Enrique Hernandez Noguera

arXiv2026

DU-NO: A Parameter-Efficient Double U-Shaped Neural Operator for Phase-Resolving Wave Modeling

Phase-resolving wave models such as FUNWAVE-TVD are the accuracy standard for nearshore dynamics, resolving the shoaling, refraction, and breaking of individual waves, but their cost rules them out for the ensembles, uncertainty quantification, and real-time warning that operational forecasting demands. Neural operators promise solver-level accuracy at a fraction of that cost, yet on wave-dominated fields the accurate ones are large: hybrid spectral-convolutional operators such as U-FNO (the strongest baseline in our study after DU-NO) buy their fidelity with tens of millions of parameters. We introduce DU-NO (Double U-shaped Neural Operator), a multiscale U-shaped spectral operator that attaches lightweight convolutional U-Net branches only at its two shallowest encoder and decoder levels. The placement follows a sampling argument: high-wavenumber content exists only on fine grids, so the local, full-band pathways go where that content lives, while the coarse, band-limited levels stay purely spectral. A depth-decaying mode schedule holds the model to 3.64M parameters, an order of magnitude below U-FNO. On our publicly released FUNWAVE-TVD benchmark, DU-NO attains the best autoregressive rollout error of six identically trained architectures, improving on U-FNO by 14.9% with 10.8x fewer parameters, and a frequency-band analysis shows the gain holds across all bands, including the high-wavenumber band where truncated-spectral operators collapse. Parameter-matched controls confirm the gain is architectural: rescaled to the same 3.6M budget, the best baseline still trails DU-NO by 28.6%. The advantage carries beyond nearshore waves: DU-NO matches the strongest baselines on 2D Navier-Stokes and wins clearly on PDEBench shallow-water rollouts. Code, trained models, and evaluation artifacts are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/duno-code-5A7B/.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DeltaSeg: Tiered Attention and Deep Delta Learning for Multi-Class Structural Defect Segmentation

Automated segmentation of structural defects from visual inspection imagery remains challenging due to the diversity of damage types, extreme class imbalance, and the need for precise boundary delineation. This paper presents DeltaSeg, a U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture with a tiered attention strategy that integrates Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) channel attention in the encoder, Coordinate Attention at the bottleneck and decoder, and a novel Deep Delta Attention (DDA) mechanism in the skip connections. The encoder uses depthwise separable convolutions with dilated stages to maintain spatial resolution while expanding the receptive field. Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) at the bottleneck captures multi-scale context. The DDA module refines skip connections through a dual-path scheme combining a learned delta operator for nuisance feature suppression with spatial attention gates conditioned on decoder signals. Deep supervision through multi-scale auxiliary heads further strengthens gradient flow and encourages semantically meaningful features at intermediate decoder stages. We evaluate DeltaSeg on two datasets: the S2DS dataset (7 classes) and the Culvert-Sewer Defect Dataset (CSDD, 9 classes). Across both benchmarks, DeltaSeg consistently outperforms 12 competing architectures including U-Net, SA-UNet, UNet3+, SegFormer, Swin-UNet, EGE-UNet, FPN, and Mobile-UNETR, demonstrating strong generalization across damage types, imaging conditions, and structural geometries.

cs.CV↗