Retinal layer segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a fundamental step for extracting quantitative biomarkers of retinal structure. Indeed, there is a growing interest in the analysis of OCTs in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. However, segmentation remains challenging due to speckle noise, shadowing artifacts, low contrast between adjacent layers, anatomical variability across subjects, and domain shifts arising from different acquisition protocols and clinical populations. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable performance, their robustness and generalization across heterogeneous datasets remain limited. In this work, we investigate the role of spatial normalization as a preprocessing strategy to mitigate geometric domain shifts and improve the consistency of retinal layer segmentation. Inspired by standard practices in neuroimaging, we introduce a fovea-centered normalization framework that aligns OCT volumes into a common anatomical reference. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. To provide a comprehensive assessment of segmentation quality, we combine conventional overlap-based metrics at B-scan level with topology-aware metrics at A-scan level and thickness-based measures at the en-face level. In cases where a ground truth is not available, we propose topology violation quantitative metrics that do not require ground truth annotations and a thickness-based qualitative assessment that captures structural consistency and clinically relevant patterns at the en-face level. The results demonstrate the importance of spatial normalization in OCT segmentation pipelines toward the development of robust and clinically meaningful retinal analysis tools, enabling reliable biomarker extraction and downstream computational analysis in neurodegenerative research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16065
Accurate segmentation of electrolyzer materials is essential for automated disassembly, sustainable recycling, and circular manufacturing in hydrogen technologies. However, this task is challenging due to strong visual similarity between materials, spectral overlap, irregular shapes, and severe class imbalance. To address these challenges, we propose an AI-driven dual-branch framework, Hyperspectral-RGB Electrolyzer Materials Network (HREM-Net), that combines hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and RGB images for electrolyzer material segmentation. We implemented several innovative modules, including Efficient Channel Attention, Coordinate Attention, Mobile Inverted Bottleneck blocks, and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling to capture spectral and spatial features from HSI, and RGB images. With an adaptive gated cross-modal fusion module and composite loss function, HREM-Net achieves a mean class accuracy of 91.66% and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.82 on the Electrolyzers-HSI dataset, outperforming baseline segmentation models. Cross-dataset validation on the PCB-Vision dataset demonstrates strong generalization with 96.91% accuracy and 0.93 mIoU. This work poses its potential as an industrial application to improve electrolyzer efficiency, thereby improving the predictive maintenance of hydrogen production.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16056
With the increasing demand for reusing paper documents in educational and office settings, accurate segmentation of handwritten and printed text has become a crucial step in document digitization. Although numerous deep learning models have been developed for this task, their high computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this challenge, we present a lightweight framework optimized for efficient performance on devices with severely limited computational capacity. Our approach begins with the Sentence-level Connected Component Segmentation algorithm, aimed at extracting coherent sentence-level segments from document images. We then design a novel Region-aware Handwriting Descriptor (RHD) to capture the intrinsic variability of human handwriting at the sentence level. A simple conventional classifier can then be seamlessly integrated with our designed descriptor, demonstrating strong classification performance for distinguishing handwritten and printed sentence-level text images, highlighting that the proposed descriptor is agnostic to the choice of classifier. Extensive experiments are performed on our self-constructed Multilingual High-Quality Annotated Dataset for Handwritten and Printed Text Segmentation (MAD-HPTS) and a public benchmark PHD-AS, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency. On MAD-HPTS, our method sacrifices only 1.4% accuracy compared to the leading deep neural network baseline, yet achieves more than 8 times speedup in inference, making it well-suited for lightweight deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15936
Automated assessment of human motion plays a vital role in rehabilitation, enabling objective evaluation of patient performance and progress. Unlike general human activity recognition, rehabilitation motion assessment focuses on analyzing the quality of movement within the same action class, requiring the detection of subtle deviations from ideal motion. Recent advances in deep learning and video-based skeleton extraction have opened new possibilities for accessible, scalable motion assessment using affordable devices such as smartphones or webcams. However, the field lacks standardized benchmarks, consistent evaluation protocols, and reproducible methodologies, limiting progress and comparability across studies. In this work, we address these gaps by (i) aggregating existing rehabilitation datasets into a unified archive called Rehab-Pile, (ii) proposing a general benchmarking framework for evaluating deep learning methods in this domain, and (iii) conducting extensive benchmarking of multiple architectures across classification and regression tasks. All datasets and implementations are released to the community to support transparency and reproducibility. This paper aims to establish a solid foundation for future research in automated rehabilitation assessment and foster the development of reliable, accessible, and personalized rehabilitation solutions. The datasets, source-code and results of this article are all publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21018
Access to potable water is crucial for health, economic development, and sustainability. However, accurately classifying water quality remains a significant challenge due to the complexity and variability of water source data. This paper addresses the challenge of predicting water potability through machine learning and deep learning algorithms. It introduces a novel feature augmentation algorithm, AquaAugmentor, to enhance the predictive performance of these models for low-dimensional datasets. Utilizing a dataset that includes chemical attributes of water, such as pH, hardness, solids, chloramines, sulfate, and others. This study evaluates the performance of the models with and without AquaAugmentor. Each model applied to classify water as potable or non-potable and its performance is then evaluated and compared based on test accuracy and AUC score. The results highlight the strengths and limitations of our proposed algorithm, providing insights into the most effective techniques for improving the predictive performance of water quality classification. This study contributes to the broader efforts of ensuring safe water access and serves as a framework for employing machine learning in environmental quality assessments. The findings aim to assist researchers, policymakers, and public health officials in making informed decisions based on reliable machine learning predictions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15775
With the rapid development of deep learning, its vulnerability has gradually emerged in recent years. This work focuses on backdoor attacks on speech recognition systems. We adopt sounds that are ordinary in nature or in our daily life as triggers for natural backdoor attacks. We conduct experiments on two datasets and three models to validate the performance of natural backdoor attacks and explore the effects of poisoning rate, trigger duration and blend ratio on the performance of natural backdoor attacks. Our results show that natural backdoor attacks have a high attack success rate without compromising model performance on benign samples, even with short or low-amplitude triggers. It requires only 5% of poisoned samples to achieve a near 100% attack success rate. In addition, the backdoor will be automatically activated by the corresponding sound in nature, which is not easy to be detected and will bring severer harm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15724
Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) is one of the leading structural causes of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, yet its subtle and heterogeneous imaging characteristics make accurate identification and delineation challenging on conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Although T1-weighted (T1w) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images are routinely acquired for presurgical evaluation, the contribution of different MRI representations to deep learning-based FCD segmentation remains poorly understood. In this study, we present a systematic benchmark of MRI representations for automated FCD segmentation using the nnU-Net framework. A publicly available presurgical MRI dataset comprising 85 FCD subjects and 25 healthy controls was used to evaluate eight input configurations, including conventional MRI contrasts (T1w and FLAIR), ratio-derived representations, and their multimodal combinations. To isolate the effect of MRI representation, all experiments employed identical preprocessing, network architecture, optimization strategy, and five-fold cross-validation. Among the evaluated single-modality representations, FLAIR achieved the strongest overall performance, whereas ratio-derived representations alone were insufficient for reliable identification of subtle FCD. Incorporating ratio-derived representations with conventional T1w and FLAIR images consistently improved lesion delineation, with the four-channel multimodal configuration achieving the highest overall Dice score (0.376), representing a 5.0% relative improvement over the conventional T1w+FLAIR representation. These findings demonstrate that MRI representation design is an important yet underexplored component of deep learning-based FCD segmentation and should be optimized alongside network architecture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15605
Recent FPGAs have improved deep learning (DL) inference efficiency through dedicated tensor blocks and in-BRAM computation. ReRAM-based analog in-memory computing (IMC) pushes efficiency further, offering an order-of-magnitude improvement in compute density and energy efficiency over conventional digital logic by performing vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) directly within the ReRAM crossbar; prior work has integrated such IMC blocks into FPGAs for DL inference. However, conventional IMC designs support only static-weight VMM, leaving nonlinear operations and dynamic matrix-matrix multiplication (DIMM) to the FPGA fabric. As a result, the benefits of IMC are largely confined to static-weight models, whereas Transformer-based models, which rely on frequent nonlinear and DIMM operations, gain only limited improvement. Moreover, the ADCs within each IMC block consume more than 70% of its area and power, further limiting system efficiency and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a novel FPGA architecture that integrates an ADC-free IMC block, replacing the conventional ADC with analog content-addressable memories (ACAMs) that natively perform nonlinear operations inside the block. To fully exploit this block, we conduct an FPGA-aware design-space exploration that determines optimal crossbar dimensions while balancing FPGA area, flexibility, and DL performance, and we develop an efficient mapping that leverages ACAMs to carry out DIMM operations, extending the applicability of IMC to attention computation. On CNN and Transformer-based benchmarks, the proposed architecture achieves up to 40x and 1.9x higher energy efficiency and 4.1x and 2.5x higher area efficiency, respectively. Overall, it significantly improves FPGA DL inference efficiency and sustains robust gains on Transformer-based workloads across long input sequences, advancing domain-specialized FPGA design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15123
Perturbation-based xAI methods are widely used to analyze the behavior and predictions of deep learning models. By altering input regions and measuring the resulting changes in class probabilities with respect to the original image, they assign relevance scores and generate heatmaps that reflect each region's contribution to the prediction. Despite their apparent simplicity, however, perturbation-based methods are sensitive to parameter choices. In this work, we focus on two key parameters of the perturbation pipeline, namely the patch geometry, including the size and shape of the perturbed regions, and the perturbation type, defined by the replacement scheme. Grounded in the use case of flood detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of how relevance estimation changes under different perturbation settings. Beyond visual inspection of the resulting relevance maps, we evaluate their consistency across perturbation strategies and their faithfulness to the model's reasoning. We demonstrate how different perturbation choices can steer the resulting relevance maps, yielding ambiguous and even contradictory explanations. Our findings emphasize the importance of methodological settings in perturbation-based xAI. They underscore the need to carefully inspect and evaluate perturbation choices and to treat them as an integral part when interpreting explanations, ensuring a robust understanding of both the explanations and model predictions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14743
Deep learning models for prostate MRI-based cancer grading may encode clinical covariates that either reflect useful disease-related signal or non-generalising shortcut information, but their role is usually assumed. We propose a causal-reasoning framework for probing covariate dependence in MRI-based International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) Grade Group prediction. Rather than treating mpMRI as a direct cause of grade, we model MRI appearance and ISUP grade as observations of latent tumour pathology, and test whether candidate clinical variables act as nuisance correlates, disease-related proxies, or irrelevant covariates in the learned representation. We implement this using an adversarial framework that suppresses the decodability of individual clinical covariate at a time while preserving MRI-based grade prediction. The approach is developed and evaluated on 2,903 prostate MRI examinations, with external validation on 576 patients. We report a set of interesting and previously under-explored imaging-to-clinical-variable interactions in the context of deep learning generalisation. For examples, in binary ISUP Grade Group $\geq2$ classification, suppressing age, BMI, and alcohol use improved AUC by 1.23%, 0.84%, and 1.42%, respectively (all p < 0.05), suggesting reduced non-generalising covariate information; In contrast, suppressing PSA and prostate volume degraded AUC by 1.91% and 7.61% (all p < 0.001), indicating that these variables carried task-relevant signal. These findings show that adversarial covariate suppression can provide a practical representation-level analysis for distinguishing potentially harmful dependence from informative signal in prostate MRI grading models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14720
Long-tailed label distributions reduce the reliability of deep learning for electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia diagnosis, particularly for clinically important but rare abnormalities. Existing rebalancing and logit adjustment methods mainly address class frequency while overlooking direction-dependent morphological variability across ECG classes. This study proposes Angular Gaussian Supervised Contrastive Learning (AG-SCL) for long-tailed multi-label ECG diagnosis. AG-SCL integrates three components into a unified framework: an Angular Gaussian contrastive branch that models full-covariance class uncertainty on unit-normalized embeddings, Adaptive Logit Adjustment that learns bounded label-state-specific prior corrections instead of fixed frequency-based margins, and tail-aware augmentation that generates morphology-preserving views while protecting the 7-25 Hz QRS-dominant band. The method was evaluated on the public PTB-XL benchmark and a nocturnal ECG dataset comprising 1317 hours of recordings from 141 subjects. AG-SCL achieved the best macro-level performance on both datasets. On PTB-XL, it obtained a balanced accuracy of 0.838, sensitivity of 0.709, specificity of 0.968, mean average precision of 0.495, and TPR at 5% FPR of 0.778. On Noc-ECG, the corresponding values were 0.918, 0.889, 0.947, 0.488, and 0.900. The largest gains occurred in rare or morphologically unstable rhythm classes, while ablation studies confirmed the contributions of full-covariance modelling, Adaptive Logit Adjustment, and tail-aware augmentation. AG-SCL improves long-tailed ECG diagnosis by combining prior calibration with anisotropic representation learning, enhancing sensitivity to rare arrhythmias while maintaining clinically relevant specificity. Our code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14613
The interconnected nature of global financial systems makes them vulnerable to systemic risks, where the failure of a few institutions can trigger catastrophic cascading defaults. Traditional risk models often fail to capture the complex, non-linear dynamics of these networks. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in modeling relational data, they primarily learn correlative patterns and function as black boxes, offering little insight into the causal mechanisms of shock propagation. This limitation is critical for regulators who require explainable models to perform stress tests and devise effective interventions. We introduce CausalGraphX, a novel framework that integrates GNNs with counterfactual reasoning to provide explainable assessments of systemic risk. CausalGraphX employs a Graph Attention mechanism to learn representations of institutional vulnerability and uses an adversarial regularization technique to ensure these representations capture causal drivers rather than spurious correlations. Furthermore, we propose an optimization-based approach to generate counterfactual explanations, answering questions such as, "What minimum capital injection would have prevented Bank A's default under a specific stress scenario?" We validate CausalGraphX on large-scale synthetic financial networks. Our results demonstrate that CausalGraphX significantly outperforms traditional and deep learning baselines in predicting cascading defaults while providing sparse, plausible, and actionable counterfactual explanations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14416
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have had a broad research impact in modeling domains governed by partial differential equations (PDE). However, PINNs have been shown to perform poorly, sometimes even converging to trivial solutions, in challenging PDE domains, or when generalizing to unseen but related PDE domains. Previously proposed solutions detail hyperparameter tuning to reduce loss imbalance between data-driven and physics guided losses, curriculum learning based training strategies, or dynamic re-sampling of hard collocation points. These methods face certain pitfalls: hyperparameter tuning is expensive, designing a training curriculum is ambiguous in multi-parameter PDE settings, and dynamic resampling still fails in complex PDE settings. Complementary to this line of thinking, we believe the initial PINN network weights also play a crucial role in the emergence of catastrophic failures during training, yet the effect of PINN weight initialization has been surprisingly under-investigated. To this end, we propose a framework for Learned Initialization via Gated Layerwise Optimization (LIGO-PINN) to overcome PINN convergence failures. Through rigorous evaluation on 1D and 2D PDE domains, including a challenging 2D fluid dynamics setting, we demonstrate that our methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed to alleviate PINN failures, achieving a 91.5% average performance improvement across six baselines and 81% over the strongest baseline. We also verify that LIGO-PINN generalizes to 3D unstructured domains. Finally, we analyze training dynamics across all three PDE domains to explain both LIGO-PINN's improvement and the convergence failure of traditional PINNs. Code: this https URL Keywords: Machine Learning, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Deep Learning, PDE Modeling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14233
Accurate determination of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) resectability relies on evaluating how the tumor interacts with major peripancreatic vessels on CT imaging, yet expert assessment often shows substantial variability. We introduce a fully automated multimodal deep learning framework that jointly analyzes 3D contrast enhanced CT and structured clinical information to classify patients into the three National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) resectability categories (upfront resectable, borderline resectable, locally advanced). The approach uses a Swin-UNETR backbone to obtain anatomy aware image representations through auxiliary segmentation of pancreas, tumor, and vascular structures. These features are fused with a compact clinical embedding derived from 17 routinely collected variables and processed by a lightweight classification head. Model training is guided by a dynamic multitask objective that adapts the balance between segmentation and classification based on current tumor Dice performance, promoting feature representations that remain both anatomically informed and discriminative.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13826
Microscopic urinalysis is a routine diagnostic test at hospitals. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of deep learning methods to automate microscopic urinalysis. These methods rely on high-quality images of the urine samples in which each cell is clearly identifiable. However, in practice, the urine sample on a glass slide has a multi-layer structure; hence, all the cells are not clearly visible within the depth of field of a lens focused at a particular focal plane. It demands acquiring multiple images at different focal planes to correctly identify each cell in a given urine sample, which is a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose to simplify the task by recording a video, in place of acquiring multiple images, while gradually changing the focus of the lens manually by hand. A typical length of the video is from 2 to 14 seconds. We reconstruct an all-in-focus image from the recorded video frames and apply a deep learning model to detect and classify urine sediments. As a proof of concept, we conduct experiments on 14 videos acquired by a trained lab technician in a usual diagnostic lab environment and show the effectiveness of the proposed automated urinalysis pipeline with our novel reconstruction algorithm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13601
Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training. Its empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work that interprets Muon as steepest descent under the spectral norm. Yet it remains unclear which of Muon's advantages stem from its update rule itself and which are artifacts of the scale, architecture, and data of modern deep networks. In this work, we isolate the optimizer from these confounding factors by studying Muon on a simple, well-understood, and spectrally structured problem: low-rank matrix factorization. Through a controlled comparison against carefully tuned adaptive baselines, we find that Muon does not consistently outperform AdamW in this setting and that several previously reported advantages are sensitive to hyperparameter choices. Our results provide a more nuanced picture of when spectrum-aware orthogonalization is beneficial and argue for evaluating modern optimizers on controlled problems in addition to end-to-end benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13246
Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and data from digital attacks. Cyberpsychology (CPSY) is defined as the use of psychology to enhance cybersecurity applications. Since the early 2010s, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly integrated with CPSY, leveraging advanced data analysis to decode the distinct personality traits and behavioral patterns of victims, attackers, and defenders. In this systematic literature review (SLR), we carefully analyze 34 collected research studies of AI usage in cyberpsychology (AI-CPSY) using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) methodology. The review presents a comprehensive taxonomy of the cyber-security applications, the AI methodologies used, and the psychological concepts employed across the studies . We sort the research studies into four cybersecurity applications: Anomaly Detection (AD), Vulnerability Risk Prediction (VRP), Security Awareness Training (SAT), and Authentication/Identity Verification (AIV). Within each application area, studies are further sorted according to the AI method used including machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), natural language processing (NLP), and reinforcement learning (RL). Furthermore, the review identifies the most commonly utilized psychological concepts, quantify the datasets used in the field, and present their current implementation and deployment status. At last, it detect research gaps, present open challenges, and deduce the trending and most effective and emerging methodologies used across the AI-CPSY landscape.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13123
Deep learning computer vision for scientific applications requires collecting and annotating large datasets in a laborious, expensive and error-prone process. Synthetic data generation through 3D modelling and rendering may simplify this process and increase the accuracy of annotations by generating them programmatically. However, minimising the domain gap between real and synthetic images visually is subjective and lacks systematic quantitative guidance. We present GraNatPy, a Python package with metrics to guide improvement of the rendered scene. We show that quantifiable increase in realism, diversity and size of rendered dataset correlates with improved visual perception of the scene and higher zero-shot performance of an object detection model. Furthermore, we demonstrated using photographs of virological plaque assays that gradient similarity affects performance on small object detection, which can be improved by mixing real and synthetic data. Finally, we turn procedural data rendering into an agentic skill (SynthClaw) to automate the procedural parameter optimisation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12874
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally, with approximately 1,926,425 new cases and 904,019 deaths reported in 2022. Accurate histologic grading plays a critical role in prognosis and treatment planning for colorectal adenocarcinoma. In recent years, artificial intelligence and its subcategories, including machine learning and deep learning, have been increasingly employed for automated cancer detection and classification. An appropriate and well-organized dataset is the essential first step to achieve this goal. This paper introduces CRC-HGD, a histopathological microscopy image dataset of 1,914 images obtained from 214 colorectal adenocarcinoma patients (Grade I: 106, Grade II: 75, Grade III: 33). The specimens are H&E-stained colorectal tissue sections acquired at the Poursina Hakim Research Center of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, diagnosed between 2014 and 2019, and graded according to the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria into three grades: well-differentiated (Grade I), moderately differentiated (Grade II), and poorly differentiated (Grade III). For each specimen, four magnification levels are provided: 4x, 10x, 20x, and 40x. The dataset is accessible via Mendeley Data (this https URL) and at this http URL, where the latest version is also available. The distinctive feature of this dataset is the provision of labeled specimens across all three differentiation grades at multiple magnification levels, enabling comprehensive computational analysis of colorectal cancer grading.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12750
Smart-building load forecasters are often trained offline on dense, multivariate, high-frequency data, but deployment may provide only hourly, feature-limited inputs. Missing features must then be reconstructed, and their errors can propagate through the model. If this input uncertainty is not reflected, prediction intervals may become miscalibrated, affecting demand-response scheduling. Our work examines where uncertainty should be placed once inference inputs are reconstructed. We develop a unified one-day-ahead probabilistic forecasting framework that aligns temporal resolution, reconstructs the unavailable inputs, and derives causal features, and we compare a modular post-hoc residual-quantile scheme with an integrated in-model quantile-learning scheme. The comparison uses three mid-scale Deep Learning (DL) backbones: recurrent, hybrid recurrent, and attention-based Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) models, under identical inputs, forecasting horizon, preprocessing rules, and training budgets. Results show that uncertainty placement is backbone-dependent. Integrated quantile learning is most reliable with the TFT, yielding 2.2-3.6% MAPE and 28-83W RMSE on the labeled test window, while producing intervals about 5x narrower than the modular intervals at the closest-to-nominal coverage level. Diebold-Mariano tests support the TFT ranking and the mixed behavior of the recurrent backbones. A reconstruction-sensitivity test shows that reconstructed inputs increase the Quantile Score (QS) by 106% while interval width remains nearly unchanged, indicating that the model does not automatically absorb reconstruction-induced uncertainty. Robustness checks against non-DL baselines and seasonal hold-out weeks support this ranking. Our results expose the limits of post-hoc residual quantiles when inference depends on reconstructed inputs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12730