Overview
Benchmarking Self-Supervised Methods for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction
Reconstructing MRI from highly undersampled measurements is crucial for accelerating medical imaging, but is challenging due to the ill-posedness of the inverse problem. While supervised deep learning approaches have shown remarkable success, they rely on fully-sampled ground truth data, which is often impractical or impossible to obtain. Recently, numerous self-supervised methods have emerged that do not require ground truth, however, the lack of systematic comparison and standard experimental setups have hindered research. We present the first comprehensive review of loss functions from all feedforward self-supervised methods and the first benchmark on accelerated MRI reconstruction without ground truth, showing that there is a wide range in performance across methods. In addition, we propose Multi-Operator Equivariant Imaging (MO-EI), a novel framework that builds on the imaging model considered in existing methods to outperform all state-of-the-art and approaches supervised performance. Finally, to facilitate reproducible benchmarking, we provide implementations of all methods in the DeepInverse library (https://deepinv.github.io) and easy-to-use demo code at https://andrewwango.github.io/deepinv-selfsup-fastmri.
Data-Driven Sequential Sampling for Tail Risk Mitigation
In various operational problems, risk-sensitive decision makers often encounter the challenge of selecting an alternative with minimal tail risk from a collection of stochastic alternatives that generate random losses. Tail risk, in this context, refers to the potential for experiencing substantial losses, which will be formally defined shortly. Despite the significance of addressing this challenge, the majority of related studies still focus on identifying a subset of the alternatives with acceptable (or minimal) expected losses, rather than using tail risk as a ranking criterion. Our objective is to develop a tractable and effective solution to this problem in situations where decision makers aim to compare the alternatives based only on their tail risk. In practical scenarios, it would be ideal to apply our proposed solution to the aforementioned subset of the alternatives, which can be obtained via existing approaches, so that decision makers can ultimately find an alternative with both acceptable expected loss and minimal tail risk.
Small Vision-Language Models: A Survey on Compact Architectures and Techniques
Patnaik, Nitesh, Nayak, Navdeep, Agrawal, Himani Bansal, Khamaru, Moinak Chinmoy, Bal, Gourav, Panda, Saishree Smaranika, Raj, Rishi, Meena, Vishal, Vadlamani, Kartheek
The emergence of small vision-language models (sVLMs) marks a critical advancement in multimodal AI, enabling efficient processing of visual and textual data in resource-constrained environments. This survey offers a comprehensive exploration of sVLM development, presenting a taxonomy of architectures - transformer-based, mamba-based, and hybrid - that highlight innovations in compact design and computational efficiency. Techniques such as knowledge distillation, lightweight attention mechanisms, and modality pre-fusion are discussed as enablers of high performance with reduced resource requirements. Through an in-depth analysis of models like TinyGPT-V, MiniGPT-4, and VL-Mamba, we identify trade-offs between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. Persistent challenges, including data biases and generalization to complex tasks, are critically examined, with proposed pathways for addressing them. By consolidating advancements in sVLMs, this work underscores their transformative potential for accessible AI, setting a foundation for future research into efficient multimodal systems.
Gender Encoding Patterns in Pretrained Language Model Representations
Zakizadeh, Mahdi, Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
Gender bias in pretrained language models (PLMs) poses significant social and ethical challenges. Despite growing awareness, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation into how different models internally represent and propagate such biases. This study adopts an information-theoretic approach to analyze how gender biases are encoded within various encoder-based architectures. We focus on three key aspects: identifying how models encode gender information and biases, examining the impact of bias mitigation techniques and fine-tuning on the encoded biases and their effectiveness, and exploring how model design differences influence the encoding of biases. Through rigorous and systematic investigation, our findings reveal a consistent pattern of gender encoding across diverse models. Surprisingly, debiasing techniques often exhibit limited efficacy, sometimes inadvertently increasing the encoded bias in internal representations while reducing bias in model output distributions. This highlights a disconnect between mitigating bias in output distributions and addressing its internal representations. This work provides valuable guidance for advancing bias mitigation strategies and fostering the development of more equitable language models.
Generative AI as Digital Media
Generative AI is frequently portrayed as revolutionary or even apocalyptic, prompting calls for novel regulatory approaches. This essay argues that such views are misguided. Instead, generative AI should be understood as an evolutionary step in the broader algorithmic media landscape, alongside search engines and social media. Like these platforms, generative AI centralizes information control, relies on complex algorithms to shape content, and extensively uses user data, thus perpetuating common problems: unchecked corporate power, echo chambers, and weakened traditional gatekeepers. Regulation should therefore share a consistent objective: ensuring media institutions remain trustworthy. Without trust, public discourse risks fragmenting into isolated communities dominated by comforting, tribal beliefs -- a threat intensified by generative AI's capacity to bypass gatekeepers and personalize truth. Current governance frameworks, such as the EU's AI Act and the US Executive Order 14110, emphasize reactive risk mitigation, addressing measurable threats like national security, public health, and algorithmic bias. While effective for novel technological risks, this reactive approach fails to adequately address broader issues of trust and legitimacy inherent to digital media. Proactive regulation fostering transparency, accountability, and public confidence is essential. Viewing generative AI exclusively as revolutionary risks repeating past regulatory failures that left social media and search engines insufficiently regulated. Instead, regulation must proactively shape an algorithmic media environment serving the public good, supporting quality information and robust civic discourse.
Reconstructing Depth Images of Moving Objects from Wi-Fi CSI Data
Cao, Guanyu, Maekawa, Takuya, Ohara, Kazuya, Kishino, Yasue
This study proposes a new deep learning method for reconstructing depth images of moving objects within a specific area using Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI). The Wi-Fi-based depth imaging technique has novel applications in domains such as security and elder care. However, reconstructing depth images from CSI is challenging because learning the mapping function between CSI and depth images, both of which are high-dimensional data, is particularly difficult. To address the challenge, we propose a new approach called Wi-Depth. The main idea behind the design of Wi-Depth is that a depth image of a moving object can be decomposed into three core components: the shape, depth, and position of the target. Therefore, in the depth-image reconstruction task, Wi-Depth simultaneously estimates the three core pieces of information as auxiliary tasks in our proposed VAE-based teacher-student architecture, enabling it to output images with the consistency of a correct shape, depth, and position. In addition, the design of Wi-Depth is based on our idea that this decomposition efficiently takes advantage of the fact that shape, depth, and position relate to primitive information inferred from CSI such as angle-of-arrival, time-of-flight, and Doppler frequency shift.
Temporal Analysis of NetFlow Datasets for Network Intrusion Detection Systems
Luay, Majed, Layeghy, Siamak, Hosseininoorbin, Seyedehfaezeh, Sarhan, Mohanad, Moustafa, Nour, Portmann, Marius
This paper investigates the temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets for machine learning (ML)-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Although many previous studies have highlighted the critical role of temporal features, such as inter-packet arrival time and flow length/duration, in NIDS, the currently available NetFlow datasets for NIDS lack these temporal features. This study addresses this gap by creating and making publicly available a set of NetFlow datasets that incorporate these temporal features [1]. With these temporal features, we provide a comprehensive temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets by examining the distribution of various features over time and presenting time-series representations of NetFlow features. This temporal analysis has not been previously provided in the existing literature. We also borrowed an idea from signal processing, time frequency analysis, and tested it to see how different the time frequency signal presentations (TFSPs) are for various attacks. The results indicate that many attacks have unique patterns, which could help ML models to identify them more easily.
What's Driving Tesla's Woes?
Tesla sales fell in the US once again last month, following a wider global trend that further fuels the suggestion that the growing backlash against billionaire CEO Elon Musk could be impacting Tesla at retail. According to Kelley Blue Book, Tesla shifted 43,650 EVs in February, a decrease of nearly 6 percent from the 46,262 sold in the same month last year. It's far from the crash seen in much of the rest of the world, with drops of over 75 percent in Europe in the first two months of the year (the UK being one of the the only markets bucking the trend, with Tesla's February sales jumping by 20 percent compared with the same month last year), but--whatever the reason--sales are stalling. In the US, the month-over-month sales decline in February was primarily driven by significant drops in Cybertruck and Model 3 sales, which fell by 32.5 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively. But Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights for Cox Automotive, says these drops aren't that bad when considered within the wider market.
A Frank System for Co-Evolutionary Hybrid Decision-Making
Mazzoni, Federico, Guidotti, Riccardo, Malizia, Alessio
We introduce Frank, a human-in-the-loop system for co-evolutionary hybrid decision-making aiding the user to label records from an un-labeled dataset. Frank employs incremental learning to ``evolve'' in parallel with the user's decisions, by training an interpretable machine learning model on the records labeled by the user. Furthermore, Frank advances state-of-the-art approaches by offering inconsistency controls, explanations, fairness checks, and bad-faith safeguards simultaneously. We evaluate our proposal by simulating the users' behavior with various levels of expertise and reliance on Frank's suggestions. The experiments show that Frank's intervention leads to improvements in the accuracy and the fairness of the decisions.
Probabilistic Robustness in Deep Learning: A Concise yet Comprehensive Guide
Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated significant potential across various safety-critical applications, yet ensuring its robustness remains a key challenge. While adversarial robustness has been extensively studied in worst-case scenarios, probabilistic robustness (PR) offers a more practical perspective by quantifying the likelihood of failures under stochastic perturbations. This paper provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of PR, covering its formal definitions, evaluation and enhancement methods. We introduce a reformulated ''min-max'' optimisation framework for adversarial training specifically designed to improve PR. Furthermore, we explore the integration of PR verification evidence into system-level safety assurance, addressing challenges in translating DL model-level robustness to system-level claims. Finally, we highlight open research questions, including benchmarking PR evaluation methods, extending PR to generative AI tasks, and developing rigorous methodologies and case studies for system-level integration.