pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
If an LLM Were a Character, Would It Know Its Own Story? Evaluating Lifelong Learning in LLMs
Authors: Siqi Fan, Xiusheng Huang, Yiqun Yao, Xuezhi Fang, Kang Liu, Peng Han, Shuo Shang, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Lifelong learning

Large language models (LLMs) can carry out human-like dialogue, but unlike humans, they are stateless due to the superposition property. However, during multi-turn, multi-agent interactions, LLMs begin to exhibit consistent, character-like behaviors, hinting at a form of emergent lifelong learning. Despite this, existing benchmarks often fail to capture these dynamics, primarily focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce LIFESTATE-BENCH, a benchmark designed to assess lifelong learning in LLMs. It features two episodic datasets: Hamlet and a synthetic script collection, rich in narrative structure and character interactions. Our fact checking evaluation probes models' self-awareness, episodic memory retrieval, and relationship tracking, across both parametric and non-parametric approaches. Experiments on models like Llama3.1-8B, GPT-4-turbo, and DeepSeek R1, we demonstrate that nonparametric methods significantly outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. However, all models exhibit challenges with catastrophic forgetting as interactions extend, highlighting the need for further advancements in lifelong learning.
Buffer is All You Need: Defending Federated Learning against Backdoor Attacks under Non-iids via Buffering
Authors: Xingyu Lyu, Ning Wang, Yang Xiao, Shixiong Li, Tao Li, Danjue Chen, Yimin Chen
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Contrastive Learning, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a popular paradigm enabling clients to jointly train a global model without sharing raw data. However, FL is known to be vulnerable towards backdoor attacks due to its distributed nature. As participants, attackers can upload model updates that effectively compromise FL. What's worse, existing defenses are mostly designed under independent-and-identically-distributed (iid) settings, hence neglecting the fundamental non-iid characteristic of FL. Here we propose FLBuff for tackling backdoor attacks even under non-iids. The main challenge for such defenses is that non-iids bring benign and malicious updates closer, hence harder to separate. FLBuff is inspired by our insight that non-iids can be modeled as omni-directional expansion in representation space while backdoor attacks as uni-directional. This leads to the key design of FLBuff, i.e., a supervised-contrastive-learning model extracting penultimate-layer representations to create a large in-between buffer layer. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that FLBuff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses.
Boosting Omnidirectional Stereo Matching with a Pre-trained Depth Foundation Model
Authors: Jannik Endres, Oliver Hahn, Charles Corbière, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Stefan Roth, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Omnnidirectional Stereo Depth Estimation, Scene Understanding, Stereo Depth Estimation, Stereo Matching

Omnidirectional depth perception is essential for mobile robotics applications that require scene understanding across a full 360{\deg} field of view. Camera-based setups offer a cost-effective option by using stereo depth estimation to generate dense, high-resolution depth maps without relying on expensive active sensing. However, existing omnidirectional stereo matching approaches achieve only limited depth accuracy across diverse environments, depth ranges, and lighting conditions, due to the scarcity of real-world data. We present DFI-OmniStereo, a novel omnidirectional stereo matching method that leverages a large-scale pre-trained foundation model for relative monocular depth estimation within an iterative optimization-based stereo matching architecture. We introduce a dedicated two-stage training strategy to utilize the relative monocular depth features for our omnidirectional stereo matching before scale-invariant fine-tuning. DFI-OmniStereo achieves state-of-the-art results on the real-world Helvipad dataset, reducing disparity MAE by approximately 16% compared to the previous best omnidirectional stereo method.
POINT$^{2}$: A Polymer Informatics Training and Testing Database
Authors: Jiaxin Xu, Gang Liu, Ruilan Guo, Meng Jiang, Tengfei Luo
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

The advancement of polymer informatics has been significantly propelled by the integration of machine learning (ML) techniques, enabling the rapid prediction of polymer properties and expediting the discovery of high-performance polymeric materials. However, the field lacks a standardized workflow that encompasses prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, ML interpretability, and polymer synthesizability. In this study, we introduce POINT$^{2}$ (POlymer INformatics Training and Testing), a comprehensive benchmark database and protocol designed to address these critical challenges. Leveraging the existing labeled datasets and the unlabeled PI1M dataset, a collection of approximately one million virtual polymers generated via a recurrent neural network trained on the realistic polymers, we develop an ensemble of ML models, including Quantile Random Forests, Multilayer Perceptrons with dropout, Graph Neural Networks, and pretrained large language models. These models are coupled with diverse polymer representations such as Morgan, MACCS, RDKit, Topological, Atom Pair fingerprints, and graph-based descriptors to achieve property predictions, uncertainty estimations, model interpretability, and template-based polymerization synthesizability across a spectrum of properties, including gas permeability, thermal conductivity, glass transition temperature, melting temperature, fractional free volume, and density. The POINT$^{2}$ database can serve as a valuable resource for the polymer informatics community for polymer discovery and optimization.
Benchmarking Systematic Relational Reasoning with Large Language and Reasoning Models
Authors: Irtaza Khalid, Amir Masoud Nourollah, Steven Schockaert
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Relational Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to struggle with systematic reasoning. Even on tasks where they appear to perform well, their performance often depends on shortcuts, rather than on genuine reasoning abilities, leading them to collapse on out-of-distribution examples. Post-training strategies based on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting have recently been hailed as a step change. However, little is still known about the potential of the resulting ``Large Reasoning Models'' (LRMs) beyond problem solving in mathematics and programming, where finding genuine out-of-distribution problems can be difficult. In this paper, we focus on tasks that require systematic reasoning about relational compositions, especially for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. These tasks allow us to control the difficulty of problem instances, and measure in a precise way to what extent models can generalise. We find that that the considered LLMs and LRMs overall perform poorly overall, albeit better than random chance.
A Systematic Decade Review of Trip Route Planning with Travel Time Estimation based on User Preferences and Behavior
Authors: Nikil Jayasuriya, Deshan Sumanathilaka
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration, Federated Learning, Meta-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Travel Time Estimation

This paper systematically explores the advancements in adaptive trip route planning and travel time estimation (TTE) through Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the increasing complexity of urban transportation systems, traditional navigation methods often struggle to accommodate dynamic user preferences, real-time traffic conditions, and scalability requirements. This study explores the contributions of established AI techniques, including Machine Learning (ML), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), alongside emerging methodologies like Meta-Learning, Explainable AI (XAI), Generative AI, and Federated Learning. In addition to highlighting these innovations, the paper identifies critical challenges such as ethical concerns, computational scalability, and effective data integration, which must be addressed to advance the field. The paper concludes with recommendations for leveraging AI to build efficient, transparent, and sustainable navigation systems.
Order Independence With Finetuning
Authors: Katrina Brown, Reid McIlroy
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, MMLU, Multiple-choice

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on many NLP tasks, yet often exhibit order dependence: simply reordering semantically identical tokens (e.g., answer choices in multiple-choice questions) can lead to inconsistent predictions. Recent work proposes Set-Based Prompting (SBP) as a way to remove order information from designated token subsets, thereby mitigating positional biases. However, applying SBP on base models induces an out-of-distribution input format, which can degrade in-distribution performance. We introduce a fine-tuning strategy that integrates SBP into the training process, "pulling" these set-formatted prompts closer to the model's training manifold. We show that SBP can be incorporated into a model via fine-tuning. Our experiments on in-distribution (MMLU) and out-of-distribution (CSQA, ARC Challenge) multiple-choice tasks show that SBP fine-tuning significantly improves accuracy and robustness to answer-order permutations, all while preserving broader language modeling capabilities. We discuss the broader implications of order-invariant modeling and outline future directions for building fairer, more consistent LLMs.
Handling Delay in Real-Time Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ivan Anokhin, Rishav Rishav, Matthew Riemer, Stephen Chung, Irina Rish, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Real-time reinforcement learning (RL) introduces several challenges. First, policies are constrained to a fixed number of actions per second due to hardware limitations. Second, the environment may change while the network is still computing an action, leading to observational delay. The first issue can partly be addressed with pipelining, leading to higher throughput and potentially better policies. However, the second issue remains: if each neuron operates in parallel with an execution time of $\tau$, an $N$-layer feed-forward network experiences observation delay of $\tau N$. Reducing the number of layers can decrease this delay, but at the cost of the network's expressivity. In this work, we explore the trade-off between minimizing delay and network's expressivity. We present a theoretically motivated solution that leverages temporal skip connections combined with history-augmented observations. We evaluate several architectures and show that those incorporating temporal skip connections achieve strong performance across various neuron execution times, reinforcement learning algorithms, and environments, including four Mujoco tasks and all MinAtar games. Moreover, we demonstrate parallel neuron computation can accelerate inference by 6-350% on standard hardware. Our investigation into temporal skip connections and parallel computations paves the way for more efficient RL agents in real-time setting.
Codehacks: A Dataset of Adversarial Tests for Competitive Programming Problems Obtained from Codeforces
Authors: Max Hort, Leon Moonen
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00

Software is used in critical applications in our day-to-day life and it is important to ensure its correctness. One popular approach to assess correctness is to evaluate software on tests. If a test fails, it indicates a fault in the software under test; if all tests pass correctly, one may assume that the software is correct. However, the reliability of these results depends on the test suite considered, and there is a risk of false negatives (i.e. software that passes all available tests but contains bugs because some cases are not tested). Therefore, it is important to consider error-inducing test cases when evaluating software. To support data-driven creation of such a test-suite, which is especially of interest for testing software synthesized from large language models, we curate a dataset (Codehacks) of programming problems together with corresponding error-inducing test cases (i.e., "hacks"). This dataset is collected from the wild, in particular, from the Codeforces online judge platform. The dataset comprises 288,617 hacks for 5,578 programming problems, each with a natural language description, as well as the source code for 2,196 submitted solutions to these problems that can be broken with their corresponding hacks. Keywords: competitive programming, language model, dataset
Semantic-Preserving Transformations as Mutation Operators: A Study on Their Effectiveness in Defect Detection
Authors: Max Hort, Linas Vidziunas, Leon Moonen
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection

Recent advances in defect detection use language models. Existing works enhanced the training data to improve the models' robustness when applied to semantically identical code (i.e., predictions should be the same). However, the use of semantically identical code has not been considered for improving the tools during their application - a concept closely related to metamorphic testing. The goal of our study is to determine whether we can use semantic-preserving transformations, analogue to mutation operators, to improve the performance of defect detection tools in the testing stage. We first collect existing publications which implemented semantic-preserving transformations and share their implementation, such that we can reuse them. We empirically study the effectiveness of three different ensemble strategies for enhancing defect detection tools. We apply the collected transformations on the Devign dataset, considering vulnerabilities as a type of defect, and two fine-tuned large language models for defect detection (VulBERTa, PLBART). We found 28 publications with 94 different transformations. We choose to implement 39 transformations from four of the publications, but a manual check revealed that 23 out 39 transformations change code semantics. Using the 16 remaining, correct transformations and three ensemble strategies, we were not able to increase the accuracy of the defect detection models. Our results show that reusing shared semantic-preserving transformation is difficult, sometimes even causing wrongful changes to the semantics. Keywords: defect detection, language model, semantic-preserving transformation, ensemble
Speculative End-Turn Detector for Efficient Speech Chatbot Assistant
Authors: Hyunjong Ok, Suho Yoo, Jaeho Lee
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Collaborative Inference, Spoken Dialogue Systems, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Spoken dialogue systems powered by large language models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding human speech and generating appropriate spoken responses. However, these systems struggle with end-turn detection (ETD) -- the ability to distinguish between user turn completion and hesitation. This limitation often leads to premature or delayed responses, disrupting the flow of spoken conversations. In this paper, we introduce the ETD Dataset, the first public dataset for end-turn detection. The ETD dataset consists of both synthetic speech data generated with text-to-speech models and real-world speech data collected from web sources. We also propose SpeculativeETD, a novel collaborative inference framework that balances efficiency and accuracy to improve real-time ETD in resource-constrained environments. Our approach jointly employs a lightweight GRU-based model, which rapidly detects the non-speaking units in real-time on local devices, and a high-performance Wav2vec-based model running on the server to make a more challenging classification of distinguishing turn ends from mere pauses. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed SpeculativeETD significantly improves ETD accuracy while keeping the required computations low. Datasets and code will be available after the review.
What Makes an Evaluation Useful? Common Pitfalls and Best Practices
Authors: Gil Gekker, Meirav Segal, Dan Lahav, Omer Nevo
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Following the rapid increase in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities in recent years, the AI community has voiced concerns regarding possible safety risks. To support decision-making on the safe use and development of AI systems, there is a growing need for high-quality evaluations of dangerous model capabilities. While several attempts to provide such evaluations have been made, a clear definition of what constitutes a "good evaluation" has yet to be agreed upon. In this practitioners' perspective paper, we present a set of best practices for safety evaluations, drawing on prior work in model evaluation and illustrated through cybersecurity examples. We first discuss the steps of the initial thought process, which connects threat modeling to evaluation design. Then, we provide the characteristics and parameters that make an evaluation useful. Finally, we address additional considerations as we move from building specific evaluations to building a full and comprehensive evaluation suite.
An Analysis of Decoding Methods for LLM-based Agents for Faithful Multi-Hop Question Answering
Authors: Alexander Murphy, Mohd Sanad Zaki Rizvi, Aden Haussmann, Ping Nie, Guifu Liu, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Pasquale Minervini
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently produce factually inaccurate outputs - a phenomenon known as hallucination - which limits their accuracy in knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation and agentic frameworks such as Reasoning and Acting (ReAct) can address this issue by giving the model access to external knowledge. However, LLMs often fail to remain faithful to retrieved information. Mitigating this is critical, especially if LLMs are required to reason about the retrieved information. Recent research has explored training-free decoding strategies to improve the faithfulness of model generations. We present a systematic analysis of how the combination of the ReAct framework and decoding strategies (i.e., DeCoRe, DoLa, and CAD) can influence the faithfulness of LLM-generated answers. Our results show that combining an agentic framework for knowledge retrieval with decoding methods that enhance faithfulness can increase accuracy on the downstream Multi-Hop Question Answering tasks. For example, we observe an F1 increase from 19.5 to 32.6 on HotpotQA when using ReAct and DoLa.
From Content Creation to Citation Inflation: A GenAI Case Study
Authors: Haitham S. Al-Sinani, Chris J. Mitchell
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00

This paper investigates the presence and impact of questionable, AI-generated academic papers on widely used preprint repositories, with a focus on their role in citation manipulation. Motivated by suspicious patterns observed in publications related to our ongoing research on GenAI-enhanced cybersecurity, we identify clusters of questionable papers and profiles. These papers frequently exhibit minimal technical content, repetitive structure, unverifiable authorship, and mutually reinforcing citation patterns among a recurring set of authors. To assess the feasibility and implications of such practices, we conduct a controlled experiment: generating a fake paper using GenAI, embedding citations to suspected questionable publications, and uploading it to one such repository (ResearchGate). Our findings demonstrate that such papers can bypass platform checks, remain publicly accessible, and contribute to inflating citation metrics like the H-index and i10-index. We present a detailed analysis of the mechanisms involved, highlight systemic weaknesses in content moderation, and offer recommendations for improving platform accountability and preserving academic integrity in the age of GenAI.
GMapLatent: Geometric Mapping in Latent Space
Authors: Wei Zeng, Xuebin Chang, Jianghao Su, Xiang Gu, Jian Sun, Zongben Xu
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Cross-domain generative models based on encoder-decoder AI architectures have attracted much attention in generating realistic images, where domain alignment is crucial for generation accuracy. Domain alignment methods usually deal directly with the initial distribution; however, mismatched or mixed clusters can lead to mode collapse and mixture problems in the decoder, compromising model generalization capabilities. In this work, we innovate a cross-domain alignment and generation model that introduces a canonical latent space representation based on geometric mapping to align the cross-domain latent spaces in a rigorous and precise manner, thus avoiding mode collapse and mixture in the encoder-decoder generation architectures. We name this model GMapLatent. The core of the method is to seamlessly align latent spaces with strict cluster correspondence constraints using the canonical parameterizations of cluster-decorated latent spaces. We first (1) transform the latent space to a canonical parameter domain by composing barycenter translation, optimal transport merging and constrained harmonic mapping, and then (2) compute geometric registration with cluster constraints over the canonical parameter domains. This process realizes a bijective (one-to-one and onto) mapping between newly transformed latent spaces and generates a precise alignment of cluster pairs. Cross-domain generation is then achieved through the aligned latent spaces embedded in the encoder-decoder pipeline. Experiments on gray-scale and color images validate the efficiency, efficacy and applicability of GMapLatent, and demonstrate that the proposed model has superior performance over existing models.
OpenSDI: Spotting Diffusion-Generated Images in the Open World
Authors: Yabin Wang, Zhiwu Huang, Xiaopeng Hong
Date: 2025-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

This paper identifies OpenSDI, a challenge for spotting diffusion-generated images in open-world settings. In response to this challenge, we define a new benchmark, the OpenSDI dataset (OpenSDID), which stands out from existing datasets due to its diverse use of large vision-language models that simulate open-world diffusion-based manipulations. Another outstanding feature of OpenSDID is its inclusion of both detection and localization tasks for images manipulated globally and locally by diffusion models. To address the OpenSDI challenge, we propose a Synergizing Pretrained Models (SPM) scheme to build up a mixture of foundation models. This approach exploits a collaboration mechanism with multiple pretrained foundation models to enhance generalization in the OpenSDI context, moving beyond traditional training by synergizing multiple pretrained models through prompting and attending strategies. Building on this scheme, we introduce MaskCLIP, an SPM-based model that aligns Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) with Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Extensive evaluations on OpenSDID show that MaskCLIP significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for the OpenSDI challenge, achieving remarkable relative improvements of 14.23% in IoU (14.11% in F1) and 2.05% in accuracy (2.38% in F1) compared to the second-best model in localization and detection tasks, respectively. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/iamwangyabin/OpenSDI.