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Rongxin Ouyang, Kokil Jaidka, Subhayan Mukerjee, Guangyu Cui

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labelling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model opti- mization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimisations are not ineffective on their own.

Sujoy Nath, Arkaprabha Basu, Kushal Bose, Swagatam Das

In the rapidly advancing field of AI-assisted medical diagnosis, the generation of medical reports for Chest X-rays (CXR) has significantly improved with the increased availability of radiographs and their corresponding reports. However, these reports often contain complex medical terminology, making them difficult for patients and non-healthcare professionals to understand. In this study, we introduce a strategy called Chained Prompting for Improved Readability of Medical Reports (CPIR-MR), which translates original medical reports into more comprehensible language. Our primary contribution is the creation of a new extension to the IU X-Ray dataset, providing Simplified Medical Reports (SMRs) generated by CPIR-MR. Additionally, we demonstrate that standard methodologies can effectively produce these simplified reports by proposing a multi-modal text decoder (MTD) that combines BLIP with a classification network to generate simplified medical explanations (SMEs) when fine-tuned on SMRs.

Glenn Fernandes, Meixi Lu, Farzad Shahabi, Jiayi Zheng, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Nabil Alshurafa

Health-risk behaviors such as overeating and smoking have a profound impact on public health, making their monitoring and mitigation critical. Wearable RGB-Thermal cameras are being employed to monitor these behaviors by capturing hand-to-mouth (HTM) gestures, which are central to them. However, detection models relying on single modalities—either RGB or thermal—often struggle to accurately distinguish these confounding gestures due to inherent sensor limitations, such as sensitivity to lighting conditions or thermal occlusions. We present a family of fusion models that integrate RGB and thermal video data using early-, decision- , and a novel mid-fusion architecture, RGB-Thermal Fusion Video Network (RTFVNet), designed to enhance the recognition of HTM gestures associated with eating and smoking. Our evaluation shows that while decision fusion achieves the highest F1-score of 88% (0.44 TFLOPs), RTFVNet offers an optimal balance between performance (85%) and complexity (0.37 TFLOPs) for gesture classification of eating, smoking, and non-gesture activities.

Ximing Wen

Pretrained transformer-based Language Models (LMs) are well-known for their ability to achieve significant improvement on NLP tasks, but their black-box nature, which leads to a lack of interpretability, has been a major concern. My dissertation focuses on developing intrinsically interpretable models when using LMs as encoders while maintaining their superior performance via prototypical networks. I initiated my research by investigating enhancements in performance for interpretable models of sarcasm detection. My proposed approach focuses on capturing sentiment incongruity to enhance accuracy while offering instance-based explanations for the classification decisions. Later, we develop a novel white-box multi-head graph attention-based prototypical framework designed to explain the decisions of text classification models without sacrificing the accuracy of the original black-box LMs. In addition, I am working on extending the attention-based prototypical framework with contrastive learning to redesign an interpretable graph neural network for document classification, aiming to enhance both the interpretability and performance of the model in document classification.

Cristiano Landi

Mobility data from smartphones, connected cars, and GPS devices are widely used for tasks such as transportation mode classification and suspicious movement detection. Time series research, a closely related field, focuses more on classification methods. Yet, Mobility Data analysis faces unique challenges like geographic transferability and limited public data due to privacy issues. My PhD work focuses on developing reusable, interpretable MD representations. I created Trajectory Interval Forest and later Geolet, a shapelet-based transformation to improve MD classification across geographic regions. Ongoing research explores improving geographic transferability and event-based trajectory clustering.

Zahra Ghorrati

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve rapidly, impacting numerous fields, including time series (TS) classification and human activity recognition (HAR). Despite the advancements in deep learning models, such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), these models face several challenges, including the need for extensive labeled datasets, significant computational resources, and lack of interpretability. This research aims to address these limitations by developing an adaptive hierarchical deep neural network framework that integrates fuzzy logic principles and adaptive learning techniques for robust, computationally efficient, and interpretable real-time TS analysis. The reduction in the number of parameters and the efficient learning of hierarchical features mean that less training data is needed to achieve robust performance. The model's ability to generalize from hierarchical representations allows it to make effective use of smaller datasets, which is particularly advantageous in scenarios where data is limited or expensive to obtain.The proposed framework specifically targets HAR applications using data from wearable sensors.

Jeevan Chapagain, Vasile Rus

Assessing students' responses, especially natural language responses, is a major challenge in education. In general, in education contexts, automatically evaluating what learners do or say is important as it enables personalized instruction, e.g., based on what the learner knows tailored tasks and feedback are given to the learner. Recently, deep learning techniques led to state-of-the-art methods in NLP such as transformer-based methods which resulted in significant performance improvements for many NLP tasks such as text classification and question answering. However, there is not much work exploring such methods for assessing students' free answers, particularly in the context of code comprehension, which brings additional challenges as the student explanations include code references as well. This paper explores the potential of applying automated assessments methods using transformers to code comprehension. We fine-tuned pre-trained transformer models, including BERT, RoBERTa, CodeBERT, and SciBERT, to see how well they can automatically judge students' responses to code comprehension tasks. Our results demonstrate that these models can significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of automated assessments, offering insights into how the latest NLP techniques can be leveraged in computer science education to support personalized learning experiences.

Moomal Farhad, Mohammad Mehedy Masud, Aisha Alnaqbi, Rawan Mubarak, Aaisha Aladawi, Sara Alnaqbi

Children's mental health is crucial for their development, but it's often overlooked, leading to psychological issues. Many children struggle to express their thoughts and feelings effectively. To address this issue, we have proposed a novel approach to analyze children's drawings for psychological screening using artificial intelligence. Specifically, we're focusing on the `draw a person' (DAP) test, where a child's drawing is used to identify potential indicators of their mental and emotional state. Thus, we are introducing an AI-powered technique to automate the psychological screening process for children using the DAP test, which a human professional would traditionally conduct. The screening tool would suggest whether the child needs or doesn’t need further psychological referral. We have collected a dataset consisting of children's drawings and labeled them by experts as either `need' or `no need', indicating whether the child needs or does not need a referral. We have proposed two alternative approaches for the screening process. The first approach consists of extracting features from the drawings following expert guidelines and training a classification model using the features to classify the drawing as either `need' or `no need'. We also propose an out-of-the-box technique applying prompt engineering on state-of-the-art LLMs to automatically extract features from the images. The second approach involves training an image classification model using the drawings. Both approaches are challenged by the issue of class imbalance, as most of the drawings correspond to the `no-need' class. To address this challenge, we introduce Siamese++, a novel Siamese network for image classification, which uses feature embedding and an adaptive distance threshold for classification, instead of the nearest neighbor classification employed by traditional Siamese. Our proposed method achieves a high F1 score (up to 88%) even with a large class imbalance and without the need for any image augmentation. Thus, we have proposed an innovative interdisciplinary integration of AI with psychology and developed novel techniques to solve the real-world problem of psychological screening.

Serdar Kadioglu, Elton Yechao Zhu, Gili Rosenberg, John Kyle Brubaker, Martin J. A. Schuetz, Grant Salton, Zhihuai Zhu, Helmut G. Katzgraber

In this tool paper, we design, develop, and release BoolXAI, an interpretable machine learning classification approach for Explainable AI (XAI) based on expressive Boolean formulas. The Boolean formula defines a logical rule with tunable complexity according to which input data are classified. Beyond the classical conjunction and disjunction, BoolXAI offers expressive operators such as AtLeast, AtMost, and Choose and their parameterization. This provides higher expressiveness compared to rigid rules- and tree-based approaches. We show how to train BoolXAI classifiers effectively using native local optimization to search the space of feasible formulas. We provide illustrative results on several well-known public benchmarks that demonstrate the competitive nature of our approach compared to existing methods. Our work is embodied in the open-source BoolXAI library with a high-level user interface to serve researchers and practitioners. BoolXAI can be used either as a standalone interpretable classifier or for post-hoc explanations of other black-box models or observed behavior. We highlight several desirable benefits of our tool, especially in industrial settings where rapid experimentation, reusability, reproducibility, deployment, and maintenance are of great interest. Finally, we showcase a deployed service powered by BoolXAI as an enterprise application.

Anthony Palladino, Dana Gajewski, Abigail Aronica, Patryk Deptula, Alexander Hamme, Seiyoung C. Lee, Jeff Muri, Todd Nelling, Michael A. Riley, Brian Wong 等

We present a novel Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system using open-vocabulary object detection and classification models. A primary advantage of this approach is that target classes can be defined just before runtime by a non-technical end user, using either a few natural language text descriptions of the target, or a few image exemplars, or both. Nuances in the desired targets can be expressed in natural language, which is useful for unique targets with little or no training data. We also implemented a novel combination of several techniques to improve performance, such as leveraging the additional information in the sequence of overlapping frames to perform tubelet identification (i.e., sequential bounding box matching), bounding box re-scoring, and tubelet linking. Additionally, we developed a technique to visualize the aggregate output of many overlapping frames as a mosaic of the area scanned during the aerial surveillance or reconnaissance, and a kernel density estimate (or heatmap) of the detected targets. We initially applied this ATR system to the use case of detecting and clearing unexploded ordinance on airfield runways and we are currently extending our research to other real-world applications.

Aditya Mohan, Andie Gomez-Patron, Matthew Pritchard, Hannah Kerner

Geologists seek to understand the relationship between volcanic unrest and eruptions by identifying subtle Volcanic Thermal Features (VTFs) in high-resolution satellite imagery. This analysis requires the careful curation of large databases of relevant volcanic thermal information. However, volcanic unrest is characterized by highly subtle thermal anomalies. Manual identification on a global scale is highly labor- and time-intensive. We propose Hotspotter: an end-to-end system to automatically detect subtle volcanic thermal anomalies in satellite images and derive relevant thermal statistics. Previous solutions for automated VTF detection have limited data size and geographic diversity. To accommodate an unprecedentedly large and diverse volcanic dataset, we propose an automated pipeline combining unsupervised anomaly detection with supervised classification to filter anomalous regions. Hotspotter gives 90% anomaly detection accuracy and robust generalization to new volcanoes. Our automated approach can accelerate scientists' search for VTFs to help identify relevant thermal precursors and enable more precise forecasts of global volcanic eruptions.

Ce Zhou, Yilun Liu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Weinan Tian, Feiyu Yao, Xiaochun Li, Tao Han, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang

In recent years, ransomware has emerged as a formidable data security threat, causing significant data privacy breaches that inflict substantial financial, reputational, and operational damages on society. Many studies employ dynamic feature analysis for ransomware detection. However, these methods utilize neither the internal semantic information (semantic information inherent in the features), nor external semantics (the wealth of existing knowledge and expert experience with regard to ransomware detection). Moreover, conventional methods rely on training data from known ransomware families, while zero-day ransomware often has unknown data distribution patterns, posing detection challenges. In this paper, we propose a Semantics-based Ransomware Detection and family Classification (SRDC) framework that can utilize both internal and external semantics of software. To bolster semantic analysis in zero-day attacks, we also design a procedure called LLM-assisted task-adaptive pre-training (LATAP). In LATAP, ransomware semantics from human experts and LLMs are employed to pre-train the detection model (GPT-2). By fully utilizing semantics, the proposed SRDC framework outperforms the SOTA methods by 12.15% for ransomware family classification tasks, and by 4.03% for zero-day ransomware detection tasks. SRDC also exhibits excellent data efficiency, requiring only two ransom families for training, which is only 35% of the data required by existing methods, to achieve a 90%+ accuracy of zero-day ransomware detection in nine unseen ransom families.

Zichong Wang, Zhibo Chu, Thang Viet Doan, Shaowei Wang, Yongkai Wu, Vasile Palade, Wenbin Zhang

Learning high-level representations for graphs is crucial for tasks like node classification, where graph pooling aggregates node features to provide a holistic view that enhances predictive performance. Despite numerous methods that have been proposed in this promising and rapidly developing research field, most efforts to generalize the pooling operation to graphs are primarily performance-driven, with fairness issues largely overlooked: i) the process of graph pooling could exacerbate disparities in distribution among various subgroups; ii) the resultant graph structure augmentation may inadvertently strengthen intra-group connectivity, leading to unintended inter-group isolation. To this end, this paper extends the initial effort on fair graph pooling to the development of fair graph neural networks, while also providing a unified framework to collectively address group and individual graph fairness. Our experimental evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of fairness but also achieves comparable predictive performance.

Isabelle Tingzon, Utku Can Ozturk, Ivan Dotu

Improving global school connectivity is critical for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. To reliably estimate the cost of connecting schools, governments and connectivity providers require complete and accurate school location data – a resource that is often scarce in many low- and middle-income countries. To address this challenge, we propose a cost-effective, scalable approach to locating schools in high-resolution satellite images using weakly supervised deep learning techniques. Our best models, which combine vision transformers and convolutional neural networks, achieve AUPRC values above 0.96 across 10 pilot African countries. Leveraging explainable AI techniques, our approach can approximate the precise geographical coordinates of the school locations using only low-cost, classification-level annotations. To demonstrate the scalability of our method, we generate nationwide maps of school location predictions in African countries and present a detailed analysis of our results, using Senegal as our case study. Finally, we demonstrate the immediate usability of our work by introducing an interactive web mapping tool to streamline human-in-the-loop model validation efforts by government partners. This work successfully showcases the real-world utility of deep learning and satellite images for planning regional infrastructure and accelerating universal school connectivity.

Elifnur Sunger, Yunus Bicer, Deniz Erdogmus, Tales Imbiriba

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) help people with severe speech and motor disabilities communicate and interact with their environment using neural activity. This work focuses on the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm of BCIs using noninvasive electroencephalography (EEG). The RSVP typing task is a recursive task with multiple sequences, where users see only a subset of symbols in each sequence. Extensive research has been conducted to improve classification in the RSVP typing task, achieving fast classification. However, these methods struggle to achieve high accuracy and do not consider the typing mechanism in the learning procedure. They apply binary target and non-target classification without including recursive training. To improve performance in the classification of symbols while controlling the classification speed, we incorporate the typing setup into training by proposing a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate the RSVP typing task as a POMDP for recursive classification. Experiments show that the proposed approach, MarkovType, results in a more accurate typing system compared to competitors. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that while there is a trade-off between accuracy and speed, MarkovType achieves the optimal balance between these factors compared to other methods.

Joshua Strong, Qianhui Men, J. Alison Noble

Large language models (LLMs) offer a valuable technology for various applications in healthcare. However, their tendency to hallucinate and the existing reliance on proprietary systems pose challenges in environments concerning critical decision-making and strict data privacy regulations, such as healthcare, where the trust in such systems is paramount. Through combining the strengths and discounting the weaknesses of humans and AI, the field of Human-AI Collaboration (HAIC) presents one front for tackling these challenges and hence improving trust. This paper presents a novel HAIC \textit{guided deferral} system that can simultaneously parse medical reports for disorder classification, and defer uncertain predictions with intelligent guidance to humans. We develop methodology which builds efficient, effective and open-source LLMs for this purpose, for the real-world deployment in healthcare. We conduct a pilot study which showcases the effectiveness of our proposed system in practice. Additionally, we highlight drawbacks of standard calibration metrics in imbalanced data scenarios commonly found in healthcare, and suggest a simple yet effective solution: the Imbalanced Expected Calibration Error.

Elena Sierra, Lauren E. Gillespie, Salim Soltani, Moises Exposito-Alonso, Teja Kattenborn

Large-scale, volunteer-collected datasets of community-identified natural world imagery like iNaturalist have enabled marked performance gains for fine-grained visual classification of species using machine learning methods. However, such data---sometimes referred to as citizen science data---are opportunistic and lack a structured sampling strategy. This volunteer-collected biodiversity data contains geographic, temporal, taxonomic, observers, and sociopolitical biases that can have significant effects on biodiversity model performance, but whose impacts are unclear for fine-grained species recognition performance. Here we introduce Diversity Shift (DivShift), a framework for quantifying the effects of domain-specific distribution shifts on machine learning model performance. To diagnose the performance effects of biases specific to volunteer-collected biodiversity data, we also introduce DivShift - North American West Coast (DivShift-NAWC), a curated dataset of almost 7.5 million iNaturalist images across the western coast of North America partitioned across five types of expert-verified bias. We compare species recognition performance across these bias partitions using a diverse variety of species- and ecosystem-focused accuracy metrics. We observe that these biases confound model performance less than expected from the underlying label distribution shift, and that more data leads to better model performance but the magnitude of these improvements are bias-specific. These findings imply that while the structure within natural world images provides generalization improvements for biodiversity monitoring tasks, the biases present in volunteer-collected biodiversity data can also affect model performance; thus these models should be used with caution in downstream biodiversity monitoring tasks.

Zhuoqi Ma, Zejun You, Yang Dong, Yukai Liu, Xiyue Gao, Qiguang Miao

Our world faces the challenge of efficiently and responsibly managing the ever-growing volume of urban waste. Many countries and regions have implemented categorized trash bins and require residents to sort their waste according to specified criteria. Proper waste classification by residents significantly reduces the workload in the waste disposal process. However, due to the lack of effective supervision during classification, the quality of waste sorting is often compromised. This misclassification can lead to higher pollution risks, lower recycling rates, and increased waste management costs and difficulties. To address this issue, we propose using images captured from within trash bins to supervise garbage delivery. We introduce UrbanWaste, an image dataset specifically designed for in-the-bin waste detection and segmentation. The dataset includes 25,254 RGB images and 140,008 annotated items, featuring dense annotations and multi-granularity labels across 193 distinct waste categories. We evaluated state-of-the-art segmentation models to understand their generalization and performance on UrbanWaste. Based on this dataset, we developed a comprehensive workflow for waste classification inspection, which has been deployed in real-world districts to assess the system's effectiveness. We hope UrbanWaste will inspire new directions in AI research for environmental sustainability.

Yuhuan Lu, Zhen Zhang, Rufan Bai, Han Liu, Wei Wang

As artificial intelligence techniques evolve, we are approaching a critical moment for the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles. Subsequently, the emergence of mixed-autonomy traffic environments presents formidable challenges to autonomous vehicles, especially for the accurate prediction of lane change intentions of their surrounding human-driven vehicles, which is crucial for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Existing lane change prediction models mainly focus on capturing the temporal variations in the movement dynamics of individual vehicles. However, the neglect to consider inter-vehicle interactions hinders their capability in complex lane change scenarios, resulting in suboptimal prediction performance. Moreover, current interaction-aware approaches for autonomous driving fail to explicitly model future interactions between vehicles, leading to unreasonable prediction results that can cause collisions between vehicles. To address the above issues, we propose to incorporate the concept of perceived safety into future interaction modeling and design a dual-view interaction-aware lane change prediction model. We evaluate the proposed model on two real-world datasets and experimental results show that the proposed model achieves average improvements of 11.7-12.4% in classification ability and 75.6-95.7% in forecast ability over the best-performing baselines across the two datasets. The ablation study and investigation into future interaction modeling demonstrate that our model has advantages in interpreting lane change scenarios from a driving safety perspective.

Feng Lu, Yuxiang Hou, Wei Li, Xiangying Yang, Haibo Zheng, Wenxi Luo, Leqing Chen, Yuyang Cao, Xiaofei Liao, Yu Zhang 等

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of mortality among women, with millions of new cases diagnosed annually. Early detection through screening is crucial. Using neural networks to improve the accuracy of breast cancer screening has become increasingly important. In accordance with radiologists' practices, we proposed using images from the unaffected side to create adversarial samples with critical medical implications in our adversarial learning process. By introducing beneficial perturbations, this method aims to reduce overconfidence and improve the precision and robustness of breast cancer classification. Our proposed framework is an adversarial quadruple-view classification network (NaFV-Net) incorporating images from both affected and unaffected perspectives. By comprehensively capturing local and global information and implementing adversarial learning from four mammography views, this framework allows for the fusion of features and the integration of medical principles and radiologist evaluation techniques, thus facilitating the accurate identification and characterization of breast tissues. Extensive experiments have shown the high effectiveness of our model in accurately distinguishing between benign and malignant findings, demonstrating state-of-the-art classification performance on both internal and public datasets.