pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Keyframe-oriented Vision Token Pruning: Enhancing Efficiency of Large Vision Language Models on Long-Form Video Processing
Authors: Yudong Liu, Jingwei Sun, Yueqian Lin, Jingyang Zhang, Ming Yin, Qinsi Wang, Jianyi Zhang, Hai Li, Yiran Chen
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: EgoSchema, Form, Video Understanding

Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in jointly processing visual and textual data. However, they often incur substantial computational overhead due to redundant visual information, particularly in long-form video scenarios. Existing approaches predominantly focus on either vision token pruning, which may overlook spatio-temporal dependencies, or keyframe selection, which identifies informative frames but discards others, thus disrupting contextual continuity. In this work, we propose KVTP (Keyframe-oriented Vision Token Pruning), a novel framework that overcomes the drawbacks of token pruning and keyframe selection. By adaptively assigning pruning rates based on frame relevance to the query, KVTP effectively retains essential contextual information while significantly reducing redundant computation. To thoroughly evaluate the long-form video understanding capacities of VLMs, we curated and reorganized subsets from VideoMME, EgoSchema, and NextQA into a unified benchmark named SparseKV-QA that highlights real-world scenarios with sparse but crucial events. Our experiments with VLMs of various scales show that KVTP can reduce token usage by 80% without compromising spatiotemporal and contextual consistency, significantly cutting computation while maintaining the performance. These results demonstrate our approach's effectiveness in efficient long-video processing, facilitating more scalable VLM deployment.
Byzantine-Resilient Federated Learning via Distributed Optimization
Authors: Yufei Xia, Wenrui Yu, Qiongxiu Li
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization, Federated Learning

Byzantine attacks present a critical challenge to Federated Learning (FL), where malicious participants can disrupt the training process, degrade model accuracy, and compromise system reliability. Traditional FL frameworks typically rely on aggregation-based protocols for model updates, leaving them vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial strategies. In this paper, we demonstrate that distributed optimization offers a principled and robust alternative to aggregation-centric methods. Specifically, we show that the Primal-Dual Method of Multipliers (PDMM) inherently mitigates Byzantine impacts by leveraging its fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. Through extensive experiments on three datasets (MNIST, FashionMNIST, and Olivetti), under various attack scenarios including bit-flipping and Gaussian noise injection, we validate the superior resilience of distributed optimization protocols. Compared to traditional aggregation-centric approaches, PDMM achieves higher model utility, faster convergence, and improved stability. Our results highlight the effectiveness of distributed optimization in defending against Byzantine threats, paving the way for more secure and resilient federated learning systems.
Fixed-Point RNNs: From Diagonal to Dense in a Few Iterations
Authors: Sajad Movahedi, Felix Sarnthein, Nicola Muca Cirone, Antonio Orvieto
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, State Space Models

Linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba have become promising alternatives to softmax-attention as sequence mixing layers in Transformer architectures. Current models, however, do not exhibit the full state-tracking expressivity of RNNs because they rely on channel-wise (i.e. diagonal) sequence mixing. In this paper, we propose to compute a dense linear RNN as the fixed-point of a parallelizable diagonal linear RNN in a single layer. We explore mechanisms to improve its memory and state-tracking abilities in practice, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the commonly used toy tasks $A_5$, $S_5$, copying, and modular arithmetics. We hope our results will open new avenues to more expressive and efficient sequence mixers.
Panopticon: Advancing Any-Sensor Foundation Models for Earth Observation
Authors: Leonard Waldmann, Ando Shah, Yi Wang, Nils Lehmann, Adam J. Stewart, Zhitong Xiong, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Stefan Bauer, John Chuang
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data features diverse sensing platforms with varying spectral bands, spatial resolutions, and sensing modalities. While most prior work has constrained inputs to fixed sensors, a new class of any-sensor foundation models able to process arbitrary sensors has recently emerged. Contributing to this line of work, we propose Panopticon, an any-sensor foundation model built on the DINOv2 framework. We extend DINOv2 by (1) treating images of the same geolocation across sensors as natural augmentations, (2) subsampling channels to diversify spectral input, and (3) adding a cross attention over channels as a flexible patch embedding mechanism. By encoding the wavelength and modes of optical and synthetic aperture radar sensors, respectively, Panopticon can effectively process any combination of arbitrary channels. In extensive evaluations, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on GEO-Bench, especially on the widely-used Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 sensors, while out-competing other any-sensor models, as well as domain adapted fixed-sensor models on unique sensor configurations. Panopticon enables immediate generalization to both existing and future satellite platforms, advancing sensor-agnostic EO.
Towards Efficient Large Scale Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting via Improved Inverted Transformers
Authors: Jiarui Sun, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Yujie Fan, Xin Dai, Xiran Fan, Zhimeng Jiang, Uday Singh Saini, Vivian Lai, Junpeng Wang, Huiyuan Chen, Zhongfang Zhuang, Yan Zheng, Girish Chowdhary
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting at scale presents significant challenges for modern prediction systems, particularly when dealing with large sets of synchronized series, such as in a global payment network. In such systems, three key challenges must be overcome for accurate and scalable predictions: 1) emergence of new entities, 2) disappearance of existing entities, and 3) the large number of entities present in the data. The recently proposed Inverted Transformer (iTransformer) architecture has shown promising results by effectively handling variable entities. However, its practical application in large-scale settings is limited by quadratic time and space complexity ($O(N^2)$) with respect to the number of entities $N$. In this paper, we introduce EiFormer, an improved inverted transformer architecture that maintains the adaptive capabilities of iTransformer while reducing computational complexity to linear scale ($O(N)$). Our key innovation lies in restructuring the attention mechanism to eliminate redundant computations without sacrificing model expressiveness. Additionally, we incorporate a random projection mechanism that not only enhances efficiency but also improves prediction accuracy through better feature representation. Extensive experiments on the public LargeST benchmark dataset and a proprietary large-scale time series dataset demonstrate that EiFormer significantly outperforms existing methods in both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy. Our approach enables practical deployment of transformer-based forecasting in industrial applications where handling time series at scale is essential.
Predicting Clinical Outcomes with Waveform LSTMs
Authors: Michael Albada
Date: 2025-03-13 00:00:00

Data mining and machine learning hold great potential to enable health systems to systematically use data and analytics to identify inefficiencies and best practices that improve care and reduce costs. Waveform data offers particularly detailed information on how patient health evolves over time and has the potential to significantly improve prediction accuracy on multiple benchmarks, but has been widely under-utilized, largely because of the challenges in working with these large and complex datasets. This study evaluates the potential of leveraging clinical waveform data to improve prediction accuracy on a single benchmark task: the risk of mortality in the intensive care unit. We identify significant potential from this data, beating the existing baselines for both logistic regression and deep learning models.
From Dionysius Emerges Apollo -- Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences
Authors: Shuchen Wu
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking

Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts -- a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation -- letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.
Riemannian Geometric-based Meta Learning
Authors: Juneyoung Park, YuMi Lee, Tae-Joon Kim, Jang-Hwan Choi
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

Meta-learning, or "learning to learn," aims to enable models to quickly adapt to new tasks with minimal data. While traditional methods like Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) optimize parameters in Euclidean space, they often struggle to capture complex learning dynamics, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Stiefel-MAML, which integrates Riemannian geometry by optimizing within the Stiefel manifold, a space that naturally enforces orthogonality constraints. By leveraging the geometric structure of the Stiefel manifold, we improve parameter expressiveness and enable more efficient optimization through Riemannian gradient calculations and retraction operations. We also introduce a novel kernel-based loss function defined on the Stiefel manifold, further enhancing the model's ability to explore the parameter space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets--including Omniglot, Mini-ImageNet, FC-100, and CUB--demonstrate that Stiefel-MAML consistently outperforms traditional MAML, achieving superior performance across various few-shot learning tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of Riemannian geometry to enhance meta-learning, paving the way for future research on optimizing over different geometric structures.
Crash Severity Analysis of Child Bicyclists using Arm-Net and MambaNet
Authors: Shriyank Somvanshi, Rohit Chakraborty, Subasish Das, Anandi K Dutta
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

Child bicyclists (14 years and younger) are among the most vulnerable road users, often experiencing severe injuries or fatalities in crashes. This study analyzed 2,394 child bicyclist crashes in Texas from 2017 to 2022 using two deep tabular learning models (ARM-Net and MambaNet). To address the issue of data imbalance, the SMOTEENN technique was applied, resulting in balanced datasets that facilitated accurate crash severity predictions across three categories: Fatal/Severe (KA), Moderate/Minor (BC), and No Injury (O). The findings revealed that MambaNet outperformed ARM-Net, achieving higher precision, recall, F1-scores, and accuracy, particularly in the KA and O categories. Both models highlighted challenges in distinguishing BC crashes due to overlapping characteristics. These insights underscored the value of advanced tabular deep learning methods and balanced datasets in understanding crash severity. While limitations such as reliance on categorical data exist, future research could explore continuous variables and real-time behavioral data to enhance predictive modeling and crash mitigation strategies.
Residual Policy Gradient: A Reward View of KL-regularized Objective
Authors: Pengcheng Wang, Xinghao Zhu, Yuxin Chen, Chenfeng Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Chenran Li
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, MuJoCo, Policy Gradient Methods, Q-Learning

Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning have achieved widespread success in many domains but remain constrained during real-world deployment. One of the main issues is the additional requirements that were not considered during training. To address this challenge, policy customization has been introduced, aiming to adapt a prior policy while preserving its inherent properties and meeting new task-specific requirements. A principled approach to policy customization is Residual Q-Learning (RQL), which formulates the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and derives a family of value-based learning algorithms. However, RQL has not yet been applied to policy gradient methods, which restricts its applicability, especially in tasks where policy gradient has already proven more effective. In this work, we first derive a concise form of Soft Policy Gradient as a preliminary. Building on this, we introduce Residual Policy Gradient (RPG), which extends RQL to policy gradient methods, allowing policy customization in gradient-based RL settings. With the view of RPG, we rethink the KL-regularized objective widely used in RL fine-tuning. We show that under certain assumptions, KL-regularized objective leads to a maximum-entropy policy that balances the inherent properties and task-specific requirements on a reward-level. Our experiments in MuJoCo demonstrate the effectiveness of Soft Policy Gradient and Residual Policy Gradient.
Neural Tangent Kernel of Neural Networks with Loss Informed by Differential Operators
Authors: Weiye Gan, Yicheng Li, Qian Lin, Zuoqiang Shi
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00

Spectral bias is a significant phenomenon in neural network training and can be explained by neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory. In this work, we develop the NTK theory for deep neural networks with physics-informed loss, providing insights into the convergence of NTK during initialization and training, and revealing its explicit structure. We find that, in most cases, the differential operators in the loss function do not induce a faster eigenvalue decay rate and stronger spectral bias. Some experimental results are also presented to verify the theory.
InverseBench: Benchmarking Plug-and-Play Diffusion Priors for Inverse Problems in Physical Sciences
Authors: Hongkai Zheng, Wenda Chu, Bingliang Zhang, Zihui Wu, Austin Wang, Berthy T. Feng, Caifeng Zou, Yu Sun, Nikola Kovachki, Zachary E. Ross, Katherine L. Bouman, Yisong Yue
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Restoration

Plug-and-play diffusion priors (PnPDP) have emerged as a promising research direction for solving inverse problems. However, current studies primarily focus on natural image restoration, leaving the performance of these algorithms in scientific inverse problems largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{InverseBench}, a framework that evaluates diffusion models across five distinct scientific inverse problems. These problems present unique structural challenges that differ from existing benchmarks, arising from critical scientific applications such as optical tomography, medical imaging, black hole imaging, seismology, and fluid dynamics. With \textsc{InverseBench}, we benchmark 14 inverse problem algorithms that use plug-and-play diffusion priors against strong, domain-specific baselines, offering valuable new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of existing algorithms. To facilitate further research and development, we open-source the codebase, along with datasets and pre-trained models, at https://devzhk.github.io/InverseBench/.
Measuring Similarity in Causal Graphs: A Framework for Semantic and Structural Analysis
Authors: Ning-Yuan Georgia Liu, Flower Yang, Mohammad S. Jalali
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Causal graphs are commonly used to understand and model complex systems. Researchers often construct these graphs from different perspectives, leading to significant variations for the same problem. Comparing causal graphs is, therefore, essential for evaluating assumptions, integrating insights, and resolving disagreements. The rise of AI tools has further amplified this need, as they are increasingly used to generate hypothesized causal graphs by synthesizing information from various sources such as prior research and community inputs, providing the potential for automating and scaling causal modeling for complex systems. Similar to humans, these tools also produce inconsistent results across platforms, versions, and iterations. Despite its importance, research on causal graph comparison remains scarce. Existing methods often focus solely on structural similarities, assuming identical variable names, and fail to capture nuanced semantic relationships, which is essential for causal graph comparison. We address these gaps by investigating methods for comparing causal graphs from both semantic and structural perspectives. First, we reviewed over 40 existing metrics and, based on predefined criteria, selected nine for evaluation from two threads of machine learning: four semantic similarity metrics and five learning graph kernels. We discuss the usability of these metrics in simple examples to illustrate their strengths and limitations. We then generated a synthetic dataset of 2,000 causal graphs using generative AI based on a reference diagram. Our findings reveal that each metric captures a different aspect of similarity, highlighting the need to use multiple metrics.
A Survey of Cross-domain Graph Learning: Progress and Future Directions
Authors: Haihong Zhao, Chenyi Zi, Aochuan Chen, Jia Li
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Survey

Graph learning plays a vital role in mining and analyzing complex relationships involved in graph data, which is widely used in many real-world applications like transaction networks and communication networks. Foundation models in CV and NLP have shown powerful cross-domain capabilities that are also significant in graph domains. However, existing graph learning approaches struggle with cross-domain tasks. Inspired by successes in CV and NLP, cross-domain graph learning has once again become a focal point of attention to realizing true graph foundation models. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review and analysis of existing works on cross-domain graph learning. Concretely, we first propose a new taxonomy, categorizing existing approaches based on the learned cross-domain information: structure, feature, and structure-feature mixture. Next, we systematically survey representative methods in these categories. Finally, we discuss the remaining limitations of existing studies and highlight promising avenues for future research. Relevant papers are summarized and will be consistently updated at: https://github.com/cshhzhao/Awesome-Cross-Domain-Graph-Learning.
A Multi-Objective Evaluation Framework for Analyzing Utility-Fairness Trade-Offs in Machine Learning Systems
Authors: Gökhan Özbulak, Oscar Jimenez-del-Toro, Maíra Fatoretto, Lilian Berton, André Anjos
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The evaluation of fairness models in Machine Learning involves complex challenges, such as defining appropriate metrics, balancing trade-offs between utility and fairness, and there are still gaps in this stage. This work presents a novel multi-objective evaluation framework that enables the analysis of utility-fairness trade-offs in Machine Learning systems. The framework was developed using criteria from Multi-Objective Optimization that collect comprehensive information regarding this complex evaluation task. The assessment of multiple Machine Learning systems is summarized, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in a straightforward manner through a radar chart and a measurement table encompassing various aspects such as convergence, system capacity, and diversity. The framework's compact representation of performance facilitates the comparative analysis of different Machine Learning strategies for decision-makers, in real-world applications, with single or multiple fairness requirements. The framework is model-agnostic and flexible to be adapted to any kind of Machine Learning systems, that is, black- or white-box, any kind and quantity of evaluation metrics, including multidimensional fairness criteria. The functionality and effectiveness of the proposed framework is shown with different simulations, and an empirical study conducted on a real-world dataset with various Machine Learning systems.
Context-Aware Rule Mining Using a Dynamic Transformer-Based Framework
Authors: Jie Liu, Yiwei Zhang, Yuan Sheng, Yujia Lou, Haige Wang, Bohuan Yang
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

This study proposes a dynamic rule data mining algorithm based on an improved Transformer architecture, aiming to improve the accuracy and efficiency of rule mining in a dynamic data environment. With the increase in data volume and complexity, traditional data mining methods are difficult to cope with dynamic data with strong temporal and variable characteristics, so new algorithms are needed to capture the temporal regularity in the data. By improving the Transformer architecture, and introducing a dynamic weight adjustment mechanism and a temporal dependency module, we enable the model to adapt to data changes and mine more accurate rules. Experimental results show that compared with traditional rule mining algorithms, the improved Transformer model has achieved significant improvements in rule mining accuracy, coverage, and stability. The contribution of each module in the algorithm performance is further verified by ablation experiments, proving the importance of temporal dependency and dynamic weight adjustment mechanisms in improving the model effect. In addition, although the improved model has certain challenges in computational efficiency, its advantages in accuracy and coverage enable it to perform well in processing complex dynamic data. Future research will focus on optimizing computational efficiency and combining more deep learning technologies to expand the application scope of the algorithm, especially in practical applications in the fields of finance, medical care, and intelligent recommendation.