pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ChatMotion: A Multimodal Multi-Agent for Human Motion Analysis
Authors: Lei LI, Sen Jia, Jianhao Wang, Zhaochong An, Jiaang Li, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Serge Belongie
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved human motion understanding. However, these models remain constrained by their "instruct-only" nature, lacking interactivity and adaptability for diverse analytical perspectives. To address these challenges, we introduce ChatMotion, a multimodal multi-agent framework for human motion analysis. ChatMotion dynamically interprets user intent, decomposes complex tasks into meta-tasks, and activates specialized function modules for motion comprehension. It integrates multiple specialized modules, such as the MotionCore, to analyze human motion from various perspectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate ChatMotion's precision, adaptability, and user engagement for human motion understanding.
MRBTP: Efficient Multi-Robot Behavior Tree Planning and Collaboration
Authors: Yishuai Cai, Xinglin Chen, Zhongxuan Cai, Yunxin Mao, Minglong Li, Wenjing Yang, Ji Wang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Task Planning, Task Planning

Multi-robot task planning and collaboration are critical challenges in robotics. While Behavior Trees (BTs) have been established as a popular control architecture and are plannable for a single robot, the development of effective multi-robot BT planning algorithms remains challenging due to the complexity of coordinating diverse action spaces. We propose the Multi-Robot Behavior Tree Planning (MRBTP) algorithm, with theoretical guarantees of both soundness and completeness. MRBTP features cross-tree expansion to coordinate heterogeneous actions across different BTs to achieve the team's goal. For homogeneous actions, we retain backup structures among BTs to ensure robustness and prevent redundant execution through intention sharing. While MRBTP is capable of generating BTs for both homogeneous and heterogeneous robot teams, its efficiency can be further improved. We then propose an optional plugin for MRBTP when Large Language Models (LLMs) are available to reason goal-related actions for each robot. These relevant actions can be pre-planned to form long-horizon subtrees, significantly enhancing the planning speed and collaboration efficiency of MRBTP. We evaluate our algorithm in warehouse management and everyday service scenarios. Results demonstrate MRBTP's robustness and execution efficiency under varying settings, as well as the ability of the pre-trained LLM to generate effective task-specific subtrees for MRBTP.
LLM Knows Geometry Better than Algebra: Numerical Understanding of LLM-Based Agents in A Trading Arena
Authors: Tianmi Ma, Jiawei Du, Wenxin Huang, Wenjie Wang, Liang Xie, Xian Zhong, Joey Tianyi Zhou
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved performance in natural language processing tasks. However, their ability to generalize to dynamic, unseen tasks, particularly in numerical reasoning, remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate LLMs on problems with predefined optimal solutions, which may not align with real-world scenarios where clear answers are absent. To bridge this gap, we design the Agent Trading Arena, a virtual numerical game simulating complex economic systems through zero-sum games, where agents invest in stock portfolios. Our experiments reveal that LLMs, including GPT-4o, struggle with algebraic reasoning when dealing with plain-text stock data, often focusing on local details rather than global trends. In contrast, LLMs perform significantly better with geometric reasoning when presented with visual data, such as scatter plots or K-line charts, suggesting that visual representations enhance numerical reasoning. This capability is further improved by incorporating the reflection module, which aids in the analysis and interpretation of complex data. We validate our findings on NASDAQ Stock dataset, where LLMs demonstrate stronger reasoning with visual data compared to text. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/wekjsdvnm/Agent-Trading-Arena.git.
Aligning Compound AI Systems via System-level DPO
Authors: Xiangwen Wang, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Zhoujie Ding, Katherine Tsai, Haolun Wu, Sanmi Koyejo
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

Compound AI systems, comprising multiple interacting components such as LLMs, foundation models, and external tools, have demonstrated remarkable improvements compared to single models in various tasks. To ensure their effective deployment in real-world applications, aligning these systems with human preferences is crucial. However, aligning the compound system via policy optimization, unlike the alignment of a single model, is challenging for two main reasons: (i) non-differentiable interactions between components make end-to-end gradient-based optimization method inapplicable, and (ii) system-level preferences cannot be directly transformed into component-level preferences. To address these challenges, we first formulate compound AI systems as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), explicitly modeling both component interactions and the associated data flows. Building on this formulation, we introduce $\textbf{SysDPO}$, a framework that extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enable joint system-level alignment. We propose two variants, SysDPO-Direct and SysDPO-Sampling, tailored for scenarios depending on whether we construct a system-specific preference dataset. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across two applications: the joint alignment of a language model and a diffusion model, and the joint alignment of an LLM collaboration system.
Learning Backbones: Sparsifying Graphs through Zero Forcing for Effective Graph-Based Learning
Authors: Obaid Ullah Ahmad, Anwar Said, Mudassir Shabbir, Xenofon Koutsoukos, Waseem Abbas
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Graph Classification

This paper introduces a novel framework for graph sparsification that preserves the essential learning attributes of original graphs, improving computational efficiency and reducing complexity in learning algorithms. We refer to these sparse graphs as "learning backbones". Our approach leverages the zero-forcing (ZF) phenomenon, a dynamic process on graphs with applications in network control. The key idea is to generate a tree from the original graph that retains critical dynamical properties. By correlating these properties with learning attributes, we construct effective learning backbones. We evaluate the performance of our ZF-based backbones in graph classification tasks across eight datasets and six baseline models. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques. Additionally, we explore extensions using node distance metrics to further enhance the framework's utility.
Hierarchical Imitation Learning of Team Behavior from Heterogeneous Demonstrations
Authors: Sangwon Seo, Vaibhav Unhelkar
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Successful collaboration requires team members to stay aligned, especially in complex sequential tasks. Team members must dynamically coordinate which subtasks to perform and in what order. However, real-world constraints like partial observability and limited communication bandwidth often lead to suboptimal collaboration. Even among expert teams, the same task can be executed in multiple ways. To develop multi-agent systems and human-AI teams for such tasks, we are interested in data-driven learning of multimodal team behaviors. Multi-Agent Imitation Learning (MAIL) provides a promising framework for data-driven learning of team behavior from demonstrations, but existing methods struggle with heterogeneous demonstrations, as they assume that all demonstrations originate from a single team policy. Hence, in this work, we introduce DTIL: a hierarchical MAIL algorithm designed to learn multimodal team behaviors in complex sequential tasks. DTIL represents each team member with a hierarchical policy and learns these policies from heterogeneous team demonstrations in a factored manner. By employing a distribution-matching approach, DTIL mitigates compounding errors and scales effectively to long horizons and continuous state representations. Experimental results show that DTIL outperforms MAIL baselines and accurately models team behavior across a variety of collaborative scenarios.
Deep-JGAC: End-to-End Deep Joint Geometry and Attribute Compression for Dense Colored Point Clouds
Authors: Yun Zhang, Zixi Guo, Linwei Zhu, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Colorization

Colored point cloud becomes a fundamental representation in the realm of 3D vision. Effective Point Cloud Compression (PCC) is urgently needed due to huge amount of data. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Deep Joint Geometry and Attribute point cloud Compression (Deep-JGAC) framework for dense colored point clouds, which exploits the correlation between the geometry and attribute for high compression efficiency. Firstly, we propose a flexible Deep-JGAC framework, where the geometry and attribute sub-encoders are compatible to either learning or non-learning based geometry and attribute encoders. Secondly, we propose an attribute-assisted deep geometry encoder that enhances the geometry latent representation with the help of attribute, where the geometry decoding remains unchanged. Moreover, Attribute Information Fusion Module (AIFM) is proposed to fuse attribute information in geometry coding. Thirdly, to solve the mismatch between the point cloud geometry and attribute caused by the geometry compression distortion, we present an optimized re-colorization module to attach the attribute to the geometrically distorted point cloud for attribute coding. It enhances the colorization and lowers the computational complexity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that in terms of the geometry quality metric D1-PSNR, the proposed Deep-JGAC achieves an average of 82.96%, 36.46%, 41.72%, and 31.16% bit-rate reductions as compared to the state-of-the-art G-PCC, V-PCC, GRASP, and PCGCv2, respectively. In terms of perceptual joint quality metric MS-GraphSIM, the proposed Deep-JGAC achieves an average of 48.72%, 14.67%, and 57.14% bit-rate reductions compared to the G-PCC, V-PCC, and IT-DL-PCC, respectively. The encoding/decoding time costs are also reduced by 94.29%/24.70%, and 96.75%/91.02% on average as compared with the V-PCC and IT-DL-PCC.
Contrastive Visual Data Augmentation
Authors: Yu Zhou, Bingxuan Li, Mohan Tang, Xiaomeng Jin, Te-Lin Wu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Heng Ji, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Novel Concepts, Scene Recognition

Large multimodal models (LMMs) often struggle to recognize novel concepts, as they rely on pre-trained knowledge and have limited ability to capture subtle visual details. Domain-specific knowledge gaps in training also make them prone to confusing visually similar, commonly misrepresented, or low-resource concepts. To help LMMs better align nuanced visual features with language, improving their ability to recognize and reason about novel or rare concepts, we propose a Contrastive visual Data Augmentation (CoDA) strategy. CoDA extracts key contrastive textual and visual features of target concepts against the known concepts they are misrecognized as, and then uses multimodal generative models to produce targeted synthetic data. Automatic filtering of extracted features and augmented images is implemented to guarantee their quality, as verified by human annotators. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of CoDA on low-resource concept and diverse scene recognition datasets including INaturalist and SUN. We additionally collect NovelSpecies, a benchmark dataset consisting of newly discovered animal species that are guaranteed to be unseen by LMMs. LLaVA-1.6 1-shot updating results on these three datasets show CoDA significantly improves SOTA visual data augmentation strategies by 12.3% (NovelSpecies), 5.1% (SUN), and 6.0% (iNat) absolute gains in accuracy.
Int2Int: a framework for mathematics with transformers
Authors: François Charton
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00

This paper documents Int2Int, an open source code base for using transformers on problems of mathematical research, with a focus on number theory and other problems involving integers. Int2Int is a complete PyTorch implementation of a transformer architecture, together with training and evaluation loops, and classes and functions to represent, generate and decode common mathematical objects. Ancillary code for data preparation, and Jupyter Notebooks for visualizing experimental results are also provided. This document presents the main features of Int2Int, serves as its user manual, and provides guidelines on how to extend it. Int2Int is released under the MIT licence, at https://github.com/f-charton/Int2Int.
Optimal Recovery Meets Minimax Estimation
Authors: Ronald DeVore, Robert D. Nowak, Rahul Parhi, Guergana Petrova, Jonathan W. Siegel
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

A fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning is to estimate a function $f$ from possibly noisy observations of its point samples. The goal is to design a numerical algorithm to construct an approximation $\hat f$ to $f$ in a prescribed norm that asymptotically achieves the best possible error (as a function of the number $m$ of observations and the variance $\sigma^2$ of the noise). This problem has received considerable attention in both nonparametric statistics (noisy observations) and optimal recovery (noiseless observations). Quantitative bounds require assumptions on $f$, known as model class assumptions. Classical results assume that $f$ is in the unit ball of a Besov space. In nonparametric statistics, the best possible performance of an algorithm for finding $\hat f$ is known as the minimax rate and has been studied in this setting under the assumption that the noise is Gaussian. In optimal recovery, the best possible performance of an algorithm is known as the optimal recovery rate and has also been determined in this setting. While one would expect that the minimax rate recovers the optimal recovery rate when the noise level $\sigma$ tends to zero, it turns out that the current results on minimax rates do not carefully determine the dependence on $\sigma$ and the limit cannot be taken. This paper handles this issue and determines the noise-level-aware (NLA) minimax rates for Besov classes when error is measured in an $L_q$-norm with matching upper and lower bounds. The end result is a reconciliation between minimax rates and optimal recovery rates. The NLA minimax rate continuously depends on the noise level and recovers the optimal recovery rate when $\sigma$ tends to zero.
Convergence Guarantees for Unmixing PSFs over a Manifold with Non-Convex Optimization
Authors: Santos Michelena, Maxime Ferreira Da Costa, José Picheral
Date: 2025-02-24 00:00:00

The problem of recovering the parameters of a mixture of spike signals convolved with different PSFs is considered. Herein, the spike support is assumed to be known, while the PSFs lie on a manifold. A non-linear least squares estimator of the mixture parameters is formulated. In the absence of noise, a lower bound on the radius of the strong basin of attraction i.e., the region of convergence, is derived. Key to the analysis is the introduction of coherence and interference functions, which capture the conditioning of the PSF manifold in terms of the minimal separation of the support. Numerical experiments validate the theoretical findings. Finally, the practicality and efficacy of the non-linear least squares approach are showcased on spectral data from laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy.
Detecting Long QT Syndrome and First-Degree Atrioventricular Block using Single-Lead AI-ECG: A Multi-Center Real-World Study
Authors: Sumei Fan, Deyun Zhang, Yue Wang, Shijia Geng, Kun Lu, Meng Sang, Weilun Xu, Haixue Wang, Qinghao Zhao, Chuandong Cheng, Peng Wang, Shenda Hong
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Specificity

Home-based single-lead AI-ECG devices have enabled continuous, real-world cardiac monitoring. However, the accuracy of parameter calculations from single-lead AI-ECG algorithm remains to be fully validated, which is critical for conditions such as Long QT Syndrome (LQTS) and First-Degree Atrioventricular Block (AVBI). In this multicenter study, we assessed FeatureDB, an ECG measurements computation algorithm, in the context of single-lead monitoring using three annotated datasets: PTB-XL+ (n=21,354), CSE (n=105), and HeartVoice-ECG-lite (n=369). FeatureDB showed strong correlation with standard ECG machines (12SL and Uni-G) in key measurements (PR, QRS, QT, QTc), and high agreement confirmed by Bland-Altman analysis. In detecting LQTS (AUC=0.786) and AVBI (AUC=0.684), FeatureDB demonstrated diagnostic performance comparable to commercial ECG systems (12SL: 0.859/0.716; Uni-G: 0.817/0.605), significantly outperforming ECGDeli (0.501/0.569). Notably, FeatureDB can operate locally on resource-limited devices, facilitating use in low-connectivity settings. These findings confirm the clinical reliability of FeatureDB for single-lead ECG diagnostics and highlight its potential to bridge traditional ECG diagnostics with wearable technology for scalable cardiovascular monitoring and early intervention.
BD Currency Detection: A CNN Based Approach with Mobile App Integration
Authors: Syed Jubayer Jaman, Md. Zahurul Haque, Md Robiul Islam, Usama Abdun Noor
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Currency recognition plays a vital role in banking, commerce, and assistive technology for visually impaired individuals. Traditional methods, such as manual verification and optical scanning, often suffer from limitations in accuracy and efficiency. This study introduces an advanced currency recognition system utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to accurately classify Bangladeshi banknotes. A dataset comprising 50,334 images was collected, preprocessed, and used to train a CNN model optimized for high performance classification. The trained model achieved an accuracy of 98.5%, surpassing conventional image based currency recognition approaches. To enable real time and offline functionality, the model was converted into TensorFlow Lite format and integrated into an Android mobile application. The results highlight the effectiveness of deep learning in currency recognition, providing a fast, secure, and accessible solution that enhances financial transactions and assistive technologies.
Task-Driven Semantic Quantization and Imitation Learning for Goal-Oriented Communications
Authors: Yu-Chieh Chao, Yubei Chen, Weiwei Wang, Achintha Wijesinghe, Suchinthaka Wanninayaka, Songyang Zhang, Zhi Ding
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Quantization, Semantic Communication

Semantic communication marks a new paradigm shift from bit-wise data transmission to semantic information delivery for the purpose of bandwidth reduction. To more effectively carry out specialized downstream tasks at the receiver end, it is crucial to define the most critical semantic message in the data based on the task or goal-oriented features. In this work, we propose a novel goal-oriented communication (GO-COM) framework, namely Goal-Oriented Semantic Variational Autoencoder (GOS-VAE), by focusing on the extraction of the semantics vital to the downstream tasks. Specifically, we adopt a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to compress media data at the transmitter side. Instead of targeting the pixel-wise image data reconstruction, we measure the quality-of-service at the receiver end based on a pre-defined task-incentivized model. Moreover, to capture the relevant semantic features in the data reconstruction, imitation learning is adopted to measure the data regeneration quality in terms of goal-oriented semantics. Our experimental results demonstrate the power of imitation learning in characterizing goal-oriented semantics and bandwidth efficiency of our proposed GOS-VAE.
Accelerated Training on Low-Power Edge Devices
Authors: Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed, Kilian Pfeiffer, Heba Khdr, Osama Abboud, Ramin Khalili, Jörg Henkel
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Training on edge devices poses several challenges as these devices are generally resource-constrained, especially in terms of power. State-of-the-art techniques at the device level reduce the GPU frequency to enforce power constraints, leading to a significant increase in training time. To accelerate training, we propose to jointly adjust the system and application parameters (in our case, the GPU frequency and the batch size of the training task) while adhering to the power constraints on devices. We introduce a novel cross-layer methodology that combines predictions of batch size efficiency and device profiling to achieve the desired optimization. Our evaluation on real hardware shows that our method outperforms the current baselines that depend on state of the art techniques, reducing the training time by $2.4\times$ with results very close to optimal. Our measurements also indicate a substantial reduction in the overall energy used for the training process. These gains are achieved without reduction in the performance of the trained model.
Large Language Models as Realistic Microservice Trace Generators
Authors: Donghyun Kim, Sriram Ravula, Taemin Ha, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Daehyeok Kim, Aditya Akella
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Workload traces are essential to understand complex computer systems' behavior and manage processing and memory resources. Since real-world traces are hard to obtain, synthetic trace generation is a promising alternative. This paper proposes a first-of-a-kind approach that relies on training a large language model (LLM) to generate synthetic workload traces, specifically microservice call graphs. To capture complex and arbitrary hierarchical structures and implicit constraints in such traces, we show how to fine-tune LLMs to generate recursively, making call graph generation a sequence of easier steps. To further enforce learning constraints in traces and generate uncommon situations, we argue for applying additional instruction tuning steps to align our model with the desired trace features. Our evaluation results show that we can generate diverse realistic traces under various conditions and outperform existing methods in accuracy and validity. We demonstrate that our synthetically generated traces can effectively replace real data to optimize important microservice management tasks. Additionally, our model adapts to downstream trace-related tasks, such as predicting key trace features and infilling missing data.