Performance Analysis
Low-Latency Neural Inference on an Edge Device for Real-Time Handwriting Recognition from EEG Signals
Sen, Ovishake, Soni, Raghav, Virmani, Darpan, Parekh, Akshar, Lehman, Patrick, Jena, Sarthak, Katikhaneni, Adithi, Khalifa, Adam, Chatterjee, Baibhab
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a pathway to restore communication for individuals with severe motor or speech impairments. Imagined handwriting provides an intuitive paradigm for character-level neural decoding, bridging the gap between human intention and digital communication. While invasive approaches such as electrocorticography (ECoG) achieve high accuracy, their surgical risks limit widespread adoption. Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) offers safer and more scalable alternatives but suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution, constraining its decoding precision. This work demonstrates that advanced machine learning combined with informative EEG feature extraction can overcome these barriers, enabling real-time, high-accuracy neural decoding on portable edge devices. A 32-channel EEG dataset was collected from fifteen participants performing imagined handwriting. Signals were preprocessed with bandpass filtering and artifact subspace reconstruction, followed by extraction of 85 time-, frequency-, and graphical-domain features. A hybrid architecture, EEdGeNet, integrates a Temporal Convolutional Network with a multilayer perceptron trained on the extracted features. When deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, the system achieved 89.83 percent accuracy with 914.18 ms per-character latency. Selecting only ten key features reduced latency by 4.5 times to 202.6 ms with less than 1 percent loss in accuracy. These results establish a pathway for accurate, low-latency, and fully portable non-invasive BCIs supporting real-time communication.
Learning to Triage Taint Flows Reported by Dynamic Program Analysis in Node.js Packages
Ni, Ronghao, Yang, Aidan Z. H., Hsu, Min-Chien, Sabino, Nuno, Jia, Limin, Martins, Ruben, Cassel, Darion, Cheang, Kevin
Program analysis tools often produce large volumes of candidate vulnerability reports that require costly manual review, creating a practical challenge: how can security analysts prioritize the reports most likely to be true vulnerabilities? This paper investigates whether machine learning can be applied to prioritizing vulnerabilities reported by program analysis tools. We focus on Node.js packages and collect a benchmark of 1,883 Node.js packages, each containing one reported ACE or ACI vulnerability. We evaluate a variety of machine learning approaches, including classical models, graph neural networks (GNNs), large language models (LLMs), and hybrid models that combine GNN and LLMs, trained on data based on a dynamic program analysis tool's output. The top LLM achieves $F_{1} {=} 0.915$, while the best GNN and classical ML models reaching $F_{1} {=} 0.904$. At a less than 7% false-negative rate, the leading model eliminates 66.9% of benign packages from manual review, taking around 60 ms per package. If the best model is tuned to operate at a precision level of 0.8 (i.e., allowing 20% false positives amongst all warnings), our approach can detect 99.2% of exploitable taint flows while missing only 0.8%, demonstrating strong potential for real-world vulnerability triage.
Optimizing Clinical Fall Risk Prediction: A Data-Driven Integration of EHR Variables with the Johns Hopkins Fall Risk Assessment Tool
Ganjkhanloo, Fardin, Springer, Emmett, Hoyer, Erik H., Young, Daniel L., Ghobadi, Kimia
In this study we aim to better align fall risk prediction from the Johns Hopkins Fall Risk Assessment Tool (JHFRAT) with additional clinically meaningful measures via a data-driven modelling approach. We conducted a retrospective analysis of 54,209 inpatient admissions from three Johns Hopkins Health System hospitals between March 2022 and October 2023. A total of 20,208 admissions were included as high fall risk encounters, and 13,941 were included as low fall risk encounters. To incorporate clinical knowledge and maintain interpretability, we employed constrained score optimization (CSO) models on JHFRAT assessment data and additional electronic health record (EHR) variables. The model demonstrated significant improvements in predictive performance over the current JHFRAT (CSO AUC-ROC=0.91, JHFRAT AUC-ROC=0.86). The constrained score optimization models performed similarly with and without the EHR variables. Although the benchmark black-box model (XGBoost), improves upon the performance metrics of the knowledge-based constrained logistic regression (AUC-ROC=0.94), the CSO demonstrates more robustness to variations in risk labelling. This evidence-based approach provides a robust foundation for health systems to systematically enhance inpatient fall prevention protocols and patient safety using data-driven optimization techniques, contributing to improved risk assessment and resource allocation in healthcare settings.
Deep Learning in Dental Image Analysis: A Systematic Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Emerging Challenges
Zhou, Zhenhuan, Zhu, Jingbo, Zhang, Yuchen, Guan, Xiaohang, Wang, Peng, Li, Tao
Efficient analysis and processing of dental images are crucial for dentists to achieve accurate diagnosis and optimal treatment planning. However, dental imaging inherently poses several challenges, such as low contrast, metallic artifacts, and variations in projection angles. Combined with the subjectivity arising from differences in clinicians' expertise, manual interpretation often proves time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based automated dental image analysis (DIA) offers a promising solution to these issues and has become an integral part of computer-aided dental diagnosis and treatment. Among various AI technologies, deep learning (DL) stands out as the most widely applied and influential approach due to its superior feature extraction and representation capabilities. To comprehensively summarize recent progress in this field, we focus on the two fundamental aspects of DL research-datasets and models. In this paper, we systematically review 260 studies on DL applications in DIA, including 49 papers on publicly available dental datasets and 211 papers on DL-based algorithms. We first introduce the basic concepts of dental imaging and summarize the characteristics and acquisition methods of existing datasets. Then, we present the foundational techniques of DL and categorize relevant models and algorithms according to different DIA tasks, analyzing their network architectures, optimization strategies, training methods, and performance. Furthermore, we summarize commonly used training and evaluation metrics in the DIA domain. Finally, we discuss the current challenges of existing research and outline potential future directions. We hope that this work provides a valuable and systematic reference for researchers in this field. All supplementary materials and detailed comparison tables will be made publicly available on GitHub.
Equitable Survival Prediction: A Fairness-Aware Survival Modeling (FASM) Approach
Liu, Mingxuan, Ning, Yilin, Wang, Haoyuan, Hong, Chuan, Engelhard, Matthew, Bitterman, Danielle S., La Cava, William G., Liu, Nan
As machine learning models become increasingly integrated into healthcare, structural inequities and social biases embedded in clinical data can be perpetuated or even amplified by data-driven models. In survival analysis, censoring and time dynamics can further add complexity to fair model development. Additionally, algorithmic fairness approaches often overlook disparities in cross-group rankings, e.g., high-risk Black patients may be ranked below lower-risk White patients who do not experience the event of mortality. Such misranking can reinforce biological essentialism and undermine equitable care. We propose a Fairness-Aware Survival Modeling (FASM), designed to mitigate algorithmic bias regarding both intra-group and cross-group risk rankings over time. Using breast cancer prognosis as a representative case and applying FASM to SEER breast cancer data, we show that FASM substantially improves fairness while preserving discrimination performance comparable to fairness-unaware survival models. Time-stratified evaluations show that FASM maintains stable fairness over a 10-year horizon, with the greatest improvements observed during the mid-term of follow-up. Our approach enables the development of survival models that prioritize both accuracy and equity in clinical decision-making, advancing fairness as a core principle in clinical care.
PSO-XAI: A PSO-Enhanced Explainable AI Framework for Reliable Breast Cancer Detection
Raquib, Mirza, Das, Niloy, Prity, Farida Siddiqi, Fahim, Arafath Al, Murad, Saydul Akbar, Hossain, Mohammad Amzad, Hoque, MD Jiabul, Moni, Mohammad Ali
Breast cancer is considered the most critical and frequently diagnosed cancer in women worldwide, leading to an increase in cancer-related mortality. Early and accurate detection is crucial as it can help mitigate possible threats while improving survival rates. In terms of prediction, conventional diagnostic methods are often limited by variability, cost, and, most importantly, risk of misdiagnosis. To address these challenges, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool for computer-aided diagnosis, with feature selection playing a vital role in improving model performance and interpretability. This research study proposes an integrated framework that incorporates customized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for feature selection. This framework has been evaluated on a comprehensive set of 29 different models, spanning classical classifiers, ensemble techniques, neural networks, probabilistic algorithms, and instance-based algorithms. To ensure interpretability and clinical relevance, the study uses cross-validation in conjunction with explainable AI methods. Experimental evaluation showed that the proposed approach achieved a superior score of 99.1\% across all performance metrics, including accuracy and precision, while effectively reducing dimensionality and providing transparent, model-agnostic explanations. The results highlight the potential of combining swarm intelligence with explainable ML for robust, trustworthy, and clinically meaningful breast cancer diagnosis.
Structural Invariance Matters: Rethinking Graph Rewiring through Graph Metrics
Benoit, Alexandre, Aitken, Catherine, He, Yu
Graph rewiring has emerged as a key technique to alleviate over-squashing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers by modifying the graph topology to improve information flow. While effective, rewiring inherently alters the graph's structure, raising the risk of distorting important topology-dependent signals. Yet, despite the growing use of rewiring, little is known about which structural properties must be preserved to ensure both performance gains and structural fidelity. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of how rewiring affects a range of graph structural metrics, and how these changes relate to downstream task performance. We study seven diverse rewiring strategies and correlate changes in local and global graph properties with node classification accuracy. Our results reveal a consistent pattern: successful rewiring methods tend to preserve local structure while allowing for flexibility in global connectivity. These findings offer new insights into the design of effective rewiring strategies, bridging the gap between graph theory and practical GNN optimization.
Systematic Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Large Language Models
Hobelsberger, Christian, Winner, Theresa, Nawroth, Andreas, Mitevski, Oliver, Haensch, Anna-Carolina
Large language models (LLMs) produce outputs with varying levels of uncertainty, and, just as often, varying levels of correctness; making their practical reliability far from guaranteed. To quantify this uncertainty, we systematically evaluate four approaches for confidence estimation in LLM outputs: VCE, MSP, Sample Consistency, and CoCoA (Vashurin et al., 2025). For the evaluation of the approaches, we conduct experiments on four question-answering tasks using a state-of-the-art open-source LLM. Our results show that each uncertainty metric captures a different facet of model confidence and that the hybrid CoCoA approach yields the best reliability overall, improving both calibration and discrimination of correct answers. We discuss the trade-offs of each method and provide recommendations for selecting uncertainty measures in LLM applications.
Dynamic Weight Adjustment for Knowledge Distillation: Leveraging Vision Transformer for High-Accuracy Lung Cancer Detection and Real-Time Deployment
Khan, Saif Ur Rehman, Asim, Muhammad Nabeel, Vollmer, Sebastian, Dengel, Andreas
This paper presents the FuzzyDistillViT-MobileNet model, a novel approach for lung cancer (LC) classification, leveraging dynamic fuzzy logic-driven knowledge distillation (KD) to address uncertainty and complexity in disease diagnosis. Unlike traditional models that rely on static KD with fixed weights, our method dynamically adjusts the distillation weight using fuzzy logic, enabling the student model to focus on high-confidence regions while reducing attention to ambiguous areas. This dynamic adjustment improves the model ability to handle varying uncertainty levels across different regions of LC images. We employ the Vision Transformer (ViT-B32) as the instructor model, which effectively transfers knowledge to the student model, MobileNet, enhancing the student generalization capabilities. The training process is further optimized using a dynamic wait adjustment mechanism that adapts the training procedure for improved convergence and performance. To enhance image quality, we introduce pixel-level image fusion improvement techniques such as Gamma correction and Histogram Equalization. The processed images (Pix1 and Pix2) are fused using a wavelet-based fusion method to improve image resolution and feature preservation. This fusion method uses the wavedec2 function to standardize images to a 224x224 resolution, decompose them into multi-scale frequency components, and recursively average coefficients at each level for better feature representation. To address computational efficiency, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to select the most suitable pre-trained student model from a pool of 12 candidates, balancing model performance with computational cost. The model is evaluated on two datasets, including LC25000 histopathological images (99.16% accuracy) and IQOTH/NCCD CT-scan images (99.54% accuracy), demonstrating robustness across different imaging domains.
Tri-Modal Severity Fused Diagnosis across Depression and Post-traumatic Stress Disorders
Cenacchi, Filippo, Richards, Deborah, Cao, Longbing
Depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often co-occur with connected symptoms, complicating automated assessment, which is often binary and disorder specific. Clinically useful diagnosis needs severity aware cross disorder estimates and decision support explanations. Our unified tri modal affective severity framework synchronizes and fuses interview text with sentence level transformer embeddings, audio with log Mel statistics with deltas, and facial signals with action units, gaze, head and pose descriptors to output graded severities for diagnosing both depression (PHQ-8; 5 classes) and PTSD (3 classes). Standardized features are fused via a calibrated late fusion classifier, yielding per disorder probabilities and feature-level attributions. This severity aware tri-modal affective fusion approach is demoed on multi disorder concurrent depression and PTSD assessment. Stratified cross validation on DAIC derived corpora outperforms unimodal/ablation baselines. The fused model matches the strongest unimodal baseline on accuracy and weighted F1, while improving decision curve utility and robustness under noisy or missing modalities. For PTSD specifically, fusion reduces regression error and improves class concordance. Errors cluster between adjacent severities; extreme classes are identified reliably. Ablations show text contributes most to depression severity, audio and facial cues are critical for PTSD, whereas attributions align with linguistic and behavioral markers. Our approach offers reproducible evaluation and clinician in the loop support for affective clinical decision making.