pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Inconsistency-based Active Learning for LiDAR Object Detection
Authors: Esteban Rivera, Loic Stratil, Markus Lienkamp
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Deep learning models for object detection in autonomous driving have recently achieved impressive performance gains and are already being deployed in vehicles worldwide. However, current models require increasingly large datasets for training. Acquiring and labeling such data is costly, necessitating the development of new strategies to optimize this process. Active learning is a promising approach that has been extensively researched in the image domain. In our work, we extend this concept to the LiDAR domain by developing several inconsistency-based sample selection strategies and evaluate their effectiveness in various settings. Our results show that using a naive inconsistency approach based on the number of detected boxes, we achieve the same mAP as the random sampling strategy with 50% of the labeled data.
Context-Aware Online Conformal Anomaly Detection with Prediction-Powered Data Acquisition
Authors: Amirmohammad Farzaneh, Osvaldo Simeone
Date: 2025-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Online anomaly detection is essential in fields such as cybersecurity, healthcare, and industrial monitoring, where promptly identifying deviations from expected behavior can avert critical failures or security breaches. While numerous anomaly scoring methods based on supervised or unsupervised learning have been proposed, current approaches typically rely on a continuous stream of real-world calibration data to provide assumption-free guarantees on the false discovery rate (FDR). To address the inherent challenges posed by limited real calibration data, we introduce context-aware prediction-powered conformal online anomaly detection (C-PP-COAD). Our framework strategically leverages synthetic calibration data to mitigate data scarcity, while adaptively integrating real data based on contextual cues. C-PP-COAD utilizes conformal p-values, active p-value statistics, and online FDR control mechanisms to maintain rigorous and reliable anomaly detection performance over time. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that C-PP-COAD significantly reduces dependency on real calibration data without compromising guaranteed FDR control.
KeySync: A Robust Approach for Leakage-free Lip Synchronization in High Resolution
Authors: Antoni Bigata, Rodrigo Mira, Stella Bounareli, Michał Stypułkowski, Konstantinos Vougioukas, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Talking Head Generation

Lip synchronization, known as the task of aligning lip movements in an existing video with new input audio, is typically framed as a simpler variant of audio-driven facial animation. However, as well as suffering from the usual issues in talking head generation (e.g., temporal consistency), lip synchronization presents significant new challenges such as expression leakage from the input video and facial occlusions, which can severely impact real-world applications like automated dubbing, but are often neglected in existing works. To address these shortcomings, we present KeySync, a two-stage framework that succeeds in solving the issue of temporal consistency, while also incorporating solutions for leakage and occlusions using a carefully designed masking strategy. We show that KeySync achieves state-of-the-art results in lip reconstruction and cross-synchronization, improving visual quality and reducing expression leakage according to LipLeak, our novel leakage metric. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our new masking approach in handling occlusions and validate our architectural choices through several ablation studies. Code and model weights can be found at https://antonibigata.github.io/KeySync.
JointDiT: Enhancing RGB-Depth Joint Modeling with Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Kwon Byung-Ki, Qi Dai, Lee Hyoseok, Chong Luo, Tae-Hyun Oh
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Image Generation, Scheduling

We present JointDiT, a diffusion transformer that models the joint distribution of RGB and depth. By leveraging the architectural benefit and outstanding image prior of the state-of-the-art diffusion transformer, JointDiT not only generates high-fidelity images but also produces geometrically plausible and accurate depth maps. This solid joint distribution modeling is achieved through two simple yet effective techniques that we propose, i.e., adaptive scheduling weights, which depend on the noise levels of each modality, and the unbalanced timestep sampling strategy. With these techniques, we train our model across all noise levels for each modality, enabling JointDiT to naturally handle various combinatorial generation tasks, including joint generation, depth estimation, and depth-conditioned image generation by simply controlling the timestep of each branch. JointDiT demonstrates outstanding joint generation performance. Furthermore, it achieves comparable results in depth estimation and depth-conditioned image generation, suggesting that joint distribution modeling can serve as a replaceable alternative to conditional generation. The project page is available at https://byungki-k.github.io/JointDiT/.
Efficient On-Chip Implementation of 4D Radar-Based 3D Object Detection on Hailo-8L
Authors: Woong-Chan Byun, Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Song, Seung-Hyun Kong
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, GPU, object-detection, Object Detection, Robust 3D Object Detection

4D radar has attracted attention in autonomous driving due to its ability to enable robust 3D object detection even under adverse weather conditions. To practically deploy such technologies, it is essential to achieve real-time processing within low-power embedded environments. Addressing this, we present the first on-chip implementation of a 4D radar-based 3D object detection model on the Hailo-8L AI accelerator. Although conventional 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures require 5D inputs, the Hailo-8L only supports 4D tensors, posing a significant challenge. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a tensor transformation method that reshapes 5D inputs into 4D formats during the compilation process, enabling direct deployment without altering the model structure. The proposed system achieves 46.47% AP_3D and 52.75% AP_BEV, maintaining comparable accuracy to GPU-based models while achieving an inference speed of 13.76 Hz. These results demonstrate the applicability of 4D radar-based perception technologies to autonomous driving systems.
CORSTITCH - A free, open source software for stitching and georeferencing underwater coral reef videos
Authors: Julian Christopher L. Maypa, Johnenn R. Manalang, Maricor N. Soriano
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00

CorStitch is an open-source software developed to automate the creation of accurate georeferenced reef mosaics from video transects obtained through Automated Rapid Reef Assessment System surveys. We utilized a Fourier-based image correlation algorithm to stitch sequential video frames, aligning them with synchronized GNSS timestamps. The resulting compressed Keyhole Markup Language files, compatible with geographic information systems such as Google Earth, enable detailed spatial analysis. Validation through comparative analysis of mosaics from two temporally distinct surveys of the same reef demonstrated the software's consistent and reliable performance.
Toward Practical Quantum Machine Learning: A Novel Hybrid Quantum LSTM for Fraud Detection
Authors: Rushikesh Ubale, Sujan K. K., Sangram Deshpande, Gregory T. Byrd
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Quantum Machine Learning

We present a novel hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture for fraud detection that integrates a classical Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with a variational quantum circuit. By leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, our model enhances the feature representation of sequential transaction data, capturing complex non-linear patterns that are challenging for purely classical models. A comprehensive data preprocessing pipeline is employed to clean, encode, balance, and normalize a credit card fraud dataset, ensuring a fair comparison with baseline models. Notably, our hybrid approach achieves per-epoch training times in the range of 45-65 seconds, which is significantly faster than similar architectures reported in the literature, where training typically requires several minutes per epoch. Both classical and quantum gradients are jointly optimized via a unified backpropagation procedure employing the parameter-shift rule for the quantum parameters. Experimental evaluations demonstrate competitive improvements in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score relative to a conventional LSTM baseline. These results underscore the promise of hybrid quantum-classical techniques in advancing the efficiency and performance of fraud detection systems. Keywords: Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks, Quantum Computing, Fraud Detection, Hybrid Quantum LSTM, Variational Quantum Circuit, Parameter-Shift Rule, Financial Risk Analysis
ClearLines - Camera Calibration from Straight Lines
Authors: Gregory Schroeder, Mohamed Sabry, Cristina Olaverri-Monreal
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration, Line Detection

The problem of calibration from straight lines is fundamental in geometric computer vision, with well-established theoretical foundations. However, its practical applicability remains limited, particularly in real-world outdoor scenarios. These environments pose significant challenges due to diverse and cluttered scenes, interrupted reprojections of straight 3D lines, and varying lighting conditions, making the task notoriously difficult. Furthermore, the field lacks a dedicated dataset encouraging the development of respective detection algorithms. In this study, we present a small dataset named "ClearLines", and by detailing its creation process, provide practical insights that can serve as a guide for developing and refining straight 3D line detection algorithms.
Estimation of discrete distributions in relative entropy, and the deviations of the missing mass
Authors: Jaouad Mourtada
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal expected risk bounds are known, high-probability guarantees remain less well-understood. First, we analyze the classical Laplace (add-one) estimator, obtaining matching upper and lower bounds on its performance and showing its optimality among confidence-independent estimators. We then characterize the minimax-optimal high-probability risk, which is attained via a simple confidence-dependent smoothing technique. Interestingly, the optimal non-asymptotic risk exhibits an additional logarithmic factor over the ideal asymptotic risk. Next, motivated by scenarios where the alphabet exceeds the sample size, we investigate methods that adapt to the sparsity of the distribution at hand. We introduce an estimator using data-dependent smoothing, for which we establish a high-probability risk bound depending on two effective sparsity parameters. As part of the analysis, we also derive a sharp high-probability upper bound on the missing mass.
Sionna RT: Technical Report
Authors: Fayçal Aït Aoudia, Jakob Hoydis, Merlin Nimier-David, Sebastian Cammerer, Alexander Keller
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Sionna is an open-source, GPU-accelerated library that, as of version 0.14, incorporates a ray tracer for simulating radio wave propagation. A unique feature of Sionna RT is differentiability, enabling the calculation of gradients for the channel impulse responses (CIRs), radio maps, and other related metrics with respect to system and environmental parameters, such as material properties, antenna patterns, and array geometries. The release of Sionna 1.0 provides a complete overhaul of the ray tracer, significantly improving its speed, memory efficiency, and extensibility. This document details the algorithms employed by Sionna RT to simulate radio wave propagation efficiently, while also addressing their current limitations. Given that the computation of CIRs and radio maps requires distinct algorithms, these are detailed in separate sections. For CIRs, Sionna RT integrates shooting and bouncing of rays (SBR) with the image method and uses a hashing-based mechanism to efficiently eliminate duplicate paths. Radio maps are computed using a purely SBR-based approach.
Markovian Continuity of the MMSE
Authors: Elad Domanovitz, Anatoly Khina
Date: 2025-04-20 00:00:00

Minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation is widely used in signal processing and related fields. While it is known to be non-continuous with respect to all standard notions of stochastic convergence, it remains robust in practical applications. In this work, we review the known counterexamples to the continuity of the MMSE. We observe that, in these counterexamples, the discontinuity arises from an element in the converging measurement sequence providing more information about the estimand than the limit of the measurement sequence. We argue that this behavior is uncharacteristic of real-world applications and introduce a new stochastic convergence notion, termed Markovian convergence, to address this issue. We prove that the MMSE is, in fact, continuous under this new notion. We supplement this result with semi-continuity and continuity guarantees of the MMSE in other settings and prove the continuity of the MMSE under linear estimation.
LZ Penalty: An information-theoretic repetition penalty for autoregressive language models
Authors: Antonio A. Ginart, Naveen Kodali, Jason Lee, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, John R. Emmons
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

We introduce the LZ penalty, a penalty specialized for reducing degenerate repetitions in autoregressive language models without loss of capability. The penalty is based on the codelengths in the LZ77 universal lossless compression algorithm. Through the lens of the prediction-compression duality, decoding the LZ penalty has the interpretation of sampling from the residual distribution after removing the information that is highly compressible. We demonstrate the LZ penalty enables state-of-the-art open-source reasoning models to operate with greedy (temperature zero) decoding without loss of capability and without instances of degenerate repetition. Both the industry-standard frequency penalty and repetition penalty are ineffective, incurring degenerate repetition rates of up to 4%.
Sustainable Smart Farm Networks: Enhancing Resilience and Efficiency with Decision Theory-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Dian Chen, Zelin Wan, Dong Sam Ha, Jin-Hee Cho
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning

Solar sensor-based monitoring systems have become a crucial agricultural innovation, advancing farm management and animal welfare through integrating sensor technology, Internet-of-Things, and edge and cloud computing. However, the resilience of these systems to cyber-attacks and their adaptability to dynamic and constrained energy supplies remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose a sustainable smart farm network designed to maintain high-quality animal monitoring under various cyber and adversarial threats, as well as fluctuating energy conditions. Our approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to devise optimal policies that maximize both monitoring effectiveness and energy efficiency. To overcome DRL's inherent challenge of slow convergence, we integrate transfer learning (TL) and decision theory (DT) to accelerate the learning process. By incorporating DT-guided strategies, we optimize monitoring quality and energy sustainability, significantly reducing training time while achieving comparable performance rewards. Our experimental results prove that DT-guided DRL outperforms TL-enhanced DRL models, improving system performance and reducing training runtime by 47.5%.
Nonnegative Low-rank Matrix Recovery Can Have Spurious Local Minima
Authors: Richard Y. Zhang
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00

The classical low-rank matrix recovery problem is well-known to exhibit \emph{benign nonconvexity} under the restricted isometry property (RIP): local optimization is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum, where the ground truth is recovered. We investigate whether benign nonconvexity continues to hold when the factor matrices are constrained to be elementwise nonnegative -- a common practical requirement. In the simple setting of a rank-1 nonnegative ground truth, we confirm that benign nonconvexity holds in the fully-observed case with RIP constant $\delta=0$. Surprisingly, however, this property fails to extend to the partially-observed case with any arbitrarily small RIP constant $\delta\to0^{+}$, irrespective of rank overparameterization. This finding exposes a critical theoretical gap: the continuity argument widely used to explain the empirical robustness of low-rank matrix recovery fundamentally breaks down once nonnegative constraints are imposed.
Learning Survival Distributions with the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution
Authors: Deming Sheng, Ricardo Henao
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: quantile regression, Survival Analysis

Probabilistic survival analysis models seek to estimate the distribution of the future occurrence (time) of an event given a set of covariates. In recent years, these models have preferred nonparametric specifications that avoid directly estimating survival distributions via discretization. Specifically, they estimate the probability of an individual event at fixed times or the time of an event at fixed probabilities (quantiles), using supervised learning. Borrowing ideas from the quantile regression literature, we propose a parametric survival analysis method based on the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution (ALD). This distribution allows for closed-form calculation of popular event summaries such as mean, median, mode, variation, and quantiles. The model is optimized by maximum likelihood to learn, at the individual level, the parameters (location, scale, and asymmetry) of the ALD distribution. Extensive results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms parametric and nonparametric approaches in terms of accuracy, discrimination and calibration.
Robust Federated Personalised Mean Estimation for the Gaussian Mixture Model
Authors: Malhar A. Managoli, Vinod M. Prabhakaran, Suhas Diggavi
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning with heterogeneous data and personalization has received significant recent attention. Separately, robustness to corrupted data in the context of federated learning has also been studied. In this paper we explore combining personalization for heterogeneous data with robustness, where a constant fraction of the clients are corrupted. Motivated by this broad problem, we formulate a simple instantiation which captures some of its difficulty. We focus on the specific problem of personalized mean estimation where the data is drawn from a Gaussian mixture model. We give an algorithm whose error depends almost linearly on the ratio of corrupted to uncorrupted samples, and show a lower bound with the same behavior, albeit with a gap of a constant factor.
Multi-modal cascade feature transfer for polymer property prediction
Authors: Kiichi Obuchi, Yuta Yahagi, Kiyohiko Toyama, Shukichi Tanaka, Kota Matsui
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Property Prediction, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach called multi-modal cascade model with feature transfer for polymer property prediction.Polymers are characterized by a composite of data in several different formats, including molecular descriptors and additive information as well as chemical structures. However, in conventional approaches, prediction models were often constructed using each type of data separately. Our model enables more accurate prediction of physical properties for polymers by combining features extracted from the chemical structure by graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) with features such as molecular descriptors and additive information. The predictive performance of the proposed method is empirically evaluated using several polymer datasets. We report that the proposed method shows high predictive performance compared to the baseline conventional approach using a single feature.
Lossy Beyond Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Modeling and Optimization
Authors: Yiyang Peng, Hongyu Li, Zheyu Wu, Bruno Clerckx
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

Beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) has emerged as an advancement and generalization of the conventional diagonal RIS (D-RIS) by introducing tunable interconnections between RIS elements, enabling smarter wave manipulation and enlarged coverage. While BD-RIS has demonstrated advantages over D-RIS in various aspects, most existing works rely on the assumption of a lossless model, leaving practical considerations unaddressed. This paper thus proposes a lossy BD-RIS model and develops corresponding optimization algorithms for various BD-RIS-aided communication systems. First, by leveraging admittance parameter analysis, we model each tunable admittance based on a lumped circuit with losses and derive an expression of a circle characterizing the real and imaginary parts of each tunable admittance. We then consider the received signal power maximization in single-user single-input single-output (SISO) systems with the proposed lossy BD-RIS model. To solve the optimization problem, we design an effective algorithm by carefully exploiting the problem structure. Specifically, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework is custom-designed to deal with the complicated constraints associated with lossy BD-RIS. Furthermore, we extend the proposed algorithmic framework to more general multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems, where the transmit precoder and BD-RIS scattering matrix are jointly designed to maximize the sum-rate of the system. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that all BD-RIS architectures still outperform D-RIS in the presence of losses, but the optimal BD-RIS architectures in the lossless case are not necessarily optimal in the lossy case, e.g. group-connected BD-RIS can outperform fully- and tree-connected BD-RISs in SISO systems with relatively high losses, whereas the opposite always holds true in the lossless case.
IndicSQuAD: A Comprehensive Multilingual Question Answering Dataset for Indic Languages
Authors: Sharvi Endait, Ruturaj Ghatage, Aditya Kulkarni, Rajlaxmi Patil, Raviraj Joshi
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

The rapid progress in question-answering (QA) systems has predominantly benefited high-resource languages, leaving Indic languages largely underrepresented despite their vast native speaker base. In this paper, we present IndicSQuAD, a comprehensive multi-lingual extractive QA dataset covering nine major Indic languages, systematically derived from the SQuAD dataset. Building on previous work with MahaSQuAD for Marathi, our approach adapts and extends translation techniques to maintain high linguistic fidelity and accurate answer-span alignment across diverse languages. IndicSQuAD comprises extensive training, validation, and test sets for each language, providing a robust foundation for model development. We evaluate baseline performances using language-specific monolingual BERT models and the multilingual MuRIL-BERT. The results indicate some challenges inherent in low-resource settings. Moreover, our experiments suggest potential directions for future work, including expanding to additional languages, developing domain-specific datasets, and incorporating multimodal data. The dataset and models are publicly shared at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/indic-nlp