pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Algorithms and SQ Lower Bounds for Robustly Learning Real-valued Multi-index Models
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas, Giannis Iakovidis, Daniel M. Kane, Lisheng Ren
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: PAC learning

We study the complexity of learning real-valued Multi-Index Models (MIMs) under the Gaussian distribution. A $K$-MIM is a function $f:\mathbb{R}^d\to \mathbb{R}$ that depends only on the projection of its input onto a $K$-dimensional subspace. We give a general algorithm for PAC learning a broad class of MIMs with respect to the square loss, even in the presence of adversarial label noise. Moreover, we establish a nearly matching Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound, providing evidence that the complexity of our algorithm is qualitatively optimal as a function of the dimension. Specifically, we consider the class of bounded variation MIMs with the property that degree at most $m$ distinguishing moments exist with respect to projections onto any subspace. In the presence of adversarial label noise, the complexity of our learning algorithm is $d^{O(m)}2^{\mathrm{poly}(K/\epsilon)}$. For the realizable and independent noise settings, our algorithm incurs complexity $d^{O(m)}2^{\mathrm{poly}(K)}(1/\epsilon)^{O(K)}$. To complement our upper bound, we show that if for some subspace degree-$m$ distinguishing moments do not exist, then any SQ learner for the corresponding class of MIMs requires complexity $d^{\Omega(m)}$. As an application, we give the first efficient learner for the class of positive-homogeneous $L$-Lipschitz $K$-MIMs. The resulting algorithm has complexity $\mathrm{poly}(d) 2^{\mathrm{poly}(KL/\epsilon)}$. This gives a new PAC learning algorithm for Lipschitz homogeneous ReLU networks with complexity independent of the network size, removing the exponential dependence incurred in prior work.
High-Dimensional Calibration from Swap Regret
Authors: Maxwell Fishelson, Noah Golowich, Mehryar Mohri, Jon Schneider
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00

We study the online calibration of multi-dimensional forecasts over an arbitrary convex set $\mathcal{P} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ relative to an arbitrary norm $\Vert\cdot\Vert$. We connect this with the problem of external regret minimization for online linear optimization, showing that if it is possible to guarantee $O(\sqrt{\rho T})$ worst-case regret after $T$ rounds when actions are drawn from $\mathcal{P}$ and losses are drawn from the dual $\Vert \cdot \Vert_*$ unit norm ball, then it is also possible to obtain $\epsilon$-calibrated forecasts after $T = \exp(O(\rho /\epsilon^2))$ rounds. When $\mathcal{P}$ is the $d$-dimensional simplex and $\Vert \cdot \Vert$ is the $\ell_1$-norm, the existence of $O(\sqrt{T\log d})$-regret algorithms for learning with experts implies that it is possible to obtain $\epsilon$-calibrated forecasts after $T = \exp(O(\log{d}/\epsilon^2)) = d^{O(1/\epsilon^2)}$ rounds, recovering a recent result of Peng (2025). Interestingly, our algorithm obtains this guarantee without requiring access to any online linear optimization subroutine or knowledge of the optimal rate $\rho$ -- in fact, our algorithm is identical for every setting of $\mathcal{P}$ and $\Vert \cdot \Vert$. Instead, we show that the optimal regularizer for the above OLO problem can be used to upper bound the above calibration error by a swap regret, which we then minimize by running the recent TreeSwap algorithm with Follow-The-Leader as a subroutine. Finally, we prove that any online calibration algorithm that guarantees $\epsilon T$ $\ell_1$-calibration error over the $d$-dimensional simplex requires $T \geq \exp(\mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ (assuming $d \geq \mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon)$). This strengthens the corresponding $d^{\Omega(\log{1/\epsilon})}$ lower bound of Peng, and shows that an exponential dependence on $1/\epsilon$ is necessary.
Scheduling with Uncertain Holding Costs and its Application to Content Moderation
Authors: Caner Gocmen, Thodoris Lykouris, Deeksha Sinha, Wentao Weng
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

In content moderation for social media platforms, the cost of delaying the review of a content is proportional to its view trajectory, which fluctuates and is apriori unknown. Motivated by such uncertain holding costs, we consider a queueing model where job states evolve based on a Markov chain with state-dependent instantaneous holding costs. We demonstrate that in the presence of such uncertain holding costs, the two canonical algorithmic principles, instantaneous-cost ($c\mu$-rule) and expected-remaining-cost ($c\mu/\theta$-rule), are suboptimal. By viewing each job as a Markovian ski-rental problem, we develop a new index-based algorithm, Opportunity-adjusted Remaining Cost (OaRC), that adjusts to the opportunity of serving jobs in the future when uncertainty partly resolves. We show that the regret of OaRC scales as $\tilde{O}(L^{1.5}\sqrt{N})$, where $L$ is the maximum length of a job's holding cost trajectory and $N$ is the system size. This regret bound shows that OaRC achieves asymptotic optimality when the system size $N$ scales to infinity. Moreover, its regret is independent of the state-space size, which is a desirable property when job states contain contextual information. We corroborate our results with an extensive simulation study based on two holding cost patterns (online ads and user-generated content) that arise in content moderation for social media platforms. Our simulations based on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that OaRC consistently outperforms existing practice, which is based on the two canonical algorithmic principles.
Large-Area Fabrication-aware Computational Diffractive Optics
Authors: Kaixuan Wei, Hector A. Jimenez-Romero, Hadi Amata, Jipeng Sun, Qiang Fu, Felix Heide, Wolfgang Heidrich
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry

Differentiable optics, as an emerging paradigm that jointly optimizes optics and (optional) image processing algorithms, has made innovative optical designs possible across a broad range of applications. Many of these systems utilize diffractive optical components (DOEs) for holography, PSF engineering, or wavefront shaping. Existing approaches have, however, mostly remained limited to laboratory prototypes, owing to a large quality gap between simulation and manufactured devices. We aim at lifting the fundamental technical barriers to the practical use of learned diffractive optical systems. To this end, we propose a fabrication-aware design pipeline for diffractive optics fabricated by direct-write grayscale lithography followed by nano-imprinting replication, which is directly suited for inexpensive mass production of large area designs. We propose a super-resolved neural lithography model that can accurately predict the 3D geometry generated by the fabrication process. This model can be seamlessly integrated into existing differentiable optics frameworks, enabling fabrication-aware, end-to-end optimization of computational optical systems. To tackle the computational challenges, we also devise tensor-parallel compute framework centered on distributing large-scale FFT computation across many GPUs. As such, we demonstrate large scale diffractive optics designs up to 32.16 mm $\times$ 21.44 mm, simulated on grids of up to 128,640 by 85,760 feature points. We find adequate agreement between simulation and fabricated prototypes for applications such as holography and PSF engineering. We also achieve high image quality from an imaging system comprised only of a single DOE, with images processed only by a Wiener filter utilizing the simulation PSF. We believe our findings lift the fabrication limitations for real-world applications of diffractive optics and differentiable optical design.
A Structured Unplugged Approach for Foundational AI Literacy in Primary Education
Authors: Maria Cristina Carrisi, Mirko Marras, Sara Vergallo
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Misconceptions, Navigate

Younger generations are growing up in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent technologies, making early AI literacy crucial for developing the skills to critically understand and navigate them. However, education in this field often emphasizes tool-based learning, prioritizing usage over understanding the underlying concepts. This lack of knowledge leaves non-experts, especially children, prone to misconceptions, unrealistic expectations, and difficulties in recognizing biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we propose a structured and replicable teaching approach that fosters foundational AI literacy in primary students, by building upon core mathematical elements closely connected to and of interest in primary curricula, to strengthen conceptualization, data representation, classification reasoning, and evaluation of AI. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an empirical study with thirty-one fifth-grade students across two classes, evaluating their progress through a post-test and a satisfaction survey. Our results indicate improvements in terminology understanding and usage, features description, logical reasoning, and evaluative skills, with students showing a deeper comprehension of decision-making processes and their limitations. Moreover, the approach proved engaging, with students particularly enjoying activities that linked AI concepts to real-world reasoning. Materials: https://github.com/tail-unica/ai-literacy-primary-ed.
Quantum Machine Learning in Healthcare: Evaluating QNN and QSVM Models
Authors: Antonio Tudisco, Deborah Volpe, Giovanna Turvani
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Quantum Machine Learning

Effective and accurate diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart failure is crucial for timely medical intervention and improving patient survival rates. Machine learning has revolutionized diagnostic methods in recent years by developing classification models that detect diseases based on selected features. However, these classification tasks are often highly imbalanced, limiting the performance of classical models. Quantum models offer a promising alternative, exploiting their ability to express complex patterns by operating in a higher-dimensional computational space through superposition and entanglement. These unique properties make quantum models potentially more effective in addressing the challenges of imbalanced datasets. This work evaluates the potential of quantum classifiers in healthcare, focusing on Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) and Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs), comparing them with popular classical models. The study is based on three well-known healthcare datasets -- Prostate Cancer, Heart Failure, and Diabetes. The results indicate that QSVMs outperform QNNs across all datasets due to their susceptibility to overfitting. Furthermore, quantum models prove the ability to overcome classical models in scenarios with high dataset imbalance. Although preliminary, these findings highlight the potential of quantum models in healthcare classification tasks and lead the way for further research in this domain.
Multi-VQC: A Novel QML Approach for Enhancing Healthcare Classification
Authors: Antonio Tudisco, Deborah Volpe, Giovanna Turvani
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Accurate and reliable diagnosis of diseases is crucial in enabling timely medical treatment and enhancing patient survival rates. In recent years, Machine Learning has revolutionized diagnostic practices by creating classification models capable of identifying diseases. However, these classification problems often suffer from significant class imbalances, which can inhibit the effectiveness of traditional models. Therefore, the interest in Quantum models has arisen, driven by the captivating promise of overcoming the limitations of the classical counterpart thanks to their ability to express complex patterns by mapping data in a higher-dimensional computational space.
WeatherEdit: Controllable Weather Editing with 4D Gaussian Field
Authors: Chenghao Qian, Wenjing Li, Yuhu Guo, Gustav Markkula
Date: 2025-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, 3DGS, 3D scene Editing, 3D Scene Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Weather Editing

In this work, we present WeatherEdit, a novel weather editing pipeline for generating realistic weather effects with controllable types and severity in 3D scenes. Our approach is structured into two key components: weather background editing and weather particle construction. For weather background editing, we introduce an all-in-one adapter that integrates multiple weather styles into a single pretrained diffusion model, enabling the generation of diverse weather effects in 2D image backgrounds. During inference, we design a Temporal-View (TV-) attention mechanism that follows a specific order to aggregate temporal and spatial information, ensuring consistent editing across multi-frame and multi-view images. To construct the weather particles, we first reconstruct a 3D scene using the edited images and then introduce a dynamic 4D Gaussian field to generate snowflakes, raindrops and fog in the scene. The attributes and dynamics of these particles are precisely controlled through physical-based modelling and simulation, ensuring realistic weather representation and flexible severity adjustments. Finally, we integrate the 4D Gaussian field with the 3D scene to render consistent and highly realistic weather effects. Experiments on multiple driving datasets demonstrate that WeatherEdit can generate diverse weather effects with controllable condition severity, highlighting its potential for autonomous driving simulation in adverse weather. See project page: https://jumponthemoon.github.io/w-edit
Cascaded 3D Diffusion Models for Whole-body 3D 18-F FDG PET/CT synthesis from Demographics
Authors: Siyeop Yoon, Sifan Song, Pengfei Jin, Matthew Tivnan, Yujin Oh, Sekeun Kim, Dufan Wu, Xiang Li, Quanzheng Li
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Super-Resolution

We propose a cascaded 3D diffusion model framework to synthesize high-fidelity 3D PET/CT volumes directly from demographic variables, addressing the growing need for realistic digital twins in oncologic imaging, virtual trials, and AI-driven data augmentation. Unlike deterministic phantoms, which rely on predefined anatomical and metabolic templates, our method employs a two-stage generative process. An initial score-based diffusion model synthesizes low-resolution PET/CT volumes from demographic variables alone, providing global anatomical structures and approximate metabolic activity. This is followed by a super-resolution residual diffusion model that refines spatial resolution. Our framework was trained on 18-F FDG PET/CT scans from the AutoPET dataset and evaluated using organ-wise volume and standardized uptake value (SUV) distributions, comparing synthetic and real data between demographic subgroups. The organ-wise comparison demonstrated strong concordance between synthetic and real images. In particular, most deviations in metabolic uptake values remained within 3-5% of the ground truth in subgroup analysis. These findings highlight the potential of cascaded 3D diffusion models to generate anatomically and metabolically accurate PET/CT images, offering a robust alternative to traditional phantoms and enabling scalable, population-informed synthetic imaging for clinical and research applications.
Neural Face Skinning for Mesh-agnostic Facial Expression Cloning
Authors: Sihun Cha, Serin Yoon, Kwanggyoon Seo, Junyong Noh
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

Accurately retargeting facial expressions to a face mesh while enabling manipulation is a key challenge in facial animation retargeting. Recent deep-learning methods address this by encoding facial expressions into a global latent code, but they often fail to capture fine-grained details in local regions. While some methods improve local accuracy by transferring deformations locally, this often complicates overall control of the facial expression. To address this, we propose a method that combines the strengths of both global and local deformation models. Our approach enables intuitive control and detailed expression cloning across diverse face meshes, regardless of their underlying structures. The core idea is to localize the influence of the global latent code on the target mesh. Our model learns to predict skinning weights for each vertex of the target face mesh through indirect supervision from predefined segmentation labels. These predicted weights localize the global latent code, enabling precise and region-specific deformations even for meshes with unseen shapes. We supervise the latent code using Facial Action Coding System (FACS)-based blendshapes to ensure interpretability and allow straightforward editing of the generated animation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate improved performance over state-of-the-art methods in terms of expression fidelity, deformation transfer accuracy, and adaptability across diverse mesh structures.
STDR: Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering
Authors: Zehao Li, Hao Jiang, Yujun Cai, Jianing Chen, Baolong Bi, Shuqin Gao, Honglong Zhao, Yiwei Wang, Tianlu Mao, Zhaoqi Wang
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Dynamic Reconstruction

Although dynamic scene reconstruction has long been a fundamental challenge in 3D vision, the recent emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a promising direction by enabling high-quality, real-time rendering through explicit Gaussian primitives. However, existing 3DGS-based methods for dynamic reconstruction often suffer from \textit{spatio-temporal incoherence} during initialization, where canonical Gaussians are constructed by aggregating observations from multiple frames without temporal distinction. This results in spatio-temporally entangled representations, making it difficult to model dynamic motion accurately. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{STDR} (Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Real-time rendering), a plug-and-play module that learns spatio-temporal probability distributions for each Gaussian. STDR introduces a spatio-temporal mask, a separated deformation field, and a consistency regularization to jointly disentangle spatial and temporal patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating our module into existing 3DGS-based dynamic scene reconstruction frameworks leads to notable improvements in both reconstruction quality and spatio-temporal consistency across synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
CityGo: Lightweight Urban Modeling and Rendering with Proxy Buildings and Residual Gaussians
Authors: Weihang Liu, Yuhui Zhong, Yuke Li, Xi Chen, Jiadi Cui, Honglong Zhang, Lan Xu, Xin Lou, Yujiao Shi, Jingyi Yu, Yingliang Zhang
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

Accurate and efficient modeling of large-scale urban scenes is critical for applications such as AR navigation, UAV based inspection, and smart city digital twins. While aerial imagery offers broad coverage and complements limitations of ground-based data, reconstructing city-scale environments from such views remains challenging due to occlusions, incomplete geometry, and high memory demands. Recent advances like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) improve scalability and visual quality but remain limited by dense primitive usage, long training times, and poor suit ability for edge devices. We propose CityGo, a hybrid framework that combines textured proxy geometry with residual and surrounding 3D Gaussians for lightweight, photorealistic rendering of urban scenes from aerial perspectives. Our approach first extracts compact building proxy meshes from MVS point clouds, then uses zero order SH Gaussians to generate occlusion-free textures via image-based rendering and back-projection. To capture high-frequency details, we introduce residual Gaussians placed based on proxy-photo discrepancies and guided by depth priors. Broader urban context is represented by surrounding Gaussians, with importance-aware downsampling applied to non-critical regions to reduce redundancy. A tailored optimization strategy jointly refines proxy textures and Gaussian parameters, enabling real-time rendering of complex urban scenes on mobile GPUs with significantly reduced training and memory requirements. Extensive experiments on real-world aerial datasets demonstrate that our hybrid representation significantly reduces training time, achieving on average 1.4x speedup, while delivering comparable visual fidelity to pure 3D Gaussian Splatting approaches. Furthermore, CityGo enables real-time rendering of large-scale urban scenes on mobile consumer GPUs, with substantially reduced memory usage and energy consumption.
Be Decisive: Noise-Induced Layouts for Multi-Subject Generation
Authors: Omer Dahary, Yehonathan Cohen, Or Patashnik, Kfir Aberman, Daniel Cohen-Or
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Generating multiple distinct subjects remains a challenge for existing text-to-image diffusion models. Complex prompts often lead to subject leakage, causing inaccuracies in quantities, attributes, and visual features. Preventing leakage among subjects necessitates knowledge of each subject's spatial location. Recent methods provide these spatial locations via an external layout control. However, enforcing such a prescribed layout often conflicts with the innate layout dictated by the sampled initial noise, leading to misalignment with the model's prior. In this work, we introduce a new approach that predicts a spatial layout aligned with the prompt, derived from the initial noise, and refines it throughout the denoising process. By relying on this noise-induced layout, we avoid conflicts with externally imposed layouts and better preserve the model's prior. Our method employs a small neural network to predict and refine the evolving noise-induced layout at each denoising step, ensuring clear boundaries between subjects while maintaining consistency. Experimental results show that this noise-aligned strategy achieves improved text-image alignment and more stable multi-subject generation compared to existing layout-guided techniques, while preserving the rich diversity of the model's original distribution.
CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects
Authors: Huaijin Pi, Zhi Cen, Zhiyang Dou, Taku Komura
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Synthesizing whole-body manipulation of articulated objects, including body motion, hand motion, and object motion, is a critical yet challenging task with broad applications in virtual humans and robotics. The core challenges are twofold. First, achieving realistic whole-body motion requires tight coordination between the hands and the rest of the body, as their movements are interdependent during manipulation. Second, articulated object manipulation typically involves high degrees of freedom and demands higher precision, often requiring the fingers to be placed at specific regions to actuate movable parts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel coordinated diffusion noise optimization framework. Specifically, we perform noise-space optimization over three specialized diffusion models for the body, left hand, and right hand, each trained on its own motion dataset to improve generalization. Coordination naturally emerges through gradient flow along the human kinematic chain, allowing the global body posture to adapt in response to hand motion objectives with high fidelity. To further enhance precision in hand-object interaction, we adopt a unified representation based on basis point sets (BPS), where end-effector positions are encoded as distances to the same BPS used for object geometry. This unified representation captures fine-grained spatial relationships between the hand and articulated object parts, and the resulting trajectories serve as targets to guide the optimization of diffusion noise, producing highly accurate interaction motion. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that our method outperforms existing approaches in motion quality and physical plausibility, and enables various capabilities such as object pose control, simultaneous walking and manipulation, and whole-body generation from hand-only data.