 2 emissions. The model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear problem, taking into account the forecasted grid generation mix and available on-site renewable electricity, along with the set of jobs to be scheduled and their corresponding power requirements. The objective is to find an optimal day-ahead schedule that minimizes scope 2 emissions. The problem is addressed using a dedicated memetic algorithm, combining evolutionary strategy and local search. Results from computational experiments confirm that by considering the dynamic carbon intensity of the grid and on-site renewable electricity availability, substantial reductions in carbon emissions can be achieved.
A Reconfigurable Stream-Based FPGA Accelerator for Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Networks
Authors: Muhammad Ihsan Al Hafiz, Naresh Ravichandran, Anders Lansner, Pawel Herman, Artur Podobas
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, High-Level Synthesis

Brain-inspired algorithms are attractive and emerging alternatives to classical deep learning methods for use in various machine learning applications. Brain-inspired systems can feature local learning rules, both unsupervised/semi-supervised learning and different types of plasticity (structural/synaptic), allowing them to potentially be faster and more energy-efficient than traditional machine learning alternatives. Among the more salient brain-inspired algorithms are Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Networks (BCPNNs). BCPNN is an important tool for both machine learning and computational neuroscience research, and recent work shows that BCPNN can reach state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as learning and memory recall compared to other models. Unfortunately, BCPNN is primarily executed on slow general-purpose processors (CPUs) or power-hungry graphics processing units (GPUs), reducing the applicability of using BCPNN in (among others) Edge systems. In this work, we design a custom stream-based accelerator for BCPNN using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) using Xilinx Vitis High-Level Synthesis (HLS) flow. Furthermore, we model our accelerator's performance using first principles, and we empirically show that our proposed accelerator is between 1.3x - 5.3x faster than an Nvidia A100 GPU while at the same time consuming between 2.62x - 3.19x less power and 5.8x - 16.5x less energy without any degradation in performance.
Do Emotions Really Affect Argument Convincingness? A Dynamic Approach with LLM-based Manipulation Checks
Authors: Yanran Chen, Steffen Eger
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

Emotions have been shown to play a role in argument convincingness, yet this aspect is underexplored in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Unlike prior studies that use static analyses, focus on a single text domain or language, or treat emotion as just one of many factors, we introduce a dynamic framework inspired by manipulation checks commonly used in psychology and social science; leveraging LLM-based manipulation checks, this framework examines the extent to which perceived emotional intensity influences perceived convincingness. Through human evaluation of arguments across different languages, text domains, and topics, we find that in over half of cases, judgments of convincingness remain unchanged despite variations in perceived emotional intensity; when emotions do have an impact, they more often enhance rather than weaken convincingness. We further analyze how 11 LLMs behave in the same scenario, finding that while LLMs generally mirror human patterns, they struggle to capture nuanced emotional effects in individual judgments.
Personalized Causal Graph Reasoning for LLMs: A Case Study on Dietary Recommendations
Authors: Zhongqi Yang, Amir Rahmani
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, counterfactual, Decision Making, Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively leverage common-sense knowledge for general reasoning, yet they struggle with personalized reasoning when tasked with interpreting multifactor personal data. This limitation restricts their applicability in domains that require context-aware decision-making tailored to individuals. This paper introduces Personalized Causal Graph Reasoning as an agentic framework that enhances LLM reasoning by incorporating personal causal graphs derived from data of individuals. These graphs provide a foundation that guides the LLM's reasoning process. We evaluate it on a case study on nutrient-oriented dietary recommendations, which requires personal reasoning due to the implicit unique dietary effects. We propose a counterfactual evaluation to estimate the efficiency of LLM-recommended foods for glucose management. Results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently provides personalized dietary recommendations to reduce average glucose iAUC across three time windows, which outperforms the previous approach. LLM-as-a-judge evaluation results indicate that our proposed method enhances personalization in the reasoning process.
SCORE: Systematic COnsistency and Robustness Evaluation for Large Language Models
Authors: Grigor Nalbandyan, Rima Shahbazyan, Evelina Bakhturina
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: MMLU

Typical evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) report a single metric per dataset, often representing the model's best-case performance under carefully selected settings. Unfortunately, this approach overlooks model robustness and reliability in real-world applications. For instance, simple paraphrasing of prompts on the MMLU-Pro dataset causes accuracy fluctuations of up to 10\%, while reordering answer choices in the AGIEval dataset results in accuracy differences of up to 6.1\%. While some studies discuss issues with LLM robustness, there is no unified or centralized framework for evaluating the robustness of language models. To address this gap and consolidate existing research on model robustness, we present SCORE ($\mathbf{S}$ystematic $\mathbf{CO}$nsistency and $\mathbf{R}$obustness $\mathbf{E}$valuation), a comprehensive framework for non-adversarial evaluation of LLMs. The SCORE framework evaluates models by repeatedly testing them on the same benchmarks in various setups to give a realistic estimate of their accuracy and consistency. We release the code publicly and start an LLM robustness leaderboard to facilitate further development and research.
A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation Methods on Large Language Models
Authors: Zhiqiu Xia, Jinxuan Xu, Yuqian Zhang, Hang Liu
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, these models could offer biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses camouflaged by their fluency and realistic appearance. Uncertainty estimation is the key method to address this challenge. While research efforts in uncertainty estimation are ramping up, there is a lack of comprehensive and dedicated surveys on LLM uncertainty estimation. This survey presents four major avenues of LLM uncertainty estimation. Furthermore, we perform extensive experimental evaluations across multiple methods and datasets. At last, we provide critical and promising future directions for LLM uncertainty estimation.
Llamarine: Open-source Maritime Industry-specific Large Language Model
Authors: William Nguyen, An Phan, Konobu Kimura, Hitoshi Maeno, Mika Tanaka, Quynh Le, William Poucher, Christopher Nguyen
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Trajectory Planning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial potential in addressing complex reasoning tasks, yet their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in specialized domains such as maritime navigation. To bridge this gap, we introduce Llamarine, the first open-source LLM designed specifically for maritime navigation. Llamarine 1.0 is developed through continued pretraining and fine-tuning on a high-quality corpus comprising maritime textbooks, research publications, and web text from Wikipedia. This domain-specific training enables the model to acquire expert-level knowledge in navigational principles, collision avoidance, route optimization, and regulatory compliance. Our key contributions include (a) the curation of a comprehensive maritime dataset from authoritative sources, ensuring depth and reliability in the model's knowledge base; (b) the development of a foundational model capable of reasoning about complex navigational challenges with greater accuracy than general-purpose LLMs; and (c) the establishment of a benchmark to evaluate performance in maritime-specific decision-making tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that Llamarine outperforms both general-purpose and commercial LLMs in critical navigation-related tasks, such as trajectory planning, risk assessment, and compliance with maritime regulations. By providing an open-source foundation model trained exclusively on high-quality maritime literature, Llamarine paves the way for AI-driven advancements in maritime safety, efficiency, and operational decision-making.
Autoencoder-Based Framework to Capture Vocabulary Quality in NLP
Authors: Vu Minh Hoang Dang, Rakesh M. Verma
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Sentence

Linguistic richness is essential for advancing natural language processing (NLP), as dataset characteristics often directly influence model performance. However, traditional metrics such as Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Vocabulary Diversity (VOCD), and Measure of Lexical Text Diversity (MTLD) do not adequately capture contextual relationships, semantic richness, and structural complexity. In this paper, we introduce an autoencoder-based framework that uses neural network capacity as a proxy for vocabulary richness, diversity, and complexity, enabling a dynamic assessment of the interplay between vocabulary size, sentence structure, and contextual depth. We validate our approach on two distinct datasets: the DIFrauD dataset, which spans multiple domains of deceptive and fraudulent text, and the Project Gutenberg dataset, representing diverse languages, genres, and historical periods. Experimental results highlight the robustness and adaptability of our method, offering practical guidance for dataset curation and NLP model design. By enhancing traditional vocabulary evaluation, our work fosters the development of more context-aware, linguistically adaptive NLP systems.
À la recherche du sens perdu: your favourite LLM might have more to say than you can understand
Authors: K. O. T. Erziev
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

We report a peculiar observation that LLMs can assign hidden meanings to sequences that seem visually incomprehensible to humans: for example, a nonsensical phrase consisting of Byzantine musical symbols is recognized by gpt-4o as "say abracadabra". Moreover, some models can communicate using these sequences. Some of these meanings are hypothesized to partly originate in the massive spurious correlations due to BPE tokenization. We systematically evaluate the presence of such abilities in a wide range of models: Claude-3.5 Haiku, Claude-3.5 Sonnet (New and Old), Claude-3.7 Sonnet, gpt-4o mini, gpt-4o, o1-mini, Llama-3.3 70B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Lllama 70B, Qwen2.5 1.5B, Qwen2.5 32B, Phi-3.5 mini, GigaChat-Max, Vikhr-Llama-3.2 1B. We argue that this observation might have far-reaching consequences for both safety and security of the modern and future LLMs and systems that employ them. As an illustration, we show that applying this method in combination with simple templates is sufficient to jailbreak previous generation models, with ASR = 0.4 on gpt-4o mini. Our code and data artifacts are available at https://github.com/L3G5/llm-hidden-meanings
Robust Multi-Objective Preference Alignment with Online DPO
Authors: Raghav Gupta, Ryan Sullivan, Yunxuan Li, Samrat Phatale, Abhinav Rastogi
Date: 2025-03-01 00:00:00

Multi-objective preference alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing AI systems that are more configurable, personalizable, helpful, and safe. However, optimizing model outputs to satisfy diverse objectives with variable weights at inference time for truly personalized models presents a significant challenge. Existing approaches are either computationally expensive to train or do not sufficiently steer model behaviors. This paper introduces the Multi-Objective Online DPO (MO-ODPO) algorithm, designed to robustly and efficiently align model behaviors with multiple, potentially conflicting human preferences. Our approach incorporates a prompt conditioning mechanism, allowing us to train a single preference-conditional policy, that can adapt to new preference combinations at inference. Experiments on two popular benchmarks show that MO-ODPO Pareto-dominates existing baselines while providing excellent inference-time steerability between diverse objectives.