Statistical Learning
News Sentiment Embeddings for Stock Price Forecasting
This paper will discuss how headline data can be used to predict stock prices. The stock price in question is the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, also known as SPY that tracks the performance of the largest 500 publicly traded corporations in the United States. A key focus is to use news headlines from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) to predict the movement of stock prices on a daily timescale with OpenAI-based text embedding models used to create vector encodings of each headline with principal component analysis (PCA) to exact the key features. The challenge of this work is to capture the time-dependent and time-independent, nuanced impacts of news on stock prices while handling potential lag effects and market noise. Financial and economic data were collected to improve model performance; such sources include the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) and Treasury Interest Yields. Over 390 machine-learning inference models were trained. The preliminary results show that headline data embeddings greatly benefit stock price prediction by at least 40% compared to training and optimizing a machine learning system without headline data embeddings.
Neural Network-based Study for Rice Leaf Disease Recognition and Classification: A Comparative Analysis Between Feature-based Model and Direct Imaging Model
Prity, Farida Siddiqi, Raquib, Mirza, Murad, Saydul Akbar, Rafi, Md. Jubayar Alam, Bhuiyan, Md. Khairul Bashar, Bairagi, Anupam Kumar
Rice leaf diseases significantly reduce productivity and cause economic losses, highlighting the need for early detection to enable effective management and improve yields. This study proposes Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based image-processing techniques for timely classification and recognition of rice diseases. Despite the prevailing approach of directly inputting images of rice leaves into ANNs, there is a noticeable absence of thorough comparative analysis between the Feature Analysis Detection Model (FADM) and Direct Image-Centric Detection Model (DICDM), specifically when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of Feature Extraction Algorithms (FEAs). Hence, this research presents initial experiments on the Feature Analysis Detection Model, utilizing various image Feature Extraction Algorithms, Dimensionality Reduction Algorithms (DRAs), Feature Selection Algorithms (FSAs), and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). The experiments are carried out on datasets encompassing bacterial leaf blight, brown spot, leaf blast, leaf scald, Sheath blight rot, and healthy leaf, utilizing 10-fold Cross-Validation method. A Direct Image-Centric Detection Model is established without the utilization of any FEA, and the evaluation of classification performance relies on different metrics. Ultimately, an exhaustive contrast is performed between the achievements of the Feature Analysis Detection Model and Direct Image-Centric Detection Model in classifying rice leaf diseases. The results reveal that the highest performance is attained using the Feature Analysis Detection Model. The adoption of the proposed Feature Analysis Detection Model for detecting rice leaf diseases holds excellent potential for improving crop health, minimizing yield losses, and enhancing overall productivity and sustainability of rice farming.
Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization
Cheng, De, Xu, Zhipeng, Jiang, Xinyang, Li, Dongsheng, Wang, Nannan, Gao, Xinbo
Domain Generalization (DG) seeks to develop a versatile model capable of performing effectively on unseen target domains. Notably, recent advances in pre-trained Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the generalization capabilities of deep learning models. Despite the increasing attention toward VFM-based domain prompt tuning within DG, the effective design of prompts capable of disentangling invariant features across diverse domains remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose addressing this challenge by leveraging the controllable and flexible language prompt of the VFM. Noting that the text modality of VFMs is naturally easier to disentangle, we introduce a novel framework for text feature-guided visual prompt tuning. This framework first automatically disentangles the text prompt using a large language model (LLM) and then learns domain-invariant visual representation guided by the disentangled text feature. However, relying solely on language to guide visual feature disentanglement has limitations, as visual features can sometimes be too complex or nuanced to be fully captured by descriptive text. To address this, we introduce Worst Explicit Representation Alignment (WERA), which extends text-guided visual prompts by incorporating an additional set of abstract prompts. These prompts enhance source domain diversity through stylized image augmentations, while alignment constraints ensure that visual representations remain consistent across both the original and augmented distributions. Experiments conducted on major DG datasets, including PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraInc, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods.
KAIROS: Scalable Model-Agnostic Data Valuation
Zhu, Jiongli, Prashant, Parjanya Prajakta, Cloninger, Alex, Salimi, Babak
Training data increasingly shapes not only model accuracy but also regulatory compliance and market valuation of AI assets. Yet existing valuation methods remain inadequate: model-based techniques depend on a single fitted model and inherit its biases, while algorithm-based approaches such as Data Shapley require costly retrainings at web scale. Recent Wasserstein-based model-agnostic methods rely on approximations that misrank examples relative to their true leave-one-out (LOO) utility. We introduce KAIROS, a scalable, model-agnostic valuation framework that assigns each example a distributional influence score: its contribution to the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between the empirical training distribution and a clean reference set. Unlike Wasserstein surrogates, our MMD-based influence admits a closed-form solution that faithfully approximates the exact LOO ranking within $O(1/N^2)$ error, requires no retraining, and naturally extends to conditional kernels for unified label- and feature-error detection. Moreover, KAIROS supports efficient online updates: when a new batch of size m arrives, all scores can be updated in $O(mN)$ time, delivering up to 50x speedup without compromising ranking quality. Empirical evaluations on noise, mislabeling, and poisoning benchmarks show that KAIROS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art model-, Shapley-, and Wasserstein-based baselines in both accuracy and runtime. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees, including symmetry for reproducible rankings and density-separation for interpretable thresholds.
Assessing Quantum Advantage for Gaussian Process Regression
Lowe, Dominic, Kim, M. S., Bondesan, Roberto
Over the last decade, the question of whether quantum computers can speed up machine learning workloads has been under intense investigation [1, 2, 3]. With quantum computers excelling at performing matrix operations in high-dimensional spaces, a natural question is whether machine learning algorithms can be implemented using quantum linear algebra more efficiently [4, 5, 6]. The workhorse of these proposals is the HHL algorithm that approximates the solution of a linear system [7]. An important caveat of these quantum machine learning algorithms is that for exponential speedup over the best classical methods, we need to load the classical data into a quantum superposition in logarithmic time, an assumption whose practicality has been heavily debated [8]. In fact, classical algorithms supplied with a similar input data structure exhibit only a polynomial slowdown compared to their quantum analogues [9, 10].
Wildlife Target Re-Identification Using Self-supervised Learning in Non-Urban Settings
Muthivhi, Mufhumudzi, van Zyl, Terence L.
--Wildlife re-identification aims to match individuals of the same species across different observations. Current state-of-the-art (SOT A) models rely on class labels to train supervised models for individual classification. This dependence on annotated data has driven the curation of numerous large-scale wildlife datasets. This study investigates self-supervised learning Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for wildlife re-identification. We automatically extract two distinct views of an individual using temporal image pairs from camera trap data without supervision. The image pairs train a self-supervised model from a potentially endless stream of video data. We evaluate the learnt representations against supervised features on open-world scenarios and transfer learning in various wildlife downstream tasks. The analysis of the experimental results shows that self-supervised models are more robust even with limited data. Moreover, self-supervised features outperform supervision across all downstream tasks. The code is available here https://github.com/pxpana/.
Holistic Continual Learning under Concept Drift with Adaptive Memory Realignment
Ashrafee, Alif, Kozal, Jedrzej, Wozniak, Michal, Krawczyk, Bartosz
Traditional continual learning methods prioritize knowledge retention and focus primarily on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, implicitly assuming that the data distribution of previously learned tasks remains static. This overlooks the dynamic nature of real-world data streams, where concept drift permanently alters previously seen data and demands both stability and rapid adaptation. We introduce a holistic framework for continual learning under concept drift that simulates realistic scenarios by evolving task distributions. As a baseline, we consider Full Relearning (FR), in which the model is retrained from scratch on newly labeled samples from the drifted distribution. While effective, this approach incurs substantial annotation and computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Memory Realignment (AMR), a lightweight alternative that equips rehearsal-based learners with a drift-aware adaptation mechanism. AMR selectively removes outdated samples of drifted classes from the replay buffer and repopulates it with a small number of up-to-date instances, effectively realigning memory with the new distribution. This targeted resampling matches the performance of FR while reducing the need for labeled data and computation by orders of magnitude. To enable reproducible evaluation, we introduce four concept-drift variants of standard vision benchmarks: Fashion-MNIST-CD, CIFAR10-CD, CIFAR100-CD, and Tiny-ImageNet-CD, where previously seen classes reappear with shifted representations. Comprehensive experiments on these datasets using several rehearsal-based baselines show that AMR consistently counters concept drift, maintaining high accuracy with minimal overhead. These results position AMR as a scalable solution that reconciles stability and plasticity in non-stationary continual learning environments.
Multi-Label Classification Framework for Hurricane Damage Assessment
Liu, Zhangding, Mohammadi, Neda, Taylor, John E.
Hurricanes cause widespread destruction, resulting in diverse damage types and severities that require timely and accurate assessment for effective disaster response. While traditional single-label classification methods fall short of capturing the complexity of post-hurricane damage, this study introduces a novel multi-label classification framework for assessing damage using aerial imagery. The proposed approach integrates a feature extraction module based on ResNet and a class-specific attention mechanism to identify multiple damage types within a single image. Using the Rescuenet dataset from Hurricane Michael, the proposed method achieves a mean average precision of 90.23%, outperforming existing baseline methods. This framework enhances post-hurricane damage assessment, enabling more targeted and efficient disaster response and contributing to future strategies for disaster mitigation and resilience. This paper has been accepted at the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE 2025), and the camera-ready version will appear in the official conference proceedings.
Dynamic Similarity Graph Construction with Kernel Density Estimation
Laenen, Steinar, Macgregor, Peter, Sun, He
In the kernel density estimation (KDE) problem, we are given a set $X$ of data points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, a kernel function $k: \mathbb{R}^d \times \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, and a query point $\mathbf{q} \in \mathbb{R}^d$, and the objective is to quickly output an estimate of $\sum_{\mathbf{x} \in X} k(\mathbf{q}, \mathbf{x})$. In this paper, we consider $\textsf{KDE}$ in the dynamic setting, and introduce a data structure that efficiently maintains the estimates for a set of query points as data points are added to $X$ over time. Based on this, we design a dynamic data structure that maintains a sparse approximation of the fully connected similarity graph on $X$, and develop a fast dynamic spectral clustering algorithm. We further evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Embedding-based Retrieval in Multimodal Content Moderation
Liang, Hanzhong, Shi, Jinghao, Shen, Xiang, Wang, Zixuan, Wen, Vera, Mehrani, Ardalan, Chen, Zhiqian, Wu, Yifan, Zhang, Zhixin
Video understanding plays a fundamental role for content moderation on short video platforms, enabling the detection of inappropriate content. While classification remains the dominant approach for content moderation, it often struggles in scenarios requiring rapid and cost-efficient responses, such as trend adaptation and urgent escalations. To address this issue, we introduce an Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) method designed to complement traditional classification approaches. We first leverage a Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) framework to train a suite of foundation embedding models, including both single-modal and multi-modal architectures. Our models demonstrate superior performance over established contrastive learning methods such as CLIP and MoCo. Building on these embedding models, we design and implement the embedding-based retrieval system that integrates embedding generation and video retrieval to enable efficient and effective trend handling. Comprehensive offline experiments on 25 diverse emerging trends show that EBR improves ROC-AUC from 0.85 to 0.99 and PR-AUC from 0.35 to 0.95. Further online experiments reveal that EBR increases action rates by 10.32% and reduces operational costs by over 80%, while also enhancing interpretability and flexibility compared to classification-based solutions.