Traditional video-based learning remains passive, offering limited opportunities for users to engage dynamically with content. While current AI-powered tools offer transcription and summarization, they lack real-time, region-specific interaction capabilities. This paper introduces Untwist, an AI-driven system that enables interactive video learning by allowing users to ask questions about the entire video or specific regions using a bounding box, receiving context-aware, multimodal responses. By integrating GPT APIs with Computer Vision techniques, Untwist extracts, processes, and structures video content to enhance comprehension. Our approach addresses GPT-4o spatial weakness by leveraging annotated frames instead of raw coordinate data, significantly improving accuracy in localizing and interpreting video content. This paper describes the system architecture, including video pre-processing and real-time interaction, and outlines how Untwist can transform passive video consumption into an interactive, AI-driven learning experience with the potential to enhance engagement and comprehension.

Large language model fine-tuning APIs enable widespread model customization, yet pose significant safety risks. Recent work shows that adversaries can exploit access to these APIs to bypass model safety mechanisms by encoding harmful content in seemingly harmless fine-tuning data, evading both human monitoring and standard content filters. We formalize the fine-tuning API defense problem, and introduce the Cipher Fine-tuning Robustness benchmark (CIFR), a benchmark for evaluating defense strategies' ability to retain model safety in the face of cipher-enabled attackers while achieving the desired level of fine-tuning functionality. We include diverse cipher encodings and families, with some kept exclusively in the test set to evaluate for generalization across unseen ciphers and cipher families. We then evaluate different defenses on the benchmark and train probe monitors on model internal activations from multiple fine-tunes. We show that probe monitors achieve over 99% detection accuracy, generalize to unseen cipher variants and families, and compare favorably to state-of-the-art monitoring approaches. We open-source CIFR and the code to reproduce our experiments to facilitate further research in this critical area. Code and data are available online https://github.com/JackYoustra/safe-finetuning-api

Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced is that of determining satisfiability. However, from a logical point of view, satisfiability problems vary along various dimensions, which may affect TLMs' ability to learn how to solve them. The problem instances of satisfiability in natural language can belong to different computational complexity classes depending on the language fragment in which they are expressed. Although prior research has explored the problem of natural language satisfiability, the above-mentioned point has not been discussed adequately. Hence, we investigate how problem instances from varying computational complexity classes and having different grammatical constructs impact TLMs' ability to learn rules of inference. Furthermore, to faithfully evaluate TLMs, we conduct an empirical study to explore the distribution of satisfiability problems.

The deployment of large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models on edge devices presents significant challenges due to memory constraints. While MoE architectures enable efficient utilization of computational resources by activating only a subset of experts per inference, they require careful memory management to operate efficiently in resource-constrained environments. Traditional heuristic-based expert caching strategies such as MoE-Infinity struggle to maintain high cache hit rates as models parameters scale. In this work, we introduce MoE-Beyond, a learning-based expert activation predictor trained to predict expert activations during autoregressive decoding. By framing the task as a multi-label sequence prediction problem, we train a lightweight transformer model on 66 million expert activation traces extracted from LDJnr-Puffin dataset [5] using DeepSeek-V2-Chat-Lite MoE. Our predictor generalizes effectively across unseen prompts from WebGLM-QA dataset [6], achieving 97.5% accuracy and an 86.6% F1-score. Simulation results show that MoE-Beyond improves GPU cache hit rate from 17% to 72% when only 10% of experts fit in GPU cache, outperforming heuristic baselines.

Despite progress in AI-based plant diagnostics, sugarcane farmers in low-resource regions remain vulnerable to leaf diseases due to the lack of scalable, efficient, and interpretable tools. Many deep learning models fail to generalize under real-world conditions and require substantial computational resources, limiting their use in resource-constrained regions. In this paper, we present SugarcaneLD-BD, a curated dataset for sugarcane leaf-disease classification; SugarcaneShuffleNet, an optimized lightweight model for rapid on-device diagnosis; and SugarcaneAI, a Progressive Web Application for field deployment. SugarcaneLD-BD contains 638 curated images across five classes, including four major sugarcane diseases, collected in Bangladesh under diverse field conditions and verified by expert pathologists. To enhance diversity, we combined SugarcaneLD-BD with two additional datasets, yielding a larger and more representative corpus. Our optimized model, SugarcaneShuffleNet, offers the best trade-off between speed and accuracy for real-time, on-device diagnosis. This 9.26 MB model achieved 98.02% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.98, and an average inference time of 4.14 ms per image. For comparison, we fine-tuned five other lightweight convolutional neural networks: MnasNet, EdgeNeXt, EfficientNet-Lite, MobileNet, and SqueezeNet via transfer learning and Bayesian optimization. MnasNet and EdgeNeXt achieved comparable accuracy to SugarcaneShuffleNet, but required significantly more parameters, memory, and computation, limiting their suitability for low-resource deployment. We integrate SugarcaneShuffleNet into SugarcaneAI, delivering Grad-CAM-based explanations in the field. Together, these contributions offer a diverse benchmark, efficient models for low-resource environments, and a practical tool for sugarcane disease classification. It spans varied lighting, backgrounds and devices used on-farm

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful tools on graph data. However, their predictions are mis-calibrated and lack interpretability, limiting their adoption in critical applications. To address this issue, we propose a new uncertainty-aware and interpretable graph classification model that combines graph functional neural process and graph generative model. The core of our method is to assume a set of latent rationales which can be mapped to a probabilistic embedding space; the predictive distribution of the classifier is conditioned on such rationale embeddings by learning a stochastic correlation matrix. The graph generator serves to decode the graph structure of the rationales from the embedding space for model interpretability. For efficient model training, we adopt an alternating optimization procedure which mimics the well known Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed method is general and can be applied to any existing GNN architecture. Extensive experiments on five graph classification datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both uncertainty quantification and GNN interpretability. We also conduct case studies to show that the decoded rationale structure can provide meaningful explanations.

In this study, we explore the use of Convolutional Neural Networks for improving train speed estimation accuracy, addressing the complex challenges of modern railway systems. We investigate three CNN architectures - single-branch 2D, single-branch 1D, and multiple-branch models - and compare them with the Adaptive Kalman Filter. We analyse their performance using simulated train operation datasets with and without Wheel Slide Protection activation. Our results reveal that CNN-based approaches, especially the multiple-branch model, demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness compared to traditional methods, particularly under challenging operational conditions. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning techniques to enhance railway safety and operational efficiency by more effectively capturing intricate patterns in complex transportation datasets.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to predict a student's future performance based on their sequence of interactions with learning content. Many KT models rely on knowledge concepts (KCs), which represent the skills required for each item. However, some of these models are vulnerable to label leakage, in which input data inadvertently reveal the correct answer, particularly in datasets with multiple KCs per question. We propose a straightforward yet effective solution to prevent label leakage by masking ground-truth labels during input embedding construction in cases susceptible to leakage. To accomplish this, we introduce a dedicated MASK label, inspired by masked language modeling (e.g., BERT), to replace ground-truth labels. In addition, we introduce Recency Encoding, which encodes the step-wise distance between the current item and its most recent previous occurrence. This distance is important for modeling learning dynamics such as forgetting, which is a fundamental aspect of human learning, yet it is often overlooked in existing models. Recency Encoding demonstrates improved performance over traditional positional encodings on multiple KT benchmarks. We show that incorporating our embeddings into KT models like DKT, DKT+, AKT, and SAKT consistently improves prediction accuracy across multiple benchmarks. The approach is both efficient and widely applicable.

This study addresses the Min-Max Multiple Traveling Salesmen Problem ($m^3$-TSP), which aims to coordinate tours for multiple salesmen such that the length of the longest tour is minimized. Due to its NP-hard nature, exact solvers become impractical under the assumption that $P \ne NP$. As a result, learning-based approaches have gained traction for their ability to rapidly generate high-quality approximate solutions. Among these, two-stage methods combine learning-based components with classical solvers, simplifying the learning objective. However, this decoupling often disrupts consistent optimization, potentially degrading solution quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel two-stage framework named \textbf{Generate-and-Split} (GaS), which integrates reinforcement learning (RL) with an optimal splitting algorithm in a joint training process. The splitting algorithm offers near-linear scalability with respect to the number of cities and guarantees optimal splitting in Euclidean space for any given path. To facilitate the joint optimization of the RL component with the algorithm, we adopt an LSTM-enhanced model architecture to address partial observability. Extensive experiments show that the proposed GaS framework significantly outperforms existing learning-based approaches in both solution quality and transferability.

This thesis develops computational methods in similarity-preserving hashing, classification, and cancer genomics. Standard space partitioning-based hashing relies on Binary Search Trees (BSTs), but their exponential growth and sparsity hinder efficiency. To overcome this, we introduce Compressed BST of Inverted hash tables (ComBI), which enables fast approximate nearest-neighbor search with reduced memory. On datasets of up to one billion samples, ComBI achieves 0.90 precision with 4X-296X speed-ups over Multi-Index Hashing, and also outperforms Cellfishing.jl on single-cell RNA-seq searches with 2X-13X gains. Building on hashing structures, we propose Guided Random Forest (GRAF), a tree-based ensemble classifier that integrates global and local partitioning, bridging decision trees and boosting while reducing generalization error. Across 115 datasets, GRAF delivers competitive or superior accuracy, and its unsupervised variant (uGRAF) supports guided hashing and importance sampling. We show that GRAF and ComBI can be used to estimate per-sample classifiability, which enables scalable prediction of cancer patient survival. To address challenges in interpreting mutations, we introduce Continuous Representation of Codon Switches (CRCS), a deep learning framework that embeds genetic changes into numerical vectors. CRCS allows identification of somatic mutations without matched normals, discovery of driver genes, and scoring of tumor mutations, with survival prediction validated in bladder, liver, and brain cancers. Together, these methods provide efficient, scalable, and interpretable tools for large-scale data analysis and biomedical applications.