pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Resource Efficient Fusion Network for Object Detection in Bird's-Eye View using Camera and Raw Radar Data
Authors: Kavin Chandrasekaran, Sorin Grigorescu, Gijs Dubbelman, Pavol Jancura
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection

Cameras can be used to perceive the environment around the vehicle, while affordable radar sensors are popular in autonomous driving systems as they can withstand adverse weather conditions unlike cameras. However, radar point clouds are sparser with low azimuth and elevation resolution that lack semantic and structural information of the scenes, resulting in generally lower radar detection performance. In this work, we directly use the raw range-Doppler (RD) spectrum of radar data, thus avoiding radar signal processing. We independently process camera images within the proposed comprehensive image processing pipeline. Specifically, first, we transform the camera images to Bird's-Eye View (BEV) Polar domain and extract the corresponding features with our camera encoder-decoder architecture. The resultant feature maps are fused with Range-Azimuth (RA) features, recovered from the RD spectrum input from the radar decoder to perform object detection. We evaluate our fusion strategy with other existing methods not only in terms of accuracy but also on computational complexity metrics on RADIal dataset.
DATTA: Domain-Adversarial Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Domain WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition
Authors: Julian Strohmayer, Rafael Sterzinger, Matthias Wödlinger, Martin Kampel
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Domain Generalization, Human Activity Recognition, Test-time Adaptation

Cross-domain generalization is an open problem in WiFi-based sensing due to variations in environments, devices, and subjects, causing domain shifts in channel state information. To address this, we propose Domain-Adversarial Test-Time Adaptation (DATTA), a novel framework combining domain-adversarial training (DAT), test-time adaptation (TTA), and weight resetting to facilitate adaptation to unseen target domains and to prevent catastrophic forgetting. DATTA is integrated into a lightweight, flexible architecture optimized for speed. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of DATTA, including an ablation study on all key components using publicly available data, and verify its suitability for real-time applications such as human activity recognition. When combining a SotA video-based variant of TTA with WiFi-based DAT and comparing it to DATTA, our method achieves an 8.1% higher F1-Score. The PyTorch implementation of DATTA is publicly available at: https://github.com/StrohmayerJ/DATTA.
VideoAutoArena: An Automated Arena for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Video Analysis through User Simulation
Authors: Ziyang Luo, HaoNing Wu, Dongxu Li, Jing Ma, Mohan Kankanhalli, Junnan Li
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Chatbot, Multiple-choice, User Simulation, Video Understanding

Large multimodal models (LMMs) with advanced video analysis capabilities have recently garnered significant attention. However, most evaluations rely on traditional methods like multiple-choice questions in benchmarks such as VideoMME and LongVideoBench, which are prone to lack the depth needed to capture the complex demands of real-world users. To address this limitation-and due to the prohibitive cost and slow pace of human annotation for video tasks-we introduce VideoAutoArena, an arena-style benchmark inspired by LMSYS Chatbot Arena's framework, designed to automatically assess LMMs' video analysis abilities. VideoAutoArena utilizes user simulation to generate open-ended, adaptive questions that rigorously assess model performance in video understanding. The benchmark features an automated, scalable evaluation framework, incorporating a modified ELO Rating System for fair and continuous comparisons across multiple LMMs. To validate our automated judging system, we construct a 'gold standard' using a carefully curated subset of human annotations, demonstrating that our arena strongly aligns with human judgment while maintaining scalability. Additionally, we introduce a fault-driven evolution strategy, progressively increasing question complexity to push models toward handling more challenging video analysis scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VideoAutoArena effectively differentiates among state-of-the-art LMMs, providing insights into model strengths and areas for improvement. To further streamline our evaluation, we introduce VideoAutoBench as an auxiliary benchmark, where human annotators label winners in a subset of VideoAutoArena battles. We use GPT-4o as a judge to compare responses against these human-validated answers. Together, VideoAutoArena and VideoAutoBench offer a cost-effective, and scalable framework for evaluating LMMs in user-centric video analysis.
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks
Authors: Keyue Qiu, Yuxuan Song, Jie Yu, Hongbo Ma, Ziyao Cao, Zhilong Zhang, Yushuai Wu, Mingyue Zheng, Hao Zhou, Wei-Ying Ma
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Drug Design

Structure-Based molecule optimization (SBMO) aims to optimize molecules with both continuous coordinates and discrete types against protein targets. A promising direction is to exert gradient guidance on generative models given its remarkable success in images, but it is challenging to guide discrete data and risks inconsistencies between modalities. To this end, we leverage a continuous and differentiable space derived through Bayesian inference, presenting Molecule Joint Optimization (MolJO), the gradient-based SBMO framework that facilitates joint guidance signals across different modalities while preserving SE(3)-equivariance. We introduce a novel backward correction strategy that optimizes within a sliding window of the past histories, allowing for a seamless trade-off between explore-and-exploit during optimization. MolJO achieves state-of-the-art performance on CrossDocked2020 benchmark (Success Rate 51.3%, Vina Dock -9.05 and SA 0.78), more than 4x improvement in Success Rate compared to the gradient-based counterpart, and 2x "Me-Better" Ratio as much as 3D baselines. Furthermore, we extend MolJO to a wide range of optimization settings, including multi-objective optimization and challenging tasks in drug design such as R-group optimization and scaffold hopping, further underscoring its versatility. Code is available at https://github.com/AlgoMole/MolCRAFT.
Towards Specification-Driven LLM-Based Generation of Embedded Automotive Software
Authors: Minal Suresh Patil, Gustav Ung, Mattias Nyberg
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

The paper studies how code generation by LLMs can be combined with formal verification to produce critical embedded software. The first contribution is a general framework, spec2code, in which LLMs are combined with different types of critics that produce feedback for iterative backprompting and fine-tuning. The second contribution presents a first feasibility study, where a minimalistic instantiation of spec2code, without iterative backprompting and fine-tuning, is empirically evaluated using three industrial case studies from the heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania. The goal is to automatically generate industrial-quality code from specifications only. Different combinations of formal ACSL specifications and natural language specifications are explored. The results indicate that formally correct code can be generated even without the application of iterative backprompting and fine-tuning.
FASTNav: Fine-tuned Adaptive Small-language-models Trained for Multi-point Robot Navigation
Authors: Yuxuan Chen, Yixin Han, Xiao Li
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Model Compression, Robot Navigation

With the rapid development of large language models (LLM), robots are starting to enjoy the benefits of new interaction methods that large language models bring. Because edge computing fulfills the needs for rapid response, privacy, and network autonomy, we believe it facilitates the extensive deployment of large models for robot navigation across various industries. To enable local deployment of language models on edge devices, we adopt some model boosting methods. In this paper, we propose FASTNav - a method for boosting lightweight LLMs, also known as small language models (SLMs), for robot navigation. The proposed method contains three modules: fine-tuning, teacher-student iteration, and language-based multi-point robot navigation. We train and evaluate models with FASTNav in both simulation and real robots, proving that we can deploy them with low cost, high accuracy and low response time. Compared to other model compression methods, FASTNav shows potential in the local deployment of language models and tends to be a promising solution for language-guided robot navigation on edge devices.
BelHouse3D: A Benchmark Dataset for Assessing Occlusion Robustness in 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Umamaheswaran Raman Kumar, Abdur Razzaq Fayjie, Jurgen Hannaert, Patrick Vandewalle
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Point Cloud Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Large-scale 2D datasets have been instrumental in advancing machine learning; however, progress in 3D vision tasks has been relatively slow. This disparity is largely due to the limited availability of 3D benchmarking datasets. In particular, creating real-world point cloud datasets for indoor scene semantic segmentation presents considerable challenges, including data collection within confined spaces and the costly, often inaccurate process of per-point labeling to generate ground truths. While synthetic datasets address some of these challenges, they often fail to replicate real-world conditions, particularly the occlusions that occur in point clouds collected from real environments. Existing 3D benchmarking datasets typically evaluate deep learning models under the assumption that training and test data are independently and identically distributed (IID), which affects the models' usability for real-world point cloud segmentation. To address these challenges, we introduce the BelHouse3D dataset, a new synthetic point cloud dataset designed for 3D indoor scene semantic segmentation. This dataset is constructed using real-world references from 32 houses in Belgium, ensuring that the synthetic data closely aligns with real-world conditions. Additionally, we include a test set with data occlusion to simulate out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, reflecting the occlusions commonly encountered in real-world point clouds. We evaluate popular point-based semantic segmentation methods using our OOD setting and present a benchmark. We believe that BelHouse3D and its OOD setting will advance research in 3D point cloud semantic segmentation for indoor scenes, providing valuable insights for the development of more generalizable models.
XMask3D: Cross-modal Mask Reasoning for Open Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ziyi Wang, Yanbo Wang, Xumin Yu, Jie zhou, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Denoising, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Existing methodologies in open vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation primarily concentrate on establishing a unified feature space encompassing 3D, 2D, and textual modalities. Nevertheless, traditional techniques such as global feature alignment or vision-language model distillation tend to impose only approximate correspondence, struggling notably with delineating fine-grained segmentation boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a more meticulous mask-level alignment between 3D features and the 2D-text embedding space through a cross-modal mask reasoning framework, XMask3D. In our approach, we developed a mask generator based on the denoising UNet from a pre-trained diffusion model, leveraging its capability for precise textual control over dense pixel representations and enhancing the open-world adaptability of the generated masks. We further integrate 3D global features as implicit conditions into the pre-trained 2D denoising UNet, enabling the generation of segmentation masks with additional 3D geometry awareness. Subsequently, the generated 2D masks are employed to align mask-level 3D representations with the vision-language feature space, thereby augmenting the open vocabulary capability of 3D geometry embeddings. Finally, we fuse complementary 2D and 3D mask features, resulting in competitive performance across multiple benchmarks for 3D open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/XMask3D.
Transforming the Hybrid Cloud for Emerging AI Workloads
Authors: Deming Chen, Alaa Youssef, Ruchi Pendse, André Schleife, Bryan K. Clark, Hendrik Hamann, Jingrui He, Teodoro Laino, Lav Varshney, YuXiong Wang, Avirup Sil, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Tianyin Xu, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Carlos Costa, Sarita Adve, Charith Mendis, Minjia Zhang, Santiago Núñez-Corrales, Raghu Ganti, Mudhakar Srivatsa, Nam Sung Kim, Josep Torrellas, Jian Huang, Seetharami Seelam, Klara Nahrstedt, Tarek Abdelzaher, Tamar Eilam, Huimin Zhao, Matteo Manica, Ravishankar Iyer, Martin Hirzel, Vikram Adve, Darko Marinov, Hubertus Franke, Hanghang Tong, Elizabeth Ainsworth, Han Zhao, Deepak Vasisht, Minh Do, Sahil Suneja, Fabio Oliveira, Giovanni Pacifici, Ruchir Puri, Priya Nagpurkar
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization, scientific discovery, Weather Forecasting

This white paper, developed through close collaboration between IBM Research and UIUC researchers within the IIDAI Institute, envisions transforming hybrid cloud systems to meet the growing complexity of AI workloads through innovative, full-stack co-design approaches, emphasizing usability, manageability, affordability, adaptability, efficiency, and scalability. By integrating cutting-edge technologies such as generative and agentic AI, cross-layer automation and optimization, unified control plane, and composable and adaptive system architecture, the proposed framework addresses critical challenges in energy efficiency, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Incorporating quantum computing as it matures will enable quantum-accelerated simulations for materials science, climate modeling, and other high-impact domains. Collaborative efforts between academia and industry are central to this vision, driving advancements in foundation models for material design and climate solutions, scalable multimodal data processing, and enhanced physics-based AI emulators for applications like weather forecasting and carbon sequestration. Research priorities include advancing AI agentic systems, LLM as an Abstraction (LLMaaA), AI model optimization and unified abstractions across heterogeneous infrastructure, end-to-end edge-cloud transformation, efficient programming model, middleware and platform, secure infrastructure, application-adaptive cloud systems, and new quantum-classical collaborative workflows. These ideas and solutions encompass both theoretical and practical research questions, requiring coordinated input and support from the research community. This joint initiative aims to establish hybrid clouds as secure, efficient, and sustainable platforms, fostering breakthroughs in AI-driven applications and scientific discovery across academia, industry, and society.
Quantum Kernel-Based Long Short-term Memory
Authors: Yu-Chao Hsu, Tai-Yu Li, Kuan-Cheng Chen
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Quantum Machine Learning

The integration of quantum computing into classical machine learning architectures has emerged as a promising approach to enhance model efficiency and computational capacity. In this work, we introduce the Quantum Kernel-Based Long Short-Term Memory (QK-LSTM) network, which utilizes quantum kernel functions within the classical LSTM framework to capture complex, non-linear patterns in sequential data. By embedding input data into a high-dimensional quantum feature space, the QK-LSTM model reduces the reliance on large parameter sets, achieving effective compression while maintaining accuracy in sequence modeling tasks. This quantum-enhanced architecture demonstrates efficient convergence, robust loss minimization, and model compactness, making it suitable for deployment in edge computing environments and resource-limited quantum devices (especially in the NISQ era). Benchmark comparisons reveal that QK-LSTM achieves performance on par with classical LSTM models, yet with fewer parameters, underscoring its potential to advance quantum machine learning applications in natural language processing and other domains requiring efficient temporal data processing.
Existential Conversations with Large Language Models: Content, Community, and Culture
Authors: Murray Shanahan, Beth Singler
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Philosophy

Contemporary conversational AI systems based on large language models (LLMs) can engage users on a wide variety of topics, including philosophy, spirituality, and religion. Suitably prompted, LLMs can be coaxed into discussing such existentially significant matters as their own putative consciousness and the role of artificial intelligence in the fate of the Cosmos. Here we examine two lengthy conversations of this type. We trace likely sources, both ancient and modern, for the extensive repertoire of images, myths, metaphors, and conceptual esoterica that the language model draws on during these conversations, and foreground the contemporary communities and cultural movements that deploy related motifs, especially in their online activity. Finally, we consider the larger societal impacts of such engagements with LLMs.
Proceedings Sixth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems
Authors: Matt Luckcuck, Mengwei Xu
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00

This EPTCS volume contains the papers from the Sixth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2024), which was held between the 11th and 13th of November 2024. FMAS 2024 was co-located with 19th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM'24), hosted by the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, in the University of Manchester's Core Technology Facility.
Comparative Analysis of Audio Feature Extraction for Real-Time Talking Portrait Synthesis
Authors: Pegah Salehi, Sajad Amouei Sheshkal, Vajira Thambawita, Sushant Gautam, Saeed S. Sabet, Dag Johansen, Michael A. Riegler, Pål Halvorsen
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Talking Head Generation

This paper examines the integration of real-time talking-head generation for interviewer training, focusing on overcoming challenges in Audio Feature Extraction (AFE), which often introduces latency and limits responsiveness in real-time applications. To address these issues, we propose and implement a fully integrated system that replaces conventional AFE models with Open AI's Whisper, leveraging its encoder to optimize processing and improve overall system efficiency. Our evaluation of two open-source real-time models across three different datasets shows that Whisper not only accelerates processing but also improves specific aspects of rendering quality, resulting in more realistic and responsive talking-head interactions. These advancements make the system a more effective tool for immersive, interactive training applications, expanding the potential of AI-driven avatars in interviewer training.
The Information Security Awareness of Large Language Models
Authors: Ofir Cohen, Gil Ari Agmon, Asaf Shabtai, Rami Puzis
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00

The popularity of large language models (LLMs) continues to increase, and LLM-based assistants have become ubiquitous, assisting people of diverse backgrounds in many aspects of life. Significant resources have been invested in the safety of LLMs and their alignment with social norms. However, research examining their behavior from the information security awareness (ISA) perspective is lacking. Chatbots and LLM-based assistants may put unwitting users in harm's way by facilitating unsafe behavior. We observe that the ISA inherent in some of today's most popular LLMs varies significantly, with most models requiring user prompts with a clear security context to utilize their security knowledge and provide safe responses to users. Based on this observation, we created a comprehensive set of 30 scenarios to assess the ISA of LLMs. These scenarios benchmark the evaluated models with respect to all focus areas defined in a mobile ISA taxonomy. Among our findings is that ISA is mildly affected by changing the model's temperature, whereas adjusting the system prompt can substantially impact it. This underscores the necessity of setting the right system prompt to mitigate ISA weaknesses. Our findings also highlight the importance of ISA assessment for the development of future LLM-based assistants.
Engagement-Driven Content Generation with Large Language Models
Authors: Erica Coppolillo, Federico Cinus, Marco Minici, Francesco Bonchi, Giuseppe Manco
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant persuasion capabilities in one-on-one interactions, but their influence within social networks remains underexplored. This study investigates the potential social impact of LLMs in these environments, where interconnected users and complex opinion dynamics pose unique challenges. In particular, we address the following research question: can LLMs learn to generate meaningful content that maximizes user engagement on social networks? To answer this question, we define a pipeline to guide the LLM-based content generation which employs reinforcement learning with simulated feedback. In our framework, the reward is based on an engagement model borrowed from the literature on opinion dynamics and information propagation. Moreover, we force the text generated by the LLM to be aligned with a given topic and to satisfy a minimum fluency requirement. Using our framework, we analyze the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in tackling the given task, specifically considering the relative positions of the LLM as an agent within the social network and the distribution of opinions in the network on the given topic. Our findings show the full potential of LLMs in creating social engagement. Notable properties of our approach are that the learning procedure is adaptive to the opinion distribution of the underlying network and agnostic to the specifics of the engagement model, which is embedded as a plug-and-play component. In this regard, our approach can be easily refined for more complex engagement tasks and interventions in computational social science. The code used for the experiments is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EDCG/.