pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Solla: Towards a Speech-Oriented LLM That Hears Acoustic Context
Authors: Junyi Ao, Dekun Chen, Xiaohai Tian, Wenjie Feng, Jun Zhang, Lu Lu, Yuxuan Wang, Haizhou Li, Zhizheng Wu
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio captioning, Audio Question Answering, Audio Tagging, Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable ability to process not only text but also multimodal inputs such as speech and audio. However, most existing models primarily focus on analyzing input signals using text instructions, overlooking scenarios in which speech instructions and audio are mixed and serve as inputs to the model. To address these challenges, we introduce Solla, a novel framework designed to understand speech-based questions and hear the acoustic context concurrently. Solla incorporates an audio tagging module to effectively identify and represent audio events, as well as an ASR-assisted prediction method to improve comprehension of spoken content. To rigorously evaluate Solla and other publicly available models, we propose a new benchmark dataset called SA-Eval, which includes three tasks: audio event classification, audio captioning, and audio question answering. SA-Eval has diverse speech instruction with various speaking styles, encompassing two difficulty levels, easy and hard, to capture the range of real-world acoustic conditions. Experimental results show that Solla performs on par with or outperforms baseline models on both the easy and hard test sets, underscoring its effectiveness in jointly understanding speech and audio.
A Bird Song Detector for improving bird identification through Deep Learning: a case study from Doñana
Authors: Alba Márquez-Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Mohedano-Munoz, Manuel J. Marín-Jiménez, Eduardo Santamaría-García, Giulia Bastianelli, Pedro Jordano, Irene Mendoza
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00

Passive Acoustic Monitoring is a key tool for biodiversity conservation, but the large volumes of unsupervised audio it generates present major challenges for extracting meaningful information. Deep Learning offers promising solutions. BirdNET, a widely used bird identification model, has shown success in many study systems but is limited at local scale due to biases in its training data, which focus on specific locations and target sounds rather than entire soundscapes. A key challenge in bird species identification is that many recordings either lack target species or contain overlapping vocalizations, complicating automatic identification. To address these problems, we developed a multi-stage pipeline for automatic bird vocalization identification in Do\~nana National Park (SW Spain), a wetland of high conservation concern. We deployed AudioMoth recorders in three main habitats across nine locations and manually annotated 461 minutes of audio, resulting in 3749 labeled segments spanning 34 classes. We first applied a Bird Song Detector to isolate bird vocalizations using spectrogram-based image processing. Then, species were classified using custom models trained at the local scale. Applying the Bird Song Detector before classification improved species identification, as all models performed better when analyzing only the segments where birds were detected. Specifically, the combination of detector and fine-tuned BirdNET outperformed the baseline without detection. This approach demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating a Bird Song Detector with local classification models. These findings highlight the need to adapt general-purpose tools to specific ecological challenges. Automatically detecting bird species helps track the health of this threatened ecosystem, given birds sensitivity to environmental change, and supports conservation planning to reduce biodiversity loss.
Shushing! Let's Imagine an Authentic Speech from the Silent Video
Authors: Jiaxin Ye, Hongming Shan
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

Vision-guided speech generation aims to produce authentic speech from facial appearance or lip motions without relying on auditory signals, offering significant potential for applications such as dubbing in filmmaking and assisting individuals with aphonia. Despite recent progress, existing methods struggle to achieve unified cross-modal alignment across semantics, timbre, and emotional prosody from visual cues, prompting us to propose Consistent Video-to-Speech (CV2S) as an extended task to enhance cross-modal consistency. To tackle emerging challenges, we introduce ImaginTalk, a novel cross-modal diffusion framework that generates faithful speech using only visual input, operating within a discrete space. Specifically, we propose a discrete lip aligner that predicts discrete speech tokens from lip videos to capture semantic information, while an error detector identifies misaligned tokens, which are subsequently refined through masked language modeling with BERT. To further enhance the expressiveness of the generated speech, we develop a style diffusion transformer equipped with a face-style adapter that adaptively customizes identity and prosody dynamics across both the channel and temporal dimensions while ensuring synchronization with lip-aware semantic features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImaginTalk can generate high-fidelity speech with more accurate semantic details and greater expressiveness in timbre and emotion compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Demos are shown at our project page: https://imagintalk.github.io.
CodeReviewQA: The Code Review Comprehension Assessment for Large Language Models
Authors: Hong Yi Lin, Chunhua Liu, Haoyu Gao, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Christoph Treude
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Multiple-choice, Text Matching

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities but struggle with real-world software engineering tasks, such as revising source code to address code reviews, hindering their practical use. Code review comments are often implicit, ambiguous, and colloquial, requiring models to grasp both code and human intent. This challenge calls for evaluating large language models' ability to bridge both technical and conversational contexts. While existing work has employed the automated code refinement (ACR) task to resolve these comments, current evaluation methods fall short, relying on text matching metrics that provide limited insight into model failures and remain susceptible to training data contamination. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel evaluation benchmark, $\textbf{CodeReviewQA}$ that enables us to conduct fine-grained assessment of model capabilities and mitigate data contamination risks. In CodeReviewQA, we decompose the generation task of code refinement into $\textbf{three essential reasoning steps}$: $\textit{change type recognition}$ (CTR), $\textit{change localisation}$ (CL), and $\textit{solution identification}$ (SI). Each step is reformulated as multiple-choice questions with varied difficulty levels, enabling precise assessment of model capabilities, while mitigating data contamination risks. Our comprehensive evaluation spans 72 recently released large language models on $\textbf{900 manually curated, high-quality examples}$ across nine programming languages. Our results show that CodeReviewQA is able to expose specific model weaknesses in code review comprehension, disentangled from their generative automated code refinement results.
Unify and Triumph: Polyglot, Diverse, and Self-Consistent Generation of Unit Tests with LLMs
Authors: Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Charly Reux, Mathieu Acher
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Large Language Model, Overall - Test

Large language model (LLM)-based test generation has gained attention in software engineering, yet most studies evaluate LLMs' ability to generate unit tests in a single attempt for a given language, missing the opportunity to leverage LLM diversity for more robust testing. This paper introduces PolyTest, a novel approach that enhances test generation by exploiting polyglot and temperature-controlled diversity. PolyTest systematically leverages these properties in two complementary ways: (1) Cross-lingual test generation, where tests are generated in multiple languages at zero temperature and then unified; (2) Diverse test sampling, where multiple test sets are generated within the same language at a higher temperature before unification. A key insight is that LLMs can generate diverse yet contradicting tests -- same input, different expected outputs -- across languages and generations. PolyTest mitigates inconsistencies by unifying test sets, fostering self-consistency and improving overall test quality. Unlike single-language or single-attempt approaches, PolyTest enhances testing without requiring on-the-fly execution, making it particularly beneficial for weaker-performing languages. We evaluate PolyTest on Llama3-70B, GPT-4o, and GPT-3.5 using EvalPlus, generating tests in five languages (Java, C, Python, JavaScript, and a CSV-based format) at temperature 0 and sampling multiple sets at temperature 1. We observe that LLMs frequently generate contradicting tests across settings, and that PolyTest significantly improves test quality across all considered metrics -- number of tests, passing rate, statement/branch coverage (up to +9.01%), and mutation score (up to +11.23%). Finally, PolyTest outperforms Pynguin in test generation, passing rate, and mutation score.
GAN-enhanced Simulation-driven DNN Testing in Absence of Ground Truth
Authors: Mohammed Attaoui, Fabrizio Pastore
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: DNN Testing

The generation of synthetic inputs via simulators driven by search algorithms is essential for cost-effective testing of Deep Neural Network (DNN) components for safety-critical systems. However, in many applications, simulators are unable to produce the ground-truth data needed for automated test oracles and to guide the search process. To tackle this issue, we propose an approach for the generation of inputs for computer vision DNNs that integrates a generative network to ensure simulator fidelity and employs heuristic-based search fitnesses that leverage transformation consistency, noise resistance, surprise adequacy, and uncertainty estimation. We compare the performance of our fitnesses with that of a traditional fitness function leveraging ground truth; further, we assess how the integration of a GAN not leveraging the ground truth impacts on test and retraining effectiveness. Our results suggest that leveraging transformation consistency is the best option to generate inputs for both DNN testing and retraining; it maximizes input diversity, spots the inputs leading to worse DNN performance, and leads to best DNN performance after retraining. Besides enabling simulator-based testing in the absence of ground truth, our findings pave the way for testing solutions that replace costly simulators with diffusion and large language models, which might be more affordable than simulators, but cannot generate ground-truth data.
Workflow for Safe-AI
Authors: Suzana Veljanovska, Hans Dermot Doran
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00

The development and deployment of safe and dependable AI models is crucial in applications where functional safety is a key concern. Given the rapid advancement in AI research and the relative novelty of the safe-AI domain, there is an increasing need for a workflow that balances stability with adaptability. This work proposes a transparent, complete, yet flexible and lightweight workflow that highlights both reliability and qualifiability. The core idea is that the workflow must be qualifiable, which demands the use of qualified tools. Tool qualification is a resource-intensive process, both in terms of time and cost. We therefore place value on a lightweight workflow featuring a minimal number of tools with limited features. The workflow is built upon an extended ONNX model description allowing for validation of AI algorithms from their generation to runtime deployment. This validation is essential to ensure that models are validated before being reliably deployed across different runtimes, particularly in mixed-criticality systems. Keywords-AI workflows, safe-AI, dependable-AI, functional safety, v-model development
Automated Non-Functional Requirements Generation in Software Engineering with Large Language Models: A Comparative Study
Authors: Jomar Thomas Almonte, Santhosh Anitha Boominathan, Nathalia Nascimento
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Neglecting non-functional requirements (NFRs) early in software development can lead to critical challenges. Despite their importance, NFRs are often overlooked or difficult to identify, impacting software quality. To support requirements engineers in eliciting NFRs, we developed a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive quality-driven NFRs from functional requirements (FRs). Using a custom prompting technique within a Deno-based pipeline, the system identifies relevant quality attributes for each functional requirement and generates corresponding NFRs, aiding systematic integration. A crucial aspect is evaluating the quality and suitability of these generated requirements. Can LLMs produce high-quality NFR suggestions? Using 34 functional requirements - selected as a representative subset of 3,964 FRs-the LLMs inferred applicable attributes based on the ISO/IEC 25010:2023 standard, generating 1,593 NFRs. A horizontal evaluation covered three dimensions: NFR validity, applicability of quality attributes, and classification precision. Ten industry software quality evaluators, averaging 13 years of experience, assessed a subset for relevance and quality. The evaluation showed strong alignment between LLM-generated NFRs and expert assessments, with median validity and applicability scores of 5.0 (means: 4.63 and 4.59, respectively) on a 1-5 scale. In the classification task, 80.4% of LLM-assigned attributes matched expert choices, with 8.3% near misses and 11.3% mismatches. A comparative analysis of eight LLMs highlighted variations in performance, with gemini-1.5-pro exhibiting the highest attribute accuracy, while llama-3.3-70B achieved higher validity and applicability scores. These findings provide insights into the feasibility of using LLMs for automated NFR generation and lay the foundation for further exploration of AI-assisted requirements engineering.
Assessing Large Language Models for Automated Feedback Generation in Learning Programming Problem Solving
Authors: Priscylla Silva, Evandro Costa
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00

Providing effective feedback is important for student learning in programming problem-solving. In this sense, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential tools to automate feedback generation. However, their reliability and ability to identify reasoning errors in student code remain not well understood. This study evaluates the performance of four LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4-Turbo, and Gemini-1.5-pro) on a benchmark dataset of 45 student solutions. We assessed the models' capacity to provide accurate and insightful feedback, particularly in identifying reasoning mistakes. Our analysis reveals that 63\% of feedback hints were accurate and complete, while 37\% contained mistakes, including incorrect line identification, flawed explanations, or hallucinated issues. These findings highlight the potential and limitations of LLMs in programming education and underscore the need for improvements to enhance reliability and minimize risks in educational applications.
Retrieval-Augmented Simulacra: Generative Agents for Up-to-date and Knowledge-Adaptive Simulations
Authors: Hikaru Shimadzu, Takehito Utsuro, Daisuke Kitayama
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, Retrieval

In the 2023 edition of the White Paper on Information and Communications, it is estimated that the population of social networking services in Japan will exceed 100 million by 2022, and the influence of social networking services in Japan is growing significantly. In addition, marketing using SNS and research on the propagation of emotions and information on SNS are being actively conducted, creating the need for a system for predicting trends in SNS interactions. We have already created a system that simulates the behavior of various communities on SNS by building a virtual SNS environment in which agents post and reply to each other in a chat community created by agents using a LLMs. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the search extension generation mechanism used to create posts and replies in a virtual SNS environment using a simulation system on the ability to generate posts and replies. As a result of the evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed search extension generation mechanism, which mimics human search behavior, generates the most natural exchange.
Parallel Domain-Decomposition Algorithms for Complexity Certification of Branch-and-Bound Algorithms for Mixed-Integer Linear and Quadratic Programming
Authors: Shamisa Shoja, Daniel Arnström, Daniel Axehill
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

When implementing model predictive control (MPC) for hybrid systems with a linear or a quadratic performance measure, a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) or a mixed-integer quadratic program (MIQP) needs to be solved, respectively, at each sampling instant. Recent work has introduced the possibility to certify the computational complexity of branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithms when solving MILP and MIQP problems formulated as multi-parametric MILPs (mp-MILPs) and mp-MIQPs. Such a framework allows for computing the worst-case computational complexity of standard B&B-based MILP and MIQP solvers, quantified by metrics such as the total number of LP/QP iterations and B&B nodes. These results are highly relevant for real-time hybrid MPC applications. In this paper, we extend this framework by developing parallel, domain-decomposition versions of the previously proposed algorithm, allowing it to scale to larger problem sizes and enable the use of high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Furthermore, to reduce peak memory consumption, we introduce two novel modifications to the existing (serial) complexity certification framework, integrating them into the proposed parallel algorithms. Numerical experiments show that the parallel algorithms significantly reduce computation time while maintaining the correctness of the original framework.
Finite Sample Analysis of System Poles for Ho-Kalman Algorithm
Authors: Shuai Sun, Xu Wang
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00

The Ho-Kalman algorithm has been widely employed for the identification of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems. In this paper, we investigate the pole estimation error for the Ho-Kalman algorithm based on finite input/output sample data. Building upon prior works, we derive finite sample error bounds for system pole estimation in both single-trajectory and multiple-trajectory scenarios. Specifically, we prove that, with high probability, the estimation error for an $n$-dimensional system decreases at a rate of at least $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/2n})$ in the single-trajectory setting with trajectory length $T$, and at a rate of at least $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2n})$ in the multiple-trajectory setting with $N$ independent trajectories. Furthermore, we reveal that in both settings, achieving a constant estimation error requires a super-polynomial sample size in $ \max\{n/m, n/p\} $, where $n/m$ and $n/p$ denote the state-to-output and state-to-input dimension ratios, respectively. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to validate the non-asymptotic results of system pole estimation.
Evaluation of Torque Ripple and Tooth Forces of a Skewed PMSM by 2D and 3D FE Simulations
Authors: Karsten Müller, Andreas Wanke, Yves Burkhardt, Herbert De Gersem
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00

In this paper, various skewing configurations for a permanent magnet synchronous machine are evaluated by comparing torque ripple amplitudes and tooth forces. Since high-frequency pure tones emitted by an electrical machine significantly impact a vehicle's noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) behavior, it is crucial to analyze radial forces. These forces are examined and compared across different skewing configurations and angles using the Maxwell stress tensor in 2D and 3D finite-element (FE) simulations. In addition to conventional investigations in 2D FE simulations, 3D FE simulations are executed. These 3D FE simulations show that axial forces occur at the transition points between the magnetic segments of a linear step skewed rotor.
A Unifying Complexity-Certification Framework for Branch-and-Bound Algorithms for Mixed-Integer Linear and Quadratic Programming
Authors: Shamisa Shoja, Daniel Arnström, Daniel Axehill
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

In model predictive control (MPC) for hybrid systems, solving optimization problems efficiently and with guarantees on worst-case computational complexity is critical to satisfy the real-time constraints in these applications. These optimization problems often take the form of mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs) or mixed-integer quadratic programs (MIQPs) that depend on system parameters. A common approach for solving such problems is the branch-and-bound (B&B) method. This paper extends existing complexity certification methods by presenting a unified complexity-certification framework for B&B-based MILP and MIQP solvers, specifically for the family of multi-parametric MILP and MIQP problems that arise in, e.g., hybrid MPC applications. The framework provides guarantees on worst-case computational measures, including the maximum number of iterations or relaxations B&B algorithms require to reach optimality. It systematically accounts for different branching and node selection strategies, as well as heuristics integrated into B&B, ensuring a comprehensive certification framework. By offering theoretical guarantees and practical insights for solver customization, the proposed framework enhances the reliability of B&B for real-time application. The usefulness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through numerical experiments on both random MILPs and MIQPs, as well as on MIQPs arising from a hybrid MPC problem.
Aging-aware Energy Management for Residential Multi-Carrier Energy Systems
Authors: Darío Slaifstein, Gautham Ram Chandra Mouli, Laura Ramirez-Elizondo, Pavol Bauer
Date: 2025-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Management

In the context of building electrification, the operation of distributed energy resources integrating multiple energy carriers (electricity, heat, mobility) poses a significant challenge due to the nonlinear device dynamics, uncertainty, and computational issues. As such, energy management systems seek to decide set points for the primary control layer in the best way possible. The objective is to minimize and balance operative costs (energy bills or asset degradation) with user requirements (mobility, heating, etc.). This paper presents a novel aging-aware day-ahead algorithm for electrified buildings. The proposed energy management algorithm incorporates physics-based battery aging models to enhance the operational performance, making explicit the trade-off between grid cost and battery degradation. The proposed day-ahead algorithm can either cut-down on grid costs or extend battery lifetime (electric vehicle or static packs). Moreover, it exploits the differences between cathode chemistries improving grid costs by 25\% when using LFP cells, with respect to NMC cells. Finally the performance using aged batteries is also enhanced, with respect to the benchmarks.