Sign language, which contains hand movements, facial expressions and bodily gestures, is a significant medium for communicating with hard-of-hearing people. A well-trained sign language community communicates easily, but those who don't know sign language face significant challenges. Recognition and generation are basic communication methods between hearing and hard-of-hearing individuals. Despite progress in recognition, sign language generation still needs to be explored. The Progressive Growing of Generative Adversarial Network (ProGAN) excels at producing high-quality images, while the Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) generates feature-rich images at medium resolutions. Balancing resolution and detail is crucial for sign language image generation. We are developing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) variant that combines both models to generate feature-rich, high-resolution, and class-conditional sign language images. Our modified Attention-based model generates high-quality images of Indian Sign Language letters, numbers, and words, outperforming the traditional ProGAN in Inception Score (IS) and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), with improvements of 3.2 and 30.12, respectively. Additionally, we are publishing a large dataset incorporating high-quality images of Indian Sign Language alphabets, numbers, and 129 words.

Distributed machine learning training and inference is common today because today's large models require more memory and compute than can be provided by a single GPU. Distributed models are generally produced by programmers who take a sequential model specification and apply several distribution strategies to distribute state and computation across GPUs. Unfortunately, bugs can be introduced in the process, and a distributed model implementation's outputs might differ from the sequential model's outputs. In this paper, we describe an approach to statically identify such bugs by checking model refinement, that is, can the sequential model's outputs be reconstructed from the distributed model's outputs? Our approach, implemented in GraphGuard, uses iterative rewriting to prove model refinement. Our approach can scale to today's large models and deployments: we evaluate it using GPT and Llama-3. Further, it provides actionable output that aids in bug localization.

The task of ethical Medical Image Synthesis (MISyn) is to ensure that the MISyn techniques are researched and developed ethically throughout their entire lifecycle, which is essential to prevent the negative impacts of MISyn. To address the ever-increasing needs and requirements for ethical practice of MISyn research and development, we first conduct a theoretical analysis that identifies the key properties of ethical MISyn and intrinsic limits of MISyn. We identify that synthetic images lack inherent grounding in real medical phenomena, cannot fully represent the training medical images, and inevitably introduce new distribution shifts and biases. Ethical risks can arise from not acknowledging the intrinsic limits and weaknesses of synthetic images compared to medical images, with the extreme form manifested as misinformation of MISyn that substitutes synthetic images for medical images without acknowledgment. The resulting ethical harms include eroding trust in the medical imaging dataset environment and causing algorithmic discrimination towards stakeholders and the public. To facilitate collective efforts towards ethical MISyn within and outside the medical image analysis community, we then propose practical supports for ethical practice in MISyn based on the theoretical analysis, including ethical practice recommendations that adapt the existing technical standards, problem formulation, design, and evaluation practice of MISyn to the ethical challenges; and oversight recommendations to facilitate checks and balances from stakeholders and the public. We also present two case studies that demonstrate how to apply the ethical practice recommendations in practice, and identify gaps between existing practice and the ethical practice recommendations.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to in-depth investigation of their potential in tabular data modeling. However, effectively utilizing advanced LLMs in few-shot and even zero-shot scenarios is still challenging. To this end, we propose a novel LLM-based prototype estimation framework for tabular learning. Our key idea is to query the LLM to generate feature values based example-free prompt, which solely relies on task and feature descriptions. With the feature values generated by LLM, we can build a zero-shot prototype in a training-free manner, which can be further enhanced by fusing few-shot samples, avoiding training a classifier or finetuning the LLMs. Thanks to the example-free prompt and prototype estimation, ours bypasses the constraints brought by the example-based prompt, providing a scalable and robust framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ours in zero and few-shot tabular learning.

Classification models used in brain-computer interface (BCI) are usually designed for a single BCI paradigm. This requires the redevelopment of the model when applying it to a new BCI paradigm, resulting in repeated costs and effort. Moreover, less complex deep learning models are desired for practical usage, as well as for deployment on portable devices. In or-der to fill the above gaps, we, in this study, proposed a light-weight and unified decoding model for cross-BCI-paradigm classification. The proposed model starts with a tempo-spatial convolution. It is followed by a multi-scale local feature selec-tion module, aiming to extract local features shared across BCI paradigms and generate weighted features. Finally, a mul-ti-dimensional global feature extraction module is designed, in which multi-dimensional global features are extracted from the weighted features and fused with the weighted features to form high-level feature representations associated with BCI para-digms. The results, evaluated on a mixture of three classical BCI paradigms (i.e., MI, SSVEP, and P300), demon-strate that the proposed model achieves 88.39%, 82.36%, 80.01%, and 0.8092 for accuracy, macro-precision, mac-ro-recall, and macro-F1-score, respectively, significantly out-performing the compared models. This study pro-vides a feasible solution for cross-BCI-paradigm classifica-tion. It lays a technological foundation for de-veloping a new generation of unified decoding systems, paving the way for low-cost and universal practical applications.

Accurate trajectory prediction for buses is crucial in intelligent transportation systems, particularly within urban environments. In developing regions where access to multimodal data is limited, relying solely on onboard GPS data remains indispensable despite inherent challenges. To address this problem, we propose GSMT, a hybrid model that integrates a Graph Attention Network (GAT) with a sequence-to-sequence Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and incorporates a task corrector capable of extracting complex behavioral patterns from large-scale trajectory data. The task corrector clusters historical trajectories to identify distinct motion patterns and fine-tunes the predictions generated by the GAT and RNN. Specifically, GSMT fuses dynamic bus information and static station information through embedded hybrid networks to perform trajectory prediction, and applies the task corrector for secondary refinement after the initial predictions are generated. This two-stage approach enables multi-node trajectory prediction among buses operating in dense urban traffic environments under complex conditions. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior performance in both short-term and long-term trajectory prediction tasks.

One of the key challenges to predict odor from molecular structure is unarguably our limited understanding of the odor space and the complexity of the underlying structure-odor relationships. Here, we show that the predictive performance of machine learning models for structure-based odor predictions can be improved using both, an expert and a data-driven odor taxonomy. The expert taxonomy is based on semantic and perceptual similarities, while the data-driven taxonomy is based on clustering co-occurrence patterns of odor descriptors directly from the prepared dataset. Both taxonomies improve the predictions of different machine learning models and outperform random groupings of descriptors that do not reflect existing relations between odor descriptors. We assess the quality of both taxonomies through their predictive performance across different odor classes and perform an in-depth error analysis highlighting the complexity of odor-structure relationships and identifying potential inconsistencies within the taxonomies by showcasing pear odorants used in perfumery. The data-driven taxonomy allows us to critically evaluate our expert taxonomy and better understand the molecular odor space. Both taxonomies as well as a full dataset are made available to the community, providing a stepping stone for a future community-driven exploration of the molecular basis of smell. In addition, we provide a detailed multi-layer expert taxonomy including a total of 777 different descriptors from the Pyrfume repository.

The process of generating fully colorized drawings from sketches is a large, usually costly bottleneck in the manga and anime industry. In this study, we examine multiple models for image-to-image translation between anime characters and their sketches, including Neural Style Transfer, C-GAN, and CycleGAN. By assessing them qualitatively and quantitatively, we find that C-GAN is the most effective model that is able to produce high-quality and high-resolution images close to those created by humans.

Visual Instruction Finetuning (VIF) is pivotal for post-training Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Unlike unimodal instruction finetuning in plain-text large language models, which mainly requires instruction datasets to enable model instruction-following ability, VIF also requires multimodal data to enable joint visual and textual understanding; therefore, it typically requires more data. Consequently, VIF imposes stricter data selection challenges: the method must scale efficiently to handle larger data demands while ensuring the quality of both visual and textual content, as well as their alignment. Despite its critical impact on performance, data selection for VIF remains an understudied area. In this paper, we propose $Δ$-AttnMask. This data-efficient framework quantifies sample quality through attention-guided masking of the model's hidden states, jointly evaluating image-text pairs without requiring domain labels, auxiliary models, or extra training. By computing loss differences ($Δ$) between the original states and states masked using high-attention regions, $Δ$-AttnMask intrinsically assesses sample quality. Experiments across multiple VLMs and datasets show that $Δ$-AttnMask achieves state-of-the-art performance with just 20% of data, accelerating training by 5x while surpassing full-dataset baselines by +10.1% in overall accuracy. Its model-agnostic and data-agnostic design ensures broad applicability across modalities and architectures.

--Cellular traffic forecasting is essential for network planning, resource allocation, or load-balancing traffic across cells. However, accurate forecasting is difficult due to intricate spatial and temporal patterns that exist due to the mobility of users. We present Hierarchical SpatioT emporal Mamba (HiSTM), which combines a dual spatial encoder with a Mamba-based temporal module and attention mechanism. HiSTM employs selective state space methods to capture spatial and temporal patterns in network traffic. In our evaluation, we use a real-world dataset to compare HiSTM against several baselines, showing a 29.4% MAE improvement over the STN baseline while using 94% fewer parameters. We show that the HiSTM generalizes well across different datasets and improves in accuracy over longer time-horizons.