pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TReB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Table Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
Authors: Ce Li, Xiaofan Liu, Zhiyan Song, Ce Chi, Chen Zhao, Jingjing Yang, Zhendong Wang, Kexin Yang, Boshen Shi, Xing Wang, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00

The majority of data in businesses and industries is stored in tables, databases, and data warehouses. Reasoning with table-structured data poses significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its hidden semantics, inherent complexity, and structured nature. One of these challenges is lacking an effective evaluation benchmark fairly reflecting the performances of LLMs on broad table reasoning abilities. In this paper, we fill in this gap, presenting a comprehensive table reasoning evolution benchmark, TReB, which measures both shallow table understanding abilities and deep table reasoning abilities, a total of 26 sub-tasks. We construct a high quality dataset through an iterative data processing procedure. We create an evaluation framework to robustly measure table reasoning capabilities with three distinct inference modes, TCoT, PoT and ICoT. Further, we benchmark over 20 state-of-the-art LLMs using this frame work and prove its effectiveness. Experimental results reveal that existing LLMs still have significant room for improvement in addressing the complex and real world Table related tasks. Both the dataset and evaluation framework are publicly available, with the dataset hosted on [HuggingFace] and the framework on [GitHub].
FOCUS: Internal MLLM Representations for Efficient Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering
Authors: Liangyu Zhong, Fabio Rosenthal, Joachim Sicking, Fabian Hüger, Thorsten Bagdonat, Hanno Gottschalk, Leo Schwinn
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer strong perception and
reasoning capabilities for image-text input, Visual Question Answering (VQA)
focusing on small image details still remains a challenge. Although visual cropping
techniques seem promising, recent approaches have several limitations: the need
for task-specific fine-tuning, low efficiency due to uninformed exhaustive search,
or incompatibility with efficient attention implementations. We address these
shortcomings by proposing a training-free visual cropping method, dubbed FOCUS,
that leverages MLLM-internal representations to guide the search for the most
relevant image region. This is accomplished in four steps: first, we identify the
target object(s) in the VQA prompt; second, we compute an object relevance map
using the key-value (KV) cache; third, we propose and rank relevant image regions
based on the map; and finally, we perform the fine-grained VQA task using the topranked region. As a result of this informed search strategy, FOCUS achieves strong
performance across four fine-grained VQA datasets and two types of MLLMs. It
outperforms three popular visual cropping methods in both accuracy and efficiency,
and matches the best-performing baseline, ZoomEye, while requiring 3 – 6.5×
less compute.
The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safety
Authors: Aidan Peppin, Julia Kreutzer, Alice Schoenauer Sebag, Kelly Marchisio, Beyza Ermis, John Dang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shivalika Singh, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Viraat Aryabumi, Aakanksha, Wei-Yin Ko, Ahmet Üstün, Matthias Gallé, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Despite advances in large language model capabilities in recent years, a large gap remains in their capabilities and safety performance for many languages beyond a relatively small handful of globally dominant languages. This paper provides researchers, policymakers and governance experts with an overview of key challenges to bridging the "language gap" in AI and minimizing safety risks across languages. We provide an analysis of why the language gap in AI exists and grows, and how it creates disparities in global AI safety. We identify barriers to address these challenges, and recommend how those working in policy and governance can help address safety concerns associated with the language gap by supporting multilingual dataset creation, transparency, and research.
Scaling Laws Are Unreliable for Downstream Tasks: A Reality Check
Authors: Nicholas Lourie, Michael Y. Hu, Kyunghyun Cho
Date: 2025-07-01 00:00:00

Downstream scaling laws aim to predict task performance at larger scales from pretraining losses at smaller scales. Whether this prediction should be possible is unclear: some works demonstrate that task performance follows clear linear scaling trends under transformation, whereas others point out fundamental challenges to downstream scaling laws, such as emergence and inverse scaling. In this work, we conduct a meta-analysis of existing data on downstream scaling laws, finding that close fit to linear scaling laws only occurs in a minority of cases: 39% of the time. Furthermore, seemingly benign changes to the experimental setting can completely change the scaling trend. Our analysis underscores the need to understand the conditions under which scaling laws succeed. To fully model the relationship between pretraining loss and downstream task performance, we must embrace the cases in which scaling behavior deviates from linear trends.
PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Report
Authors: Cheng Cui, Ting Sun, Manhui Lin, Tingquan Gao, Yubo Zhang, Jiaxuan Liu, Xueqing Wang, Zelun Zhang, Changda Zhou, Hongen Liu, Yue Zhang, Wenyu Lv, Kui Huang, Yichao Zhang, Jing Zhang, Jun Zhang, Yi Liu, dianhai yu, Yanjun Ma
Date: 2025-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Key Information Extraction, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

This technical report introduces PaddleOCR 3.0, an Apache-licensed open-source toolkit for OCR and document parsing. To address the growing demand for document understanding in the era of large language models, PaddleOCR 3.0 presents three major solutions: (1) PP-OCRv5 for multilingual text recognition, (2) PP-StructureV3 for hierarchical document parsing, and (3) PP-ChatOCRv4 for key information extraction. Compared to mainstream vision-language models (VLMs), these models with fewer than 100 million parameters achieve competitive accuracy and efficiency, rivaling billion-parameter VLMs. In addition to offering a high-quality OCR model library, PaddleOCR 3.0 provides efficient tools for training, inference, and deployment, supports heterogeneous hardware acceleration, and enables developers to easily build intelligent document applications.
Bilateral Collaboration with Large Vision-Language Models for Open Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Yupeng Hu, Changxing Ding, Chang Sun, Shaoli Huang, Xiangmin Xu
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Large Language Model

Open vocabulary Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a challenging task that detects all <human, verb, object> triplets of interest in an image, even those that are not pre-defined in the training set. Existing approaches typically rely on output features generated by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance the generalization ability of interaction representations. However, the visual features produced by VLMs are holistic and coarse-grained, which contradicts the nature of detection tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel Bilateral Collaboration framework for open vocabulary HOI detection (BC-HOI). This framework includes an Attention Bias Guidance (ABG) component, which guides the VLM to produce fine-grained instance-level interaction features according to the attention bias provided by the HOI detector. It also includes a Large Language Model (LLM)-based Supervision Guidance (LSG) component, which provides fine-grained token-level supervision for the HOI detector by the LLM component of the VLM. LSG enhances the ability of ABG to generate high-quality attention bias. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks: HICO-DET and V-COCO, consistently achieving superior performance in the open vocabulary and closed settings. The code will be released in Github.
Following the Clues: Experiments on Person Re-ID using Cross-Modal Intelligence
Authors: Robert Aufschläger, Youssef Shoeb, Azarm Nowzad, Michael Heigl, Fabian Bally, Martin Schramm
Date: 2025-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Generalizable Person Re-identification, Graph Attention, Person Re-Identification, Representation Learning

The collection and release of street-level recordings as Open Data play a vital role in advancing autonomous driving systems and AI research. However, these datasets pose significant privacy risks, particularly for pedestrians, due to the presence of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that extends beyond biometric traits such as faces. In this paper, we present cRID, a novel cross-modal framework combining Large Vision-Language Models, Graph Attention Networks, and representation learning to detect textual describable clues of PII and enhance person re-identification (Re-ID). Our approach focuses on identifying and leveraging interpretable features, enabling the detection of semantically meaningful PII beyond low-level appearance cues. We conduct a systematic evaluation of PII presence in person image datasets. Our experiments show improved performance in practical cross-dataset Re-ID scenarios, notably from Market-1501 to CUHK03-np (detected), highlighting the framework's practical utility. Code is available at https://github.com/RAufschlaeger/cRID.
UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions
Authors: Siyuan Yao, Rui Zhu, Ziqi Wang, Wenqi Ren, Yanyang Yan, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2025-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking has gained promising progress in past decades. Most of the existing approaches focus on learning target representation in well-conditioned daytime data, while for the unconstrained real-world scenarios with adverse weather conditions, e.g. nighttime or foggy environment, the tremendous domain shift leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose UMDATrack, which is capable of maintaining high-quality target state prediction under various adverse weather conditions within a unified domain adaptation framework. Specifically, we first use a controllable scenario generator to synthesize a small amount of unlabeled videos (less than 2% frames in source daytime datasets) in multiple weather conditions under the guidance of different text prompts. Afterwards, we design a simple yet effective domain-customized adapter (DCA), allowing the target objects' representation to rapidly adapt to various weather conditions without redundant model updating. Furthermore, to enhance the localization consistency between source and target domains, we propose a target-aware confidence alignment module (TCA) following optimal transport theorem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMDATrack can surpass existing advanced visual trackers and lead new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/Z-Z188/UMDATrack.
SketchColour: Channel Concat Guided DiT-based Sketch-to-Colour Pipeline for 2D Animation
Authors: Bryan Constantine Sadihin, Michael Hua Wang, Shei Pern Chua, Hang Su
Date: 2025-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The production of high-quality 2D animation is highly labor-intensive process, as animators are currently required to draw and color a large number of frames by hand. We present SketchColour, the first sketch-to-colour pipeline for 2D animation built on a diffusion transformer (DiT) backbone. By replacing the conventional U-Net denoiser with a DiT-style architecture and injecting sketch information via lightweight channel-concatenation adapters accompanied with LoRA finetuning, our method natively integrates conditioning without the parameter and memory bloat of a duplicated ControlNet, greatly reducing parameter count and GPU memory usage. Evaluated on the SAKUGA dataset, SketchColour outperforms previous state-of-the-art video colourization methods across all metrics, despite using only half the training data of competing models. Our approach produces temporally coherent animations with minimal artifacts such as colour bleeding or object deformation. Our code is available at: https://bconstantine.github.io/SketchColour .
HiM2SAM: Enhancing SAM2 with Hierarchical Motion Estimation and Memory Optimization towards Long-term Tracking
Authors: Ruixiang Chen, Guolei Sun, Yawei Li, Jie Qin, Luca Benini
Date: 2025-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Object Tracking, Video Object Tracking

This paper presents enhancements to the SAM2 framework for video object tracking task, addressing challenges such as occlusions, background clutter, and target reappearance. We introduce a hierarchical motion estimation strategy, combining lightweight linear prediction with selective non-linear refinement to improve tracking accuracy without requiring additional training. In addition, we optimize the memory bank by distinguishing long-term and short-term memory frames, enabling more reliable tracking under long-term occlusions and appearance changes. Experimental results show consistent improvements across different model scales. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on LaSOT and LaSOText with the large model, achieving 9.6% and 7.2% relative improvements in AUC over the original SAM2, and demonstrates even larger relative gains on smaller models, highlighting the effectiveness of our trainless, low-overhead improvements for boosting long-term tracking performance. The code is available at https://github.com/LouisFinner/HiM2SAM.
TOMI: Transforming and Organizing Music Ideas for Multi-Track Compositions with Full-Song Structure
Authors: Qi He, Gus Xia, Ziyu Wang
Date: 2025-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Hierarchical planning is a powerful approach to model long sequences structurally. Aside from considering hierarchies in the temporal structure of music, this paper explores an even more important aspect: concept hierarchy, which involves generating music ideas, transforming them, and ultimately organizing them--across musical time and space--into a complete composition. To this end, we introduce TOMI (Transforming and Organizing Music Ideas) as a novel approach in deep music generation and develop a TOMI-based model via instruction-tuned foundation LLM. Formally, we represent a multi-track composition process via a sparse, four-dimensional space characterized by clips (short audio or MIDI segments), sections (temporal positions), tracks (instrument layers), and transformations (elaboration methods). Our model is capable of generating multi-track electronic music with full-song structure, and we further integrate the TOMI-based model with the REAPER digital audio workstation, enabling interactive human-AI co-creation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces higher-quality electronic music with stronger structural coherence compared to baselines.
Graph Collaborative Attention Network for Link Prediction in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Thanh Hoang-Minh
Date: 2025-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Base Completion, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

Knowledge graphs offer a structured representation of real-world entities and their relationships, enabling a wide range of applications from information retrieval to automated reasoning. In this paper, we conduct a systematic comparison between traditional rule-based approaches and modern deep learning methods for link prediction. We focus on KBGAT, a graph neural network model that leverages multi-head attention to jointly encode both entity and relation features within local neighborhood structures. To advance this line of research, we introduce \textbf{GCAT} (Graph Collaborative Attention Network), a refined model that enhances context aggregation and interaction between heterogeneous nodes. Experimental results on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that GCAT not only consistently outperforms rule-based methods but also achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing neural embedding models. Our findings highlight the advantages of attention-based architectures in capturing complex relational patterns for knowledge graph completion tasks.
FOCUS: Fine-grained Optimization with Semantic Guided Understanding for Pedestrian Attributes Recognition
Authors: Hongyan An, Kuan Zhu, Xin He, Haiyun Guo, Chaoyang Zhao, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Date: 2025-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Contrastive Learning, Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR) is a fundamental perception task in intelligent transportation and security. To tackle this fine-grained task, most existing methods focus on extracting regional features to enrich attribute information. However, a regional feature is typically used to predict a fixed set of pre-defined attributes in these methods, which limits the performance and practicality in two aspects: 1) Regional features may compromise fine-grained patterns unique to certain attributes in favor of capturing common characteristics shared across attributes. 2) Regional features cannot generalize to predict unseen attributes in the test time. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{O}ptimization with semanti\textbf{C} g\textbf{U}ided under\textbf{S}tanding (FOCUS) approach for PAR, which adaptively extracts fine-grained attribute-level features for each attribute individually, regardless of whether the attributes are seen or not during training. Specifically, we propose the Multi-Granularity Mix Tokens (MGMT) to capture latent features at varying levels of visual granularity, thereby enriching the diversity of the extracted information. Next, we introduce the Attribute-guided Visual Feature Extraction (AVFE) module, which leverages textual attributes as queries to retrieve their corresponding visual attribute features from the Mix Tokens using a cross-attention mechanism. To ensure that textual attributes focus on the appropriate Mix Tokens, we further incorporate a Region-Aware Contrastive Learning (RACL) method, encouraging attributes within the same region to share consistent attention maps. Extensive experiments on PA100K, PETA, and RAPv1 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of our method.
What Makes for Text to 360-degree Panorama Generation with Stable Diffusion?
Authors: Jinhong Ni, Chang-Bin Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Jing Zhang
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

Recent prosperity of text-to-image diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion, has stimulated research to adapt them to 360-degree panorama generation. Prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of using conventional low-rank adaptation techniques on pre-trained diffusion models to generate panoramic images. However, the substantial domain gap between perspective and panoramic images raises questions about the underlying mechanisms enabling this empirical success. We hypothesize and examine that the trainable counterparts exhibit distinct behaviors when fine-tuned on panoramic data, and such an adaptation conceals some intrinsic mechanism to leverage the prior knowledge within the pre-trained diffusion models. Our analysis reveals the following: 1) the query and key matrices in the attention modules are responsible for common information that can be shared between the panoramic and perspective domains, thus are less relevant to panorama generation; and 2) the value and output weight matrices specialize in adapting pre-trained knowledge to the panoramic domain, playing a more critical role during fine-tuning for panorama generation. We empirically verify these insights by introducing a simple framework called UniPano, with the objective of establishing an elegant baseline for future research. UniPano not only outperforms existing methods but also significantly reduces memory usage and training time compared to prior dual-branch approaches, making it scalable for end-to-end panorama generation with higher resolution. The code will be released.
Entangled Threats: A Unified Kill Chain Model for Quantum Machine Learning Security
Authors: Pascal Debus, Maximilian Wendlinger, Kilian Tscharke, Daniel Herr, Cedric Brügmann, Daniel Ohl de Mello, Juris Ulmanis, Alexander Erhard, Arthur Schmidt, Fabian Petsch
Date: 2025-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Model extraction, Quantum Machine Learning

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) systems inherit vulnerabilities from classical machine learning while introducing new attack surfaces rooted in the physical and algorithmic layers of quantum computing. Despite a growing body of research on individual attack vectors - ranging from adversarial poisoning and evasion to circuit-level backdoors, side-channel leakage, and model extraction - these threats are often analyzed in isolation, with unrealistic assumptions about attacker capabilities and system environments. This fragmentation hampers the development of effective, holistic defense strategies. In this work, we argue that QML security requires more structured modeling of the attack surface, capturing not only individual techniques but also their relationships, prerequisites, and potential impact across the QML pipeline. We propose adapting kill chain models, widely used in classical IT and cybersecurity, to the quantum machine learning context. Such models allow for structured reasoning about attacker objectives, capabilities, and possible multi-stage attack paths - spanning reconnaissance, initial access, manipulation, persistence, and exfiltration. Based on extensive literature analysis, we present a detailed taxonomy of QML attack vectors mapped to corresponding stages in a quantum-aware kill chain framework that is inspired by the MITRE ATLAS for classical machine learning. We highlight interdependencies between physical-level threats (like side-channel leakage and crosstalk faults), data and algorithm manipulation (such as poisoning or circuit backdoors), and privacy attacks (including model extraction and training data inference). This work provides a foundation for more realistic threat modeling and proactive security-in-depth design in the emerging field of quantum machine learning.
Evaluating Attribute Confusion in Fashion Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Ziyue Liu, Federico Girella, Yiming Wang, Davide Talon
Date: 2025-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, cross-modal alignment, Image Generation, Question Answering, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, Visual Localization, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Despite the rapid advances in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models, their evaluation remains challenging in domains like fashion, involving complex compositional generation. Recent automated T2I evaluation methods leverage pre-trained vision-language models to measure cross-modal alignment. However, our preliminary study reveals that they are still limited in assessing rich entity-attribute semantics, facing challenges in attribute confusion, i.e., when attributes are correctly depicted but associated to the wrong entities. To address this, we build on a Visual Question Answering (VQA) localization strategy targeting one single entity at a time across both visual and textual modalities. We propose a localized human evaluation protocol and introduce a novel automatic metric, Localized VQAScore (L-VQAScore), that combines visual localization with VQA probing both correct (reflection) and miss-localized (leakage) attribute generation. On a newly curated dataset featuring challenging compositional alignment scenarios, L-VQAScore outperforms state-of-the-art T2I evaluation methods in terms of correlation with human judgments, demonstrating its strength in capturing fine-grained entity-attribute associations. We believe L-VQAScore can be a reliable and scalable alternative to subjective evaluations.