Classification
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Protein Crystallization Segmentation and Classification Using Subordinate Color Channel in Fluorescence Microscopy Images
2026-10-11 02:33:49Truong X. Tran, Marc L. Pusey, Ramazan S. AygunAbstract
The accuracy of detecting protein crystals for fluorescence microscopy images is very critical for high throughput and automated systems. Although the trace fluorescent labeling method could highlight protein crystals, reflection and emission from the fluorescence dye is not always due to crystal regions. Therefore, the analysis of the peak wavelength in the emission spectra of a fluorophore may not always yield effective results. In this paper, we show that using the subordinate color intensity corresponding to longer wavelengths than the peak wavelength of the emission spectra could improve the accuracy of protein crystal detection. Hence, we have built a segmentation method based on the percentile intensity of the subordinate color for trace fluorescently labeled (TFL'd) protein crystallization trial images. Compared to using the dominant color channel, our segmentation method on subordinate color channel was able to reduce the misclassification rate of likely-leads or crystals as non-crystals by the percentage of from 9.71% to 2.02% depending on the classifier. Similarly, the accuracy of classifiers were increased by the percentage of from 1.77% to 5.53%. Our method reached around 94% accuracy while keeping misclassification of likely-leads and crystals as non-crystals below 1%. Moreover, to evaluate the generalizability of our method, we have conducted new wet lab experiments on two proteins, Concanavalin A (Con A) and Ab inorganic pyrophosphate (AbIPPase), and the misclassification rate was below 1%. Our experiments show that using the subordinate channel may be more helpful for TFL'd protein trial image classification.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15286
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RIECNN: Real-Time Image Enhanced CNN for Traffic Sign Recognition
2026-10-10 19:01:49Reem Abdel-Salam, Rana Mostafa, Ahmed H. Abdel-GawadAbstract
Traffic sign recognition plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous cars to reduce the accident rate and promote road safety. It has been a necessity to address traffic signs that are affected significantly by the environment as well as poor real-time performance for deep-learning state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we introduce Real-Time Image Enhanced CNN ({\our}) for Traffic Sign Recognition. {\our} is a real-time, novel approach that tackles multiple, diverse traffic sign datasets, and out-performs the state-of-the-art architectures in terms of recognition rate and execution time. Experiments are conducted using the German Traffic Sign Benchmark (GTSRB), the Belgium Traffic Sign Classification (BTSC), and the Croatian Traffic Sign (rMASTIF) benchmark. Experimental results show that our approach has achieved the highest recognition rate for all Benchmarks, achieving a recognition accuracy of 99.75\% for GTSRB, 99.25\% for BTSC and 99.55\% for rMASTIF. In terms of latency and meeting the real-time constraint, the pre-processing time and inference time together do not exceed 1.3 ms per image. Not only have our proposed approach achieved remarkably high accuracy with real-time performance, but it also demonstrated robustness against traffic sign recognition challenges such as brightness and contrast variations in the environment.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15127
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scHFBiMamba: a bidirectional Mamba autoencoder for cardiac disease-state classification from single-nucleus RNA-seq data
2026-10-10 18:47:11Ugo Lomoio, Pietro Hiram Guzzi, Pierangelo VeltriAbstract
To evaluate whether a compact bidirectional state-space autoencoder improves joint classification of species, cell type, and disease state from single-nucleus RNA-sequencing profiles in heart failure (HF), while yielding interpretable gene attributions. Building on the dense denoising autoencoder (DAE) and MLP framework of Ruz Jurado et al., we developed scHFBiMamba, combining a bidirectional Mamba autoencoder (BiMambaAE) with an MLP head. BiMambaAE maps 16,545-gene profiles to 350-dimensional latent representations using 13.2M parameters, about 14.6-fold fewer than the dense DAE (192.9M). We compared six encoder-classifier configurations on 38,275 held-out cardiac nuclei using McNemar tests with Benjamini-Hochberg correction, and assessed nine classifiers on frozen representations. Biological relevance was evaluated by comparing SHAP-derived differentially explained genes with differentially expressed genes against curated HF-related Gene Ontology keywords. BiMambaAE+MLP achieved the highest aggregate F1: pooled macro-F1 across 13 outputs was 0.966 versus 0.957 for DAE+MLP, and the mean category macro-F1 was 0.977 versus 0.970. It significantly improved cell-type and disease-state accuracy (adjusted p=7.1e-3 and p=4.8e-6, respectively), with species F1 of 1.000. SHAP-derived differentially explained genes achieved a pathway-enrichment benchmark F1 of 0.105 versus 0.053 for differentially expressed genes. Compact bidirectional state-space autoencoders can outperform substantially larger dense autoencoders for joint cardiac transcriptomic classification while reducing parameters. scHFBiMamba enables accurate multi-task prediction and hypothesis-generating gene-level interpretation. Code: this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15117
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VLCQ: Post-training quantization for deep neural networks using variable length coding
2026-10-10 18:02:45Reem Abdel-Salam, Ahmed H. Abdel-Gawad, Amr G. WassalAbstract
Quantization plays a crucial role in efficiently deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained devices. Post-training quantization does not require access to the original dataset or retraining the full model. Current methods that achieve high performance close to baseline results typically require INT8 fixed-point integers. However, achieving higher model compression with lower bit-widths often leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose VLCQ, a post-training quantization method that relaxes the fixed-point encoding constraint, enabling more flexible exploration of quantization techniques through variable-length encoding. This approach achieves competitive or improved performance while reducing bit-widths, without requiring access to training data or model fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on image classification, segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that VLCQ improves model compression and accuracy compared with state-of-the-art post-training quantization approaches. For per-channel quantization, VLCQ surpasses FP32 accuracy and Piece-Wise Linear Quantization (PWLQ) on most evaluated models, achieving up to 6x compression compared with FP32 and up to 1.7x compared with PWLQ. When prioritizing compression with limited accuracy loss, VLCQ achieves up to 12.25x compression compared with FP32 with less than 4% performance degradation. For per-tensor quantization, VLCQ is competitive with Data-Free Quantization (DFQ), while providing greater flexibility to achieve lower bit rates across different tasks and models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15092
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Toward System One Clinical Intelligence: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Counterfactual Explainability of Decision Foundation Models
2026-10-10 16:13:49S. M. Mahbub Uddin AhmedAbstract
Automated disease classification from patient-reported symptoms requires balancing the speed of lightweight discriminative models against the contextual understanding and latency costs of autoregressive large language models (LLMs). Decision foundation models offer an alternative by mapping representations directly to candidate classes without free-form text generation. We adapt Clef-Flash, a 9-billion-parameter decision model built on a Qwen3.5 backbone, for 24-class disease classification on the Symptom2Disease benchmark. Using 4-bit quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) with differential learning rates and a stratified split of 960 training and 240 test cases, the model achieves 95.42% diagnostic accuracy and a macro F1 score of 0.9551. This improves upon the reported zero-shot baselines of 61.67% for a remote API and 65.00% for a local unadapted initialization, and outperforms the ClinicalBERT baseline (90.90%). By evaluating candidate logits in a single forward pass without autoregressive decoding, inference takes under 80 milliseconds per record on a single GPU, yielding a reported 31-fold speedup over generative LLM baselines. To examine symptom-level evidence, we introduce a Leave-One-Symptom-Out (LOSO) counterfactual perturbation framework. Removing disease-defining symptom clauses in a psoriasis example reduces predicted-class confidence from 100.00% to 0.12% and shifts the prediction to impetigo with 99.59% confidence, while removing secondary systemic symptoms produces less than 0.01% change in confidence. These findings suggest that decision-based architectures can combine the linguistic capabilities of large foundation models with low-latency inference and symptom-level interpretability for clinical triage.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15029
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UltraBERT: Beyond the Limit of BERT Pre-Training
2026-10-10 16:11:27Jungwoo Park, Taewhoo Lee, Jaewoo KangAbstract
Recent bidirectional encoders have been modernized with innovations from causal large language models (LLMs). However, the pretraining recipe itself remains inherited from small-scale conventions, leaving encoders underoptimized, with no single model performing competitively across both classification and retrieval tasks. In this work, we investigate how far encoder performance can be pushed by revisiting core design choices in training, revealing three key findings: (1) Encoders saturate on downstream tasks beyond a few trillion tokens, indicating that additional compute past this point does not help. (2) Across model sizes, lower masking ratios benefit classification while higher ones benefit retrieval, contradicting prior work suggesting larger ratios for larger models. (3) Distillation with pruning improves classification at low masking ratios but degrades retrieval at high ones. Guided by these findings, we present UltraBERT, a single encoder that assigns separate LM heads to low and high masking ratios within a batch and restricts the distillation objective to the low ratio. To our knowledge, UltraBERT is the first encoder to achieve state of the art on both classification and retrieval tasks, reaching 91.0 on GLUE and 47.7 on BEIR. Together, these results show how far encoder performance can be pushed and provide a principled basis for compute allocation, masking ratio design, and knowledge transfer in bidirectional models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15028
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FAM-gate: field-aware metadata attention with prior-constrained vector gating for audio classification
2026-10-10 07:41:00Xiangyu Jing, Hongqing Liu, Liming ShiAbstract
User-generated audio collections frequently contain textual metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions. Effectively leveraging these complementary fields requires accounting for both field het erogeneity and varying semantic relevance relative to the acoustic content. We propose FAM-Gate, a two-stage framework for metadata-enriched audio classification. In the first stage, field-aware metadata-view attention dynamically aggregates multiple metadata views using audio-guided weighting, explicit field-identity embeddings, a shared identity-initialized projection, and mean-anchored regularized aggregation. In the second stage, a prior-constrained vector gate performs bounded, dimension-wise fusion of audio and metadata representations centered around an acoustic prior. Ex periments on BSD10K, BSD35K, and FSD50K show consistent improvements in both hierarchical single-label and multi-label classification. Compared with matched random-view scalar-fusion base lines, FAM-Gate improves the hierarchical F-score by 2.53 and 5.72 percentage points on BSD10K and BSD35K, respectively, while increasing macro mAP and macro F1 by 5.07 and 10.25 percentage points on FSD50K.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14673
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EarthAlign: Learning Language-Aligned Representations of Earth System Data
2026-10-10 06:14:12Fadillah Adamsyah Maani, Numan Saeed, Jiaqi Ma, Dat Tien Nguyen, Youssef Wehbe, Duncan Watson-Parris, Salman KhanAbstract
Interpreting Earth system conditions is central to understanding environmental risks and informing decisions across weather- and climate-sensitive sectors. Existing multimodal weather systems primarily target task-specific prediction, generation, or question answering, while general-purpose alignment between Earth system data and language remains underexplored due to the limited availability of diverse language supervision grounded in meteorological conditions. To fill this gap, we introduce EarthAlign, a large-scale dataset with broad geographic coverage spanning 2000-2024 that combines 10 expert-curated natural event and disaster data sources with climatology-derived normal-weather samples. Each sample includes temporal and geospatial information and four grounded caption styles aligned with 63-variable ERA5 meteorological data. Building on EarthAlign, we introduce MeteoLIP, a dual-encoder framework for learning aligned meteorology-language representations. MeteoLIP incorporates MetTok, which uses a geolocation- and time-conditioned query to aggregate variable-specific patch embeddings into a compact sequence of meteorology tokens. To comprehensively assess Earth system multimodal representations, we introduce three downstream tasks: cross-modal retrieval, weather-condition classification, and physical variable estimation. Our experiments show that MeteoLIP improves upon the corresponding CLIP and SigLIP baselines across these tasks. Further analyses highlight the importance of meteorological input, temporal and geospatial conditioning, and multi-style supervision for meteorology-language alignment. Thus, EarthAlign and MeteoLIP provide a foundation for learning and evaluating language-aligned representations of Earth system data. Our code, dataset, and weights are publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14624
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Boosting Transferable Adversarial Attacks against Deep Reinforcement Learning
2026-10-10 01:34:43Zexin Li, Ruili Yao, Yiming Zeng, Xiaoxue GaoAbstract
Most adversarial attacks on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) assume white-box access to the victim policy, which rarely holds in practice. This paper studies transfer-based black-box attacks on DRL: the attacker crafts observation perturbations on a white-box surrogate agent and feeds them to an unknown victim. We formulate the attack as return minimization under a per-step perturbation budget. We first show that transplanting transferable image-classification attacks (FGSM, MI-FGSM, and NI-FGSM) with a per-step objective yields perturbations that transfer but are no stronger than random noise of the same budget. We then propose a trajectory-level attack that optimizes a sequence of perturbations over a receding horizon through a differentiable model of the environment and a temperature-smoothed surrogate policy, with the same optimizers. On CartPole-v1 with ten DQN and DDQN agents and 100 surrogate--victim pairs, the trajectory-level attack outperforms per-step attacks and random noise in the white-box, cross-model, and cross-algorithm settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06083
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The RNN Homunculus: Learning to Gate Long-Term Memory
2026-10-09 19:59:35Zeyu Fan, Alexandru-Dragos Manolache, Jan van GemertAbstract
Learning long-range dependencies with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is difficult because of the vanishing gradient problem. Gated recurrent neural networks like GRUs and LSTMs address this problem and are commonly explained by their ability to create additive copy paths through time. This explanation is correct, but incomplete: useful RNN gate values must themselves be learned, which is typically done with another RNN. We study this gate-learning problem through carefully controlled sequence classification tasks. Our analysis shows that gated architectures struggle when all training samples require long-range memory and thus equally suffer from the vanishing gradient problem. We intervene by adding short-dependency samples which let gated models learn solutions that capture long-dependency samples, but also generalize across different class labels. When properly learned, gated RNNs match or even exceed the test accuracy of modern architectures like Mamba and xLSTM. Overall, our results highlight gate learning as a central part of learning long-range memory and show how training data can support this process by exposing the same task over shorter dependencies.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14279
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CAPTOR: a vision-language foundation model for Chest-Abdomen-Pelvis Oncologic CT
2026-10-09 18:39:01S\'el\'ena Jean-Mactoux, Sophie Loizillon, Ghina Jardali, Amandine Cromb\'e, Nathalie Lassau, Alexandre B\^oneAbstract
Purpose : To develop and evaluate CAPTOR, a deep-learning vision-language foundation model for oncologic chest-abdomen-pelvis (CAP) CT interpretation. Materials & Methods : CAPTOR (Chest-Abdomen-Pelvis foundaTion model for Oncologic Radiology) is a contrastive vision-language model, trained using a pretraining strategy for oncologic CAP CT (in single- or multiple-series acquisitions), on a multicenter retrospective dataset from North America, Europe and Asia, predominantly from tumor lesion examinations. CAPTOR was compared with state-of-the-art CT foundation models on three downstream tasks: disease detection, survival prediction using TumorImagingBench and image retrieval. Classification and retrieval were both evaluated on held-out internal and public test sets, stratified by anatomical coverage and indication. Bootstrap resampling was used to estimate confidence intervals, and pairwise comparisons were performed using permutation tests. Results : CAPTOR was trained and tested on 25,512 and 10,794 CT-report pairs respectively. TumorImagingBench datasets comprised between 134 and 421 studies each. CAPTOR outperformed all baseline models, on the classification task, on the CAP subset (AUC 0.767, 95%CI: 0.734-0.793, vs. 0.695, 95%CI: 0.645-0.736 for the next-best, p<0.001) and oncologic subset (AUC 0.784, 95%CI: 0.759-0.805, vs. 0.734, 95%CI: 0.703-0.767 p<0.001), ranked first on three of the four oncologic prognostic benchmarks, and achieved superior retrieval performance on CAP and oncologic subsets. Conclusion : A foundation model trained on oncology-enriched CAP CT data outperformed relevant state-of-the-art models in its target clinical context, underscoring the importance of clinically aligned pretraining. We release our preprocessing, training and inference code : this https URL and model weights : this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14226
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Hide and Seek: HIDE Concepts to SEEK explanations for black box models
2026-10-09 17:56:59Bhanu Tokas, Rahul Nair, Rockwell Jackson, Hannah KernerAbstract
Interpreting machine learning model predictions is a central challenge, particularly for black-box vision models. Concept-based attribution methods interpret models using human-understandable concepts. Existing concept-based methods can only interpret classification and regression models. They require access to model weights or large concept-annotated datasets, and most methods cannot provide image-level attribution. We propose Hide and Seek (HnS), a new method for concept-level attribution that does not require access to model weights or labeled concept datasets. HnS can interpret a wide range of vision models. Given a concept and image set, HnS retrieves concept-aligned images using a vision-language model, localizes the concept within each image, masks the localized region, and measures attribution from the change in the black-box model's output between the original and masked images. This enables faithful attribution by directly measuring the model's behavior and supporting local attributions. We validated HnS on CelebA and COCO-Stuff. Compared to existing methods, HnS showed better agreement with ground-truth attributions. We demonstrated the applicability of HnS on diverse tasks, including image captioning and satellite image segmentation, where no existing concept attribution method can be used. We provided our anonymous code in the supplementary material.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13935
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Detection of extremely rare dead cells in fluorescence microscopy images
2026-10-09 16:01:04Prateek Verma, Benjamin Butter, Jian Zhang, Xintao WuAbstract
Dead cell detection in fluorescence microscopy is essential for phenotypic screening and drug efficacy assessment. However, automated identification remains challenging due to signal variability, optical artifacts, and colocalization ambiguities across multiple channels. Markers that define nuclear boundaries do not neatly coincide spatially or temporally with apoptotic markers. Furthermore, marker accumulation kinetics vary across individual cells and apoptosis stages, making universal thresholds unreliable. We present a systematic comparison of several computational approaches for detecting apoptotic cells in nucleus-stained specimens: (1) heuristic methods using intensity thresholds, distributions, correlations, and domain guidance; (2) classification using numerical features (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost and LightGBM) and image features (ResNet-18 and EfficientNet-B0); and (3) anomaly detection, also using numerical features (Isolation Forest, one-class SVM and PCA reconstruction) and image features (convolutional autoencoders and Deep SVDD). Using a dataset of 258 images containing 65,527 cells/nuclei across multiple scenes with 243 manually annotated ground truth dead cells, we evaluate each method on metrics such as PR-AUC, Precision, Recall, F1-score, and macro-F1. Our results indicate that classification using image features (deep learning) and numerical features (traditional) achieved the best performance, with ResNet-18 and XGBoost significantly outperforming manually designed heuristics and anomaly detection methods. Our findings demonstrate that such biomedical problems remain highly challenging to solve even with the state-of-the-art computational and learning techniques. We aim to provide an effective decision-support tool to researchers while tackling such problems either fully-automatically or in a human-in-the-loop setting as an aide to domain scientists.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13780
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Beyond Gate Weights: Decision-Level Interpretation of Radiomics-Image Feature Fusion for RCC Classification
2026-10-09 15:57:04Yuan Liang, Sourav Bhattacharjee, Abraham CampbellAbstract
Gate coefficients describe how a fusion layer weights intermediate features, but they do not necessarily reflect the magnitude of branch contributions at the classifier output. We investigate this distinction in a fixed 3D MedVAE--radiomics model for clear cell versus non-clear cell renal cell carcinoma classification from contrast-enhanced CT. Because the model uses a linear classification head, the binary decision logit can be decomposed exactly into a gated image term, a direct radiomics term, and a bias. We define effective radiomics dominance as the direct radiomics term's share of the summed absolute non-bias branch contributions and compare it with structural radiomics weighting. Internally, mean structural radiomics weighting was 0.823, whereas mean effective radiomics dominance was 0.148, with a modest case-wise association (\r{ho} = 0.290). The gated image term retained substantially stronger discriminative ranking information than the direct radiomics term. The same structural-to-effective discrepancy was observed in exploratory external evaluation. Branch-targeted permutation, integrated-gradient, and Shapley-style analyses further identified radiomics descriptors influencing the direct radiomics term. Because radiomics also generates the gate, the gated image term remains radiomics-dependent, so additive branch contribution should not be interpreted as total input influence. These findings show that structural gate weighting and decision-level branch contribution represent distinct aspects of gated feature fusion and should be interpreted separately.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14152
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Beyond Discrimination: Evaluating Probability Calibration in Radiomics-Image Fusion for Renal Cell Carcinoma Classification
2026-10-09 15:50:47Yuan Liang, Morgan May, Abraham Campbell, Sourav Bhattacharjee, Simon Caton, Pierpaolo DondioAbstract
Reliable probability estimates are important for the clinical interpretation of machine-learning classifiers, yet radiomics--image fusion models for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) are commonly evaluated primarily by discrimination. Using 396 patients from the KiTS23 dataset, we evaluated whether adding radiomics to four image-model families improved probabilistic performance in addition to discrimination. Seventeen individual models and four probability-average ensembles were assessed using discrimination, probability calibration, and proper scoring measures. Across 12 matched image-only versus fusion comparisons, AUC and AP improved in all 12, while Brier score and negative log likelihood (NLL) improved in 11 of 12 and expected calibration error (ECE) in eight of 12. The 3D MedVAE gated-fusion model achieved the strongest overall individual-model profile. Probability averaging across concatenation, cross-attention, and gated fusion produced favourable point estimates across all five primary metrics relative to image-only models in all four families, although paired-bootstrap support was stronger for Brier score and NLL than for ECE. These findings show that radiomics--image fusion can improve probabilistic prediction quality beyond discrimination, while calibration behaviour varies across image architectures and fusion strategies. We show that our proposed probability-average ensemble models improve discrimination and calibration simultaneously across all architectures in the study.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14151
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Enhancing Legal Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Graph-Guided Multi-Task Pre-training
2026-10-09 15:21:12Ibrahim Siddig, Munir GeorgesAbstract
Legal language understanding requires reasoning over semi-structured regulatory documents, yet standard pre-training objectives do not explicitly target this structural capability. Because current legal language models rely solely on masked language modeling, they treat statutory text as flat token sequences and ignore the underlying hierarchical constraints. To bridge this gap, we present a multi-task pre-training approach for German traffic law (StVO). Our approach combines three complementary objectives: Next Sentence Prediction (NSP), Knowledge Graph (KG) Guided Clustering (CLU), and Knowledge Graph (KG) Aware Paragraph Classification (CLS). This approach explicitly encodes structured legal knowledge directly into the model weights. This encoding enables zero-shot legal reasoning at inference time and removes the need for discrete graph traversal. We evaluate our approach across nine Transformer-based encoders and 324 experimental runs. On synthetic StVO question answering, our models demonstrate consistent relative improvements between 10.3% and 155.0% over baselines. Furthermore, relative to the established LexGLUE baselines (Chalkidis et al., 2022), our models improve over prior results on four of seven legal benchmarks. It also achieves consistent zero-shot transfer gains between 3.4% and 15.8% on Austrian driving regulations. These experimental results indicate that our training approach generalizes successfully beyond the initial training legal domain.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13722
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ThinkNet: Evolutionary Deep Ensembles for Efficient Motor-Imagery EEG Classification
2026-10-09 15:00:12Abdul Basit, Saim Rehman, Muhammad ShafiqueAbstract
Practical assistive and rehabilitative brain--computer interfaces require subject-independent motor-imagery EEG (MI-EEG) decoders that generalize to new users under limited target-user data and constrained compute. However, held-out-subject performance can be overstated when test-subject information influences preprocessing, model selection, or ensemble selection. We present \textit{ThinkNet}, a validation-controlled framework that combines train-only normalization, validation-guided evolutionary search, and validation-gated inference to identify compact decoders and inference policies for held-out subjects. We evaluate four-class BCI Competition IV-2a (session T) decoding with nine Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) folds, three seeds, seven fixed decoder entries, and a broader search over ten representative decoder families; the held-out subject is never used for normalization, hyperparameter, architecture, or ensemble-policy selection. In the fixed benchmark, the validation-selected compact decoder achieved 44.35$\pm$15.41\% accuracy with 4.9K parameters, 19 KB FP32 weights, and 0.99 ms batch-1 Orin CUDA inference. Across the broader search, compact models ($\leq$25K parameters) achieved higher mean held-out accuracy than mid-size and large alternatives after selected retraining (40.10\% vs. 35.09\% and 34.78\%). Validation-gated ensembling improved over validation-selected single-model inference, reaching 43.98$\pm$16.25\% in the fixed benchmark and 43.31$\pm$15.88\% for the compact six-family ensemble. A non-deployable oracle analysis revealed a 6.1-point family-selection gap and near-zero validation--test correlation, showing that validation reliability remains a key bottleneck under subject shift. Thus, ThinkNet is a validation-controlled framework for compact MI-EEG model and inference-policy selection, rather than a single-architecture benchmark.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33967
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Improving Semantic Coverage in AI Test & Evaluation through Generative Augmentation
2026-10-09 14:57:12Connor Hashemi, Bharadwaj Ravichandran, Connor Anderson, Shitij Govil, Brandon RichardWebster, Brian Hu, Keith FieldhouseAbstract
In test and evaluation (T&E) of AI models, evaluators typically have access only to a held-out test dataset and no knowledge of the training data or its semantic composition. If critical input conditions---such as time-of-day, weather, or scene location---are underrepresented in this test dataset, T&E results can be misleadingly due to this semantic coverage gap. We propose a three-stage generative AI pipeline to detect and fill such semantic gaps without requiring ground-truth labels of these semantics. First, vision-language models (VLMs) perform zero-shot binary labeling of semantic factors, and an embedding-space clustering step identifies which semantics most affect downstream model behavior. Second, diffusion-based image-to-image models transform existing covered images into the underrepresented semantic domain, preserving scene content while augmenting high-level appearance. Third, statistical analysis of the augmented image embeddings verifies that the synthetic imagery improves dataset coverage before it is incorporated. Crucially, the synthetic data is used only to enrich the test set and no model retraining is performed for T&E. We validate the full pipeline on both image classification and object detection under day/night semantic gaps, showing that the augmented test datasets better distinguish models with and without exposure to the missing semantic, thereby yielding T&E conclusions that more closely match those of an ideal, fully covered dataset. Code available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13697
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Calibration in One Go: Jointly Learning Accurate and Calibrated Neural Networks
2026-10-09 14:54:35Nektarios Kalampalikis, Pablo M. Olmos, Isabel ValeraAbstract
Neural networks (NNs), while highly flexible and versatile, are often poorly calibrated. Post-hoc calibration methods adjust the outputs of an already trained model using a separate calibration dataset and additional calibration parameters. This process adds overhead that requires separate optimization of the calibrator and subsequent model selection. In this paper, we show that standard (post-hoc) calibrators can be trained end-to-end with the backbone via a bilevel Stackelberg formulation. This formulation eliminates the need for a separate calibration set or a dedicated calibration loss by jointly optimizing accuracy and calibration using cross-entropy, introducing only one additional hyperparameter: the calibrator learning rate. Although our framework supports calibrators ranging from temperature and matrix scaling to NN layers, our results show that using the final classification layer itself as the calibrator yields accurate, well-calibrated models with no additional parameters. Our approach outperforms SOTA calibrators with minimal added complexity, while also avoiding the multiplicative overhead of separate calibration components in settings such as multi-task learning.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13693
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Towards a Unified Taxonomy of Agricultural Harvesting Technologies: Linking Physical Interaction, Automation, and Selectivity
2026-10-09 14:52:52Renato Cristiano Torres, Fabiano Mariath D Oliveira, Claudio Gottschalg DuqueAbstract
Harvesting technologies have evolved from conventional mechanized systems based on bulk mechanical interaction toward increasingly automated and robotic systems capable of perception, decision-making, and localized actuation. This evolution has also created a classification problem, as harvesting systems are commonly described according to crop type, mechanical removal principle, sensing technology, robotic architecture, or degree of automation, making direct comparison difficult. This paper proposes a unified taxonomy for agricultural harvesting technologies based on two primary classification axes: the physical principle governing plant-machine interaction and the level of automation incorporated into the harvesting process. Selectivity is treated as an emergent functional attribute that expresses the biological and spatial scale at which perception and decision-making influence physical actuation. Conventional mechanized methods, including cutting, pulling, vibration, impact, brushing, pneumatic action, and combined systems, are analyzed together with semi-automated and robotic harvesting approaches. The analysis shows that increasing automation does not necessarily result in greater selectivity. A qualitative transition occurs when perception and decision-making directly influence product-level actuation, shifting harvesting from distributed or bulk interaction toward localized and selective manipulation. The proposed framework provides a common conceptual basis for positioning and comparing mechanized, automated, and robotic harvesting technologies. By separating the physical mechanism of product removal from the automation level and resulting selectivity, the taxonomy clarifies technological boundaries, identifies intermediate configurations, and supports the analysis and development of future harvesting systems.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13688
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