pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SPARC: Subspace-Aware Prompt Adaptation for Robust Continual Learning in LLMs
Authors: Dinithi Jayasuriya, Sina Tayebati, Davide Ettori, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

We propose SPARC, a lightweight continual learning framework for large language models (LLMs) that enables efficient task adaptation through prompt tuning in a lower-dimensional space. By leveraging principal component analysis (PCA), we identify a compact subspace of the training data. Optimizing prompts in this lower-dimensional space enhances training efficiency, as it focuses updates on the most relevant features while reducing computational overhead. Furthermore, since the model's internal structure remains unaltered, the extensive knowledge gained from pretraining is fully preserved, ensuring that previously learned information is not compromised during adaptation. Our method achieves high knowledge retention in both task-incremental and domain-incremental continual learning setups while fine-tuning only 0.04% of the model's parameters. Additionally, by integrating LoRA, we enhance adaptability to computational constraints, allowing for a tradeoff between accuracy and training cost. Experiments on the SuperGLUE benchmark demonstrate that our PCA-based prompt tuning combined with LoRA maintains full knowledge retention while improving accuracy, utilizing only 1% of the model's parameters. These results establish our approach as a scalable and resource-efficient solution for continual learning in LLMs.
Conformal Uncertainty Indicator for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Fan Lyu, Hanyu Zhao, Ziqi Shi, Ye Liu, Fuyuan Hu, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Test-time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt models to sequentially changing domains during testing, relying on pseudo-labels for self-adaptation. However, incorrect pseudo-labels can accumulate, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we propose a Conformal Uncertainty Indicator (CUI) for CTTA, leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP) to generate prediction sets that include the true label with a specified coverage probability. Since domain shifts can lower the coverage than expected, making CP unreliable, we dynamically compensate for the coverage by measuring both domain and data differences. Reliable pseudo-labels from CP are then selectively utilized to enhance adaptation. Experiments confirm that CUI effectively estimates uncertainty and improves adaptation performance across various existing CTTA methods.
SAMRefiner: Taming Segment Anything Model for Universal Mask Refinement
Authors: Yuqi Lin, Hengjia Li, Wenqi Shao, Zheng Yang, Jun Zhao, Xiaofei He, Ping Luo, Kaipeng Zhang
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we explore a principal way to enhance the quality of widely pre-existing coarse masks, enabling them to serve as reliable training data for segmentation models to reduce the annotation cost. In contrast to prior refinement techniques that are tailored to specific models or tasks in a close-world manner, we propose SAMRefiner, a universal and efficient approach by adapting SAM to the mask refinement task. The core technique of our model is the noise-tolerant prompting scheme. Specifically, we introduce a multi-prompt excavation strategy to mine diverse input prompts for SAM (i.e., distance-guided points, context-aware elastic bounding boxes, and Gaussian-style masks) from initial coarse masks. These prompts can collaborate with each other to mitigate the effect of defects in coarse masks. In particular, considering the difficulty of SAM to handle the multi-object case in semantic segmentation, we introduce a split-then-merge (STM) pipeline. Additionally, we extend our method to SAMRefiner++ by introducing an additional IoU adaption step to further boost the performance of the generic SAMRefiner on the target dataset. This step is self-boosted and requires no additional annotation. The proposed framework is versatile and can flexibly cooperate with existing segmentation methods. We evaluate our mask framework on a wide range of benchmarks under different settings, demonstrating better accuracy and efficiency. SAMRefiner holds significant potential to expedite the evolution of refinement tools. Our code is available at https://github.com/linyq2117/SAMRefiner.
Multimodal Task Representation Memory Bank vs. Catastrophic Forgetting in Anomaly Detection
Authors: You Zhou, Jiangshan Zhao, Deyu Zeng, Zuo Zuo, Weixiang Liu, Zongze Wu
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Unsupervised Continuous Anomaly Detection (UCAD) faces significant challenges in multi-task representation learning, with existing methods suffering from incomplete representation and catastrophic forgetting. Unlike supervised models, unsupervised scenarios lack prior information, making it difficult to effectively distinguish redundant and complementary multimodal features. To address this, we propose the Multimodal Task Representation Memory Bank (MTRMB) method through two key technical innovations: A Key-Prompt-Multimodal Knowledge (KPMK) mechanism that uses concise key prompts to guide cross-modal feature interaction between BERT and ViT. Refined Structure-based Contrastive Learning (RSCL) leveraging Grounding DINO and SAM to generate precise segmentation masks, pulling features of the same structural region closer while pushing different structural regions apart. Experiments on MVtec AD and VisA datasets demonstrate MTRMB's superiority, achieving an average detection accuracy of 0.921 at the lowest forgetting rate, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We plan to open source on GitHub.
FunduSAM: A Specialized Deep Learning Model for Enhanced Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation in Fundus Images
Authors: Jinchen Yu, Yongwei Nie, Fei Qi, Wenxiong Liao, Hongmin Cai
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained popularity as a versatile image segmentation method, thanks to its strong generalization capabilities across various domains. However, when applied to optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation tasks, SAM encounters challenges due to the complex structures, low contrast, and blurred boundaries typical of fundus images, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel model, FunduSAM, which incorporates several Adapters into SAM to create a deep network specifically designed for OD and OC segmentation. The FunduSAM utilizes Adapter into each transformer block after encoder for parameter fine-tuning (PEFT). It enhances SAM's feature extraction capabilities by designing a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), addressing issues related to blurred boundaries and low contrast. Given the unique requirements of OD and OC segmentation, polar transformation is used to convert the original fundus OD images into a format better suited for training and evaluating FunduSAM. A joint loss is used to achieve structure preservation between the OD and OC, while accurate segmentation. Extensive experiments on the REFUGE dataset, comprising 1,200 fundus images, demonstrate the superior performance of FunduSAM compared to five mainstream approaches.
LawGPT: Knowledge-Guided Data Generation and Its Application to Legal LLM
Authors: Zhi Zhou, Kun-Yang Yu, Shi-Yu Tian, Jiang-Xin Shi, Xiao-Wen Yang, Pengxiao Song, Yi-Xuan Jin, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Legal Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs), both proprietary and open-source, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. However, they face significant limitations in legal reasoning tasks. Proprietary models introduce data privacy risks and high inference costs, while open-source models underperform due to insufficient legal domain training data. To address these limitations, we study data generation for legal reasoning to improve the legal reasoning performance of open-source LLMs with the help of proprietary LLMs. This is challenging due to the lack of legal knowledge in proprietary LLMs and the difficulty in verifying the generated data. We propose KgDG, a knowledge-guided data generation framework for legal reasoning. Our framework enables leveraging legal knowledge to enhance generation diversity and introduces a refinement and verification process to ensure the quality of generated data. Moreover, we expand the generated dataset to further enhance the LLM reasoning capabilities. Using KgDG, we create a synthetic legal reasoning dataset containing 50K high-quality examples. Our trained model LawGPT outperforms existing legal-specific LLMs and achieves performance comparable to proprietary LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of KgDG and LawGPT. Our code and resources is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KgDG-45F5 .
LegalViz: Legal Text Visualization by Text To Diagram Generation
Authors: Eri Onami, Taiki Miyanishi, Koki Maeda, Shuhei Kurita
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Legal documents including judgments and court orders require highly sophisticated legal knowledge for understanding. To disclose expert knowledge for non-experts, we explore the problem of visualizing legal texts with easy-to-understand diagrams and propose a novel dataset of LegalViz with 23 languages and 7,010 cases of legal document and visualization pairs, using the DOT graph description language of Graphviz. LegalViz provides a simple diagram from a complicated legal corpus identifying legal entities, transactions, legal sources, and statements at a glance, that are essential in each judgment. In addition, we provide new evaluation metrics for the legal diagram visualization by considering graph structures, textual similarities, and legal contents. We conducted empirical studies on few-shot and finetuning large language models for generating legal diagrams and evaluated them with these metrics, including legal content-based evaluation within 23 languages. Models trained with LegalViz outperform existing models including GPTs, confirming the effectiveness of our dataset.
Investigating the Shortcomings of LLMs in Step-by-Step Legal Reasoning
Authors: Venkatesh Mishra, Bimsara Pathiraja, Mihir Parmar, Sat Chidananda, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Chitta Baral
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Legal Reasoning, Multiple-choice, Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA), Question Answering

Reasoning abilities of LLMs have been a key focus in recent years. One challenging reasoning domain with interesting nuances is legal reasoning, which requires careful application of rules, and precedents while balancing deductive and analogical reasoning, and conflicts between rules. Although there have been a few works on using LLMs for legal reasoning, their focus has been on overall accuracy. In this paper, we dig deeper to do a step-by-step analysis and figure out where they commit errors. We use the college-level Multiple Choice Question-Answering (MCQA) task from the \textit{Civil Procedure} dataset and propose a new error taxonomy derived from initial manual analysis of reasoning chains with respect to several LLMs, including two objective measures: soundness and correctness scores. We then develop an LLM-based automated evaluation framework to identify reasoning errors and evaluate the performance of LLMs. The computation of soundness and correctness on the dataset using the auto-evaluator framework reveals several interesting insights. Furthermore, we show that incorporating the error taxonomy as feedback in popular prompting techniques marginally increases LLM performance. Our work will also serve as an evaluation framework that can be used in detailed error analysis of reasoning chains for logic-intensive complex tasks.
3CAD: A Large-Scale Real-World 3C Product Dataset for Unsupervised Anomaly
Authors: Enquan Yang, Peng Xing, Hanyang Sun, Wenbo Guo, Yuanwei Ma, Zechao Li, Dan Zeng
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection achieves progress thanks to datasets such as MVTec-AD and VisA. However, they suf- fer from limitations in terms of the number of defect sam- ples, types of defects, and availability of real-world scenes. These constraints inhibit researchers from further exploring the performance of industrial detection with higher accuracy. To this end, we propose a new large-scale anomaly detection dataset called 3CAD, which is derived from real 3C produc- tion lines. Specifically, the proposed 3CAD includes eight different types of manufactured parts, totaling 27,039 high- resolution images labeled with pixel-level anomalies. The key features of 3CAD are that it covers anomalous regions of different sizes, multiple anomaly types, and the possibility of multiple anomalous regions and multiple anomaly types per anomaly image. This is the largest and first anomaly de- tection dataset dedicated to 3C product quality control for community exploration and development. Meanwhile, we in- troduce a simple yet effective framework for unsupervised anomaly detection: a Coarse-to-Fine detection paradigm with Recovery Guidance (CFRG). To detect small defect anoma- lies, the proposed CFRG utilizes a coarse-to-fine detection paradigm. Specifically, we utilize a heterogeneous distilla- tion model for coarse localization and then fine localiza- tion through a segmentation model. In addition, to better capture normal patterns, we introduce recovery features as guidance. Finally, we report the results of our CFRG frame- work and popular anomaly detection methods on the 3CAD dataset, demonstrating strong competitiveness and providing a highly challenging benchmark to promote the development of the anomaly detection field. Data and code are available: https://github.com/EnquanYang2022/3CAD.
The Evolution of Dataset Distillation: Toward Scalable and Generalizable Solutions
Authors: Ping Liu, Jiawei Du
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Distillation, Survey

Dataset distillation, which condenses large-scale datasets into compact synthetic representations, has emerged as a critical solution for training modern deep learning models efficiently. While prior surveys focus on developments before 2023, this work comprehensively reviews recent advances, emphasizing scalability to large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K. We categorize progress into a few key methodologies: trajectory matching, gradient matching, distribution matching, scalable generative approaches, and decoupling optimization mechanisms. As a comprehensive examination of recent dataset distillation advances, this survey highlights breakthrough innovations: the SRe2L framework for efficient and effective condensation, soft label strategies that significantly enhance model accuracy, and lossless distillation techniques that maximize compression while maintaining performance. Beyond these methodological advancements, we address critical challenges, including robustness against adversarial and backdoor attacks, effective handling of non-IID data distributions. Additionally, we explore emerging applications in video and audio processing, multi-modal learning, medical imaging, and scientific computing, highlighting its domain versatility. By offering extensive performance comparisons and actionable research directions, this survey equips researchers and practitioners with practical insights to advance efficient and generalizable dataset distillation, paving the way for future innovations.
LLMs Can Teach Themselves to Better Predict the Future
Authors: Benjamin Turtel, Danny Franklin, Philipp Schoenegger
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00

We present an outcome-driven fine-tuning framework that enhances the forecasting capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without relying on human-curated reasoning samples. Our method leverages model self-play to generate pairs of diverse reasoning trajectories and probabilistic forecasts for a set of diverse questions that resolve after the models' knowledge cutoff date. We then rank pairs of these reasoning traces by their distance to the actual outcomes before fine-tuning the model via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). On a separate test set, our approach increases prediction accuracy of Phi-4 14B and DeepSeek-R1 14B by between 7--10\% over a base model and a DPO fine-tuned control model with randomized labels, bringing them on par with forecasting capabilities of much larger frontier models like GPT-4o.
Hyperparameters in Score-Based Membership Inference Attacks
Authors: Gauri Pradhan, Joonas Jälkö, Marlon Tobaben, Antti Honkela
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization, Transfer Learning

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have emerged as a valuable framework for evaluating privacy leakage by machine learning models. Score-based MIAs are distinguished, in particular, by their ability to exploit the confidence scores that the model generates for particular inputs. Existing score-based MIAs implicitly assume that the adversary has access to the target model's hyperparameters, which can be used to train the shadow models for the attack. In this work, we demonstrate that the knowledge of target hyperparameters is not a prerequisite for MIA in the transfer learning setting. Based on this, we propose a novel approach to select the hyperparameters for training the shadow models for MIA when the attacker has no prior knowledge about them by matching the output distributions of target and shadow models. We demonstrate that using the new approach yields hyperparameters that lead to an attack near indistinguishable in performance from an attack that uses target hyperparameters to train the shadow models. Furthermore, we study the empirical privacy risk of unaccounted use of training data for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in differentially private (DP) transfer learning. We find no statistically significant evidence that performing HPO using training data would increase vulnerability to MIA.
Filter, Obstruct and Dilute: Defending Against Backdoor Attacks on Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Xinrui Wang, Chuanxing Geng, Wenhai Wan, Shao-Yuan Li, Songcan Chen
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning

Recent studies have verified that semi-supervised learning (SSL) is vulnerable to data poisoning backdoor attacks. Even a tiny fraction of contaminated training data is sufficient for adversaries to manipulate up to 90\% of the test outputs in existing SSL methods. Given the emerging threat of backdoor attacks designed for SSL, this work aims to protect SSL against such risks, marking it as one of the few known efforts in this area. Specifically, we begin by identifying that the spurious correlations between the backdoor triggers and the target class implanted by adversaries are the primary cause of manipulated model predictions during the test phase. To disrupt these correlations, we utilize three key techniques: Gaussian Filter, complementary learning and trigger mix-up, which collectively filter, obstruct and dilute the influence of backdoor attacks in both data pre-processing and feature learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, Backdoor Invalidator (BI), significantly reduces the average attack success rate from 84.7\% to 1.8\% across different state-of-the-art backdoor attacks. It is also worth mentioning that BI does not sacrifice accuracy on clean data and is supported by a theoretical guarantee of its generalization capability.
Democratic Training Against Universal Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Wei Zhao
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Despite their advances and success, real-world deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Universal adversarial perturbation, an input-agnostic attack, poses a serious threat for them to be deployed in security-sensitive systems. In this case, a single universal adversarial perturbation deceives the model on a range of clean inputs without requiring input-specific optimization, which makes it particularly threatening. In this work, we observe that universal adversarial perturbations usually lead to abnormal entropy spectrum in hidden layers, which suggests that the prediction is dominated by a small number of ``feature'' in such cases (rather than democratically by many features). Inspired by this, we propose an efficient yet effective defense method for mitigating UAPs called \emph{Democratic Training} by performing entropy-based model enhancement to suppress the effect of the universal adversarial perturbations in a given model. \emph{Democratic Training} is evaluated with 7 neural networks trained on 5 benchmark datasets and 5 types of state-of-the-art universal adversarial attack methods. The results show that it effectively reduces the attack success rate, improves model robustness and preserves the model accuracy on clean samples.
Towards LLM Unlearning Resilient to Relearning Attacks: A Sharpness-Aware Minimization Perspective and Beyond
Authors: Chongyu Fan, Jinghan Jia, Yihua Zhang, Anil Ramakrishna, Mingyi Hong, Sijia Liu
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00

The LLM unlearning technique has recently been introduced to comply with data regulations and address the safety and ethical concerns of LLMs by removing the undesired data-model influence. However, state-of-the-art unlearning methods face a critical vulnerability: they are susceptible to ``relearning'' the removed information from a small number of forget data points, known as relearning attacks. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to make unlearned models robust against such attacks. For the first time, we establish a connection between robust unlearning and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) through a unified robust optimization framework, in an analogy to adversarial training designed to defend against adversarial attacks. Our analysis for SAM reveals that smoothness optimization plays a pivotal role in mitigating relearning attacks. Thus, we further explore diverse smoothing strategies to enhance unlearning robustness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including WMDP and MUSE, demonstrate that SAM and other smoothness optimization approaches consistently improve the resistance of LLM unlearning to relearning attacks. Notably, smoothness-enhanced unlearning also helps defend against (input-level) jailbreaking attacks, broadening our proposal's impact in robustifying LLM unlearning. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Smooth.
Biomechanical Reconstruction with Confidence Intervals from Multiview Markerless Motion Capture
Authors: R. James Cotton, Fabian Sinz
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Markerless Motion Capture

Advances in multiview markerless motion capture (MMMC) promise high-quality movement analysis for clinical practice and research. While prior validation studies show MMMC performs well on average, they do not provide what is needed in clinical practice or for large-scale utilization of MMMC -- confidence intervals over specific kinematic estimates from a specific individual analyzed using a possibly unique camera configuration. We extend our previous work using an implicit representation of trajectories optimized end-to-end through a differentiable biomechanical model to learn the posterior probability distribution over pose given all the detected keypoints. This posterior probability is learned through a variational approximation and estimates confidence intervals for individual joints at each moment in a trial, showing confidence intervals generally within 10-15 mm of spatial error for virtual marker locations, consistent with our prior validation studies. Confidence intervals over joint angles are typically only a few degrees and widen for more distal joints. The posterior also models the correlation structure over joint angles, such as correlations between hip and pelvis angles. The confidence intervals estimated through this method allow us to identify times and trials where kinematic uncertainty is high.