pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Preference Curriculum: LLMs Should Always Be Pretrained on Their Preferred Data
Authors: Xuemiao Zhang, Liangyu Xu, Feiyu Duan, Yongwei Zhou, Sirui Wang, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Current large language models (LLMs) generally utilize a consistent data distribution throughout the entire pretraining process. However, as the model's ability improves, it intuitively should be pretrained with differentiated data. To achieve it, we propose the Perplexity Difference based Preference Curriculum learning (PDPC) framework, which always perceives and uses the data preferred by LLMs to train and boost them. Firstly, we introduce the PD metric to measure the difference in how well strong and weak models fit the samples. Samples with high PD are more challenging for weak models to learn and are more suitable to be arranged in the later stage of pretraining. Secondly, we propose the PD preference function to approximate the model and predict the data preference of the LLM at any time, so as to complete the arrangement of the entire data offline and ensure continuous training without interruption. Experimental results on 1.3B and 3B models demonstrate that our PDPC significantly surpasses baselines. Notably, the 3B model achieved more substantial gains, with an increased average accuracy of over 4.1% across various benchmarks.
Debate Helps Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Authors: Hao Lang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Common methods for aligning already-capable models with desired behavior rely on the ability of humans to provide supervision. However, future superhuman models will surpass the capability of humans. Therefore, humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models. This expected deficiency of human evaluation would weaken the safety of future AI systems. Scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization are two complementary approaches to tackle this issue. In this paper, we attempt to combine the strengths of these two approaches to further improve alignment. Specifically, we investigate ways of improving human supervision with a strong pretrained model and then supervise the strong model with enhanced weak human supervision. To make iterative empirical progress, we consider an analogy: can we use a strong model to improve weak model supervision and then use it to supervise the strong model? We empirically test it by finetuning a small weak model on ground truth labels with the additional help from a large strong model, and then finetuning the strong model on labels generated by the weak model. We find that debate can assist a weak model in extracting trustworthy information from an untrustworthy strong model, which provides leverage as context on samples when training a weak model. We also show that an ensemble of weak models helps exploit long arguments generated by strong model debaters and obtain a more robust supervision estimate. Extensive experiments on the OpenAI weak-to-strong NLP benchmarks show that the combination approach leads to better alignment, which indicates that debate has the potential to help weak-to-strong generalization.
Zero-Shot Verification-guided Chain of Thoughts
Authors: Jishnu Ray Chowdhury, Cornelia Caragea
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (COT) prompts and verifiers in guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) through the space of reasoning. However, most such studies either use a fine-tuned verifier or rely on manually handcrafted few-shot examples. In contrast, in this paper, we focus on LLM-based self-verification of self-generated reasoning steps via COT prompts in a completely zero-shot regime. To explore this setting, we design a new zero-shot prompt, which we call COT STEP, to aid zero-shot decomposition of reasoning steps and design two new zero-shot prompts for LLM-based verifiers. We evaluate the verifiers' ability to classify the correctness of reasoning chains and explore different ways to use verifier scores in guiding reasoning for various mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks with different LLMs.
Episodic Memories Generation and Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Alexis Huet, Zied Ben Houidi, Dario Rossi
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00

Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a robust mechanism for episodic memory: we argue that integrating episodic memory capabilities into LLM is essential for advancing AI towards human-like cognition, increasing their potential to reason consistently and ground their output in real-world episodic events, hence avoiding confabulations. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework to model and evaluate LLM episodic memory capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we develop a structured approach to represent episodic events, encapsulating temporal and spatial contexts, involved entities, and detailed descriptions. We synthesize a unique episodic memory benchmark, free from contamination, and release open source code and datasets to assess LLM performance across various recall and episodic reasoning tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4 and Claude variants, Llama 3.1, and o1-mini, reveals that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with episodic memory tasks, particularly when dealing with multiple related events or complex spatio-temporal relationships -- even in contexts as short as 10k-100k tokens.
Multilinguality in LLM-Designed Reward Functions for Restless Bandits: Effects on Task Performance and Fairness
Authors: Ambreesh Parthasarathy, Chandrasekar Subramanian, Ganesh Senrayan, Shreyash Adappanavar, Aparna Taneja, Balaraman Ravindran, Milind Tambe
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Multi-Armed Bandits

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) have been successfully applied to resource allocation problems in a variety of settings, including public health. With the rapid development of powerful large language models (LLMs), they are increasingly used to design reward functions to better match human preferences. Recent work has shown that LLMs can be used to tailor automated allocation decisions to community needs using language prompts. However, this has been studied primarily for English prompts and with a focus on task performance only. This can be an issue since grassroots workers, especially in developing countries like India, prefer to work in local languages, some of which are low-resource. Further, given the nature of the problem, biases along population groups unintended by the user are also undesirable. In this work, we study the effects on both task performance and fairness when the DLM algorithm, a recent work on using LLMs to design reward functions for RMABs, is prompted with non-English language commands. Specifically, we run the model on a synthetic environment for various prompts translated into multiple languages. The prompts themselves vary in complexity. Our results show that the LLM-proposed reward functions are significantly better when prompted in English compared to other languages. We also find that the exact phrasing of the prompt impacts task performance. Further, as prompt complexity increases, performance worsens for all languages; however, it is more robust with English prompts than with lower-resource languages. On the fairness side, we find that low-resource languages and more complex prompts are both highly likely to create unfairness along unintended dimensions.
MyGO Multiplex CoT: A Method for Self-Reflection in Large Language Models via Double Chain of Thought Thinking
Authors: Shihao Ji, Zihui Song, Fucheng Zhong, Jisen Jia, Zhaobo Wu, Zheyi Cao, Tianhao Xu
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, GSM8K, HumanEval, LLM real-life tasks, MMLU, Prompt Engineering

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their impressive abilities in various reasoning and decision-making tasks. However, the quality and coherence of the reasoning process can still benefit from enhanced introspection and self-reflection. In this paper, we introduce Multiplex CoT (Chain of Thought), a method that enables LLMs to simulate a form of self-review while reasoning, by initiating double Chain of Thought (CoT) thinking. Multiplex CoT leverages the power of iterative reasoning, where the model generates an initial chain of thought and subsequently critiques and refines this reasoning with a second round of thought generation. This recursive approach allows for more coherent, logical, and robust answers, improving the overall decision-making process. We demonstrate how this method can be effectively implemented using simple prompt engineering in existing LLM architectures, achieving an effect similar to that of the Learning-Refinement Model (LRM) without the need for additional training. Additionally, we present a practical guide for implementing the method in Google Colab, enabling easy integration into real-world applications.
GeoPixel: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model in Remote Sensing
Authors: Akashah Shabbir, Mohammed Zumri, Mohammed Bennamoun, Fahad S. Khan, Salman Khan
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have recognized fine-grained grounding as an imperative factor of visual understanding and dialogue. However, the benefits of such representation in LMMs are limited to the natural image domain, and these models perform poorly for remote sensing (RS). The distinct overhead viewpoint, scale variation, and presence of small objects in high-resolution RS imagery present a unique challenge in region-level comprehension. Moreover, the development of the grounding conversation capability of LMMs within RS is hindered by the lack of granular, RS domain-specific grounded data. Addressing these limitations, we propose GeoPixel - the first end-to-end high resolution RS-LMM that supports pixel-level grounding. This capability allows fine-grained visual perception by generating interleaved masks in conversation. GeoPixel supports up to 4K HD resolution in any aspect ratio, ideal for high-precision RS image analysis. To support the grounded conversation generation (GCG) in RS imagery, we curate a visually grounded dataset GeoPixelD through a semi-automated pipeline that utilizes set-of-marks prompting and spatial priors tailored for RS data to methodically control the data generation process. GeoPixel demonstrates superior performance in pixel-level comprehension, surpassing existing LMMs in both single-target and multi-target segmentation tasks. Our methodological ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the overall architecture. Our code and data will be publicly released.
IMAGINE-E: Image Generation Intelligence Evaluation of State-of-the-art Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Jiayi Lei, Renrui Zhang, Xiangfei Hu, Weifeng Lin, Zhen Li, Wenjian Sun, Ruoyi Du, Le Zhuo, Zhongyu Li, Xinyue Li, Shitian Zhao, Ziyu Guo, Yiting Lu, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Image Generation, Motion Generation, Semantic Segmentation, Structured Output Generation

With the rapid development of diffusion models, text-to-image(T2I) models have made significant progress, showcasing impressive abilities in prompt following and image generation. Recently launched models such as FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0, along with others like Dall-E3 and Stable Diffusion 3, have demonstrated exceptional performance across various complex tasks, raising questions about whether T2I models are moving towards general-purpose applicability. Beyond traditional image generation, these models exhibit capabilities across a range of fields, including controllable generation, image editing, video, audio, 3D, and motion generation, as well as computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation and depth estimation. However, current evaluation frameworks are insufficient to comprehensively assess these models' performance across expanding domains. To thoroughly evaluate these models, we developed the IMAGINE-E and tested six prominent models: FLUX.1, Ideogram2.0, Midjourney, Dall-E3, Stable Diffusion 3, and Jimeng. Our evaluation is divided into five key domains: structured output generation, realism, and physical consistency, specific domain generation, challenging scenario generation, and multi-style creation tasks. This comprehensive assessment highlights each model's strengths and limitations, particularly the outstanding performance of FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0 in structured and specific domain tasks, underscoring the expanding applications and potential of T2I models as foundational AI tools. This study provides valuable insights into the current state and future trajectory of T2I models as they evolve towards general-purpose usability. Evaluation scripts will be released at https://github.com/jylei16/Imagine-e.
Binary Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Authors: Vitaliy Kinakh, Slava Voloshynovskiy
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration, Denoising, Facial Inpainting, Image Generation, Image Inpainting, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, model, Super-Resolution

We introduce the Binary Diffusion Probabilistic Model (BDPM), a novel generative model optimized for binary data representations. While denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have demonstrated notable success in tasks like image synthesis and restoration, traditional DDPMs rely on continuous data representations and mean squared error (MSE) loss for training, applying Gaussian noise models that may not be optimal for discrete or binary data structures. BDPM addresses this by decomposing images into bitplanes and employing XOR-based noise transformations, with a denoising model trained using binary cross-entropy loss. This approach enables precise noise control and computationally efficient inference, significantly lowering computational costs and improving model convergence. When evaluated on image restoration tasks such as image super-resolution, inpainting, and blind image restoration, BDPM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the FFHQ, CelebA, and CelebA-HQ datasets. Notably, BDPM requires fewer inference steps than traditional DDPM models to reach optimal results, showcasing enhanced inference efficiency.
Generating Realistic Forehead-Creases for User Verification via Conditioned Piecewise Polynomial Curves
Authors: Abhishek Tandon, Geetanjali Sharma, Gaurav Jaswal, Aditya Nigam, Raghavendra Ramachandra
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation

We propose a trait-specific image generation method that models forehead creases geometrically using B-spline and B\'ezier curves. This approach ensures the realistic generation of both principal creases and non-prominent crease patterns, effectively constructing detailed and authentic forehead-crease images. These geometrically rendered images serve as visual prompts for a diffusion-based Edge-to-Image translation model, which generates corresponding mated samples. The resulting novel synthetic identities are then used to train a forehead-crease verification network. To enhance intra-subject diversity in the generated samples, we employ two strategies: (a) perturbing the control points of B-splines under defined constraints to maintain label consistency, and (b) applying image-level augmentations to the geometric visual prompts, such as dropout and elastic transformations, specifically tailored to crease patterns. By integrating the proposed synthetic dataset with real-world data, our method significantly improves the performance of forehead-crease verification systems under a cross-database verification protocol.
Multimodal Sensor Dataset for Monitoring Older Adults Post Lower-Limb Fractures in Community Settings
Authors: Ali Abedi, Charlene H. Chu, Shehroz S. Khan
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

Lower-Limb Fractures (LLF) are a major health concern for older adults, often leading to reduced mobility and prolonged recovery, potentially impairing daily activities and independence. During recovery, older adults frequently face social isolation and functional decline, complicating rehabilitation and adversely affecting physical and mental health. Multi-modal sensor platforms that continuously collect data and analyze it using machine-learning algorithms can remotely monitor this population and infer health outcomes. They can also alert clinicians to individuals at risk of isolation and decline. This paper presents a new publicly available multi-modal sensor dataset, MAISON-LLF, collected from older adults recovering from LLF in community settings. The dataset includes data from smartphone and smartwatch sensors, motion detectors, sleep-tracking mattresses, and clinical questionnaires on isolation and decline. The dataset was collected from ten older adults living alone at home for eight weeks each, totaling 560 days of 24-hour sensor data. For technical validation, supervised machine-learning and deep-learning models were developed using the sensor and clinical questionnaire data, providing a foundational comparison for the research community.
Eye Gaze as a Signal for Conveying User Attention in Contextual AI Systems
Authors: Ethan Wilson, Naveen Sendhilnathan, Charlie S. Burlingham, Yusuf Mansour, Robert Cavin, Sai Deep Tetali, Ajoy Savio Fernandes, Michael J. Proulx
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Human-Object Interaction Detection

Advanced multimodal AI agents can now collaborate with users to solve challenges in the world. Yet, these emerging contextual AI systems rely on explicit communication channels between the user and system. We hypothesize that implicit communication of the user's interests and intent would reduce friction and improve user experience when collaborating with AI agents. In this work, we explore the potential of wearable eye tracking to convey signals about user attention. We measure the eye tracking signal quality requirements to effectively map gaze traces to physical objects, then conduct experiments that provide visual scanpath history as additional context when querying vision language models. Our results show that eye tracking provides high value as a user attention signal and can convey important context about the user's current task and interests, improving understanding of contextual AI agents.
Dual-Modal Prototype Joint Learning for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Shiyu Zhang, Cheng Yan, Yang Liu, Chenchen Jing, Lei Zhou, Wenjun Wang
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, Prompt Engineering, Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions of attributes and objects by leveraging knowledge learned from seen compositions. Recent approaches have explored the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to align textual and visual modalities. These methods typically employ prompt engineering, parameter-tuning, and modality fusion to generate rich textual prototypes that serve as class prototypes for CZSL. However, the modality gap results in textual prototypes being unable to fully capture the optimal representations of all class prototypes, particularly those with fine-grained features, which can be directly obtained from the visual modality. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Modal Prototype Joint Learning framework for the CZSL task. Our approach, based on VLMs, introduces prototypes in both the textual and visual modalities. The textual prototype is optimized to capture broad conceptual information, aiding the model's generalization across unseen compositions. Meanwhile, the visual prototype is used to mitigate the classification errors caused by the modality gap and capture fine-grained details to distinguish images with similar appearances. To effectively optimize these prototypes, we design specialized decomposition modules and a joint learning strategy that enrich the features from both modalities. These prototypes not only capture key category information during training but also serve as crucial reference targets during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in the closed-world setting and competitive performance in the open-world setting across three publicly available CZSL benchmarks. These findings validate the effectiveness of our method in advancing compositional generalization.
First Lessons Learned of an Artificial Intelligence Robotic System for Autonomous Coarse Waste Recycling Using Multispectral Imaging-Based Methods
Authors: Timo Lange, Ajish Babu, Philipp Meyer, Matthis Keppner, Tim Tiedemann, Martin Wittmaier, Sebastian Wolff, Thomas Vögele
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Material Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

Current disposal facilities for coarse-grained waste perform manual sorting of materials with heavy machinery. Large quantities of recyclable materials are lost to coarse waste, so more effective sorting processes must be developed to recover them. Two key aspects to automate the sorting process are object detection with material classification in mixed piles of waste, and autonomous control of hydraulic machinery. Because most objects in those accumulations of waste are damaged or destroyed, object detection alone is not feasible in the majority of cases. To address these challenges, we propose a classification of materials with multispectral images of ultraviolet (UV), visual (VIS), near infrared (NIR), and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectrums. Solution for autonomous control of hydraulic heavy machines for sorting of bulky waste is being investigated using cost-effective cameras and artificial intelligence-based controllers.
Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multi-Discipline Professional Videos
Authors: Kairui Hu, Penghao Wu, Fanyi Pu, Wang Xiao, Yuanhan Zhang, Xiang Yue, Bo Li, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

Humans acquire knowledge through three cognitive stages: perceiving information, comprehending knowledge, and adapting knowledge to solve novel problems. Videos serve as an effective medium for this learning process, facilitating a progression through these cognitive stages. However, existing video benchmarks fail to systematically evaluate the knowledge acquisition capabilities in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). To address this gap, we introduce Video-MMMU, a multi-modal, multi-disciplinary benchmark designed to assess LMMs' ability to acquire and utilize knowledge from videos. Video-MMMU features a curated collection of 300 expert-level videos and 900 human-annotated questions across six disciplines, evaluating knowledge acquisition through stage-aligned question-answer pairs: Perception, Comprehension, and Adaptation. A proposed knowledge gain metric, {\Delta}knowledge, quantifies improvement in performance after video viewing. Evaluation of LMMs reveals a steep decline in performance as cognitive demands increase and highlights a significant gap between human and model knowledge acquisition, underscoring the need for methods to enhance LMMs' capability to learn and adapt from videos.
By-Example Synthesis of Vector Textures
Authors: Christopher Palazzolo, Oliver van Kaick, David Mould
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

We propose a new method for synthesizing an arbitrarily sized novel vector texture given a single raster exemplar. Our method first segments the exemplar to extract the primary textons, and then clusters them based on visual similarity. We then compute a descriptor to capture each texton's neighborhood which contains the inter-category relationships that are used at synthesis time. Next, we use a simple procedure to both extract and place the secondary textons behind the primary polygons. Finally, our method constructs a gradient field for the background which is defined by a set of data points and colors. The color of the secondary polygons are also adjusted to better match the gradient field. To compare our work with other methods, we use a wide range of perceptual-based metrics.