pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Time to Retrain? Detecting Concept Drifts in Machine Learning Systems
Authors: Tri Minh Triet Pham, Karthikeyan Premkumar, Mohamed Naili, Jinqiu Yang
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

With the boom of machine learning (ML) techniques, software practitioners build ML systems to process the massive volume of streaming data for diverse software engineering tasks such as failure prediction in AIOps. Trained using historical data, such ML models encounter performance degradation caused by concept drift, i.e., data and inter-relationship (concept) changes between training and production. It is essential to use concept rift detection to monitor the deployed ML models and re-train the ML models when needed. In this work, we explore applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept drift detection techniques on synthetic and real-world datasets in an industrial setting. Such an industrial setting requires minimal manual effort in labeling and maximal generality in ML model architecture. We find that current SOTA semi-supervised methods not only require significant labeling effort but also only work for certain types of ML models. To overcome such limitations, we propose a novel model-agnostic technique (CDSeer) for detecting concept drift. Our evaluation shows that CDSeer has better precision and recall compared to the state-of-the-art while requiring significantly less manual labeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CDSeer at concept drift detection by evaluating it on eight datasets from different domains and use cases. Results from internal deployment of CDSeer on an industrial proprietary dataset show a 57.1% improvement in precision while using 99% fewer labels compared to the SOTA concept drift detection method. The performance is also comparable to the supervised concept drift detection method, which requires 100% of the data to be labeled. The improved performance and ease of adoption of CDSeer are valuable in making ML systems more reliable.
Aligned Manifold Property and Topology Point Clouds for Learning Molecular Properties
Authors: Alexander Mihalcea
Date: 2025-07-22 00:00:00

Machine learning models for molecular property prediction generally rely on representations -- such as SMILES strings and molecular graphs -- that overlook the surface-local phenomena driving intermolecular behavior. 3D-based approaches often reduce surface detail or require computationally expensive SE(3)-equivariant architectures to manage spatial variance. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces AMPTCR (Aligned Manifold Property and Topology Cloud Representation), a molecular surface representation that combines local quantum-derived scalar fields and custom topological descriptors within an aligned point cloud format. Each surface point includes a chemically meaningful scalar, geodesically derived topology vectors, and coordinates transformed into a canonical reference frame, enabling efficient learning with conventional SE(3)-sensitive architectures. AMPTCR is evaluated using a DGCNN framework on two tasks: molecular weight and bacterial growth inhibition. For molecular weight, results confirm that AMPTCR encodes physically meaningful data, with a validation R^2 of 0.87. In the bacterial inhibition task, AMPTCR enables both classification and direct regression of E. coli inhibition values using Dual Fukui functions as the electronic descriptor and Morgan Fingerprints as auxiliary data, achieving an ROC AUC of 0.912 on the classification task, and an R^2 of 0.54 on the regression task. These results help demonstrate that AMPTCR offers a compact, expressive, and architecture-agnostic representation for modeling surface-mediated molecular properties.
HoliTracer: Holistic Vectorization of Geographic Objects from Large-Size Remote Sensing Imagery
Authors: Yu Wang, Bo Dang, Wanchun Li, Wei Chen, Yansheng Li
Date: 2025-07-22 00:00:00

With the increasing resolution of remote sensing imagery (RSI), large-size RSI has emerged as a vital data source for high-precision vector mapping of geographic objects. Existing methods are typically constrained to processing small image patches, which often leads to the loss of contextual information and produces fragmented vector outputs. To address these, this paper introduces HoliTracer, the first framework designed to holistically extract vectorized geographic objects from large-size RSI. In HoliTracer, we enhance segmentation of large-size RSI using the Context Attention Net (CAN), which employs a local-to-global attention mechanism to capture contextual dependencies. Furthermore, we achieve holistic vectorization through a robust pipeline that leverages the Mask Contour Reformer (MCR) to reconstruct polygons and the Polygon Sequence Tracer (PST) to trace vertices. Extensive experiments on large-size RSI datasets, including buildings, water bodies, and roads, demonstrate that HoliTracer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code and data are available in https://github.com/vvangfaye/HoliTracer.
Interpretable Embeddings of Speech Enhance and Explain Brain Encoding Performance of Audio Models
Authors: Riki Shimizu, Richard J. Antonello, Chandan Singh, Nima Mesgarani
Date: 2025-07-21 00:00:00

Self-supervised speech models (SSMs) are increasingly hailed as more powerful computational models of human speech perception than models based on traditional hand-crafted features. However, since their representations are inherently black-box, it remains unclear what drives their alignment with brain responses. To remedy this, we built linear encoding models from six interpretable feature families: mel-spectrogram, Gabor filter bank features, speech presence, phonetic, syntactic, and semantic Question-Answering features, and contextualized embeddings from three state-of-the-art SSMs (Whisper, HuBERT, WavLM), quantifying the shared and unique neural variance captured by each feature class. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, our interpretable model predicted electrocorticography (ECoG) responses to speech more accurately than any SSM. Moreover, augmenting SSM representations with interpretable features yielded the best overall neural predictions, significantly outperforming either class alone. Further variance-partitioning analyses revealed previously unresolved components of SSM representations that contribute to their neural alignment: 1. Despite the common assumption that later layers of SSMs discard low-level acoustic information, these models compress and preferentially retain frequency bands critical for neural encoding of speech (100-1000 Hz). 2. Contrary to previous claims, SSMs encode brain-relevant semantic information that cannot be reduced to lower-level features, improving with context length and model size. These results highlight the importance of using refined, interpretable features in understanding speech perception.
Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty
Authors: Mehul Damani, Isha Puri, Stewart Slocum, Idan Shenfeld, Leshem Choshen, Yoon Kim, Jacob Andreas
Date: 2025-07-22 00:00:00

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications of RL for reasoning use binary reward functions that evaluate the correctness of LM outputs. Because such reward functions do not penalize guessing or low-confidence outputs, they often have the unintended side-effect of degrading calibration and increasing the rate at which LMs generate incorrect responses (or "hallucinate") in other problem domains. This paper describes RLCR (Reinforcement Learning with Calibration Rewards), an approach to training reasoning models that jointly improves accuracy and calibrated confidence estimation. During RLCR, LMs generate both predictions and numerical confidence estimates after reasoning. They are trained to optimize a reward function that augments a binary correctness score with a Brier score -- a scoring rule for confidence estimates that incentivizes calibrated prediction. We first prove that this reward function (or any analogous reward function that uses a bounded, proper scoring rule) yields models whose predictions are both accurate and well-calibrated. We next show that across diverse datasets, RLCR substantially improves calibration with no loss in accuracy, on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations -- outperforming both ordinary RL training and classifiers trained to assign post-hoc confidence scores. While ordinary RL hurts calibration, RLCR improves it. Finally, we demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be leveraged at test time to improve accuracy and calibration via confidence-weighted scaling methods. Our results show that explicitly optimizing for calibration can produce more generally reliable reasoning models.
Learning Multiple Semantic Knowledge For Cross-Domain Unsupervised Vehicle Re-Identification
Authors: Huibing Wang, Jinjia Peng, Guangqi Jiang, Xianping Fu
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2021 7
Tasks: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Vehicle re-identification (reID) aims at searching the similar vehicles’ images from large unlabelled datasets captured in a multiple camera network, which is still a challenging task. In this paper, a multiple semantic knowledge learning approach is proposed to exploit the potential similarity of unlabeled samples, which builds multiple clusters from different views automatically with different cues. Specially, different from some existing works focus on the knowledge of one view, for each vehicle in the target domain, different semantic knowledge could be learned with the proposed focal drop network and several different labels can be assigned according these knowledge, which would be employed to train the vehicle reID model jointly. In addition, due to the unreliability of pseudo labels assigned by the clustering, the hard triplet center loss is proposed to take the difference of intra-cluster and inter-cluster into consideration for better training the unsupervised framework to adapt the unknown domain. Comprehensive experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on both VehicleID dataset and VeRi-776 dataset.
Small Edits, Big Consequences: Telling Good from Bad Robustness in Large Language Models
Authors: Altynbek Ismailov, Salia Asanova
Date: 2025-07-15 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) now write code in settings where misreading a single word can break safety or cost money, yet we still expect them to overlook stray typos. To probe where useful robustness ends and harmful insensitivity begins, we compile 50 LeetCode problems and craft three minimal prompt perturbations that should vary in importance: (i) progressive underspecification deleting 10 % of words per step; (ii) lexical flip swapping a pivotal quantifier ("max" to "min"); and (iii) jargon inflation replacing a common noun with an obscure technical synonym. Six frontier models, including three "reasoning-tuned" versions, solve each mutated prompt, and their Python outputs are checked against the original test suites to reveal whether they reused the baseline solution or adapted. Among 11 853 generations we observe a sharp double asymmetry. Models remain correct in 85 % of cases even after 90 % of the prompt is missing, showing over-robustness to underspecification, yet only 54 % react to a single quantifier flip that reverses the task, with reasoning-tuned variants even less sensitive than their bases. Jargon edits lie in between, passing through 56 %. Current LLMs thus blur the line between harmless noise and meaning - changing edits, often treating both as ignorable. Masking salient anchors such as function names can force re - evaluation. We advocate evaluation and training protocols that reward differential sensitivity: stay steady under benign noise but adapt - or refuse - when semantics truly change.
EarthCrafter: Scalable 3D Earth Generation via Dual-Sparse Latent Diffusion
Authors: Shang Liu, Chenjie Cao, Chaohui Yu, Wen Qian, Jing Wang, Fan Wang
Date: 2025-07-22 00:00:00

Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth's surface, remains an open challenge. We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture. First, we introduce Aerial-Earth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m x 600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames. Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity. Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation: 1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation. The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D.