pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spatio-temporal Graph Learning on Adaptive Mined Key Frames for High-performance Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Futian Wang, Fengxiang Liu, Xiao Wang
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

In the realm of multi-object tracking, the challenge of accurately capturing the spatial and temporal relationships between objects in video sequences remains a significant hurdle. This is further complicated by frequent occurrences of mutual occlusions among objects, which can lead to tracking errors and reduced performance in existing methods. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel adaptive key frame mining strategy that addresses the limitations of current tracking approaches. Specifically, we introduce a Key Frame Extraction (KFE) module that leverages reinforcement learning to adaptively segment videos, thereby guiding the tracker to exploit the intrinsic logic of the video content. This approach allows us to capture structured spatial relationships between different objects as well as the temporal relationships of objects across frames. To tackle the issue of object occlusions, we have developed an Intra-Frame Feature Fusion (IFF) module. Unlike traditional graph-based methods that primarily focus on inter-frame feature fusion, our IFF module uses a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to facilitate information exchange between the target and surrounding objects within a frame. This innovation significantly enhances target distinguishability and mitigates tracking loss and appearance similarity due to occlusions. By combining the strengths of both long and short trajectories and considering the spatial relationships between objects, our proposed tracker achieves impressive results on the MOT17 dataset, i.e., 68.6 HOTA, 81.0 IDF1, 66.6 AssA, and 893 IDS, proving its effectiveness and accuracy.
Infrastructure for AI Agents
Authors: Alan Chan, Kevin Wei, Sihao Huang, Nitarshan Rajkumar, Elija Perrier, Seth Lazar, Gillian K. Hadfield, Markus Anderljung
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00

AI agents plan and execute interactions in open-ended environments. For example, OpenAI's Operator can use a web browser to do product comparisons and buy online goods. To facilitate beneficial interactions and mitigate harmful ones, much research focuses on directly modifying agent behaviour. For example, developers can train agents to follow user instructions. This focus on direct modifications is useful, but insufficient. We will also need external protocols and systems that shape how agents interact with institutions and other actors. For instance, agents will need more efficient protocols to communicate with each other and form agreements. In addition, attributing an agent's actions to a particular human or other legal entity can help to establish trust, and also disincentivize misuse. Given this motivation, we propose the concept of agent infrastructure: technical systems and shared protocols external to agents that are designed to mediate and influence their interactions with and impacts on their environments. Just as the Internet relies on protocols like HTTPS, our work argues that agent infrastructure will be similarly indispensable to ecosystems of agents. We identify three functions for agent infrastructure: 1) attributing actions, properties, and other information to specific agents, their users, or other actors; 2) shaping agents' interactions; and 3) detecting and remedying harmful actions from agents. We provide an incomplete catalog of research directions for such functions. For each direction, we include analysis of use cases, infrastructure adoption, relationships to existing (internet) infrastructure, limitations, and open questions. Making progress on agent infrastructure can prepare society for the adoption of more advanced agents.
BBPOS: BERT-based Part-of-Speech Tagging for Uzbek
Authors: Latofat Bobojonova, Arofat Akhundjanova, Phil Ostheimer, Sophie Fellenz
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Sensitivity

This paper advances NLP research for the low-resource Uzbek language by evaluating two previously untested monolingual Uzbek BERT models on the part-of-speech (POS) tagging task and introducing the first publicly available UPOS-tagged benchmark dataset for Uzbek. Our fine-tuned models achieve 91% average accuracy, outperforming the baseline multi-lingual BERT as well as the rule-based tagger. Notably, these models capture intermediate POS changes through affixes and demonstrate context sensitivity, unlike existing rule-based taggers.
LLM Reasoner and Automated Planner: A new NPC approach
Authors: Israel Puerta-Merino, Jordi Sabater-Mir
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In domains requiring intelligent agents to emulate plausible human-like behaviour, such as formative simulations, traditional techniques like behaviour trees encounter significant challenges. Large Language Models (LLMs), despite not always yielding optimal solutions, usually offer plausible and human-like responses to a given problem. In this paper, we exploit this capability and propose a novel architecture that integrates an LLM for decision-making with a classical automated planner that can generate sound plans for that decision. The combination aims to equip an agent with the ability to make decisions in various situations, even if they were not anticipated during the design phase.
Universal Actions for Enhanced Embodied Foundation Models
Authors: Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Dongxiu Liu, Yinan Zheng, Zhihao Wang, Zhonghong Ou, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Xianyuan Zhan
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Training on diverse, internet-scale data is a key factor in the success of recent large foundation models. Yet, using the same recipe for building embodied agents has faced noticeable difficulties. Despite the availability of many crowd-sourced embodied datasets, their action spaces often exhibit significant heterogeneity due to distinct physical embodiment and control interfaces for different robots, causing substantial challenges in developing embodied foundation models using cross-domain data. In this paper, we introduce UniAct, a new embodied foundation modeling framework operating in a Universal Action Space. Our learned universal actions capture the generic atomic behaviors across diverse robots by exploiting their shared structural features, and enable enhanced cross-domain data utilization and cross-embodiment generalizations by eliminating the notorious heterogeneity. The universal actions can be efficiently translated back to heterogeneous actionable commands by simply adding embodiment-specific details, from which fast adaptation to new robots becomes simple and straightforward. Our 0.5B instantiation of UniAct outperforms 14X larger SOTA embodied foundation models in extensive evaluations on various real-world and simulation robots, showcasing exceptional cross-embodiment control and adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of adopting universal actions. Project page: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct
Robotic World Model: A Neural Network Simulator for Robust Policy Optimization in Robotics
Authors: Chenhao Li, Andreas Krause, Marco Hutter
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Learning robust and generalizable world models is crucial for enabling efficient and scalable robotic control in real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for learning world models that accurately capture complex, partially observable, and stochastic dynamics. The proposed method employs a dual-autoregressive mechanism and self-supervised training to achieve reliable long-horizon predictions without relying on domain-specific inductive biases, ensuring adaptability across diverse robotic tasks. We further propose a policy optimization framework that leverages world models for efficient training in imagined environments and seamless deployment in real-world systems. Through extensive experiments, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior autoregressive prediction accuracy, robustness to noise, and generalization across manipulation and locomotion tasks. Notably, policies trained with our method are successfully deployed on ANYmal D hardware in a zero-shot transfer, achieving robust performance with minimal sim-to-real performance loss. This work advances model-based reinforcement learning by addressing the challenges of long-horizon prediction, error accumulation, and sim-to-real transfer. By providing a scalable and robust framework, the introduced methods pave the way for adaptive and efficient robotic systems in real-world applications.
landmarker: a Toolkit for Anatomical Landmark Localization in 2D/3D Images
Authors: Jef Jonkers, Luc Duchateau, Glenn Van Wallendael, Sofie Van Hoecke
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Anatomical landmark localization in 2D/3D images is a critical task in medical imaging. Although many general-purpose tools exist for landmark localization in classical computer vision tasks, such as pose estimation, they lack the specialized features and modularity necessary for anatomical landmark localization applications in the medical domain. Therefore, we introduce landmarker, a Python package built on PyTorch. The package provides a comprehensive, flexible toolkit for developing and evaluating landmark localization algorithms, supporting a range of methodologies, including static and adaptive heatmap regression. landmarker enhances the accuracy of landmark identification, streamlines research and development processes, and supports various image formats and preprocessing pipelines. Its modular design allows users to customize and extend the toolkit for specific datasets and applications, accelerating innovation in medical imaging. landmarker addresses a critical need for precision and customization in landmark localization tasks not adequately met by existing general-purpose pose estimation tools.
How Do Programming Students Use Generative AI?
Authors: Christian Rahe, Walid Maalej
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Programming students have a widespread access to powerful Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. While this can help understand the learning material and assist with exercises, educators are voicing more and more concerns about an overreliance on generated outputs and lack of critical thinking skills. It is thus important to understand how students actually use generative AI and what impact this could have on their learning behavior. To this end, we conducted a study including an exploratory experiment with 37 programming students, giving them monitored access to ChatGPT while solving a code authoring exercise. The task was not directly solvable by ChatGPT and required code comprehension and reasoning. While only 23 of the students actually opted to use the chatbot, the majority of those eventually prompted it to simply generate a full solution. We observed two prevalent usage strategies: to seek knowledge about general concepts and to directly generate solutions. Instead of using the bot to comprehend the code and their own mistakes, students often got trapped in a vicious cycle of submitting wrong generated code and then asking the bot for a fix. Those who self-reported using generative AI regularly were more likely to prompt the bot to generate a solution. Our findings indicate that concerns about potential decrease in programmers' agency and productivity with Generative AI are justified. We discuss how researchers and educators can respond to the potential risk of students uncritically over-relying on Generative AI. We also discuss potential modifications to our study design for large-scale replications.
Robust Change Captioning in Remote Sensing: SECOND-CC Dataset and MModalCC Framework
Authors: Ali Can Karaca, M. Enes Ozelbas, Saadettin Berber, Orkhan Karimli, Turabi Yildirim, M. Fatih Amasyali
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing change captioning (RSICC) aims to describe changes between bitemporal images in natural language. Existing methods often fail under challenges like illumination differences, viewpoint changes, blur effects, leading to inaccuracies, especially in no-change regions. Moreover, the images acquired at different spatial resolutions and have registration errors tend to affect the captions. To address these issues, we introduce SECOND-CC, a novel RSICC dataset featuring high-resolution RGB image pairs, semantic segmentation maps, and diverse real-world scenarios. SECOND-CC which contains 6,041 pairs of bitemporal RS images and 30,205 sentences describing the differences between images. Additionally, we propose MModalCC, a multimodal framework that integrates semantic and visual data using advanced attention mechanisms, including Cross-Modal Cross Attention (CMCA) and Multimodal Gated Cross Attention (MGCA). Detailed ablation studies and attention visualizations further demonstrate its effectiveness and ability to address RSICC challenges. Comprehensive experiments show that MModalCC outperforms state-of-the-art RSICC methods, including RSICCformer, Chg2Cap, and PSNet with +4.6% improvement on BLEU4 score and +9.6% improvement on CIDEr score. We will make our dataset and codebase publicly available to facilitate future research at https://github.com/ChangeCapsInRS/SecondCC
SpatialCoT: Advancing Spatial Reasoning through Coordinate Alignment and Chain-of-Thought for Embodied Task Planning
Authors: Yuecheng Liu, Dafeng Chi, Shiguang Wu, Zhanguang Zhang, Yaochen Hu, Lingfeng Zhang, Yingxue Zhang, Shuang Wu, Tongtong Cao, Guowei Huang, Helong Huang, Guangjian Tian, Weichao Qiu, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao, Yuzheng Zhuang
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning, Task Planning

Spatial reasoning is an essential problem in embodied AI research. Efforts to enhance spatial reasoning abilities through supplementary spatial data and fine-tuning have proven limited and ineffective when addressing complex embodied tasks, largely due to their dependence on language-based outputs. While some approaches have introduced a point-based action space to mitigate this issue, they fall short in managing more intricate tasks within complex environments. This deficiency arises from their failure to fully exploit the inherent thinking and reasoning capabilities that are fundamental strengths of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named SpatialCoT, specifically designed to bolster the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Our approach comprises two stages: spatial coordinate bi-directional alignment, which aligns vision-language inputs with spatial coordinates, and chain-of-thought spatial grounding, which harnesses the reasoning capabilities of language models for advanced spatial reasoning. We evaluate SpatialCoT on challenging navigation and manipulation tasks, both in simulation and real-world settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in both tasks.
A Survey on LLM Test-Time Compute via Search: Tasks, LLM Profiling, Search Algorithms, and Relevant Frameworks
Authors: Xinzhe Li
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

LLM test-time compute (or LLM inference) via search has emerged as a promising research area with rapid developments. However, current frameworks often adopt distinct perspectives on three key aspects (task definition, LLM profiling, and search procedures), making direct comparisons challenging. Moreover, the search algorithms employed often diverge from standard implementations, and their specific characteristics are not thoroughly specified. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive technical review that unifies task definitions and provides modular definitions of LLM profiling and search procedures. The definitions enable precise comparisons of various LLM inference frameworks while highlighting their departures from conventional search algorithms. We also discuss the applicability, performance, and efficiency of these methods. For further details and ongoing updates, please refer to our GitHub repository: https://github.com/xinzhel/LLM-Agent-Survey/blob/main/search.md
Accelerating Large Language Models through Partially Linear Feed-Forward Network
Authors: Gansen Hu, Zhaoguo Wang, Jinglin Wei, Wei Huang, Haibo Chen
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Compiler Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but face deployment challenges due to their massive parameter counts. While existing compression techniques like pruning can reduce model size, it leads to significant accuracy degradation under high compression ratios. We present a novel perspective inspired by constant folding in compiler optimization. Our approach enables parameter reduction by treating activation functions in LLMs as linear functions. However, recent LLMs use complex non-linear activations like GELU that prevent direct application of this technique. We propose TARDIS, which enables optimization of LLMs with non-linear activations by partially approximating them with linear functions in frequently occurring input ranges. For outlier inputs, TARDIS employs an online predictor to dynamically fall back to original computations. Our experiments demonstrate that TARDIS achieves 80% parameter reduction in feed-forward networks, while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art pruning methods Wanda and RIA with up to 65% higher accuracy. In practical deployments for a 7B model, TARDIS achieves 1.6x end-to-end inference speedup when integrated with the vLLM serving system, and 1.4x speedup with the widely adopted HuggingFace implementation, while incurring only a 10.9% accuracy trade-off.
AirRAG: Activating Intrinsic Reasoning for Retrieval Augmented Generation via Tree-based Search
Authors: Wenfeng Feng, Chuzhan Hao, Yuewei Zhang, Jingyi Song, Hao Wang
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Leveraging the autonomous decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates superior performance in reasoning tasks. Despite the successes of iterative or recursive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), they often are trapped in a single solution space when confronted with complex tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel thinking pattern in RAG which integrates system analysis with efficient reasoning actions, significantly activating intrinsic reasoning capabilities and expanding the solution space of specific tasks via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), dubbed AirRAG. Specifically, our approach designs five fundamental reasoning actions that are expanded to a wide tree-based reasoning spaces using MCTS. The extension also uses self-consistency verification to explore potential reasoning paths and implement inference scaling. In addition, computationally optimal strategies are used to apply more inference computation to key actions to achieve further performance improvements. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of AirRAG through considerable performance gains over complex QA datasets. Furthermore, AirRAG is flexible and lightweight, making it easy to integrate with other advanced technologies.
Virtual Nodes Improve Long-term Traffic Prediction
Authors: Xiaoyang Cao, Dingyi Zhuang, Jinhua Zhao, Shenhao Wang
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Effective traffic prediction is a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, enabling precise forecasts of traffic flow, speed, and congestion. While traditional spatio-temporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) have achieved notable success in short-term traffic forecasting, their performance in long-term predictions remains limited. This challenge arises from over-squashing problem, where bottlenecks and limited receptive fields restrict information flow and hinder the modeling of global dependencies. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel framework that incorporates virtual nodes, which are additional nodes added to the graph and connected to existing nodes, in order to aggregate information across the entire graph within a single GNN layer. Our proposed model incorporates virtual nodes by constructing a semi-adaptive adjacency matrix. This matrix integrates distance-based and adaptive adjacency matrices, allowing the model to leverage geographical information while also learning task-specific features from data. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of virtual nodes significantly enhances long-term prediction accuracy while also improving layer-wise sensitivity to mitigate the over-squashing problem. Virtual nodes also offer enhanced explainability by focusing on key intersections and high-traffic areas, as shown by the visualization of their adjacency matrix weights on road network heat maps. Our advanced approach enhances the understanding and management of urban traffic systems, making it particularly well-suited for real-world applications.
Spatiotemporal Prediction of Secondary Crashes by Rebalancing Dynamic and Static Data with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Junlan Chen, Yiqun Li, Chenyu Ling, Ziyuan Pu, Xiucheng Guo
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Data imbalance is a common issue in analyzing and predicting sudden traffic events. Secondary crashes constitute only a small proportion of all crashes. These secondary crashes, triggered by primary crashes, significantly exacerbate traffic congestion and increase the severity of incidents. However, the severe imbalance of secondary crash data poses significant challenges for prediction models, affecting their generalization ability and prediction accuracy. Existing methods fail to fully address the complexity of traffic crash data, particularly the coexistence of dynamic and static features, and often struggle to effectively handle data samples of varying lengths. Furthermore, most current studies predict the occurrence probability and spatiotemporal distribution of secondary crashes separately, lacking an integrated solution. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid model named VarFusiGAN-Transformer, aimed at improving the fidelity of secondary crash data generation and jointly predicting the occurrence and spatiotemporal distribution of secondary crashes. The VarFusiGAN-Transformer model employs Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to enhance the generation of multivariate long-time series data, incorporating a static data generator and an auxiliary discriminator to model the joint distribution of dynamic and static features. In addition, the model's prediction module achieves simultaneous prediction of both the occurrence and spatiotemporal distribution of secondary crashes. Compared to existing methods, the proposed model demonstrates superior performance in generating high-fidelity data and improving prediction accuracy.
Automatic Speech Recognition for Sanskrit with Transfer Learning
Authors: Bidit Sadhukhan, Swami Punyeshwarananda
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Sanskrit, one of humanity's most ancient languages, has a vast collection of books and manuscripts on diverse topics that have been accumulated over millennia. However, its digital content (audio and text), which is vital for the training of AI systems, is profoundly limited. Furthermore, its intricate linguistics make it hard to develop robust NLP tools for wider accessibility. Given these constraints, we have developed an automatic speech recognition model for Sanskrit by employing transfer learning mechanism on OpenAI's Whisper model. After carefully optimising the hyper-parameters, we obtained promising results with our transfer-learned model achieving a word error rate of 15.42% on Vaksancayah dataset. An online demo of our model is made available for the use of public and to evaluate its performance firsthand thereby paving the way for improved accessibility and technological support for Sanskrit learning in the modern era.