Automated radiology report generation aims to expedite the tedious and error-prone reporting process for radiologists. While recent works have made progress, learning to align medical images and textual findings remains challenging due to the relative scarcity of labeled medical data. For example, datasets for this task are much smaller than those used for image captioning in computer vision. In this work, we propose to transfer representations from CLIP, a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model, to better capture cross-modal semantics between images and texts. However, directly applying CLIP is suboptimal due to the domain gap between natural images and radiology. To enable efficient adaptation, we introduce UniCrossAdapter, lightweight adapter modules that are incorporated into CLIP and fine-tuned on the target task while keeping base parameters fixed. The adapters are distributed across modalities and their interaction to enhance vision-language alignment. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, advancing state-of-the-art in radiology report generation. The proposed transfer learning framework provides a means of harnessing semantic knowledge from large-scale pre-trained models to tackle data-scarce medical vision-language tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chauncey-tow/MRG-CLIP.
Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have been driven by the increasing availability of paired 2D data. However, the development of 3D diffusion models has been hindered by the scarcity of high-quality 3D data, resulting in less competitive performance compared to their 2D counterparts. To address this challenge, we propose repurposing pre-trained 2D diffusion models for 3D object generation. We introduce Gaussian Atlas, a novel representation that utilizes dense 2D grids, enabling the fine-tuning of 2D diffusion models to generate 3D Gaussians. Our approach demonstrates successful transfer learning from a pre-trained 2D diffusion model to a 2D manifold flattened from 3D structures. To support model training, we compile GaussianVerse, a large-scale dataset comprising 205K high-quality 3D Gaussian fittings of various 3D objects. Our experimental results show that text-to-image diffusion models can be effectively adapted for 3D content generation, bridging the gap between 2D and 3D modeling.
The EU AI Act underscores the importance of transparency, user-centricity, and robustness in AI systems, particularly for high-risk systems. In response, we present advancements in XentricAI, an explainable hand gesture recognition (HGR) system designed to meet these regulatory requirements. XentricAI adresses fundamental challenges in HGR, such as the opacity of black-box models using explainable AI methods and the handling of distributional shifts in real-world data through transfer learning techniques. We extend an existing radar-based HGR dataset by adding 28,000 new gestures, with contributions from multiple users across varied locations, including 24,000 out-of-distribution gestures. Leveraging this real-world dataset, we enhance XentricAI's capabilities by integrating a variational autoencoder module for improved gesture anomaly detection, incorporating user-specific thresholding. This integration enables the identification of 11.50% more anomalous gestures. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a 97.5% sucess rate in characterizing these anomalies, significantly improving system explainability. Furthermore, the implementation of transfer learning techniques has shown a substantial increase in user adaptability, with an average improvement of at least 15.17%. This work contributes to the development of trustworthy AI systems by providing both technical advancements and regulatory compliance, offering a commercially viable solution that aligns with the EU AI Act requirements.
For a data-driven and physics combined modelling of unsteady flow systems with moving immersed boundaries, Sundar {\it et al.} introduced an immersed boundary-aware (IBA) framework, combining Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and the immersed boundary method (IBM). This approach was beneficial because it avoided case-specific transformations to a body-attached reference frame. Building on this, we now address the challenges of long time integration in velocity reconstruction and pressure recovery by extending this IBA framework with sequential learning strategies. Key difficulties for PINNs in long time integration include temporal sparsity, long temporal domains and rich spectral content. To tackle these, a moving boundary-enabled PINN is developed, proposing two sequential learning strategies: - a time marching with gradual increase in time domain size, however, this approach struggles with error accumulation over long time domains; and - a time decomposition which divides the temporal domain into smaller segments, combined with transfer learning it effectively reduces error propagation and computational complexity. The key findings for modelling of incompressible unsteady flows past a flapping airfoil include: - for quasi-periodic flows, the time decomposition approach with preferential spatio-temporal sampling improves accuracy and efficiency for pressure recovery and aerodynamic load reconstruction, and, - for long time domains, decomposing it into smaller temporal segments and employing multiple sub-networks, simplifies the problem ensuring stability and reduced network sizes. This study highlights the limitations of traditional PINNs for long time integration of flow-structure interaction problems and demonstrates the benefits of decomposition-based strategies for addressing error accumulation, computational cost, and complex dynamics.
Recent advancements in detecting tumors using deep learning on breast ultrasound images (BUSI) have demonstrated significant success. Deep CNNs and vision-transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated individually promising initial performance. However, challenges related to model complexity and contrast, texture, and tumor morphology variations introduce uncertainties that hinder the effectiveness of current methods. This study introduces a novel hybrid framework, CB-Res-RBCMT, combining customized residual CNNs and new ViT components for detailed BUSI cancer analysis. The proposed RBCMT uses stem convolution blocks with CNN Meet Transformer (CMT) blocks, followed by new Regional and boundary (RB) feature extraction operations for capturing contrast and morphological variations. Moreover, the CMT block incorporates global contextual interactions through multi-head attention, enhancing computational efficiency with a lightweight design. Additionally, the customized inverse residual and stem CNNs within the CMT effectively extract local texture information and handle vanishing gradients. Finally, the new channel-boosted (CB) strategy enriches the feature diversity of the limited dataset by combining the original RBCMT channels with transfer learning-based residual CNN-generated maps. These diverse channels are processed through a spatial attention block for optimal pixel selection, reducing redundancy and improving the discrimination of minor contrast and texture variations. The proposed CB-Res-RBCMT achieves an F1-score of 95.57%, accuracy of 95.63%, sensitivity of 96.42%, and precision of 94.79% on the standard harmonized stringent BUSI dataset, outperforming existing ViT and CNN methods. These results demonstrate the versatility of our integrated CNN-Transformer framework in capturing diverse features and delivering superior performance in BUSI cancer diagnosis.
The promising potential of AI and network convergence in improving networking performance and enabling new service capabilities has recently attracted significant interest. Existing network AI solutions, while powerful, are mainly built based on the close-loop and passive learning framework, resulting in major limitations in autonomous solution finding and dynamic environmental adaptation. Agentic AI has recently been introduced as a promising solution to address the above limitations and pave the way for true generally intelligent and beneficial AI systems. The key idea is to create a networking ecosystem to support a diverse range of autonomous and embodied AI agents in fulfilling their goals. In this paper, we focus on the novel challenges and requirements of agentic AI networking. We propose AgentNet, a novel framework for supporting interaction, collaborative learning, and knowledge transfer among AI agents. We introduce a general architectural framework of AgentNet and then propose a generative foundation model (GFM)-based implementation in which multiple GFM-as-agents have been created as an interactive knowledge-base to bootstrap the development of embodied AI agents according to different task requirements and environmental features. We consider two application scenarios, digital-twin-based industrial automation and metaverse-based infotainment system, to describe how to apply AgentNet for supporting efficient task-driven collaboration and interaction among AI agents.
Transfer Learning (TL) is a powerful tool that enables robots to transfer learned policies across different environments, tasks, or embodiments. To further facilitate this process, efforts have been made to combine it with Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) for more flexible and efficient policy transfer. However, these approaches are almost exclusively limited to offline demonstrations collected before policy transfer starts, which may suffer from the intrinsic issue of covariance shift brought by LfD and harm the performance of policy transfer. Meanwhile, extensive work in the learning-from-scratch setting has shown that online demonstrations can effectively alleviate covariance shift and lead to better policy performance with improved sample efficiency. This work combines these insights to introduce online demonstrations into a policy transfer setting. We present Policy Transfer with Online Demonstrations, an active LfD algorithm for policy transfer that can optimize the timing and content of queries for online episodic expert demonstrations under a limited demonstration budget. We evaluate our method in eight robotic scenarios, involving policy transfer across diverse environment characteristics, task objectives, and robotic embodiments, with the aim to transfer a trained policy from a source task to a related but different target task. The results show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines in terms of average success rate and sample efficiency, compared to two canonical LfD methods with offline demonstrations and one active LfD method with online demonstrations. Additionally, we conduct preliminary sim-to-real tests of the transferred policy on three transfer scenarios in the real-world environment, demonstrating the policy effectiveness on a real robot manipulator.
Identifying claims requiring verification is a critical task in automated fact-checking, especially given the proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms. Despite significant progress in the task, there remain open challenges such as dealing with multilingual and multimodal data prevalent in online discourse. Addressing the multilingual challenge, recent efforts have focused on fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual language models. While these models can handle multiple languages, their ability to effectively transfer cross-lingual knowledge for detecting claims spreading on social media remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce \textit{EX-Claim}, an entity-aware cross-lingual claim detection model that generalizes well to handle claims written in any language. The model leverages entity information derived from named entity recognition and entity linking techniques to improve the language-level performance of both seen and unseen languages during training. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets from different social media platforms demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms the baselines, across 27 languages, and achieves the highest rate of knowledge transfer, even with limited training data.
While representation learning and generative modeling seek to understand visual data, unifying both domains remains unexplored. Recent Unified Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods have started to bridge the gap between both paradigms. However, they rely solely on semantic token reconstruction, which requires an external tokenizer during training -- introducing a significant overhead. In this work, we introduce Sorcen, a novel unified SSL framework, incorporating a synergic Contrastive-Reconstruction objective. Our Contrastive objective, "Echo Contrast", leverages the generative capabilities of Sorcen, eliminating the need for additional image crops or augmentations during training. Sorcen "generates" an echo sample in the semantic token space, forming the contrastive positive pair. Sorcen operates exclusively on precomputed tokens, eliminating the need for an online token transformation during training, thereby significantly reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1k demonstrate that Sorcen outperforms the previous Unified SSL SoTA by 0.4%, 1.48 FID, 1.76%, and 1.53% on linear probing, unconditional image generation, few-shot learning, and transfer learning, respectively, while being 60.8% more efficient. Additionally, Sorcen surpasses previous single-crop MIM SoTA in linear probing and achieves SoTA performance in unconditional image generation, highlighting significant improvements and breakthroughs in Unified SSL models.
We introduce Efficient LLM Token Extraction (ELTEX), a framework addressing the critical challenge of LLM domain specialization by systematically extracting and integrating domain indicators throughout synthetic data generation. Unlike approaches relying on implicit knowledge transfer, ELTEX explicitly leverages domain signals to maintain specialized knowledge integrity. In our cybersecurity case study, ELTEX-enhanced data enables a fine-tuned Gemma-2B model to achieve performance competitive with GPT-4o on blockchain cyberattack classification while reducing computational requirements. Our Google Sheets implementation makes ELTEX accessible to non-technical users. Our contributions include: (1) the ELTEX framework; (2) Google Sheets Add-on implementation; (3) empirical validation showing how ELTEX bridges performance gaps between small and large models; and (4) a synthetic dataset of 11,448 texts for blockchain cyberattack detection.
Compact and efficient 6DoF object pose estimation is crucial in applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and space autonomous navigation systems, where lightweight models are critical for real-time accurate performance. This paper introduces a novel uncertainty-aware end-to-end Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework focused on keypoint-based 6DoF pose estimation. Keypoints predicted by a large teacher model exhibit varying levels of uncertainty that can be exploited within the distillation process to enhance the accuracy of the student model while ensuring its compactness. To this end, we propose a distillation strategy that aligns the student and teacher predictions by adjusting the knowledge transfer based on the uncertainty associated with each teacher keypoint prediction. Additionally, the proposed KD leverages this uncertainty-aware alignment of keypoints to transfer the knowledge at key locations of their respective feature maps. Experiments on the widely-used LINEMOD benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving superior 6DoF object pose estimation with lightweight models compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Further validation on the SPEED+ dataset for spacecraft pose estimation highlights the robustness of our approach under diverse 6DoF pose estimation scenarios.
Chinese porcelain holds immense historical and cultural value, making its accurate classification essential for archaeological research and cultural heritage preservation. Traditional classification methods rely heavily on expert analysis, which is time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale. This paper explores the application of DL and transfer learning techniques to automate the classification of porcelain artifacts across four key attributes: dynasty, glaze, ware, and type. We evaluate four Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) - ResNet50, MobileNetV2, VGG16, and InceptionV3 - comparing their performance with and without pre-trained weights. Our results demonstrate that transfer learning significantly enhances classification accuracy, particularly for complex tasks like type classification, where models trained from scratch exhibit lower performance. MobileNetV2 and ResNet50 consistently achieve high accuracy and robustness across all tasks, while VGG16 struggles with more diverse classifications. We further discuss the impact of dataset limitations and propose future directions, including domain-specific pre-training, integration of attention mechanisms, explainable AI methods, and generalization to other cultural artifacts.
Existing 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) methods achieve high accuracy but suffer from computational overhead and slow inference, while knowledge distillation methods fail to address spatial relationships between joints and temporal correlations in multi-frame inputs. In this paper, we propose Sparse Correlation and Joint Distillation (SCJD), a novel framework that balances efficiency and accuracy for 3D HPE. SCJD introduces Sparse Correlation Input Sequence Downsampling to reduce redundancy in student network inputs while preserving inter-frame correlations. For effective knowledge transfer, we propose Dynamic Joint Spatial Attention Distillation, which includes Dynamic Joint Embedding Distillation to enhance the student's feature representation using the teacher's multi-frame context feature, and Adjacent Joint Attention Distillation to improve the student network's focus on adjacent joint relationships for better spatial understanding. Additionally, Temporal Consistency Distillation aligns the temporal correlations between teacher and student networks through upsampling and global supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCJD achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/wileychan/SCJD.
Large foundation models trained on large-scale vision-language data can boost Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) via synthetic training data, yet the hand-crafted pipelines often introduce bias and overfit to specific prompts. We sidestep this issue by directly fusing hidden states from Large Language Models (LLMs) into detectors-an avenue surprisingly under-explored. This paper presents a systematic method to enhance visual grounding by utilizing decoder layers of the LLM of an MLLM. We introduce a zero-initialized cross-attention adapter to enable efficient knowledge fusion from LLMs to object detectors, a new approach called LED (LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection). We find that intermediate LLM layers already encode rich spatial semantics; adapting only the early layers yields most of the gain. With Swin-T as the vision encoder, Qwen2-0.5B + LED lifts GroundingDINO by 3.82 % on OmniLabel at just 8.7 % extra GFLOPs, and a larger vision backbone pushes the improvement to 6.22 %. Extensive ablations on adapter variants, LLM scales and fusion depths further corroborate our design.
Forecasting the volatility of financial assets is essential for various financial applications. This paper addresses the challenging task of forecasting the volatility of financial assets with limited historical data, such as new issues or spin-offs, by proposing a multi-source transfer learning approach. Specifically, we exploit complementary source data of assets with a substantial historical data record by selecting source time series instances that are most similar to the limited target data of the new issue/spin-off. Based on these instances and the target data, we estimate linear and non-linear realized volatility models and compare their forecasting performance to forecasts of models trained exclusively on the target data, and models trained on the entire source and target data. The results show that our transfer learning approach outperforms the alternative models and that the integration of complementary data is also beneficial immediately after the initial trading day of the new issue/spin-off.
With the significantly increasing incidence and prevalence of abdominal diseases, there is a need to embrace greater use of new innovations and technology for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Although deep-learning methods have notably been developed to assist radiologists in diagnosing abdominal diseases, existing models have the restricted ability to segment common lesions in the abdomen due to missing annotations for typical abdominal pathologies in their training datasets. To address the limitation, we introduce MSWAL, the first 3D Multi-class Segmentation of the Whole Abdominal Lesions dataset, which broadens the coverage of various common lesion types, such as gallstones, kidney stones, liver tumors, kidney tumors, pancreatic cancer, liver cysts, and kidney cysts. With CT scans collected from 694 patients (191,417 slices) of different genders across various scanning phases, MSWAL demonstrates strong robustness and generalizability. The transfer learning experiment from MSWAL to two public datasets, LiTS and KiTS, effectively demonstrates consistent improvements, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) increase of 3.00% for liver tumors and 0.89% for kidney tumors, demonstrating that the comprehensive annotations and diverse lesion types in MSWAL facilitate effective learning across different domains and data distributions. Furthermore, we propose Inception nnU-Net, a novel segmentation framework that effectively integrates an Inception module with the nnU-Net architecture to extract information from different receptive fields, achieving significant enhancement in both voxel-level DSC and region-level F1 compared to the cutting-edge public algorithms on MSWAL. Our dataset will be released after being accepted, and the code is publicly released at https://github.com/tiuxuxsh76075/MSWAL-.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are disorders impacting the heart and circulatory system. These disorders are the foremost and continuously escalating cause of mortality worldwide. One of the main tasks when working with CVDs is analyzing and identifying pathologies on a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) with a standard 10-second duration. Using machine learning (ML) in automatic ECG analysis increases CVD diagnostics' availability, speed, and accuracy. However, the most significant difficulty in developing ML models is obtaining a sufficient training dataset. Due to the limitations of medical data usage, such as expensiveness, errors, the ambiguity of labels, imbalance of classes, and privacy issues, utilizing synthetic samples depending on specific pathologies bypasses these restrictions and improves algorithm quality. Existing solutions for the conditional generation of ECG signals are mainly built on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and only a few papers consider the architectures based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), showing comparable results in recent works. This paper proposes the publicly available conditional Nouveau VAE model for ECG signal generation (cNVAE-ECG), which produces high-resolution ECGs with multiple pathologies. We provide an extensive comparison of the proposed model on various practical downstream tasks, including transfer learning scenarios showing an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) increase up to 2% surpassing GAN-like competitors.
Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, are responsible for COVID-19, a highly transmissible disease that emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. During the past five years, significant advancements have been made in understanding and mitigating the virus. Although the initial outbreak led to global health crises, improved vaccination strategies, antiviral treatments, and AI-driven diagnostic tools have contributed to better disease management. However, COVID-19 continues to pose risks, particularly for immuno-compromised individuals and those with pre-existing conditions. This study explores the use of deep learning for a rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19, addressing ongoing challenges in healthcare infrastructure and testing accessibility. We propose an enhanced automated detection system leveraging state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including updated versions of VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50, to classify COVID-19 infections from chest radiographs and computerized tomography (CT) scans. Our results, based on an expanded dataset of over 6000 medical images, demonstrate that the optimized ResNet50 model achieves the highest classification performance, with 97.77% accuracy, 100% sensitivity, 93.33% specificity, and a 98.0% F1-score. These findings reinforce the potential of AI-assisted diagnostic tools in improving early detection and pandemic preparedness.
Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communications requirebeamforming and consequent precise beam alignmentbetween the gNodeB (gNB) and the user equipment (UE) toovercome high propagation losses. This beam alignment needs tobe constantly updated for different UE locations based on beamsweepingradio frequency measurements, leading to significantbeam management overhead. One potential solution involvesusing machine learning (ML) beam prediction algorithms thatleverage UE position information to select the serving beamwithout the overhead of beam sweeping. However, the highlysite-specific nature of mm-wave propagation means that MLmodels require training from scratch for each scenario, whichis inefficient in practice. In this paper, we propose a robustcross-environment transfer learning solution for location-aidedbeam prediction, whereby the ML model trained on a referencegNB is transferred to a target gNB by fine-tuning with a limiteddataset. Extensive simulation results based on ray-tracing in twourban environments show the effectiveness of our solution forboth inter- and intra-city model transfer. Our results show thatby training the model on a reference gNB and transferring themodel by fine-tuning with only 5% of the target gNB dataset,we can achieve 80% accuracy in predicting the best beamfor the target gNB. Importantly, our approach improves thepoor generalization accuracy of transferring the model to newenvironments without fine-tuning by around 75 percentage points.This demonstrates that transfer learning enables high predictionaccuracy while reducing the computational and training datasetcollection burden of ML-based beam prediction, making itpractical for 5G-and-beyond deployments.
Lifelong Reinforcement Learning (LRL) holds significant potential for addressing sequential tasks, but it still faces considerable challenges. A key difficulty lies in effectively preventing catastrophic forgetting and facilitating knowledge transfer while maintaining reliable decision-making performance across subsequent tasks in dynamic environments. To tackle this, we propose a novel framework, SDW (Similarity-Driven Weighting Framework), which leverages large-language-model-generated dynamic functions to precisely control the training process. The core of SDW lies in two functions pre-generated by large models: the task similarity function and the weight computation function. The task similarity function extracts multidimensional features from task descriptions to quantify the similarities and differences between tasks in terms of states, actions, and rewards. The weight computation function dynamically generates critical training parameters based on the similarity information, including the proportion of old task data stored in the Replay Buffer and the strategy consistency weight in the loss function, enabling an adaptive balance between learning new tasks and transferring knowledge from previous tasks. By generating function code offline prior to training, rather than relying on large-model inference during the training process, the SDW framework reduces computational overhead while maintaining efficiency in sequential task scenarios. Experimental results on Atari and MiniHack sequential tasks demonstrate that SDW significantly outperforms existing lifelong reinforcement learning methods.