This study addresses the classification of defects in apples as a crucial measure to mitigate economic losses and optimize the food supply chain. An innovative approach is employed that integrates images from the visible spectrum and 660 nm spectral wavelength to enhance accuracy and efficiency in defect classification. The methodology is based on the use of Single-Input and Multi-Inputs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to validate the proposed strategies. Steps include image acquisition and preprocessing, classification model training, and performance evaluation. Results demonstrate that defect classification using the 660 nm spectral wavelength reveals details not visible in the entire visible spectrum. It is seen that the use of the appropriate spectral range in the classification process is slightly superior to the entire visible spectrum. The MobileNetV1 model achieves an accuracy of 98.80\% on the validation dataset versus the 98.26\% achieved using the entire visible spectrum. Conclusions highlight the potential to enhance the method by capturing images with specific spectral ranges using filters, enabling more effective network training for classification task. These improvements could further enhance the system's capability to identify and classify defects in apples.

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing gradient-free versions of SVGD make use of simple Monte Carlo approximations or gradients from surrogate distributions, both with limitations. To improve gradient-free Stein variational inference, we combine SVGD steps with evolution strategy (ES) updates. Our results demonstrate that the resulting algorithm generates high-quality samples from unnormalized target densities without requiring gradient information. Compared to prior gradient-free SVGD methods, we find that the integration of the ES update in SVGD significantly improves the performance on multiple challenging benchmark problems.

In this paper, we focus on estimating the causal effect of an intervention over time on a dynamical system. To that end, we formally define causal interventions and their effects over time on discrete-time stochastic processes (DSPs). Then, we show under which conditions the equilibrium states of a DSP, both before and after a causal intervention, can be captured by a structural causal model (SCM). With such an equivalence at hand, we provide an explicit mapping from vector autoregressive models (VARs), broadly applied in econometrics, to linear, but potentially cyclic and/or affected by unmeasured confounders, SCMs. The resulting causal VAR framework allows us to perform causal inference over time from observational time series data. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed framework achieves strong performance in terms of observational forecasting while enabling accurate estimation of the causal effect of interventions on dynamical systems. We demonstrate, through a case study, the potential practical questions that can be addressed using the proposed causal VAR framework.

Current generative models for drug discovery primarily use molecular docking as an oracle to guide the generation of active compounds. However, such models are often not useful in practice because even compounds with high docking scores do not consistently show experimental activity. More accurate methods for activity prediction exist, such as molecular dynamics based binding free energy calculations, but they are too computationally expensive to use in a generative model. To address this challenge, we propose Multi-Fidelity Latent space Active Learning (MF-LAL), a generative modeling framework that integrates a set of oracles with varying cost-accuracy tradeoffs. Unlike previous approaches that separately learn the surrogate model and generative model, MF-LAL combines the generative and multi-fidelity surrogate models into a single framework, allowing for more accurate activity prediction and higher quality samples. We train MF-LAL with a novel active learning algorithm to further reduce computational cost. Our experiments on two disease-relevant proteins show that MF-LAL produces compounds with significantly better binding free energy scores than other single and multi-fidelity approaches.

Diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential in speech synthesis tasks, including text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning. However, their iterative denoising processes are inefficient and hinder the application of end-to-end optimization with perceptual metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel method of distilling TTS diffusion models with direct end-to-end evaluation metric optimization, achieving state-of-the-art performance. By incorporating Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and Speaker Verification (SV) loss, our approach optimizes perceptual evaluation metrics, leading to notable improvements in word error rate and speaker similarity. Our experiments show that DMDSpeech consistently surpasses prior state-of-the-art models in both naturalness and speaker similarity while being significantly faster. Moreover, our synthetic speech has a higher level of voice similarity to the prompt than the ground truth in both human evaluation and objective speaker similarity metric. This work highlights the potential of direct metric optimization in speech synthesis, allowing models to better align with human auditory preferences. The audio samples are available at https://dmdspeech.github.io/.

Complex networks describe important structures in nature and society, composed of nodes and the edges that connect them. The evolution of these networks is typically described by dynamics, which are labor-intensive and require expert knowledge to derive. However, because the complex network involves noisy observations from multiple trajectories of nodes, existing symbolic regression methods are either not applicable or ineffective on its dynamics. In this paper, we propose Physically Inspired Neural Dynamics Symbolic Regression (PI-NDSR), a method based on neural networks and genetic programming to automatically learn the symbolic expression of dynamics. Our method consists of two key components: a Physically Inspired Neural Dynamics (PIND) to augment and denoise trajectories through observed trajectory interpolation; and a coordinated genetic search algorithm to derive symbolic expressions. This algorithm leverages references of node dynamics and edge dynamics from neural dynamics to avoid overfitted expressions in symbolic space. We evaluate our method on synthetic datasets generated by various dynamics and real datasets on disease spreading. The results demonstrate that PI-NDSR outperforms the existing method in terms of both recovery probability and error. Complex networks (Gerstner et al., 2014; Gao et al., 2016; Bashan et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2011) describe important structures in nature and society, which is composed of a set of nodes and a set of edges that connect them. Complex networks can model various real-world systems, including social networks (Kitsak et al., 2010), epidemic networks (Pastor-Satorras & Vespignani, 2001), brain networks (Laurence et al., 2019; Wilson & Cowan, 1972), and transportation networks (Kaluza et al., 2010). Extensive works (Zang & Wang, 2020; Murphy et al., 2021; Gao & Yan, 2022) have been conducted to analyze the dynamics of complex networks (Pastor-Satorras et al., 2015; MacArthur, 1970; Kuramoto & Kuramoto, 1984), which is crucial for understanding the underlying mechanisms of complex systems and predicting their future behaviors.

This study presents an investigation into the utilization of a Multi-Input architecture for the classification of fruits (apples and mangoes) into healthy and defective states, employing both RGB and silhouette images. The primary aim is to enhance the accuracy of CNN models. The methodology encompasses image acquisition, preprocessing of datasets, training, and evaluation of two CNN models: MobileNetV2 and VGG16. Results reveal that the inclusion of silhouette images alongside the Multi-Input architecture yields models with superior performance compared to using only RGB images for fruit classification, whether healthy or defective. Specifically, optimal results were achieved using the MobileNetV2 model, achieving 100\% accuracy. This finding suggests the efficacy of this combined methodology in improving the precise classification of healthy or defective fruits, which could have significant implications for applications related to external quality inspection of fruits.

In the absence of abundant reliable annotations for challenging tasks and contexts, how can we expand the frontier of LLM capabilities with potentially wrong answers? We focus on two research questions: (1) Can LLMs generate reliable preferences among wrong options? And if so, (2) Would alignment with such wrong-over-wrong preferences be helpful? We employ methods based on self-consistency, token probabilities, and LLM-as-a-judge to elicit wrong-over-wrong preferences, and fine-tune language models with preference optimization approaches using these synthesized preferences. Extensive experiments with seven LLMs and eight datasets demonstrate that (1) LLMs do have preliminary capability in distinguishing various shades of wrong, achieving up to 20.9% higher performance than random guess; (2) Alignment with wrong-over-wrong preferences helps LLMs to produce less wrong and sometimes even outright correct answers, while overall improving model calibration.

Methodology is provided towards the solution of the minimum enclosing ball problem. This problem concerns the determination of the unique spherical surface of smallest radius enclosing a given bounded set in the d-dimensional Euclidean space. Mathematical formulation and typical methods for solving this problem are presented. Also, the paper is focused on areas that are related to this problem, namely: (a) promise problems and property testing, (b) theorems for partitioning and enclosing (covering) a set, and (c) computation of the diameter of a set.

Adapting medical Large Language Models to local languages can reduce barriers to accessing healthcare services, but data scarcity remains a significant challenge, particularly for low-resource languages. To address this, we first construct a highquality medical dataset and conduct analysis to ensure its quality. In order to leverage the generalization capability of multilingual LLMs to efficiently scale to more resource-constrained languages, we explore the internal information flow of LLMs from a multilingual perspective using Mixture of Experts (MoE) modularity. Technically, we propose a novel MoE routing method that employs languagespecific experts and cross-lingual routing. Inspired by circuit theory, our routing analysis revealed a "Spread Out in the End" information flow mechanism: while earlier layers concentrate cross-lingual information flow, the later layers exhibit language-specific divergence. This insight directly led to the development of the Post-MoE architecture, which applies sparse routing only in the later layers while maintaining dense others. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach enhances the generalization of multilingual models to other languages while preserving interpretability. Finally, to efficiently scale the model to 50 languages, we introduce the concept of language family experts, drawing on linguistic priors, which enables scaling the number of languages without adding additional parameters.