Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, while histopathological diagnosis is often affected by inter-observer variability and the substantial workload associated with manual slide examination. Although deep learning has shown considerable potential in computational pathology, comprehensive benchmarks that integrate tissue classification and region segmentation within a unified analytical framework remain limited. This study presents a two-stage deep learning framework for multi-class tissue classification and pixel-level histopathological region segmentation, accompanied by a systematic comparison of state-of-the-art architectures at each stage. For tissue classification, six models, a custom convolutional neural network, VGG16, DenseNet, MobileNetV3, a custom Vision Transformer, and YOLO11, are evaluated on a combined dataset of 39,000 images derived from LC25000 and LungHist700. The models distinguish between adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and normal lung tissue. YOLO11 achieves the best classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.38%, a five-fold cross-validation accuracy of 98.21 +/- 0.35%, and a macro F1-score of 0.98. For region segmentation, U-Net, ResNet-encoder U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and YOLO11-seg are evaluated using the GlaS gland segmentation benchmark. DeepLabV3+ obtains the highest Intersection over Union of 0.80 and a Dice score of 0.89, while YOLO11-seg achieves a comparable Intersection over Union of 0.79 using approximately 14x fewer parameters. The best-performing classification and segmentation models are subsequently integrated into an end-to-end framework, providing an accurate, computationally efficient, and reproducible baseline for automated histopathological image analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15915
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the main causes of impaired vision. A good and reliable automated grading system can make the screening process safer and more accurate. Because DR stages progress gradually, the task of grading disease severity naturally follows an ordinal structure in which neighboring classes share similar visual characteristics. In this study, ORViT-DR, a hybrid deep learning framework, is designed to improve DR grading from low-resolution retinal images. The proposed approach combines convolutional feature extraction with transformer-based global context modeling through a pre-trained ViT-Hybrid backbone, which integrates BiT-ResNetv2 with a Vision Transformer architecture. The approach is tested on the RetinaMNIST subset of the MedMNISTv2 dataset, which contains 28x28 retinal fundus images annotated with five levels of disease severity. To promote stable training and better feature learning, the training strategy applies progressive layer unfreezing, layer-wise learning rate decay, exponential moving average (EMA) parameter updates, and ensemble-based prediction during inference. Experimental results on the official RetinaMNIST test set show that the proposed method achieves 57.00% classification accuracy, along with a quadratic weighted kappa score of 0.5963 and a macro-F1 score of 0.4293. These results suggest that hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures can provide effective representations for ordinal retinal image analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16958
The garment manufacturing industry is under increasing pressure to improve product quality, reduce costs, and accelerate digital transformation toward Industry 4.0. One of the most challenging quality-control activities is sewing-line inspection, where defects such as broken stitches and skipped stitches are difficult to detect consistently through manual inspection. Human-based inspection is often affected by fatigue, subjective judgement, and inconsistent performance, resulting in defect leakage, rework, and reduced production efficiency. This study presents the development and validation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based visual inspection system for garment sewing-line quality control. The system utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect sewing defects and was initially trained using black fabric and black sewing thread samples. Experimental testing was conducted on black, red, dark green, light blue, silver, and fluorescent yellow fabrics. The results demonstrated successful detection of jump sewing-line defects on black, red, and dark green materials, while performance limitations were observed for broken sewing-line defects and fabrics with significantly different visual characteristics, including light blue, silver, and fluorescent yellow colours. These findings indicate that model accuracy is strongly influenced by the diversity of training data and the ability to generalize across different fabric and thread colours.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21426
We introduce TinyCast, an attention-free zero-shot forecaster that emits a predictive distribution from 146,505 parameters, on the premise that at this size the periodic structure of a context is worth computing rather than learning. A zero-parameter spectral detector supplies the dominant periods, the context is folded on their phase, and a dilated convolutional encoder and a block-autoregressive quantile decoder model the rest. It is smaller than every zero-shot entry on the GIFT-Eval board whose parameter count can be established. On probabilistic accuracy it defines the size-accuracy frontier. Among zero-shot entries declaring no test-data leakage it is the only one below 1.4M parameters that emits a predictive distribution, and every entry scoring better carries at least that budget. On Chronos-ZS and fev-bench every neural model ahead of it carries at least 28 times its parameters. Because the mixing path is convolutions and matrix multiplications only, it exports to static INT8 and forecasts end to end on an embedded device without per-signal fitting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15767
The conventional hearing aid is both costly and lim- ited in usage, as it is not intended to detect non-speech audio. Our objective is to develop a machine learning solution to provide a more accurate and affordable mechanism to identify surrounding sounds to improve the safety of the hearing impaired, i.e., if a car is honking behind pedestrians, or a gunshot is fired, and they need to move away from the source. By adding randomized augmentations to audio, concatenating a Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) diagram and a log-mel Spectrogram, and including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in a Trans- former architecture, the Randomized Audiomentational Layered Convolutional Transformers (RALCT) model efficiently extracts features from diversified audio representations. In addition, RALCT is small enough, with only approximately 310,000 parameters, to be deployed into mobile devices. Experimental results on the UrbanSound8K dataset resulted in an accuracy consistently over 93% for all variations of RALCT with the highest at 94.56%, reaching state-of-the-art levels. To leverage the capabilities of this technology, a mobile app is developed to be integrated with the model to provide real-time safety control. RALCT thus represents a robust, lightweight, affordable, and versatile deep learning tool to aid the navigation and safety of the hearing impaired.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27762
Accurate boundary delineation remains a persistent challenge in dermoscopic image segmentation because of blurred lesion margins, heterogeneous textures, and complex background artifacts. From a signal-processing perspective, lesion boundaries represent high-frequency components that are highly susceptible to aliasing, noise amplification, and information loss. Consequently, repeated downsampling and feature transformations in conventional convolutional architectures often lead to severely degraded boundary representations. To address these limitations, we propose EA-LiteUNet, an edge-adaptive and computationally efficient U-Net variant specifically designed for boundary-sensitive medical image segmentation. The architecture integrates three core mechanisms: (1) boundary-aware representation learning to suppress aliasing and preserve high-frequency structural details; (2) attention-guided feature modulation to selectively enhance boundary-relevant responses across multi-scale features; and (3) a resource-adaptive inference strategy to dynamically balance segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations across three public dermoscopic datasets demonstrate that EA-LiteUNet consistently achieves superior boundary precision. Specifically, on the ISIC 2018 dataset, the method significantly reduces the 95% Hausdorff Distance (HD95) to 12.89 pixels while maintaining a robust Dice score of 92.08%. Notably, this strong performance is achieved with an ultralightweight configuration of merely 0.29M parameters and 1.17 GFLOPs. Ablation studies further validate the complementary effects of these components, confirming their contribution to enhanced boundary fidelity and stable optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15537
Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) reduces radiation dose by acquiring fewer projection views, but the resulting inverse problem is highly ill-posed and often produces severe streak artifacts. Existing deep reconstruction methods have achieved promising performance, yet many rely on first-order updates or large regularization networks, which can be less effective in ill-conditioned settings. We propose \textbf{CG-GLORE}, a compact deep unrolling framework inspired by second-order optimization for sparse-view CT reconstruction. Each unrolled stage uses a CG-solved linear system based on a structured Hessian surrogate: it retains the physics-induced curvature of the data-fidelity term while using an identity approximation for the learned regularization term. Thus, the method is second-order-inspired rather than an exact Newton method for the full learned objective. To model image priors, we design a Global-Local Regularization Network (GLORE), which combines convolutional local feature extraction with a Long-Range Dependency Representation module based on sparse patchification and Nyström attention. This design captures anatomical details and non-local dependencies while maintaining practical complexity. Experiments on AAPM and DeepLesion under multiple sparse-view and noise settings show that CG-GLORE achieves strong quantitative performance, stable convergence, lower noise power, and improved visual fidelity compared with representative reconstruction methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15246
Training high-resolution AI-based Earth forecasting models is memory-intensive. Window-based Swin Transformers reduce the quadratic cost of global attention, but existing distributed systems such as AERIS primarily target pixel-level models and do not jointly support convolutional sampling modules and shifted-window execution. Long-lead rollout finetuning further increases activation memory. To address these challenges, we present TERRA, a hierarchical parallel training framework for high-resolution Earth forecasting. TERRA introduces Sampling-Aware Window, Sequence, and Tensor Parallelism (SAWSTP), which preserves spatially contiguous layouts for sampling modules and routes tokens into topology-aware ragged window layouts for Transformer execution. For long-lead finetuning, Memory Orchestration (MO) provides rollout-aware checkpoint planning and combines input buffering with budget-constrained activation offloading. Experiments on the $1/12^\circ$ GLORYS-based Wenhai workload show that TERRA supports models with up to 11.4B parameters on 96 H200 GPUs and sustains up to $39.76$ PFLOPS, achieving $65.0\%$ strong-scaling and $94.1\%$ weak-scaling efficiency. Compared with checkpoint-only policies, MO further reduces peak allocated GPU memory by $32.2\%$--$51.8\%$ with at most $20.0\%$ step-time overhead, which makes finetuning with smaller patch sizes and longer rollouts feasible for improved forecasting accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15211
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) faces distinct representation bottlenecks under varying observation lengths, where a single model architecture often fails to excel. To address this, we propose a unified backbone-expert framework with a common convolutional state-space backbone and two specialized interfaces. For short sequences, we inject explicit lag-aware complex-plane descriptors as relation tokens before encoding to compensate for information loss. For long sequences, we design a gated multi-scale residual refinement module to correct the feature map, combined with a fixed-averaging classifier collaboration to harness complementary evidence. Our framework achieves overall average accuracies of 67.28 \pm 0.14% on RML2016.10b and 87.19 \pm 0.77% on HisarMod2019 (mean \pm sample standard deviation over three runs), respectively. The framework's efficacy is further validated through three-seed ablations, native-length cross-configuration tests, and controlled window studies, confirming the benefit of expert-interface decoupling over one-size-fits-all architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15160
Breast mass segmentation is an important step in computer-aided mammography, but it remains difficult because masses can have low contrast, irregular shapes, and boundaries that blend with surrounding breast tissue. To address this problem, we present DualMiT-Net, a dual-branch network that uses both a focused view of the mass and a wider view of the surrounding tissue. The local branch uses a Mix Transformer (MiT-B5) encoder to learn mass shape, texture, and boundary information, while the global branch uses an EfficientNet-B5 encoder to learn surrounding breast context. Features from the two branches are shared at the deeper encoder levels and are then progressively fused in a single decoder. A spatial gate controls how much global information is added during decoding. We also evaluated four input representations and selected a percentile-windowed mammogram combined with a Gabor texture response. The model was trained and evaluated on the mass subset of the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) using a patient-level split. Across three training runs, DualMiT-Net with exponential moving average weights achieved a mean Dice coefficient of 0.9375 and a mean Intersection over Union of 0.8834. It also achieved better Dice and IoU scores than six standard encoder-decoder baselines trained using the same data and training settings. These results show that combining local mass information with wider breast context can provide accurate and consistent breast mass segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15019
High-resolution image restoration from degraded inputs is challenging because it must preserve global structural consistency while recovering fine-grained local details, especially at 4K resolution where direct diffusion-based restoration is computationally expensive and prone to repeated or inconsistent textures. In this work, we introduce MagnifiQ, an image restoration framework that progressively upscales and restores images across resolutions, e.g., from 1024x1024 to 4096x4096. Our approach leverages a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model such as SDXL and adapts it for more scalable high-resolution inference by replacing its original self-attention layers with convolutional operations whose computational cost grows linearly with image resolution. We further propose a progressive upscaling strategy that iteratively restores images over multiple resolution stages, refining each intermediate output rather than directly hallucinating the final 4K image, thereby improving global coherence and reducing high-resolution artifacts. To enhance local details while controlling content drift, MagnifiQ uses patch-specific text prompts that provide spatially localized semantic guidance during restoration. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world degraded images show that MagnifiQ outperforms prior diffusion-based restoration methods in perceptual quality and human preference, producing sharper textures and more coherent 4K results while offering practical speed--quality trade-offs through its scalable backbone and progressive design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14543
Tea is known as an important crop in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, yet the production of tea is still hampered by the multiple diseases that decrease the quantity and quality. Traditional methods of inspection, which are manual, are not consistent, labor-intensive, and depend on extensive monitoring. This paper introduces a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for weakly supervised multi-label classification and disease localization in tea leaves called LightTeaNet. LightTeaNet learns directly from image-level labels and employs Class Activation Mapping (CAM) to localize disease-affected regions automatically, unlike conventional object detection models such as YOLO, which require extensive bounding box annotations. For Parameter efficiency, the network integrates Depthwise Separable Convolutions, and for enhanced feature discrimination, it integrates Channel Attention. LightTeaNet has achieved a Precision of 0.9615, a Recall of 0.8772, and an F1-score of 0.9179, while it shows mAP@0.50=0.1810 without any manual annotations, which delivers a competitive localization performance in the experimental results. These results validate the model as an interpretable as well as a resource-efficient framework for intelligent disease monitoring in agriculture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14178
Accurate polyp segmentation is critical for computer-aided colonoscopy, yet endoscopic images often contain low-contrast boundaries, mucosal texture interference, specular highlights, and device-dependent appearance shifts. Vision State Space Models (SSMs) provide efficient long-range modeling with linear complexity, but existing Vision Mamba segmentation models typically convert 2D features into 1D scanning sequences, which may weaken local geometric continuity and over-smooth irregular contours. We propose CSG-Mamba, a convolutional scoring gating Vision State Space network for endoscopic polyp segmentation. Built on a VM-UNet-style asymmetric U-shaped encoder-decoder, CSG-Mamba inserts a Convolutional Scoring Gating (CSG) module at the semantically rich bottleneck. CSG generates a local spatial score map through pointwise and large-kernel depthwise convolutions and recalibrates state-space features by multiplicative gating. Experiments with three random seeds show that CSG-Mamba achieves 0.9220 Dice and 15.87 HD95 on Kvasir-SEG, and 0.7418 Dice and 0.6570 mIoU on CVC-ColonDB, outperforming the baselines on most overlap and recall metrics while maintaining competitive boundary accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14146
Audio-visual zooming on mobile devices is fundamentally constrained by limited microphone count, compute resource, unknown array geometry, and weak assumptions on real-world acoustic conditions. We present RDSE: Real-Time Directional Speech Enhancement Framework, a hybrid pipeline that combines traditional signal processing and modern machine learning methods for dual-microphone low-end smartphones. Unlike tightly coupled AV systems that continuously use visual feeds or embeddings, RDSE decouples visual interaction from feature inference, using camera input solely to parameterize the steering vector for spatial filtering. The proposed system uses four modules: dereverberation network, a beamformer with a temporal convolutional network, and a MetricGAN based denoiser. Extensive evaluation on benchmark data and real-world recordings demonstrates effective zooming without precise geometry calibration. Comparative experiments show competitive performance to existing methods. Proposed system is rigorously tested for statistical validity, ablation study, latency profiling, and practicality through real-time live-streaming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12476
Autonomous navigation in cluttered environments is hampered by partial observability and dynamic constraints. This paper presents PILOT, a constraint-aware privileged imitation learning framework for vision-based end-to-end UAV motion planning under partial observability. The framework distills planning strategies from a computationally intensive optimal control expert into a student policy regularized toward safety and dynamic requirements via a dual-objective loss function. To mitigate partial observability, a spatiotemporal perception fusion module using a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is developed to integrate historical depth images and odometry. This module infers task-relevant latent context from historical observations, enhancing spatial awareness beyond the instantaneous FOV without maintaining persistent map memory. A trajectory parameterization layer mapping network outputs to a structured trajectory, while enabling explicit continuity, dynamic-consistency, and obstacle soft penalties during training, encouraging constraint satisfaction for unseen observations without formal guarantees. Simulations on quadrotor and fixed-wing aircraft demonstrate that PILOT achieves performance comparable to the privileged expert while reducing computational overhead by over 80\%. Successful indoor and outdoor zero-shot deployment confirms the practical feasibility and cross-domain generalization of the planner.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14082
Background and Objective: Image-guided surgical navigation has been actively studied because of its advantage of identifying subsurface targets and critical structures, whereas it requires incision trajectories to update the preoperative three-dimensional model dynamically during the surgery. The novelty of this study is the thermal feature distinguishment of whether the electric tools contacting the tissue by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and the extraction of the knife contacting frames, to form incision trajectories which can meet with the requirement during the surgery. Methods: This study firstly verified that CNN can classify the thermal images of electric knife and ultrasonic cutter operations separately, and can raise the accuracy of the incision trajectories derived from the connection of the thermal intensity centroid of the frames predicted by CNN as contacting. Results: Our results obtained by employing the electric knife not only reveal a remarkably high accuracy 97.2 % in CNNs identification, but also can achieve an error reduction as high as more than 2.5 times of the incision trajectory prediction as compared to those proceeded in the conventional method. Besides electric knife, the results obtained by employing another electric tool, ultrasonic cutter, reveal a high accuracy up to 93.7 %. Conclusion: In this study, we ensured the possibility of CNN in distinguishing electric tools contacting with the tissue, and confirmed that the proposed method has not only overcome the problem of missing trajectories which usually occurs in the convolutional long-short term memory method but also achieved a remarkable improvement of the accuracy with less limitation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14749
Computer-aided detection (CADe) systems for colonoscopy promise to reduce clinical miss rates, yet reliable real-world deployment remains elusive. This translational gap stems in part from a structural flaw in model development: the reliance on curated datasets that under-represent the long negative stretches and procedure-related artifacts characteristic of routine examinations. Training and evaluating architectures strictly on these lesion-centric benchmarks creates an illusion of success, since such benchmarks cannot capture clinically crucial metrics. To expose this gap, we establish TRUE-Colon, a standardized benchmarking protocol that measures key deployment characteristics alongside localization accuracy, and evaluate four real-time architectures (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv8, YOLOv11, RT-DETR) across curated benchmarks (SUN, PICCOLO) and 60 unedited, full-length procedures (REAL-Colon). We observe a consistent transfer asymmetry: models trained strictly on curated clips suffer a severe performance collapse when evaluated on full procedures, whereas procedure-trained models substantially improve rejection of non-polyp content on REAL-Colon, and largely retain their accuracy on curated benchmarks. Beyond transferability, we find that the Transformer detector attains the strongest sensitivity and the earliest, most persistent detections, while the convolutional detectors stay competitive at a higher throughput. Together, these results indicate that both training and benchmarking for deployable CADe should shift from curated, lesion-centric clips toward full-procedure data and deployment-relevant operating points. Source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13711
Tabular-to-image methods have emerged as novel approaches to leverage the high predictive performance of convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. They convert tabular data into image representations, mapping each feature at a fixed pixel location derived from a dimensionality-reduction method (e.g., t-SNE, UMAP, PCA). However, they encode only the marginal value of each feature and discard information about feature relationships. We propose TabSOM, a tabular-to-image encoding built on the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), which provides: (i) a spatial layout in which every input feature occupies a fixed canvas position derived from its component plane via collision-free Hungarian assignment; and (ii) a graph that captures pairwise feature relationships derived from the SOM component planes. The resulting image stacks two multi-scale node channels: one encodes feature values at fixed scales, while the other encodes pairwise feature interactions as spatial connections between related features. Two SOM-derived interpretability approaches are introduced: a prototype-inspired partial dependence plot and a class--separation importance score. Benchmarked against twelve existing tabular-to-image methods across public binary-classification datasets, TabSOM ranks first or second on every dataset and achieves the lowest variance of any method evaluated. Interpretability obtained with TabSOM was validated against Random Forest, XGBoost, and SHAP, the class-separation score shows reasonable agreement with established baselines on the top-ranked features while capturing complementary structural information from input data. These results demonstrate that TabSOM provides an effective and interpretable approach for applying deep learning architectures to tabular data, bridging the performance--interpretability gap in this domain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13513
Modern image classification models excel when trained on single task-specific datasets but often struggle to generalize across domains and difficulty levels. We propose ARMDIL, an Adaptive Router for Multi-Domain Image classification with LLMs. ARMDIL is an ensemble that uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent to dynamically route each image to the most suitable vision backbone. Our diverse ensemble employs convolutional neural networks (ResNets), self-supervised representation learners (SSL), and vision-language models (VLMs), each trained on a unified label space constructed from multiple image datasets with differing distributions and characteristics. Empirical evaluations illuminate the distinct capabilities and vulnerabilities of each architecture across disparate visual domains. Crucially, we show that ARMDIL effectively navigates these trade-offs, performing competitively with specialized training-based routers. Furthermore, it drastically improves adaptability by allowing new information to be integrated via simple prompt modifications, while enhancing interpretability through natural language reasoning traces. These advances in cross-dataset image classification pave the way for more reliable general-purpose vision systems such as AI assistants and autonomous robots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13463
This preliminary technical report presents a framework for sign language video synthesis using a loss-guided multi-expert Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to enhance communication for individuals with hearing impairments. Three specialized discriminators -- global, hand, and head -- each guide a corresponding expert branch in the generator toward a distinct visual region, enabling implicit feature specialization without explicit diversity losses. To stabilize this multi-discriminator system, whose early-phase training otherwise exhibits chaotic dynamics, we introduce a United Loss consensus mechanism that regularizes each discriminator toward the ensemble average at a 10% weight. Each branch further adopts a dual-pathway convolutional-transformer design with learnable AdaptiveFeatureFusion, balancing the stability of convolutions against the detail of windowed self-attention. The generator is trained using an alternating three-mode schedule (discriminator, holistic generation, branch-specialized generation). On a custom 156GB dataset with a filtered test set that removes easy and repetitive samples, our 0.2B-parameter variant achieves 29.8 PSNR and the 1.3B-parameter variant achieves 30.7 PSNR, with inference VRAM footprints of 1.5 GB and 8 GB respectively, enabling deployment on consumer-grade hardware. Full ablation studies remain ongoing due to the 2-3 month training cycle on a single GPU. The system was showcased at the 2025 Hong Kong Frontier Technology Summit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13368