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Amin Beheshti

Publications and source records attributed to Amin Beheshti.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting for Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to evolving data streams. A major challenge of CL is catastrophic forgetting, where new knowledge will overwrite previously acquired knowledge. Traditional methods usually retain the past data for replay or add additional branches in the model to learn new knowledge, which has high memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight CL framework, Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting (AESP), which integrates prompt tuning and adapter techniques. Specifically, we design semantic-guided prompts to enhance the generalization ability of visual features and utilize adapters to efficiently fuse the semantic information, aiming to learn more adaptive features for the continual learning task. Furthermore, to choose the right task prompt for feature adaptation, we have developed a novel matching mechanism for prompt selection. Extensive experiments on three CL datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable performance across multiple metrics, showing its potential for advancing CL.

cs.CV↗

VITAL: A New Dataset for Benchmarking Pluralistic Alignment in Healthcare

Alignment techniques have become central to ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) generate outputs consistent with human values. However, existing alignment paradigms often model an averaged or monolithic preference, failing to account for the diversity of perspectives across cultures, demographics, and communities. This limitation is particularly critical in health-related scenarios, where plurality is essential due to the influence of culture, religion, personal values, and conflicting opinions. Despite progress in pluralistic alignment, no prior work has focused on health, likely due to the unavailability of publicly available datasets. To address this gap, we introduce VITAL, a new benchmark dataset comprising 13.1K value-laden situations and 5.4K multiple-choice questions focused on health, designed to assess and benchmark pluralistic alignment methodologies. Through extensive evaluation of eight LLMs of varying sizes, we demonstrate that existing pluralistic alignment techniques fall short in effectively accommodating diverse healthcare beliefs, underscoring the need for tailored AI alignment in specific domains. This work highlights the limitations of current approaches and lays the groundwork for developing health-specific alignment solutions.

cs.CL↗

Ratas framework: A comprehensive genai-based approach to rubric-based marking of real-world textual exams

Automated answer grading is a critical challenge in educational technology, with the potential to streamline assessment processes, ensure grading consistency, and provide timely feedback to students. However, existing approaches are often constrained to specific exam formats, lack interpretability in score assignment, and struggle with real-world applicability across diverse subjects and assessment types. To address these limitations, we introduce RATAS (Rubric Automated Tree-based Answer Scoring), a novel framework that leverages state-of-the-art generative AI models for rubric-based grading of textual responses. RATAS is designed to support a wide range of grading rubrics, enable subject-agnostic evaluation, and generate structured, explainable rationales for assigned scores. We formalize the automatic grading task through a mathematical framework tailored to rubric-based assessment and present an architecture capable of handling complex, real-world exam structures. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we construct a unique, contextualized dataset derived from real-world project-based courses, encompassing diverse response formats and varying levels of complexity. Empirical results demonstrate that RATAS achieves high reliability and accuracy in automated grading while providing interpretable feedback that enhances transparency for both students and nstructors.

cs.CL↗

SDVPT: Semantic-Driven Visual Prompt Tuning for Open-World Object Counting

Open-world object counting leverages the robust text-image alignment of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to enable counting of arbitrary categories in images specified by textual queries. However, widely adopted naive fine-tuning strategies concentrate exclusively on text-image consistency for categories contained in training, which leads to limited generalizability for unseen categories. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play Semantic-Driven Visual Prompt Tuning framework (SDVPT) that transfers knowledge from the training set to unseen categories with minimal overhead in parameters and inference time. First, we introduce a two-stage visual prompt learning strategy composed of Category-Specific Prompt Initialization (CSPI) and Topology-Guided Prompt Refinement (TGPR). The CSPI generates category-specific visual prompts, and then TGPR distills latent structural patterns from the VLM's text encoder to refine these prompts. During inference, we dynamically synthesize the visual prompts for unseen categories based on the semantic correlation between unseen and training categories, facilitating robust text-image alignment for unseen categories. Extensive experiments integrating SDVPT with all available open-world object counting models demonstrate its effectiveness and adaptability across three widely used datasets: FSC-147, CARPK, and PUCPR+.

cs.CV↗

ProgRoCC: A Progressive Approach to Rough Crowd Counting

As the number of individuals in a crowd grows, enumeration-based techniques become increasingly infeasible and their estimates increasingly unreliable. We propose instead an estimation-based version of the problem: we label Rough Crowd Counting that delivers better accuracy on the basis of training data that is easier to acquire. Rough crowd counting requires only rough annotations of the number of targets in an image, instead of the more traditional, and far more expensive, per-target annotations. We propose an approach to the rough crowd counting problem based on CLIP, termed ProgRoCC. Specifically, we introduce a progressive estimation learning strategy that determines the object count through a coarse-to-fine approach. This approach delivers answers quickly, outperforms the state-of-the-art in semi- and weakly-supervised crowd counting. In addition, we design a vision-language matching adapter that optimizes key-value pairs by mining effective matches of two modalities to refine the visual features, thereby improving the final performance. Extensive experimental results on three widely adopted crowd counting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

The Devil is in the Distributions: Explicit Modeling of Scene Content is Key in Zero-Shot Video Captioning

Zero-shot video captioning requires that a model generate high-quality captions without human-annotated video-text pairs for training. State-of-the-art approaches to the problem leverage CLIP to extract visual-relevant textual prompts to guide language models in generating captions. These methods tend to focus on one key aspect of the scene and build a caption that ignores the rest of the visual input. To address this issue, and generate more accurate and complete captions, we propose a novel progressive multi-granularity textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning. Our approach constructs three distinct memory banks, encompassing noun phrases, scene graphs of noun phrases, and entire sentences. Moreover, we introduce a category-aware retrieval mechanism that models the distribution of natural language surrounding the specific topics in question. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with 5.7%, 16.2%, and 3.4% improvements in terms of the main metric CIDEr on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX benchmarks compared to existing state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

VaxGuard: A Multi-Generator, Multi-Type, and Multi-Role Dataset for Detecting LLM-Generated Vaccine Misinformation

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved text generation capabilities. However, they also present challenges, particularly in generating vaccine-related misinformation, which poses risks to public health. Despite research on human-authored misinformation, a notable gap remains in understanding how LLMs contribute to vaccine misinformation and how best to detect it. Existing benchmarks often overlook vaccine-specific misinformation and the diverse roles of misinformation spreaders. This paper introduces VaxGuard, a novel dataset designed to address these challenges. VaxGuard includes vaccine-related misinformation generated by multiple LLMs and provides a comprehensive framework for detecting misinformation across various roles. Our findings show that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o consistently outperform other LLMs in detecting misinformation, especially when dealing with subtle or emotionally charged narratives. On the other hand, PHI3 and Mistral show lower performance, struggling with precision and recall in fear-driven contexts. Additionally, detection performance tends to decline as input text length increases, indicating the need for improved methods to handle larger content. These results highlight the importance of role-specific detection strategies and suggest that VaxGuard can serve as a key resource for improving the detection of LLM-generated vaccine misinformation.

cs.CL↗

FTA-FTL: A Fine-Tuned Aggregation Federated Transfer Learning Scheme for Lithology Microscopic Image Classification

Lithology discrimination is a crucial activity in characterizing oil reservoirs, and processing lithology microscopic images is an essential technique for investigating fossils and minerals and geological assessment of shale oil exploration. In this way, Deep Learning (DL) technique is a powerful approach for building robust classifier models. However, there is still a considerable challenge to collect and produce a large dataset. Transfer-learning and data augmentation techniques have emerged as popular approaches to tackle this problem. Furthermore, due to different reasons, especially data privacy, individuals, organizations, and industry companies often are not willing to share their sensitive data and information. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to train a highly accurate central model across multiple decentralized edge servers without transferring sensitive data, preserving sensitive data, and enhancing security. This study involves two phases; the first phase is to conduct Lithology microscopic image classification on a small dataset using transfer learning. In doing so, various pre-trained DL model architectures are comprehensively compared for the classification task. In the second phase, we formulated the classification task to a Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) scheme and proposed a Fine-Tuned Aggregation strategy for Federated Learning (FTA-FTL). In order to perform a comprehensive experimental study, several metrics such as accuracy, f1 score, precision, specificity, sensitivity (recall), and confusion matrix are taken into account. The results are in excellent agreement and confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme, and show that the proposed FTA-FTL algorithm is capable enough to achieve approximately the same results obtained by the centralized implementation for Lithology microscopic images classification task.

cs.LG↗

DapperFL: Domain Adaptive Federated Learning with Model Fusion Pruning for Edge Devices

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent machine learning paradigm in edge computing environments, enabling edge devices to collaboratively optimize a global model without sharing their private data. However, existing FL frameworks suffer from efficacy deterioration due to the system heterogeneity inherent in edge computing, especially in the presence of domain shifts across local data. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous FL framework DapperFL, to enhance model performance across multiple domains. In DapperFL, we introduce a dedicated Model Fusion Pruning (MFP) module to produce personalized compact local models for clients to address the system heterogeneity challenges. The MFP module prunes local models with fused knowledge obtained from both local and remaining domains, ensuring robustness to domain shifts. Additionally, we design a Domain Adaptive Regularization (DAR) module to further improve the overall performance of DapperFL. The DAR module employs regularization generated by the pruned model, aiming to learn robust representations across domains. Furthermore, we introduce a specific aggregation algorithm for aggregating heterogeneous local models with tailored architectures and weights. We implement DapperFL on a realworld FL platform with heterogeneous clients. Experimental results on benchmark datasets with multiple domains demonstrate that DapperFL outperforms several state-of-the-art FL frameworks by up to 2.28%, while significantly achieving model volume reductions ranging from 20% to 80%. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jyzgh/DapperFL.

cs.LG↗

StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing

Given a script, the challenge in Movie Dubbing (Visual Voice Cloning, V2C) is to generate speech that aligns well with the video in both time and emotion, based on the tone of a reference audio track. Existing state-of-the-art V2C models break the phonemes in the script according to the divisions between video frames, which solves the temporal alignment problem but leads to incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability. To address this problem, we propose StyleDubber, which switches dubbing learning from the frame level to phoneme level. It contains three main components: (1) A multimodal style adaptor operating at the phoneme level to learn pronunciation style from the reference audio, and generate intermediate representations informed by the facial emotion presented in the video; (2) An utterance-level style learning module, which guides both the mel-spectrogram decoding and the refining processes from the intermediate embeddings to improve the overall style expression; And (3) a phoneme-guided lip aligner to maintain lip sync. Extensive experiments on two of the primary benchmarks, V2C and Grid, demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to the current stateof-the-art. The code will be made available at https://github.com/GalaxyCong/StyleDubber.

cs.CL↗

Natural Language-Oriented Programming (NLOP): Towards Democratizing Software Creation

As generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies evolve, they offer unprecedented potential to automate and enhance various tasks, including coding. Natural Language-Oriented Programming (NLOP), a vision introduced in this paper, harnesses this potential by allowing developers to articulate software requirements and logic in their natural language, thereby democratizing software creation. This approach streamlines the development process and significantly lowers the barrier to entry for software engineering, making it feasible for non-experts to contribute effectively to software projects. By simplifying the transition from concept to code, NLOP can accelerate development cycles, enhance collaborative efforts, and reduce misunderstandings in requirement specifications. This paper reviews various programming models, assesses their contributions and limitations, and highlights that natural language will be the new programming language. Through this comparison, we illustrate how NLOP stands to transform the landscape of software engineering by fostering greater inclusivity and innovation.

cs.SE↗

Graph Neural Networks for Brain Graph Learning: A Survey

Exploring the complex structure of the human brain is crucial for understanding its functionality and diagnosing brain disorders. Thanks to advancements in neuroimaging technology, a novel approach has emerged that involves modeling the human brain as a graph-structured pattern, with different brain regions represented as nodes and the functional relationships among these regions as edges. Moreover, graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant advantage in mining graph-structured data. Developing GNNs to learn brain graph representations for brain disorder analysis has recently gained increasing attention. However, there is a lack of systematic survey work summarizing current research methods in this domain. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by reviewing brain graph learning works that utilize GNNs. We first introduce the process of brain graph modeling based on common neuroimaging data. Subsequently, we systematically categorize current works based on the type of brain graph generated and the targeted research problems. To make this research accessible to a broader range of interested researchers, we provide an overview of representative methods and commonly used datasets, along with their implementation sources. Finally, we present our insights on future research directions. The repository of this survey is available at \url{https://github.com/XuexiongLuoMQ/Awesome-Brain-Graph-Learning-with-GNNs}.

cs.LG↗

Shadow-Free Membership Inference Attacks: Recommender Systems Are More Vulnerable Than You Thought

Recommender systems have been successfully applied in many applications. Nonetheless, recent studies demonstrate that recommender systems are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), leading to the leakage of users' membership privacy. However, existing MIAs relying on shadow training suffer a large performance drop when the attacker lacks knowledge of the training data distribution and the model architecture of the target recommender system. To better understand the privacy risks of recommender systems, we propose shadow-free MIAs that directly leverage a user's recommendations for membership inference. Without shadow training, the proposed attack can conduct MIAs efficiently and effectively under a practice scenario where the attacker is given only black-box access to the target recommender system. The proposed attack leverages an intuition that the recommender system personalizes a user's recommendations if his historical interactions are used by it. Thus, an attacker can infer membership privacy by determining whether the recommendations are more similar to the interactions or the general popular items. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets across various recommender systems. Remarkably, our attack achieves far better attack accuracy with low false positive rates than baselines while with a much lower computational cost.

cs.CR↗

When Eye-Tracking Meets Machine Learning: A Systematic Review on Applications in Medical Image Analysis

Eye-gaze tracking research offers significant promise in enhancing various healthcare-related tasks, above all in medical image analysis and interpretation. Eye tracking, a technology that monitors and records the movement of the eyes, provides valuable insights into human visual attention patterns. This technology can transform how healthcare professionals and medical specialists engage with and analyze diagnostic images, offering a more insightful and efficient approach to medical diagnostics. Hence, extracting meaningful features and insights from medical images by leveraging eye-gaze data improves our understanding of how radiologists and other medical experts monitor, interpret, and understand images for diagnostic purposes. Eye-tracking data, with intricate human visual attention patterns embedded, provides a bridge to integrating artificial intelligence (AI) development and human cognition. This integration allows novel methods to incorporate domain knowledge into machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches to enhance their alignment with human-like perception and decision-making. Moreover, extensive collections of eye-tracking data have also enabled novel ML/DL methods to analyze human visual patterns, paving the way to a better understanding of human vision, attention, and cognition. This systematic review investigates eye-gaze tracking applications and methodologies for enhancing ML/DL algorithms for medical image analysis in depth.

eess.IV↗

FedLPS: Heterogeneous Federated Learning for Multiple Tasks with Local Parameter Sharing

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution in Edge Computing (EC) environments to process the proliferation of data generated by edge devices. By collaboratively optimizing the global machine learning models on distributed edge devices, FL circumvents the need for transmitting raw data and enhances user privacy. Despite practical successes, FL still confronts significant challenges including constrained edge device resources, multiple tasks deployment, and data heterogeneity. However, existing studies focus on mitigating the FL training costs of each single task whereas neglecting the resource consumption across multiple tasks in heterogeneous FL scenarios. In this paper, we propose Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Local Parameter Sharing (FedLPS) to fill this gap. FedLPS leverages principles from transfer learning to facilitate the deployment of multiple tasks on a single device by dividing the local model into a shareable encoder and task-specific encoders. To further reduce resource consumption, a channel-wise model pruning algorithm that shrinks the footprint of local models while accounting for both data and system heterogeneity is employed in FedLPS. Additionally, a novel heterogeneous model aggregation algorithm is proposed to aggregate the heterogeneous predictors in FedLPS. We implemented the proposed FedLPS on a real FL platform and compared it with state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL frameworks. The experimental results on five popular datasets and two modern DNN models illustrate that the proposed FedLPS significantly outperforms the SOTA FL frameworks by up to 4.88% and reduces the computational resource consumption by 21.3%. Our code is available at:https://github.com/jyzgh/FedLPS.

cs.LG↗

A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Summarization with Graph Neural Networks

As large-scale graphs become more widespread, more and more computational challenges with extracting, processing, and interpreting large graph data are being exposed. It is therefore natural to search for ways to summarize these expansive graphs while preserving their key characteristics. In the past, most graph summarization techniques sought to capture the most important part of a graph statistically. However, today, the high dimensionality and complexity of modern graph data are making deep learning techniques more popular. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of progress in deep learning summarization techniques that rely on graph neural networks (GNNs). Our investigation includes a review of the current state-of-the-art approaches, including recurrent GNNs, convolutional GNNs, graph autoencoders, and graph attention networks. A new burgeoning line of research is also discussed where graph reinforcement learning is being used to evaluate and improve the quality of graph summaries. Additionally, the survey provides details of benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source tools that are often employed in experimentation settings, along with a detailed comparison, discussion, and takeaways for the research community focused on graph summarization. Finally, the survey concludes with a number of open research challenges to motivate further study in this area.

cs.LG↗

Automatic Diagnosis of Myocarditis Disease in Cardiac MRI Modality using Deep Transformers and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Myocarditis is a significant cardiovascular disease (CVD) that poses a threat to the health of many individuals by causing damage to the myocardium. The occurrence of microbes and viruses, including the likes of HIV, plays a crucial role in the development of myocarditis disease (MCD). The images produced during cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) scans are low contrast, which can make it challenging to diagnose cardiovascular diseases. In other hand, checking numerous CMRI slices for each CVD patient can be a challenging task for medical doctors. To overcome the existing challenges, researchers have suggested the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADS). The presented paper outlines a CADS for the detection of MCD from CMR images, utilizing deep learning (DL) methods. The proposed CADS consists of several steps, including dataset, preprocessing, feature extraction, classification, and post-processing. First, the Z-Alizadeh dataset was selected for the experiments. Subsequently, the CMR images underwent various preprocessing steps, including denoising, resizing, as well as data augmentation (DA) via CutMix and MixUp techniques. In the following, the most current deep pre-trained and transformer models are used for feature extraction and classification on the CMR images. The findings of our study reveal that transformer models exhibit superior performance in detecting MCD as opposed to pre-trained architectures. In terms of DL architectures, the Turbulence Neural Transformer (TNT) model exhibited impressive accuracy, reaching 99.73% utilizing a 10-fold cross-validation approach. Additionally, to pinpoint areas of suspicion for MCD in CMRI images, the Explainable-based Grad Cam method was employed.

cs.CV↗

Empowering Precision Medicine: AI-Driven Schizophrenia Diagnosis via EEG Signals: A Comprehensive Review from 2002-2023

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a prevalent mental disorder characterized by cognitive, emotional, and behavioral changes. Symptoms of SZ include hallucinations, illusions, delusions, lack of motivation, and difficulties in concentration. Diagnosing SZ involves employing various tools, including clinical interviews, physical examinations, psychological evaluations, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and neuroimaging techniques. Electroencephalography (EEG) recording is a significant functional neuroimaging modality that provides valuable insights into brain function during SZ. However, EEG signal analysis poses challenges for neurologists and scientists due to the presence of artifacts, long-term recordings, and the utilization of multiple channels. To address these challenges, researchers have introduced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, encompassing conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods, to aid in SZ diagnosis. This study reviews papers focused on SZ diagnosis utilizing EEG signals and AI methods. The introduction section provides a comprehensive explanation of SZ diagnosis methods and intervention techniques. Subsequently, review papers in this field are discussed, followed by an introduction to the AI methods employed for SZ diagnosis and a summary of relevant papers presented in tabular form. Additionally, this study reports on the most significant challenges encountered in SZ diagnosis, as identified through a review of papers in this field. Future directions to overcome these challenges are also addressed. The discussion section examines the specific details of each paper, culminating in the presentation of conclusions and findings.

eess.SP↗