Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown substantial success in various applications but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This study aims to identify and isolate the components of two different adversarial training techniques that contribute most to increased adversarial robustness, particularly through the lens of margins in the input space -- the minimal distance between data points and decision boundaries. Specifically, we compare two methods that maximize margins: a simple approach which modifies the loss function to increase an approximation of the margin, and a more complex state-of-the-art method (Dynamics-Aware Robust Training) which builds upon this approach. Using a VGG-16 model as our base, we systematically isolate and evaluate individual components from these methods to determine their relative impact on adversarial robustness. We assess the effect of each component on the model's performance under various adversarial attacks, including AutoAttack and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). Our analysis on the CIFAR-10 dataset reveals which elements most effectively enhance adversarial robustness, providing insights for designing more robust DNNs.

Neural networks in assistive technology for visually impaired leverage artificial intelligence's capacity to recognize patterns in complex data. They are used for converting visual data into auditory or tactile representations, helping the visually impaired understand their surroundings. The primary aim of this research is to explore the potential of artificial neural networks to facilitate the differentiation of various forms of cash for individuals with visual impairments. In this study, we built a custom dataset of 3,468 images, which was subsequently used to train an SSD neural network model. The proposed system can accurately identify Nigerian cash, thereby streamlining commercial transactions. The performance of the system in terms of accuracy was assessed, and the Mean Average Precision score was over 90%. We believe that our system has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the field of assistive technology while also improving the quality of life of visually challenged persons in Nigeria and beyond.

Modern Code Review (MCR) is a standard practice in software engineering, yet it demands substantial time and resource investments. Recent research has increasingly explored automating core review tasks using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). As a result, there is substantial variability in task definitions, datasets, and evaluation procedures. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of MCR automation research, aiming to characterize the field's evolution, formalize learning tasks, highlight methodological challenges, and offer actionable recommendations to guide future research. Focusing on the primary code review tasks, we systematically surveyed 691 publications and identified 24 relevant studies published between May 2015 and April 2024. Each study was analyzed in terms of tasks, models, metrics, baselines, results, validity concerns, and artifact availability. In particular, our analysis reveals significant potential for standardization, including 48 task metric combinations, 22 of which were unique to their original paper, and limited dataset reuse. We highlight challenges and derive concrete recommendations for examples such as the temporal bias threat, which are rarely addressed so far. Our work contributes to a clearer overview of the field, supports the framing of new research, helps to avoid pitfalls, and promotes greater standardization in evaluation practices.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis enhances sentiment detection by associating it with specific aspects, offering deeper insights than traditional sentiment analysis. This study introduces a manually annotated dataset of 10,814 multilingual customer reviews covering brick-and-mortar retail stores, labeled with eight aspect categories and their sentiment. Using this dataset, the performance of GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 in aspect based sentiment analysis is evaluated to establish a baseline for the newly introduced data. The results show both models achieving over 85% accuracy, while GPT-4 outperforms LLaMA-3 overall with regard to all relevant metrics.

ACL configuration is essential for managing network flow reachability, yet its complexity grows significantly with topologies and pre-existing rules. To carry out ACL configuration, the operator needs to (1) understand the new configuration policies or intents and translate them into concrete ACL rules, (2) check and resolve any conflicts between the new and existing rules, and (3) deploy them across the network. Existing systems rely heavily on manual efforts for these tasks, especially for the first two, which are tedious, error-prone, and impractical to scale. We propose Xumi to tackle this problem. Leveraging LLMs with domain knowledge of the target network, Xumi automatically and accurately translates the natural language intents into complete ACL rules to reduce operators' manual efforts. Xumi then detects all potential conflicts between new and existing rules and generates resolved intents for deployment with operators' guidance, and finally identifies the best deployment plan that minimizes the rule additions while satisfying all intents. Evaluation shows that Xumi accelerates the entire configuration pipeline by over 10x compared to current practices, addresses O(100) conflicting ACLs and reduces rule additions by ~40% in modern cloud network.

This paper introduces a holistic perception system for internal and external monitoring of autonomous vehicles, with the aim of demonstrating a novel AI-leveraged self-adaptive framework of advanced vehicle technologies and solutions that optimize perception and experience on-board. Internal monitoring system relies on a multi-camera setup designed for predicting and identifying driver and occupant behavior through facial recognition, exploiting in addition a large language model as virtual assistant. Moreover, the in-cabin monitoring system includes AI-empowered smart sensors that measure air-quality and perform thermal comfort analysis for efficient on and off-boarding. On the other hand, external monitoring system perceives the surrounding environment of vehicle, through a LiDAR-based cost-efficient semantic segmentation approach, that performs highly accurate and efficient super-resolution on low-quality raw 3D point clouds. The holistic perception framework is developed in the context of EU's Horizon Europe programm AutoTRUST, and has been integrated and deployed on a real electric vehicle provided by ALKE. Experimental validation and evaluation at the integration site of Joint Research Centre at Ispra, Italy, highlights increased performance and efficiency of the modular blocks of the proposed perception architecture.

Large language models (LLMs) take sequences of subwords as input, requiring them to effective compose subword representations into meaningful word-level representations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive set of experiments to probe how LLMs compose subword information, focusing on three key aspects: structural similarity, semantic decomposability, and form retention. Our analysis of the experiments suggests that these five LLM families can be classified into three distinct groups, likely reflecting difference in their underlying composition strategies. Specifically, we observe (i) three distinct patterns in the evolution of structural similarity between subword compositions and whole-word representations across layers; (ii) great performance when probing layer by layer their sensitivity to semantic decompositionality; and (iii) three distinct patterns when probing sensitivity to formal features, e.g., character sequence length. These findings provide valuable insights into the compositional dynamics of LLMs and highlight different compositional pattens in how LLMs encode and integrate subword information.

Human video comprehension demonstrates dynamic coordination between reasoning and visual attention, adaptively focusing on query-relevant details. However, current long-form video question answering systems employ rigid pipelines that decouple reasoning from perception, leading to either information loss through premature visual abstraction or computational inefficiency through exhaustive processing. The core limitation lies in the inability to adapt visual extraction to specific reasoning requirements, different queries demand fundamentally different visual evidence from the same video content. In this work, we present CAVIA, a training-free framework that revolutionizes video understanding through reasoning, perception coordination. Unlike conventional approaches where visual processing operates independently of reasoning, CAVIA creates a closed-loop system where reasoning continuously guides visual extraction based on identified information gaps. CAVIA introduces three innovations: (1) hierarchical reasoning, guided localization to precise frames; (2) cross-modal semantic bridging for targeted extraction; (3) confidence-driven iterative synthesis. CAVIA achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks: EgoSchema (65.7%, +5.3%), NExT-QA (76.1%, +2.6%), and IntentQA (73.8%, +6.9%), demonstrating that dynamic reasoning-perception coordination provides a scalable paradigm for video understanding.

--Recently, detection of label errors and improvement of label quality in datasets for supervised learning tasks has become an increasingly important goal in both research and industry. The consequences of incorrectly annotated data include reduced model performance, biased benchmark results, and lower overall accuracy. Current state-of-the-art label error detection methods often focus on a single computer vision task and, consequently, a specific type of dataset, containing, for example, either bounding boxes or pixel-wise annotations. Furthermore, previous methods are not learning-based. In this work, we overcome this research gap. We present a unified method for detecting label errors in object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation datasets. In a nutshell, our approach - learning to detect label errors by making them - works as follows: we inject different kinds of label errors into the ground truth. Then, the detection of label errors, across all mentioned primary tasks, is framed as an instance segmentation problem based on a composite input. In our experiments, we compare the label error detection performance of our method with various baselines and state-of-the-art approaches of each task's domain on simulated label errors across multiple tasks, datasets, and base models. This is complemented by a generalization study on real-world label errors. Additionally, we release 459 real label errors identified in the Cityscapes dataset and provide a benchmark for real label error detection in Cityscapes. Deep learning thrives on data: the more complex the task, the more data is required. In computer vision, larger training datasets consistently improve model performance [1], driving demand for large-scale, high-quality annotations.

Argument mining is a subfield of argumentation that aims to automatically extract argumentative structures and their relations from natural language texts. This paper investigates how a single large language model can be leveraged to perform one or several argument mining tasks. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we construct a multi-task dataset by surveying and converting 19 well-known argument mining datasets from the literature into a unified format. Second, we explore various training strategies using Meta AI's Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model: (1) fine-tuning on individual tasks, (2) fine-tuning jointly on multiple tasks, and (3) merging models fine-tuned separately on individual tasks. Our experiments show that task-specific fine-tuning significantly improves individual performance across all tasks. Moreover, multi-task fine-tuning maintains strong performance without degradation, suggesting effective transfer learning across related tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that model merging offers a viable compromise: it yields competitive performance while mitigating the computational costs associated with full multi-task fine-tuning.