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András Horváth

Publications and source records attributed to András Horváth.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

cs.CV↗

Phase-Type Variational Autoencoders for Heavy-Tailed Data

Heavy-tailed distributions are ubiquitous in real-world data, where rare but extreme events dominate risk and variability. However, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) employ simple decoder distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, that fail to capture heavy-tailed behavior, while existing heavy-tail-aware extensions remain restricted to predefined parametric families whose tail behavior is fixed a priori. We propose the Phase-Type Variational Autoencoder (PH-VAE), whose decoder distribution is a latent-conditioned Phase-Type (PH) distribution, defined as the absorption time of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). This formulation composes multiple exponential time scales, yielding a flexible and analytically tractable decoder that adapts its finite-range tail behavior directly from the observed data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PH-VAE accurately approximates diverse heavy-tailed distributions, significantly outperforming Gaussian, Student-t, and extreme-value-based VAE decoders in modeling observed tail behavior and extreme quantiles. In multivariate settings, PH-VAE captures realistic cross-dimensional tail dependence through its shared latent representation. To our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate Phase-Type distributions into deep generative modeling, bridging applied probability and representation learning.

cs.LG↗

Mitigating Pretraining-Induced Attention Asymmetry in 2D+ Electron Microscopy Image Segmentation

Vision models pretrained on large-scale RGB natural image datasets are widely reused for electron microscopy image segmentation. In electron microscopy, volumetric data are acquired as serial sections and processed as stacks of adjacent grayscale slices, where neighboring slices provide symmetric contextual information for identifying features on the central slice. The common strategy maps such stacks to pseudo-RGB inputs to enable transfer learning from pretrained models. However, this mapping imposes channel-specific semantics inherited from natural images, even though electron microscopy slices are homogeneous in the modality and symmetric in their predictive roles. As a result, pretrained models may encode inductive biases that are misaligned with the inherent symmetry of volumetric electron microscopy data. In this work, it is demonstrated that RGB-pretrained models systematically assign unequal importance to individual input slices when applied to stacked electron microscopy data, despite the absence of any intrinsic channel ordering. Using saliency-based attribution analysis across multiple architectures, a consistent channel-level asymmetry was observed that persists after fine-tuning and affects model interpretability, even when segmentation performance is unchanged. To address this issue, a targeted modification of pretraining weights based on uniform channel initialization was proposed, which restores symmetric feature attribution while preserving the benefits of pretraining. Experiments on the SNEMI, Lucchi and GF-PA66 datasets confirm a substantial reduction in attribution bias without compromising or even improving segmentation accuracy.

cs.CV↗

Approximating Heavy-Tailed Distributions with a Mixture of Bernstein Phase-Type and Hyperexponential Models

Heavy-tailed distributions, prevalent in a lot of real-world applications such as finance, telecommunications, queuing theory, and natural language processing, are challenging to model accurately owing to their slow tail decay. Bernstein phase-type (BPH) distributions, through their analytical tractability and good approximations in the non-tail region, can present a good solution, but they suffer from an inability to reproduce these heavy-tailed behaviors exactly, thus leading to inadequate performance in important tail areas. On the contrary, while highly adaptable to heavy-tailed distributions, hyperexponential (HE) models struggle in the body part of the distribution. Additionally, they are highly sensitive to initial parameter selection, significantly affecting their precision. To solve these issues, we propose a novel hybrid model of BPH and HE distributions, borrowing the most desirable features from each for enhanced approximation quality. Specifically, we leverage an optimization to set initial parameters for the HE component, significantly enhancing its robustness and reducing the possibility that the associated procedure results in an invalid HE model. Experimental validation demonstrates that the novel hybrid approach is more performant than individual application of BPH or HE models. More precisely, it can capture both the body and the tail of heavy-tailed distributions, with a considerable enhancement in matching parameters such as mean and coefficient of variation. Additional validation through experiments utilizing queuing theory proves the practical usefulness, accuracy, and precision of our hybrid approach.

cs.PF↗

Statistical process discovery

Stochastic process discovery is concerned with deriving a model capable of reproducing the stochastic character of observed executions of a given process, stored in a log. This leads to an optimisation problem in which the model's parameter space is searched for, driven by the resemblance between the log's and the model's stochastic languages. The bottleneck of such optimisation problem lay in the determination of the model's stochastic language which existing approaches deal with through, hardly scalable, exact computation approaches. In this paper we introduce a novel framework in which we combine a simulation-based Bayesian parameter inference scheme, used to search for the ``optimal'' instance of a stochastic model, with an expressive statistical model checking engine, used (during inference) to approximate the language of the considered model's instance. Because of its simulation-based nature, the payoff is that, the runtime for discovering of the optimal instance of a model can be easily traded in for accuracy, hence allowing to treat large models which would result in a prohibitive runtime with non-simulation based alternatives. We validate our approach on several popular event logs concerning real-life systems.

cs.FL↗

Probabilistic Process Discovery with Stochastic Process Trees

In order to obtain a stochastic model that accounts for the stochastic aspects of the dynamics of a business process, usually the following steps are taken. Given an event log, a process tree is obtained through a process discovery algorithm, i.e., a process tree that is aimed at reproducing, as accurately as possible, the language of the log. The process tree is then transformed into a Petri net that generates the same set of sequences as the process tree. In order to capture the frequency of the sequences in the event log, weights are assigned to the transitions of the Petri net, resulting in a stochastic Petri net with a stochastic language in which each sequence is associated with a probability. In this paper we show that this procedure has unfavorable properties. First, the weights assigned to the transitions of the Petri net have an unclear role in the resulting stochastic language. We will show that a weight can have multiple, ambiguous impact on the probability of the sequences generated by the Petri net. Second, a number of different Petri nets with different number of transitions can correspond to the same process tree. This means that the number of parameters (the number of weights) that determines the stochastic language is not well-defined. In order to avoid these ambiguities, in this paper, we propose to add stochasticity directly to process trees. The result is a new formalism, called stochastic process trees, in which the number of parameters and their role in the associated stochastic language is clear and well-defined.

cs.CL↗

Edge Training and Inference with Analog ReRAM Technology for Hand Gesture Recognition

Tactile hand gesture recognition is a crucial task for user control in the automotive sector, where Human-Machine Interactions (HMI) demand low latency and high energy efficiency. This study addresses the challenges of power-constrained edge training and inference by utilizing analog Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM) technology in conjunction with a real tactile hand gesture dataset. By optimizing the input space through a feature engineering strategy, we avoid relying on large-scale crossbar arrays, making the system more suitable for edge deployment. Through realistic hardware-aware simulations that account for device non-idealities derived from experimental data, we demonstrate the functionalities of our analog ReRAM-based analog in-memory computing for on-chip training, utilizing the state-of-the-art Tiki-Taka algorithm. Furthermore, we validate the classification accuracy of approximately 91.4% for post-deployment inference of hand gestures. The results highlight the potential of analog ReRAM technology and crossbar architecture with fully parallelized matrix computations for real-time HMI systems at the Edge.

eess.SP↗

Enhancing Cell Tracking with a Time-Symmetric Deep Learning Approach

The accurate tracking of live cells using video microscopy recordings remains a challenging task for popular state-of-the-art image processing based object tracking methods. In recent years, several existing and new applications have attempted to integrate deep-learning based frameworks for this task, but most of them still heavily rely on consecutive frame based tracking embedded in their architecture or other premises that hinder generalized learning. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a new deep-learning based tracking method that relies solely on the assumption that cells can be tracked based on their spatio-temporal neighborhood, without restricting it to consecutive frames. The proposed method has the additional benefit that the motion patterns of the cells can be learned completely by the predictor without any prior assumptions, and it has the potential to handle a large number of video frames with heavy artifacts. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated through biologically motivated validation strategies and compared against multiple state-of-the-art cell tracking methods.

eess.IV↗

Post-Hoc MOTS: Exploring the Capabilities of Time-Symmetric Multi-Object Tracking

Temporal forward-tracking has been the dominant approach for multi-object segmentation and tracking (MOTS). However, a novel time-symmetric tracking methodology has recently been introduced for the detection, segmentation, and tracking of budding yeast cells in pre-recorded samples. Although this architecture has demonstrated a unique perspective on stable and consistent tracking, as well as missed instance re-interpolation, its evaluation has so far been largely confined to settings related to videomicroscopic environments. In this work, we aim to reveal the broader capabilities, advantages, and potential challenges of this architecture across various specifically designed scenarios, including a pedestrian tracking dataset. We also conduct an ablation study comparing the model against its restricted variants and the widely used Kalman filter. Furthermore, we present an attention analysis of the tracking architecture for both pretrained and non-pretrained models

cs.CV↗

A framework for optimisation based stochastic process discovery

Process mining is concerned with deriving formal models capable of reproducing the behaviour of a given organisational process by analysing observed executions collected in an event log. The elements of an event log are finite sequences (i.e., traces or words) of actions. Many effective algorithms have been introduced which issue a control flow model (commonly in Petri net form) aimed at reproducing, as precisely as possible, the language of the considered event log. However, given that identical executions can be observed several times, traces of an event log are associated with a frequency and, hence, an event log inherently yields also a stochastic language. By exploiting the trace frequencies contained in the event log, the stochastic extension of process mining, therefore, consists in deriving stochastic (Petri nets) models capable of reproducing the likelihood of the observed executions. In this paper, we introduce a novel stochastic process mining approach. Starting from a "standard" Petri net model mined through classical mining algorithms, we employ optimization to identify optimal weights for the transitions of the mined net so that the stochastic language issued by the stochastic interpretation of the mined net closely resembles that of the event log. The optimization is either based on the maximum likelihood principle or on the earth moving distance. Experiments on some popular real system logs show an improved accuracy w.r.t. to alternative approaches.

cs.DB↗

Saliency Map Based Data Augmentation

Data augmentation is a commonly applied technique with two seemingly related advantages. With this method one can increase the size of the training set generating new samples and also increase the invariance of the network against the applied transformations. Unfortunately all images contain both relevant and irrelevant features for classification therefore this invariance has to be class specific. In this paper we will present a new method which uses saliency maps to restrict the invariance of neural networks to certain regions, providing higher test accuracy in classification tasks.

cs.CV↗

Receptive Field Size Optimization with Continuous Time Pooling

The pooling operation is a cornerstone element of convolutional neural networks. These elements generate receptive fields for neurons, in which local perturbations should have minimal effect on the output activations, increasing robustness and invariance of the network. In this paper we will present an altered version of the most commonly applied method, maximum pooling, where pooling in theory is substituted by a continuous time differential equation, which generates a location sensitive pooling operation, more similar to biological receptive fields. We will present how this continuous method can be approximated numerically using discrete operations which fit ideally on a GPU. In our approach the kernel size is substituted by diffusion strength which is a continuous valued parameter, this way it can be optimized by gradient descent algorithms. We will evaluate the effect of continuous pooling on accuracy and computational need using commonly applied network architectures and datasets.

cs.CV↗

Sorted Pooling in Convolutional Networks for One-shot Learning

We present generalized versions of the commonly used maximum pooling operation: $k$th maximum and sorted pooling operations which selects the $k$th largest response in each pooling region, selecting locally consistent features of the input images. This method is able to increase the generalization power of a network and can be used to decrease training time and error rate of networks and it can significantly improve accuracy in case of training scenarios where the amount of available data is limited, like one-shot learning scenarios

cs.CV↗

MimosaNet: An Unrobust Neural Network Preventing Model Stealing

Deep Neural Networks are robust to minor perturbations of the learned network parameters and their minor modifications do not change the overall network response significantly. This allows space for model stealing, where a malevolent attacker can steal an already trained network, modify the weights and claim the new network his own intellectual property. In certain cases this can prevent the free distribution and application of networks in the embedded domain. In this paper, we propose a method for creating an equivalent version of an already trained fully connected deep neural network that can prevent network stealing: namely, it produces the same responses and classification accuracy, but it is extremely sensitive to weight changes.

cs.LG↗

Domain Partitioning Network

Standard adversarial training involves two agents, namely a generator and a discriminator, playing a mini-max game. However, even if the players converge to an equilibrium, the generator may only recover a part of the target data distribution, in a situation commonly referred to as mode collapse. In this work, we present the Domain Partitioning Network (DoPaNet), a new approach to deal with mode collapse in generative adversarial learning. We employ multiple discriminators, each encouraging the generator to cover a different part of the target distribution. To ensure these parts do not overlap and collapse into the same mode, we add a classifier as a third agent in the game. The classifier decides which discriminator the generator is trained against for each sample. Through experiments on toy examples and real images, we show the merits of DoPaNet in covering the real distribution and its superiority with respect to the competing methods. Besides, we also show that we can control the modes from which samples are generated using DoPaNet.

cs.LG↗