arXiv subjects

Jean-Daniel Zucker

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Daniel Zucker.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Automated pipeline for herbarium label digitization

Digitized herbarium collections, now comprising over 100 million freely accessible specimen images, have become a critical resource for addressing fundamental questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet the rich metadata encoded in herbarium labels (collector identities, geographic localities, collection dates, and ecological observations) remains largely inaccessible at scale, constraining both biodiversity informatics and the construction of specimen-specific image-text corpora for multimodal AI. We present HERBIOME, a modular end-to-end pipeline for automated herbarium label digitization, integrating YOLOv8-based component detection, CRAFT Hezar word-level text localization, fine-tuned TrOCR for recognition of mixed handwritten and printed text, and GPT-4o Mini for semantic metadata structuring into standardized fields. TrOCR was trained on a multi-source dataset combining general transcription corpora (CREMMA-AN, PictoCatalogs) with herbarium-specific data (R\'eColNat), achieving a Character Error Rate of 4.05-4.10%. End-to-end evaluation on 450 French herbarium specimens, using a dual-metric framework of Maximum Window Similarity (MWS: 0.614-0.618) and Semantic Metadata Accuracy (SMA: 0.440-0.445), reveals that hybrid training strategies improve semantic fidelity while random sampling maximizes surface similarity, with taxonomic fields remaining the principal bottleneck. By automating the extraction of structured metadata from complex, heterogeneous labels, HERBIOME reduces transcription burden, enables the construction of paired image-text datasets that faithfully capture specimen individuality, which is a prerequisite for next-generation multimodal biodiversity AI systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AT-ViT: Area-Targeted Multi-View Vision Transformer with Cross-Attention and Multi-Scale Patching for Plant Trait Recognition in Herbarium Images

Automated plant traits recognition from herbarium images is essential for plant sciences, yet remains challenging because background elements (e.g., textual labels, mounting artifacts, and color charts) can introduce shortcut learning, leading models to rely on spurious non-plant cues rather than plant morphology. This bias degrades both generalization and interpretability. In this paper, we introduce AT-ViT, a dual-branch Vision Transformer that jointly encodes raw herbarium scans and their segmented-derived counterparts via a multi-scale, multi-view cross-attention fusion scheme. AT-ViT further incorporates a mask-guided patch weighting mechanism that amplifies plant-relevant regions and attenuates background-driven features. By learning from the original scans while being guided by segmentation masks through the mask-guided patch reweighting mechanism, the model is encouraged to focus on plant organs and learn plant-centric representations more effectively. Across multiple trait classification tasks (e.g., leaf base shape, thorns), AT-ViT delivers consistent accuracy gains, improves attention localization on plant regions, and exhibits increased robustness under synthetic background perturbations. Specifically, AT-ViT substantially improves spatial attention grounding, boosting plant-region alignment (Avg IoU_p: +15.66 to +18.03 pp) while reducing background overlap (Avg IoU_b: -27.92 to -31.02 pp) relative to CrossViT, and remains markedly more robust to background perturbations, outperforming ResNet101 by up to +32.32 accuracy points and CrossViT by up to +5.07 points under background-noise conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Are Tabular Foundation Models Robust to Realistic Query Distribution Shifts in Microbiome Data?

Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve strong performance on microbiome abundance data, yet their robustness under realistic distribution shift remains poorly characterized. We introduce a benchmark that evaluates the robustness of TFMs to biologically inspired perturbations across six gut microbiome datasets spanning four disease contexts. In this in-context learning setting, models receive unperturbed support sets as context and are evaluated on perturbed query samples. To isolate robustness beyond "shortcut" features, we preserve the most discriminative taxa and apply three controlled perturbation strategies: (i) removal of high-abundance (uninformative) taxa, (ii) sparsification via increased zero-inflation, and (iii) zero-imputation via spurious non-zero injections. Our results show that protecting discriminative features is insufficient to guarantee stability under support-query shift: across datasets, all perturbations degrade model performance, with zero-imputation consistently the most harmful, indicating that corrupting global feature structure can break generalization even when key taxa are retained. Sparsification disproportionately affects TFMs relative to a classical random forest baseline, suggesting greater sensitivity to zero-inflation-type shifts. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/UMMISCO/metagenomics-fm/.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

An Agentic Framework Using Rules and LLMs for Embedding and Annotating Descriptive Document Layouts: A Plant Science Use Case

Background: Recent advances in information retrieval (IR) leverage both dense and sparse representations, large language models (LLMs), and specialized retrieval models to improve ranking accuracy, relevance, and cross-lingual performance. Complementary techniques such as passage indexing, document layout analysis, and semantic knowledge representation further enhance retrieval effectiveness by capturing fine-grained contextual and structural information. Emerging agentic LLM frameworks extend these capabilities by enabling planning, iterative reasoning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration, thereby broadening applications across diverse domains. These frameworks also emphasize rigorous evaluation, ethical considerations, and trustworthiness, ensuring responsible deployment in real-world settings. We propose a modular, agent-based pipeline for botanical trait extraction. Optical character recognition (OCR) converts PDFs into machine-readable text, while segmentation and indexing organize content by genus and species. Rule-based parsers extract structured botanical traits, and ensembles of large language models (LLMs) expand trait vocabularies and resolve ambiguities. This approach ensures accurate species recognition, scalable annotation, and explainable integration of textual botanical descriptions, enabling robust and interpretable data extraction across large botanical corpora. Results: Using three regional botanical datasets, our system extracted 55,737 trait annotations across 4,961 species, averaging 9.1 traits per species. Integration of LLM-based enrichment improved coverage for 75% of traits, increasing total annotations by 59%. While the choice of OCR engine had a minor effect on species recognition, overall annotation counts remained stable, demonstrating the robustness, scalability, and reliability of the pipeline for large-scale botanical trait extraction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Maximum Entropy Relaxation of Multi-Way Cardinality Constraints for Synthetic Population Generation

Generating synthetic populations from aggregate statistics is a core component of microsimulation, agent-based modeling, policy analysis, and privacy-preserving data release. Beyond classical census marginals, many applications require matching heterogeneous unary, binary, and ternary constraints derived from surveys, expert knowledge, or automatically extracted descriptions. Constructing populations that satisfy such multi-way constraints simultaneously poses a significant computational challenge. We consider populations where each individual is described by categorical attributes and the target is a collection of global frequency constraints over attribute combinations. Exact formulations scale poorly as the number and arity of constraints increase, especially when the constraints are numerous and overlapping. Grounded in methods from statistical physics, we propose a maximum-entropy relaxation of this problem. Multi-way cardinality constraints are matched in expectation rather than exactly, yielding an exponential-family distribution over complete population assignments and a convex optimization problem over Lagrange multipliers. We evaluate the approach on NPORS-derived scaling benchmarks with 4 to 40 attributes and compare it primarily against generalized raking. The results show that MaxEnt becomes increasingly advantageous as the number of attributes and ternary interactions grows, while raking remains competitive on smaller, lower-arity instances.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MetagenBERT: a Transformer-based Architecture using Foundational genomic Large Language Models for novel Metagenome Representation

Metagenomic disease prediction commonly relies on species abundance tables derived from large, incomplete reference catalogs, constraining resolution and discarding valuable information contained in DNA reads. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MetagenBERT, a Transformer based framework that produces end to end metagenome embeddings directly from raw DNA sequences, without taxonomic or functional annotations. Reads are embedded using foundational genomic language models (DNABERT2 and the microbiome specialized DNABERTMS), then aggregated through a scalable clustering strategy based on FAISS accelerated KMeans. Each metagenome is represented as a cluster abundance vector summarizing the distribution of its embedded reads. We evaluate this approach on five benchmark gut microbiome datasets (Cirrhosis, T2D, Obesity, IBD, CRC). MetagenBERT achieves competitive or superior AUC performance relative to species abundance baselines across most tasks. Concatenating both representations further improves prediction, demonstrating complementarity between taxonomic and embedding derived signals. Clustering remains robust when applied to as little as 10% of reads, highlighting substantial redundancy in metagenomes and enabling major computational gains. We additionally introduce MetagenBERT Glob Mcardis, a cross cohort variant trained on the large, phenotypically diverse MetaCardis cohort and transferred to other datasets, retaining predictive signal including for unseen phenotypes, indicating the feasibility of a foundation model for metagenome representation. Robustness analyses (PERMANOVA, PERMDISP, entropy) show consistent separation of different states across subsamples. Overall, MetagenBERT provides a scalable, annotation free representation of metagenomes pointing toward future phenotype aware generalization across heterogeneous cohorts and sequencing technologies.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2025

PlantSAM: An Object Detection-Driven Segmentation Pipeline for Herbarium Specimens

Deep learning-based classification of herbarium images is hampered by background heterogeneity, which introduces noise and artifacts that can potentially mislead models and reduce classification accuracy. Addressing these background-related challenges is critical to improving model performance. We introduce PlantSAM, an automated segmentation pipeline that integrates YOLOv10 for plant region detection and the Segment Anything Model (SAM2) for segmentation. YOLOv10 generates bounding box prompts to guide SAM2, enhancing segmentation accuracy. Both models were fine-tuned on herbarium images and evaluated using Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice coefficient metrics. PlantSAM achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance, with an IoU of 0.94 and a Dice coefficient of 0.97. Incorporating segmented images into classification models led to consistent performance improvements across five tested botanical traits, with accuracy gains of up to 4.36% and F1-score improvements of 4.15%. Our findings highlight the importance of background removal in herbarium image analysis, as it significantly enhances classification accuracy by allowing models to focus more effectively on the foreground plant structures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A text-to-tabular approach to generate synthetic patient data using LLMs

Access to large-scale high-quality healthcare databases is key to accelerate medical research and make insightful discoveries about diseases. However, access to such data is often limited by patient privacy concerns, data sharing restrictions and high costs. To overcome these limitations, synthetic patient data has emerged as an alternative. However, synthetic data generation (SDG) methods typically rely on machine learning (ML) models trained on original data, leading back to the data scarcity problem. We propose an approach to generate synthetic tabular patient data that does not require access to the original data, but only a description of the desired database. We leverage prior medical knowledge and in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to generate realistic patient data, even in a low-resource setting. We quantitatively evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art SDG models, using fidelity, privacy, and utility metrics. Our results show that while LLMs may not match the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on the original data, they effectively generate realistic patient data with well-preserved clinical correlations. An ablation study highlights key elements of our prompt contributing to high-quality synthetic patient data generation. This approach, which is easy to use and does not require original data or advanced ML skills, is particularly valuable for quickly generating custom-designed patient data, supporting project implementation and providing educational resources.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SIM-Net: A Multimodal Fusion Network Using Inferred 3D Object Shape Point Clouds from RGB Images for 2D Classification

We introduce the Shape-Image Multimodal Network (SIM-Net), a novel 2D image classification architecture that integrates 3D point cloud representations inferred directly from RGB images. Our key contribution lies in a pixel-to-point transformation that converts 2D object masks into 3D point clouds, enabling the fusion of texture-based and geometric features for enhanced classification performance. SIM-Net is particularly well-suited for the classification of digitized herbarium specimens (a task made challenging by heterogeneous backgrounds), non-plant elements, and occlusions that compromise conventional image-based models. To address these issues, SIM-Net employs a segmentation-based preprocessing step to extract object masks prior to 3D point cloud generation. The architecture comprises a CNN encoder for 2D image features and a PointNet-based encoder for geometric features, which are fused into a unified latent space. Experimental evaluations on herbarium datasets demonstrate that SIM-Net consistently outperforms ResNet101, achieving gains of up to 9.9% in accuracy and 12.3% in F-score. It also surpasses several transformer-based state-of-the-art architectures, highlighting the benefits of incorporating 3D structural reasoning into 2D image classification tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

IKrNet: A Neural Network for Detecting Specific Drug-Induced Patterns in Electrocardiograms Amidst Physiological Variability

Monitoring and analyzing electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, even under varying physiological conditions, including those influenced by physical activity, drugs and stress, is crucial to accurately assess cardiac health. However, current AI-based methods often fail to account for how these factors interact and alter ECG patterns, ultimately limiting their applicability in real-world settings. This study introduces IKrNet, a novel neural network model, which identifies drug-specific patterns in ECGs amidst certain physiological conditions. IKrNet's architecture incorporates spatial and temporal dynamics by using a convolutional backbone with varying receptive field size to capture spatial features. A bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory module is also employed to model temporal dependencies. By treating heart rate variability as a surrogate for physiological fluctuations, we evaluated IKrNet's performance across diverse scenarios, including conditions with physical stress, drug intake alone, and a baseline without drug presence. Our assessment follows a clinical protocol in which 990 healthy volunteers were administered 80mg of Sotalol, a drug which is known to be a precursor to Torsades-de-Pointes, a life-threatening arrhythmia. We show that IKrNet outperforms state-of-the-art models' accuracy and stability in varying physiological conditions, underscoring its clinical viability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Prompting ChatGPT for Chinese Learning as L2: A CEFR and EBCL Level Study

The use of chatbots in language learning has evolved significantly since the 1960s, becoming more sophisticated platforms as generative AI emerged. These tools now simulate natural conversations, adapting to individual learners' needs, including those studying Chinese. Our study explores how learners can use specific prompts to engage Large Language Models (LLM) as personalized chatbots, aiming to target their language level based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the European Benchmarking Chinese Language (EBCL) project. Focusing on A1, A1+ and A2 levels, we examine the teaching of Chinese, which presents unique challenges due to its logographic writing system. Our goal is to develop prompts that integrate oral and written skills, using high-frequency character lists and controlling oral lexical productions. These tools, powered by generative AI, aim to enhance language practice by crossing lexical and sinographic recurrence. While generative AI shows potential as a personalized tutor, further evaluation is needed to assess its effectiveness. We conducted a systematic series of experiments using ChatGPT models to evaluate their adherence to constraints specified in the prompts. The results indicate that incorporating level A1 and A1+ characters, along with the associated reference list, significantly enhances compliance with the EBCL character set. Properly prompted, LLMs can increase exposure to the target language and offer interactive exchanges to develop language skills.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ECGrecover: a Deep Learning Approach for Electrocardiogram Signal Completion

In this work, we address the challenge of reconstructing the complete 12-lead ECG signal from its incomplete parts. We focus on two main scenarios: (i) reconstructing missing signal segments within an ECG lead and (ii) recovering entire leads from signal in another unique lead. Two emerging clinical applications emphasize the relevance of our work. The first is the increasing need to digitize paper-stored ECGs for utilization in AI-based applications, often limited to digital 12 lead 10s ECGs. The second is the widespread use of wearable devices that record ECGs but typically capture only one or a few leads. In both cases, a non-negligible amount of information is lost or not recorded. Our approach aims to recover this missing signal. We propose ECGrecover, a U-Net neural network model trained on a novel composite objective function to address the reconstruction problem. This function incorporates both spatial and temporal features of the ECG by combining the distance in amplitude and sycnhronization through time between the reconstructed and the real digital signals. We used real-life ECG datasets and through comprehensive assessments compared ECGrecover with three state-of-the-art methods based on generative adversarial networks (EKGAN, Pix2Pix) as well as the CopyPaste strategy. The results demonstrated that ECGrecover consistently outperformed state-of-the-art methods in standard distortion metrics as well as in preserving critical ECG characteristics, particularly the P, QRS, and T wave coordinates.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

ECGtizer: a fully automated digitizing and signal recovery pipeline for electrocardiograms

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are essential for diagnosing cardiac pathologies, yet traditional paper-based ECG storage poses significant challenges for automated analysis. This study introduces ECGtizer, an open-source, fully automated tool designed to digitize paper ECGs and recover signals lost during storage. ECGtizer facilitates automated analyses using modern AI methods. It employs automated lead detection, three pixel-based signal extraction algorithms, and a deep learning-based signal reconstruction module. We evaluated ECGtizer on two datasets: a real-life cohort from the COVID-19 pandemic (JOCOVID) and a publicly available dataset (PTB-XL). Performance was compared with two existing methods: the fully automated ECGminer and the semi-automated PaperECG, which requires human intervention. ECGtizer's performance was assessed in terms of signal recovery and the fidelity of clinically relevant feature measurement. Additionally, we tested these tools on a third dataset (GENEREPOL) for downstream AI tasks. Results show that ECGtizer outperforms existing tools, with its ECGtizerFrag algorithm delivering superior signal recovery. While PaperECG demonstrated better outcomes than ECGminer, it required human input. ECGtizer enhances the usability of historical ECG data and supports advanced AI-based diagnostic methods, making it a valuable addition to the field of AI in ECG analysis.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Disease Classification in Metagenomics with 2D Embeddings and Deep Learning

Deep learning (DL) techniques have shown unprecedented success when applied to images, waveforms, and text. Generally, when the sample size ($N$) is much bigger than the number of features ($d$), DL often outperforms other machine learning (ML) techniques, often through the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, in many bioinformatics fields (including metagenomics), we encounter the opposite situation where $d$ is significantly greater than $N$. In these situations, applying DL techniques would lead to severe overfitting. Here we aim to improve classification of various diseases with metagenomic data through the use of CNNs. For this we proposed to represent metagenomic data as images. The proposed Met2Img approach relies on taxonomic and t-SNE embeddings to transform abundance data into "synthetic images". We applied our approach to twelve benchmark data sets including more than 1400 metagenomic samples. Our results show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms (Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM)). We observe that the integration of phylogenetic information alongside abundance data improves classification. The proposed approach is not only important in classification setting but also allows to visualize complex metagenomic data. The Met2Img is implemented in Python.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Deep Learning for Metagenomic Data: using 2D Embeddings and Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep learning (DL) techniques have had unprecedented success when applied to images, waveforms, and texts to cite a few. In general, when the sample size (N) is much greater than the number of features (d), DL outperforms previous machine learning (ML) techniques, often through the use of convolution neural networks (CNNs). However, in many bioinformatics ML tasks, we encounter the opposite situation where d is greater than N. In these situations, applying DL techniques (such as feed-forward networks) would lead to severe overfitting. Thus, sparse ML techniques (such as LASSO e.g.) usually yield the best results on these tasks. In this paper, we show how to apply CNNs on data which do not have originally an image structure (in particular on metagenomic data). Our first contribution is to show how to map metagenomic data in a meaningful way to 1D or 2D images. Based on this representation, we then apply a CNN, with the aim of predicting various diseases. The proposed approach is applied on six different datasets including in total over 1000 samples from various diseases. This approach could be a promising one for prediction tasks in the bioinformatics field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2013

Use of the C4.5 machine learning algorithm to test a clinical guideline-based decision support system

Well-designed medical decision support system (DSS) have been shown to improve health care quality. However, before they can be used in real clinical situations, these systems must be extensively tested, to ensure that they conform to the clinical guidelines (CG) on which they are based. Existing methods cannot be used for the systematic testing of all possible test cases. We describe here a new exhaustive dynamic verification method. In this method, the DSS is considered to be a black box, and the Quinlan C4.5 algorithm is used to build a decision tree from an exhaustive set of DSS input vectors and outputs. This method was successfully used for the testing of a medical DSS relating to chronic diseases: the ASTI critiquing module for type 2 diabetes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2013

The new science of metagenomics and the challenges of its use in both developed and developing countries

Our view of the microbial world and its impact on human health is changing radically with the ability to sequence uncultured or unculturable microbes sampled directly from their habitats, ability made possible by fast and cheap next generation sequencing technologies. Such recent developments represents a paradigmatic shift in the analysis of habitat biodiversity, be it the human, soil or ocean microbiome. We review here some research examples and results that indicate the importance of the microbiome in our lives and then discus some of the challenges faced by metagenomic experiments and the subsequent analysis of the generated data. We then analyze the economic and social impact on genomic-medicine and research in both developing and developed countries. We support the idea that there are significant benefits in building capacities for developing high-level scientific research in metagenomics in developing countries. Indeed, the notion that developing countries should wait for developed countries to make advances in science and technology that they later import at great cost has recently been challenged.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2002

Stress response function of a two-dimensional ordered packing of frictional beads

We study the stress profile of an ordered two-dimensional packing of beads in response to the application of a vertical overload localized at its top surface. Disorder is introduced through the Coulombic friction between the grains which gives some indeterminacy and allows the choice of one constrained random number per grain in the calculation of the contact forces. The so-called `multi-agent' technique we use, lets us deal with systems as large as $1000\times1000$ grains. We show that the average response profile has a double peaked structure. At large depth $z$, the position of these peaks grows with $cz$, while their widths scales like $\sqrt{Dz}$. $c$ and $D$ are analogous to `propagation' and `diffusion' coefficients. Their values depend on that of the friction coefficient $μ$. At small $μ$, we get $c_0-c \propto μ$ and $D \propto μ^β$, with $β\sim 2.5$, which means that the peaks get closer and wider as the disorder gets larger. This behavior is qualitatively what was predicted in a model where a stochastic relation between the stress components is assumed.

cond-mat↗