pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sample Complexity of Distributionally Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zijun Chen, Shengbo Wang, Nian Si
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical-such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare-we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose two algorithms that achieve near-optimal sample complexity. The first reduces the problem to a DR discounted Markov decision process (MDP), while the second, Anchored DR Average-Reward MDP, introduces an anchoring state to stabilize the controlled transition kernels within the uncertainty set. Assuming the nominal MDP is uniformly ergodic, we prove that both algorithms attain a sample complexity of $\widetilde{O}\left(|\mathbf{S}||\mathbf{A}| t_{\mathrm{mix}}^2\varepsilon^{-2}\right)$ for estimating the optimal policy as well as the robust average reward under KL and $f_k$-divergence-based uncertainty sets, provided the uncertainty radius is sufficiently small. Here, $\varepsilon$ is the target accuracy, $|\mathbf{S}|$ and $|\mathbf{A}|$ denote the sizes of the state and action spaces, and $t_{\mathrm{mix}}$ is the mixing time of the nominal MDP. This represents the first finite-sample convergence guarantee for DR average-reward reinforcement learning. We further validate the convergence rates of our algorithms through numerical experiments.
AI2MMUM: AI-AI Oriented Multi-Modal Universal Model Leveraging Telecom Domain Large Model
Authors: Tianyu Jiao, Zhuoran Xiao, Yihang Huang, Chenhui Ye, Yijia Feng, Liyu Cai, Jiang Chang, Fangkun Liu, Yin Xu, Dazhi He, Yunfeng Guan, Wenjun Zhang
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Designing a 6G-oriented universal model capable of processing multi-modal data and executing diverse air interface tasks has emerged as a common goal in future wireless systems. Building on our prior work in communication multi-modal alignment and telecom large language model (LLM), we propose a scalable, task-aware artificial intelligence-air interface multi-modal universal model (AI2MMUM), which flexibility and effectively perform various physical layer tasks according to subtle task instructions. The LLM backbone provides robust contextual comprehension and generalization capabilities, while a fine-tuning approach is adopted to incorporate domain-specific knowledge. To enhance task adaptability, task instructions consist of fixed task keywords and learnable, implicit prefix prompts. Frozen radio modality encoders extract universal representations and adapter layers subsequently bridge radio and language modalities. Moreover, lightweight task-specific heads are designed to directly output task objectives. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that AI2MMUM achieves SOTA performance across five representative physical environment/wireless channel-based downstream tasks using the WAIR-D and DeepMIMO datasets.
Sybil-based Virtual Data Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning
Authors: Changxun Zhu, Qilong Wu, Lingjuan Lyu, Shibei Xue
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Federated Learning

Federated learning is vulnerable to poisoning attacks by malicious adversaries. Existing methods often involve high costs to achieve effective attacks. To address this challenge, we propose a sybil-based virtual data poisoning attack, where a malicious client generates sybil nodes to amplify the poisoning model's impact. To reduce neural network computational complexity, we develop a virtual data generation method based on gradient matching. We also design three schemes for target model acquisition, applicable to online local, online global, and offline scenarios. In simulation, our method outperforms other attack algorithms since our method can obtain a global target model under non-independent uniformly distributed data.
Who Said What WSW 2.0? Enhanced Automated Analysis of Preschool Classroom Speech
Authors: Anchen Sun, Tiantian Feng, Gabriela Gutierrez, Juan J Londono, Anfeng Xu, Batya Elbaum, Shrikanth Narayanan, Lynn K Perry, Daniel S Messinger
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

This paper introduces an automated framework WSW2.0 for analyzing vocal interactions in preschool classrooms, enhancing both accuracy and scalability through the integration of wav2vec2-based speaker classification and Whisper (large-v2 and large-v3) speech transcription. A total of 235 minutes of audio recordings (160 minutes from 12 children and 75 minutes from 5 teachers), were used to compare system outputs to expert human annotations. WSW2.0 achieves a weighted F1 score of .845, accuracy of .846, and an error-corrected kappa of .672 for speaker classification (child vs. teacher). Transcription quality is moderate to high with word error rates of .119 for teachers and .238 for children. WSW2.0 exhibits relatively high absolute agreement intraclass correlations (ICC) with expert transcriptions for a range of classroom language features. These include teacher and child mean utterance length, lexical diversity, question asking, and responses to questions and other utterances, which show absolute agreement intraclass correlations between .64 and .98. To establish scalability, we apply the framework to an extensive dataset spanning two years and over 1,592 hours of classroom audio recordings, demonstrating the framework's robustness for broad real-world applications. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning and natural language processing techniques to revolutionize educational research by providing accurate measures of key features of preschool classroom speech, ultimately guiding more effective intervention strategies and supporting early childhood language development.
Approximated Behavioral Metric-based State Projection for Federated Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zengxia Guo, Bohui An, Zhongqi Lu
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) methods usually share the encrypted local state or policy information and help each client to learn from others while preserving everyone's privacy. In this work, we propose that sharing the approximated behavior metric-based state projection function is a promising way to enhance the performance of FRL and concurrently provides an effective protection of sensitive information. We introduce FedRAG, a FRL framework to learn a computationally practical projection function of states for each client and aggregating the parameters of projection functions at a central server. The FedRAG approach shares no sensitive task-specific information, yet provides information gain for each client. We conduct extensive experiments on the DeepMind Control Suite to demonstrate insightful results.
Advanced Crash Causation Analysis for Freeway Safety: A Large Language Model Approach to Identifying Key Contributing Factors
Authors: Ahmed S. Abdelrahman, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Samgyu Yang, Abdulrahman Faden
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Understanding the factors contributing to traffic crashes and developing strategies to mitigate their severity is essential. Traditional statistical methods and machine learning models often struggle to capture the complex interactions between various factors and the unique characteristics of each crash. This research leverages large language model (LLM) to analyze freeway crash data and provide crash causation analysis accordingly. By compiling 226 traffic safety studies related to freeway crashes, a training dataset encompassing environmental, driver, traffic, and geometric design factors was created. The Llama3 8B model was fine-tuned using QLoRA to enhance its understanding of freeway crashes and their contributing factors, as covered in these studies. The fine-tuned Llama3 8B model was then used to identify crash causation without pre-labeled data through zero-shot classification, providing comprehensive explanations to ensure that the identified causes were reasonable and aligned with existing research. Results demonstrate that LLMs effectively identify primary crash causes such as alcohol-impaired driving, speeding, aggressive driving, and driver inattention. Incorporating event data, such as road maintenance, offers more profound insights. The model's practical applicability and potential to improve traffic safety measures were validated by a high level of agreement among researchers in the field of traffic safety, as reflected in questionnaire results with 88.89%. This research highlights the complex nature of traffic crashes and how LLMs can be used for comprehensive analysis of crash causation and other contributing factors. Moreover, it provides valuable insights and potential countermeasures to aid planners and policymakers in developing more effective and efficient traffic safety practices.
Improving the Euclidean Diffusion Generation of Manifold Data by Mitigating Score Function Singularity
Authors: Zichen Liu, Wei zhang, Tiejun Li
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

Euclidean diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative modeling across diverse domains, and they have been extended to manifold case in recent advances. Instead of explicitly utilizing the structure of special manifolds as studied in previous works, we investigate direct sampling of the Euclidean diffusion models for general manifold-constrained data in this paper. We reveal the multiscale singularity of the score function in the embedded space of manifold, which hinders the accuracy of diffusion-generated samples. We then present an elaborate theoretical analysis of the singularity structure of the score function by separating it along the tangential and normal directions of the manifold. To mitigate the singularity and improve the sampling accuracy, we propose two novel methods: (1) Niso-DM, which introduces non-isotropic noise along the normal direction to reduce scale discrepancies, and (2) Tango-DM, which trains only the tangential component of the score function using a tangential-only loss function. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve superior performance on distributions over various manifolds with complex geometries.
BINGO: A Novel Pruning Mechanism to Reduce the Size of Neural Networks
Authors: Aditya Panangat
Date: 2025-05-15 00:00:00

Over the past decade, the use of machine learning has increased exponentially. Models are far more complex than ever before, growing to gargantuan sizes and housing millions of weights. Unfortunately, the fact that large models have become the state of the art means that it often costs millions of dollars to train and operate them. These expenses not only hurt companies but also bar non-wealthy individuals from contributing to new developments and force consumers to pay greater prices for AI. Current methods used to prune models, such as iterative magnitude pruning, have shown great accuracy but require an iterative training sequence that is incredibly computationally and environmentally taxing. To solve this problem, BINGO is introduced. BINGO, during the training pass, studies specific subsets of a neural network one at a time to gauge how significant of a role each weight plays in contributing to a network's accuracy. By the time training is done, BINGO generates a significance score for each weight, allowing for insignificant weights to be pruned in one shot. BINGO provides an accuracy-preserving pruning technique that is less computationally intensive than current methods, allowing for a world where AI growth does not have to mean model growth, as well.
Chisme: Fully Decentralized Differentiated Deep Learning for Edge Intelligence
Authors: Harikrishna Kuttivelil, Katia Obraczka
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

As demand for intelligent services rises and edge devices become more capable, distributed learning at the network edge has emerged as a key enabling technology. While existing paradigms like federated learning (FL) and decentralized FL (DFL) enable privacy-preserving distributed learning in many scenarios, they face potential challenges in connectivity and synchronization imposed by resource-constrained and infrastructure-less environments. While more robust, gossip learning (GL) algorithms have generally been designed for homogeneous data distributions and may not suit all contexts. This paper introduces Chisme, a novel suite of protocols designed to address the challenges of implementing robust intelligence in the network edge, characterized by heterogeneous data distributions, episodic connectivity, and lack of infrastructure. Chisme includes both synchronous DFL (Chisme-DFL) and asynchronous GL (Chisme-GL) variants that enable collaborative yet decentralized model training that considers underlying data heterogeneity. We introduce a data similarity heuristic that allows agents to opportunistically infer affinity with each other using the existing communication of model updates in decentralized FL and GL. We leverage the heuristic to extend DFL's model aggregation and GL's model merge mechanisms for better personalized training while maintaining collaboration. While Chisme-DFL is a synchronous decentralized approach whose resource utilization scales linearly with network size, Chisme-GL is fully asynchronous and has a lower, constant resource requirement independent of network size. We demonstrate that Chisme methods outperform their standard counterparts in model training over distributed and heterogeneous data in network scenarios ranging from less connected and reliable networks to fully connected and lossless networks.
ZENN: A Thermodynamics-Inspired Computational Framework for Heterogeneous Data-Driven Modeling
Authors: Shun Wang, Shun-Li Shang, Zi-Kui Liu, Wenrui Hao
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00

Traditional entropy-based methods - such as cross-entropy loss in classification problems - have long been essential tools for quantifying uncertainty and disorder in data and developing artificial intelligence algorithms. However, the rapid growth of data across various domains has introduced new challenges, particularly the integration of heterogeneous datasets with intrinsic disparities. In this paper, we extend zentropy theory into the data science domain by introducing intrinsic entropy, enabling more effective learning from heterogeneous data sources. We propose a zentropy-enhanced neural network (ZENN) that simultaneously learns both energy and intrinsic entropy components, capturing the underlying structure of multi-source data. To support this, we redesign the neural network architecture to better reflect the intrinsic properties and variability inherent in diverse datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ZENN on classification tasks and energy landscape reconstructions, showing its superior generalization capabilities and robustness-particularly in predicting high-order derivatives. As a practical application, we employ ZENN to reconstruct the Helmholtz energy landscape of Fe3Pt using data generated from DFT and capture key material behaviors, including negative thermal expansion and the critical point in the temperature-pressure space. Overall, our study introduces a novel approach for data-driven machine learning grounded in zentropy theory, highlighting ZENN as a versatile and robust deep learning framework for scientific problems involving complex, heterogeneous datasets.
Radiogenomic Bipartite Graph Representation Learning for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Authors: Aditya Raj, Golrokh Mirzaei
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Alzheimer's Disease Detection, Classification, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Imaging and genomic data offer distinct and rich features, and their integration can unveil new insights into the complex landscape of diseases. In this study, we present a novel approach utilizing radiogenomic data including structural MRI images and gene expression data, for Alzheimer's disease detection. Our framework introduces a novel heterogeneous bipartite graph representation learning featuring two distinct node types: genes and images. The network can effectively classify Alzheimer's disease (AD) into three distinct stages:AD, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Cognitive Normal (CN) classes, utilizing a small dataset. Additionally, it identified which genes play a significant role in each of these classification groups. We evaluate the performance of our approach using metrics including classification accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score. The proposed technique holds potential for extending to radiogenomic-based classification to other diseases.
Automated Alert Classification and Triage (AACT): An Intelligent System for the Prioritisation of Cybersecurity Alerts
Authors: Melissa Turcotte, François Labrèche, Serge-Olivier Paquette
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00

Enterprise networks are growing ever larger with a rapidly expanding attack surface, increasing the volume of security alerts generated from security controls. Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts triage these alerts to identify malicious activity, but they struggle with alert fatigue due to the overwhelming number of benign alerts. Organisations are turning to managed SOC providers, where the problem is amplified by context switching and limited visibility into business processes. A novel system, named AACT, is introduced that automates SOC workflows by learning from analysts' triage actions on cybersecurity alerts. It accurately predicts triage decisions in real time, allowing benign alerts to be closed automatically and critical ones prioritised. This reduces the SOC queue allowing analysts to focus on the most severe, relevant or ambiguous threats. The system has been trained and evaluated on both real SOC data and an open dataset, obtaining high performance in identifying malicious alerts from benign alerts. Additionally, the system has demonstrated high accuracy in a real SOC environment, reducing alerts shown to analysts by 61% over six months, with a low false negative rate of 1.36% over millions of alerts.
Learning Rock Pushability on Rough Planetary Terrain
Authors: Tuba Girgin, Emre Girgin, Cagri Kilic
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00

In the context of mobile navigation in unstructured environments, the predominant approach entails the avoidance of obstacles. The prevailing path planning algorithms are contingent upon deviating from the intended path for an indefinite duration and returning to the closest point on the route after the obstacle is left behind spatially. However, avoiding an obstacle on a path that will be used repeatedly by multiple agents can hinder long-term efficiency and lead to a lasting reliance on an active path planning system. In this study, we propose an alternative approach to mobile navigation in unstructured environments by leveraging the manipulation capabilities of a robotic manipulator mounted on top of a mobile robot. Our proposed framework integrates exteroceptive and proprioceptive feedback to assess the push affordance of obstacles, facilitating their repositioning rather than avoidance. While our preliminary visual estimation takes into account the characteristics of both the obstacle and the surface it relies on, the push affordance estimation module exploits the force feedback obtained by interacting with the obstacle via a robotic manipulator as the guidance signal. The objective of our navigation approach is to enhance the efficiency of routes utilized by multiple agents over extended periods by reducing the overall time spent by a fleet in environments where autonomous infrastructure development is imperative, such as lunar or Martian surfaces.
Learning Kronecker-Structured Graphs from Smooth Signals
Authors: Changhao Shi, Gal Mishne
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Graph learning, or network inference, is a prominent problem in graph signal processing (GSP). GSP generalizes the Fourier transform to non-Euclidean domains, and graph learning is pivotal to applying GSP when these domains are unknown. With the recent prevalence of multi-way data, there has been growing interest in product graphs that naturally factorize dependencies across different ways. However, the types of graph products that can be learned are still limited for modeling diverse dependency structures. In this paper, we study the problem of learning a Kronecker-structured product graph from smooth signals. Unlike the more commonly used Cartesian product, the Kronecker product models dependencies in a more intricate, non-separable way, but posits harder constraints on the graph learning problem. To tackle this non-convex problem, we propose an alternating scheme to optimize each factor graph and provide theoretical guarantees for its asymptotic convergence. The proposed algorithm is also modified to learn factor graphs of the strong product. We conduct experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs and demonstrate our approach's efficacy and superior performance compared to existing methods.
Adversarial Attack on Large Language Models using Exponentiated Gradient Descent
Authors: Sajib Biswas, Mao Nishino, Samuel Jacob Chacko, Xiuwen Liu
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used, understanding them systematically is key to improving their safety and realizing their full potential. Although many models are aligned using techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), they are still vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. Some of the existing adversarial attack methods search for discrete tokens that may jailbreak a target model while others try to optimize the continuous space represented by the tokens of the model's vocabulary. While techniques based on the discrete space may prove to be inefficient, optimization of continuous token embeddings requires projections to produce discrete tokens, which might render them ineffective. To fully utilize the constraints and the structures of the space, we develop an intrinsic optimization technique using exponentiated gradient descent with the Bregman projection method to ensure that the optimized one-hot encoding always stays within the probability simplex. We prove the convergence of the technique and implement an efficient algorithm that is effective in jailbreaking several widely used LLMs. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique using five open-source LLMs on four openly available datasets. The results show that the technique achieves a higher success rate with great efficiency compared to three other state-of-the-art jailbreaking techniques. The source code for our implementation is available at: https://github.com/sbamit/Exponentiated-Gradient-Descent-LLM-Attack
Comparative Analysis of Stroke Prediction Models Using Machine Learning
Authors: Anastasija Tashkova, Stefan Eftimov, Bojan Ristov, Slobodan Kalajdziski
Date: 2025-05-14 00:00:00

Stroke remains one of the most critical global health challenges, ranking as the second leading cause of death and the third leading cause of disability worldwide. This study explores the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms in predicting stroke risk using demographic, clinical, and lifestyle data from the Stroke Prediction Dataset. By addressing key methodological challenges such as class imbalance and missing data, we evaluated the performance of multiple models, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost. Our results demonstrate that while these models achieve high accuracy, sensitivity remains a limiting factor for real-world clinical applications. In addition, we identify the most influential predictive features and propose strategies to improve machine learning-based stroke prediction. These findings contribute to the development of more reliable and interpretable models for the early assessment of stroke risk.