They are 300 Poisson neurons, where the first 100 encode the whisker stimulus, the next 100 encode the auditory cue and the last 100 act as an extra noise source for our model. Out of the 300 neurons, 60 of them are inhibitory (red). The input neurons project unrestrictedly to the whole RSNN. The baseline firing rate of all input neurons is 5 Hz. The whisker stimulus and auditory cue are encoded with an increase of the firing rate for 10 ms, starting 4 ms after the onset of the actual stimuli.

They are 300 Poisson neurons, where the first 100 encode the whisker stimulus, the next 100 encode the auditory cue and the last 100 act as an extra noise source for our model. Out of the 300 neurons, 60 of them are inhibitory (red). The input neurons project unrestrictedly to the whole RSNN. The baseline firing rate of all input neurons is 5 Hz. The whisker stimulus and auditory cue are encoded with an increase of the firing rate for 10 ms, starting 4 ms after the onset of the actual stimuli.

This work investigates how a multilingual transformer model represents morphosyntactic properties of questions. We introduce the Question Type and Complexity (QTC) dataset with sentences across seven languages, annotated with type information and complexity metrics including dependency length, tree depth, and lexical density. Our evaluation extends probing methods to regression labels with selectivity controls to quantify gains in generalizability. We compare layer-wise probes on frozen Glot500-m (Imani et al., 2023) representations against subword TF-IDF baselines, and a fine-tuned model. Results show that statistical features classify questions effectively in languages with explicit marking, while neural probes capture fine-grained structural complexity patterns better. We use these results to evaluate when contextual representations outperform statistical baselines and whether parameter updates reduce the availability of pre-trained linguistic information.

The escalating rates of gun-related violence and mass shootings represent a significant threat to public safety. Timely and accurate information for law enforcement agencies is crucial in mitigating these incidents. Current commercial gunshot detection systems, while effective, often come with prohibitive costs. This research explores a cost-effective alternative by leveraging acoustic analysis of gunshot recordings, potentially obtainable from ubiquitous devices like cell phones, to not only detect gunshots but also classify the type of firearm used. This paper details a study on deciphering gun type hierarchies using a curated dataset of 3459 recordings. We investigate the fundamental acoustic characteristics of gunshots, including muzzle blasts and shockwaves, which vary based on firearm type, ammunition, and shooting direction. We propose and evaluate machine learning frameworks, including Support Vector Machines (SVMs) as a baseline and a more advanced Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for joint gunshot detection and gun type classification. Results indicate that our deep learning approach achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.58 on clean labeled data, outperforming the SVM baseline (mAP 0.39). Challenges related to data quality, environmental noise, and the generalization capabilities when using noisy web-sourced data (mAP 0.35) are also discussed. The long-term vision is to develop a highly accurate, real-time system deployable on common recording devices, significantly reducing detection costs and providing critical intelligence to first responders.

--Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in debugging for various programming languages. However, the application of LLMs to V erilog debugging remains insufficiently explored. Here, we present V eriDebug, an approach that integrates contrastive representation and guided correction capabilities for automated V erilog debugging. Unlike existing methods, V eriDebug employs an embedding-based technique to accurately retrieve internal information, followed by bug-fixing. V eriDebugunifies V erilog bug detection and correction through a shared parameter space. By simultaneously learning bug patterns and fixes, it streamlines debugging via contrastive embedding and guided correction. Empirical results show the efficacy of V eriDebugin enhancing V erilog debugging. This performance not only outperforms open-source alternatives but also exceeds larger closed-source models like GPT -3.5-turbo (36.6%), offering a more accurate alternative to conventional debugging methods. Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, enabling the generation of human-like text across diverse topics due to their unprecedented scale and complexity.

--The rapid increase in cybersecurity vulnerabilities necessitates automated tools for analyzing and classifying vulnerability reports. This paper presents a novel V ulnerability Report Classifier that leverages the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model to perform multi-label classification of Common V ulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reports from the National V ulnerability Database (NVD). The classifier predicts both the severity (Low, Medium, High, Critical) and vulnerability types (e.g., Buffer Overflow, XSS) from textual descriptions. We introduce a custom training pipeline using a combined loss function--Cross-Entropy for severity and Binary Cross-Entropy with Logits for types--integrated into a Hugging Face Trainer subclass. Experiments on recent NVD data demonstrate promising results, with decreasing evaluation loss across epochs. The system is deployed via a REST API and a Streamlit UI, enabling real-time vulnerability analysis. This work contributes a scalable, open-source solution for cybersecurity practitioners to automate vulnerability triage. I NTRODUCTION The relentless evolution of software systems, driven by their increasing complexity and interconnectedness, has ushered in a dramatic rise in cybersecurity vulnerabilities, presenting a formidable challenge to organizations, governments, and individual users alike. Each year, thousands of new vulnerabilities are identified and cataloged, with repositories like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) serving as critical resources for tracking these threats.

Single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) has significantly advanced our understanding of the disease etiology of neurodegenerative disorders. However, the low quality of specimens derived from postmortem brain tissues, combined with the high variability caused by disease heterogeneity, makes it challenging to integrate snRNA-seq data from multiple sources for precise analyses. To address these challenges, we present scMamba, a pre-trained model designed to improve the quality and utility of snRNA-seq analysis, with a particular focus on neurodegenerative diseases. Inspired by the recent Mamba model, scMamba introduces a novel architecture that incorporates a linear adapter layer, gene embeddings, and bidirectional Mamba blocks, enabling efficient processing of snRNA-seq data while preserving information from the raw input. Notably, scMamba learns generalizable features of cells and genes through pre-training on snRNA-seq data, without relying on dimension reduction or selection of highly variable genes. We demonstrate that scMamba outperforms benchmark methods in various downstream tasks, including cell type annotation, doublet detection, imputation, and the identification of differentially expressed genes.

This work explores how to fine-tune large language models using prompt engineering techniques with contextual information for generating an accurate text description of the full story, ready to be forwarded to off-the-shelve speech synthesis tools. We propose to use existing computer vision and optical character recognition techniques to build a grounded context from the comic strip image content, such as panels, characters, text, reading order and the association of bubbles and characters. Then we infer character identification and generate comic book script with context-aware panel description including character's appearance, posture, mood, dialogues etc. We believe that such enriched content description can be easily used to produce audiobook and eBook with various voices for characters, captions and playing sound effects. Keywords: comics understanding large language model prompt engineering character identification comic book script accessible comics.

Cervical cancer stands as a predominant cause of female mortality, underscoring the need for regular screenings to enable early diagnosis and preemptive treatment of pre-cancerous conditions. The transformation zone in the cervix, where cellular differentiation occurs, plays a critical role in the detection of abnormalities. Colposcopy has emerged as a pivotal tool in cervical cancer prevention since it provides a meticulous examination of cervical abnormalities. However, challenges in visual evaluation necessitate the development of Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. We propose a novel CAD system that combines the strengths of various deep-learning descriptors (ResNet50, ResNet101, and ResNet152) with appropriate feature normalization (min-max) as well as feature reduction technique (LDA). The combination of different descriptors ensures that all the features (low-level like edges and colour, high-level like shape and texture) are captured, feature normalization prevents biased learning, and feature reduction avoids overfitting. We do experiments on the IARC dataset provided by WHO. The dataset is initially segmented and balanced. Our approach achieves exceptional performance in the range of 97%-100% for both the normal-abnormal and the type classification. A competitive approach for type classification on the same dataset achieved 81%-91% performance.

Table understanding (TU) has achieved promising advancements, but it faces the challenges of the scarcity of manually labeled tables and the presence of complex table structures.To address these challenges, we propose HGT, a framework with a heterogeneous graph (HG)-enhanced large language model (LLM) to tackle few-shot TU tasks.It leverages the LLM by aligning the table semantics with the LLM's parametric knowledge through soft prompts and instruction turning and deals with complex tables by a multi-task pre-training scheme involving three novel multi-granularity self-supervised HG pre-training objectives.We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of HGT, showing that it outperforms the SOTA for few-shot complex TU on several benchmarks.