pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
KHAIT: K-9 Handler Artificial Intelligence Teaming for Collaborative Sensemaking
Authors: Matthew Wilchek, Linhan Wang, Sally Dickinson, Erica Feuerbacher, Kurt Luther, Feras A. Batarseh
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, object-detection, Object Detection

In urban search and rescue (USAR) operations, communication between handlers and specially trained canines is crucial but often complicated by challenging environments and the specific behaviors canines are trained to exhibit when detecting a person. Since a USAR canine often works out of sight of the handler, the handler lacks awareness of the canine's location and situation, known as the 'sensemaking gap.' In this paper, we propose KHAIT, a novel approach to close the sensemaking gap and enhance USAR effectiveness by integrating object detection-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR). Equipped with AI-powered cameras, edge computing, and AR headsets, KHAIT enables precise and rapid object detection from a canine's perspective, improving survivor localization. We evaluate this approach in a real-world USAR environment, demonstrating an average survival allocation time decrease of 22%, enhancing the speed and accuracy of operations.
The Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Assessing Content Validity: A Comparative Study with Human Experts
Authors: Hatice Gurdil, Hatice Ozlem Anadol, Yesim Beril Soguksu
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Reading Comprehension

In this study, it was investigated whether AI evaluators assess the content validity of B1-level English reading comprehension test items in a manner similar to human evaluators. A 25-item multiple-choice test was developed, and these test items were evaluated by four human and four AI evaluators. No statistically significant difference was found between the scores given by human and AI evaluators, with similar evaluation trends observed. The Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and the Item Content Validity Index (I-CVI) were calculated and analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, with no statistically significant difference. The findings revealed that in some cases, AI evaluators could replace human evaluators. However, differences in specific items were thought to arise from varying interpretations of the evaluation criteria. Ensuring linguistic clarity and clearly defining criteria could contribute to more consistent evaluations. In this regard, the development of hybrid evaluation systems, in which AI technologies are used alongside human experts, is recommended.
Exploring the Panorama of Anxiety Levels: A Multi-Scenario Study Based on Human-Centric Anxiety Level Detection and Personalized Guidance
Authors: Longdi Xian, Junhao Xu
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00

More and more people are experiencing pressure from work, life, and education. These pressures often lead to an anxious state of mind, or even the early symptoms of suicidal ideation. With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, large language models have become one of the most prominent technologies. They are often used for detecting psychological disorders. However, current studies primarily provide categorization results without offering interpretable explanations for these results. To address this gap, this study adopts a person-centered perspective and focuses on GPT-generated multi-scenario simulated conversations. These simulated conversations were selected as data samples for the study. Various transformer-based encoder models were utilized to develop a classification model capable of identifying different levels of anxiety. Additionally, a knowledge base focusing on anxiety was constructed using LangChain and GPT-4. When analyzing classification results, this knowledge base was able to provide explanations and reasons most relevant to the interlocutor's anxiety situation. The study demonstrates that the proposed model achieves over 94% accuracy in categorical prediction, and the advice provided is highly personalized and relevant.
Complying with the EU AI Act: Innovations in Explainable and User-Centric Hand Gesture Recognition
Authors: Sarah Seifi, Tobias Sukianto, Cecilia Carbonelli, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Gesture Recognition, Hand Gesture Recognition, Hand-Gesture Recognition, Transfer Learning

The EU AI Act underscores the importance of transparency, user-centricity, and robustness in AI systems, particularly for high-risk systems. In response, we present advancements in XentricAI, an explainable hand gesture recognition (HGR) system designed to meet these regulatory requirements. XentricAI adresses fundamental challenges in HGR, such as the opacity of black-box models using explainable AI methods and the handling of distributional shifts in real-world data through transfer learning techniques. We extend an existing radar-based HGR dataset by adding 28,000 new gestures, with contributions from multiple users across varied locations, including 24,000 out-of-distribution gestures. Leveraging this real-world dataset, we enhance XentricAI's capabilities by integrating a variational autoencoder module for improved gesture anomaly detection, incorporating user-specific thresholding. This integration enables the identification of 11.50% more anomalous gestures. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a 97.5% sucess rate in characterizing these anomalies, significantly improving system explainability. Furthermore, the implementation of transfer learning techniques has shown a substantial increase in user adaptability, with an average improvement of at least 15.17%. This work contributes to the development of trustworthy AI systems by providing both technical advancements and regulatory compliance, offering a commercially viable solution that aligns with the EU AI Act requirements.
A Beautiful Mind: Principles and Strategies for AI-Augmented Human Reasoning
Authors: Sean Koon
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

Amidst the race to create more intelligent machines there is a risk that we will rely on AI in ways that reduce our own agency as humans. To reduce this risk, we could aim to create tools that prioritize and enhance the human role in human-AI interactions. This paper outlines a human-centered augmented reasoning paradigm by 1. Articulating fundamental principles for augmented reasoning tools, emphasizing their ergonomic, pre-conclusive, directable, exploratory, enhancing, and integrated nature; 2. Proposing a 'many tasks, many tools' approach to ensuring human influence and control, and 3. Offering examples of interaction modes that can serve as bridges between human reasoning and AI algorithms.
CAM-Seg: A Continuous-valued Embedding Approach for Semantic Image Generation
Authors: Masud Ahmed, Zahid Hasan, Syed Arefinul Haque, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Sanjay Purushotham, Suya You, Nirmalya Roy
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Generation, Semantic Segmentation

Traditional transformer-based semantic segmentation relies on quantized embeddings. However, our analysis reveals that autoencoder accuracy on segmentation mask using quantized embeddings (e.g. VQ-VAE) is 8% lower than continuous-valued embeddings (e.g. KL-VAE). Motivated by this, we propose a continuous-valued embedding framework for semantic segmentation. By reformulating semantic mask generation as a continuous image-to-embedding diffusion process, our approach eliminates the need for discrete latent representations while preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic details. Our key contribution includes a diffusion-guided autoregressive transformer that learns a continuous semantic embedding space by modeling long-range dependencies in image features. Our framework contains a unified architecture combining a VAE encoder for continuous feature extraction, a diffusion-guided transformer for conditioned embedding generation, and a VAE decoder for semantic mask reconstruction. Our setting facilitates zero-shot domain adaptation capabilities enabled by the continuity of the embedding space. Experiments across diverse datasets (e.g., Cityscapes and domain-shifted variants) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness to distribution shifts, including adverse weather (e.g., fog, snow) and viewpoint variations. Our model also exhibits strong noise resilience, achieving robust performance ($\approx$ 95% AP compared to baseline) under gaussian noise, moderate motion blur, and moderate brightness/contrast variations, while experiencing only a moderate impact ($\approx$ 90% AP compared to baseline) from 50% salt and pepper noise, saturation and hue shifts. Code available: https://github.com/mahmed10/CAMSS.git
A Context-Driven Training-Free Network for Lightweight Scene Text Segmentation and Recognition
Authors: Ritabrata Chakraborty, Shivakumara Palaiahnakote, Umapada Pal, Cheng-Lin Liu
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition, Text Detection, Text Segmentation

Modern scene text recognition systems often depend on large end-to-end architectures that require extensive training and are prohibitively expensive for real-time scenarios. In such cases, the deployment of heavy models becomes impractical due to constraints on memory, computational resources, and latency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, training-free plug-and-play framework that leverages the strengths of pre-trained text recognizers while minimizing redundant computations. Our approach uses context-based understanding and introduces an attention-based segmentation stage, which refines candidate text regions at the pixel level, improving downstream recognition. Instead of performing traditional text detection that follows a block-level comparison between feature map and source image and harnesses contextual information using pretrained captioners, allowing the framework to generate word predictions directly from scene context.Candidate texts are semantically and lexically evaluated to get a final score. Predictions that meet or exceed a pre-defined confidence threshold bypass the heavier process of end-to-end text STR profiling, ensuring faster inference and cutting down on unnecessary computations. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that our paradigm achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art systems, yet requires substantially fewer resources.
Survey on Generalization Theory for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Antonis Vasileiou, Stefanie Jegelka, Ron Levie, Christopher Morris
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) have emerged as the leading approach for machine learning on graphs, attracting significant attention in recent years. While a large set of works explored the expressivity of MPNNs, i.e., their ability to separate graphs and approximate functions over them, comparatively less attention has been directed toward investigating their generalization abilities, i.e., making meaningful predictions beyond the training data. Here, we systematically review the existing literature on the generalization abilities of MPNNs. We analyze the strengths and limitations of various studies in these domains, providing insights into their methodologies and findings. Furthermore, we identify potential avenues for future research, aiming to deepen our understanding of the generalization abilities of MPNNs.
UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction
Authors: Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Juan A. Rodriguez, Montek Kalsi, Rabiul Awal, Nicolas Chapados, M. Tamer Özsu, Aishwarya Agrawal, David Vazquez, Christopher Pal, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Spatial Reasoning

Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks-Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction-with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents' performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer use agents. By releasing UI-Vision as open-source, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.
Can one size fit all?: Measuring Failure in Multi-Document Summarization Domain Transfer
Authors: Alexandra DeLucia, Mark Dredze
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Articles, Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization

Abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS) is the task of automatically summarizing information in multiple documents, from news articles to conversations with multiple speakers. The training approaches for current MDS models can be grouped into four approaches: end-to-end with special pre-training ("direct"), chunk-then-summarize, extract-then-summarize, and inference with GPT-style models. In this work, we evaluate MDS models across training approaches, domains, and dimensions (reference similarity, quality, and factuality), to analyze how and why models trained on one domain can fail to summarize documents from another (News, Science, and Conversation) in the zero-shot domain transfer setting. We define domain-transfer "failure" as a decrease in factuality, higher deviation from the target, and a general decrease in summary quality. In addition to exploring domain transfer for MDS models, we examine potential issues with applying popular summarization metrics out-of-the-box.
MobiFuse: Learning Universal Human Mobility Patterns through Cross-domain Data Fusion
Authors: Haoxuan Ma, Xishun Liao, Yifan Liu, Qinhua Jiang, Chris Stanford, Shangqing Cao, Jiaqi Ma
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Privacy Preserving

Human mobility modeling is critical for urban planning and transportation management, yet existing datasets often lack the resolution and semantic richness required for comprehensive analysis. To address this, we proposed a cross-domain data fusion framework that integrates multi-modal data of distinct nature and spatio-temporal resolution, including geographical, mobility, socio-demographic, and traffic information, to construct a privacy-preserving and semantically enriched human travel trajectory dataset. This framework is demonstrated through two case studies in Los Angeles (LA) and Egypt, where a domain adaptation algorithm ensures its transferability across diverse urban contexts. Quantitative evaluation shows that the generated synthetic dataset accurately reproduces mobility patterns observed in empirical data. Moreover, large-scale traffic simulations for LA County based on the generated synthetic demand align well with observed traffic. On California's I-405 corridor, the simulation yields a Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 5.85% for traffic volume and 4.36% for speed compared to Caltrans PeMS observations.
Grammar and Gameplay-aligned RL for Game Description Generation with LLMs
Authors: Tsunehiko Tanaka, Edgar Simo-Serra
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Game Description Generation (GDG) is the task of generating a game description written in a Game Description Language (GDL) from natural language text. Previous studies have explored generation methods leveraging the contextual understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, accurately reproducing the game features of the game descriptions remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning of LLMs for GDG (RLGDG). Our training method simultaneously improves grammatical correctness and fidelity to game concepts by introducing both grammar rewards and concept rewards. Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage training strategy where Reinforcement Learning (RL) is applied following Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods using SFT alone.
Blend the Separated: Mixture of Synergistic Experts for Data-Scarcity Drug-Target Interaction Prediction
Authors: Xinlong Zhai, Chunchen Wang, Ruijia Wang, Jiazheng Kang, Shujie Li, BoYu Chen, Tengfei Ma, Zikai Zhou, Cheng Yang, Chuan Shi
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Drug-target interaction prediction (DTI) is essential in various applications including drug discovery and clinical application. There are two perspectives of input data widely used in DTI prediction: Intrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are constructed, and extrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are related to other biological entities. However, any of the two perspectives of input data can be scarce for some drugs or targets, especially for those unpopular or newly discovered. Furthermore, ground-truth labels for specific interaction types can also be scarce. Therefore, we propose the first method to tackle DTI prediction under input data and/or label scarcity. To make our model functional when only one perspective of input data is available, we design two separate experts to process intrinsic and extrinsic data respectively and fuse them adaptively according to different samples. Furthermore, to make the two perspectives complement each other and remedy label scarcity, two experts synergize with each other in a mutually supervised way to exploit the enormous unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets under different extents of input data scarcity and/or label scarcity demonstrate our model outperforms states of the art significantly and steadily, with a maximum improvement of 53.53%. We also test our model without any data scarcity and it still outperforms current methods.
Computation-Efficient and Recognition-Friendly 3D Point Cloud Privacy Protection
Authors: Haotian Ma, Lin Gu, Siyi Wu, Yingying Zhu
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Self-Driving Cars

3D point cloud has been widely used in applications such as self-driving cars, robotics, CAD models, etc. To the best of our knowledge, these applications raised the issue of privacy leakage in 3D point clouds, which has not been studied well. Different from the 2D image privacy, which is related to texture and 2D geometric structure, the 3D point cloud is texture-less and only relevant to 3D geometric structure. In this work, we defined the 3D point cloud privacy problem and proposed an efficient privacy-preserving framework named PointFlowGMM that can support downstream classification and segmentation tasks without seeing the original data. Using a flow-based generative model, the point cloud is projected into a latent Gaussian mixture distributed subspace. We further designed a novel angular similarity loss to obfuscate the original geometric structure and reduce the model size from 767MB to 120MB without a decrease in recognition performance. The projected point cloud in the latent space is orthogonally rotated randomly to further protect the original geometric structure, the class-to-class relationship is preserved after rotation, thus, the protected point cloud can support the recognition task. We evaluated our model on multiple datasets and achieved comparable recognition results on encrypted point clouds compared to the original point clouds.
Fùxì: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models on Ancient Chinese Text Understanding and Generation
Authors: Shangqing Zhao, Yuhao Zhou, Yupei Ren, Zhe Chen, Chenghao Jia, Fang Zhe, Zhaogaung Long, Shu Liu, Man Lan
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Text Generation

Ancient Chinese text processing presents unique challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its distinct linguistic features, complex structural constraints, and rich cultural context. While existing benchmarks have primarily focused on evaluating comprehension through multiple-choice questions, there remains a critical gap in assessing models' generative capabilities in classical Chinese. We introduce F\`ux\`i, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates both understanding and generation capabilities across 21 diverse tasks. Our benchmark distinguishes itself through three key contributions: (1) balanced coverage of both comprehension and generation tasks, including novel tasks like poetry composition and couplet completion, (2) specialized evaluation metrics designed specifically for classical Chinese text generation, combining rule-based verification with fine-tuned LLM evaluators, and (3) a systematic assessment framework that considers both linguistic accuracy and cultural authenticity. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, we reveal significant performance gaps between understanding and generation tasks, with models achieving promising results in comprehension but struggling considerably in generation tasks, particularly those requiring deep cultural knowledge and adherence to classical formats. Our findings highlight the current limitations in ancient Chinese text processing and provide insights for future model development. The benchmark, evaluation toolkit, and baseline results are publicly available to facilitate research in this domain.
VideoRFSplat: Direct Scene-Level Text-to-3D Gaussian Splatting Generation with Flexible Pose and Multi-View Joint Modeling
Authors: Hyojun Go, Byeongjun Park, Hyelin Nam, Byung-Hoon Kim, Hyungjin Chung, Changick Kim
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Text to 3D, Video Generation

We propose VideoRFSplat, a direct text-to-3D model leveraging a video generation model to generate realistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for unbounded real-world scenes. To generate diverse camera poses and unbounded spatial extent of real-world scenes, while ensuring generalization to arbitrary text prompts, previous methods fine-tune 2D generative models to jointly model camera poses and multi-view images. However, these methods suffer from instability when extending 2D generative models to joint modeling due to the modality gap, which necessitates additional models to stabilize training and inference. In this work, we propose an architecture and a sampling strategy to jointly model multi-view images and camera poses when fine-tuning a video generation model. Our core idea is a dual-stream architecture that attaches a dedicated pose generation model alongside a pre-trained video generation model via communication blocks, generating multi-view images and camera poses through separate streams. This design reduces interference between the pose and image modalities. Additionally, we propose an asynchronous sampling strategy that denoises camera poses faster than multi-view images, allowing rapidly denoised poses to condition multi-view generation, reducing mutual ambiguity and enhancing cross-modal consistency. Trained on multiple large-scale real-world datasets (RealEstate10K, MVImgNet, DL3DV-10K, ACID), VideoRFSplat outperforms existing text-to-3D direct generation methods that heavily depend on post-hoc refinement via score distillation sampling, achieving superior results without such refinement.