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Md Zabirul Islam

Publications and source records attributed to Md Zabirul Islam.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

CourseBlueprint: A Structured Pipeline for Adaptive Pedagogical Video Generation Grounded in Course Corpora

Generative text-to-video systems can produce visually fluent educational clips, but they rarely encode the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) needed for effective instruction, including prerequisite-aware sequencing, learner-adaptive depth, and sustained cognitive engagement. We present CourseBlueprint, a course-grounded pipeline for adaptive pedagogical video generation. Given a topic and learner persona, the system generates a structured teaching blueprint in a single forward pass over an undergraduate biomedical-imaging corpus (BMED 2300; twenty-three lectures, 1,116 slides). Instead of ad-hoc prompt chaining, the pipeline uses typed intermediate representations with validation: a scaffolding module builds a stage-labeled prerequisite concept graph with deterministic cycle removal, an adaptive controller assigns per-concept style specifications, and an engagement generator produces narration following a fixed hook->retrieval->core->analogy->forward contract. A deterministic slide-image override further grounds the rendered video by reusing instructor slides whenever retrieval confidence is high. We also release a reusable benchmark corpus and an evaluation harness combining repeated LLM-judge scoring with regex-grounded objective metrics. In a five-topic ablation, removing the engagement contract reduces the engagement score from 5.00 to 1.20, the adaptive score from 4.80 to 3.40, Flesch readability from 38.0 to 19.8, and analogy and retrieval-prompt counts to near zero. The slide-image override converts a 0/9 corpus-grounding failure into 9/10 successful slide matches on the same topic. These results show that pedagogical video quality depends less on surface fluency than on explicit, typed instructional contracts that make scaffolding, adaptation, engagement, and grounding auditable.

cs.CY

SlideChain: Semantic Provenance for Lecture Understanding via Blockchain Registration

Modern vision--language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret and generate educational content, yet their semantic outputs remain challenging to verify, reproduce, and audit over time. Inconsistencies across model families, inference settings, and computing environments undermine the reliability of AI-generated instructional material, particularly in high-stakes and quantitative STEM domains. This work introduces SlideChain, a blockchain-backed provenance framework designed to provide verifiable integrity for multimodal semantic extraction at scale. Using the SlideChain Slides Dataset-a curated corpus of 1,117 medical imaging lecture slides from a university course-we extract concepts and relational triples from four state-of-the-art VLMs and construct structured provenance records for every slide. SlideChain anchors cryptographic hashes of these records on a local EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible blockchain, providing tamper-evident auditability and persistent semantic baselines. Through the first systematic analysis of semantic disagreement, cross-model similarity, and lecture-level variability in multimodal educational content, we reveal pronounced cross-model discrepancies, including low concept overlap and near-zero agreement in relational triples on many slides. We further evaluate gas usage, throughput, and scalability under simulated deployment conditions, and demonstrate perfect tamper detection along with deterministic reproducibility across independent extraction runs. Together, these results show that SlideChain provides a practical and scalable step toward trustworthy, verifiable multimodal educational pipelines, supporting long-term auditability, reproducibility, and integrity for AI-assisted instructional systems.

cs.CV

ALIVE: An Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine with Content-Aware Retrieval for Real-Time Interaction

Traditional lecture videos offer flexibility but lack mechanisms for real-time clarification, forcing learners to search externally when confusion arises. Recent advances in large language models and neural avatars provide new opportunities for interactive learning, yet existing systems typically lack lecture awareness, rely on cloud-based services, or fail to integrate retrieval and avatar-delivered explanations in a unified, privacy-preserving pipeline. We present ALIVE, an Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine that transforms passive lecture viewing into a dynamic, real-time learning experience. ALIVE operates fully on local hardware and integrates (1) Avatar-delivered lecture generated through ASR transcription, LLM refinement, and neural talking-head synthesis; (2) A content-aware retrieval mechanism that combines semantic similarity with timestamp alignment to surface contextually relevant lecture segments; and (3) Real-time multimodal interaction, enabling students to pause the lecture, ask questions through text or voice, and receive grounded explanations either as text or as avatar-delivered responses. To maintain responsiveness, ALIVE employs lightweight embedding models, FAISS-based retrieval, and segmented avatar synthesis with progressive preloading. We demonstrate the system on a complete medical imaging course, evaluate its retrieval accuracy, latency characteristics, and user experience, and show that ALIVE provides accurate, content-aware, and engaging real-time support. ALIVE illustrates how multimodal AI-when combined with content-aware retrieval and local deployment-can significantly enhance the pedagogical value of recorded lectures, offering an extensible pathway toward next-generation interactive learning environments.

cs.CV

N-ReLU: Zero-Mean Stochastic Extension of ReLU

Activation functions are fundamental for enabling nonlinear representations in deep neural networks. However, the standard rectified linear unit (ReLU) often suffers from inactive or "dead" neurons caused by its hard zero cutoff. To address this issue, we introduce N-ReLU (Noise-ReLU), a zero-mean stochastic extension of ReLU that replaces negative activations with Gaussian noise while preserving the same expected output. This expectation-aligned formulation maintains gradient flow in inactive regions and acts as an annealing-style regularizer during training. Experiments on the MNIST dataset using both multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures show that N-ReLU achieves accuracy comparable to or slightly exceeding that of ReLU, LeakyReLU, PReLU, GELU, and RReLU at moderate noise levels (sigma = 0.05-0.10), with stable convergence and no dead neurons observed. These results demonstrate that lightweight Gaussian noise injection offers a simple yet effective mechanism to enhance optimization robustness without modifying network structures or introducing additional parameters.

cs.LG

Development and Validation of a Large Language Model for Generating Fully-Structured Radiology Reports

Current LLMs for creating fully-structured reports face the challenges of formatting errors, content hallucinations, and privacy leakage issues when uploading data to external servers.We aim to develop an open-source, accurate LLM for creating fully-structured and standardized LCS reports from varying free-text reports across institutions and demonstrate its utility in automatic statistical analysis and individual lung nodule retrieval. With IRB approvals, our retrospective study included 5,442 de-identified LDCT LCS radiology reports from two institutions. We constructed two evaluation datasets by labeling 500 pairs of free-text and fully-structured radiology reports and one large-scale consecutive dataset from January 2021 to December 2023. Two radiologists created a standardized template for recording 27 lung nodule features on LCS. We designed a dynamic-template-constrained decoding method to enhance existing LLMs for creating fully-structured reports from free-text radiology reports. Using consecutive structured reports, we automated descriptive statistical analyses and a nodule retrieval prototype. Our best LLM for creating fully-structured reports achieved high performance on cross-institutional datasets with an F1 score of about 97%, with neither formatting errors nor content hallucinations. Our method consistently improved the best open-source LLMs by up to 10.42%, and outperformed GPT-4o by 17.19%. The automatically derived statistical distributions were consistent with prior findings regarding attenuation, location, size, stability, and Lung-RADS. The retrieval system with structured reports allowed flexible nodule-level search and complex statistical analysis. Our developed software is publicly available for local deployment and further research.

cs.AI

TrialDura: Hierarchical Attention Transformer for Interpretable Clinical Trial Duration Prediction

The clinical trial process, a critical phase in drug development, is essential for developing new treatments. The primary goal of interventional clinical trials is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of drug-based treatments for specific diseases. However, these trials are often lengthy, labor-intensive, and expensive. The duration of a clinical trial significantly impacts overall costs, making efficient timeline management crucial for controlling budgets and ensuring the economic feasibility of research. To address this issue, We propose TrialDura, a machine learning-based method that estimates the duration of clinical trials using multimodal data, including disease names, drug molecules, trial phases, and eligibility criteria. Then, we encode them into Bio-BERT embeddings specifically tuned for biomedical contexts to provide a deeper and more relevant semantic understanding of clinical trial data. Finally, the model's hierarchical attention mechanism connects all of the embeddings to capture their interactions and predict clinical trial duration. Our proposed model demonstrated superior performance with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.04 years and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.39 years compared to the other models, indicating more accurate clinical trial duration prediction. Publicly available code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrialDura-F196.

cs.LG