Deep Learning
Automated Cervical Cancer Detection through Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid in Resource-Poor Settings with Lightweight Deep Learning Models Deployed on an Android Device
Maben, Leander Melroy, Prasad, Keerthana, Guruvare, Shyamala, Kudva, Vidya, Siddalingaswamy, P C
Cervical cancer is among the most commonly occurring cancer among women and claims a huge number of lives in low and middle-income countries despite being relatively easy to treat. Several studies have shown that public screening programs can bring down cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates significantly. While several screening tests are available, visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) presents itself as the most viable option for low-resource settings due to the affordability and simplicity of performing the test. VIA requires a trained medical professional to interpret the test and is subjective in nature. Automating VIA using AI eliminates subjectivity and would allow shifting of the task to less trained health workers. Task shifting with AI would help further expedite screening programs in low-resource settings. In our work, we propose a lightweight deep learning algorithm that includes EfficientDet-Lite3 as the Region of Interest (ROI) detector and a MobileNet- V2 based model for classification. These models would be deployed on an android-based device that can operate remotely and provide almost instant results without the requirement of highly-trained medical professionals, labs, sophisticated infrastructure, or internet connectivity. The classification model gives an accuracy of 92.31%, a sensitivity of 98.24%, and a specificity of 88.37% on the test dataset and presents itself as a promising automated low-resource screening approach.
MIRAGE: Towards AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild
Xia, Cheng, Lin, Manxi, Tan, Jiexiang, Du, Xiaoxiong, Qiu, Yang, Zheng, Junjun, Kong, Xiangheng, Jiang, Yuning, Zheng, Bo
The spreading of AI-generated images (AIGI), driven by advances in generative AI, poses a significant threat to information security and public trust. Existing AIGI detectors, while effective against images in clean laboratory settings, fail to generalize to in-the-wild scenarios. These real-world images are noisy, varying from ``obviously fake" images to realistic ones derived from multiple generative models and further edited for quality control. We address in-the-wild AIGI detection in this paper. We introduce Mirage, a challenging benchmark designed to emulate the complexity of in-the-wild AIGI. Mirage is constructed from two sources: (1) a large corpus of Internet-sourced AIGI verified by human experts, and (2) a synthesized dataset created through the collaboration between multiple expert generators, closely simulating the realistic AIGI in the wild. Building on this benchmark, we propose Mirage-R1, a vision-language model with heuristic-to-analytic reasoning, a reflective reasoning mechanism for AIGI detection. Mirage-R1 is trained in two stages: a supervised-fine-tuning cold start, followed by a reinforcement learning stage. By further adopting an inference-time adaptive thinking strategy, Mirage-R1 is able to provide either a quick judgment or a more robust and accurate conclusion, effectively balancing inference speed and performance. Extensive experiments show that our model leads state-of-the-art detectors by 5% and 10% on Mirage and the public benchmark, respectively. The benchmark and code will be made publicly available.
Strategies for training point distributions in physics-informed neural networks
Humagain, Santosh, Schneidereit, Toni
Physics-informed neural networks approach the approximation of differential equations by directly incorporating their structure and given conditions in a loss function. This enables conditions like, e.g., invariants to be easily added during the modelling phase. In addition, the approach can be considered as mesh free and can be utilised to compute solutions on arbitrary grids after the training phase. Therefore, physics-informed neural networks are emerging as a promising alternative to solving differential equations with methods from numerical mathematics. However, their performance highly depends on a large variety of factors. In this paper, we systematically investigate and evaluate a core component of the approach, namely the training point distribution. We test two ordinary and two partial differential equations with five strategies for training data generation and shallow network architectures, with one and two hidden layers. In addition to common distributions, we introduce sine-based training points, which are motivated by the construction of Chebyshev nodes. The results are challenged by using certain parameter combinations like, e.g., random and fixed-seed weight initialisation for reproducibility. The results show the impact of the training point distributions on the solution accuracy and we find evidence that they are connected to the characteristics of the differential equation.
Contextual Attention-Based Multimodal Fusion of LLM and CNN for Sentiment Analysis
Zerkouk, Meriem, Mihoubi, Miloud, Chikhaoui, Belkacem
This paper introduces a novel approach for multimodal sentiment analysis on social media, particularly in the context of natural disasters, where understanding public sentiment is crucial for effective crisis management. Unlike conventional methods that process text and image modalities separately, our approach seamlessly integrates Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based image analysis with Large Language Model (LLM) based text processing, leveraging Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and prompt engineering to extract sentiment relevant features from the CrisisMMD dataset. To effectively model intermodal relationships, we introduce a contextual attention mechanism within the fusion process. Leveraging contextual-attention layers, this mechanism effectively captures intermodality interactions, enhancing the model's comprehension of complex relationships between textual and visual data. The deep neural network architecture of our model learns from these fused features, leading to improved accuracy compared to existing baselines. Experimental results demonstrate significant advancements in classifying social media data into informative and noninformative categories across various natural disasters. Our model achieves a notable 2.43% increase in accuracy and 5.18% in F1-score, highlighting its efficacy in processing complex multimodal data. Beyond quantitative metrics, our approach provides deeper insight into the sentiments expressed during crises. The practical implications extend to real time disaster management, where enhanced sentiment analysis can optimize the accuracy of emergency interventions. By bridging the gap between multimodal analysis, LLM powered text understanding, and disaster response, our work presents a promising direction for Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven crisis management solutions. Keywords:
MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agents
Li, Shilong, Bu, Xingyuan, Wang, Wenjie, Liu, Jiaheng, Dong, Jun, He, Haoyang, Lu, Hao, Zhang, Haozhe, Jing, Chenchen, Li, Zhen, Li, Chuanhao, Tian, Jiayi, Zhang, Chenchen, Peng, Tianhao, He, Yancheng, Gu, Jihao, Zhang, Yuanxing, Yang, Jian, Zhang, Ge, Huang, Wenhao, Zhou, Wangchunshu, Zhang, Zhaoxiang, Ding, Ruizhe, Wen, Shilei
AI agents with advanced reasoning and tool use capabilities have demonstrated impressive performance in web browsing for deep search. While existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp evaluate these browsing abilities, they primarily focus on textual information, overlooking the prevalence of multimodal content. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-BrowseComp, a novel benchmark comprising 224 challenging, hand-crafted questions specifically designed to assess agents' multimodal retrieval and reasoning capabilities. These questions often incorporate images in prompts, and crucial information encountered during the search and reasoning process may also be embedded within images or videos on webpages. Consequently, methods relying solely on text prove insufficient for our benchmark. Additionally, we provide a verified checklist for each question, enabling fine-grained analysis of multimodal dependencies and reasoning paths. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models on MM-BrowseComp reveals that even top models like OpenAI o3 with tools achieve only 29.02\% accuracy, highlighting the suboptimal multimodal capabilities and lack of native multimodal reasoning in current models.
BERT-VQA: Visual Question Answering on Plots
Visual question answering has been an exciting challenge in the field of natural language understanding, as it requires deep learning models to exchange information from both vision and language domains. In this project, we aim to tackle a subtask of this problem, namely visual question answering on plots. To achieve this, we developed BERT-VQA, a VisualBERT-based model architecture with a pretrained ResNet 101 image encoder, along with a potential addition of joint fusion. We trained and evaluated this model against a baseline that consisted of a LSTM, a CNN, and a shallow classifier. The final outcome disproved our core hypothesis that the cross-modality module in VisualBERT is essential in aligning plot components with question phrases. Therefore, our work provided valuable insights into the difficulty of the plot question answering challenge as well as the appropriateness of different model architectures in solving this problem.
Search-Time Data Contamination
Han, Ziwen, Mankikar, Meher, Michael, Julian, Wang, Zifan
Data contamination refers to the leakage of evaluation data into model training data, resulting in overfitting to supposedly held-out test sets and compromising test validity. We identify an analogous issue, search-time contamination (STC), in evaluating search-based LLM agents which use tools to gather information from online sources when answering user queries. STC occurs when the retrieval step surfaces a source containing the test question (or a near-duplicate) alongside its answer, enabling agents to copy rather than genuinely infer or reason, undermining benchmark integrity. We find that HuggingFace, an online platform hosting evaluation datasets, appears among retrieved sources in search based agent logs. Consequently, agents often explicitly acknowledge discovering question answer pairs from HuggingFace within their reasoning chains. On three commonly used capability benchmarks: Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), SimpleQA, and GPQA, we demonstrate that for approximately 3% of questions, search-based agents directly find the datasets with ground truth labels on HuggingFace. When millions of evaluation queries target the same benchmark, even small, repeated leaks can accelerate the benchmark's obsolescence, shortening its intended lifecycle. After HuggingFace is blocked, we observe a drop in accuracy on the contaminated subset of approximately 15%. We further show through ablation experiments that publicly accessible evaluation datasets on HuggingFace may not be the sole source of STC. To this end, we conclude by proposing best practices for benchmark design and result reporting to address this novel form of leakage and ensure trustworthy evaluation of search-based LLM agents. To facilitate the auditing of evaluation results, we also publicly release the complete logs from our experiments.
Cognitive Workspace: Active Memory Management for LLMs -- An Empirical Study of Functional Infinite Context
Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental limitations in context management despite recent advances extending context windows to millions of tokens. We propose Cognitive Workspace, a novel paradigm that transcends traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by emulating human cognitive mechanisms of external memory use. Drawing from cognitive science foundations including Baddeley's working memory model, Clark's extended mind thesis, and Hutchins' distributed cognition framework, we demonstrate that current passive retrieval systems fail to capture the dynamic, task-driven nature of human memory management. Our analysis of 2024-2025 developments reveals that while techniques like Infini-attention and StreamingLLM achieve impressive context lengths, they lack the metacognitive awareness and active planning capabilities essential for true cognitive extension. Cognitive Workspace addresses these limitations through three core innovations: (1) active memory management with deliberate information curation, (2) hierarchical cognitive buffers enabling persistent working states, and (3) task-driven context optimization that dynamically adapts to cognitive demands. Empirical validation demonstrates Cognitive Workspace achieves an average 58.6% memory reuse rate (ranging from 54-60% across different tasks) compared to 0% for traditional RAG, with 17-18% net efficiency gain despite 3.3x higher operation counts. Statistical analysis confirms these advantages with p < 0.001 and Cohen's d > 23 across multiple task types, establishing the first quantitative evidence for active memory superiority in LLM systems. We present a comprehensive theoretical framework synthesizing insights from 50+ recent papers, positioning Cognitive Workspace as a fundamental shift from information retrieval to genuine cognitive augmentation.
Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL
Li, Weizhen, Lin, Jianbo, Jiang, Zhuosong, Cao, Jingyi, Liu, Xinpeng, Zhang, Jiayu, Huang, Zhenqiang, Chen, Qianben, Sun, Weichen, Wang, Qiexiang, Lu, Hongxuan, Qin, Tianrui, Zhu, Chenghao, Yao, Yi, Fan, Shuying, Li, Xiaowan, Wang, Tiannan, Liu, Pai, Zhu, King, Zhu, He, Shi, Dingfeng, Wang, Piaohong, Guan, Yeyi, Tang, Xiangru, Liu, Minghao, Jiang, Yuchen Eleanor, Yang, Jian, Liu, Jiaheng, Zhang, Ge, Zhou, Wangchunshu
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.
Sustainable AI Training via Hardware-Software Co-Design on NVIDIA, AMD, and Emerging GPU Architectures
Makin, Yashasvi, Maliakkal, Rahul
--In particular, large-scale deep learning and artificial intelligence model training uses a lot of computational power and energy, so it poses serious sustainability issues. The fast rise in model complexity has resulted in exponential increases in energy consumption, increasing the demand for techniques maximizing computational efficiency and lowering environmental impact. This work explores environmentally driven performance optimization methods especially intended for advanced GPU architectures from NVIDIA, AMD, and other emerging GPU architectures. Our main focus is on investigating hardware-software co-design techniques meant to significantly increase memory-level and kernel-level operations, so improving performance-per-watt measures. Our thorough research encompasses evaluations of specialized tensor and matrix cores, advanced memory optimization methods, and creative integration approaches that taken together result in notable energy efficiency increases. We also discuss important software-level optimizations that augment hardware capability including mixed-precision arithmetic, advanced energy-aware scheduling algorithms, and compiler-driven kernel enhancements. Moreover, we methodically point out important research gaps and suggest future directions necessary to create really sustainable artificial intelligence systems. This paper emphasizes how major increases in training efficiency can be obtained by co-design of hardware and software, so lowering the environmental impact of artificial intelligence without compromising performance. T o back up our analysis, we use real-world case studies from top companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and others that show how these sustainable AI training methods are used in the real world. With this thorough analysis, we show that a comprehensive co-design approach can significantly increase training efficiency and lower the carbon footprint of AI without compromising performance. Training modern artificial intelligence models calls for enormous computational resources and energy. Training a single large language model (LLM) such GPT -3 was projected to consume almost 1,300 MWh of electricity--equivalent to the annual power consumption of roughly 130 U.S. homes [1].