pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Provable Sim-to-Real Transfer via Offline Domain Randomization
Authors: Arnaud Fickinger, Abderrahim Bendahi, Stuart Russell
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

Reinforcement-learning agents often struggle when deployed from simulation to the real-world. A dominant strategy for reducing the sim-to-real gap is domain randomization (DR) which trains the policy across many simulators produced by sampling dynamics parameters, but standard DR ignores offline data already available from the real system. We study offline domain randomization (ODR), which first fits a distribution over simulator parameters to an offline dataset. While a growing body of empirical work reports substantial gains with algorithms such as DROPO, the theoretical foundations of ODR remain largely unexplored. In this work, we (i) formalize ODR as a maximum-likelihood estimation over a parametric simulator family, (ii) prove consistency of this estimator under mild regularity and identifiability conditions, showing it converges to the true dynamics as the dataset grows, (iii) derive gap bounds demonstrating ODRs sim-to-real error is up to an O(M) factor tighter than uniform DR in the finite-simulator case (and analogous gains in the continuous setting), and (iv) introduce E-DROPO, a new version of DROPO which adds an entropy bonus to prevent variance collapse, yielding broader randomization and more robust zero-shot transfer in practice.
Self-Predictive Representations for Combinatorial Generalization in Behavioral Cloning
Authors: Daniel Lawson, Adriana Hugessen, Charlotte Cloutier, Glen Berseth, Khimya Khetarpal
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Behavioral cloning (BC) methods trained with supervised learning (SL) are an effective way to learn policies from human demonstrations in domains like robotics. Goal-conditioning these policies enables a single generalist policy to capture diverse behaviors contained within an offline dataset. While goal-conditioned behavior cloning (GCBC) methods can perform well on in-distribution training tasks, they do not necessarily generalize zero-shot to tasks that require conditioning on novel state-goal pairs, i.e. combinatorial generalization. In part, this limitation can be attributed to a lack of temporal consistency in the state representation learned by BC; if temporally related states are encoded to similar latent representations, then the out-of-distribution gap for novel state-goal pairs would be reduced. Hence, encouraging this temporal consistency in the representation space should facilitate combinatorial generalization. Successor representations, which encode the distribution of future states visited from the current state, nicely encapsulate this property. However, previous methods for learning successor representations have relied on contrastive samples, temporal-difference (TD) learning, or both. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective representation learning objective, $\text{BYOL-}\gamma$ augmented GCBC, which is not only able to theoretically approximate the successor representation in the finite MDP case without contrastive samples or TD learning, but also, results in competitive empirical performance across a suite of challenging tasks requiring combinatorial generalization.
Interpreting learned search: finding a transition model and value function in an RNN that plays Sokoban
Authors: Mohammad Taufeeque, Aaron David Tucker, Adam Gleave, Adrià Garriga-Alonso
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Sokoban

We partially reverse-engineer a convolutional recurrent neural network (RNN) trained to play the puzzle game Sokoban with model-free reinforcement learning. Prior work found that this network solves more levels with more test-time compute. Our analysis reveals several mechanisms analogous to components of classic bidirectional search. For each square, the RNN represents its plan in the activations of channels associated with specific directions. These state-action activations are analogous to a value function - their magnitudes determine when to backtrack and which plan branch survives pruning. Specialized kernels extend these activations (containing plan and value) forward and backward to create paths, forming a transition model. The algorithm is also unlike classical search in some ways. State representation is not unified; instead, the network considers each box separately. Each layer has its own plan representation and value function, increasing search depth. Far from being inscrutable, the mechanisms leveraging test-time compute learned in this network by model-free training can be understood in familiar terms.
Physiological-Model-Based Neural Network for Heart Rate Estimation during Daily Physical Activities
Authors: Yaowen Zhang, Libera Fresiello, Peter H. Veltink, Dirk W. Donker, Ying Wang
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Heart rate estimation

Heart failure (HF) poses a significant global health challenge, with early detection offering opportunities for improved outcomes. Abnormalities in heart rate (HR), particularly during daily activities, may serve as early indicators of HF risk. However, existing HR monitoring tools for HF detection are limited by their reliability on population-based averages. The estimation of individualized HR serves as a dynamic digital twin, enabling precise tracking of cardiac health biomarkers. Current HR estimation methods, categorized into physiologically-driven and purely data-driven models, struggle with efficiency and interpretability. This study introduces a novel physiological-model-based neural network (PMB-NN) framework for HR estimation based on oxygen uptake (VO2) data during daily physical activities. The framework was trained and tested on individual datasets from 12 participants engaged in activities including resting, cycling, and running. By embedding physiological constraints, which were derived from our proposed simplified human movement physiological model (PM), into the neural network training process, the PMB-NN model adheres to human physiological principles while achieving high estimation accuracy, with a median R$^2$ score of 0.8 and an RMSE of 8.3 bpm. Comparative statistical analysis demonstrates that the PMB-NN achieves performance on par with the benchmark neural network model while significantly outperforming traditional physiological model (p=0.002). In addition, our PMB-NN is adept at identifying personalized parameters of the PM, enabling the PM to generate reasonable HR estimation. The proposed framework with a precise VO2 estimation system derived from body movements enables the future possibilities of personalized and real-time cardiac monitoring during daily life physical activities.
Balanced Hyperbolic Embeddings Are Natural Out-of-Distribution Detectors
Authors: Tejaswi Kasarla, Max van Spengler, Pascal Mettes
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Out-of-distribution recognition forms an important and well-studied problem in deep learning, with the goal to filter out samples that do not belong to the distribution on which a network has been trained. The conclusion of this paper is simple: a good hierarchical hyperbolic embedding is preferred for discriminating in- and out-of-distribution samples. We introduce Balanced Hyperbolic Learning. We outline a hyperbolic class embedding algorithm that jointly optimizes for hierarchical distortion and balancing between shallow and wide subhierarchies. We then use the class embeddings as hyperbolic prototypes for classification on in-distribution data. We outline how to generalize existing out-of-distribution scoring functions to operate with hyperbolic prototypes. Empirical evaluations across 13 datasets and 13 scoring functions show that our hyperbolic embeddings outperform existing out-of-distribution approaches when trained on the same data with the same backbones. We also show that our hyperbolic embeddings outperform other hyperbolic approaches, beat state-of-the-art contrastive methods, and natively enable hierarchical out-of-distribution generalization.
The 2025 PNPL Competition: Speech Detection and Phoneme Classification in the LibriBrain Dataset
Authors: Gilad Landau, Miran Özdogan, Gereon Elvers, Francesco Mantegna, Pratik Somaiya, Dulhan Jayalath, Luisa Kurth, Teyun Kwon, Brendan Shillingford, Greg Farquhar, Minqi Jiang, Karim Jerbi, Hamza Abdelhedi, Yorguin Mantilla Ramos, Caglar Gulcehre, Mark Woolrich, Natalie Voets, Oiwi Parker Jones
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface

The advance of speech decoding from non-invasive brain data holds the potential for profound societal impact. Among its most promising applications is the restoration of communication to paralysed individuals affected by speech deficits such as dysarthria, without the need for high-risk surgical interventions. The ultimate aim of the 2025 PNPL competition is to produce the conditions for an "ImageNet moment" or breakthrough in non-invasive neural decoding, by harnessing the collective power of the machine learning community. To facilitate this vision we present the largest within-subject MEG dataset recorded to date (LibriBrain) together with a user-friendly Python library (pnpl) for easy data access and integration with deep learning frameworks. For the competition we define two foundational tasks (i.e. Speech Detection and Phoneme Classification from brain data), complete with standardised data splits and evaluation metrics, illustrative benchmark models, online tutorial code, a community discussion board, and public leaderboard for submissions. To promote accessibility and participation the competition features a Standard track that emphasises algorithmic innovation, as well as an Extended track that is expected to reward larger-scale computing, accelerating progress toward a non-invasive brain-computer interface for speech.
Wasserstein Barycenter Soft Actor-Critic
Authors: Zahra Shahrooei, Ali Baheri
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, MuJoCo

Deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have emerged as the leading framework for reinforcement learning in continuous control domains. However, most of these algorithms suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially in environments with sparse rewards. In this paper, we take a step towards addressing this issue by providing a principled directed exploration strategy. We propose Wasserstein Barycenter Soft Actor-Critic (WBSAC) algorithm, which benefits from a pessimistic actor for temporal difference learning and an optimistic actor to promote exploration. This is achieved by using the Wasserstein barycenter of the pessimistic and optimistic policies as the exploration policy and adjusting the degree of exploration throughout the learning process. We compare WBSAC with state-of-the-art off-policy actor-critic algorithms and show that WBSAC is more sample-efficient on MuJoCo continuous control tasks.
A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Early Prediction of Diabetes
Authors: Mowafaq Salem Alzboon, Mohammad Al-Batah, Muhyeeddin Alqaraleh, Ahmad Abuashour, Ahmad Fuad Bader
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diabetes Prediction

In many nations, diabetes is becoming a significant health problem, and early identification and control are crucial. Using machine learning algorithms to predict diabetes has yielded encouraging results. Using the Pima Indians Diabetes dataset, this study attempts to evaluate the efficacy of several machine-learning methods for diabetes prediction. The collection includes information on 768 patients, such as their ages, BMIs, and glucose levels. The techniques assessed are Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosting, and Neural Network. The findings indicate that the Neural Network algorithm performed the best, with an accuracy of 78.57 percent, followed by the Random Forest method, with an accuracy of 76.30 percent. The study implies that machine learning algorithms can aid diabetes prediction and be an efficient early detection tool.
Optimizing Genetic Algorithms with Multilayer Perceptron Networks for Enhancing TinyFace Recognition
Authors: Mohammad Subhi Al-Batah, Mowafaq Salem Alzboon, Muhyeeddin Alqaraleh
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Feature Engineering, feature selection

This study conducts an empirical examination of MLP networks investigated through a rigorous methodical experimentation process involving three diverse datasets: TinyFace, Heart Disease, and Iris. Study Overview: The study includes three key methods: a) a baseline training using the default settings for the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), b) feature selection using Genetic Algorithm (GA) based refinement c) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based dimension reduction. The results show important information on how such techniques affect performance. While PCA had showed benefits in low-dimensional and noise-free datasets GA consistently increased accuracy in complex datasets by accurately identifying critical features. Comparison reveals that feature selection and dimensionality reduction play interdependent roles in enhancing MLP performance. The study contributes to the literature on feature engineering and neural network parameter optimization, offering practical guidelines for a wide range of machine learning tasks
Scalable Non-Equivariant 3D Molecule Generation via Rotational Alignment
Authors: Yuhui Ding, Thomas Hofmann
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Molecule Generation, Denoising

Equivariant diffusion models have achieved impressive performance in 3D molecule generation. These models incorporate Euclidean symmetries of 3D molecules by utilizing an SE(3)-equivariant denoising network. However, specialized equivariant architectures limit the scalability and efficiency of diffusion models. In this paper, we propose an approach that relaxes such equivariance constraints. Specifically, our approach learns a sample-dependent SO(3) transformation for each molecule to construct an aligned latent space. A non-equivariant diffusion model is then trained over the aligned representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs significantly better than previously reported non-equivariant models. It yields sample quality comparable to state-of-the-art equivariant diffusion models and offers improved training and sampling efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/skeletondyh/RADM
Improving Oral Cancer Outcomes Through Machine Learning and Dimensionality Reduction
Authors: Mohammad Subhi Al-Batah, Muhyeeddin Alqaraleh, Mowafaq Salem Alzboon
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Dimensionality Reduction, Ensemble Learning, feature selection, Prognosis

Oral cancer presents a formidable challenge in oncology, necessitating early diagnosis and accurate prognosis to enhance patient survival rates. Recent advancements in machine learning and data mining have revolutionized traditional diagnostic methodologies, providing sophisticated and automated tools for differentiating between benign and malignant oral lesions. This study presents a comprehensive review of cutting-edge data mining methodologies, including Neural Networks, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and ensemble learning techniques, specifically applied to the diagnosis and prognosis of oral cancer. Through a rigorous comparative analysis, our findings reveal that Neural Networks surpass other models, achieving an impressive classification accuracy of 93,6 % in predicting oral cancer. Furthermore, we underscore the potential benefits of integrating feature selection and dimensionality reduction techniques to enhance model performance. These insights underscore the significant promise of advanced data mining techniques in bolstering early detection, optimizing treatment strategies, and ultimately improving patient outcomes in the realm of oral oncology.
DynaSubVAE: Adaptive Subgrouping for Scalable and Robust OOD Detection
Authors: Tina Behrouzi, Sana Tonekaboni, Rahul G. Krishnan, Anna Goldenberg
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Representation Learning

Real-world observational data often contain existing or emerging heterogeneous subpopulations that deviate from global patterns. The majority of models tend to overlook these underrepresented groups, leading to inaccurate or even harmful predictions. Existing solutions often rely on detecting these samples as Out-of-domain (OOD) rather than adapting the model to new emerging patterns. We introduce DynaSubVAE, a Dynamic Subgrouping Variational Autoencoder framework that jointly performs representation learning and adaptive OOD detection. Unlike conventional approaches, DynaSubVAE evolves with the data by dynamically updating its latent structure to capture new trends. It leverages a novel non-parametric clustering mechanism, inspired by Gaussian Mixture Models, to discover and model latent subgroups based on embedding similarity. Extensive experiments show that DynaSubVAE achieves competitive performance in both near-OOD and far-OOD detection, and excels in class-OOD scenarios where an entire class is missing during training. We further illustrate that our dynamic subgrouping mechanism outperforms standalone clustering methods such as GMM and KMeans++ in terms of both OOD accuracy and regret precision.
AWP: Activation-Aware Weight Pruning and Quantization with Projected Gradient Descent
Authors: Jing Liu, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Hassan Mansour, Matthew Brand
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression, Quantization

To address the enormous size of Large Language Models (LLMs), model compression methods, such as quantization and pruning, are often deployed, especially on edge devices. In this work, we focus on layer-wise post-training quantization and pruning. Drawing connections between activation-aware weight pruning and sparse approximation problems, and motivated by the success of Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT), we propose a unified method for Activation-aware Weight pruning and quantization via Projected gradient descent (AWP). Our experiments demonstrate that AWP outperforms state-of-the-art LLM pruning and quantization methods. Theoretical convergence guarantees of the proposed method for pruning are also provided.
Cross-Learning Between ECG and PCG: Exploring Common and Exclusive Characteristics of Bimodal Electromechanical Cardiac Waveforms
Authors: Sajjad Karimi, Amit J. Shah, Gari D. Clifford, Reza Sameni
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Electrocardiography (ECG)

Simultaneous electrocardiography (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) provide a comprehensive, multimodal perspective on cardiac function by capturing the heart's electrical and mechanical activities, respectively. However, the distinct and overlapping information content of these signals, as well as their potential for mutual reconstruction and biomarker extraction, remains incompletely understood, especially under varying physiological conditions and across individuals. In this study, we systematically investigate the common and exclusive characteristics of ECG and PCG using the EPHNOGRAM dataset of simultaneous ECG-PCG recordings during rest and exercise. We employ a suite of linear and nonlinear machine learning models, including non-causal LSTM networks, to reconstruct each modality from the other and analyze the influence of causality, physiological state, and cross-subject variability. Our results demonstrate that nonlinear models, particularly non-causal LSTM, provide superior reconstruction performance, with reconstructing ECG from PCG proving more tractable than the reverse. Exercise and cross-subject scenarios present significant challenges, but envelope-based modeling that utilizes instantaneous amplitude features substantially improves cross-subject generalizability for cross-modal learning. Furthermore, we demonstrate that clinically relevant ECG biomarkers, such as fiducial points and QT intervals, can be estimated from PCG in cross-subject settings. These findings advance our understanding of the relationship between electromechanical cardiac modalities, in terms of both waveform characteristics and the timing of cardiac events, with potential applications in novel multimodal cardiac monitoring technologies.
LaMAGIC2: Advanced Circuit Formulations for Language Model-Based Analog Topology Generation
Authors: Chen-Chia Chang, Wan-Hsuan Lin, Yikang Shen, Yiran Chen, Xin Zhang
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sensitivity

Automation of analog topology design is crucial due to customized requirements of modern applications with heavily manual engineering efforts. The state-of-the-art work applies a sequence-to-sequence approach and supervised finetuning on language models to generate topologies given user specifications. However, its circuit formulation is inefficient due to O(|V |2) token length and suffers from low precision sensitivity to numeric inputs. In this work, we introduce LaMAGIC2, a succinct float-input canonical formulation with identifier (SFCI) for language model-based analog topology generation. SFCI addresses these challenges by improving component-type recognition through identifier-based representations, reducing token length complexity to O(|V |), and enhancing numeric precision sensitivity for better performance under tight tolerances. Our experiments demonstrate that LaMAGIC2 achieves 34% higher success rates under a tight tolerance of 0.01 and 10X lower MSEs compared to a prior method. LaMAGIC2 also exhibits better transferability for circuits with more vertices with up to 58.5% improvement. These advancements establish LaMAGIC2 as a robust framework for analog topology generation.
A new type of federated clustering: A non-model-sharing approach
Authors: Yuji Kawamata, Kaoru Kamijo, Maki Kihira, Akihiro Toyoda, Tomoru Nakayama, Akira Imakura, Tetsuya Sakurai, Yukihiko Okada
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning

In recent years, the growing need to leverage sensitive data across institutions has led to increased attention on federated learning (FL), a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables model training without sharing raw data. However, existing FL-based clustering methods, known as federated clustering, typically assume simple data partitioning scenarios such as horizontal or vertical splits, and cannot handle more complex distributed structures. This study proposes data collaboration clustering (DC-Clustering), a novel federated clustering method that supports clustering over complex data partitioning scenarios where horizontal and vertical splits coexist. In DC-Clustering, each institution shares only intermediate representations instead of raw data, ensuring privacy preservation while enabling collaborative clustering. The method allows flexible selection between k-means and spectral clustering, and achieves final results with a single round of communication with the central server. We conducted extensive experiments using synthetic and open benchmark datasets. The results show that our method achieves clustering performance comparable to centralized clustering where all data are pooled. DC-Clustering addresses an important gap in current FL research by enabling effective knowledge discovery from distributed heterogeneous data. Its practical properties -- privacy preservation, communication efficiency, and flexibility -- make it a promising tool for privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance.