pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MLOps with Microservices: A Case Study on the Maritime Domain
Authors: Renato Cordeiro Ferreira, Rowanne Trapmann, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This case study describes challenges and lessons learned on building Ocean Guard: a Machine Learning-Enabled System (MLES) for anomaly detection in the maritime domain. First, the paper presents the system's specification, and architecture. Ocean Guard was designed with a microservices' architecture to enable multiple teams to work on the project in parallel. Then, the paper discusses how the developers adapted contract-based design to MLOps for achieving that goal. As a MLES, Ocean Guard employs code, model, and data contracts to establish guidelines between its services. This case study hopes to inspire software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists to leverage similar approaches for their systems.
RailTrack-DaViT: A Vision Transformer-Based Approach for Automated Railway Track Defect Detection
Authors: Aniwat Phaphuangwittayakul, Napat Harnpornchai, Fangli Ying, Jinming Zhang
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Journal of Imaging 2024 8
Tasks: Defect Detection

Railway track defects pose significant safety risks and can lead to accidents, economic losses, and loss of life. Traditional manual inspection methods are either time-consuming, costly, or prone to human error. This paper proposes RailTrack-DaViT, a novel vision transformer-based approach for railway track defect classification. By leveraging the Dual Attention Vision Transformer (DaViT) architecture, RailTrack-DaViT effectively captures both global and local information, enabling accurate defect detection. The model is trained and evaluated on multiple datasets including rail, fastener and fishplate, multi-faults, and ThaiRailTrack. A comprehensive analysis of the model’s performance is provided including confusion matrices, training visualizations, and classification metrics. RailTrack-DaViT demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art CNN-based methods, achieving the highest accuracies: 96.9% on the rail dataset, 98.9% on the fastener and fishplate dataset, and 98.8% on the multi-faults dataset. Moreover, RailTrack-DaViT outperforms baselines on the ThaiRailTrack dataset with 99.2% accuracy, quickly adapts to unseen images, and shows better model stability during fine-tuning. This capability can significantly reduce time consumption when applying the model to novel datasets in practical applications.
Fast Adaptive Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Image Generation
Authors: Aniwat Phaphuangwittayakul, Yi Guo, Fangli Ying
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2021 5
Tasks: Image Generation, Meta-Learning

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are capable of effectively synthesising new realistic images and estimating the potential distribution of samples utilising adversarial learning. Nevertheless, conventional GANs require a large amount of training data samples to produce plausible results. Inspired by the capacity for humans to quickly learn new concepts from a small number of examples, several meta-learning approaches for the few-shot datasets are presented. However, most of meta-learning algorithms are designed to tackle few-shot classification and reinforcement learning tasks. Moreover, the existing meta-learning models for image generation are complex, thereby affecting the length of training time required. Fast Adaptive Meta-Learning (FAML) based on GAN and the encoder network is proposed in this study for few-shot image generation. This model demonstrates the capability to generate new realistic images from previously unseen target classes with only a small number of examples required. With 10 times faster convergence, FAML requires only one-fourth of the trainable parameters in comparison baseline models by training a simpler network with conditional feature vectors from the encoder, while increasing the number of generator iterations. The visualisation results are demonstrated in the paper. This model is able to improve few-shot image generation with the lowest FID score, highest IS, and comparable LPIPS to MNIST, Omniglot, VGG-Faces, and miniImageNet datasets. The source code is available on https://github.com/phaphuang/FAML.
Self-Attention Recurrent Summarization Network with Reinforcement Learning for Video Summarization Task
Authors: Aniwat Phaphuangwittayakul, Yi Guo, Fangli Ying, Wentian Xu, Zheng Zheng
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2021 6
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Video Summarization, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

With the exponential growth of video data, video summarization techniques are urgently needed for reducing people’s efforts in the videos' content exploration by generating succinct but informative summaries from original lengthy videos. Though supervised video summarization approaches have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance, unsupervised methods are still highly demanded due to resourcefully expensive human annotations and the subjectiveness of video summarization tasks. In this paper, a novel unsupervised-based Deep Self-attention Recurrent summarization network with Reinforcement Learning (DSR-RL) for video summarization is proposed. The model can learn the input video sequence and suggest the key-shot summary without additional human annotations by integrating self-attention, BRNN, and reinforcement learning mechanisms. The DSR-RL improves not only importance score through the attention map vector of self-attention network but also the diversity of summaries via the reward function of reinforcement learning. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised video summarization methods on both SumMe and TVSum datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/phaphuang/DSR-RL.
TissUnet: Improved Extracranial Tissue and Cranium Segmentation for Children through Adulthood
Authors: Markian Mandzak, Elvira Yang, Anna Zapaishchykova, Yu-Hui Chen, Lucas Heilbroner, John Zielke, Divyanshu Tak, Reza Mojahed-Yazdi, Francesca Romana Mussa, Zezhong Ye, Sridhar Vajapeyam, Viviana Benitez, Ralph Salloum, Susan N. Chi, Houman Sotoudeh, Jakob Seidlitz, Sabine Mueller, Hugo J. W. L. Aerts, Tina Y. Poussaint, Benjamin H. Kann
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Extracranial tissues visible on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may hold significant value for characterizing health conditions and clinical decision-making, yet they are rarely quantified. Current tools have not been widely validated, particularly in settings of developing brains or underlying pathology. We present TissUnet, a deep learning model that segments skull bone, subcutaneous fat, and muscle from routine three-dimensional T1-weighted MRI, with or without contrast enhancement. The model was trained on 155 paired MRI-computed tomography (CT) scans and validated across nine datasets covering a wide age range and including individuals with brain tumors. In comparison to AI-CT-derived labels from 37 MRI-CT pairs, TissUnet achieved a median Dice coefficient of 0.79 [IQR: 0.77-0.81] in a healthy adult cohort. In a second validation using expert manual annotations, median Dice was 0.83 [IQR: 0.83-0.84] in healthy individuals and 0.81 [IQR: 0.78-0.83] in tumor cases, outperforming previous state-of-the-art method. Acceptability testing resulted in an 89% acceptance rate after adjudication by a tie-breaker(N=108 MRIs), and TissUnet demonstrated excellent performance in the blinded comparative review (N=45 MRIs), including both healthy and tumor cases in pediatric populations. TissUnet enables fast, accurate, and reproducible segmentation of extracranial tissues, supporting large-scale studies on craniofacial morphology, treatment effects, and cardiometabolic risk using standard brain T1w MRI.
Composite Reward Design in PPO-Driven Adaptive Filtering
Authors: Abdullah Burkan Bereketoglu
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Model-free and reinforcement learning-based adaptive filtering methods are gaining traction for denoising in dynamic, non-stationary environments such as wireless signal channels. Traditional filters like LMS, RLS, Wiener, and Kalman are limited by assumptions of stationary or requiring complex fine-tuning or exact noise statistics or fixed models. This letter proposes an adaptive filtering framework using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), guided by a composite reward that balances SNR improvement, MSE reduction, and residual smoothness. Experiments on synthetic signals with various noise types show that our PPO agent generalizes beyond its training distribution, achieving real-time performance and outperforming classical filters. This work demonstrates the viability of policy-gradient reinforcement learning for robust, low-latency adaptive signal filtering.
Controlled Reach-avoid Set Computation for Discrete-time Polynomial Systems via Convex Optimization
Authors: Taoran Wu, Yiling Xue, Dejin Ren, Arvind Easwaran, Martin Fränzle, Bai Xue
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00

This paper addresses the computation of controlled reach-avoid sets (CRASs) for discrete-time polynomial systems subject to control inputs. A CRAS is a set encompassing initial states from which there exist control inputs driving the system into a target set while avoiding unsafe sets. However, efficiently computing CRASs remains an open problem, especially for discrete-time systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for computing CRASs which takes advantage of a probabilistic perspective. This framework transforms the fundamentally nonlinear problem of computing CRASs into a computationally tractable convex optimization problem. By regarding control inputs as disturbances obeying certain probability distributions, a CRAS can be equivalently treated as a 0-reach-avoid set in the probabilistic sense, which consists of initial states from which the probability of eventually entering the target set while remaining within the safe set is greater than zero. Thus, we can employ the convex optimization method of computing 0-reach-avoid sets to estimate CRASs. Furthermore, inspired by the $\epsilon$-greedy strategy widely used in reinforcement learning, we propose an approach that iteratively updates the aforementioned probability distributions imposed on control inputs to compute larger CRASs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on extensive examples.
NSUN2 as a potential prognostic as well as therapeutic target in cancer by regulating m5C modification
Authors: Zifang He, Longtao Yang, Peiyao Ma
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

m5C modification is a type of RNA methylation modification, and its major methyltransferase, NSUN2, catalyzes m5C modification. NSUN2 is overexpressed in a variety of cancers, and it affects the metabolism of RNA from target genes by affecting the level of m5C modification in cancer cells, which in turn promotes the development of cancers and is associated with poor prognosis. This review summarizes the mechanisms by which NSUN2 and m5C play a pro-cancer role in various cancers, and the relationship between NSUN2 and the prognosis of various cancers, with the aim of identifying NSUN2 as a prognostic indicator and a target for future cancer therapy, and to provide a clearer therapeutic idea and direction for the future treatment of cancer.
Fractional-order Jacobian Matrix Differentiation and Its Application in Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Xiaojun Zhou, Chunna Zhao, Yaqun Huang, Chengli Zhou, Junjie Ye, Kemeng Xiang
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Fractional-order differentiation has many characteristics different from integer-order differentiation. These characteristics can be applied to the optimization algorithms of artificial neural networks to obtain better results. However, due to insufficient theoretical research, at present, there is no fractional-order matrix differentiation method that is perfectly compatible with automatic differentiation (Autograd) technology. Therefore, we propose a fractional-order matrix differentiation calculation method. This method is introduced by the definition of the integer-order Jacobian matrix. We denote it as fractional-order Jacobian matrix differentiation (${{\bf{J}}^\alpha }$). Through ${{\bf{J}}^\alpha }$, we can carry out the matrix-based fractional-order chain rule. Based on the Linear module and the fractional-order differentiation, we design the fractional-order Autograd technology to enable the use of fractional-order differentiation in hidden layers, thereby enhancing the practicality of fractional-order differentiation in deep learning. In the experiment, according to the PyTorch framework, we design fractional-order Linear (FLinear) and replace nn.Linear in the multilayer perceptron with FLinear. Through the qualitative analysis of the training set and validation set $Loss$, the quantitative analysis of the test set indicators, and the analysis of time consumption and GPU memory usage during model training, we verify the superior performance of ${{\bf{J}}^\alpha }$ and prove that it is an excellent fractional-order gradient descent method in the field of deep learning.
Difference Inversion: Interpolate and Isolate the Difference with Token Consistency for Image Analogy Generation
Authors: Hyunsoo Kim, Donghyun Kim, Suhyun Kim
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: In-Context Learning

How can we generate an image B' that satisfies A:A'::B:B', given the input images A,A' and B? Recent works have tackled this challenge through approaches like visual in-context learning or visual instruction. However, these methods are typically limited to specific models (e.g. InstructPix2Pix. Inpainting models) rather than general diffusion models (e.g. Stable Diffusion, SDXL). This dependency may lead to inherited biases or lower editing capabilities. In this paper, we propose Difference Inversion, a method that isolates only the difference from A and A' and applies it to B to generate a plausible B'. To address model dependency, it is crucial to structure prompts in the form of a "Full Prompt" suitable for input to stable diffusion models, rather than using an "Instruction Prompt". To this end, we accurately extract the Difference between A and A' and combine it with the prompt of B, enabling a plug-and-play application of the difference. To extract a precise difference, we first identify it through 1) Delta Interpolation. Additionally, to ensure accurate training, we propose the 2) Token Consistency Loss and 3) Zero Initialization of Token Embeddings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Difference Inversion outperforms existing baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively, indicating its ability to generate more feasible B' in a model-agnostic manner.
Learning Compact Vision Tokens for Efficient Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Hao Tang, Chengchao Shen
Date: 2025-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, Token Reduction

Large multimodal models (LMMs) suffer significant computational challenges due to the high cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the quadratic complexity of processing long vision token sequences. In this paper, we explore the spatial redundancy among vision tokens and shorten the length of vision token sequences for inference acceleration. Specifically, we propose a Spatial Token Fusion (STF) method to learn compact vision tokens for short vision token sequence, where spatial-adjacent tokens are fused into one. Meanwhile, weight-frozen vision encoder can not well adapt to the demand of extensive downstream vision-language tasks. To this end, we further introduce a Multi-Block Token Fusion (MBTF) module to supplement multi-granularity features for the reduced token sequence. Overall, we combine STF and MBTF module to balance token reduction and information preservation, thereby improving inference efficiency without sacrificing multimodal reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method based on LLaVA-1.5 achieves comparable or even superior performance to the baseline on 8 popular vision-language benchmarks with only $25\%$ vision tokens of baseline. The source code and trained weights are available at https://github.com/visresearch/LLaVA-STF.
Multiple Object Stitching for Unsupervised Representation Learning
Authors: Chengchao Shen, Dawei Liu, Jianxin Wang
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Contrastive learning for single object centric images has achieved remarkable progress on unsupervised representation, but suffering inferior performance on the widespread images with multiple objects. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method, Multiple Object Stitching (MOS), to refine the unsupervised representation for multi-object images. Specifically, we construct the multi-object images by stitching the single object centric ones, where the objects in the synthesized multi-object images are predetermined. Hence, compared to the existing contrastive methods, our method provides additional object correspondences between multi-object images without human annotations. In this manner, our method pays more attention to the representations of each object in multi-object image, thus providing more detailed representations for complicated downstream tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Experimental results on ImageNet, CIFAR and COCO datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the leading unsupervised representation performance on both single object centric images and multi-object ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/MultipleObjectStitching.
Well Begun is Half Done: Low-resource Preference Alignment by Weak-to-Strong Decoding
Authors: Feifan Song, Shaohang Wei, Wen Luo, Yuxuan Fan, Tianyu Liu, Guoyin Wang, Houfeng Wang
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) require alignment with human preferences to avoid generating offensive, false, or meaningless content. Recently, low-resource methods for LLM alignment have been popular, while still facing challenges in obtaining both high-quality and aligned content. Motivated by the observation that the difficulty of generating aligned responses is concentrated at the beginning of decoding, we propose a novel framework, Weak-to-Strong Decoding (WSD), to enhance the alignment ability of base models by the guidance of a small aligned model. The small model first drafts well-aligned beginnings, followed by the large base model to continue the rest, controlled by a well-designed auto-switch mechanism. We also collect a new dataset, GenerAlign, to fine-tune a small-sized Pilot-3B as the draft model, which effectively enhances different base models under the WSD framework to outperform all baseline methods, while avoiding degradation on downstream tasks, termed as the alignment tax. Extensive experiments are further conducted to examine the impact of different settings and time efficiency, as well as analyses on the intrinsic mechanisms of WSD in depth.
A Framework for Controllable Multi-objective Learning with Annealed Stein Variational Hypernetworks
Authors: Minh-Duc Nguyen, Dung D. Le
Date: 2025-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Pareto Set Learning (PSL) is popular as an efficient approach to obtaining the complete optimal solution in Multi-objective Learning (MOL). A set of optimal solutions approximates the Pareto set, and its mapping is a set of dense points in the Pareto front in objective space. However, some current methods face a challenge: how to make the Pareto solution is diverse while maximizing the hypervolume value. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address this challenge, which employs Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to approximate the entire Pareto set. SVGD pushes a set of particles towards the Pareto set by applying a form of functional gradient descent, which helps to converge and diversify optimal solutions. Additionally, we employ diverse gradient direction strategies to thoroughly investigate a unified framework for SVGD in multi-objective optimization and adapt this framework with an annealing schedule to promote stability. We introduce our method, SVH-MOL, and validate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on multi-objective problems and multi-task learning, demonstrating its superior performance.
Modified K-means Algorithm with Local Optimality Guarantees
Authors: Mingyi Li, Michael R. Metel, Akiko Takeda
Date: 2025-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The K-means algorithm is one of the most widely studied clustering algorithms in machine learning. While extensive research has focused on its ability to achieve a globally optimal solution, there still lacks a rigorous analysis of its local optimality guarantees. In this paper, we first present conditions under which the K-means algorithm converges to a locally optimal solution. Based on this, we propose simple modifications to the K-means algorithm which ensure local optimality in both the continuous and discrete sense, with the same computational complexity as the original K-means algorithm. As the dissimilarity measure, we consider a general Bregman divergence, which is an extension of the squared Euclidean distance often used in the K-means algorithm. Numerical experiments confirm that the K-means algorithm does not always find a locally optimal solution in practice, while our proposed methods provide improved locally optimal solutions with reduced clustering loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/lmingyi/LO-K-means.
Large Language Models for EEG: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy
Authors: Naseem Babu, Jimson Mathew, A. P. Vinod
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, EEG, Representation Learning, Survey, Text Generation, Zero-Shot Learning

The growing convergence between Large Language Models (LLMs) and electroencephalography (EEG) research is enabling new directions in neural decoding, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and affective computing. This survey offers a systematic review and structured taxonomy of recent advancements that utilize LLMs for EEG-based analysis and applications. We organize the literature into four domains: (1) LLM-inspired foundation models for EEG representation learning, (2) EEG-to-language decoding, (3) cross-modal generation including image and 3D object synthesis, and (4) clinical applications and dataset management tools. The survey highlights how transformer-based architectures adapted through fine-tuning, few-shot, and zero-shot learning have enabled EEG-based models to perform complex tasks such as natural language generation, semantic interpretation, and diagnostic assistance. By offering a structured overview of modeling strategies, system designs, and application areas, this work serves as a foundational resource for future work to bridge natural language processing and neural signal analysis through language models.