arXiv subjects

Koorosh Aslansefat

Publications and source records attributed to Koorosh Aslansefat.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

EcoFair: Energy-Efficient Inference Routing for Edge AI under Data Degradation

Medical edge-AI systems must operate under a difficult tension: delivering reliable diagnostic inference while running on devices with limited battery capacity, memory, and compute. In dermatology, this problem is amplified by real-world image degradation caused by smartphone capture, poor lighting, blur, compression, and heterogeneous edge sensors. To handle these degraded inputs, deploying a heavyweight model can improve reliability, but it rapidly increases the energy burden on resource-constrained devices. Conversely, always using a lightweight model saves energy but may be less reliable on ambiguous or degraded inputs. This paper introduces EcoFair, a vertically partitioned inference framework for dermatology classification in which image and tabular inputs remain local to edge clients while only learned modality-specific representations are transmitted for server-side fusion. EcoFair first processes each sample using a lightweight image encoder and then decides whether additional heavyweight computation is necessary. Escalation is triggered when the lightweight prediction exhibits high uncertainty, a narrow separation between safe and high-risk classes, or elevated metadata-derived risk from patient age and lesion location. Across HAM10000, BCN20000, and PAD-UFES-20, EcoFair is evaluated using multiple lightweight--heavy backbone pairings to quantify the trade-off between energy consumption, diagnostic performance, and worst-group malignant-case recall. Results show that EcoFair can reduce per-sample image-inference energy by up to 68\% relative to always using the heavyweight encoder, while selectively allocating additional computation under difficult data regimes to support inference reliability. Group-level analysis further shows configuration-dependent effects, with improvements in selected model--dataset settings and mixed behaviour in others.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Human-Centered Explainable AI for TinyML Edge Devices: A Pareto-Based Selection Framework with LLM-Guided Design

Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI) enables the deployment of AI models directly on local edge devices, while such deployments are subject to strict resource constraints, particularly in clinical applications requiring local and timely inference. In such contexts, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can serve as a human-AI interface intended to support healthcare professionals' and patients' understanding of model predictions and informed decision-making. To fulfill this role, XAI method selection for TinyML deployments can be formulated as a human-centered multi-objective design problem that jointly considers qualitative stakeholder preferences, explanation quality, and proxy-based deployment cost. We propose a framework that integrates a large language model (LLM)-guided design interface that maps qualitative stakeholder preferences to candidate XAI methods, followed by deterministic feasibility filtering and Pareto-based optimization. The framework exposes trade-offs among explanation fidelity, stability, and proxy-based deployment cost while characterizing their implications for explanation quality and estimated deployment feasibility. A proof-of-concept evaluation on a skin lesion classification task illustrates how the framework systematically compares candidate XAI methods and identifies Pareto-efficient trade-offs. The present evaluation covers the computational selection stages, while physical MCU deployment and empirical human-expert validation remain outside the scope of this study.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Runtime Uncertainty Monitoring for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems Using Bayesian Networks

This paper investigates how multi-agent systems (MAS)-based on large language models (LLMs) can support actuarial risk modelling, with a particular focus on uncertainty quantification. Actuarial workflows represent a high-stakes decision-support setting where unreliable outputs may lead to incorrect risk assessment, unfair pricing, and regulatory non-compliance. To address uncertainty introduced by the probabilistic nature of LLMs and dependencies between agents, a multi-agent framework is proposed in which specialised agents perform data preparation, modelling, review, and explanation tasks under a central hub. The main contribution is a novel approach to uncertainty propagation using token-level log-probabilities and a Bayesian Network. Importantly, log probabilities are not treated as direct probabilities of correctness or task success. Instead, length-normalised log-probability summaries are transformed into calibrated task-level confidence estimates before incorporation into the Bayesian Network. Results show that the framework reproduces baseline actuarial performance while providing additional insight into workflow stability and runtime uncertainty propagation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Data Safety: Synthetic Data Quality Analysis Using CIFAKE Dataset

Recently, the societal implementation of high-performance image classification models has expanded rapidly. While these models require vast amounts of training data to improve performance, securing sufficient real images is often impractical. As a means to compensate for this shortage, the use of synthetic data is becoming widespread. However, synthetic images are not necessarily equivalent to real images for training purposes. This study systematically analyzes the differences between two types of synthetic images created by different generation methods and real images from three perspectives: high-dimensional feature space, low-level statistics in color space, and the model training process. Furthermore, it experimentally verifies how synthetic data should be utilized by considering realistic data mixing scenarios. This enables the proposal of an evaluation and application strategy for performing preliminary assessments on synthetic images of unknown quality and safely incorporating them into training. This research aims to contribute to enhancing the reliability and safety of image classification models utilizing synthetic images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ConceptSMILE: Auditing the Trustworthiness of Concept-Based Explainable AI

Concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (AI) can make model reasoning more human-understandable, but concept-level outputs are not automatically trustworthy. We introduce ConceptSMILE, a model-agnostic perturbation-based auditing framework for evaluating the reliability of concept-based explanations. Rather than replacing SMILE, ConceptSMILE extends its perturbation-based logic from feature- or region-level attribution to the auditing of human-understandable concept explanations. The framework perturbs input regions, measures concept-response shifts, applies locality weighting, and fits an XGBoost surrogate to approximate local concept behaviour. Reliability is assessed through attribution accuracy, surrogate fidelity, faithfulness, stability, and consistency. We evaluate ConceptSMILE on retinal fundus images by comparing MedSAM-derived visual concepts with VLM-based semantic concepts. Results show that reliability varies across concepts and pathways: MedSAM achieves stronger spatial attribution and the highest surrogate fidelity ($R^2 = 0.8503$, $R_w^2 = 0.8465$), while the VLM pathway shows stronger vessel faithfulness and stronger stability under selected artefact conditions. ConceptSMILE provides an independent audit layer for evaluating the trustworthiness of concept-based XAI.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Bayesian Uncertainty Propagation for Agentic RAG Pipelines: A Proof-of-Concept Study on Multi-Hop Question Answering

Trustworthy deployment of Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems requires mechanisms for estimating when multi-stage reasoning pipelines may fail. This paper presents an uncertainty-aware Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework in which planner, evaluator and generator stages produce uncertainty signals derived from semantic divergence and generator self-evaluation. These signals are propagated through a Bayesian Network (BN) to estimate system-level uncertainty and provide node-level indicators of potential failure points across the workflow. The approach is evaluated on StrategyQA and HotpotQA using GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4.1-Nano, with Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC), Area Under the Accuracy-Rejection Curve (AUARC), Expected Calibration Error (ECE), and Brier Score used to assess discrimination, selective prediction and calibration. Results show that Bayesian propagation is more effective on HotpotQA, where uncertainty accumulates across multi-hop reasoning stages, while StrategyQA exposes limitations caused by miscalibration and unreliable upstream signals. The study positions Bayesian uncertainty propagation as a promising but preliminary mechanism for monitoring Agentic RAG systems, with future validation required in industrial domains such as Offshore Wind (OSW) maintenance decision support.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Risk Assessments for Evasive Emergency Maneuvers in Autonomous Vehicles

This paper presents a systematic verification and validation (V\&V) framework for the Evasive Minimum Risk Maneuver (EMRM) feature in autonomous vehicles, addressing a critical gap in existing safety assessment methods. We introduce the first formally integrated pipeline that unifies Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), and Finite State Machine (FSM) modeling into a single traceable workflow specifically designed for EMRM V\&V. HARA and STPA are combined through a structured hazard-loss mapping to identify hazards and unsafe control actions; an FSM layer captures hazard-to-loss state transitions that neither method models individually; and the unified framework drives automated scenario generation with measurable parameter-space coverage. Applied to a T-junction EMRM case study, the framework guides 1{,}880 RRT-based simulations spanning ego speed, time-to-collision (TTC), and road friction, uncovering a key physical result: the T-junction geometry gives nearly equal difficulty to stopping and to navigating, so the intermediate mitigation mode occupies only 1.9\% of the feasible parameter space. EMRM steering strategies achieve 81\% collision-avoidance rate and reduce mean residual impact speed from 18.9~km/h to 9.0~km/h compared with emergency braking alone, while the framework attains 100\% hazard, UCA, and parameter-space coverage versus $\leq$1\% for traditional methods. These results demonstrate that the integrated HARA-STPA-FSM framework enables high-resolution, traceable EMRM V\&V that is not achievable with any single method in isolation.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating a Multi-Agent Voice-Enabled Smart Speaker for Care Homes: A Safety-Focused Framework

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being explored in health and social care to reduce administrative workload and allow staff to spend more time on patient care. This paper evaluates a voice-enabled Care Home Smart Speaker designed to support everyday activities in residential care homes, including spoken access to resident records, reminders, and scheduling tasks. A safety-focused evaluation framework is presented that examines the system end-to-end, combining Whisper-based speech recognition with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches (hybrid, sparse, and dense). Using supervised care-home trials and controlled testing, we evaluated 330 spoken transcripts across 11 care categories, including 184 reminder-containing interactions. These evaluations focus on (i) correct identification of residents and care categories, (ii) reminder recognition and extraction, and (iii) end-to-end scheduling correctness under uncertainty (including safe deferral/clarification). Given the safety-critical nature of care homes, particular attention is also paid to reliability in noisy environments and across diverse accents, supported by confidence scoring, clarification prompts, and human-in-the-loop oversight. In the best-performing configuration (GPT-5.2), resident ID and care category matching reached 100% (95% CI: 98.86-100), while reminder recognition reached 89.09\% (95% CI: 83.81-92.80) with zero missed reminders (100% recall) but some false positives. End-to-end scheduling via calendar integration achieved 84.65% exact reminder-count agreement (95% CI: 78.00-89.56), indicating remaining edge cases in converting informal spoken instructions into actionable events. The findings suggest that voice-enabled systems, when carefully evaluated and appropriately safeguarded, can support accurate documentation, effective task management, and trustworthy use of AI in care home settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A Multi-Modal Dataset for Ground Reaction Force Estimation Using Consumer Wearable Sensors

This Data Descriptor presents a fully open, multi-modal dataset for estimating vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) from consumer-grade Apple Watch sensors with laboratory force plate ground truth. Ten healthy adults aged 26--41 years performed five activities: walking, jogging, running, heel drops, and step drops, while wearing two Apple Watches positioned at the left wrist and waist. The dataset contains 492 validated trials with time-aligned inertial measurement unit (IMU) recordings (approximately 100 Hz) and force plate vGRF (Force\_Z, 1000 Hz). The release includes raw and processed time series, trial-level metadata, quality-control flags, and machine-readable data dictionaries. Trial-level matching manifests link recordings across modalities using stable identifiers. Of the 492 validated trials, 395 are triad-complete, containing wrist, waist, and force plate data, enabling cross-sensor analyses and reproducible model evaluation. Dataset quality is characterised through a three-phase cross-sensor plausibility and consistency framework, repeatability analysis of peak vGRF (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.871--0.990), and systematic checks of force ranges and trial completeness. Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis showed that correlation-based validation metrics were robust to single-sample timing perturbations at the IMU sampling resolution. All data are released under CC BY 4.0, with analysis scripts archived alongside the dataset and mirrored on GitHub. This resource supports reproducible research in wearable biomechanics, benchmarking of machine learning models for vGRF estimation, and investigation of sensor placement effects using widely available consumer wearables.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

HybridVFL: Disentangled Feature Learning for Edge-Enabled Vertical Federated Multimodal Classification

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for Edge AI scenarios like mobile health diagnostics, where sensitive multimodal data reside on distributed, resource-constrained devices. Yet, standard VFL systems often suffer performance limitations due to simplistic feature fusion. This paper introduces HybridVFL, a novel framework designed to overcome this bottleneck by employing client-side feature disentanglement paired with a server-side cross-modal transformer for context-aware fusion. Through systematic evaluation on the multimodal HAM10000 skin lesion dataset, we demonstrate that HybridVFL significantly outperforms standard federated baselines, validating the criticality of advanced fusion mechanisms in robust, privacy-preserving systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Mitigating Individual Skin Tone Bias in Skin Lesion Classification through Distribution-Aware Reweighting

Skin color has historically been a focal point of discrimination, yet fairness research in machine learning for medical imaging often relies on coarse subgroup categories, overlooking individual-level variations. Such group-based approaches risk obscuring biases faced by outliers within subgroups. This study introduces a distribution-based framework for evaluating and mitigating individual fairness in skin lesion classification. We treat skin tone as a continuous attribute rather than a categorical label, and employ kernel density estimation (KDE) to model its distribution. We further compare twelve statistical distance metrics to quantify disparities between skin tone distributions and propose a distance-based reweighting (DRW) loss function to correct underrepresentation in minority tones. Experiments across CNN and Transformer models demonstrate: (i) the limitations of categorical reweighting in capturing individual-level disparities, and (ii) the superior performance of distribution-based reweighting, particularly with Fidelity Similarity (FS), Wasserstein Distance (WD), Hellinger Metric (HM), and Harmonic Mean Similarity (HS). These findings establish a robust methodology for advancing fairness at individual level in dermatological AI systems, and highlight broader implications for sensitive continuous attributes in medical image analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Skewness-Guided Pruning of Multimodal Swin Transformers for Federated Skin Lesion Classification on Edge Devices

In recent years, high-performance computer vision models have achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, with some skin lesion classification systems even surpassing dermatology specialists in diagnostic accuracy. However, such models are computationally intensive and large in size, making them unsuitable for deployment on edge devices. In addition, strict privacy constraints hinder centralized data management, motivating the adoption of Federated Learning (FL). To address these challenges, this study proposes a skewness-guided pruning method that selectively prunes the Multi-Head Self-Attention and Multi-Layer Perceptron layers of a multimodal Swin Transformer based on the statistical skewness of their output distributions. The proposed method was validated in a horizontal FL environment and shown to maintain performance while substantially reducing model complexity. Experiments on the compact Swin Transformer demonstrate approximately 36\% model size reduction with no loss in accuracy. These findings highlight the feasibility of achieving efficient model compression and privacy-preserving distributed learning for multimodal medical AI on edge devices.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Explaining Large Language Models with gSMILE

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT, LLaMA, and Claude achieve remarkable performance in text generation but remain opaque in their decision-making processes, limiting trust and accountability in high-stakes applications. We present gSMILE (generative SMILE), a model-agnostic, perturbation-based framework for token-level interpretability in LLMs. Extending the SMILE methodology, gSMILE uses controlled prompt perturbations, Wasserstein distance metrics, and weighted linear surrogates to identify input tokens with the most significant impact on the output. This process enables the generation of intuitive heatmaps that visually highlight influential tokens and reasoning paths. We evaluate gSMILE across leading LLMs (OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, Meta's LLaMA 3.1 Instruct Turbo, and Anthropic's Claude 2.1) using attribution fidelity, attribution consistency, attribution stability, attribution faithfulness, and attribution accuracy as metrics. Results show that gSMILE delivers reliable human-aligned attributions, with Claude 2.1 excelling in attention fidelity and GPT-3.5 achieving the highest output consistency. These findings demonstrate gSMILE's ability to balance model performance and interpretability, enabling more transparent and trustworthy AI systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Q-SafeML: Safety Assessment of Quantum Machine Learning via Quantum Distance Metrics

The rise of machine learning in safety-critical systems has paralleled advancements in quantum computing, leading to the emerging field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). While safety monitoring has progressed in classical ML, existing methods are not directly applicable to QML due to fundamental differences in quantum computation. Given the novelty of QML, dedicated safety mechanisms remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces Q-SafeML, a safety monitoring approach for QML. The method builds on SafeML, a recent method that utilizes statistical distance measures to assess model accuracy and provide confidence in the reasoning of an algorithm. An adapted version of Q-SafeML incorporates quantum-centric distance measures, aligning with the probabilistic nature of QML outputs. This shift to a model-dependent, post-classification evaluation represents a key departure from classical SafeML, which is dataset-driven and classifier-agnostic. The distinction is motivated by the unique representational constraints of quantum systems, requiring distance metrics defined over quantum state spaces. Q-SafeML detects distances between operational and training data addressing the concept drifts in the context of QML. Experiments on QCNN and VQC Models show that this enables informed human oversight, enhancing system transparency and safety.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Explainable Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) with KG-SMILE

Generative AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved impressive progress but still produces hallucinations and unverifiable claims, limiting reliability in sensitive domains. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves accuracy by grounding outputs in external knowledge, especially in domains like healthcare, where precision is vital. However, RAG remains opaque and essentially a black box, heavily dependent on data quality. We developed a method-agnostic, perturbation-based framework that provides token and component-level interoperability for Graph RAG using SMILE and named it as Knowledge-Graph (KG)-SMILE. By applying controlled perturbations, computing similarities, and training weighted linear surrogates, KG-SMILE identifies the graph entities and relations most influential to generated outputs, thereby making RAG more transparent. We evaluate KG-SMILE using comprehensive attribution metrics, including fidelity, faithfulness, consistency, stability, and accuracy. Our findings show that KG-SMILE produces stable, human-aligned explanations, demonstrating its capacity to balance model effectiveness with interpretability and thereby fostering greater transparency and trust in machine learning technologies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

RAGuard: A Novel Approach for in-context Safe Retrieval Augmented Generation for LLMs

Accuracy and safety are paramount in Offshore Wind (OSW) maintenance, yet conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail when confronted with highly specialised or unexpected scenarios. We introduce RAGuard, an enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that explicitly integrates safety-critical documents alongside technical manuals.By issuing parallel queries to two indices and allocating separate retrieval budgets for knowledge and safety, RAGuard guarantees both technical depth and safety coverage. We further develop a SafetyClamp extension that fetches a larger candidate pool, "hard-clamping" exact slot guarantees to safety. We evaluate across sparse (BM25), dense (Dense Passage Retrieval) and hybrid retrieval paradigms, measuring Technical Recall@K and Safety Recall@K. Both proposed extensions of RAG show an increase in Safety Recall@K from almost 0\% in RAG to more than 50\% in RAGuard, while maintaining Technical Recall above 60\%. These results demonstrate that RAGuard and SafetyClamp have the potential to establish a new standard for integrating safety assurance into LLM-powered decision support in critical maintenance contexts.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Fairness in Skin Lesion Classification for Medical Diagnosis Using Prune Learning

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the accuracy of skin lesion classification models, supporting medical diagnoses and promoting equitable healthcare. However, concerns remain about potential biases related to skin color, which can impact diagnostic outcomes. Ensuring fairness is challenging due to difficulties in classifying skin tones, high computational demands, and the complexity of objectively verifying fairness. To address these challenges, we propose a fairness algorithm for skin lesion classification that overcomes the challenges associated with achieving diagnostic fairness across varying skin tones. By calculating the skewness of the feature map in the convolution layer of the VGG (Visual Geometry Group) network and the patches and the heads of the Vision Transformer, our method reduces unnecessary channels related to skin tone, focusing instead on the lesion area. This approach lowers computational costs and mitigates bias without relying on conventional statistical methods. It potentially reduces model size while maintaining fairness, making it more practical for real-world applications.

cs.CV↗