Statistical Learning
Product vs. Process: Exploring EFL Students' Editing of AI-Generated Text for Expository Writing
Woo, David James, Yu, Yangyang, Guo, Kai, Huang, Yilin, Fung, April Ka Yeng
Text generated by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots is increasingly used in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing contexts, yet its impact on students' expository writing process and compositions remains understudied. This research examines how EFL secondary students edit AI-generated text. Exploring editing behaviors in their expository writing process and in expository compositions, and their effect on human-rated scores for content, organization, language, and overall quality. Participants were 39 Hong Kong secondary students who wrote an expository composition with AI chatbots in a workshop. A convergent design was employed to analyze their screen recordings and compositions to examine students' editing behaviors and writing qualities. Analytical methods included qualitative coding, descriptive statistics, temporal sequence analysis, human-rated scoring, and multiple linear regression analysis. We analyzed over 260 edits per dataset, and identified two editing patterns: one where students refined introductory units repeatedly before progressing, and another where they quickly shifted to extensive edits in body units (e.g., topic and supporting sentences). MLR analyses revealed that the number of AI-generated words positively predicted all score dimensions, while most editing variables showed minimal impact. These results suggest a disconnect between students' significant editing effort and improved composition quality, indicating AI supports but does not replace writing skills. The findings highlight the importance of genre-specific instruction and process-focused writing before AI integration. Educators should also develop assessments valuing both process and product to encourage critical engagement with AI text.
Categorical Classification of Book Summaries Using Word Embedding Techniques
Keskin, Kerem, Keleş, Mümine Kaya
In this study, book summaries and categories taken from book sites were classified using word embedding methods, natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms. In addition, one hot encoding, Word2Vec and Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF - IDF) methods, which are frequently used word embedding methods were used in this study and their success was compared. Additionally, the combination table of the pre - processing methods used is shown and added to the table. Looking at the results, it was observed that Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression Models and TF - IDF and One - Hot Encoder word embedding techniques gave more successful results for Turkish texts. Using word2vec to process big text data.
A Scalable and High Availability Solution for Recommending Resolutions to Problem Tickets
Saragadam, Harish, Nayak, Chetana K, Bose, Joy
-- Resolution of i ncidents or problem tickets is a common theme in service industries in any sector, including billing and charging systems in telecom domain. Machine learning can help to identify patterns and suggest resolutions for the problem tickets, based on patterns in the historical data of the tickets . However, this process may be complicated due to a variety of phenomena such as data drift and issues such as missing data, lack of data pertaining to resolutions of past incidents, too many similar sound ing resolutions due to free text and similar sounding text . This paper proposes a robust ML - driven solution employing clustering, supervised learning, and advanced NLP models to tackle these challenges effectively. Building on previous work, w e demonstrate clustering - based resolution identification, supervised classification with LDA, Siamese networks, and One - shot learning, Index embedding . Additionally, we present a real - time dashboard and a highly available Kubernetes - based production deployment. Our experiments with both the open - source Bitext customer - support dataset and proprietary telecom datasets demonstrate high prediction accuracy. The problem of recommend ing resolutions for problem tickets or incidents on the basis of historical data is an important problem for service users, including telecom operators. Typically, service desks have dedicated manual teams that perform triaging of the issues and root cause analysis, and recommending a solution can take several hours end to end. Using machine learning models to recommend resolutions can save significant time and manpower of the operators by recommending solutions based on historical i ncident data. However, real - world application involves addressing several practical challenges: Diverse ticketing formats across service desks.
TiVy: Time Series Visual Summary for Scalable Visualization
Chan, Gromit Yeuk-Yin, Nonato, Luis Gustavo, Palpanas, Themis, Silva, Cláudio T., Freire, Juliana
Visualizing multiple time series presents fundamental tradeoffs between scalability and visual clarity. Time series capture the behavior of many large-scale real-world processes, from stock market trends to urban activities. Users often gain insights by visualizing them as line charts, juxtaposing or superposing multiple time series to compare them and identify trends and patterns. However, existing representations struggle with scalability: when covering long time spans, leading to visual clutter from too many small multiples or overlapping lines. We propose TiVy, a new algorithm that summarizes time series using sequential patterns. It transforms the series into a set of symbolic sequences based on subsequence visual similarity using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), then constructs a disjoint grouping of similar subsequences based on the frequent sequential patterns. The grouping result, a visual summary of time series, provides uncluttered superposition with fewer small multiples. Unlike common clustering techniques, TiVy extracts similar subsequences (of varying lengths) aligned in time. We also present an interactive time series visualization that renders large-scale time series in real-time. Our experimental evaluation shows that our algorithm (1) extracts clear and accurate patterns when visualizing time series data, (2) achieves a significant speed-up (1000X) compared to a straightforward DTW clustering. We also demonstrate the efficiency of our approach to explore hidden structures in massive time series data in two usage scenarios.
Machine learning-based multimodal prognostic models integrating pathology images and high-throughput omic data for overall survival prediction in cancer: a systematic review
Jennings, Charlotte, Broad, Andrew, Godson, Lucy, Clarke, Emily, Westhead, David, Treanor, Darren
Multimodal machine learning integrating histopathology and molecular data shows promise for cancer prognostication. We systematically reviewed studies combining whole slide images (WSIs) and high-throughput omics to predict overall survival. Searches of EMBASE, PubMed, and Cochrane CENTRAL (12/08/2024), plus citation screening, identified eligible studies. Data extraction used CHARMS; bias was assessed with PROBAST+AI; synthesis followed SWiM and PRISMA 2020. Protocol: PROSPERO (CRD42024594745). Forty-eight studies (all since 2017) across 19 cancer types met criteria; all used The Cancer Genome Atlas. Approaches included regularised Cox regression (n=4), classical ML (n=13), and deep learning (n=31). Reported c-indices ranged 0.550-0.857; multimodal models typically outperformed unimodal ones. However, all studies showed unclear/high bias, limited external validation, and little focus on clinical utility. Multimodal WSI-omics survival prediction is a fast-growing field with promising results but needs improved methodological rigor, broader datasets, and clinical evaluation. Funded by NPIC, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, UK (Project 104687), supported by UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
Segmentation-free Goodness of Pronunciation
Cao, Xinwei, Fan, Zijian, Svendsen, Torbjørn, Salvi, Giampiero
Mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) is a significant part in modern computer aided language learning (CALL) systems. Within MDD, phoneme-level pronunciation assessment is key to helping L2 learners improve their pronunciation. However, most systems are based on a form of goodness of pronunciation (GOP) which requires pre-segmentation of speech into phonetic units. This limits the accuracy of these methods and the possibility to use modern CTC-based acoustic models for their evaluation. In this study, we first propose self-alignment GOP (GOP-SA) that enables the use of CTC-trained ASR models for MDD. Next, we define a more general alignment-free method that takes all possible alignments of the target phoneme into account (GOP-AF). We give a theoretical account of our definition of GOP-AF, an implementation that solves potential numerical issues as well as a proper normalization which makes the method applicable with acoustic models with different peakiness over time. We provide extensive experimental results on the CMU Kids and Speechocean762 datasets comparing the different definitions of our methods, estimating the dependency of GOP-AF on the peakiness of the acoustic models and on the amount of context around the target phoneme. Finally, we compare our methods with recent studies over the Speechocean762 data showing that the feature vectors derived from the proposed method achieve state-of-the-art results on phoneme-level pronunciation assessment.
Quantum Boltzmann Machines using Parallel Annealing for Medical Image Classification
Schuman, Daniëlle, Seebode, Mark V., Rohe, Tobias, Mansky, Maximilian Balthasar, Schroedl-Baumann, Michael, Stein, Jonas, Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia, Krellner, Florian
Exploiting the fact that samples drawn from a quantum annealer inherently follow a Boltzmann-like distribution, annealing-based Quantum Boltzmann Machines (QBMs) have gained increasing popularity in the quantum research community. While they harbor great promises for quantum speed-up, their usage currently stays a costly endeavor, as large amounts of QPU time are required to train them. This limits their applicability in the NISQ era. Following the idea of Noè et al. (2024), who tried to alleviate this cost by incorporating parallel quantum annealing into their unsupervised training of QBMs, this paper presents an improved version of parallel quantum annealing that we employ to train QBMs in a supervised setting. Saving qubits to encode the inputs, the latter setting allows us to test our approach on medical images from the MedMNIST data set (Yang et al., 2023), thereby moving closer to real-world applicability of the technology. Our experiments show that QBMs using our approach already achieve reasonable results, comparable to those of similarly-sized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), with markedly smaller numbers of epochs than these classical models. Our parallel annealing technique leads to a speed-up of almost 70 % compared to regular annealing-based BM executions.
Unsupervised risk factor identification across cancer types and data modalities via explainable artificial intelligence
Ferle, Maximilian, Ader, Jonas, Wiemers, Thomas, Grieb, Nora, Lindenmeyer, Adrian, Meyer, Hans-Jonas, Neumuth, Thomas, Kreuz, Markus, Reiche, Kristin, Merz, Maximilian
Risk stratification is a key tool in clinical decision-making, yet current approaches often fail to translate sophisticated survival analysis into actionable clinical criteria. We present a novel method for unsupervised machine learning that directly optimizes for survival heterogeneity across patient clusters through a differentiable adaptation of the multivariate logrank statistic. Unlike most existing methods that rely on proxy metrics, our approach represents novel methodology for training any neural network architecture on any data modality to identify prognostically distinct patient groups. We thoroughly evaluate the method in simulation experiments and demonstrate its utility in practice by applying it to two distinct cancer types: analyzing laboratory parameters from multiple myeloma patients and computed tomography images from non-small cell lung cancer patients, identifying prognostically distinct patient subgroups with significantly different survival outcomes in both cases. Post-hoc explainability analyses uncover clinically meaningful features determining the group assignments which align well with established risk factors and thus lend strong weight to the methods utility. This pan-cancer, model-agnostic approach represents a valuable advancement in clinical risk stratification, enabling the discovery of novel prognostic signatures across diverse data types while providing interpretable results that promise to complement treatment personalization and clinical decision-making in oncology and beyond.
Hierarchy-of-Visual-Words: a Learning-based Approach for Trademark Image Retrieval
Lourenço, Vítor N., Silva, Gabriela G., Fernandes, Leandro A. F.
From the background, the procedure extracts the holes' shapes and associate them with the component shapes' list (lines 7 and 8). The foreground shapes are used in the next iterations (lines 5 and 9) until all component shapes have been extracted from the initial binary trademark image. Shape's feature extraction consists of building a feature vector for each component shape of a given trademark image (Figs. 1 (d) and (k)). These 29-dimension feature vectors combine region-based and contour-based descriptors. Shape's region is described by the 25 moments of the Zernike polynomials (ZM) of order p from 0 to 8: Z p,q= p + 1 π null ρ null θ V p,q(ρ,θ) I ( ρ,θ), (1) where ρ = null x 2 + y 2 is the length of vector from origin to pixel (x,y), θ is the angle between the vector defining ρ and the x -axis in the counter clockwise direction and V p,q(ρ,θ) is a Zernike polynomial of order p with repetition q that forms a complete set over the interior of the unit disk inscribing the component shape: V p,q( ρ,θ) = R p,q(ρ) exp ( i qθ) .
Teach Me to Trick: Exploring Adversarial Transferability via Knowledge Distillation
Pradhan, Siddhartha, Shiwakoti, Shikshya, Bathuri, Neha
We investigate whether knowledge distillation (KD) from multiple heterogeneous teacher models can enhance the generation of transferable adversarial examples. A lightweight student model is trained using two KD strategies: curriculum-based switching and joint optimization, with ResNet50 and DenseNet-161 as teachers. The trained student is then used to generate adversarial examples using FG, FGS, and PGD attacks, which are evaluated against a black-box target model (GoogLeNet). Our results show that student models distilled from multiple teachers achieve attack success rates comparable to ensemble-based baselines, while reducing adversarial example generation time by up to a factor of six. An ablation study further reveals that lower temperature settings and the inclusion of hard-label supervision significantly enhance transferability. These findings suggest that KD can serve not only as a model compression technique but also as a powerful tool for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of black-box adversarial attacks.