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Azam Bastanfard

Publications and source records attributed to Azam Bastanfard.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Belief-Guided Decision Making with Uncertainty Gating in the Game of Go

Recent advancements in Computer Go, driven by AlphaZero and MuZero, rely heavily on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to correct the errors of the neural network policy. While effective on massive computational clusters, this dependence creates a critical bottleneck on consumer-grade hardware, where the computational cost of tree management severely limits inference rates. Furthermore, without deep search, these models suffer from hallucination, proposing moves with high confidence that are strategically fatal. This paper introduces a novel Belief-Guided architecture that disentangles the Policy head from a distinct Belief head. Unlike traditional value functions, the Belief head acts as an internal simulator and independent critic, modeling epistemic uncertainty and strategic stability. By integrating memory mechanisms (Transformer/GRU) to handle long-term dependencies and the Ko rule, and utilizing a gating mechanism to filter overconfident policy errors, our model shifts the burden of intelligence from runtime search to parametric "intuition." Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves search-free win rates and reduces hallucination, enabling professional-level play on limited hardware where massive MCTS is infeasible.

cs.AI

Transcript-Free Lightweight Detection of Alzheimer's Disease from Spontaneous Speech Using Handcrafted MFCC-Dominant Acoustic Biomarkers

It is still hard to find Alzheimer's disease (AD) early, especially when neuroimaging is expensive or tools that depend on language are not available. Spontaneous speech provides a non-invasive signal; however, numerous current methodologies depend on transcripts/ASR or computationally intensive deep models. We offer a simple, audio-only baseline for detecting AD using 176 Cookie Theft recordings from the DementiaBank Pitt corpus (88 AD, 88 controls). WebRTC voice activity detection (VAD) is used to separate speech from non-speech. We take out 99 hand-crafted acoustic-temporal features, including pause and fluency statistics, spectral/prosodic descriptors, and MFCC summaries with {\Delta} and {\Delta}{\Delta}. Evaluation is performed using a stringent speaker-independent GroupShuffleSplit,documenting performance across 30 iterations. A lightweight SVM with an RBF kernel gets an average AUC of 0.674 across runs. For example, a single split has an AUC of 0.742 and an accuracy of 0.657. We also present an exploratory compact-feature analysis utilizing a Top-20 subset ranked by Random Forest importance; since selection is not nested within training splits, these results may be overly optimistic and are not employed for primary conclusions (AUC 0.719). The results indicate that transcript-free spectro-temporal and fluency-related cues can facilitate speaker-independent Alzheimer's disease screening from raw audio, establishing a practical foundation for deployment-oriented research.

cs.SD

EigenCoin: sassanid coins classification based on Bhattacharyya distance

Solving pattern recognition problems using imbalanced databases is a hot topic, which entices researchers to bring it into focus. Therefore, we consider this problem in the application of Sassanid coins classification. Our focus is not only on proposing EigenCoin manifold with Bhattacharyya distance for the classification task, but also on testing the influence of the holistic and feature-based approaches. EigenCoin consists of three main steps namely manifold construction, mapping test data, and classification. Conducted experiments show EigenCoin outperformed other observed algorithms and achieved the accuracy from 9.45% up to 21.75%, while it has the capability of handling the over-fitting problem.

cs.CV

Data-Driven Animation Controller: A Prioritized Visual System for Decoupled Animation Logic in Godot Game Engine

This paper introduces the Data-Driven Animation Controller (DDAC), a specialized Godot component that achieves robust decoupling of animation logic from core gameplay scripts through a data-driven approach. Animation control is typically centralized and imperatively defined within core character scripts, often relying on implicit Finite State Machines (FSMs). This practice leads to tightly coupled and difficult-to-maintain codebases. The DDAC component externalizes these instructions into easily inspector-editable resources, effectively making the animation logic declarative. Rules are defined by reading Conditions from any variable on any external node and executing Actions (setting the target animation). The DDAC also manages secondary visual state settings, such as Animation Speed Scaling and Horizontal/Vertical Sprite Flipping, using the same simple rule-based setup. The highest contribution of this work is the use of a Prioritized Resolution Algorithm to enforce mutual exclusion, ensuring that when multiple rules match, only the highest-priority rule executes. This framework allows designers to quickly iterate on character-state visualization without modifying code, while significantly improving maintainability and reducing cognitive load on core developers.

cs.GR

A Study on Enhancing User Engagement by Employing Gamified Recommender Systems

Providing customized products and services in the modern business world is one of the most efficient solutions to improve users' experience and their engagements with the industries. To aim, recommender systems, by producing personalized recommendations, have a crucial role in the digital age. As a consequence of modern improvements in the internet and online-based technologies, using gamification rules also increased in various fields. Recent studies showed that considering gamification concepts in implementing recommendation systems not only can become helpful to overcome the cold start and lack of sufficient data, moreover, can effectively improve user engagement. Gamification can motivate individuals to have more activities on the system; these interactions are valuable resources of data for recommender engines. Unlike the past related works about using gamified recommendation systems in different environments or studies that particularly surveyed gamification strategies or recommenders separately, this work provides a comprehensive review of how gamified recommender systems can enhance user engagement in various domain applications. Furthermore, comparing different approaches for building recommender systems is followed by in-depth surveying about investigating the gamified recommender systems, including their approaches, limitations, evaluation metrics, proposed achievements, datasets, domain areas, and their recommendation techniques. This exhaustive analysis provides a detailed picture of the topic's popularity, gaps, and unexplored regions. It is envisaged that the proposed research and introduced possible future directions would serve as a stepping stone for researchers interested in using gamified recommender systems for user satisfaction and engagement.

cs.IR

Req-Rec: Enhancing Requirements Elicitation for Increasing Stakeholder's Satisfaction Using a Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender System

The success or failure of a project is highly related to recognizing the right stakeholders and accurately finding and discovering their requirements. However, choosing the proper elicitation technique was always a considerable challenge for efficient requirement engineering. As a consequence of the swift improvement of digital technologies since the past decade, recommender systems have become an efficient channel for making a deeply personalized interactive communication with stakeholders. In this research, a new method, called the Req-Rec (Requirements Recommender), is proposed. It is a hybrid recommender system based on the collaborative filtering approach and the repertory grid technique as the core component. The primary goal of Req-Rec is to increase stakeholder satisfaction by assisting them in the requirement elicitation phase. Based on the results, the method efficiently could overcome weaknesses of common requirement elicitation techniques, such as time limitation, location-based restrictions, and bias in requirements' elicitation process. Therefore, recommending related requirements assists stakeholders in becoming more aware of different aspects of the project.

cs.IR

Proposing a Semantic Movie Recommendation System Enhanced by ChatGPT's NLP Results

The importance of recommender systems on the web has grown, especially in the movie industry, with a vast selection of options to watch. To assist users in traversing available items and finding relevant results, recommender systems analyze operational data and investigate users' tastes and habits. Providing highly individualized suggestions can boost user engagement and satisfaction, which is one of the fundamental goals of the movie industry, significantly in online platforms. According to recent studies and research, using knowledge-based techniques and considering the semantic ideas of the textual data is a suitable way to get more appropriate results. This study provides a new method for building a knowledge graph based on semantic information. It uses the ChatGPT, as a large language model, to assess the brief descriptions of movies and extract their tone of voice. Results indicated that using the proposed method may significantly enhance accuracy rather than employing the explicit genres supplied by the publishers.

cs.IR

The Persian Piano Corpus: A Collection Of Instrument-Based Feature Extracted Data Considering Dastgah

The research in the field of music is rapidly growing, and this trend emphasizes the need for comprehensive data. Though researchers have made an effort to contribute their own datasets, many data collections lack the requisite inclusivity for comprehensive study because they are frequently focused on particular components of music or other specific topics. We have endeavored to address data scarcity by employing an instrument-based approach to provide a complete corpus related to the Persian piano. Our piano corpus includes relevant labels for Persian music mode (Dastgah) and comprehensive metadata, allowing for utilization in various popular research areas. The features extracted from 2022 Persian piano pieces in The Persian Piano Corpus (PPC) have been collected and made available to researchers, aiming for a more thorough understanding of Persian music and the role of the piano in it in subsequent steps.

cs.SD

RLAS-BIABC: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Answer Selection Using the BERT Model Boosted by an Improved ABC Algorithm

Answer selection (AS) is a critical subtask of the open-domain question answering (QA) problem. The present paper proposes a method called RLAS-BIABC for AS, which is established on attention mechanism-based long short-term memory (LSTM) and the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) word embedding, enriched by an improved artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for pretraining and a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for training backpropagation (BP) algorithm. BERT can be comprised in downstream work and fine-tuned as a united task-specific architecture, and the pretrained BERT model can grab different linguistic effects. Existing algorithms typically train the AS model with positive-negative pairs for a two-class classifier. A positive pair contains a question and a genuine answer, while a negative one includes a question and a fake answer. The output should be one for positive and zero for negative pairs. Typically, negative pairs are more than positive, leading to an imbalanced classification that drastically reduces system performance. To deal with it, we define classification as a sequential decision-making process in which the agent takes a sample at each step and classifies it. For each classification operation, the agent receives a reward, in which the prize of the majority class is less than the reward of the minority class. Ultimately, the agent finds the optimal value for the policy weights. We initialize the policy weights with the improved ABC algorithm. The initial value technique can prevent problems such as getting stuck in the local optimum. Although ABC serves well in most tasks, there is still a weakness in the ABC algorithm that disregards the fitness of related pairs of individuals in discovering a neighboring food source position.

cs.CL

Adjustable Method Based on Body Parts for Improving the Accuracy of 3D Reconstruction in Visually Important Body Parts from Silhouettes

This research proposes a novel adjustable algorithm for reconstructing 3D body shapes from front and side silhouettes. Most recent silhouette-based approaches use a deep neural network trained by silhouettes and key points to estimate the shape parameters but cannot accurately fit the model to the body contours and consequently are struggling to cover detailed body geometry, especially in the torso. In addition, in most of these cases, body parts have the same accuracy priority, making the optimization harder and avoiding reaching the optimum possible result in essential body parts, like the torso, which is visually important in most applications, such as virtual garment fitting. In the proposed method, we can adjust the expected accuracy for each body part based on our purpose by assigning coefficients for the distance of each body part between the projected 3D body and 2D silhouettes. To measure this distance, we first recognize the correspondent body parts using body segmentation in both views. Then, we align individual body parts by 2D rigid registration and match them using pairwise matching. The objective function tries to minimize the distance cost for the individual body parts in both views based on distances and coefficients by optimizing the statistical model parameters. We also handle the slight variation in the degree of arms and limbs by matching the pose. We evaluate the proposed method with synthetic body meshes from the normalized S-SCAPE. The result shows that the algorithm can more accurately reconstruct visually important body parts with high coefficients.

cs.CV