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Joshua Wong

Publications and source records attributed to Joshua Wong.

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Analyzing Traditional and Neural Approaches to Multilingual Readability Assessment

Transformer-based models excel at Automatic Readability Assessment (ARA), yet feature-based models remain in active use because their predictions tie back to linguistic properties. This matters because readability labels are subjective and rater-dependent, so high accuracy on noisy ground truth may reflect surface patterns rather than the linguistic structure that defines difficulty. We test whether transformers internalize the same features as traditional models across Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian using the ReadMe++ dataset. Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) identify the features driving traditional classifiers, which we then use as TCAV concept sets to probe multilingual XLM-R and language-specific encoders. Transformers recover surface-length, syntactic, and lexical-diversity signals, and reflect the ordinal CEFR structure of the traditional models. Alignment varies by model family, language, and layer, with language-specific encoders tracking traditional models more clearly than XLM-R. High linear separability does not always imply directional influence, limiting linear probing for count-based readability features.

cs.CL

A Multi-scale Linear-time Encoder for Whole-Slide Image Analysis

We introduce Multi-scale Adaptive Recurrent Biomedical Linear-time Encoder (MARBLE), the first \textit{purely Mamba-based} multi-state multiple instance learning (MIL) framework for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis. MARBLE processes multiple magnification levels in parallel and integrates coarse-to-fine reasoning within a linear-time state-space model, efficiently capturing cross-scale dependencies with minimal parameter overhead. WSI analysis remains challenging due to gigapixel resolutions and hierarchical magnifications, while existing MIL methods typically operate at a single scale and transformer-based approaches suffer from quadratic attention costs. By coupling parallel multi-scale processing with linear-time sequence modeling, MARBLE provides a scalable and modular alternative to attention-based architectures. Experiments on five public datasets show improvements of up to \textbf{6.9\%} in AUC, \textbf{20.3\%} in accuracy, and \textbf{2.3\%} in C-index, establishing MARBLE as an efficient and generalizable framework for multi-scale WSI analysis.

cs.CV

A Reproducible Framework for Bias-Resistant Machine Learning on Small-Sample Neuroimaging Data

We introduce a reproducible, bias-resistant machine learning framework that integrates domain-informed feature engineering, nested cross-validation, and calibrated decision-threshold optimization for small-sample neuroimaging data. Conventional cross-validation frameworks that reuse the same folds for both model selection and performance estimation yield optimistically biased results, limiting reproducibility and generalization. Demonstrated on a high-dimensional structural MRI dataset of deep brain stimulation cognitive outcomes, the framework achieved a nested-CV balanced accuracy of 0.660\,$\pm$\,0.068 using a compact, interpretable subset selected via importance-guided ranking. By combining interpretability and unbiased evaluation, this work provides a generalizable computational blueprint for reliable machine learning in data-limited biomedical domains.

cs.LG

A Highly Available GTFS-RT Positions System

We develop a system for real-time public transportation data, deciding to use the data standard GTFS-RT (GTFS Realtime), an open data format for public transit data. We give an overview of the design of a physical GPS sensor device, its firmware, and processes. Next, we give the algorithms used to translate raw sensor data into a public GTFS-RT data feed. We deploy this feed over a highly available cluster across multiple regions to maintain high availability.

eess.SP

Algorithmic Analysis of GTFS-RT vehicle position accuracy

This paper presents three novel algorithms for calculating geodesic intersections on an ellipsoid. These algorithms are applied in a case study analyzing real-time transit data in California to assess vehicle position drift. The analysis reveals that while certain data anomalies can be corrected, large-scale discrepancies persist. The paper concludes by proposing a set of practical solutions that can be implemented by either data producers or consumers to significantly improve positional accuracy.

physics.geo-ph

Shelving it rather than Ditching it: Dynamically Debloating DEX and Native Methods of Android Applications without APK Modification

Today's Android developers tend to include numerous features to accommodate diverse user requirements, which inevitably leads to bloated apps. Yet more often than not, only a fraction of these features are frequently utilized by users, thus a bloated app costs dearly in potential vulnerabilities, expanded attack surfaces, and additional resource consumption. Especially in the event of severe security incidents, users have the need to block vulnerable functionalities immediately. Existing works have proposed various code debloating approaches for identifying and removing features of executable components. However, they typically involve static modification of files (and, for Android apps, repackaging of APKs, too), which lacks user convenience let alone undermining the security model of Android due to the compromising of public key verification and code integrity checks. This paper introduces 3DNDroid, a Dynamic Debloating approach targeting both DEX and Native methods in AnDroid apps. Using an unprivileged management app in tandem with a customized Android OS, 3DNDroid dynamically reduces unnecessary code loading during app execution based on a pre-generated debloating schema from static or dynamic analyses. It intercepts invocations of debloated bytecode methods to prevent their interpretation, compilation, and execution, while zero-filling memory spaces of debloated native methods during code loading. Evaluation demonstrates 3DNDroid's ability to debloat 187 DEX methods and 30 native methods across 55 real-world apps, removing over 10K Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) gadgets. Case studies confirm its effectiveness in mitigating vulnerabilities, and performance assessments highlight its resource-saving advantages over non-debloated apps.

cs.CR

Relation Extraction from Tables using Artificially Generated Metadata

Relation Extraction (RE) from tables is the task of identifying relations between pairs of columns of a table. Generally, RE models for this task require labelled tables for training. These labelled tables can also be generated artificially from a Knowledge Graph (KG), which makes the cost to acquire them much lower in comparison to manual annotations. However, unlike real tables, these synthetic tables lack associated metadata, such as, column-headers, captions, etc; this is because synthetic tables are created out of KGs that do not store such metadata. Meanwhile, previous works have shown that metadata is important for accurate RE from tables. To address this issue, we propose methods to artificially create some of this metadata for synthetic tables. Afterward, we experiment with a BERT-based model, in line with recently published works, that takes as input a combination of proposed artificial metadata and table content. Our empirical results show that this leads to an improvement of 9\%-45\% in F1 score, in absolute terms, over 2 tabular datasets.

cs.CL

Chemical Structure Elucidation from Mass Spectrometry by Matching Substructures

Chemical structure elucidation is a serious bottleneck in analytical chemistry today. We address the problem of identifying an unknown chemical threat given its mass spectrum and its chemical formula, a task which might take well trained chemists several days to complete. Given a chemical formula, there could be over a million possible candidate structures. We take a data driven approach to rank these structures by using neural networks to predict the presence of substructures given the mass spectrum, and matching these substructures to the candidate structures. Empirically, we evaluate our approach on a data set of chemical agents built for unknown chemical threat identification. We show that our substructure classifiers can attain over 90% micro F1-score, and we can find the correct structure among the top 20 candidates in 88% and 71% of test cases for two compound classes.

physics.chem-ph