Text-to-image (T2I) generative models are largely used in AI-powered real-world applications and value creation. However, their strategic deployment raises critical concerns for responsible AI management, particularly regarding the reproduction and amplification of race- and gender-related stereotypes that can undermine organizational ethics. In this work, we investigate whether such societal biases are systematically encoded within the pretrained latent spaces of state-of-the-art T2I models. We conduct an empirical study across the five most popular open-source models, using ten neutral, profession-related prompts to generate 100 images per profession, resulting in a dataset of 5,000 images evaluated by diverse human assessors representing different races and genders. We demonstrate that all five models encode and amplify pronounced societal skew: caregiving and nursing roles are consistently feminized, while high-status professions such as corporate CEO, politician, doctor, and lawyer are overwhelmingly represented by males and mostly White individuals. We further identify model-specific patterns, such as QWEN-Image's near-exclusive focus on East Asian outputs, Kandinsky's dominance of White individuals, and SDXL's comparatively broader but still biased distributions. These results provide critical insights for AI project managers and practitioners, enabling them to select equitable AI models and customized prompts that generate images in alignment with the principles of responsible AI. We conclude by discussing the risks of these biases and proposing actionable strategies for bias mitigation in building responsible GenAI systems. The code and Data Repository: https://github.com/Sufianlab/T2IBias

To improve the segmentation of diabetic retinopathy lesions (microaneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates, and soft exudates), we implemented a binary segmentation method specific to each type of lesion. As post-segmentation, we combined the individual model outputs into a single image to better analyze the lesion types. This approach facilitated parameter optimization and improved accuracy, effectively overcoming challenges related to dataset limitations and annotation complexity. Specific preprocessing steps included cropping and applying contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization to the L channel of the LAB image. Additionally, we employed targeted data augmentation techniques to further refine the model's efficacy. Our methodology utilized the DeepLabv3+ model, achieving a segmentation accuracy of 99%. These findings highlight the efficacy of innovative strategies in advancing medical image analysis, particularly in the precise segmentation of diabetic retinopathy lesions. The IDRID dataset was utilized to validate and demonstrate the robustness of our approach.

Local clustering aims to find a compact cluster near the given starting instances. This work focuses on graph local clustering, which has broad applications beyond graphs because of the internal connectivities within various modalities. While most existing studies on local graph clustering adopt the discrete graph setting (i.e., unweighted graphs without self-loops), real-world graphs can be more complex. In this paper, we extend the non-approximating Andersen-Chung-Lang ("ACL") algorithm beyond discrete graphs and generalize its quadratic optimality to a wider range of graphs, including weighted, directed, and self-looped graphs and hypergraphs. Specifically, leveraging PageRank, we propose two algorithms: GeneralACL for graphs and HyperACL for hypergraphs. We theoretically prove that, under two mild conditions, both algorithms can identify a quadratically optimal local cluster in terms of conductance with at least 1/2 probability. On the property of hypergraphs, we address a fundamental gap in the literature by defining conductance for hypergraphs from the perspective of hypergraph random walks. Additionally, we provide experiments to validate our theoretical findings.

Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is the most important clinical parameter of cardiovascular function. The accuracy in estimating this parameter is highly dependent upon the precise segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) structure at the end diastole and systole phases. Therefore, it is crucial to develop robust algorithms for the precise segmentation of the heart structure during different phases. Methodology: In this work, an improved 3D UNet model is introduced to segment the myocardium and LV, while excluding papillary muscles, as per the recommendation of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. For the practical testing of the proposed framework, a total of 8,400 cardiac MRI images were collected and analysed from the military hospital in Tunis (HMPIT), as well as the popular ACDC public dataset. As performance metrics, we used the Dice coefficient and the F1 score for validation/testing of the LV and the myocardium segmentation. Results: The data was split into 70%, 10%, and 20% for training, validation, and testing, respectively. It is worth noting that the proposed segmentation model was tested across three axis views: basal, medio basal and apical at two different cardiac phases: end diastole and end systole instances. The experimental results showed a Dice index of 0.965 and 0.945, and an F1 score of 0.801 and 0.799, at the end diastolic and systolic phases, respectively. Additionally, clinical evaluation outcomes revealed a significant difference in the LVEF and other clinical parameters when the papillary muscles were included or excluded.

A recent paper by Boughammoura (2023) describes the back-propagation algorithm in terms of an alternative formulation called the F-adjoint method. In particular, by the F-adjoint algorithm the computation of the loss gradient, with respect to each weight within the network, is straightforward and can simply be done. In this work, we develop and investigate this theoretical framework to improve some supervised learning algorithm for feed-forward neural network. Our main result is that by introducing some neural dynamical model combined by the gradient descent algorithm, we derived an equilibrium F-adjoint process which yields to some local learning rule for deep feed-forward networks setting. Experimental results on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, demonstrate that the proposed approach provide a significant improvements on the standard back-propagation training procedure.

In this study, the authors present a novel methodology adept at decoding multilingual topic dynamics and identifying communication trends during crises. We focus on dialogues within Tunisian social networks during the Coronavirus Pandemic and other notable themes like sports and politics. We start by aggregating a varied multilingual corpus of comments relevant to these subjects. This dataset undergoes rigorous refinement during data preprocessing. We then introduce our No-English-to-English Machine Translation approach to handle linguistic differences. Empirical tests of this method showed high accuracy and F1 scores, highlighting its suitability for linguistically coherent tasks. Delving deeper, advanced modeling techniques, specifically LDA and HDP models are employed to extract pertinent topics from the translated content. This leads to applying ARIMA time series analysis to decode evolving topic trends. Applying our method to a multilingual Tunisian dataset, we effectively identified key topics mirroring public sentiment. Such insights prove vital for organizations and governments striving to understand public perspectives during crises. Compared to standard approaches, our model outperforms, as confirmed by metrics like Coherence Score, U-mass, and Topic Coherence. Additionally, an in-depth assessment of the identified topics revealed notable thematic shifts in discussions, with our trends identification indicating impressive accuracy, backed by RMSE-based analysis.

Identifying relevant machine-learning features for multi-sensing platforms is both an applicative limitation to recognize environments and a necessity to interpret the physical relevance of transducers' complementarity in their information processing. Particularly for long acquisitions, feature extraction must be fully automatized without human intervention and resilient to perturbations without increasing significantly the computational cost of a classifier. In this study, we investigate on the relative resistance and current modulation of a 24-dimensional conductimetric electronic nose, which uses the exponential moving average as a floating reference in a low-cost information descriptor for environment recognition. In particular, we identified that depending on the structure of a linear classifier, the 'modema' descriptor is optimized for different material sensing elements' contributions to classify information patterns. The low-pass filtering optimization leads to opposite behaviors between unsupervised and supervised learning: the latter one favors longer integration of the reference, allowing to recognize five different classes over 90%, while the first one prefers using the latest events as its reference to clusterize patterns by environment nature. Its electronic implementation shall greatly diminish the computational requirements of conductimetric electronic noses for on-board environment recognition without human supervision.

Extensive bedside monitoring in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) has resulted in complex temporal data regarding patient physiology, which presents an upscale context for clinical data analysis. In the other hand, identifying the time-series patterns within these data may provide a high aptitude to predict clinical events. Hence, we investigate, during this work, the implementation of an automatic data-driven system, which analyzes large amounts of multivariate temporal data derived from Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and extracts high-level information so as to predict in-hospital mortality and Length of Stay (LOS) early. Practically, we investigate the applicability of LSTM network by reducing the time-frame to 6-hour so as to enhance clinical tasks. The experimental results highlight the efficiency of LSTM model with rigorous multivariate time-series measurements for building real-world prediction engines.

While it is well known that population differences from genetics, sex, race, and environmental factors contribute to disease, AI studies in medicine have largely focused on locoregional patient cohorts with less diverse data sources. Such limitation stems from barriers to large-scale data share and ethical concerns over data privacy. Federated learning (FL) is one potential pathway for AI development that enables learning across hospitals without data share. In this study, we show the results of various FL strategies on one of the largest and most diverse COVID-19 chest CT datasets: 21 participating hospitals across five continents that comprise >10,000 patients with >1 million images. We also propose an FL strategy that leverages synthetically generated data to overcome class and size imbalances. We also describe the sources of data heterogeneity in the context of FL, and show how even among the correctly labeled populations, disparities can arise due to these biases.

Environmental perception obtained via object detectors have no predictable safety layer encoded into their model schema, which creates the question of trustworthiness about the system's prediction. As can be seen from recent adversarial attacks, most of the current object detection networks are vulnerable to input tampering, which in the real world could compromise the safety of autonomous vehicles. The problem would be amplified even more when uncertainty errors could not propagate into the submodules, if these are not a part of the end-to-end system design. To address these concerns, a parallel module which verifies the predictions of the object proposals coming out of Deep Neural Networks are required. This work aims to verify 3D object proposals from MonoRUn model by proposing a plausibility framework that leverages cross sensor streams to reduce false positives. The verification metric being proposed uses prior knowledge in the form of four different energy functions, each utilizing a certain prior to output an energy value leading to a plausibility justification for the hypothesis under consideration. We also employ a novel two-step schema to improve the optimization of the composite energy function representing the energy model.