pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Using LLMs in Generating Design Rationale for Software Architecture Decisions
Authors: Xiyu Zhou, Ruiyin Li, Peng Liang, Beiqi Zhang, Mojtaba Shahin, Zengyang Li, Chen Yang
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

Design Rationale (DR) for software architecture decisions refers to the reasoning underlying architectural choices, which provides valuable insights into the different phases of the architecting process throughout software development. However, in practice, DR is often inadequately documented due to a lack of motivation and effort from developers. With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their capabilities in text comprehension, reasoning, and generation may enable the generation and recovery of DR for architecture decisions. In this study, we evaluated the performance of LLMs in generating DR for architecture decisions. First, we collected 50 Stack Overflow (SO) posts, 25 GitHub issues, and 25 GitHub discussions related to architecture decisions to construct a dataset of 100 architecture-related problems. Then, we selected five LLMs to generate DR for the architecture decisions with three prompting strategies, including zero-shot, chain of thought (CoT), and LLM-based agents. With the DR provided by human experts as ground truth, the Precision of LLM-generated DR with the three prompting strategies ranges from 0.267 to 0.278, Recall from 0.627 to 0.715, and F1-score from 0.351 to 0.389. Additionally, 64.45% to 69.42% of the arguments of DR not mentioned by human experts are also helpful, 4.12% to 4.87% of the arguments have uncertain correctness, and 1.59% to 3.24% of the arguments are potentially misleading. Based on the results, we further discussed the pros and cons of the three prompting strategies and the strengths and limitations of the DR generated by LLMs.
Evaluation and Verification of Physics-Informed Neural Models of the Grad-Shafranov Equation
Authors: Fauzan Nazranda Rizqan, Matthew Hole, Charles Gretton
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00

Our contributions are motivated by fusion reactors that rely on maintaining magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium, where the balance between plasma pressure and confining magnetic fields is required for stable operation. In axisymmetric tokamak reactors in particular, and under the assumption of toroidal symmetry, this equilibrium can be mathematically modelled using the Grad-Shafranov Equation (GSE). Recent works have demonstrated the potential of using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to model the GSE. Existing studies did not examine realistic scenarios in which a single network generalizes to a variety of boundary conditions. Addressing that limitation, we evaluate a PINN architecture that incorporates boundary points as network inputs. Additionally, we compare PINN model accuracy and inference speeds with a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) model. Finding the PINN model to be the most performant, and accurate in our setting, we use the network verification tool Marabou to perform a range of verification tasks. Although we find some discrepancies between evaluations of the networks natively in PyTorch, compared to via Marabou, we are able to demonstrate useful and practical verification workflows. Our study is the first investigation of verification of such networks.
Weighted-Scenario Optimisation for the Chance Constrained Travelling Thief Problem
Authors: Thilina Pathirage Don, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

The chance constrained travelling thief problem (chance constrained TTP) has been introduced as a stochastic variation of the classical travelling thief problem (TTP) in an attempt to embody the effect of uncertainty in the problem definition. In this work, we characterise the chance constrained TTP using a limited number of weighted scenarios. Each scenario represents a similar TTP instance, differing slightly in the weight profile of the items and associated with a certain probability of occurrence. Collectively, the weighted scenarios represent a relaxed form of a stochastic TTP instance where the objective is to maximise the expected benefit while satisfying the knapsack constraint with a larger probability. We incorporate a set of evolutionary algorithms and heuristic procedures developed for the classical TTP, and formulate adaptations that apply to the weighted scenario-based representation of the problem. The analysis focuses on the performance of the algorithms on different settings and examines the impact of uncertainty on the quality of the solutions.
CoCo-Bench: A Comprehensive Code Benchmark For Multi-task Large Language Model Evaluation
Authors: Wenjing Yin, Tianze Sun, Yijiong Yu, Jiawei Fang, Guangyao Su, Jiancheng Wang, Zekun Wang, Wei Wang, Ran Chen, Ziyun Dai, Shuai Yuan, Menghang Dong, Peng Luo, Dong Cao, Da Lei, Yajun Zhang, Hao Chen, Xiang Ma, Yong liu, Weifeng Liu, Yuanjian Xu, Ji Pei
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Model Evaluation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in software engineering, excelling in tasks like code generation and maintenance. However, existing benchmarks are often narrow in scope, focusing on a specific task and lack a comprehensive evaluation framework that reflects real-world applications. To address these gaps, we introduce CoCo-Bench (Comprehensive Code Benchmark), designed to evaluate LLMs across four critical dimensions: code understanding, code generation, code modification, and code review. These dimensions capture essential developer needs, ensuring a more systematic and representative evaluation. CoCo-Bench includes multiple programming languages and varying task difficulties, with rigorous manual review to ensure data quality and accuracy. Empirical results show that CoCo-Bench aligns with existing benchmarks while uncovering significant variations in model performance, effectively highlighting strengths and weaknesses. By offering a holistic and objective evaluation, CoCo-Bench provides valuable insights to guide future research and technological advancements in code-oriented LLMs, establishing a reliable benchmark for the field.
Neuroevolution of Self-Attention Over Proto-Objects
Authors: Rafael C. Pinto, Anderson R. Tavares
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Hard Attention, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Proto-objects - image regions that share common visual properties - offer a promising alternative to traditional attention mechanisms based on rectangular-shaped image patches in neural networks. Although previous work demonstrated that evolving a patch-based hard-attention module alongside a controller network could achieve state-of-the-art performance in visual reinforcement learning tasks, our approach leverages image segmentation to work with higher-level features. By operating on proto-objects rather than fixed patches, we significantly reduce the representational complexity: each image decomposes into fewer proto-objects than regular patches, and each proto-object can be efficiently encoded as a compact feature vector. This enables a substantially smaller self-attention module that processes richer semantic information. Our experiments demonstrate that this proto-object-based approach matches or exceeds the state-of-the-art performance of patch-based implementations with 62% less parameters and 2.6 times less training time.
The First Theoretical Approximation Guarantees for the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III)
Authors: Renzhong Deng, Weijie Zheng, Benjamin Doerr
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

This work conducts a first theoretical analysis studying how well the NSGA-III approximates the Pareto front when the population size $N$ is less than the Pareto front size. We show that when $N$ is at least the number $N_r$ of reference points, then the approximation quality, measured by the maximum empty interval (MEI) indicator, on the OneMinMax benchmark is such that there is no empty interval longer than $\lceil\frac{(5-2\sqrt2)n}{N_r-1}\rceil$. This bound is independent of $N$, which suggests that further increasing the population size does not increase the quality of approximation when $N_r$ is fixed. This is a notable difference to the NSGA-II with sequential survival selection, where increasing the population size improves the quality of the approximations. We also prove two results indicating approximation difficulties when $N<N_r$. These theoretical results suggest that the best setting to approximate the Pareto front is $N_r=N$. In our experiments, we observe that with this setting the NSGA-III computes optimal approximations, very different from the NSGA-II, for which optimal approximations have not been observed so far.
Meta knowledge assisted Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Yangyang Li, Guanlong Liu, Ronghua Shang, Licheng Jiao
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Neural Architecture Search

Evolutionary computation (EC)-based neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved remarkable performance in the automatic design of neural architectures. However, the high computational cost associated with evaluating searched architectures poses a challenge for these methods, and a fixed form of learning rate (LR) schedule means greater information loss on diverse searched architectures. This paper introduces an efficient EC-based NAS method to solve these problems via an innovative meta-learning framework. Specifically, a meta-learning-rate (Meta-LR) scheme is used through pretraining to obtain a suitable LR schedule, which guides the training process with lower information loss when evaluating each individual. An adaptive surrogate model is designed through an adaptive threshold to select the potential architectures in a few epochs and then evaluate the potential architectures with complete epochs. Additionally, a periodic mutation operator is proposed to increase the diversity of the population, which enhances the generalizability and robustness. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet1K datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high performance comparable to that of many state-of-the-art peer methods, with lower computational cost and greater robustness.
CAE-DFKD: Bridging the Transferability Gap in Data-Free Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Zherui Zhang, Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu, Wenhao Xu, Shibiao Xu, Yu Zhang, Li Guo
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-free Knowledge Distillation, Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) enables the knowledge transfer from the given pre-trained teacher network to the target student model without access to the real training data. Existing DFKD methods focus primarily on improving image recognition performance on associated datasets, often neglecting the crucial aspect of the transferability of learned representations. In this paper, we propose Category-Aware Embedding Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (CAE-DFKD), which addresses at the embedding level the limitations of previous rely on image-level methods to improve model generalization but fail when directly applied to DFKD. The superiority and flexibility of CAE-DFKD are extensively evaluated, including: \textit{\textbf{i.)}} Significant efficiency advantages resulting from altering the generator training paradigm; \textit{\textbf{ii.)}} Competitive performance with existing DFKD state-of-the-art methods on image recognition tasks; \textit{\textbf{iii.)}} Remarkable transferability of data-free learned representations demonstrated in downstream tasks.
Evolution Meets Diffusion: Efficient Neural Architecture Generation
Authors: Bingye Zhou, Caiyang Yu
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has gained widespread attention for its transformative potential in deep learning model design. However, the vast and complex search space of NAS leads to significant computational and time costs. Neural Architecture Generation (NAG) addresses this by reframing NAS as a generation problem, enabling the precise generation of optimal architectures for specific tasks. Despite its promise, mainstream methods like diffusion models face limitations in global search capabilities and are still hindered by high computational and time demands. To overcome these challenges, we propose Evolutionary Diffusion-based Neural Architecture Generation (EDNAG), a novel approach that achieves efficient and training-free architecture generation. EDNAG leverages evolutionary algorithms to simulate the denoising process in diffusion models, using fitness to guide the transition from random Gaussian distributions to optimal architecture distributions. This approach combines the strengths of evolutionary strategies and diffusion models, enabling rapid and effective architecture generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDNAG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in architecture optimization, with an improvement in accuracy of up to 10.45%. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for time-consuming training and boosts inference speed by an average of 50 times, showcasing its exceptional efficiency and effectiveness.
A Memetic Algorithm based on Variational Autoencoder for Black-Box Discrete Optimization with Epistasis among Parameters
Authors: Aoi Kato, Kenta Kojima, Masahiro Nomura, Isao Ono
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Architecture Search

Black-box discrete optimization (BB-DO) problems arise in many real-world applications, such as neural architecture search and mathematical model estimation. A key challenge in BB-DO is epistasis among parameters where multiple variables must be modified simultaneously to effectively improve the objective function. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) provide a powerful framework for tackling BB-DO problems. In particular, an EDA leveraging a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has demonstrated strong performance on relatively low-dimensional problems with epistasis while reducing computational cost. Meanwhile, evolutionary algorithms such as DSMGA-II and P3, which integrate bit-flip-based local search with linkage learning, have shown excellent performance on high-dimensional problems. In this study, we propose a new memetic algorithm that combines VAE-based sampling with local search. The proposed method inherits the strengths of both VAE-based EDAs and local search-based approaches: it effectively handles high-dimensional problems with epistasis among parameters without incurring excessive computational overhead. Experiments on NK landscapes -- a challenging benchmark for BB-DO involving epistasis among parameters -- demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art VAE-based EDA methods, as well as leading approaches such as P3 and DSMGA-II.
ARCS: Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Code Synthesis with Iterative Refinement
Authors: Manish Bhattarai, Miguel Cordova, Javier Santos, Dan O'Malley
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Translation

In supercomputing, efficient and optimized code generation is essential to leverage high-performance systems effectively. We propose Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Code Synthesis (ARCS), an advanced framework for accurate, robust, and efficient code generation, completion, and translation. ARCS integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to systematically break down and iteratively refine complex programming tasks. An agent-based RAG mechanism retrieves relevant code snippets, while real-time execution feedback drives the synthesis of candidate solutions. This process is formalized as a state-action search tree optimization, balancing code correctness with editing efficiency. Evaluations on the Geeks4Geeks and HumanEval benchmarks demonstrate that ARCS significantly outperforms traditional prompting methods in translation and generation quality. By enabling scalable and precise code synthesis, ARCS offers transformative potential for automating and optimizing code development in supercomputing applications, enhancing computational resource utilization.
Revisiting Reset Mechanisms in Spiking Neural Networks for Sequential Modeling: Specialized Discretization for Binary Activated RNN
Authors: Enqi Zhang
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00

In the field of image recognition, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have achieved performance comparable to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). In such applications, SNNs essentially function as traditional neural networks with quantized activation values. This article focuses on an another alternative perspective,viewing SNNs as binary-activated recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for sequential modeling tasks. From this viewpoint, current SNN architectures face several fundamental challenges in sequence modeling: (1) Traditional models lack effective memory mechanisms for long-range sequence modeling; (2) The biological-inspired components in SNNs (such as reset mechanisms and refractory period applications) remain theoretically under-explored for sequence tasks; (3) The RNN-like computational paradigm in SNNs prevents parallel training across different timesteps. To address these challenges, this study conducts a systematic analysis of the fundamental mechanisms underlying reset operations and refractory periods in binary-activated RNN-based SNN sequence models. We re-examine whether such biological mechanisms are strictly necessary for generating sparse spiking patterns, provide new theoretical explanations and insights, and ultimately propose the fixed-refractory-period SNN architecture for sequence modeling.
Generate more than one child in your co-evolutionary semi-supervised learning GAN
Authors: Francisco Sedeño, Jamal Toutouh, Francisco Chicano
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very useful methods to address semi-supervised learning (SSL) datasets, thanks to their ability to generate samples similar to real data. This approach, called SSL-GAN has attracted many researchers in the last decade. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to guide the evolution and training of SSL-GANs with great success. In particular, several co-evolutionary approaches have been applied where the two networks of a GAN (the generator and the discriminator) are evolved in separate populations. The co-evolutionary approaches published to date assume some spatial structure of the populations, based on the ideas of cellular evolutionary algorithms. They also create one single individual per generation and follow a generational replacement strategy in the evolution. In this paper, we re-consider those algorithmic design decisions and propose a new co-evolutionary approach, called Co-evolutionary Elitist SSL-GAN (CE-SSLGAN), with panmictic population, elitist replacement, and more than one individual in the offspring. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using three standard benchmark datasets. The results show that creating more than one offspring per population and using elitism improves the results in comparison with a classical SSL-GAN.
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs
Authors: Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Graph Neural Network, Link Prediction, Natural Language Queries, Navigate

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.
SteelBlastQC: Shot-blasted Steel Surface Dataset with Interpretable Detection of Surface Defects
Authors: Irina Ruzavina, Lisa Sophie Theis, Jesse Lemeer, Rutger de Groen, Leo Ebeling, Andrej Hulak, Jouaria Ali, Guangzhi Tang, Rico Mockel
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection

Automating the quality control of shot-blasted steel surfaces is crucial for improving manufacturing efficiency and consistency. This study presents a dataset of 1654 labeled RGB images (512x512) of steel surfaces, classified as either "ready for paint" or "needs shot-blasting." The dataset captures real-world surface defects, including discoloration, welding lines, scratches and corrosion, making it well-suited for training computer vision models. Additionally, three classification approaches were evaluated: Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT), Support Vector Machines (SVM) with ResNet-50 feature extraction, and a Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE). The supervised methods (CCT and SVM) achieve 95% classification accuracy on the test set, with CCT leveraging transformer-based attention mechanisms and SVM offering a computationally efficient alternative. The CAE approach, while less effective, establishes a baseline for unsupervised quality control. We present interpretable decision-making by all three neural networks, allowing industry users to visually pinpoint problematic regions and understand the model's rationale. By releasing the dataset and baseline codes, this work aims to support further research in defect detection, advance the development of interpretable computer vision models for quality control, and encourage the adoption of automated inspection systems in industrial applications.