Deep Learning
The Loupe: A Plug-and-Play Attention Module for Amplifying Discriminative Features in Vision Transformers
Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) is a critical and challenging area within computer vision, demanding the identification of highly subtle, localized visual cues. The importance of FGVC extends to critical applications such as biodiversity monitoring and medical diagnostics, where precision is paramount. While large-scale Vision Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance, their decision-making processes often lack the interpretability required for trust and verification in such domains. In this paper, we introduce The Loupe, a novel, lightweight, and plug-and-play attention module designed to be inserted into pre-trained backbones like the Swin Transformer. The Loupe is trained end-to-end with a composite loss function that implicitly guides the model to focus on the most discriminative object parts without requiring explicit part-level annotations. Our unique contribution lies in demonstrating that a simple, intrinsic attention mechanism can act as a powerful regularizer, significantly boosting performance while simultaneously providing clear visual explanations. Our experimental evaluation on the challenging CUB-200-2011 dataset shows that The Loupe improves the accuracy of a Swin-Base model from 85.40% to 88.06%, a significant gain of 2.66%. Crucially, our qualitative analysis of the learned attention maps reveals that The Loupe effectively localizes semantically meaningful features, providing a valuable tool for understanding and trusting the model's decision-making process.
Optimizing Hyper parameters in CNN for Soil Classification using PSO and Whale Optimization Algorithm
Ibrahim, Yasir Nooruldeen, Ramo, Fawziya Mahmood, Qadir, Mahmood Siddeeq, Al-Shamdeen, Muna Jaffer
Classifying soil images contributes to better land management, increased agricultural output, and practical solutions for environmental issues. The development of various disciplines, particularly agriculture, civil engineering, and natural resource management, is aided by understanding of soil quality since it helps with risk reduction, performance improvement, and sound decision-making . Artificial intelligence has recently been used in a number of different fields. In this study, an intelligent model was constructed using Convolutional Neural Networks to classify soil kinds, and machine learning algorithms were used to enhance the performance of soil classification . To achieve better implementation and performance of the Convolutional Neural Networks algorithm and obtain valuable results for the process of classifying soil type images, swarm algorithms were employed to obtain the best performance by choosing Hyper parameters for the Convolutional Neural Networks network using the Whale optimization algorithm and the Particle swarm optimization algorithm, and comparing the results of using the two algorithms in the process of multiple classification of soil types. The Accuracy and F1 measures were adopted to test the system, and the results of the proposed work were efficient result
Enabling Multi-Agent Systems as Learning Designers: Applying Learning Sciences to AI Instructional Design
Wang, Jiayi, Xiao, Ruiwei, Hou, Xinying, Stamper, John
K-12 educators are increasingly using Large Language Models (LLMs) to create instructional materials. These systems excel at producing fluent, coherent content, but often lack support for high-quality teaching. The reason is twofold: first, commercial LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini which are among the most widely accessible to teachers, do not come preloaded with the depth of pedagogical theory needed to design truly effective activities; second, although sophisticated prompt engineering can bridge this gap, most teachers lack the time or expertise and find it difficult to encode such pedagogical nuance into their requests. This study shifts pedagogical expertise from the user's prompt to the LLM's internal architecture. We embed the well-established Knowledge-Learning-Instruction (KLI) framework into a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to act as a sophisticated instructional designer. We tested three systems for generating secondary Math and Science learning activities: a Single-Agent baseline simulating typical teacher prompts; a role-based MAS where agents work sequentially; and a collaborative MAS-CMD where agents co-construct activities through conquer and merge discussion. The generated materials were evaluated by 20 practicing teachers and a complementary LLM-as-a-judge system using the Quality Matters (QM) K-12 standards. While the rubric scores showed only small, often statistically insignificant differences between the systems, the qualitative feedback from educators painted a clear and compelling picture. Teachers strongly preferred the activities from the collaborative MAS-CMD, describing them as significantly more creative, contextually relevant, and classroom-ready. Our findings show that embedding pedagogical principles into LLM systems offers a scalable path for creating high-quality educational content.
Leveraging Multi-Source Textural UGC for Neighbourhood Housing Quality Assessment: A GPT-Enhanced Framework
Hong, Qiyuan, Zhao, Huimin, Long, Ying
This study leverages GPT-4o to assess neighbourhood housing quality using multi-source textural user-generated content (UGC) from Dianping, Weibo, and the Government Message Board. The analysis involves filtering relevant texts, extracting structured evaluation units, and conducting sentiment scoring. A refined housing quality assessment system with 46 indicators across 11 categories was developed, highlighting an objective-subjective method gap and platform-specific differences in focus. GPT-4o outperformed rule-based and BERT models, achieving 92.5% accuracy in fine-tuned settings. The findings underscore the value of integrating UGC and GPT-driven analysis for scalable, resident-centric urban assessments, offering practical insights for policymakers and urban planners.
OASIS: Open-world Adaptive Self-supervised and Imbalanced-aware System
Kim, Miru, Joe, Mugon, Kwon, Minhae
The expansion of machine learning into dynamic environments presents challenges in handling open-world problems where label shift, covariate shift, and unknown classes emerge. Post-training methods have been explored to address these challenges, adapting models to newly emerging data. However, these methods struggle when the initial pre-training is performed on class-imbalanced datasets, limiting generalization to minority classes. To address this, we propose a method that effectively handles open-world problems even when pre-training is conducted on imbalanced data. Our contrastive-based pre-training approach enhances classification performance, particularly for underrepresented classes. Our post-training mechanism generates reliable pseudo-labels, improving model robustness against open-world problems. We also introduce selective activation criteria to optimize the post-training process, reducing unnecessary computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art adaptation techniques in both accuracy and efficiency across diverse open-world scenarios.
A Laplace diffusion-based transformer model for heart rate forecasting within daily activity context
Mateescu, Andrei, Hadarau, Ioana, Anghel, Ionut, Cioara, Tudor, Anchidin, Ovidiu, Nemes, Ancuta
With the advent of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices, remote patient monitoring (RPM) emerged as a promising solution for managing heart failure. However, the heart rate can fluctuate significantly due to various factors, and without correlating it to the patient's actual physical activity, it becomes difficult to assess whether changes are significant. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) models may enhance the accuracy and contextual understanding of remote heart rate monitoring, the integration of activity data is still rarely addressed. In this paper, we propose a Transformer model combined with a Laplace diffusion technique to model heart rate fluctuations driven by physical activity of the patient. Unlike prior models that treat activity as secondary, our approach conditions the entire modeling process on activity context using specialized embeddings and attention mechanisms to prioritize activity specific historical patents. The model captures both long-term patterns and activity-specific heart rate dynamics by incorporating contextualized embeddings and dedicated encoder. The Transformer model was validated on a real-world dataset collected from 29 patients over a 4-month period. Experimental results show that our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 43% reduction in mean absolute error compared to the considered baseline models. Moreover, the coefficient of determination R2 is 0.97 indicating the model predicted heart rate is in strong agreement with actual heart rate values. These findings suggest that the proposed model is a practical and effective tool for supporting both healthcare providers and remote patient monitoring systems.
Equinox: Holistic Fair Scheduling in Serving Large Language Models
Wei, Zhixiang, Yen, James, Chen, Jingyi, Zhang, Ziyang, Huang, Zhibai, Chen, Chen, Yu, Xingzi, Gu, Yicheng, Wu, Chenggang, Wang, Yun, Xia, Mingyuan, Wu, Jie, Wang, Hao, Qi, Zhengwei
We address the limitations of current LLM serving with a dual-counter framework separating user and operator perspectives. The User Fairness Counter measures quality of service via weighted tokens and latency; the Resource Fairness Counter measures operational efficiency through throughput and GPU utilization. Since these metrics are only available post-execution, creating a scheduling paradox, we introduce a deterministic Mixture of Prediction Experts (MoPE) framework to predict user-perceived latency, output tokens, throughput, and GPU utilization. These predictions enable calculation of a unified Holistic Fairness score that balances both counters through tunable parameters for proactive fairness-aware scheduling. We implement this in Equinox, an open-source system with other optimizations like adaptive batching, and stall-free scheduling. Evaluations on production traces (ShareGPT, LMSYS) and synthetic workloads demonstrate Equinox achieves up to $1.3\times$ higher throughput, 60\% lower time-to-first-token latency, and 13\% higher fairness versus VTC while maintaining 94\% GPU utilization, proving fairness under bounded discrepancy across heterogeneous platforms.
From Classical Probabilistic Latent Variable Models to Modern Generative AI: A Unified Perspective
From large language models to multi-modal agents, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) now underpins state-of-the-art systems. Despite their varied architectures, many share a common foundation in probabilistic latent variable models (PLVMs), where hidden variables explain observed data for density estimation, latent reasoning, and structured inference. This paper presents a unified perspective by framing both classical and modern generative methods within the PLVM paradigm. We trace the progression from classical flat models such as probabilistic PCA, Gaussian mixture models, latent class analysis, item response theory, and latent Dirichlet allocation, through their sequential extensions including Hidden Markov Models, Gaussian HMMs, and Linear Dynamical Systems, to contemporary deep architectures: Variational Autoencoders as Deep PLVMs, Normalizing Flows as Tractable PLVMs, Diffusion Models as Sequential PLVMs, Autoregressive Models as Explicit Generative Models, and Generative Adversarial Networks as Implicit PLVMs. Viewing these architectures under a common probabilistic taxonomy reveals shared principles, distinct inference strategies, and the representational trade-offs that shape their strengths. We offer a conceptual roadmap that consolidates generative AI's theoretical foundations, clarifies methodological lineages, and guides future innovation by grounding emerging architectures in their probabilistic heritage.
Learn to Memorize: Optimizing LLM-based Agents with Adaptive Memory Framework
Zhang, Zeyu, Dai, Quanyu, Li, Rui, Bo, Xiaohe, Chen, Xu, Dong, Zhenhua
LLM-based agents have been extensively applied across various domains, where memory stands out as one of their most essential capabilities. Previous memory mechanisms of LLM-based agents are manually predefined by human experts, leading to higher labor costs and suboptimal performance. In addition, these methods overlook the memory cycle effect in interactive scenarios, which is critical to optimizing LLM-based agents for specific environments. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose to optimize LLM-based agents with an adaptive and data-driven memory framework by modeling memory cycles. Specifically, we design an MoE gate function to facilitate memory retrieval, propose a learnable aggregation process to improve memory utilization, and develop task-specific reflection to adapt memory storage. Our memory framework empowers LLM-based agents to learn how to memorize information effectively in specific environments, with both off-policy and on-policy optimization. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple aspects. To benefit the research community in this area, we release our project at https://github.com/nuster1128/learn_to_memorize.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Thought
This research paper examines, from a multidimensional perspective (cognitive, social, ethical, and philosophical), how AI is transforming human thought. It highlights a cognitive offloading effect: the externalization of mental functions to AI can reduce intellectual engagement and weaken critical thinking. On the social level, algorithmic personalization creates filter bubbles that limit the diversity of opinions and can lead to the homogenization of thought and polarization. This research also describes the mechanisms of algorithmic manipulation (exploitation of cognitive biases, automated disinformation, etc.) that amplify AI's power of influence. Finally, the question of potential artificial consciousness is discussed, along with its ethical implications. The report as a whole underscores the risks that AI poses to human intellectual autonomy and creativity, while proposing avenues (education, transparency, governance) to align AI development with the interests of humanity.