pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Machine-generated text detection prevents language model collapse
Authors: George Drayson, Emine Yilmaz, Vasileios Lampos
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Text Detection, Text Generation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, their generated outputs are proliferating across the web, risking a future where machine-generated content dilutes human-authored text. Since online data is the primary resource for LLM pre-training, subsequent models could be trained on an unknown portion of synthetic samples. This will lead to model collapse, a degenerative process whereby LLMs reinforce their own errors, converge to a low variance output distribution, and ultimately yield a declining performance. In this study, we investigate the impact of decoding strategy on model collapse, analysing the text characteristics at each model generation, the similarity to human references, and the resulting model performance. Using the decoding strategies that lead to the most significant degradation, we evaluate model collapse in more realistic scenarios where the origin of the data (human or synthetic) is unknown. We train a machine-generated text detector and propose an importance sampling approach to alleviate model collapse. Our method is validated on two LLM variants (GPT-2 and SmolLM2), across a range of model sizes (124M to 1.7B), on the open-ended text generation task. We demonstrate that it can not only prevent model collapse but also improve performance when sufficient human-authored samples are present. Source code: github.com/GeorgeDrayson/model_collapse.
Bridging vision language model (VLM) evaluation gaps with a framework for scalable and cost-effective benchmark generation
Authors: Tim Rädsch, Leon Mayer, Simon Pavicic, A. Emre Kavur, Marcel Knopp, Barış Öztürk, Klaus Maier-Hein, Paul F. Jaeger, Fabian Isensee, Annika Reinke, Lena Maier-Hein
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Task 2

Reliable evaluation of AI models is critical for scientific progress and practical application. While existing VLM benchmarks provide general insights into model capabilities, their heterogeneous designs and limited focus on a few imaging domains pose significant challenges for both cross-domain performance comparison and targeted domain-specific evaluation. To address this, we propose three key contributions: (1) a framework for the resource-efficient creation of domain-specific VLM benchmarks enabled by task augmentation for creating multiple diverse tasks from a single existing task, (2) the release of new VLM benchmarks for seven domains, created according to the same homogeneous protocol and including 162,946 thoroughly human-validated answers, and (3) an extensive benchmarking of 22 state-of-the-art VLMs on a total of 37,171 tasks, revealing performance variances across domains and tasks, thereby supporting the need for tailored VLM benchmarks. Adoption of our methodology will pave the way for the resource-efficient domain-specific selection of models and guide future research efforts toward addressing core open questions.
CondiQuant: Condition Number Based Low-Bit Quantization for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Kai Liu, Dehui Wang, Zhiteng Li, Zheng Chen, Yong Guo, Wenbo Li, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Quantization, Super-Resolution

Low-bit model quantization for image super-resolution (SR) is a longstanding task that is renowned for its surprising compression and acceleration ability. However, accuracy degradation is inevitable when compressing the full-precision (FP) model to ultra-low bit widths (2~4 bits). Experimentally, we observe that the degradation of quantization is mainly attributed to the quantization of activation instead of model weights. In numerical analysis, the condition number of weights could measure how much the output value can change for a small change in the input argument, inherently reflecting the quantization error. Therefore, we propose CondiQuant, a condition number based low-bit post-training quantization for image super-resolution. Specifically, we formulate the quantization error as the condition number of weight metrics. By decoupling the representation ability and the quantization sensitivity, we design an efficient proximal gradient descent algorithm to iteratively minimize the condition number and maintain the output still. With comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that CondiQuant outperforms existing state-of-the-art post-training quantization methods in accuracy without computation overhead and gains the theoretically optimal compression ratio in model parameters. Our code and model are released at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/CondiQuant.
Testing the limits of fine-tuning to improve reasoning in vision language models
Authors: Luca M. Schulze Buschoff, Konstantinos Voudouris, Elif Akata, Matthias Bethge, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Eric Schulz
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

Pre-trained vision language models still fall short of human visual cognition. In an effort to improve visual cognition and align models with human behavior, we introduce visual stimuli and human judgments on visual cognition tasks, allowing us to systematically evaluate performance across cognitive domains under a consistent environment. We fine-tune models on ground truth data for intuitive physics and causal reasoning and find that this improves model performance in the respective fine-tuning domain. Furthermore, it can improve model alignment with human behavior. However, we find that fine-tuning does not contribute to robust human-like generalization to data with other visual characteristics or to tasks in other cognitive domains.
Memory Helps, but Confabulation Misleads: Understanding Streaming Events in Videos with MLLMs
Authors: Gengyuan Zhang, Mingcong Ding, Tong Liu, Yao Zhang, Volker Tresp
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in understanding videos holistically, yet their ability to process streaming videos-videos are treated as a sequence of visual events-remains underexplored. Intuitively, leveraging past events as memory can enrich contextual and temporal understanding of the current event. In this paper, we show that leveraging memories as contexts helps MLLMs better understand video events. However, because such memories rely on predictions of preceding events, they may contain misinformation, leading to confabulation and degraded performance. To address this, we propose a confabulation-aware memory modification method that mitigates confabulated memory for memory-enhanced event understanding.
Mantis: Lightweight Calibrated Foundation Model for User-Friendly Time Series Classification
Authors: Vasilii Feofanov, Songkang Wen, Marius Alonso, Romain Ilbert, Hongbo Guo, Malik Tiomoko, Lujia Pan, Jianfeng Zhang, Ievgen Redko
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Time Series, Time Series Classification

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in developing foundation models for time series data that can generalize across diverse downstream tasks. While numerous forecasting-oriented foundation models have been introduced, there is a notable scarcity of models tailored for time series classification. To address this gap, we present Mantis, a new open-source foundation model for time series classification based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture that has been pre-trained using a contrastive learning approach. Our experimental results show that Mantis outperforms existing foundation models both when the backbone is frozen and when fine-tuned, while achieving the lowest calibration error. In addition, we propose several adapters to handle the multivariate setting, reducing memory requirements and modeling channel interdependence.
A general language model for peptide identification
Authors: Jixiu Zhai, Tianchi Lu, Haitian Zhong, Ziyang Xu, Yuhuan Liu, Shengrui XU, Jingwan Wang, Dan Huang
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Specificity

Advances in peptide identification are revolutionizing our ability to decipher protein functions and accelerate therapeutic discovery. We present PDeepPP, a deep learning framework that integrates pretrained protein language models with parallel transformer-CNN architectures, achieving state-of-the-art performance in peptide characterization tasks. The model's hybrid architecture demonstrates unique capabilities in capturing both local sequence motifs and global structural features, as evidenced by 29% improved cluster separation in UMAP visualizations compared to conventional approaches. Evaluated across 33 biological recognition tasks - including post-translational modification site prediction and bioactive peptide identification - PDeepPP outperformed existing methods in 25 tasks with average AUC improvements of 4.2%. Notably, it achieved 0.9726 accuracy with PR AUC 0.9977 in antimicrobial peptide detection while reducing false negatives by 37.5% in antimalarial recognition scenarios. This framework enables accurate large-scale peptide analysis, achieving 218* acceleration over sequence-alignment-based methods while maintaining 99.5% specificity in critical glycosylation site detection.PDeepPP establishes a new paradigm for computational peptide analysis through its synergistic architecture design, enabling rapid yet precise functional annotation that bridges molecular pattern recognition with translational biomedical applications.We have made our implementation, including code, data, and pretrained models, publicly available via GitHub (https://github.com/fondress/PDeepPP) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/fondress/PDeppPP).
On the Robustness of Transformers against Context Hijacking for Linear Classification
Authors: Tianle Li, Chenyang Zhang, Xingwu Chen, Yuan Cao, Difan Zou
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful in-context learning capabilities. However, their predictions can be disrupted by factually correct context, a phenomenon known as context hijacking, revealing a significant robustness issue. To understand this phenomenon theoretically, we explore an in-context linear classification problem based on recent advances in linear transformers. In our setup, context tokens are designed as factually correct query-answer pairs, where the queries are similar to the final query but have opposite labels. Then, we develop a general theoretical analysis on the robustness of the linear transformers, which is formulated as a function of the model depth, training context lengths, and number of hijacking context tokens. A key finding is that a well-trained deeper transformer can achieve higher robustness, which aligns with empirical observations. We show that this improvement arises because deeper layers enable more fine-grained optimization steps, effectively mitigating interference from context hijacking. This is also well supported by our numerical experiments. Our findings provide theoretical insights into the benefits of deeper architectures and contribute to enhancing the understanding of transformer architectures.
LEAP: Enhancing Vision-Based Occupancy Networks with Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Correlation
Authors: Fengcheng Yu, Haoran Xu, Canming Xia, Guang Tan
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

Vision-based occupancy networks provide an end-to-end solution for reconstructing the surrounding environment using semantic occupied voxels derived from multi-view images. This technique relies on effectively learning the correlation between pixel-level visual information and voxels. Despite recent advancements, occupancy results still suffer from limited accuracy due to occlusions and sparse visual cues. To address this, we propose a Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Correlation (LEAP)} method, which significantly enhances the performance of existing occupancy networks with minimal computational overhead. LEAP can be seamlessly integrated into various baseline networks, enabling a plug-and-play application. LEAP operates in three stages: 1) it tokenizes information from recent baseline and motion features into a shared, compact latent space; 2) it establishes full correlation through a tri-stream fusion architecture; 3) it generates occupancy results that strengthen the baseline's output. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, outperforming the latest baseline models. The source code and several demos are available in the supplementary material.
Probe Pruning: Accelerating LLMs through Dynamic Pruning via Model-Probing
Authors: Qi Le, Enmao Diao, Ziyan Wang, Xinran Wang, Jie Ding, Li Yang, Ali Anwar
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

We introduce Probe Pruning (PP), a novel framework for online, dynamic, structured pruning of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied in a batch-wise manner. PP leverages the insight that not all samples and tokens contribute equally to the model's output, and probing a small portion of each batch effectively identifies crucial weights, enabling tailored dynamic pruning for different batches. It comprises three main stages: probing, history-informed pruning, and full inference. In the probing stage, PP selects a small yet crucial set of hidden states, based on residual importance, to run a few model layers ahead. During the history-informed pruning stage, PP strategically integrates the probing states with historical states. Subsequently, it structurally prunes weights based on the integrated states and the PP importance score, a metric developed specifically to assess the importance of each weight channel in maintaining performance. In the final stage, full inference is conducted on the remaining weights. A major advantage of PP is its compatibility with existing models, as it operates without requiring additional neural network modules or fine-tuning. Comprehensive evaluations of PP on LLaMA-2/3 and OPT models reveal that even minimal probing-using just 1.5% of FLOPs-can substantially enhance the efficiency of structured pruning of LLMs. For instance, when evaluated on LLaMA-2-7B with WikiText2, PP achieves a 2.56 times lower ratio of performance degradation per unit of runtime reduction compared to the state-of-the-art method at a 40% pruning ratio. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qi-Le1/Probe_Pruning.
MHQA: A Diverse, Knowledge Intensive Mental Health Question Answering Challenge for Language Models
Authors: Suraj Racha, Prashant Joshi, Anshika Raman, Nikita Jangid, Mridul Sharma, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Nirmal Punjabi
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diagnostic, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification

Mental health remains a challenging problem all over the world, with issues like depression, anxiety becoming increasingly common. Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen a vast application in healthcare, specifically in answering medical questions. However, there is a lack of standard benchmarking datasets for question answering (QA) in mental health. Our work presents a novel multiple choice dataset, MHQA (Mental Health Question Answering), for benchmarking Language models (LMs). Previous mental health datasets have focused primarily on text classification into specific labels or disorders. MHQA, on the other hand, presents question-answering for mental health focused on four key domains: anxiety, depression, trauma, and obsessive/compulsive issues, with diverse question types, namely, factoid, diagnostic, prognostic, and preventive. We use PubMed abstracts as the primary source for QA. We develop a rigorous pipeline for LLM-based identification of information from abstracts based on various selection criteria and converting it into QA pairs. Further, valid QA pairs are extracted based on post-hoc validation criteria. Overall, our MHQA dataset consists of 2,475 expert-verified gold standard instances called MHQA-gold and ~56.1k pairs pseudo labeled using external medical references. We report F1 scores on different LLMs along with few-shot and supervised fine-tuning experiments, further discussing the insights for the scores.
Weakly Supervised Video Scene Graph Generation via Natural Language Supervision
Authors: Kibum Kim, Kanghoon Yoon, Yeonjun In, Jaehyeong Jeon, Jinyoung Moon, Donghyun Kim, Chanyoung Park
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Image Captioning, Large Language Model, Scene Graph Generation, Video scene graph generation

Existing Video Scene Graph Generation (VidSGG) studies are trained in a fully supervised manner, which requires all frames in a video to be annotated, thereby incurring high annotation cost compared to Image Scene Graph Generation (ImgSGG). Although the annotation cost of VidSGG can be alleviated by adopting a weakly supervised approach commonly used for ImgSGG (WS-ImgSGG) that uses image captions, there are two key reasons that hinder such a naive adoption: 1) Temporality within video captions, i.e., unlike image captions, video captions include temporal markers (e.g., before, while, then, after) that indicate time related details, and 2) Variability in action duration, i.e., unlike human actions in image captions, human actions in video captions unfold over varying duration. To address these issues, we propose a Natural Language-based Video Scene Graph Generation (NL-VSGG) framework that only utilizes the readily available video captions for training a VidSGG model. NL-VSGG consists of two key modules: Temporality-aware Caption Segmentation (TCS) module and Action Duration Variability-aware caption-frame alignment (ADV) module. Specifically, TCS segments the video captions into multiple sentences in a temporal order based on a Large Language Model (LLM), and ADV aligns each segmented sentence with appropriate frames considering the variability in action duration. Our approach leads to a significant enhancement in performance compared to simply applying the WS-ImgSGG pipeline to VidSGG on the Action Genome dataset. As a further benefit of utilizing the video captions as weak supervision, we show that the VidSGG model trained by NL-VSGG is able to predict a broader range of action classes that are not included in the training data, which makes our framework practical in reality.
Confidence-Weighted Boundary-Aware Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ebenezer Tarubinga, Jenifer Kalafatovich Espinoza
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label Filtering, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) aims to improve segmentation performance by utilising unlabeled data alongside limited labeled samples. Existing SSSS methods often face challenges such as coupling, where over-reliance on initial labeled data leads to suboptimal learning; confirmation bias, where incorrect predictions reinforce themselves repeatedly; and boundary blur caused by insufficient boundary-awareness and ambiguous edge information. To address these issues, we propose CW-BASS, a novel framework for SSSS. In order to mitigate the impact of incorrect predictions, we assign confidence weights to pseudo-labels. Additionally, we leverage boundary-delineation techniques, which, despite being extensively explored in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) remain under-explored in SSSS. Specifically, our approach: (1) reduces coupling through a confidence-weighted loss function that adjusts the influence of pseudo-labels based on their predicted confidence scores, (2) mitigates confirmation bias with a dynamic thresholding mechanism that learns to filter out pseudo-labels based on model performance, (3) resolves boundary blur with a boundary-aware module that enhances segmentation accuracy near object boundaries, and (4) reduces label noise with a confidence decay strategy that progressively refines pseudo-labels during training. Extensive experiments on the Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, using only 1/8 or 12.5\% of labeled data, our method achieves a mIoU of 75.81 on Pascal VOC 2012, highlighting its effectiveness in limited-label settings.
DAM-Seg: Anatomically accurate cardiac segmentation using Dense Associative Networks
Authors: Zahid Ullah, Jihie Kim
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Cardiac Segmentation, Segmentation

Deep learning-based cardiac segmentation has seen significant advancements over the years. Many studies have tackled the challenge of anatomically incorrect segmentation predictions by introducing auxiliary modules. These modules either post-process segmentation outputs or enforce consistency between specific points to ensure anatomical correctness. However, such approaches often increase network complexity, require separate training for these modules, and may lack robustness in scenarios with poor visibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture that leverages dense associative networks to learn and retain specific patterns inherent to cardiac inputs. Unlike traditional methods, our approach restricts the network to memorize a limited set of patterns. During forward propagation, a weighted sum of these patterns is used to enforce anatomical correctness in the output. Since these patterns are input-independent, the model demonstrates enhanced robustness, even in cases with poor visibility. The proposed pipeline was evaluated on two publicly available datasets, CAMUS and CardiacNet. Experimental results indicate that our model consistently outperforms baseline approaches across all metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and reliability for cardiac segmentation tasks.
Leveraging ChatGPT for Sponsored Ad Detection and Keyword Extraction in YouTube Videos
Authors: Brice Valentin Kok-Shun, Johnny Chan
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Extraction

This work-in-progress paper presents a novel approach to detecting sponsored advertisement segments in YouTube videos and comparing the advertisement with the main content. Our methodology involves the collection of 421 auto-generated and manual transcripts which are then fed into a prompt-engineered GPT-4o for ad detection, a KeyBERT for keyword extraction, and another iteration of ChatGPT for category identification. The results revealed a significant prevalence of product-related ads across various educational topics, with ad categories refined using GPT-4o into succinct 9 content and 4 advertisement categories. This approach provides a scalable and efficient alternative to traditional ad detection methods while offering new insights into the types and relevance of ads embedded within educational content. This study highlights the potential of LLMs in transforming ad detection processes and improving our understanding of advertisement strategies in digital media.
Using tournaments to calculate AUROC for zero-shot classification with LLMs
Authors: Wonjin Yoon, Ian Bulovic, Timothy A. Miller
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, Scheduling, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Large language models perform surprisingly well on many zero-shot classification tasks, but are difficult to fairly compare to supervised classifiers due to the lack of a modifiable decision boundary. In this work, we propose and evaluate a method that converts binary classification tasks into pairwise comparison tasks, obtaining relative rankings from LLMs. Repeated pairwise comparisons can be used to score instances using the Elo rating system (used in chess and other competitions), inducing a confidence ordering over instances in a dataset. We evaluate scheduling algorithms for their ability to minimize comparisons, and show that our proposed algorithm leads to improved classification performance, while also providing more information than traditional zero-shot classification.