pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PCL: Prompt-based Continual Learning for User Modeling in Recommender Systems
Authors: Mingdai Yang, Fan Yang, Yanhui Guo, Shaoyuan Xu, Tianchen Zhou, Yetian Chen, Simone Shao, Jia Liu, Yan Gao
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Recommendation Systems

User modeling in large e-commerce platforms aims to optimize user experiences by incorporating various customer activities. Traditional models targeting a single task often focus on specific business metrics, neglecting the comprehensive user behavior, and thus limiting their effectiveness. To develop more generalized user representations, some existing work adopts Multi-task Learning (MTL)approaches. But they all face the challenges of optimization imbalance and inefficiency in adapting to new tasks. Continual Learning (CL), which allows models to learn new tasks incrementally and independently, has emerged as a solution to MTL's limitations. However, CL faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where previously learned knowledge is lost when the model is learning the new task. Inspired by the success of prompt tuning in Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), we propose PCL, a Prompt-based Continual Learning framework for user modeling, which utilizes position-wise prompts as external memory for each task, preserving knowledge and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we design contextual prompts to capture and leverage inter-task relationships during prompt tuning. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate PCL's effectiveness.
Teaching Dense Retrieval Models to Specialize with Listwise Distillation and LLM Data Augmentation
Authors: Manveer Singh Tamber, Suleman Kazi, Vivek Sourabh, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, Retrieval

While the current state-of-the-art dense retrieval models exhibit strong out-of-domain generalization, they might fail to capture nuanced domain-specific knowledge. In principle, fine-tuning these models for specialized retrieval tasks should yield higher effectiveness than relying on a one-size-fits-all model, but in practice, results can disappoint. We show that standard fine-tuning methods using an InfoNCE loss can unexpectedly degrade effectiveness rather than improve it, even for domain-specific scenarios. This holds true even when applying widely adopted techniques such as hard-negative mining and negative de-noising. To address this, we explore a training strategy that uses listwise distillation from a teacher cross-encoder, leveraging rich relevance signals to fine-tune the retriever. We further explore synthetic query generation using large language models. Through listwise distillation and training with a diverse set of queries ranging from natural user searches and factual claims to keyword-based queries, we achieve consistent effectiveness gains across multiple datasets. Our results also reveal that synthetic queries can rival human-written queries in training utility. However, we also identify limitations, particularly in the effectiveness of cross-encoder teachers as a bottleneck. We release our code and scripts to encourage further research.
Bisecting K-Means in RAG for Enhancing Question-Answering Tasks Performance in Telecommunications
Authors: Pedro Sousa, Cláudio Klautau Mello, Frank B. Morte, Luis F. Solis Navarro
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Question-answering tasks in the telecom domain are still reasonably unexplored in the literature, primarily due to the field's rapid changes and evolving standards. This work presents a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework explicitly designed for the telecommunication domain, focusing on datasets composed of 3GPP documents. The framework introduces the use of the Bisecting K-Means clustering technique to organize the embedding vectors by contents, facilitating more efficient information retrieval. By leveraging this clustering technique, the system pre-selects a subset of clusters that are most similar to the user's query, enhancing the relevance of the retrieved information. Aiming for models with lower computational cost for inference, the framework was tested using Small Language Models, demonstrating improved performance with an accuracy of 66.12% on phi-2 and 72.13% on phi-3 fine-tuned models, and reduced training time.
Waves and symbols in neuromorphic hardware: from analog signal processing to digital computing on the same computational substrate
Authors: Dmitrii Zendrikov, Alessio Franci, Giacomo Indiveri
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00

Neural systems use the same underlying computational substrate to carry out analog filtering and signal processing operations, as well as discrete symbol manipulation and digital computation. Inspired by the computational principles of canonical cortical microcircuits, we propose a framework for using recurrent spiking neural networks to seamlessly and robustly switch between analog signal processing and categorical and discrete computation. We provide theoretical analysis and practical neural network design tools to formally determine the conditions for inducing this switch. We demonstrate the robustness of this framework experimentally with hardware soft Winner-Take-All and mixed-feedback recurrent spiking neural networks, implemented by appropriately configuring the analog neuron and synapse circuits of a mixed-signal neuromorphic processor chip.
Talking like Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs)
Authors: Achmad Anggawirya Alimin, Dominik P. Goldstein, Lukas Schulze Balhorn, Artur M. Schweidtmann
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

We propose a methodology that allows communication with Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) using natural language. In particular, we represent P&IDs through the DEXPI data model as labeled property graphs and integrate them with Large Language Models (LLMs). The approach consists of three main parts: 1) P&IDs are cast into a graph representation from the DEXPI format using our pyDEXPI Python package. 2) A tool for generating P&ID knowledge graphs from pyDEXPI. 3) Integration of the P&ID knowledge graph to LLMs using graph-based retrieval augmented generation (graph-RAG). This approach allows users to communicate with P&IDs using natural language. It extends LLM's ability to retrieve contextual data from P&IDs and mitigate hallucinations. Leveraging the LLM's large corpus, the model is also able to interpret process information in PIDs, which could help engineers in their daily tasks. In the future, this work will also open up opportunities in the context of other generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) solutions on P&IDs, and AI-assisted HAZOP studies.
Integrating convolutional layers and biformer network with forward-forward and backpropagation training
Authors: Ali Kianfar, Parvin Razzaghi, Zahra Asgari
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: Scientific Reports 2025 2
Tasks: Computational chemistry, Drug Discovery, Feature Engineering, Molecular Property Prediction, Prediction, Property Prediction

Accurate molecular property prediction is crucial for drug discovery and computational chemistry, facilitating the identification of promising compounds and accelerating therapeutic development. Traditional machine learning falters with high-dimensional data and manual feature engineering, while existing deep learning approaches may not capture complex molecular structures, leaving a research gap. We introduce Deep-CBN, a novel framework designed to enhance molecular property prediction by capturing intricate molecular representations directly from raw data, thus improving accuracy and efficiency. Our methodology combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with a BiFormer attention mechanism, employing both the forward-forward algorithm and backpropagation. The model operates in three stages: (1) feature learning, extracting local features from SMILES strings using CNNs; (2) attention refinement, capturing global context with a BiFormer module enhanced by the forward-forward algorithm; and (3) prediction subnetwork tuning, fine-tuning via backpropagation. Evaluations on benchmark datasets—including Tox21, BBBP, SIDER, ClinTox, BACE, HIV, and MUV—show that Deep-CBN achieves near-perfect ROC-AUC scores, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. These findings demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing complex molecular patterns, offering a robust tool to accelerate drug discovery processes.
Generalizable Lightweight Proxy for Robust NAS against Diverse Perturbations
Authors: Hyeonjeong Ha, Minseon Kim, Sung Ju Hwang
Date: 2023-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Recent neural architecture search (NAS) frameworks have been successful in finding optimal architectures for given conditions (e.g., performance or latency). However, they search for optimal architectures in terms of their performance on clean images only, while robustness against various types of perturbations or corruptions is crucial in practice. Although there exist several robust NAS frameworks that tackle this issue by integrating adversarial training into one-shot NAS, however, they are limited in that they only consider robustness against adversarial attacks and require significant computational resources to discover optimal architectures for a single task, which makes them impractical in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel lightweight robust zero-cost proxy that considers the consistency across features, parameters, and gradients of both clean and perturbed images at the initialization state. Our approach facilitates an efficient and rapid search for neural architectures capable of learning generalizable features that exhibit robustness across diverse perturbations. The experimental results demonstrate that our proxy can rapidly and efficiently search for neural architectures that are consistently robust against various perturbations on multiple benchmark datasets and diverse search spaces, largely outperforming existing clean zero-shot NAS and robust NAS with reduced search cost.
LLM Bandit: Cost-Efficient LLM Generation via Preference-Conditioned Dynamic Routing
Authors: Yang Li
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00

The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has brought forth a diverse range of models with varying capabilities that excel in different tasks and domains. However, selecting the optimal LLM for user queries often involves a challenging trade-off between accuracy and cost, a problem exacerbated by the diverse demands of individual queries. In this work, we present a novel framework that formulates the LLM selection process as a multi-armed bandit problem, enabling dynamic and intelligent routing of queries to the most appropriate model. Our approach incorporates a preference-conditioned dynamic routing mechanism, allowing users to specify their preferences at inference time, thereby offering a customizable balance between performance and cost. Additionally, our selection policy is designed to generalize to unseen LLMs, ensuring adaptability to new models as they emerge. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and cost-effectiveness across various LLM platforms, showcasing the potential of our framework to adaptively optimize LLM selection in real-world scenarios.
PickLLM: Context-Aware RL-Assisted Large Language Model Routing
Authors: Dimitrios Sikeridis, Dennis Ramdass, Pranay Pareek
Date: 2024-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recently, the number of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) has exploded with many open-source options. This creates a diverse landscape regarding both serving options (e.g., inference on local hardware vs remote LLM APIs) and model heterogeneous expertise. However, it is hard for the user to efficiently optimize considering operational cost (pricing structures, expensive LLMs-as-a-service for large querying volumes), efficiency, or even per-case specific measures such as response accuracy, bias, or toxicity. Also, existing LLM routing solutions focus mainly on cost reduction, with response accuracy optimizations relying on non-generalizable supervised training, and ensemble approaches necessitating output computation for every considered LLM candidate. In this work, we tackle the challenge of selecting the optimal LLM from a model pool for specific queries with customizable objectives. We propose PickLLM, a lightweight framework that relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to route on-the-fly queries to available models. We introduce a weighted reward function that considers per-query cost, inference latency, and model response accuracy by a customizable scoring function. Regarding the learning algorithms, we explore two alternatives: PickLLM router acting as a learning automaton that utilizes gradient ascent to select a specific LLM, or utilizing stateless Q-learning to explore the set of LLMs and perform selection with a $\epsilon$-greedy approach. The algorithm converges to a single LLM for the remaining session queries. To evaluate, we utilize a pool of four LLMs and benchmark prompt-response datasets with different contexts. A separate scoring function is assessing response accuracy during the experiment. We demonstrate the speed of convergence for different learning rates and improvement in hard metrics such as cost per querying session and overall response latency.
Large Language Diffusion Models
Authors: Shen Nie, Fengqi Zhu, Zebin You, Xiaolu Zhang, Jingyang Ou, Jun Hu, Jun Zhou, Yankai Lin, Ji-Rong Wen, Chongxuan Li
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Instruction Following

Autoregressive models (ARMs) are widely regarded as the cornerstone of large language models (LLMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA models distributions through a forward data masking process and a reverse process, parameterized by a vanilla Transformer to predict masked tokens. By optimizing a likelihood bound, it provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference. Across extensive benchmarks, LLaDA demonstrates strong scalability, outperforming our self-constructed ARM baselines. Remarkably, LLaDA 8B is competitive with strong LLMs like LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning and, after SFT, exhibits impressive instruction-following abilities in case studies such as multi-turn dialogue. Moreover, LLaDA addresses the reversal curse, surpassing GPT-4o in a reversal poem completion task. Our findings establish diffusion models as a viable and promising alternative to ARMs, challenging the assumption that key LLM capabilities discussed above are inherently tied to ARMs. Project page and codes: https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-demo/.
ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Shu Wang, Yixiang Fang, Yingli Zhou, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) for question-answer (QA) tasks. The state-of-the-art RAG approaches often use the graph data as the external data since they capture the rich semantic information and link relationships between entities. However, existing graph-based RAG approaches cannot accurately identify the relevant information from the graph and also consume large numbers of tokens in the online retrieval process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel graph-based RAG approach, called Attributed Community-based Hierarchical RAG (ArchRAG), by augmenting the question using attributed communities, and also introducing a novel LLM-based hierarchical clustering method. To retrieve the most relevant information from the graph for the question, we build a novel hierarchical index structure for the attributed communities and develop an effective online retrieval method. Experimental results demonstrate that ArchRAG outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and token cost.
M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance
Authors: Qingpei Guo, Kaiyou Song, Zipeng Feng, Ziping Ma, Qinglong Zhang, Sirui Gao, Xuzheng Yu, Yunxiao Sun, Tai-WeiChang, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

We present M2-omni, a cutting-edge, open-source omni-MLLM that achieves competitive performance to GPT-4o. M2-omni employs a unified multimodal sequence modeling framework, which empowers Large Language Models(LLMs) to acquire comprehensive cross-modal understanding and generation capabilities. Specifically, M2-omni can process arbitrary combinations of audio, video, image, and text modalities as input, generating multimodal sequences interleaving with audio, image, or text outputs, thereby enabling an advanced and interactive real-time experience. The training of such an omni-MLLM is challenged by significant disparities in data quantity and convergence rates across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a step balance strategy during pre-training to handle the quantity disparities in modality-specific data. Additionally, a dynamically adaptive balance strategy is introduced during the instruction tuning stage to synchronize the modality-wise training progress, ensuring optimal convergence. Notably, we prioritize preserving strong performance on pure text tasks to maintain the robustness of M2-omni's language understanding capability throughout the training process. To our best knowledge, M2-omni is currently a very competitive open-source model to GPT-4o, characterized by its comprehensive modality and task support, as well as its exceptional performance. We expect M2-omni will advance the development of omni-MLLMs, thus facilitating future research in this domain.
Dynamic Degradation Decomposition Network for All-in-One Image Restoration
Authors: Huiqiang Wang, Mingchen Song, Guoqiang Zhong
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Restoration

Currently, restoring clean images from a variety of degradation types using a single model is still a challenging task. Existing all-in-one image restoration approaches struggle with addressing complex and ambiguously defined degradation types. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic degradation decomposition network for all-in-one image restoration, named D$^3$Net. D$^3$Net achieves degradation-adaptive image restoration with guided prompt through cross-domain interaction and dynamic degradation decomposition. Concretely, in D$^3$Net, the proposed Cross-Domain Degradation Analyzer (CDDA) engages in deep interaction between frequency domain degradation characteristics and spatial domain image features to identify and model variations of different degradation types on the image manifold, generating degradation correction prompt and strategy prompt, which guide the following decomposition process. Furthermore, the prompt-based Dynamic Decomposition Mechanism (DDM) for progressive degradation decomposition, that encourages the network to adaptively select restoration strategies utilizing the two-level prompt generated by CDDA. Thanks to the synergistic cooperation between CDDA and DDM, D$^3$Net achieves superior flexibility and scalability in handling unknown degradation, while effectively reducing unnecessary computational overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple image restoration tasks demonstrate that D$^3$Net significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially improving PSNR by 5.47dB and 3.30dB on the SOTS-Outdoor and GoPro datasets, respectively.
MDE: Modality Discrimination Enhancement for Multi-modal Recommendation
Authors: Hang Zhou, Yucheng Wang, Huijing Zhan
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Multi-modal Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Multi-modal recommendation systems aim to enhance performance by integrating an item's content features across various modalities with user behavior data. Effective utilization of features from different modalities requires addressing two challenges: preserving semantic commonality across modalities (modality-shared) and capturing unique characteristics for each modality (modality-specific). Most existing approaches focus on aligning feature spaces across modalities, which helps represent modality-shared features. However, modality-specific distinctions are often neglected, especially when there are significant semantic variations between modalities. To address this, we propose a Modality Distinctiveness Enhancement (MDE) framework that prioritizes extracting modality-specific information to improve recommendation accuracy while maintaining shared features. MDE enhances differences across modalities through a novel multi-modal fusion module and introduces a node-level trade-off mechanism to balance cross-modal alignment and differentiation. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of jointly considering modality-shared and modality-specific features.
Multiview graph dual-attention deep learning and contrastive learning for multi-criteria recommender systems
Authors: Saman Forouzandeh, Pavel N. Krivitsky, Rohitash Chandra
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Attention, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems leveraging deep learning models have been crucial for assisting users in selecting items aligned with their preferences and interests. However, a significant challenge persists in single-criteria recommender systems, which often overlook the diverse attributes of items that have been addressed by Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems (MCRS). Shared embedding vector for multi-criteria item ratings but have struggled to capture the nuanced relationships between users and items based on specific criteria. In this study, we present a novel representation for Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems (MCRS) based on a multi-edge bipartite graph, where each edge represents one criterion rating of items by users, and Multiview Dual Graph Attention Networks (MDGAT). Employing MDGAT is beneficial and important for adequately considering all relations between users and items, given the presence of both local (criterion-based) and global (multi-criteria) relations. Additionally, we define anchor points in each view based on similarity and employ local and global contrastive learning to distinguish between positive and negative samples across each view and the entire graph. We evaluate our method on two real-world datasets and assess its performance based on item rating predictions. The results demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy compared to the baseline method for predicting item ratings on the same datasets. MDGAT effectively capture the local and global impact of neighbours and the similarity between nodes.