Portfolio optimization requires dynamic allocation of funds by balancing the risk and return tradeoff under dynamic market conditions. With the recent advancements in AI, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has gained prominence in providing adaptive and scalable strategies for portfolio optimization. However, the success of these strategies depends not only on their ability to adapt to market dynamics but also on the careful pre-selection of assets that influence overall portfolio performance. Incorporating the investor's preference in pre-selecting assets for a portfolio is essential in refining their investment strategies. This study proposes a volatility-guided DRL-based portfolio optimization framework that dynamically constructs portfolios based on investors' risk profiles. The Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model is utilized for volatility forecasting of stocks and categorizes them based on their volatility as aggressive, moderate, and conservative. The DRL agent is then employed to learn an optimal investment policy by interacting with the historical market data. The efficacy of the proposed methodology is established using stocks from the Dow $30$ index. The proposed investor-specific DRL-based portfolios outperformed the baseline strategies by generating consistent risk-adjusted returns.

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of structured complex-valued Hopfield neural networks (CvHNNs), which arise when the synaptic weight matrix possesses specific structural properties. We begin by analyzing CvHNNs with a Hermitian synaptic weight matrix and establish the existence of four-cycle dynamics in CvHNNs with skew-Hermitian weight matrices operating synchronously. Furthermore, we introduce two new classes of complex-valued matrices: braided Hermitian and braided skew-Hermitian matrices. We demonstrate that CvHNNs utilizing these matrix types exhibit cycles of length eight when operating in full parallel update mode. Finally, we conduct extensive computational experiments on synchronous CvHNNs, exploring other synaptic weight matrix structures. This work was supported in part by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under grant no 315820/2021-7, the S ao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) under grant no 2023/03368-0, and the Postdoctoral Researcher Program (PPPD) at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Keywords-- Hopfield neural network, complex-valued neural network, associative memory, braided Hermitian matrix. 1 Introduction Artificial neural networks have been conceived as emulators of the biological neural network synapse process. Their processing units, the artificial neurons, usually act based on input signals received from other neurons or cells. Like a biological neuron firing an electric impulse in the presence of specific chemical components in appropriate concentrations, an artificial neuron fires when certain mathematical conditions are satisfied.

In this work, we introduce Virology-Informed Neural Networks (VINNs), a powerful tool for capturing the intricate dynamics of viral infection when data of some compartments of the model are not available. VINNs, an extension of the widely known Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), offer an alternative approach to traditional numerical methods for solving system of differential equations. We apply this VINN technique on a recently proposed hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection dynamics model to predict the transmission of the infection within the liver more accurately. This model consists of four compartments, namely uninfected and infected hepatocytes, rcDNA-containing capsids, and free viruses, along with the consideration of capsid recycling. Leveraging the power of VINNs, we study the impacts of variations in parameter range, experimental noise, data variability, network architecture, and learning rate in this work. In order to demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of VINNs, we employ this approach on the data collected from nine HBV-infceted chimpanzees, and it is observed that VINNs can effectively estimate the model parameters. VINNs reliably capture the dynamics of infection spread and accurately predict their future progression using real-world data. Furthermore, VINNs efficiently identify the most influential parameters in HBV dynamics based solely on experimental data from the capsid component. It is also expected that this framework can be extended beyond viral dynamics, providing a powerful tool for uncovering hidden patterns and complex interactions across various scientific and engineering domains.

We present our shared task on text-based emotion detection, covering more than 30 languages from seven distinct language families. These languages are predominantly low-resource and spoken across various continents. The data instances are multi-labeled into six emotional classes, with additional datasets in 11 languages annotated for emotion intensity. Participants were asked to predict labels in three tracks: (a) emotion labels in monolingual settings, (b) emotion intensity scores, and (c) emotion labels in cross-lingual settings. The task attracted over 700 participants. We received final submissions from more than 200 teams and 93 system description papers. We report baseline results, as well as findings on the best-performing systems, the most common approaches, and the most effective methods across various tracks and languages. The datasets for this task are publicly available.

Neural networks have significantly advanced AI applications, yet their real-world adoption remains constrained by high computational demands, hardware limitations, and accessibility challenges. In image captioning, many state-of-the-art models have achieved impressive performances while relying on resource-intensive architectures. This made them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This limitation is particularly noticeable for applications involving low-resource languages. We demonstrate the case of image captioning in Assamese language, where lack of effective, scalable systems can restrict the accessibility of AI-based solutions for native Assamese speakers. This work presents AC-Lite, a computationally efficient model for image captioning in low-resource Assamese language. AC-Lite reduces computational requirements by replacing computation-heavy visual feature extractors like FasterRCNN with lightweight ShuffleNetv2x1.5. Additionally, Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) are used as the caption decoder to further reduce computational demands and model parameters. Furthermore, the integration of bilinear attention enhances the model's overall performance. AC-Lite can operate on edge devices, thereby eliminating the need for computation on remote servers. The proposed AC-Lite model achieves 82.3 CIDEr score on the COCO-AC dataset with 1.098 GFLOPs and 25.65M parameters.

The paper overviews the shared task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages. It focuses on the reverse transliteration of low-resourced languages in the Indo-Aryan family to their native scripts. Typing Romanized Indo-Aryan languages using ad-hoc transliterals and achieving accurate native scripts are complex and often inaccurate processes with the current keyboard systems. This task aims to introduce and evaluate a real-time reverse transliterator that converts Romanized Indo-Aryan languages to their native scripts, improving the typing experience for users. Out of 11 registered teams, four teams participated in the final evaluation phase with transliteration models for Sinhala, Hindi and Malayalam. These proposed solutions not only solve the issue of ad-hoc transliteration but also empower low-resource language usability in the digital arena.

Generating music from images can enhance various applications, including background music for photo slideshows, social media experiences, and video creation. This paper presents an emotion-guided image-to-music generation framework that leverages the Valence-Arousal (VA) emotional space to produce music that aligns with the emotional tone of a given image. Unlike previous models that rely on contrastive learning for emotional consistency, the proposed approach directly integrates a VA loss function to enable accurate emotional alignment. The model employs a CNN-Transformer architecture, featuring pre-trained CNN image feature extractors and three Transformer encoders to capture complex, high-level emotional features from MIDI music. Three Transformer decoders refine these features to generate musically and emotionally consistent MIDI sequences. Experimental results on a newly curated emotionally paired image-MIDI dataset demonstrate the proposed model's superior performance across metrics such as Polyphony Rate, Pitch Entropy, Groove Consistency, and loss convergence.

Large Deep Learning models are compressed and deployed for specific applications. However, current Deep Learning model compression methods do not utilize the information about the target application. As a result, the compressed models are application agnostic. Our goal is to customize the model compression process to create a compressed model that will perform better for the target application. Our method, Application Specific Compression (ASC), identifies and prunes components of the large Deep Learning model that are redundant specifically for the given target application. The intuition of our work is to prune the parts of the network that do not contribute significantly to updating the data representation for the given application. We have experimented with the BERT family of models for three applications: Extractive QA, Natural Language Inference, and Paraphrase Identification. We observe that customized compressed models created using ASC method perform better than existing model compression methods and off-the-shelf compressed models.

This work proposes a novel and efficient quadstream BiLSTM-Attention network, abbreviated as QSLA network, for robust automatic modulation classification (AMC) of wireless signals. The proposed model exploits multiple representations of the wireless signal as inputs to the network and the feature extraction process combines convolutional and BiLSTM layers for processing the spatial and temporal features of the signal, respectively. An attention layer is used after the BiLSTM layer to emphasize the important temporal features. The experimental results on the recent and realistic RML22 dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model with an accuracy up to around 99%. The model is compared with other benchmark models in the literature in terms of classification accuracy, computational complexity, memory usage, and training time to show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Early detection of drought stress is critical for taking timely measures for reducing crop loss before the drought impact becomes irreversible. The subtle phenotypical and physiological changes in response to drought stress are captured by non-invasive imaging techniques and these imaging data serve as valuable resource for machine learning methods to identify drought stress. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are in wide use, vision transformers (ViTs) present a promising alternative in capturing long-range dependencies and intricate spatial relationships, thereby enhancing the detection of subtle indicators of drought stress. We propose an explainable deep learning pipeline that leverages the power of ViTs for drought stress detection in potato crops using aerial imagery. We applied two distinct approaches: a synergistic combination of ViT and support vector machine (SVM), where ViT extracts intricate spatial features from aerial images, and SVM classifies the crops as stressed or healthy and an end-to-end approach using a dedicated classification layer within ViT to directly detect drought stress. Our key findings explain the ViT model's decision-making process by visualizing attention maps. These maps highlight the specific spatial features within the aerial images that the ViT model focuses as the drought stress signature. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed methods not only achieve high accuracy in drought stress identification but also shedding light on the diverse subtle plant features associated with drought stress. This offers a robust and interpretable solution for drought stress monitoring for farmers to undertake informed decisions for improved crop management.