In recent years, weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted much attention due to its low labeling cost. The success of recent WSOD models is often ascribed to the two-stage multi-class classification (MCC) task, i.e., multiple instance learning and online classification refinement. Despite achieving non-trivial progresses, these methods overlook potential classification ambiguities between these two MCC tasks and fail to leverage their unique strengths. In this work, we introduce a novel WSOD framework to ameliorate these two issues. For one thing, we propose a self-classification enhancement module that integrates intra-class binary classification (ICBC) to bridge the gap between the two distinct MCC tasks. The ICBC task enhances the network's discrimination between positive and mis-located samples in a class-wise manner and forges a mutually reinforcing relationship with the MCC task. For another, we propose a self-classification correction algorithm during inference, which combines the results of both MCC tasks to effectively reduce the mis-classified predictions. Extensive experiments on the prevalent VOC 2007 & 2012 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework.
Retraining a model using its own predictions together with the original, potentially noisy labels is a well-known strategy for improving the model performance. While prior works have demonstrated the benefits of specific heuristic retraining schemes, the question of how to optimally combine the model's predictions and the provided labels remains largely open. This paper addresses this fundamental question for binary classification tasks. We develop a principled framework based on approximate message passing (AMP) to analyze iterative retraining procedures for two ground truth settings: Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and generalized linear model (GLM). Our main contribution is the derivation of the Bayes optimal aggregator function to combine the current model's predictions and the given labels, which when used to retrain the same model, minimizes its prediction error. We also quantify the performance of this optimal retraining strategy over multiple rounds. We complement our theoretical results by proposing a practically usable version of the theoretically-optimal aggregator function for linear probing with the cross-entropy loss, and demonstrate its superiority over baseline methods in the high label noise regime.
In this paper, we study the problem of estimation and learning under temporal distribution shift. Consider an observation sequence of length $n$, which is a noisy realization of a time-varying groundtruth sequence. Our focus is to develop methods to estimate the groundtruth at the final time-step while providing sharp point-wise estimation error rates. We show that, without prior knowledge on the level of temporal shift, a wavelet soft-thresholding estimator provides an optimal estimation error bound for the groundtruth. Our proposed estimation method generalizes existing researches Mazzetto and Upfal (2023) by establishing a connection between the sequence's non-stationarity level and the sparsity in the wavelet-transformed domain. Our theoretical findings are validated by numerical experiments. Additionally, we applied the estimator to derive sparsity-aware excess risk bounds for binary classification under distribution shift and to develop computationally efficient training objectives. As a final contribution, we draw parallels between our results and the classical signal processing problem of total-variation denoising (Mammen and van de Geer,1997; Tibshirani, 2014), uncovering novel optimal algorithms for such task.
A common neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer's disease requires a precise diagnosis and efficient treatment, particularly in light of escalating healthcare expenses and the expanding use of artificial intelligence in medical diagnostics. Many recent studies shows that the combination of brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and deep neural networks have achieved promising results for diagnosing AD. Using deep convolutional neural networks, this paper introduces a novel deep learning architecture that incorporates multiresidual blocks, specialized spatial attention blocks, grouped query attention, and multi-head attention. The study assessed the model's performance on four publicly accessible datasets and concentrated on identifying binary and multiclass issues across various categories. This paper also takes into account of the explainability of AD's progression and compared with state-of-the-art methods namely Gradient Class Activation Mapping (GradCAM), Score-CAM, Faster Score-CAM, and XGRADCAM. Our methodology consistently outperforms current approaches, achieving 99.66\% accuracy in 4-class classification, 99.63\% in 3-class classification, and 100\% in binary classification using Kaggle datasets. For Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) datasets the accuracies are 99.92\%, 99.90\%, and 99.95\% respectively. The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative-1 (ADNI-1) dataset was used for experiments in three planes (axial, sagittal, and coronal) and a combination of all planes. The study achieved accuracies of 99.08\% for axis, 99.85\% for sagittal, 99.5\% for coronal, and 99.17\% for all axis, and 97.79\% and 8.60\% respectively for ADNI-2. The network's ability to retrieve important information from MRI images is demonstrated by its excellent accuracy in categorizing AD stages.
As computer networks proliferate, the gravity of network intrusions has escalated, emphasizing the criticality of network intrusion detection systems for safeguarding security. While deep learning models have exhibited promising results in intrusion detection, they face challenges in managing high-dimensional, complex traffic patterns and imbalanced data categories. This paper presents CSAGC-IDS, a network intrusion detection model based on deep learning techniques. CSAGC-IDS integrates SC-CGAN, a self-attention-enhanced convolutional conditional generative adversarial network that generates high-quality data to mitigate class imbalance. Furthermore, CSAGC-IDS integrates CSCA-CNN, a convolutional neural network enhanced through cost sensitive learning and channel attention mechanism, to extract features from complex traffic data for precise detection. Experiments conducted on the NSL-KDD dataset. CSAGC-IDS achieves an accuracy of 84.55% and an F1-score of 84.52% in five-class classification task, and an accuracy of 91.09% and an F1 score of 92.04% in binary classification task.Furthermore, this paper provides an interpretability analysis of the proposed model, using SHAP and LIME to explain the decision-making mechanisms of the model.
Deep learning models have driven significant progress in predicting protein function and interactions at the protein level. While these advancements have been invaluable for many biological applications such as enzyme engineering and function annotation, a more detailed perspective is essential for understanding protein functional mechanisms and evaluating the biological knowledge captured by models. To address this demand, we introduce VenusX, the first large-scale benchmark for fine-grained functional annotation and function-based protein pairing at the residue, fragment, and domain levels. VenusX comprises three major task categories across six types of annotations, including residue-level binary classification, fragment-level multi-class classification, and pairwise functional similarity scoring for identifying critical active sites, binding sites, conserved sites, motifs, domains, and epitopes. The benchmark features over 878,000 samples curated from major open-source databases such as InterPro, BioLiP, and SAbDab. By providing mixed-family and cross-family splits at three sequence identity thresholds, our benchmark enables a comprehensive assessment of model performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. For baseline evaluation, we assess a diverse set of popular and open-source models, including pre-trained protein language models, sequence-structure hybrids, structure-based methods, and alignment-based techniques. Their performance is reported across all benchmark datasets and evaluation settings using multiple metrics, offering a thorough comparison and a strong foundation for future research. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ai4protein/VenusX.
Advances in AI generative models facilitate super-realistic video synthesis, amplifying misinformation risks via social media and eroding trust in digital content. Several research works have explored new deepfake detection methods on AI-generated images to alleviate these risks. However, with the fast development of video generation models, such as Sora and WanX, there is currently a lack of large-scale, high-quality AI-generated video datasets for forgery detection. In addition, existing detection approaches predominantly treat the task as binary classification, lacking explainability in model decision-making and failing to provide actionable insights or guidance for the public. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{GenBuster-200K}, a large-scale AI-generated video dataset featuring 200K high-resolution video clips, diverse latest generative techniques, and real-world scenes. We further introduce \textbf{BusterX}, a novel AI-generated video detection and explanation framework leveraging multimodal large language model (MLLM) and reinforcement learning for authenticity determination and explainable rationale. To our knowledge, GenBuster-200K is the {\it \textbf{first}} large-scale, high-quality AI-generated video dataset that incorporates the latest generative techniques for real-world scenarios. BusterX is the {\it \textbf{first}} framework to integrate MLLM with reinforcement learning for explainable AI-generated video detection. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness and generalizability of BusterX. The code, models, and datasets will be released.
Segmentation evaluation metrics traditionally rely on binary decision logic: predictions are either correct or incorrect, based on rigid IoU thresholds. Detection--based metrics such as F1 and mAP determine correctness at the object level using fixed overlap cutoffs, while overlap--based metrics like Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice operate at the pixel level, often overlooking instance--level structure. Panoptic Quality (PQ) attempts to unify detection and segmentation assessment, but it remains dependent on hard-threshold matching--treating predictions below the threshold as entirely incorrect. This binary framing obscures important distinctions between qualitatively different errors and fails to reward gradual model improvements. We propose SoftPQ, a flexible and interpretable instance segmentation metric that redefines evaluation as a graded continuum rather than a binary classification. SoftPQ introduces tunable upper and lower IoU thresholds to define a partial matching region and applies a sublinear penalty function to ambiguous or fragmented predictions. These extensions allow SoftPQ to exhibit smoother score behavior, greater robustness to structural segmentation errors, and more informative feedback for model development and evaluation. Through controlled perturbation experiments, we show that SoftPQ captures meaningful differences in segmentation quality that existing metrics overlook, making it a practical and principled alternative for both benchmarking and iterative model refinement.
Synthetic media generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) pose significant challenges in verifying authenticity and tracing dataset origins, raising critical concerns in copyright enforcement, privacy protection, and legal compliance. This paper introduces a novel forensic framework for identifying the training dataset (e.g., CelebA or FFHQ) of GAN-generated images through interpretable feature analysis. By integrating spectral transforms (Fourier/DCT), color distribution metrics, and local feature descriptors (SIFT), our pipeline extracts discriminative statistical signatures embedded in synthetic outputs. Supervised classifiers (Random Forest, SVM, XGBoost) achieve 98-99% accuracy in binary classification (real vs. synthetic) and multi-class dataset attribution across diverse GAN architectures (StyleGAN, AttGAN, GDWCT, StarGAN, and StyleGAN2). Experimental results highlight the dominance of frequency-domain features (DCT/FFT) in capturing dataset-specific artifacts, such as upsampling patterns and spectral irregularities, while color histograms reveal implicit regularization strategies in GAN training. We further examine legal and ethical implications, showing how dataset attribution can address copyright infringement, unauthorized use of personal data, and regulatory compliance under frameworks like GDPR and California's AB 602. Our framework advances accountability and governance in generative modeling, with applications in digital forensics, content moderation, and intellectual property litigation.
The application of AI in oncology has been limited by its reliance on large, annotated datasets and the need for retraining models for domain-specific diagnostic tasks. Taking heed of these limitations, we investigated in-context learning as a pragmatic alternative to model retraining by allowing models to adapt to new diagnostic tasks using only a few labeled examples at inference, without the need for retraining. Using four vision-language models (VLMs)-Paligemma, CLIP, ALIGN and GPT-4o, we evaluated the performance across three oncology datasets: MHIST, PatchCamelyon and HAM10000. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare the performance of multiple VLMs on different oncology classification tasks. Without any parameter updates, all models showed significant gains with few-shot prompting, with GPT-4o reaching an F1 score of 0.81 in binary classification and 0.60 in multi-class classification settings. While these results remain below the ceiling of fully fine-tuned systems, they highlight the potential of ICL to approximate task-specific behavior using only a handful of examples, reflecting how clinicians often reason from prior cases. Notably, open-source models like Paligemma and CLIP demonstrated competitive gains despite their smaller size, suggesting feasibility for deployment in computing constrained clinical environments. Overall, these findings highlight the potential of ICL as a practical solution in oncology, particularly for rare cancers and resource-limited contexts where fine-tuning is infeasible and annotated data is difficult to obtain.
In the era of increasingly sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) systems, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for diverse applications, including tasks requiring nuanced textual understanding and contextual reasoning. This study investigates the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art LLMs - GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLAMA3, Mistral 7B, and Claude-2 - for zero-shot and few-shot annotation of a complex textual dataset comprising social media posts in Russian and Ukrainian. Specifically, the focus is on the binary classification task of identifying references to human rights violations within the dataset. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, their annotations are compared against a gold standard set of human double-annotated labels across 1000 samples. The analysis includes assessing annotation performance under different prompting conditions, with prompts provided in both English and Russian. Additionally, the study explores the unique patterns of errors and disagreements exhibited by each model, offering insights into their strengths, limitations, and cross-linguistic adaptability. By juxtaposing LLM outputs with human annotations, this research contributes to understanding the reliability and applicability of LLMs for sensitive, domain-specific tasks in multilingual contexts. It also sheds light on how language models handle inherently subjective and context-dependent judgments, a critical consideration for their deployment in real-world scenarios.
Introduction: Timely identification of intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) subtypes on non-contrast computed tomography is critical for prognosis prediction and therapeutic decision-making, yet remains challenging due to low contrast and blurring boundaries. This study evaluates the performance of zero-shot multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) compared to traditional deep learning methods in ICH binary classification and subtyping. Methods: We utilized a dataset provided by RSNA, comprising 192 NCCT volumes. The study compares various MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2, with conventional deep learning models, including ResNet50 and Vision Transformer. Carefully crafted prompts were used to guide MLLMs in tasks such as ICH presence, subtype classification, localization, and volume estimation. Results: The results indicate that in the ICH binary classification task, traditional deep learning models outperform MLLMs comprehensively. For subtype classification, MLLMs also exhibit inferior performance compared to traditional deep learning models, with Gemini 2.0 Flash achieving an macro-averaged precision of 0.41 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.31. Conclusion: While MLLMs excel in interactive capabilities, their overall accuracy in ICH subtyping is inferior to deep networks. However, MLLMs enhance interpretability through language interactions, indicating potential in medical imaging analysis. Future efforts will focus on model refinement and developing more precise MLLMs to improve performance in three-dimensional medical image processing.
Our research is focused on two main applications of crowd scene analysis crowd counting and anomaly detection In recent years a large number of researches have been presented in the domain of crowd counting We addressed two main challenges in this domain 1 Deep learning models are datahungry paradigms and always need a large amount of annotated data for the training of algorithm It is timeconsuming and costly task to annotate such large amount of data Selfsupervised training is proposed to deal with this challenge 2 MCNN consists of multicolumns of CNN with different sizes of filters by presenting a novel approach based on a combination of selfsupervised training and MultiColumn CNN This enables the model to learn features at different levels and makes it effective in dealing with challenges of occluded scenes nonuniform density complex backgrounds and scale invariation The proposed model was evaluated on publicly available data sets such as ShanghaiTech and UCFQNRF by means of MAE and MSE A spatiotemporal model based on VGG19 is proposed for crowd anomaly detection addressing challenges like lighting environmental conditions unexpected objects and scalability The model extracts spatial and temporal features allowing it to be generalized to realworld scenes Spatial features are learned using CNN while temporal features are learned using LSTM blocks The model works on binary classification and can detect normal or abnormal behavior The models performance is improved by replacing fully connected layers with dense residual blocks Experiments on the Hockey Fight dataset and SCVD dataset show our models outperform other stateoftheart approaches
Perinatal depression (PND) affects 1 in 5 mothers, with 85% lacking support. Digital health tools offer early identification and prevention, potentially reducing PND risk by over 50% and improving engagement. Despite high interest, user retention needs improvement for maximum benefit. Voice biomarkers have emerged as a possible digital alternative to collecting mood questionnaires to inform individualized user adherence and retention. However, no voice biomarkers have been developed specifically for pregnant mothers. We aimed to test an unstructured speech sample for the feasibility of yielding a machine learning (ML) model to predict PND. We surveyed 446 women nationwide at 22 weeks of gestation. We measured PHQ-8 and modified EPDS and four voice samples. Participants were classified as depressed if their PHQ-8 or EPDS were equal or higher than 10. In the present report, we focus on a 2-minute unstructured speech prompt. A standardized cleaning pipeline was applied to the audio files, including a uniform format conversion, segment filtering for background noise, extraneous acoustic events, and file size. This resulted in 112 high-quality voice recordings, i.e., a rate of 25%. The ML modeling strategy utilized the Allie ML framework on 80% of the data for training on the binary classification task (depressed or not). The analysis included steps for feature selection using referenced speech audio embeddings, followed by a TPOT classifier for ML. We report the validation results for the 20% held-out data. For PHQ-8, we achieved a balanced accuracy of ~71%, precision of 73%, recall of 68%, and AUC of 0.71. For EPDS, we achieved a balanced accuracy of 80%, precision of 92%, recall of 80%, and AUC of 0.80. In conclusion, we demonstrate the feasibility at scale and a promising accuracy for detecting PND using 120 seconds of unstructured speech audio data in expectant mothers.
We study the classical binary classification problem for hypothesis spaces of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation under Tsybakov's low-noise condition with exponent $q>0$, and its limit-case $q\to\infty$ which we refer to as the "hard-margin condition". We show that DNNs which minimize the empirical risk with square loss surrogate and $\ell_p$ penalty can achieve finite-sample excess risk bounds of order $\mathcal{O}\left(n^{-\alpha}\right)$ for arbitrarily large $\alpha>0$ under the hard-margin condition, provided that the regression function $\eta$ is sufficiently smooth. The proof relies on a novel decomposition of the excess risk which might be of independent interest.
In many scenarios of binary classification, only positive instances are provided in the training data, leaving the rest of the data unlabeled. This setup, known as positive-unlabeled (PU) learning, is addressed here with a network flow-based method which utilizes pairwise similarities between samples. The method we propose here, 2-HNC, leverages Hochbaum's Normalized Cut (HNC) and the set of solutions it provides by solving a parametric minimum cut problem. The set of solutions, that are nested partitions of the samples into two sets, correspond to varying tradeoff values between the two goals: high intra-similarity inside the sets and low inter-similarity between the two sets. This nested sequence is utilized here to deliver a ranking of unlabeled samples by their likelihood of being negative. Building on this insight, our method, 2-HNC, proceeds in two stages. The first stage generates this ranking without assuming any negative labels, using a problem formulation that is constrained only on positive labeled samples. The second stage augments the positive set with likely-negative samples and recomputes the classification. The final label prediction selects among all generated partitions in both stages, the one that delivers a positive class proportion, closest to a prior estimate of this quantity, which is assumed to be given. Extensive experiments across synthetic and real datasets show that 2-HNC yields strong performance and often surpasses existing state-of-the-art algorithms.
A well-known issue with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is that retrieved passages that are irrelevant to the query sometimes distract the answer-generating LLM, causing it to provide an incorrect response. In this paper, we shed light on this core issue and formulate the distracting effect of a passage w.r.t. a query (and an LLM). We provide a quantifiable measure of the distracting effect of a passage and demonstrate its robustness across LLMs. Our research introduces novel methods for identifying and using hard distracting passages to improve RAG systems. By fine-tuning LLMs with these carefully selected distracting passages, we achieve up to a 7.5% increase in answering accuracy compared to counterparts fine-tuned on conventional RAG datasets. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we move beyond the simple binary classification of irrelevant passages as either completely unrelated vs. distracting, and second, we develop and analyze multiple methods for finding hard distracting passages. To our knowledge, no other research has provided such a comprehensive framework for identifying and utilizing hard distracting passages.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in various domains such as social networks, molecular biology, or recommendation systems. Concurrently, different explanations methods of GNNs have arisen to complement its black-box nature. Explanations of the GNNs' predictions can be categorized into two types--factual and counterfactual. Given a GNN trained on binary classification into ''accept'' and ''reject'' classes, a global counterfactual explanation consists in generating a small set of ''accept'' graphs relevant to all of the input ''reject'' graphs. The transformation of a ''reject'' graph into an ''accept'' graph is called a recourse. A common recourse explanation is a small set of recourse, from which every ''reject'' graph can be turned into an ''accept'' graph. Although local counterfactual explanations have been studied extensively, the problem of finding common recourse for global counterfactual explanation remains unexplored, particularly for GNNs. In this paper, we formalize the common recourse explanation problem, and design an effective algorithm, COMRECGC, to solve it. We benchmark our algorithm against strong baselines on four different real-world graphs datasets and demonstrate the superior performance of COMRECGC against the competitors. We also compare the common recourse explanations to the graph counterfactual explanation, showing that common recourse explanations are either comparable or superior, making them worth considering for applications such as drug discovery or computational biology.
We present MarkMatch, a retrieval system for detecting whether two paper ballot marks were filled by the same hand. Unlike the previous SOTA method BubbleSig, which used binary classification on isolated mark pairs, MarkMatch ranks stylistic similarity between a query mark and a mark in the database using contrastive learning. Our model is trained with a dense batch similarity matrix and a dual loss objective. Each sample is contrasted against many negatives within each batch, enabling the model to learn subtle handwriting difference and improve generalization under handwriting variation and visual noise, while diagonal supervision reinforces high confidence on true matches. The model achieves an F1 score of 0.943, surpassing BubbleSig's best performance. MarkMatch also integrates Segment Anything Model for flexible mark extraction via box- or point-based prompts. The system offers election auditors a practical tool for visual, non-biometric investigation of suspicious ballots.
Achieving group-robust generalization in the presence of spurious correlations remains a significant challenge, particularly when bias annotations are unavailable. Recent studies on Class-Conditional Distribution Balancing (CCDB) reveal that spurious correlations often stem from mismatches between the class-conditional and marginal distributions of bias attributes. They achieve promising results by addressing this issue through simple distribution matching in a bias-agnostic manner. However, CCDB approximates each distribution using a single Gaussian, which is overly simplistic and rarely holds in real-world applications. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method called Bias Exploration via Overfitting (BEO), which captures each distribution in greater detail by modeling it as a mixture of latent groups. Building on these group-level descriptions, we introduce a fine-grained variant of CCDB, termed FG-CCDB, which performs more precise distribution matching and balancing within each group. Through group-level reweighting, FG-CCDB learns sample weights from a global perspective, achieving stronger mitigation of spurious correlations without incurring substantial storage or computational costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BEO serves as a strong proxy for ground-truth bias annotations and can be seamlessly integrated with bias-supervised methods. Moreover, when combined with FG-CCDB, our method performs on par with bias-supervised approaches on binary classification tasks and significantly outperforms them in highly biased multi-class scenarios.