pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Boosting Neural Language Inference via Cascaded Interactive Reasoning
Authors: Min Li, Chun Yuan
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Relational Reasoning

Natural Language Inference (NLI) focuses on ascertaining the logical relationship (entailment, contradiction, or neutral) between a given premise and hypothesis. This task presents significant challenges due to inherent linguistic features such as diverse phrasing, semantic complexity, and contextual nuances. While Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) built upon the Transformer architecture have yielded substantial advancements in NLI, prevailing methods predominantly utilize representations from the terminal layer. This reliance on final-layer outputs may overlook valuable information encoded in intermediate layers, potentially limiting the capacity to model intricate semantic interactions effectively. Addressing this gap, we introduce the Cascaded Interactive Reasoning Network (CIRN), a novel architecture designed for deeper semantic comprehension in NLI. CIRN implements a hierarchical feature extraction strategy across multiple network depths, operating within an interactive space where cross-sentence information is continuously integrated. This mechanism aims to mimic a process of progressive reasoning, transitioning from surface-level feature matching to uncovering more profound logical and semantic connections between the premise and hypothesis. By systematically mining latent semantic relationships at various representational levels, CIRN facilitates a more thorough understanding of the input pair. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on several standard NLI benchmark datasets reveal consistent performance gains achieved by CIRN over competitive baseline approaches, demonstrating the efficacy of leveraging multi-level interactive features for complex relational reasoning.
Using External knowledge to Enhanced PLM for Semantic Matching
Authors: Min Li, Chun Yuan
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Relevance Detection

Modeling semantic relevance has always been a challenging and critical task in natural language processing. In recent years, with the emergence of massive amounts of annotated data, it has become feasible to train complex models, such as neural network-based reasoning models. These models have shown excellent performance in practical applications and have achieved the current state-ofthe-art performance. However, even with such large-scale annotated data, we still need to think: Can machines learn all the knowledge necessary to perform semantic relevance detection tasks based on this data alone? If not, how can neural network-based models incorporate external knowledge into themselves, and how can relevance detection models be constructed to make full use of external knowledge? In this paper, we use external knowledge to enhance the pre-trained semantic relevance discrimination model. Experimental results on 10 public datasets show that our method achieves consistent improvements in performance compared to the baseline model.
Bridging the Gap: An Intermediate Language for Enhanced and Cost-Effective Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion with Homographs with Multiple Pronunciations Disambiguation
Authors: Abbas Bertina, Shahab Beirami, Hossein Biniazian, Elham Esmaeilnia, Soheil Shahi, Mahdi Pirnia
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion, Large Language Model, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Transliteration

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Persian presents unique challenges due to its complex phonological features, particularly homographs and Ezafe, which exist in formal and informal language contexts. This paper introduces an intermediate language specifically designed for Persian language processing that addresses these challenges through a multi-faceted approach. Our methodology combines two key components: Large Language Model (LLM) prompting techniques and a specialized sequence-to-sequence machine transliteration architecture. We developed and implemented a systematic approach for constructing a comprehensive lexical database for homographs with multiple pronunciations disambiguation often termed polyphones, utilizing formal concept analysis for semantic differentiation. We train our model using two distinct datasets: the LLM-generated dataset for formal and informal Persian and the B-Plus podcasts for informal language variants. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in handling the complexities of Persian phoneme conversion. Our model significantly improves Phoneme Error Rate (PER) metrics, establishing a new benchmark for Persian G2P conversion accuracy. This work contributes to the growing research in low-resource language processing and provides a robust solution for Persian text-to-speech systems and demonstrating its applicability beyond Persian. Specifically, the approach can extend to languages with rich homographic phenomena such as Chinese and Arabic
Evaluating LLM-Generated Q&A Test: a Student-Centered Study
Authors: Anna Wróblewska, Bartosz Grabek, Jakub Świstak, Daniel Dan
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

This research prepares an automatic pipeline for generating reliable question-answer (Q&A) tests using AI chatbots. We automatically generated a GPT-4o-mini-based Q&A test for a Natural Language Processing course and evaluated its psychometric and perceived-quality metrics with students and experts. A mixed-format IRT analysis showed that the generated items exhibit strong discrimination and appropriate difficulty, while student and expert star ratings reflect high overall quality. A uniform DIF check identified two items for review. These findings demonstrate that LLM-generated assessments can match human-authored tests in psychometric performance and user satisfaction, illustrating a scalable approach to AI-assisted assessment development.
REFINE-AF: A Task-Agnostic Framework to Align Language Models via Self-Generated Instructions using Reinforcement Learning from Automated Feedback
Authors: Aniruddha Roy, Pretam Ray, Abhilash Nandy, Somak Aditya, Pawan Goyal
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Instruction-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective in numerous few-shot or zero-shot Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, creating human-annotated instruction data is time-consuming, expensive, and often limited in quantity and task diversity. Previous research endeavors have attempted to address this challenge by proposing frameworks capable of generating instructions in a semi-automated and task-agnostic manner directly from the model itself. Many of these efforts have relied on large API-only parameter-based models such as GPT-3.5 (175B), which are expensive, and subject to limits on a number of queries. This paper explores the performance of three open-source small LLMs such as LLaMA 2-7B, LLama 2-13B, and Mistral 7B, using a semi-automated framework, thereby reducing human intervention, effort, and cost required to generate an instruction dataset for fine-tuning LLMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based training algorithm into this LLMs-based framework leads to further enhancements. Our evaluation of the dataset reveals that these RL-based frameworks achieve a substantial improvements in 63-66% of the tasks compared to previous approaches.
Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model
Authors: Xinyue Lou, You Li, Jinan Xu, Xiangyu Shi, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) has demonstrated broad application potential, yet their safety and reliability remain critical concerns that require systematic exploration. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic safety evaluation of 11 MLRMs across 5 benchmarks and unveil prevalent safety degradation phenomena in most advanced models. Moreover, our analysis reveals distinct safety patterns across different benchmarks: significant safety degradation is observed across jailbreak robustness benchmarks, whereas safety-awareness benchmarks demonstrate less pronounced degradation. In particular, the long thought process in some scenarios even enhances safety performance. Therefore, it is a potential approach to address safety issues in MLRMs by leveraging the intrinsic reasoning capabilities of the model to detect unsafe intent. To operationalize this insight, we construct a multimodal tuning dataset that incorporates a safety-oriented thought process. Experimental results from fine-tuning existing MLRMs with this dataset effectively enhances the safety on both jailbreak robustness and safety-awareness benchmarks. This study provides a new perspective for developing safe MLRMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/xinyuelou/Think-in-Safety.
Is your multimodal large language model a good science tutor?
Authors: Ming Liu, LiWen Wang, Wensheng Zhang
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on scientific reasoning tasks (e.g., ScienceQA). However, most existing benchmarks focus narrowly on the accuracy of the final answer while ignoring other metrics. In particular, when applying MLLMs to educational contexts, the goal is not only correctness but also the ability to teach. In this paper, we propose a framework that evaluates MLLMs as science tutors using a comprehensive educational rubric and a simulated student model that judges the teaching performance of the tutors. Given a list of candidate MLLM science tutors, we use rubric-based student judgments to produce a range of tutor performance scores, identifying both strong and weak tutors. Using the training section of the ScienceQA dataset, we then construct a data set of pairwise comparisons between the outputs of strong and weak tutors. This enables us to apply multiple preference optimization methods to fine-tune an underperforming tutor model (Qwen2-VL-2B) into more effective ones. Our results also show that strong problem-solving skills do not guarantee high-quality tutoring and that performance optimization-guided refinements can yield more educationally aligned tutor models. This approach opens avenues for building MLLMs that serve not only as problem solvers, but as genuinely helpful educational assistants.
ScaleMCP: Dynamic and Auto-Synchronizing Model Context Protocol Tools for LLM Agents
Authors: Elias Lumer, Anmol Gulati, Vamse Kumar Subbiah, Pradeep Honaganahalli Basavaraju, James A. Burke
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the introduction of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) have significantly expanded LLM agents' capability to interact dynamically with external tools and APIs. However, existing tool selection frameworks do not integrate MCP servers, instead relying heavily on error-prone manual updates to monolithic local tool repositories, leading to duplication, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. Additionally, current approaches abstract tool selection before the LLM agent is invoked, limiting its autonomy and hindering dynamic re-querying capabilities during multi-turn interactions. To address these issues, we introduce ScaleMCP, a novel tool selection approach that dynamically equips LLM agents with a MCP tool retriever, giving agents the autonomy to add tools into their memory, as well as an auto-synchronizing tool storage system pipeline through CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations with MCP servers as the single source of truth. We also propose a novel embedding strategy, Tool Document Weighted Average (TDWA), designed to selectively emphasize critical components of tool documents (e.g. tool name or synthetic questions) during the embedding process. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on a created dataset of 5,000 financial metric MCP servers, across 10 LLM models, 5 embedding models, and 5 retriever types, demonstrate substantial improvements in tool retrieval and agent invocation performance, emphasizing ScaleMCP's effectiveness in scalable, dynamic tool selection and invocation.
Lagrange Oscillatory Neural Networks for Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization
Authors: Corentin Delacour, Bram Haverkort, Filip Sabo, Nadine Azemard, Aida Todri-Sanial
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Physics-inspired computing paradigms are receiving renewed attention to enhance efficiency in compute-intensive tasks such as artificial intelligence and optimization. Similar to Hopfield neural networks, oscillatory neural networks (ONNs) minimize an Ising energy function that embeds the solutions of hard combinatorial optimization problems. Despite their success in solving unconstrained optimization problems, Ising machines still face challenges with constrained problems as they can get stuck at infeasible local minima. In this paper, we introduce a Lagrange ONN (LagONN) designed to escape infeasible states based on the theory of Lagrange multipliers. Unlike existing oscillatory Ising machines, LagONN employs additional Lagrange oscillators to guide the system towards feasible states in an augmented energy landscape and settles only when constraints are met. Taking the maximum satisfiability problem with three literals as a use case (Max-3-SAT), we harness LagONN's constraint satisfaction mechanism to find optimal solutions for random SATlib instances with up to 200 variables and 860 clauses, which provides a deterministic alternative to simulated annealing for coupled oscillators. We further discuss the potential of Lagrange oscillators to address other constraints, such as phase copying, which is useful in oscillatory Ising machines with limited connectivity.
Visual Evolutionary Optimization on Combinatorial Problems with Multimodal Large Language Models: A Case Study of Influence Maximization
Authors: Jie Zhao, Kang Hao Cheong
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Graph-structured combinatorial problems in complex networks are prevalent in many domains, and are computationally demanding due to their complexity and non-linear nature. Traditional evolutionary algorithms (EAs), while robust, often face obstacles due to content-shallow encoding limitations and lack of structural awareness, necessitating hand-crafted modifications for effective application. In this work, we introduce an original framework, Visual Evolutionary Optimization (VEO), leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as the backbone evolutionary optimizer in this context. Specifically, we propose a context-aware encoding way, representing the solution of the network as an image. In this manner, we can utilize MLLMs' image processing capabilities to intuitively comprehend network configurations, thus enabling machines to solve these problems in a human-like way. We have developed MLLM-based operators tailored for various evolutionary optimization stages, including initialization, crossover, and mutation. Furthermore, we propose that graph sparsification can effectively enhance the applicability and scalability of VEO on large-scale networks, owing to the scale-free nature of real-world networks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using a well-known task in complex networks, influence maximization, and validate it on eight different real-world networks of various structures. The results have confirmed VEO's reliability and enhanced effectiveness compared to traditional evolutionary optimization.
Adversarial Coevolutionary Illumination with Generational Adversarial MAP-Elites
Authors: Timothée Anne, Noah Syrkis, Meriem Elhosni, Florian Turati, Franck Legendre, Alain Jaquier, Sebastian Risi
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

Unlike traditional optimization algorithms focusing on finding a single optimal solution, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms illuminate a search space by finding high-performing solutions that cover a specified behavior space. However, tackling adversarial problems is more challenging due to the behavioral interdependence between opposing sides. Most applications of QD algorithms to these problems evolve only one side, thus reducing illumination coverage. In this paper, we propose a new QD algorithm, Generational Adversarial MAP-Elites (GAME), which coevolves solutions by alternating sides through a sequence of generations. Combining GAME with vision embedding models enables the algorithm to directly work from videos of behaviors instead of handcrafted descriptors. Some key findings are that (1) emerging evolutionary dynamics sometimes resemble an arms race, (2) starting each generation from scratch increases open-endedness, and (3) keeping neutral mutations preserves stepping stones that seem necessary to reach the highest performance. In conclusion, the results demonstrate that GAME can successfully illuminate an adversarial multi-agent game, opening up interesting future directions in understanding the emergence of open-ended coevolution.
Impact of internal noise on convolutional neural networks
Authors: Ivan Kolesnikov, Nadezhda Semenova
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate the impact of noise on a simplified trained convolutional network. The types of noise studied originate from a real optical implementation of a neural network, but we generalize these types to enhance the applicability of our findings on a broader scale. The noise types considered include additive and multiplicative noise, which relate to how noise affects individual neurons, as well as correlated and uncorrelated noise, which pertains to the influence of noise across one layers. We demonstrate that the propagation of uncorrelated noise primarily depends on the statistical properties of the connection matrices. Specifically, the mean value of the connection matrix following the layer impacted by noise governs the propagation of correlated additive noise, while the mean of its square contributes to the accumulation of uncorrelated noise. Additionally, we propose an analytical assessment of the noise level in the network's output signal, which shows a strong correlation with the results of numerical simulations.
Event-based Neural Spike Detection Using Spiking Neural Networks for Neuromorphic iBMI Systems
Authors: Chanwook Hwang, Biyan Zhou, Ye Ke, Vivek Mohan, Jong Hwan Ko, Arindam Basu
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression

Implantable brain-machine interfaces (iBMIs) are evolving to record from thousands of neurons wirelessly but face challenges in data bandwidth, power consumption, and implant size. We propose a novel Spiking Neural Network Spike Detector (SNN-SPD) that processes event-based neural data generated via delta modulation and pulse count modulation, converting signals into sparse events. By leveraging the temporal dynamics and inherent sparsity of spiking neural networks, our method improves spike detection performance while maintaining low computational overhead suitable for implantable devices. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SNN-SPD achieves an accuracy of 95.72% at high noise levels (standard deviation 0.2), which is about 2% higher than the existing Artificial Neural Network Spike Detector (ANN-SPD). Moreover, SNN-SPD requires only 0.41% of the computation and about 26.62% of the weight parameters compared to ANN-SPD, with zero multiplications. This approach balances efficiency and performance, enabling effective data compression and power savings for next-generation iBMIs.
Sigma-Delta Neural Network Conversion on Loihi 2
Authors: Matthew Brehove, Sadia Anjum Tumpa, Espoir Kyubwa, Naresh Menon, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00

Neuromorphic computing aims to improve the efficiency of artificial neural networks by taking inspiration from biological neurons and leveraging temporal sparsity, spatial sparsity, and compute near/in memory. Although these approaches have shown efficiency gains, training these spiking neural networks (SNN) remains difficult. The original attempts at converting trained conventional analog neural networks (ANN) to SNNs used the rate of binary spikes to represent neuron activations. This required many simulation time steps per inference, which degraded efficiency. Intel's Loihi 2 is a neuromorphic platform that supports graded spikes which can be used to represent changes in neuron activation. In this work, we use Loihi 2's graded spikes to develop a method for converting ANN networks to spiking networks, which take advantage of temporal and spatial sparsity. We evaluated the performance of this network on Loihi 2 and compared it to NVIDIA's Jetson Xavier edge AI platform.
Beyond Attention: Toward Machines with Intrinsic Higher Mental States
Authors: Ahsan Adeel
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Attending to what is relevant is fundamental to both the mammalian brain and modern machine learning models such as Transformers. Yet, determining relevance remains a core challenge, traditionally offloaded to learning algorithms like backpropagation. Inspired by recent cellular neurobiological evidence linking neocortical pyramidal cells to distinct mental states, this work shows how models (e.g., Transformers) can emulate high-level perceptual processing and awake thought (imagination) states to pre-select relevant information before applying attention. Triadic neuronal-level modulation loops among questions ($Q$), clues (keys, $K$), and hypotheses (values, $V$) enable diverse, deep, parallel reasoning chains at the representation level and allow a rapid shift from initial biases to refined understanding. This leads to orders-of-magnitude faster learning with significantly reduced computational demand (e.g., fewer heads, layers, and tokens), at an approximate cost of $\mathcal{O}(N)$, where $N$ is the number of input tokens. Results span reinforcement learning (e.g., CarRacing in a high-dimensional visual setup), computer vision, and natural language question answering.
Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Inference with Many Weak Instruments
Authors: Lars van der Laan, Nathan Kallus, Aurélien Bibaut
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00

We study inference on linear functionals in the nonparametric instrumental variable (NPIV) problem with a discretely-valued instrument under a many-weak-instruments asymptotic regime, where the number of instrument values grows with the sample size. A key motivating example is estimating long-term causal effects in a new experiment with only short-term outcomes, using past experiments to instrument for the effect of short- on long-term outcomes. Here, the assignment to a past experiment serves as the instrument: we have many past experiments but only a limited number of units in each. Since the structural function is nonparametric but constrained by only finitely many moment restrictions, point identification typically fails. To address this, we consider linear functionals of the minimum-norm solution to the moment restrictions, which is always well-defined. As the number of instrument levels grows, these functionals define an approximating sequence to a target functional, replacing point identification with a weaker asymptotic notion suited to discrete instruments. Extending the Jackknife Instrumental Variable Estimator (JIVE) beyond the classical parametric setting, we propose npJIVE, a nonparametric estimator for solutions to linear inverse problems with many weak instruments. We construct automatic debiased machine learning estimators for linear functionals of both the structural function and its minimum-norm projection, and establish their efficiency in the many-weak-instruments regime.