pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Smaller But Better: Unifying Layout Generation with Smaller Large Language Models
Authors: Peirong Zhang, Jiaxin Zhang, Jiahuan Cao, Hongliang Li, Lianwen Jin
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Generation

We propose LGGPT, an LLM-based model tailored for unified layout generation. First, we propose Arbitrary Layout Instruction (ALI) and Universal Layout Response (ULR) as the uniform I/O template. ALI accommodates arbitrary layout generation task inputs across multiple layout domains, enabling LGGPT to unify both task-generic and domain-generic layout generation hitherto unexplored. Collectively, ALI and ULR boast a succinct structure that forgoes superfluous tokens typically found in existing HTML-based formats, facilitating efficient instruction tuning and boosting unified generation performance. In addition, we propose an Interval Quantization Encoding (IQE) strategy that compresses ALI into a more condensed structure. IQE precisely preserves valid layout clues while eliminating the less informative placeholders, facilitating LGGPT to capture complex and variable layout generation conditions during the unified training process. Experimental results demonstrate that LGGPT achieves superior or on par performance compared to existing methods. Notably, LGGPT strikes a prominent balance between proficiency and efficiency with a compact 1.5B parameter LLM, which beats prior 7B or 175B models even in the most extensive and challenging unified scenario. Furthermore, we underscore the necessity of employing LLMs for unified layout generation and suggest that 1.5B could be an optimal parameter size by comparing LLMs of varying scales. Code is available at https://github.com/NiceRingNode/LGGPT.
I Want 'Em All (At Once) -- Ultrametric Cluster Hierarchies
Authors: Andrew Draganov, Pascal Weber, Rasmus Skibdahl Melanchton Jørgensen, Anna Beer, Claudia Plant, Ira Assent
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Clustering

Hierarchical clustering is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis, organizing data into a tree of clusterings from which a partition can be chosen. This paper generalizes these ideas by proving that, for any reasonable hierarchy, one can optimally solve any center-based clustering objective over it (such as $k$-means). Moreover, these solutions can be found exceedingly quickly and are themselves necessarily hierarchical. Thus, given a cluster tree, we show that one can quickly access a plethora of new, equally meaningful hierarchies. Just as in standard hierarchical clustering, one can then choose any desired partition from these new hierarchies. We conclude by verifying the utility of our proposed techniques across datasets, hierarchies, and partitioning schemes.
Asking for Help Enables Safety Guarantees Without Sacrificing Effectiveness
Authors: Benjamin Plaut, Juan Liévano-Karim, Stuart Russell
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00

Most reinforcement learning algorithms with regret guarantees rely on a critical assumption: that all errors are recoverable. Recent work by Plaut et al. discarded this assumption and presented algorithms that avoid "catastrophe" (i.e., irreparable errors) by asking for help. However, they provided only safety guarantees and did not consider reward maximization. We prove that any algorithm that avoids catastrophe in their setting also guarantees high reward (i.e., sublinear regret) in any Markov Decision Process (MDP), including MDPs with irreversible costs. This constitutes the first no-regret guarantee for general MDPs. More broadly, our result may be the first formal proof that it is possible for an agent to obtain high reward while becoming self-sufficient in an unknown, unbounded, and high-stakes environment without causing catastrophe or requiring resets.
Position: There are no Champions in Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Lorenzo Brigato, Rafael Morand, Knut Strømmen, Maria Panagiotou, Markus Schmidt, Stavroula Mougiakakou
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Position, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Recent advances in long-term time series forecasting have introduced numerous complex prediction models that consistently outperform previously published architectures. However, this rapid progression raises concerns regarding inconsistent benchmarking and reporting practices, which may undermine the reliability of these comparisons. Our position emphasizes the need to shift focus away from pursuing ever-more complex models and towards enhancing benchmarking practices through rigorous and standardized evaluation methods. To support our claim, we first perform a broad, thorough, and reproducible evaluation of the top-performing models on the most popular benchmark by training 3,500+ networks over 14 datasets. Then, through a comprehensive analysis, we find that slight changes to experimental setups or current evaluation metrics drastically shift the common belief that newly published results are advancing the state of the art. Our findings suggest the need for rigorous and standardized evaluation methods that enable more substantiated claims, including reproducible hyperparameter setups and statistical testing.
Towards a Learning Theory of Representation Alignment
Authors: Francesco Insulla, Shuo Huang, Lorenzo Rosasco
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

It has recently been argued that AI models' representations are becoming aligned as their scale and performance increase. Empirical analyses have been designed to support this idea and conjecture the possible alignment of different representations toward a shared statistical model of reality. In this paper, we propose a learning-theoretic perspective to representation alignment. First, we review and connect different notions of alignment based on metric, probabilistic, and spectral ideas. Then, we focus on stitching, a particular approach to understanding the interplay between different representations in the context of a task. Our main contribution here is relating properties of stitching to the kernel alignment of the underlying representation. Our results can be seen as a first step toward casting representation alignment as a learning-theoretic problem.
Towards Vector Optimization on Low-Dimensional Vector Symbolic Architecture
Authors: Shijin Duan, Yejia Liu, Gaowen Liu, Ramana Rao Kompella, Shaolei Ren, Xiaolin Xu
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Vector Symbolic Architecture (VSA) is emerging in machine learning due to its efficiency, but they are hindered by issues of hyperdimensionality and accuracy. As a promising mitigation, the Low-Dimensional Computing (LDC) method significantly reduces the vector dimension by ~100 times while maintaining accuracy, by employing a gradient-based optimization. Despite its potential, LDC optimization for VSA is still underexplored. Our investigation into vector updates underscores the importance of stable, adaptive dynamics in LDC training. We also reveal the overlooked yet critical roles of batch normalization (BN) and knowledge distillation (KD) in standard approaches. Besides the accuracy boost, BN does not add computational overhead during inference, and KD significantly enhances inference confidence. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies across multiple benchmarks, we provide a thorough evaluation of our approach and extend the interpretability of binary neural network optimization similar to LDC, previously unaddressed in BNN literature.
Efficient and Optimal Policy Gradient Algorithm for Corrupted Multi-armed Bandits
Authors: Jiayuan Liu, Siwei Wang, Zhixuan Fang
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

In this paper, we consider the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem with adversarial corruptions, where the random rewards of the arms are partially modified by an adversary to fool the algorithm. We apply the policy gradient algorithm SAMBA to this setting, and show that it is computationally efficient, and achieves a state-of-the-art $O(K\log T/\Delta) + O(C/\Delta)$ regret upper bound, where $K$ is the number of arms, $C$ is the unknown corruption level, $\Delta$ is the minimum expected reward gap between the best arm and other ones, and $T$ is the time horizon. Compared with the best existing efficient algorithm (e.g., CBARBAR), whose regret upper bound is $O(K\log^2 T/\Delta) + O(C)$, we show that SAMBA reduces one $\log T$ factor in the regret bound, while maintaining the corruption-dependent term to be linear with $C$. This is indeed asymptotically optimal. We also conduct simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of SAMBA, and the results show that SAMBA outperforms existing baselines.
InstaSHAP: Interpretable Additive Models Explain Shapley Values Instantly
Authors: James Enouen, Yan Liu
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, Computational Efficiency

In recent years, the Shapley value and SHAP explanations have emerged as one of the most dominant paradigms for providing post-hoc explanations of black-box models. Despite their well-founded theoretical properties, many recent works have focused on the limitations in both their computational efficiency and their representation power. The underlying connection with additive models, however, is left critically under-emphasized in the current literature. In this work, we find that a variational perspective linking GAM models and SHAP explanations is able to provide deep insights into nearly all recent developments. In light of this connection, we borrow in the other direction to develop a new method to train interpretable GAM models which are automatically purified to compute the Shapley value in a single forward pass. Finally, we provide theoretical results showing the limited representation power of GAM models is the same Achilles' heel existing in SHAP and discuss the implications for SHAP's modern usage in CV and NLP.
Type 1 Diabetes Management using GLIMMER: Glucose Level Indicator Model with Modified Error Rate
Authors: Saman Khamesian, Asiful Arefeen, Adela Grando, Bithika Thompson, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Managing Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) demands constant vigilance as individuals strive to regulate their blood glucose levels to avert the dangers of dysglycemia (hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia). Despite the advent of sophisticated technologies such as automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, achieving optimal glycemic control remains a formidable task. AID systems integrate continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) and continuous glucose monitors (CGM) data, offering promise in reducing variability and increasing glucose time-in-range. However, these systems often fail to prevent dysglycemia, partly due to limitations in prediction algorithms that lack the precision to avert abnormal glucose events. This gap highlights the need for proactive behavioral adjustments. We address this need with GLIMMER, Glucose Level Indicator Model with Modified Error Rate, a machine learning approach for forecasting blood glucose levels. GLIMMER categorizes glucose values into normal and abnormal ranges and devises a novel custom loss function to prioritize accuracy in dysglycemic events where patient safety is critical. To evaluate the potential of GLIMMER for T1D management, we both use a publicly available dataset and collect new data involving 25 patients with T1D. In predicting next-hour glucose values, GLIMMER achieved a root mean square error (RMSE) of 23.97 (+/-3.77) and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 15.83 (+/-2.09) mg/dL. These results reflect a 23% improvement in RMSE and a 31% improvement in MAE compared to the best-reported error rates.
Adaptive Sparsified Graph Learning Framework for Vessel Behavior Anomalies
Authors: Jeehong Kim, Minchan Kim, Jaeseong Ju, Youngseok Hwang, Wonhee Lee, Hyunwoo Park
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Graph Learning

Graph neural networks have emerged as a powerful tool for learning spatiotemporal interactions. However, conventional approaches often rely on predefined graphs, which may obscure the precise relationships being modeled. Additionally, existing methods typically define nodes based on fixed spatial locations, a strategy that is ill-suited for dynamic environments like maritime environments. Our method introduces an innovative graph representation where timestamps are modeled as distinct nodes, allowing temporal dependencies to be explicitly captured through graph edges. This setup is extended to construct a multi-ship graph that effectively captures spatial interactions while preserving graph sparsity. The graph is processed using Graph Convolutional Network layers to capture spatiotemporal patterns, with a forecasting layer for feature prediction and a Variational Graph Autoencoder for reconstruction, enabling robust anomaly detection.
Accurate Forgetting for Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning
Authors: Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Sen Cui, Jingfeng Zhang, Kunda Yan, Bo Han, Gang Niu, Lei Fang, ChangShui Zhang, Masashi Sugiyama
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Federated Learning

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in federated learning (FL). However, the contexts in which clients engage in sequential learning remain under-explored. Bridging FL and continual learning (CL) gives rise to a challenging practical problem: federated continual learning (FCL). Existing research in FCL primarily focuses on mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue of continual learning while collaborating with other clients. We argue that the forgetting phenomena are not invariably detrimental. In this paper, we consider a more practical and challenging FCL setting characterized by potentially unrelated or even antagonistic data/tasks across different clients. In the FL scenario, statistical heterogeneity and data noise among clients may exhibit spurious correlations which result in biased feature learning. While existing CL strategies focus on a complete utilization of previous knowledge, we found that forgetting biased information is beneficial in our study. Therefore, we propose a new concept accurate forgetting (AF) and develop a novel generative-replay method~\method~which selectively utilizes previous knowledge in federated networks. We employ a probabilistic framework based on a normalizing flow model to quantify the credibility of previous knowledge. Comprehensive experiments affirm the superiority of our method over baselines.
Asymmetric Co-Training for Source-Free Few-Shot Domain Adaptation
Authors: Gengxu Li, Yuan Wu
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) has gained significant attention as an alternative to traditional unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), which relies on the constant availability of labeled source data. However, SFUDA approaches come with inherent limitations that are frequently overlooked. These challenges include performance degradation when the unlabeled target data fails to meet critical assumptions, such as having a closed-set label distribution identical to that of the source domain, or when sufficient unlabeled target data is unavailable-a common situation in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose an asymmetric co-training (ACT) method specifically designed for the SFFSDA scenario. SFFSDA presents a more practical alternative to SFUDA, as gathering a few labeled target instances is more feasible than acquiring large volumes of unlabeled target data in many real-world contexts. Our ACT method begins by employing a weak-strong augmentation to enhance data diversity. Then we use a two-step optimization process to train the target model. In the first step, we optimize the label smoothing cross-entropy loss, the entropy of the class-conditional distribution, and the reverse-entropy loss to bolster the model's discriminative ability while mitigating overfitting. The second step focuses on reducing redundancy in the output space by minimizing classifier determinacy disparity. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our ACT approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art SFUDA methods and transfer learning techniques. Our findings suggest that adapting a source pre-trained model using only a small amount of labeled target data offers a practical and dependable solution. The code is available at https://github.com/gengxuli/ACT.
Rethinking Spiking Neural Networks from an Ensemble Learning Perspective
Authors: Yongqi Ding, Lin Zuo, Mengmeng Jing, Pei He, Hanpu Deng
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibit superior energy efficiency but suffer from limited performance. In this paper, we consider SNNs as ensembles of temporal subnetworks that share architectures and weights, and highlight a crucial issue that affects their performance: excessive differences in initial states (neuronal membrane potentials) across timesteps lead to unstable subnetwork outputs, resulting in degraded performance. To mitigate this, we promote the consistency of the initial membrane potential distribution and output through membrane potential smoothing and temporally adjacent subnetwork guidance, respectively, to improve overall stability and performance. Moreover, membrane potential smoothing facilitates forward propagation of information and backward propagation of gradients, mitigating the notorious temporal gradient vanishing problem. Our method requires only minimal modification of the spiking neurons without adapting the network structure, making our method generalizable and showing consistent performance gains in 1D speech, 2D object, and 3D point cloud recognition tasks. In particular, on the challenging CIFAR10-DVS dataset, we achieved 83.20\% accuracy with only four timesteps. This provides valuable insights into unleashing the potential of SNNs.
SleepGMUformer: A gated multimodal temporal neural network for sleep staging
Authors: Chenjun Zhao, Xuesen Niu, Xinglin Yu, Long Chen, Na Lv, Huiyu Zhou, Aite Zhao
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Sleep Quality, Sleep Staging

Sleep staging is a key method for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. However, current deep learning methods face challenges: 1) postfusion techniques ignore the varying contributions of different modalities; 2) unprocessed sleep data can interfere with frequency-domain information. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a gated multimodal temporal neural network for multidomain sleep data, including heart rate, motion, steps, EEG (Fpz-Cz, Pz-Oz), and EOG from WristHR-Motion-Sleep and SleepEDF-78. The model integrates: 1) a pre-processing module for feature alignment, missing value handling, and EEG de-trending; 2) a feature extraction module for complex sleep features in the time dimension; and 3) a dynamic fusion module for real-time modality weighting.Experiments show classification accuracies of 85.03% on SleepEDF-78 and 94.54% on WristHR-Motion-Sleep datasets. The model handles heterogeneous datasets and outperforms state-of-the-art models by 1.00%-4.00%.
LabTOP: A Unified Model for Lab Test Outcome Prediction on Electronic Health Records
Authors: Sujeong Im, JungWoo Oh, Edward Choi
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Lab tests are fundamental for diagnosing diseases and monitoring patient conditions. However, frequent testing can be burdensome for patients, and test results may not always be immediately available. To address these challenges, we propose LabTOP, a unified model that predicts lab test outcomes by leveraging a language modeling approach on EHR data. Unlike conventional methods that estimate only a subset of lab tests or classify discrete value ranges, LabTOP performs continuous numerical predictions for a diverse range of lab items. We evaluate LabTOP on three publicly available EHR datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods, including traditional machine learning models and state-of-the-art large language models. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the effectiveness of our design choices. We believe that LabTOP will serve as an accurate and generalizable framework for lab test outcome prediction, with potential applications in clinical decision support and early detection of critical conditions.
Predicting Fetal Birthweight from High Dimensional Data using Advanced Machine Learning
Authors: Nachiket Kapure, Harsh Joshi, Rajeshwari Mistri, Parul Kumari, Manasi Mali, Seema Purohit, Neha Sharma, Mrityunjoy Panday, Chittaranjan S. Yajnik
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Imputation

Birth weight serves as a fundamental indicator of neonatal health, closely linked to both early medical interventions and long-term developmental risks. Traditional predictive models, often constrained by limited feature selection and incomplete datasets, struggle to achieve overlooking complex maternal and fetal interactions in diverse clinical settings. This research explores machine learning to address these limitations, utilizing a structured methodology that integrates advanced imputation strategies, supervised feature selection techniques, and predictive modeling. Given the constraints of the dataset, the research strengthens the role of data preprocessing in improving the model performance. Among the various methodologies explored, tree-based feature selection methods demonstrated superior capability in identifying the most relevant predictors, while ensemble-based regression models proved highly effective in capturing non-linear relationships and complex maternal-fetal interactions within the data. Beyond model performance, the study highlights the clinical significance of key physiological determinants, offering insights into maternal and fetal health factors that influence birth weight, offering insights that extend over statistical modeling. By bridging computational intelligence with perinatal research, this work underscores the transformative role of machine learning in enhancing predictive accuracy, refining risk assessment and informing data-driven decision-making in maternal and neonatal care. Keywords: Birth weight prediction, maternal-fetal health, MICE, BART, Gradient Boosting, neonatal outcomes, Clinipredictive.
Correcting Noisy Multilabel Predictions: Modeling Label Noise through Latent Space Shifts
Authors: Weipeng Huang, Qin Li, Yang Xiao, Cheng Qiao, Tie Cai, Junwei Liang, Neil J. Hurley, Guangyuan Piao
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Noise in data appears to be inevitable in most real-world machine learning applications and would cause severe overfitting problems. Not only can data features contain noise, but labels are also prone to be noisy due to human input. In this paper, rather than noisy label learning in multiclass classifications, we instead focus on the less explored area of noisy label learning for multilabel classifications. Specifically, we investigate the post-correction of predictions generated from classifiers learned with noisy labels. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, this approach can directly work with the trained models to save computational resources. Secondly, it could be applied on top of other noisy label correction techniques to achieve further improvements. To handle this problem, we appeal to deep generative approaches that are possible for uncertainty estimation. Our model posits that label noise arises from a stochastic shift in the latent variable, providing a more robust and beneficial means for noisy learning. We develop both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods for our model. The extensive empirical study presents solid evidence to that our approach is able to consistently improve the independent models and performs better than a number of existing methods across various noisy label settings. Moreover, a comprehensive empirical analysis of the proposed method is carried out to validate its robustness, including sensitivity analysis and an ablation study, among other elements.