pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Short-Term Load Forecasting for AI-Data Center
Authors: Mariam Mughees, Yuzhuo Li, Yize Chen, Yunwei Ryan Li
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Load Forecasting

Recent research shows large-scale AI-centric data centers could experience rapid fluctuations in power demand due to varying computation loads, such as sudden spikes from inference or interruption of training large language models (LLMs). As a consequence, such huge and fluctuating power demand pose significant challenges to both data center and power utility operation. Accurate short-term power forecasting allows data centers and utilities to dynamically allocate resources and power large computing clusters as required. However, due to the complex data center power usage patterns and the black-box nature of the underlying AI algorithms running in data centers, explicit modeling of AI-data center is quite challenging. Alternatively, to deal with this emerging load forecasting problem, we propose a data-driven workflow to model and predict the short-term electricity load in an AI-data center, and such workflow is compatible with learning-based algorithms such as LSTM, GRU, 1D-CNN. We validate our framework, which achieves decent accuracy on data center GPU short-term power consumption. This provides opportunity for improved power management and sustainable data center operations.
CLIMB: Data Foundations for Large Scale Multimodal Clinical Foundation Models
Authors: Wei Dai, Peilin Chen, Malinda Lu, Daniel Li, Haowen Wei, Hejie Cui, Paul Pu Liang
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00

Recent advances in clinical AI have enabled remarkable progress across many clinical domains. However, existing benchmarks and models are primarily limited to a small set of modalities and tasks, which hinders the development of large-scale multimodal methods that can make holistic assessments of patient health and well-being. To bridge this gap, we introduce Clinical Large-Scale Integrative Multimodal Benchmark (CLIMB), a comprehensive clinical benchmark unifying diverse clinical data across imaging, language, temporal, and graph modalities. CLIMB comprises 4.51 million patient samples totaling 19.01 terabytes distributed across 2D imaging, 3D video, time series, graphs, and multimodal data. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that multitask pretraining significantly improves performance on understudied domains, achieving up to 29% improvement in ultrasound and 23% in ECG analysis over single-task learning. Pretraining on CLIMB also effectively improves models' generalization capability to new tasks, and strong unimodal encoder performance translates well to multimodal performance when paired with task-appropriate fusion strategies. Our findings provide a foundation for new architecture designs and pretraining strategies to advance clinical AI research. Code is released at https://github.com/DDVD233/climb.
A Framework for Reducing the Complexity of Geometric Vision Problems and its Application to Two-View Triangulation with Approximation Bounds
Authors: Felix Rydell, Georg Bökman, Fredrik Kahl, Kathlén Kohn
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a new framework for reducing the computational complexity of geometric vision problems through targeted reweighting of the cost functions used to minimize reprojection errors. Triangulation - the task of estimating a 3D point from noisy 2D projections across multiple images - is a fundamental problem in multiview geometry and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines. We apply our framework to the two-view case and demonstrate that optimal triangulation, which requires solving a univariate polynomial of degree six, can be simplified through cost function reweighting reducing the polynomial degree to two. This reweighting yields a closed-form solution while preserving strong geometric accuracy. We derive optimal weighting strategies, establish theoretical bounds on the approximation error, and provide experimental results on real data demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to standard methods. Although this work focuses on two-view triangulation, the framework generalizes to other geometric vision problems.
Tangentially Aligned Integrated Gradients for User-Friendly Explanations
Authors: Lachlan Simpson, Federico Costanza, Kyle Millar, Adriel Cheng, Cheng-Chew Lim, Hong Gunn Chew
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Integrated gradients is prevalent within machine learning to address the black-box problem of neural networks. The explanations given by integrated gradients depend on a choice of base-point. The choice of base-point is not a priori obvious and can lead to drastically different explanations. There is a longstanding hypothesis that data lies on a low dimensional Riemannian manifold. The quality of explanations on a manifold can be measured by the extent to which an explanation for a point lies in its tangent space. In this work, we propose that the base-point should be chosen such that it maximises the tangential alignment of the explanation. We formalise the notion of tangential alignment and provide theoretical conditions under which a base-point choice will provide explanations lying in the tangent space. We demonstrate how to approximate the optimal base-point on several well-known image classification datasets. Furthermore, we compare the optimal base-point choice with common base-points and three gradient explainability models.
Partial differential equation system for binarization of degraded document images
Authors: Youjin Liu, Yu Wang
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization

In recent years, partial differential equation (PDE) systems have been successfully applied to the binarization of text images, achieving promising results. Inspired by the DH model and incorporating a novel image modeling approach, this study proposes a new weakly coupled PDE system for degraded text image binarization. In this system, the first equation is designed to estimate the background component, incorporating both diffusion and fidelity terms. The second equation estimates the foreground component and includes diffusion, fidelity, and binarization source terms. The final binarization result is obtained by applying a hard projection to the estimated foreground component. Experimental results on 86 degraded text images demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits significant advantages in handling degraded text images.
Dynamical behavior and bifurcation analysis for a theoretical model of dengue fever transmission with incubation period and delayed recovery
Authors: Burcu Gürbüz, Aytül Gökçe, Segun I. Oke, Michael O. Adeniyi, Mayowa M. Ojo
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00

As offered by the World Health Organisation (WHO), close to half of the population in the world's resides in dengue-risk zones. Dengue viruses are transmitted to individuals by Aedes mosquito species infected bite (Ae. Albopictus of Ae. aegypti). These mosquitoes can transmit other viruses, including Zika and Chikungunya. In this research, a mathematical model is formulated to reflect different time delays considered in both extrinsic and intrinsic incubation periods, as well as in the recovery periods of infectious individuals. Preliminary results for the non-delayed model including positivity and boundedness of solutions, non-dimensionalization and equalibria analysis are presented. The threshold parameter (reproduction number) of the model is obtained via next generation matrix schemes. The stability analysis of the model revealed that various dynamical behaviour can be observed depending on delay parameters, where in particular the effect of delay in the recovery time of infectious individuals may lead to substantial changes in the dynamics. The ideas presented in this paper can be applied to other infectious diseases, providing qualitative evaluations for understanding time delays influencing the transmission dynamics.
Global Convergence and Rich Feature Learning in $L$-Layer Infinite-Width Neural Networks under $μ$P Parametrization
Authors: Zixiang Chen, Greg Yang, Qingyue Zhao, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Despite deep neural networks' powerful representation learning capabilities, theoretical understanding of how networks can simultaneously achieve meaningful feature learning and global convergence remains elusive. Existing approaches like the neural tangent kernel (NTK) are limited because features stay close to their initialization in this parametrization, leaving open questions about feature properties during substantial evolution. In this paper, we investigate the training dynamics of infinitely wide, $L$-layer neural networks using the tensor program (TP) framework. Specifically, we show that, when trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) under the Maximal Update parametrization ($\mu$P) and mild conditions on the activation function, SGD enables these networks to learn linearly independent features that substantially deviate from their initial values. This rich feature space captures relevant data information and ensures that any convergent point of the training process is a global minimum. Our analysis leverages both the interactions among features across layers and the properties of Gaussian random variables, providing new insights into deep representation learning. We further validate our theoretical findings through experiments on real-world datasets.
Learning Spatially Adaptive $\ell_1$-Norms Weights for Convolutional Synthesis Regularization
Authors: Andreas Kofler, Luca Calatroni, Christoph Kolbitsch, Kostas Papafitsoros
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

We propose an unrolled algorithm approach for learning spatially adaptive parameter maps in the framework of convolutional synthesis-based $\ell_1$ regularization. More precisely, we consider a family of pre-trained convolutional filters and estimate deeply parametrized spatially varying parameters applied to the sparse feature maps by means of unrolling a FISTA algorithm to solve the underlying sparse estimation problem. The proposed approach is evaluated for image reconstruction of low-field MRI and compared to spatially adaptive and non-adaptive analysis-type procedures relying on Total Variation regularization and to a well-established model-based deep learning approach. We show that the proposed approach produces visually and quantitatively comparable results with the latter approaches and at the same time remains highly interpretable. In particular, the inferred parameter maps quantify the local contribution of each filter in the reconstruction, which provides valuable insight into the algorithm mechanism and could potentially be used to discard unsuited filters.
Benefits of Learning Rate Annealing for Tuning-Robustness in Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Amit Attia, Tomer Koren
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

The learning rate in stochastic gradient methods is a critical hyperparameter that is notoriously costly to tune via standard grid search, especially for training modern large-scale models with billions of parameters. We identify a theoretical advantage of learning rate annealing schemes that decay the learning rate to zero at a polynomial rate, such as the widely-used cosine schedule, by demonstrating their increased robustness to initial parameter misspecification due to a coarse grid search. We present an analysis in a stochastic convex optimization setup demonstrating that the convergence rate of stochastic gradient descent with annealed schedules depends sublinearly on the multiplicative misspecification factor $\rho$ (i.e., the grid resolution), achieving a rate of $O(\rho^{1/(2p+1)}/\sqrt{T})$ where $p$ is the degree of polynomial decay and $T$ is the number of steps, in contrast to the $O(\rho/\sqrt{T})$ rate that arises with fixed stepsizes and exhibits a linear dependence on $\rho$. Experiments confirm the increased robustness compared to tuning with a fixed stepsize, that has significant implications for the computational overhead of hyperparameter search in practical training scenarios.
Revisiting Frank-Wolfe for Structured Nonconvex Optimization
Authors: Hoomaan Maskan, Yikun Hou, Suvrit Sra, Alp Yurtsever
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

We introduce a new projection-free (Frank-Wolfe) method for optimizing structured nonconvex functions that are expressed as a difference of two convex functions. This problem class subsumes smooth nonconvex minimization, positioning our method as a promising alternative to the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm. DC decompositions are not unique; by carefully selecting a decomposition, we can better exploit the problem structure, improve computational efficiency, and adapt to the underlying problem geometry to find better local solutions. We prove that the proposed method achieves a first-order stationary point in $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations, matching the complexity of the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm for smooth nonconvex minimization in general. Specific decompositions can, for instance, yield a gradient-efficient variant that requires only $O(1/\epsilon)$ calls to the gradient oracle. Finally, we present numerical experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm.
Accelerated Distributed Optimization with Compression and Error Feedback
Authors: Yuan Gao, Anton Rodomanov, Jeremy Rack, Sebastian U. Stich
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization

Modern machine learning tasks often involve massive datasets and models, necessitating distributed optimization algorithms with reduced communication overhead. Communication compression, where clients transmit compressed updates to a central server, has emerged as a key technique to mitigate communication bottlenecks. However, the theoretical understanding of stochastic distributed optimization with contractive compression remains limited, particularly in conjunction with Nesterov acceleration -- a cornerstone for achieving faster convergence in optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, ADEF (Accelerated Distributed Error Feedback), which integrates Nesterov acceleration, contractive compression, error feedback, and gradient difference compression. We prove that ADEF achieves the first accelerated convergence rate for stochastic distributed optimization with contractive compression in the general convex regime. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the practical efficacy of ADEF in reducing communication costs while maintaining fast convergence.
Dynamically optimal portfolios for monotone mean--variance preferences
Authors: Aleš Černý, Johannes Ruf, Martin Schweizer
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00

Monotone mean-variance (MMV) utility is the minimal modification of the classical Markowitz utility that respects rational ordering of investment opportunities. This paper provides, for the first time, a complete characterization of optimal dynamic portfolio choice for the MMV utility in asset price models with independent returns. The task is performed under minimal assumptions, weaker than the existence of an equivalent martingale measure and with no restrictions on the moments of asset returns. We interpret the maximal MMV utility in terms of the monotone Sharpe ratio (MSR) and show that the global squared MSR arises as the nominal yield from continuously compounding at the rate equal to the maximal local squared MSR. The paper gives simple necessary and sufficient conditions for mean-variance (MV) efficient portfolios to be MMV efficient. Several illustrative examples contrasting the MV and MMV criteria are provided.
Whiteness-based bilevel estimation of weighted TV parameter maps for image denoising
Authors: Monica Pragliola, Luca Calatroni, Alessandro Lanza
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We consider a bilevel optimisation strategy based on normalised residual whiteness loss for estimating the weighted total variation parameter maps for denoising images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. Compared to supervised and semi-supervised approaches relying on prior knowledge of (approximate) reference data and/or information on the noise magnitude, the proposal is fully unsupervised. To avoid noise overfitting an early stopping strategy is used, relying on simple statistics of optimal performances on a set of natural images. Numerical results comparing the supervised/unsupervised procedures for scalar/pixel-dependent \mbox{parameter maps are shown.
A Beam Search Based Parallel Algorithm for the Two-Dimensional Strip Packing Problem
Authors: Yajie Wen, Defu Zhang
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00

This paper introduces BSPA, a parallel algorithm that leverages beam search to address the two-dimensional strip packing problem. The study begins with a comprehensive review of existing approaches and methodologies, followed by a detailed presentation of the BSPA algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To facilitate further research, both the code and datasets are publicly available.
A Block-Based Heuristic Algorithm for the Three-Dimensional Nuclear Waste Packing Problem
Authors: Yajie Wen, Defu Zhang
Date: 2025-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Heuristic Search

In this study, we present a block-based heuristic search algorithm to address the nuclear waste container packing problem in the context of real-world nuclear power plants. Additionally, we provide a dataset comprising 1600 problem instances for future researchers to use. Experimental results on this dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively enhances the disposal pool's space utilization while minimizing the radiation dose within the pool. The code and data employed in this study are publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and further investigation.
A non-homogeneous Markov early epidemic growth dynamics model. Application to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
Authors: Nestor R. Barraza, Gabriel Pena, Verónica Moreno
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00

This work introduces a new markovian stochastic model that can be described as a non-homogeneous Pure Birth process. We propose a functional form of birth rate that depends on the number of individuals in the population and on the elapsed time, allowing us to model a contagion effect. Thus, we model the early stages of an epidemic. The number of individuals then becomes the infectious cases and the birth rate becomes the incidence rate. We obtain this way a process that depends on two competitive phenomena, infection and immunization. Variations in those rates allow us to monitor how effective the actions taken by government and health organizations are. From our model, three useful indicators for the epidemic evolution over time are obtained: the immunization rate, the infection/immunization ratio and the mean time between infections (MTBI). The proposed model allows either positive or negative concavities for the mean value curve, provided the infection/immunization ratio is either greater or less than one. We apply this model to the present SARS-CoV-2 pandemic still in its early growth stage in Latin American countries. As it is shown, the model accomplishes a good fit for the real number of both positive cases and deaths. We analyze the evolution of the three indicators for several countries and perform a comparative study between them. Important conclusions are obtained from this analysis.
Addressing pitfalls in implicit unobserved confounding synthesis using explicit block hierarchical ancestral sampling
Authors: Xudong Sun, Alex Markham, Pratik Misra, Carsten Marr
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, valid

Unbiased data synthesis is crucial for evaluating causal discovery algorithms in the presence of unobserved confounding, given the scarcity of real-world datasets. A common approach, implicit parameterization, encodes unobserved confounding by modifying the off-diagonal entries of the idiosyncratic covariance matrix while preserving positive definiteness. Within this approach, we identify that state-of-the-art protocols have two distinct issues that hinder unbiased sampling from the complete space of causal models: first, we give a detailed analysis of use of diagonally dominant constructions restricts the spectrum of partial correlation matrices; and second, the restriction of possible graphical structures when sampling bidirected edges, unnecessarily ruling out valid causal models. To address these limitations, we propose an improved explicit modeling approach for unobserved confounding, leveraging block-hierarchical ancestral generation of ground truth causal graphs. Algorithms for converting the ground truth DAG into ancestral graph is provided so that the output of causal discovery algorithms could be compared with. We draw connections between implicit and explicit parameterization, prove that our approach fully covers the space of causal models, including those generated by the implicit parameterization, thus enabling more robust evaluation of methods for causal discovery and inference.
Empirical Error Estimates for Graph Sparsification
Authors: Siyao Wang, Miles E. Lopes
Date: 2025-03-11 00:00:00

Graph sparsification is a well-established technique for accelerating graph-based learning algorithms, which uses edge sampling to approximate dense graphs with sparse ones. Because the sparsification error is random and unknown, users must contend with uncertainty about the reliability of downstream computations. Although it is possible for users to obtain conceptual guidance from theoretical error bounds in the literature, such results are typically impractical at a numerical level. Taking an alternative approach, we propose to address these issues from a data-driven perspective by computing empirical error estimates. The proposed error estimates are highly versatile, and we demonstrate this in four use cases: Laplacian matrix approximation, graph cut queries, graph-structured regression, and spectral clustering. Moreover, we provide two theoretical guarantees for the error estimates, and explain why the cost of computing them is manageable in comparison to the overall cost of a typical graph sparsification workflow.
Personalized Convolutional Dictionary Learning of Physiological Time Series
Authors: Axel Roques, Samuel Gruffaz, Kyurae Kim, Alain Oliviero-Durmus, Laurent Oudre
Date: 2025-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning, Time Series

Human physiological signals tend to exhibit both global and local structures: the former are shared across a population, while the latter reflect inter-individual variability. For instance, kinetic measurements of the gait cycle during locomotion present common characteristics, although idiosyncrasies may be observed due to biomechanical disposition or pathology. To better represent datasets with local-global structure, this work extends Convolutional Dictionary Learning (CDL), a popular method for learning interpretable representations, or dictionaries, of time-series data. In particular, we propose Personalized CDL (PerCDL), in which a local dictionary models local information as a personalized spatiotemporal transformation of a global dictionary. The transformation is learnable and can combine operations such as time warping and rotation. Formal computational and statistical guarantees for PerCDL are provided and its effectiveness on synthetic and real human locomotion data is demonstrated.