pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ArchSeek: Retrieving Architectural Case Studies Using Vision-Language Models
Authors: Danrui Li, Yichao Shi, Yaluo Wang, Ziying Shi, Mubbasir Kapadia
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00

Efficiently searching for relevant case studies is critical in architectural design, as designers rely on precedent examples to guide or inspire their ongoing projects. However, traditional text-based search tools struggle to capture the inherently visual and complex nature of architectural knowledge, often leading to time-consuming and imprecise exploration. This paper introduces ArchSeek, an innovative case study search system with recommendation capability, tailored for architecture design professionals. Powered by the visual understanding capabilities from vision-language models and cross-modal embeddings, it enables text and image queries with fine-grained control, and interaction-based design case recommendations. It offers architects a more efficient, personalized way to discover design inspirations, with potential applications across other visually driven design fields. The source code is available at https://github.com/danruili/ArchSeek.
Exploring Training and Inference Scaling Laws in Generative Retrieval
Authors: Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Ruifeng Yuan, Wenjie Wang, Zhen Zhang, Wenjie Li, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Retrieval

Generative retrieval has emerged as a novel paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to autoregressively generate document identifiers. Although promising, the mechanisms that underpin its performance and scalability remain largely unclear. We conduct a systematic investigation of training and inference scaling laws in generative retrieval, exploring how model size, training data scale, and inference-time compute jointly influence retrieval performance. To address the lack of suitable metrics, we propose a novel evaluation measure inspired by contrastive entropy and generation loss, providing a continuous performance signal that enables robust comparisons across diverse generative retrieval methods. Our experiments show that n-gram-based methods demonstrate strong alignment with both training and inference scaling laws, especially when paired with larger LLMs. Furthermore, increasing inference computation yields substantial performance gains, revealing that generative retrieval can significantly benefit from higher compute budgets at inference. Across these settings, LLaMA models consistently outperform T5 models, suggesting a particular advantage for larger decoder-only models in generative retrieval. Taken together, our findings underscore that model sizes, data availability, and inference computation interact to unlock the full potential of generative retrieval, offering new insights for designing and optimizing future systems.
Enhancing Subsequent Video Retrieval via Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
Authors: Yicheng Duan, Xi Huang, Duo Chen
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

The rapid growth of video content demands efficient and precise retrieval systems. While vision-language models (VLMs) excel in representation learning, they often struggle with adaptive, time-sensitive video retrieval. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines vector similarity search with graph-based data structures. By leveraging VLM embeddings for initial retrieval and modeling contextual relationships among video segments, our approach enables adaptive query refinement and improves retrieval accuracy. Experiments demonstrate its precision, scalability, and robustness, offering an effective solution for interactive video retrieval in dynamic environments.
Beyond Negation Detection: Comprehensive Assertion Detection Models for Clinical NLP
Authors: Veysel Kocaman, Yigit Gul, M. Aytug Kaya, Hasham Ul Haq, Mehmet Butgul, Cabir Celik, David Talby
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Negation, Negation Detection, NER, Relation Extraction

Assertion status detection is a critical yet often overlooked component of clinical NLP, essential for accurately attributing extracted medical facts. Past studies have narrowly focused on negation detection, leading to underperforming commercial solutions such as AWS Medical Comprehend, Azure AI Text Analytics, and GPT-4o due to their limited domain adaptation. To address this gap, we developed state-of-the-art assertion detection models, including fine-tuned LLMs, transformer-based classifiers, few-shot classifiers, and deep learning (DL) approaches. We evaluated these models against cloud-based commercial API solutions, the legacy rule-based NegEx approach, and GPT-4o. Our fine-tuned LLM achieves the highest overall accuracy (0.962), outperforming GPT-4o (0.901) and commercial APIs by a notable margin, particularly excelling in Present (+4.2%), Absent (+8.4%), and Hypothetical (+23.4%) assertions. Our DL-based models surpass commercial solutions in Conditional (+5.3%) and Associated-with-Someone-Else (+10.1%) categories, while the few-shot classifier offers a lightweight yet highly competitive alternative (0.929), making it ideal for resource-constrained environments. Integrated within Spark NLP, our models consistently outperform black-box commercial solutions while enabling scalable inference and seamless integration with medical NER, Relation Extraction, and Terminology Resolution. These results reinforce the importance of domain-adapted, transparent, and customizable clinical NLP solutions over general-purpose LLMs and proprietary APIs.
Satisfactory Medical Consultation based on Terminology-Enhanced Information Retrieval and Emotional In-Context Learning
Authors: Kaiwen Zuo, Jing Tang, Hanbing Qin, Binli Luo, Ligang He, Shiyan Tang
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, In-Context Learning, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have marked significant progress in understanding and responding to medical inquiries. However, their performance still falls short of the standards set by professional consultations. This paper introduces a novel framework for medical consultation, comprising two main modules: Terminology-Enhanced Information Retrieval (TEIR) and Emotional In-Context Learning (EICL). TEIR ensures implicit reasoning through the utilization of inductive knowledge and key terminology retrieval, overcoming the limitations of restricted domain knowledge in public databases. Additionally, this module features capabilities for processing long context. The EICL module aids in generating sentences with high attribute relevance by memorizing semantic and attribute information from unlabelled corpora and applying controlled retrieval for the required information. Furthermore, a dataset comprising 803,564 consultation records was compiled in China, significantly enhancing the model's capability for complex dialogues and proactive inquiry initiation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the proposed method's effectiveness in extending the context window length of existing LLMs. The experimental outcomes and extensive data validate the framework's superiority over five baseline models in terms of BLEU and ROUGE performance metrics, with substantial leads in certain capabilities. Notably, ablation studies confirm the significance of the TEIR and EICL components. In addition, our new framework has the potential to significantly improve patient satisfaction in real clinical consulting situations.
Experience Retrieval-Augmentation with Electronic Health Records Enables Accurate Discharge QA
Authors: Justice Ou, Tinglin Huang, Yilun Zhao, Ziyang Yu, Peiqing Lu, Rex Ying
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

To improve the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in clinical applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is extensively applied to provide factual medical knowledge. However, beyond general medical knowledge from open-ended datasets, clinical case-based knowledge is also critical for effective medical reasoning, as it provides context grounded in real-world patient experiences. Motivated by this, we propose Experience Retrieval Augmentation - ExpRAG framework based on Electronic Health Record (EHR), aiming to offer the relevant context from other patients' discharge reports. ExpRAG performs retrieval through a coarse-to-fine process, utilizing an EHR-based report ranker to efficiently identify similar patients, followed by an experience retriever to extract task-relevant content for enhanced medical reasoning. To evaluate ExpRAG, we introduce DischargeQA, a clinical QA dataset with 1,280 discharge-related questions across diagnosis, medication, and instruction tasks. Each problem is generated using EHR data to ensure realistic and challenging scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ExpRAG consistently outperforms a text-based ranker, achieving an average relative improvement of 5.2%, highlighting the importance of case-based knowledge for medical reasoning.
GINGER: Grounded Information Nugget-Based Generation of Responses
Authors: Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Response Generation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) faces challenges related to factual correctness, source attribution, and response completeness. To address them, we propose a modular pipeline for grounded response generation that operates on information nuggets-minimal, atomic units of relevant information extracted from retrieved documents. The multistage pipeline encompasses nugget detection, clustering, ranking, top cluster summarization, and fluency enhancement. It guarantees grounding in specific facts, facilitates source attribution, and ensures maximum information inclusion within length constraints. Extensive experiments on the TREC RAG'24 dataset evaluated with the AutoNuggetizer framework demonstrate that GINGER achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark.
Causality-Aware Next Location Prediction Framework based on Human Mobility Stratification
Authors: Xiaojie Yang, Zipei Fan, Hangli Ge, Takashi Michikata, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Noboru Koshizuka
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Human mobility data are fused with multiple travel patterns and hidden spatiotemporal patterns are extracted by integrating user, location, and time information to improve next location prediction accuracy. In existing next location prediction methods, different causal relationships that result from patterns in human mobility data are ignored, which leads to confounding information that can have a negative effect on predictions. Therefore, this study introduces a causality-aware framework for next location prediction, focusing on human mobility stratification for travel patterns. In our research, a novel causal graph is developed that describes the relationships between various input variables. We use counterfactuals to enhance the indirect effects in our causal graph for specific travel patterns: non-anchor targeted travels. The proposed framework is designed as a plug-and-play module that integrates multiple next location prediction paradigms. We tested our proposed framework using several state-of-the-art models and human mobility datasets, and the results reveal that the proposed module improves the prediction performance. In addition, we provide results from the ablation study and quantitative study to demonstrate the soundness of our causal graph and its ability to further enhance the interpretability of the current next location prediction models.
Lifelong Evolution of Swarms
Authors: Lorenzo Leuzzi, Simon Jones, Sabine Hauert, Davide Bacciu, Andrea Cossu
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning

Adapting to task changes without forgetting previous knowledge is a key skill for intelligent systems, and a crucial aspect of lifelong learning. Swarm controllers, however, are typically designed for specific tasks, lacking the ability to retain knowledge across changing tasks. Lifelong learning, on the other hand, focuses on individual agents with limited insights into the emergent abilities of a collective like a swarm. To address this gap, we introduce a lifelong evolutionary framework for swarms, where a population of swarm controllers is evolved in a dynamic environment that incrementally presents novel tasks. This requires evolution to find controllers that quickly adapt to new tasks while retaining knowledge of previous ones, as they may reappear in the future. We discover that the population inherently preserves information about previous tasks, and it can reuse it to foster adaptation and mitigate forgetting. In contrast, the top-performing individual for a given task catastrophically forgets previous tasks. To mitigate this phenomenon, we design a regularization process for the evolutionary algorithm, reducing forgetting in top-performing individuals. Evolving swarms in a lifelong fashion raises fundamental questions on the current state of deep lifelong learning and on the robustness of swarm controllers in dynamic environments.
Neuromorphic Principles for Efficient Large Language Models on Intel Loihi 2
Authors: Steven Abreu, Sumit Bam Shrestha, Rui-Jie Zhu, Jason Eshraghian
Date: 2025-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Large language models (LLMs) deliver impressive performance but require large amounts of energy. In this work, we present a MatMul-free LLM architecture adapted for Intel's neuromorphic processor, Loihi 2. Our approach leverages Loihi 2's support for low-precision, event-driven computation and stateful processing. Our hardware-aware quantized model on GPU demonstrates that a 370M parameter MatMul-free model can be quantized with no accuracy loss. Based on preliminary results, we report up to 3x higher throughput with 2x less energy, compared to transformer-based LLMs on an edge GPU, with significantly better scaling. Further hardware optimizations will increase throughput and decrease energy consumption. These results show the potential of neuromorphic hardware for efficient inference and pave the way for efficient reasoning models capable of generating complex, long-form text rapidly and cost-effectively.
Reinforcement Learning-based Self-adaptive Differential Evolution through Automated Landscape Feature Learning
Authors: Hongshu Guo, Sijie Ma, Zechuan Huang, Yuzhi Hu, Zeyuan Ma, Xinglin Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Recently, Meta-Black-Box-Optimization (MetaBBO) methods significantly enhance the performance of traditional black-box optimizers through meta-learning flexible and generalizable meta-level policies that excel in dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC) tasks within the low-level optimization, reducing the expertise required to adapt optimizers for novel optimization tasks. Though promising, existing MetaBBO methods heavily rely on human-crafted feature extraction approach to secure learning effectiveness. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel MetaBBO method that supports automated feature learning during the meta-learning process, termed as RLDE-AFL, which integrates a learnable feature extraction module into a reinforcement learning-based DE method to learn both the feature encoding and meta-level policy. Specifically, we design an attention-based neural network with mantissa-exponent based embedding to transform the solution populations and corresponding objective values during the low-level optimization into expressive landscape features. We further incorporate a comprehensive algorithm configuration space including diverse DE operators into a reinforcement learning-aided DAC paradigm to unleash the behavior diversity and performance of the proposed RLDE-AFL. Extensive benchmark results show that co-training the proposed feature learning module and DAC policy contributes to the superior optimization performance of RLDE-AFL to several advanced DE methods and recent MetaBBO baselines over both synthetic and realistic BBO scenarios. The source codes of RLDE-AFL are available at https://github.com/GMC-DRL/RLDE-AFL.
Accurate Peak Detection in Multimodal Optimization via Approximated Landscape Learning
Authors: Zeyuan Ma, Hongqiao Lian, Wenjie Qiu, Yue-Jiao Gong
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Detecting potential optimal peak areas and locating the accurate peaks in these areas are two major challenges in Multimodal Optimization problems (MMOPs). To address them, much efforts have been spent on developing novel searching operators, niching strategies and multi-objective problem transformation pipelines. Though promising, existing approaches more or less overlook the potential usage of landscape knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization framework tailored for MMOPs, termed as APDMMO, which facilitates peak detection via fully leveraging the landscape knowledge and hence capable of providing strong optimization performance on MMOPs. Specifically, we first design a novel surrogate landscape model which ensembles a group of non-linear activation units to improve the regression accuracy on diverse MMOPs. Then we propose a free-of-trial peak detection method which efficiently locates potential peak areas through back-propagation on the learned surrogate landscape model. Based on the detected peak areas, we employ SEP-CMAES for local search within these areas in parallel to further improve the accuracy of the found optima. Extensive benchmarking results demonstrate that APDMMO outperforms several up-to-date baselines. Further ablation studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed novel designs. The source-code is available at ~\href{}{https://github.com/GMC-DRL/APDMMO}.
Application of Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Solving the Inverse Advection-Diffusion Problem to Localize Pollution Sources
Authors: Ivan Chuprov, Denis Derkach, Dmitry Efremenko, Aleksei Kychkin
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper investigates the application of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for solving the inverse advection-diffusion problem to localize pollution sources. The study focuses on optimizing neural network architectures to accurately model pollutant dispersion dynamics under diverse conditions, including scenarios with weak and strong winds and multiple pollution sources. Various PINN configurations are evaluated, showing the strong dependence of solution accuracy on hyperparameter selection. Recommendations for efficient PINN configurations are provided based on these comparisons. The approach is tested across multiple scenarios and validated using real-world data that accounts for atmospheric variability. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology achieves high accuracy in source localization, showcasing the stability and potential of PINNs for addressing environmental monitoring and pollution management challenges under complex weather conditions.
Temporal Flexibility in Spiking Neural Networks: Towards Generalization Across Time Steps and Deployment Friendliness
Authors: Kangrui Du, Yuhang Wu, Shikuang Deng, Shi Gu
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), models inspired by neural mechanisms in the brain, allow for energy-efficient implementation on neuromorphic hardware. However, SNNs trained with current direct training approaches are constrained to a specific time step. This "temporal inflexibility" 1) hinders SNNs' deployment on time-step-free fully event-driven chips and 2) prevents energy-performance balance based on dynamic inference time steps. In this study, we first explore the feasibility of training SNNs that generalize across different time steps. We then introduce Mixed Time-step Training (MTT), a novel method that improves the temporal flexibility of SNNs, making SNNs adaptive to diverse temporal structures. During each iteration of MTT, random time steps are assigned to different SNN stages, with spikes transmitted between stages via communication modules. After training, the weights are deployed and evaluated on both time-stepped and fully event-driven platforms. Experimental results show that models trained by MTT gain remarkable temporal flexibility, friendliness for both event-driven and clock-driven deployment (nearly lossless on N-MNIST and 10.1% higher than standard methods on CIFAR10-DVS), enhanced network generalization, and near SOTA performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to report the results of large-scale SNN deployment on fully event-driven scenarios.
Personalized Language Models via Privacy-Preserving Evolutionary Model Merging
Authors: KyuYoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Privacy Preserving

Personalization in large language models (LLMs) seeks to tailor models to individual user or user group preferences. Prompt-based methods augment queries with user preference information, whereas training-based methods directly encode preferences into model parameters for more effective personalization. Despite achieving some success in personalizing LLMs, prior methods often fail to directly optimize task-specific metrics and lack explicit privacy-preservation mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose Privacy-Preserving Model Merging via Evolutionary Algorithms (PriME), a novel approach to personalization that employs gradient-free methods to directly optimize task-specific metrics while preserving user privacy. By incorporating privacy preservation into optimization, PriME produces a personalized module that effectively captures the target user's preferences while minimizing the privacy risks for the users sharing their private information. Experiments on the LaMP benchmark show that PriME outperforms both prompt-based and training-based methods, achieving up to a 45% performance improvement over the prior art. Further analysis shows that PriME achieves a significantly better privacy-utility trade-off, highlighting the potential of evolutionary approaches for privacy-preserving LLM personalization.
Surrogate Learning in Meta-Black-Box Optimization: A Preliminary Study
Authors: Zeyuan Ma, Zhiyang Huang, Jiacheng Chen, Zhiguang Cao, Yue-Jiao Gong
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) approaches have shown possibility of enhancing the optimization performance through learning meta-level policies to dynamically configure low-level optimizers. However, existing MetaBBO approaches potentially consume massive function evaluations to train their meta-level policies. Inspired by the recent trend of using surrogate models for cost-friendly evaluation of expensive optimization problems, in this paper, we propose a novel MetaBBO framework which combines surrogate learning process and reinforcement learning-aided Differential Evolution algorithm, namely Surr-RLDE, to address the intensive function evaluation in MetaBBO. Surr-RLDE comprises two learning stages: surrogate learning and policy learning. In surrogate learning, we train a Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) with a novel relative-order-aware loss to accurately approximate the objective functions of the problem instances used for subsequent policy learning. In policy learning, we employ reinforcement learning (RL) to dynamically configure the mutation operator in DE. The learned surrogate model is integrated into the training of the RL-based policy to substitute for the original objective function, which effectively reduces consumed evaluations during policy learning. Extensive benchmark results demonstrate that Surr-RLDE not only shows competitive performance to recent baselines, but also shows compelling generalization for higher-dimensional problems. Further ablation studies underscore the effectiveness of each technical components in Surr-RLDE. We open-source Surr-RLDE at https://github.com/GMC-DRL/Surr-RLDE.