Accuracy
Hierarchy-Consistent Learning and Adaptive Loss Balancing for Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification
Jiang, Ruobing, Liu, Mengzhe, Liu, Haobing, Yu, Yanwei
Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification (HMC) faces critical challenges in maintaining structural consistency and balancing loss weighting in Multi-Task Learning (MTL). In order to address these issues, we propose a classifier called HCAL based on MTL integrated with prototype contrastive learning and adaptive task-weighting mechanisms. The most significant advantage of our classifier is semantic consistency including both prototype with explicitly modeling label and feature aggregation from child classes to parent classes. The other important advantage is an adaptive loss-weighting mechanism that dynamically allocates optimization resources by monitoring task-specific convergence rates. It effectively resolves the "one-strong-many-weak" optimization bias inherent in traditional MTL approaches. To further enhance robustness, a prototype perturbation mechanism is formulated by injecting controlled noise into prototype to expand decision boundaries. Additionally, we formalize a quantitative metric called Hierarchical Violation Rate (HVR) as to evaluate hierarchical consistency and generalization. Extensive experiments across three datasets demonstrate both the higher classification accuracy and reduced hierarchical violation rate of the proposed classifier over baseline models.
Whispering Context: Distilling Syntax and Semantics for Long Speech Transcripts
ASR systems often struggle with maintaining syntactic and semantic accuracy in long audio transcripts, impacting tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER), capitalization, and punctuation. We propose a novel approach that enhances ASR by distilling contextual knowledge from LLaMA models into Whisper. Our method uses two strategies: (1) token level distillation with optimal transport to align dimensions and sequence lengths, and (2) representation loss minimization between sentence embeddings of Whisper and LLaMA, blending syntax and semantics. Evaluations on the Spoken Wikipedia dataset, a benchmark with long audios and rich entities demonstrate significant improvements in Word Error Rate (WER), NER, capitalization, and punctuation success. By introducing novel NER metrics and exploring semantics aware ASR, our work highlights the value of integrating linguistic context into transcription, setting a foundation for robust, context-aware ASR in longform speech.
MR-EEGWaveNet: Multiresolutional EEGWaveNet for Seizure Detection from Long EEG Recordings
Hassan, Kazi Mahmudul, Zhao, Xuyang, Sugano, Hidenori, Tanaka, Toshihisa
Feature engineering for generalized seizure detection models remains a significant challenge. Recently proposed models show variable performance depending on the training data and remain ineffective at accurately distinguishing artifacts from seizure data. In this study, we propose a novel end-to-end model, "Multiresolutional EEGWaveNet (MR-EEGWaveNet)," which efficiently distinguishes seizure events from background electroencephalogram (EEG) and artifacts/noise by capturing both temporal dependencies across different time frames and spatial relationships between channels. The model has three modules: convolution, feature extraction, and predictor. The convolution module extracts features through depth-wise and spatio-temporal convolution. The feature extraction module individually reduces the feature dimension extracted from EEG segments and their sub-segments. Subsequently, the extracted features are concatenated into a single vector for classification using a fully connected classifier called the predictor module. In addition, an anomaly score-based post-classification processing technique is introduced to reduce the false-positive rates of the model. Experimental results are reported and analyzed using different parameter settings and datasets (Siena (public) and Juntendo (private)). The proposed MR-EEGWaveNet significantly outperformed the conventional non-multiresolution approach, improving the F1 scores from 0.177 to 0.336 on Siena and 0.327 to 0.488 on Juntendo, with precision gains of 15.9% and 20.62%, respectively.
Collapsing ROC approach for risk prediction research on both common and rare variants
Risk prediction that capitalizes on emerging genetic findings holds great promise for improving public health and clinical care. However, recent risk prediction research has shown that predictive tests formed on existing common genetic loci, including those from genome-wide association studies, have lacked sufficient accuracy for clinical use. Because most rare variants on the genome have not yet been studied for their role in risk prediction, future disease prediction discoveries should shift toward a more comprehensive risk prediction strategy that takes into account both common and rare variants. We are proposing a collapsing receiver operating characteristic CROC approach for risk prediction research on both common and rare variants. The new approach is an extension of a previously developed forward ROC FROC approach, with additional procedures for handling rare variants. The approach was evaluated through the use of 533 single-nucleotide polymorphisms SNPs in 37 candidate genes from the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 mini-exome data set. We found that a prediction model built on all SNPs gained more accuracy AUC = 0.605 than one built on common variants alone AUC = 0.585. We further evaluated the performance of two approaches by gradually reducing the number of common variants in the analysis. We found that the CROC method attained more accuracy than the FROC method when the number of common variants in the data decreased. In an extreme scenario, when there are only rare variants in the data, the CROC reached an AUC value of 0.603, whereas the FROC had an AUC value of 0.524.
Classifying Clinical Outcome of Epilepsy Patients with Ictal Chirp Embeddings
Bahador, Nooshin, Lankarany, Milad
This study presents a pipeline leveraging t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) for interpretable visualizations of chirp features across diverse outcome scenarios. The dataset, comprising chirp-based temporal, spectral, and frequency metrics. Using t-SNE, local neighborhood relationships were preserved while addressing the crowding problem through Student t-distribution-based similarity optimization. Three classification tasks were formulated on the 2D t-SNE embeddings: (1) distinguishing clinical success from failure/no-resection, (2) separating high-difficulty from low-difficulty cases, and (3) identifying optimal cases, defined as successful outcomes with minimal clinical difficulty. Four classifiers, namely, Random Forests, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, and k-Nearest Neighbors, were trained and evaluated using stratified 5-fold cross-validation. Across tasks, the Random Forest and k-NN classifiers demonstrated superior performance, achieving up to 88.8% accuracy in optimal case detection (successful outcomes with minimal clinical difficulty). Additionally, feature influence sensitivity maps were generated using SHAP explanations applied to model predicting t-SNE coordinates, revealing spatially localized feature importance within the embedding space. These maps highlighted how specific chirp attributes drive regional clustering and class separation, offering insights into the latent structure of the data. The integrated framework showcases the potential of interpretable embeddings and local feature attribution for clinical stratification and decision support.
CLoE: Curriculum Learning on Endoscopic Images for Robust MES Classification
Ozdemir, Zeynep, Keles, Hacer Yalim, Tanriover, Omer Ozgur
Estimating disease severity from endoscopic images is essential in assessing ulcerative colitis, where the Mayo Endoscopic Subscore (MES) is widely used to grade inflammation. However, MES classification remains challenging due to label noise from inter-observer variability and the ordinal nature of the score, which standard models often ignore. We propose CLoE, a curriculum learning framework that accounts for both label reliability and ordinal structure. Image quality, estimated via a lightweight model trained on Boston Bowel Preparation Scale (BBPS) labels, is used as a proxy for annotation confidence to order samples from easy (clean) to hard (noisy). This curriculum is further combined with ResizeMix augmentation to improve robustness. Experiments on the LIMUC and HyperKvasir datasets, using both CNNs and Transformers, show that CLoE consistently improves performance over strong supervised and self-supervised baselines. For instance, ConvNeXt-Tiny reaches 82.5\% accuracy and a QWK of 0.894 on LIMUC with low computational cost. These results highlight the potential of difficulty-aware training strategies for improving ordinal classification under label uncertainty. Code will be released at https://github.com/zeynepozdemir/CLoE.
Adaptive Important Region Selection with Reinforced Hierarchical Search for Dense Object Detection
Existing state-of-the-art dense object detection techniques tend to produce a large number of false positive detections on difficult images with complex scenes because they focus on ensuring a high recall. To improve the detection accuracy, we propose an Adaptive Important Region Selection ( AIRS) framework guided by Evidential Q-learning coupled with a uniquely designed reward function. Inspired by human visual attention, our detection model conducts object search in a top-down, hierarchical fashion. It starts from the top of the hierarchy with the coarsest granularity and then identifies the potential patches likely to contain objects of interest. It then discards non-informative patches and progressively moves downward on the selected ones for a fine-grained search. The proposed evidential Q-learning systematically encodes epistemic uncertainty in its evidential-Q value to encourage the exploration of unknown patches, especially in the early phase of model training. In this way, the proposed model dynamically balances exploration-exploitation to cover both highly valuable and informative patches. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the SOT A models.