Many indoor workspaces are quasi-static: global layout is stable but local semantics change continually, producing repetitive geometry, dynamic clutter, and perceptual noise that defeat vision-based localization. We present ShelfAware, a semantic particle filter for robust global localization that treats scene semantics as statistical evidence over object categories rather than fixed landmarks. ShelfAware fuses a depth likelihood with a category-centric semantic similarity and uses a precomputed bank of semantic viewpoints to perform inverse semantic proposals inside MCL, yielding fast, targeted hypothesis generation on low-cost, vision-only hardware. Across 100 global-localization trials spanning four conditions (cart-mounted, wearable, dynamic obstacles, and sparse semantics) in a semantically dense, retail environment, ShelfAware achieves a 96% success rate (vs. 22% MCL and 10% AMCL) with a mean time-to-convergence of 1.91s, attains the lowest translational RMSE in all conditions, and maintains stable tracking in 80% of tested sequences, all while running in real time on a consumer laptop-class platform. By modeling semantics distributionally at the category level and leveraging inverse proposals, ShelfAware resolves geometric aliasing and semantic drift common to quasi-static domains. Because the method requires only vision sensors and VIO, it integrates as an infrastructure-free building block for mobile robots in warehouses, labs, and retail settings; as a representative application, it also supports the creation of assistive devices providing start-anytime, shared-control assistive navigation for people with visual impairments.

Accurate 3D scene interpretation in active construction sites is essential for progress monitoring, safety assessment, and digital twin development. LiDAR is widely used in construction because it offers advantages over camera-based systems, performing reliably in cluttered and dynamically changing conditions. Yet most public datasets for 3D perception are derived from densely fused scans with uniform sampling and complete visibility, conditions that do not reflect real construction sites. Field data are often collected as isolated single-station LiDAR views, constrained by safety requirements, limited access, and ongoing operations. These factors lead to radial density decay, fragmented geometry, and view-dependent visibility-characteristics that remain underrepresented in existing datasets. This paper presents SIP, Site in Pieces, a dataset created to reflect the practical constraints of LiDAR acquisition during construction. SIP provides indoor and outdoor scenes captured with a terrestrial LiDAR scanner and annotated at the point level using a taxonomy tailored to construction environments: A. Built Environment, B. Construction Operations, and C. Site Surroundings. The dataset includes both structural components and slender temporary objects such as scaffolding, MEP piping, and scissor lifts, where sparsity caused by occlusion and fragmented geometry make segmentation particularly challenging. The scanning protocol, annotation workflow, and quality control procedures establish a consistent foundation for the dataset. SIP is openly available with a supporting Git repository, offering adaptable class configurations that streamline adoption within modern 3D deep learning frameworks. By providing field data that retain real-world sensing characteristics, SIP enables robust benchmarking and contributes to advancing construction-oriented 3D vision tasks.

Accurate precipitation forecasting is essential for hydrometeorological risk management, especially for anticipating extreme rainfall that can lead to flash flooding and infrastructure damage. This study introduces a diffusion-based deep learning (DL) framework that systematically compares three residual prediction strategies differing only in their input sources: (1) a fully data-driven model using only past observations from the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system, (2) a corrective model using only forecasts from the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) numerical weather prediction system, and (3) a hybrid model integrating both MRMS and selected HRRR forecast variables. By evaluating these approaches under a unified setup, we provide a clearer understanding of how each data source contributes to predictive skill over the Continental United States (CONUS). Forecasts are produced at 1-km spatial resolution, beginning with direct 1-hour predictions and extending to 12 hours using autoregressive rollouts. Performance is evaluated using both CONUS-wide and region-specific metrics that assess overall performance and skill at extreme rainfall thresholds. Across all lead times, our DL framework consistently outperforms the HRRR baseline in pixel-wise and spatiostatistical metrics. The hybrid model performs best at the shortest lead time, while the HRRR-corrective model outperforms others at longer lead times, maintaining high skill through 12 hours. To assess reliability, we incorporate calibrated uncertainty quantification tailored to the residual learning setup. These gains, particularly at longer lead times, are critical for emergency preparedness, where modest increases in forecast horizon can improve decision-making. This work advances DL-based precipitation forecasting by enhancing predictive skill, reliability, and applicability across regions.

The significant increase in software production, driven by the acceleration of development cycles over the past two decades, has led to a steady rise in software vulnerabilities, as shown by statistics published yearly by the CVE program. The automation of the source code vulnerability detection (CVD) process has thus become essential, and several methods have been proposed ranging from the well established program analysis techniques to the more recent AI-based methods. Our research investigates Large Language Models (LLMs), which are considered among the most performant AI models to date, for the CVD task. The objective is to study their performance and apply different state-of-the-art techniques to enhance their effectiveness for this task. We explore various fine-tuning and prompt engineering settings. We particularly suggest one novel approach for fine-tuning LLMs which we call Double Fine-tuning, and also test the understudied Test-Time fine-tuning approach. We leverage the recent open-source Llama-3.1 8B, with source code samples extracted from BigVul and PrimeVul datasets. Our conclusions highlight the importance of fine-tuning to resolve the task, the performance of Double tuning, as well as the potential of Llama models for CVD. Though prompting proved ineffective, Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) performed relatively well as an example selection technique. Overall, some of our research questions have been answered, and many are still on hold, which leaves us many future work perspectives. Code repository is available here: https://github.com/DynaSoumhaneOuchebara/Llama-based-vulnerability-detection.

The efficacy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in micro/nano manufacturing is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of high-quality and physically grounded training data for defect inspection. Lithography defect data from semiconductor industry are rarely accessible for research use, resulting in a shortage of publicly available datasets. To address this bottleneck in lithography, this study proposes a novel methodology for generating large-scale, physically valid defect datasets with pixel-level annotations. The framework begins with the ab initio synthesis of defect layouts using controllable, physics-constrained mathematical morphology operations (erosion and dilation) applied to the original design-level layout. These synthesized layouts, together with their defect-free counterparts, are fabricated into physical samples via high-fidelity digital micromirror device (DMD)-based lithography. Optical micrographs of the synthesized defect samples and their defect-free references are then compared to create consistent defect delineation annotations. Using this methodology, we constructed a comprehensive dataset of 3,530 Optical micrographs containing 13,365 annotated defect instances including four classes: bridge, burr, pinch, and contamination. Each defect instance is annotated with a pixel-accurate segmentation mask, preserving full contour and geometry. The segmentation-based Mask R-CNN achieves AP@0.5 of 0.980, 0.965, and 0.971, compared with 0.740, 0.719, and 0.717 for Faster R-CNN on bridge, burr, and pinch classes, representing a mean AP@0.5 improvement of approximately 34%. For the contamination class, Mask R-CNN achieves an AP@0.5 roughly 42% higher than Faster R-CNN. These consistent gains demonstrate that our proposed methodology to generate defect datasets with pixel-level annotations is feasible for robust AI-based Measurement/Inspection (MI) in semiconductor fabrication.

Our work introduces the DermETAS-SNA LLM Assistant that integrates Dermatology-focused Evolutionary Transformer Architecture Search with StackNet Augmented LLM. The assistant dynamically learns skin-disease classifiers and provides medically informed descriptions to facilitate clinician-patient interpretation. Contributions include: (1) Developed an ETAS framework on the SKINCON dataset to optimize a Vision Transformer (ViT) tailored for dermatological feature representation and then fine-tuned binary classifiers for each of the 23 skin disease categories in the DermNet dataset to enhance classification performance; (2) Designed a StackNet architecture that integrates multiple fine-tuned binary ViT classifiers to enhance predictive robustness and mitigate class imbalance issues; (3) Implemented a RAG pipeline, termed Diagnostic Explanation and Retrieval Model for Dermatology, which harnesses the capabilities of the Google Gemini 2.5 Pro LLM architecture to generate personalized, contextually informed diagnostic descriptions and explanations for patients, leveraging a repository of verified dermatological materials; (4) Performed extensive experimental evaluations on 23 skin disease categories to demonstrate performance increase, achieving an overall F1-score of 56.30% that surpasses SkinGPT-4 (48.51%) by a considerable margin, representing a performance increase of 16.06%; (5) Conducted a domain-expert evaluation, with eight licensed medical doctors, of the clinical responses generated by our AI assistant for seven dermatological conditions. Our results show a 92% agreement rate with the assessments provided by our AI assistant (6) Created a proof-of-concept prototype that fully integrates our DermETAS-SNA LLM into our AI assistant to demonstrate its practical feasibility for real-world clinical and educational applications.

Verifying closed-loop vision-based control systems remains a fundamental challenge due to the high dimensionality of images and the difficulty of modeling visual environments. While generative models are increasingly used as camera surrogates in verification, their reliance on stochastic latent variables introduces unnecessary overapproximation error. To address this bottleneck, we propose a Deterministic World Model (DWM) that maps system states directly to generative images, effectively eliminating uninterpretable latent variables to ensure precise input bounds. The DWM is trained with a dual-objective loss function that combines pixel-level reconstruction accuracy with a control difference loss to maintain behavioral consistency with the real system. We integrate DWM into a verification pipeline utilizing Star-based reachabil-ity analysis (StarV) and employ conformal prediction to derive rigorous statistical bounds on the trajectory deviation between the world model and the actual vision-based system. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our approach yields significantly tighter reachable sets and better verification performance than a latent-variable baseline.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) affects individuals with long-term diabetes. Without early diagnosis, DR can lead to vision loss. Fundus photography captures the structure of the retina along with abnormalities indicative of the stage of the disease. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support clinicians in identifying these lesions, reducing manual workload, but models require high-quality annotated datasets. Due to the complexity of retinal structures, errors in image acquisition and lesion interpretation of manual annotators can occur. We proposed a quality-control framework, ensuring only high-standard data is used for evaluation and AI training. First, an explainable feature-based classifier is used to filter inadequate images. The features are extracted both using image processing and contrastive learning. Then, the images are enhanced and put subject to annotation, using deep-learning-based assistance. Lastly, the agreement between annotators calculated using derived formulas determines the usability of the annotations.

Abstract--Human Activity Recognition (HAR) underpins applications in healthcare, rehabilitation, fitness tracking, and smart environments, yet existing deep learning approaches demand dataset-specific training, large labeled corpora, and significant computational resources. We introduce RAG-HAR, a training-free retrieval-augmented framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for HAR. RAG-HAR computes lightweight statistical descriptors, retrieves semantically similar samples from a vector database, and uses this contextual evidence to make LLM based activity identification. We further enhance RAG-HAR by first applying prompt optimization and introducing an LLM-based activity descriptor that generates context-enriched vector databases for delivering accurate and highly relevant contextual information. Along with these mechanisms, RAG-HAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across six diverse HAR benchmarks. RAG-HAR moves beyond known behaviors, enabling the recognition and meaningful labelling of multiple unseen human activities. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensor data enables continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and personalized interventions across healthcare [3], rehabilitation [31], fitness [28], and smart environments [14]. Despite wide-ranging applications, HAR remains challenging due to inter-subject variability, differences in sensor placement, device heterogeneity, and subtle distinctions between activities that exhibit similar motion patterns [39]. Those challenges create a strong need for accurate, generalizable, and cost-efficient solutions. Deep learning (DL) has become the dominant paradigm for HAR, with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [6], [43], recurrent architectures [15], [17], and attention-based models [2] achieving state-of-the-art (SOT A) performance on benchmark datasets. However, DL-based HAR faces three critical limitations: (i) costly and time-consuming training procedures tailored to each dataset; (ii) performance degradation under domain shift across subjects, sensor placements, or devices; and (iii) heavy dependence on large labeled datasets [7], [35]. Despite advances in DL, these limitations leave HAR without a practical solution that is simultaneously training-free, generalizable, and scalable. To address this gap, this paper explores a fundamentally different paradigm: leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as reasoning engines for HAR.

With the rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the increasing complexity of low-altitude security threats, traditional UAV identification methods struggle to extract reliable signal features and meet real-time requirements in complex environments. Recently, deep learning based Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) approaches have greatly improved recognition accuracy. However, their large model sizes and high computational demands hinder deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. While model pruning offers a general solution for complexity reduction, existing weight, channel, and layer pruning techniques struggle to concurrently optimize compression rate, hardware acceleration, and recognition accuracy. To this end, in this paper, we introduce HSCP, a Hierarchical Spectral Clustering Pruning framework that combines layer pruning with channel pruning to achieve extreme compression, high performance, and efficient inference. In the first stage, HSCP employs spectral clustering guided by Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) to identify and remove redundant layers. Subsequently, the same strategy is applied to the channel dimension to eliminate a finer redundancy. To ensure robustness, we further employ a noise-robust fine-tuning strategy. Experiments on the UAV-M100 benchmark demonstrate that HSCP outperforms existing channel and layer pruning methods. Specifically, HSCP achieves $86.39\%$ parameter reduction and $84.44\%$ FLOPs reduction on ResNet18 while improving accuracy by $1.49\%$ compared to the unpruned baseline, and maintains superior robustness even in low signal-to-noise ratio environments.