This work presents an automatic bee entrance monitoring system based on YOLO11 transfer learning and the ByteTrack tracking algorithm. The study investigates the influence of data augmentation, backbone freezing, and tracker parameter optimization on the detection and counting of small, fast-moving bees. The detector with progressive backbone unfreezing strategy achieved about 97.0% precision and 98.7% mAP50, while providing more stable convergence than full fine-tuning. Experiments also showed that light augmentation outperformed heavy augmentation. For tracking, ByteTrack parameters were optimized to improve trajectory continuity under low-confidence detections. On an independent 25 FPS side-view video, the optimized YOLO11-ByteTrack system correctly counted 43 of 47 incoming bees (91.5%) and 7 of 30 outgoing bees (23.3%). Error analysis showed that most counting errors were caused by missed detections due to rapid bee motion and motion blur, while tracking failures became less frequent after parameter optimization. Overall, the results indicate that moderate augmentation, progressive backbone unfreezing, and ByteTrack tuning improve the reliability of automatic bee entrance monitoring under realistic recording conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23213
Lifting 3D hand poses from 2D monocular representations remains challenging due to the limited availability of large-scale, diverse 3D-annotated hand datasets, in contrast to the abundance of human body motion data. We address this limitation by transferring motion representations learned from large body pose corpora to the hand domain. We introduce TransHands, a backbone-agnostic transfer learning framework that enables pre-trained human motion encoders to be effectively adapted for 3D hand pose estimation from 2D pose inputs. Rather than training hand-specific biomechanical models from scratch, TransHands combines a two-stage training and fine-tuning strategy with a lightweight hand-specific input adaptation module that aligns hand kinematics with the representation space learned for full-body motion. We evaluate TransHands across four state-of-the-art motion modeling architectures, including transformer-based, graph-based, and frequency- domain models. Results demonstrate that motion priors learned from body pose data transfer consistently across architectures, yielding consistent accuracy gains, strong cross-domain generalization, particularly in challenging egocentric settings, and applicability for downstream tasks in real-world contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22341
Lung cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and early diagnosis is critical for improving survival. However, early-stage malignancies can be subtle on chest X-rays, creating challenges for radiologists. This study evaluates Vision Transformers (ViTs) for predicting lung cancer one to two years before clinical diagnosis. We analyzed 259,361 chest X-rays from 91,020 imaging studies at the Jamaica Plains VA Hospital in Boston, MA. The dataset showed extreme class imbalance, approximately 1:150 cancer to non-cancer, which was addressed using hybrid under- and over-sampling and class-weighted loss optimization. Three ViT configurations were evaluated: a model trained from scratch, an ImageNet-pretrained model, and a Corona-pretrained model fine-tuned on the lung cancer dataset. Transfer learning improved performance, with pretrained models exceeding the scratch baseline by 6-10 percentage points in AUC and about 10-12 percent in balanced accuracy. ImageNet-pretrained models showed the most stable overall performance, while Corona-pretrained models achieved higher sensitivity in some settings but greater variability. Moderate resampling ratios, including 1:1 undersampling and 1.5:2 oversampling, provided favorable trade-offs between sensitivity, precision, and computational efficiency, reducing runtime by up to 70 percent without major performance loss. These findings demonstrate the potential of ViTs for early lung cancer risk prediction from routine chest X-rays. Although performance remains below clinical deployment thresholds, the results support further development of ViT-based triage systems to flag high-risk patients for earlier evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21571
Sign language serves as a vital means of communication for individuals with hearing impairments, yet recognition resources for the over 100 distinct sign languages are severely lacking. In response, we present our work on sign language recognition using transfer learning and the domain adaptation method TA3N, which utilizes the Temporal Relational Network (TRN) module for aligning multi-scale temporal relations. Our findings highlight the superior performance of Domain Adaptation to neural network-based transfer learning, particularly in improving recognition of American Sign Language (ASL). Our research also identifies the effectiveness of aligning shorter-term temporal features between source and target domains. In addition to using RGB, we conducted experiments using Optical Flow mode for the sign language samples, ultimately determining that RGB outperforms Optical Flow in the majority of cases. Our work aims to improve accessibility and communication for individuals who rely on sign language as their primary mode of communication.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16804
Short-horizon forecasting of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) remains difficult when observations from the target domain are limited and the statistical properties of the source and target domains differ. In these settings, models trained only on local data may not capture complex temporal dynamics, while direct transfer learning can result in negative transfer. This study develops a shift-aware dual-encoder transfer framework that combines source-domain knowledge with target-specific representation learning. The source encoder was pretrained using hourly observations from 10 U.S. monitoring locations. The framework was then adapted and evaluated using two years of hourly observations from 77 stations in Taiwan under a chronological train-validation-test protocol. Among the four principal baselines, the frozen-source dual-encoder model achieved the best performance, with MSE = 21.8960, MAE = 3.1597, and R^2 = 0.8725. This corresponds to an MSE reduction of approximately 7.1% relative to TL-v1 and 4.1% relative to TL-v2. The ablation analysis showed that removing the Taiwan-specific branch caused the largest decline in performance. Allowing the source encoder to adapt produced the best overall result, with MSE = 21.6575, MAE = 3.1383, and R^2 = 0.8739. SHAP analysis indicated that predictions were driven mainly by recent PM2.5 observations and meteorological variables related to pollutant transport and dispersion. These results suggest that source-domain knowledge is most effective when target-specific information is preserved and the transferred representation is allowed to adapt under target supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14456
Infrared (IR) spectroscopy is widely used for chemical sensing, but extracting reliable chemical information from spectra remains challenging. Conventional interpretation is labor-intensive, relies on prior knowledge and reference spectra, and is difficult to scale, whereas most machine-learning methods are tailored to individual tasks or datasets, require large labeled training sets, and transfer poorly across analytical objectives and experimental datasets. Here we introduce UltraIR, a foundation model for IR spectroscopy with more than 100 million parameters that enables simulation-to-real transfer learning for chemical sensing and analysis from molecules to complex samples. UltraIR is pretrained on approximately 60 million simulated IR spectra using spectral reconstruction, molecular fingerprint similarity alignment, and functional-group prediction, then adapted to downstream objectives with task-specific labels or targets. Across functional-group prediction, molecular structure elucidation, physicochemical property prediction, mixture-component identification and quantification, bacterial classification, medicinal-herb geographic origin traceability and constituent quantification, microplastics classification, and soil property prediction, UltraIR outperforms conventional machine-learning and task-specific deep-learning baselines. It performs strongly with limited labeled experimental spectra and in zero-shot inference for the same analytical task across Fourier-transform infrared spectrometers and laboratories, providing a route to adaptable, data-efficient chemical sensing from complex real-world samples.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13341
Worldwide, millions of senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer disease abbreviated as AD, a well- versed form of dementia. AD is featured by amnesia, intellectual disability, and difficulty with consciousness. DL and ML models are undoubtedly explored to identify AD related patterns on large dimensional neuroimaging data but they need global optimization and are suffering from overfitting issue that might yield dissatisfactory result in testing data set. DL overcomes the issue by convolution of input image with kernel but any sudden change in the MRI image or human manipulation, limited pre- processing of the images can mislead CNN in achieving highly accurate detection. Transfer Learning (TL) has proved itself in AD diagnosis by utilizing pre-trained models on large data sets to guide novice model in a new neuroimaging dataset. This review provides an inclusive glimpse of TL implication in classification, identification including the conversion of AD. Keeping in view, we have assessed the strengths and limitations of TL in improvising diagnostic accuracy even with limited data. The uniqueness of the present review is the incorporation of explainable AI in TL based AD diagnosis system. Finally, it can be claimed that the review will guide the new re-searchers in the area of TL induced neurodegenerative disease detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14731
Alzheimer's disease is a leading cause of death with no cure. Therefore, early detection is critical to slow progression and preserve quality of life. Diagnosis relies on medical history, cognitive tests, physical exams, and MRI brain scans, making deep learning suitable for Alzheimer's classification. This work proposes a benchmark that evaluates ten different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures (including ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet, EfficientNet, and VGG family models) under the same held-out test split protocol. A two-stage transfer learning and full fine-tuning pipeline is introduced to perform training using a class-balanced subset (3,900 images) derived from the OASIS medical imaging dataset, comprising 86,437 single-view MRI brain scans labeled into four classifications of Alzheimer's disease: Non-Demented, Very Mild Dementia, Mild Dementia, and Moderate Dementia. The best results were achieved by VGG16, with a 0.9637 validation accuracy and a 0.9533 test accuracy score. A key finding documented in this work is the difficulty of classifying the transition from Non-Demented to Very Mild Demented stages, observed consistently across all ten architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11762
In recent research on the Digital Twin-based Vehicular Ad hoc Network(DT-VANET), Federated Learning (FL) has shown its ability to provide data privacy. However, Federated learning struggles to adequately train a global model when confronted with data heterogeneity and data sparsity among vehicles, which ensure suboptimal accuracy in making precise predictions for different vehicle types. To address these challenges, this paper combines Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) to conduct vehicle clustering related to types of vehicles and proposes a novel Hierarchical Federated Transfer Learning (HFTL). We construct a framework for DT-VANET, along with two algorithms designed for cloud server model updates and intra-cluster federated transfer learning, to improve the accuracy of the global model. In addition, we developed a data quality score-based mechanism to prevent the global model from being affected by malicious vehicles. Lastly, detailed experiments on real-world datasets are conducted, considering different performance metrics that verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11532
Spatio-temporal PV data are essential for understanding adoption processes in off-grid regions, yet such data remain largely unavailable. Automated segmentation of remote sensing (RS) imagery offers a promising solution; yet, residential PV systems remain challenging targets because of their small size and sparse distribution, resulting in severe target-background imbalance. Vision-language foundation models (FMs) provide a data-efficient paradigm through prompt-based semantic and spatial guidance, but the relative contribution of different prompt types remains unclear. We systematically evaluate SAM3 for small-scale PV segmentation in RS imagery by comparing textual, geometric, and hybrid prompting, under varying supervision levels, training strategies, spatial resolutions, and imaging conditions. Multi-temporal aerial imagery from a large off-grid rural region serves as a study site, with findings validated across three additional datasets. Prompting strategy emerged as the dominant factor governing model behavior. Textual prompting consistently produced the lowest performance and showed the greatest sensitivity to supervision and imaging conditions. In contrast, spatial guidance substantially improved both segmentation accuracy and robustness. Hybrid prompting achieved the highest accuracy and stability, indicating that semantic and spatial guidance provide complementary information. Most performance gains were achieved with only a few hundred annotated samples, demonstrating strong data efficiency. Transfer learning had limited overall impact, with only modest improvements observed for textual prompting under limited supervision. Overall, our findings establish prompting strategy as a key determinant of SAM3 adaptation, robustness, and generalization, highlighting the potential of promptable FMs for scalable PV mapping in data-constrained off-grid regions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10801
Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, predominantly arising from precancerous polyps. Accurate detection, segmentation, and endoscopic and histological classification of colorectal polyps are crucial for timely clinical intervention. In this study, we present PolypVision, a three-stage hierarchical deep learning framework that sequentially performs: (Stage 1) binary classification of polyps as adenomatous or hyperplastic, with simultaneous Paris and JNet classification, using EfficientNetV2-M with Focal Loss; (Stage 2) polyp segmentation with recommended resection method using a UNet++ decoder with the Stage 1 backbone as encoder, optimized with Dice and BCE losses; and (Stage 3) adenoma subtype classification (tubular, tubulovillous, villous) using EfficientNetV2-M with transfer learning from Stage 2. Evaluated on three public datasets -- PolypGen, Kvasir-SEG, and CVC-ClinicDB -- PolypVision achieves an AUC of approximately 0.99 for frame classification and a detection mAP@50 of 94.4% on Kvasir-SEG, outperforming or matching state-of-the-art methods. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Maps (Grad-CAM) confirm that the model attends to clinically relevant lesion features. The framework is device-independent, operating across diverse endoscopic imaging systems without hardware-specific adaptation. These results demonstrate that a hierarchical, transfer-learning-driven pipeline with task-specific loss functions offers a robust, device-independent, and clinically meaningful approach to automated colorectal polyp analysis. PolypVision is freely available as a web application at this https URL, a DataBioX initiative, with a free usage tier open to all users.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10649
Transfer learning is particularly useful in settings with limited training data, and within image classification it is common to transfer learn upon massive datasets like ImageNet , CIFAR-100, or COCO . Qualitatively, it seems a transfer learning dataset should have both more classes and more examples per class than the fine tuning dataset; however, a quantitative method to choose the best transfer learning dataset does not currently exist. In this paper, we design TLDChoiceNet, a model to choose the best transfer learning dataset given a fine tuning dataset by predicting the test-set accuracy after fine-tuning. A simple version 1 achieves 0.154 MSE on the test dataset, while a version 2 leveraging an ImageNet pre-trained ResNet50 v2 embedding with per-class information attains a 5X lower MSE of 0.031. We further design two metrics that enable an unsupervised method of choosing an optimal transfer learning dataset: distribution distance (DD), which linearly regresses against fine-tune accuracy with an R2 of 0.89, and average class correlation (ACC), which improves the R2 to 0.97. Our results underscore that a dataset's low-level statistics can explain the transfer learning effect, and that using a pre-trained ImageNet can embed different classes further apart in latent feature space.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09091
Hypercomplex numbers extend the concept of complex numbers by introducing additional imaginary components. Besides increasing dimensionality, operations on the imaginary parts provide algebraic and geometrical properties that can be beneficial for solving machine learning problems. In this paper, we show how to create hypercomplex-valued neural network layers where the real part corresponds to the output of a traditional real-valued layer. The additional imaginary parts of these hypercomplex-valued layers produce what we call ``ghost features,'' which contain enhanced information that is not present in the output of the real-valued layer. Moreover, ghost features can be effectively integrated into a trained neural network through a process we refer to as ``spooky transfer learning.'' This approach allows us to harness the richness of ghost features, leading to more efficient neural networks. The source code and Jupyter Notebook are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07735
In transfer learning, the choice of source model largely influences the performance on a target dataset. Still, selecting a fitting source remains a challenging task, especially in medical imaging where one has to decide between models pre-trained on off-the-shelf options, such as ImageNet, and domain specific datasets. Transferability estimation (TE) metrics address this problem by aiming to predict the best performing source model in a computationally cost effective way. However, previous work has reported conflicting TE metric performances due to differences in experimental setups. Moreover, most TE metrics are designed for and evaluated on natural images, while being optimized for accuracy, whereas in medical imaging metrics that are more robust to class imbalance are typically used. We study the impact of varying the target dataset as an isolated factor, by constructing miniature populations of different sample sizes and random seeds. In addition, we investigate the influence of the evaluation metric used to obtain the reference ranking. We find that small modifications to the target dataset change the rankings. Furthermore, we show that the choice of evaluation metric affects the reference rankings and therefore the evaluation of TE metrics. Overall, we observe a low agreement between rankings from TE metrics and reference. The code, model checkpoints and data splits used in this work are available through this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09999
Millimeter-wave human activity recognition suffers significant performance degradation when the user's orientation changes relative to the sensing system, yet collecting labeled multi-orientation data is labor-intensive and costly. To eliminate the need for exhaustive multi-orientation measured data, we develop a physics-guided simulator that synthesizes orientation-diverse wireless training data from single-orientation motion. Specifically, to suppress orientation-induced feature variations, we propose a dual-attention network that extracts activity-discriminative and orientation-robust representations from dual-link Doppler spectrograms. To bridge the simulation-to-reality gap, we introduce an adversarial unsupervised transfer learning mechanism that aligns feature distributions using only a small number of unlabeled target-domain samples. The S2M-Sense platform shows high fidelity in reproducing real-world signatures, validated against 60.48 GHz mmWave measured data with an average structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 0.84 between simulated and measured Doppler spectrograms across all 4 activities and 4 orientations. Experimental results show that S2M-Sense achieves 88.33% recognition accuracy using only the dual-link multi-orientation simulated dataset, which improves to 95% after simulation-to-reality transfer learning with as few as 16 unlabeled measured samples. Both cases with and without transfer learning outperform state-of-the-art cross-domain sensing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05664
We investigate the transferability of Earth weather foundation models to planetary atmospheres by adapting the GraphCast graph neural weather forecasting model to Mars. While GraphCast achieves state-of-the-art performance for terrestrial forecasting, its applicability to non-Earth environments remains unexplored. Using the Mars Climate Database (MCD), which provides global atmospheric fields across vertical altitude levels (similar to Earth pressure levels), we evaluate zero-shot and fine-tuned GraphCast predictions of Martian temperature and wind fields. Zero-shot forecasts produce a surprisingly accurate depiction of current conditions but fail to reproduce diurnal variability and rapidly decay toward climatological mean states. To address this limitation, we fine-tune GraphCast using MCD variables and top-of-atmosphere solar radiation forcing while holding humidity constant. Fine-tuning enables rapid learning of Martian thermal variability. Within as few as 10 training epochs, the model begins to capture the diurnal cycle and forecasts up to 10 days reproduce seasonal and vertical temperature structure. Prediction quality improves with training sample size and exhibits sensitivity to seasonal initialization. These results demonstrate that Earth-trained AI weather models can be adapted to simulate Martian atmospheric dynamics, providing a pathway toward rapid planetary weather prediction to support mission operations, dust storm risk mitigation, and future human exploration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05054
Neuron counting and segmentation in microscopy images of neuronal cultures is a routine and time-consuming task in neuroscience research, traditionally performed through manual inspection or semi-automatic tools. We present NeuroAdaptTrainer, an open-source Fiji/ImageJ plugin that integrates a YOLO instance-segmentation model directly into the microscopist's workflow. The plugin allows a user to run automatic neuron detection on a single image or a batch of images, manually correct the resulting detections from within Fiji, and use those corrections to adapt the model to new imaging conditions via transfer learning. A built-in external validation module allows the base and adapted models to be compared quantitatively on a held-out annotated set. NeuroAdaptTrainer lowers the barrier for non-specialist users to benefit from deep-learning-based segmentation while keeping expert supervision at the center of the workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05226
Passive acoustic monitoring is an important tool for biodiversity assessment and wildlife conservation because it supports continuous and non-invasive monitoring of species across large spatial and temporal scales. Robust monitoring remains challenging because many datasets contain sparse positive labels, where species presences may be confirmed while unannotated species cannot be assumed absent. In this work, we study transfer learning under sparse positive labels using BirdCLEF+ 2026 as a target benchmark and BirdCLEF 2021, iNatSounds, WABAD, and BirdSet as external bioacoustic sources. We introduce a multi-source reliability framework that models heterogeneous bioacoustic datasets as distinct supervision sources with differing reliability. Our approach achieves 0.584 macro average precision and 0.860 macro AUC on public BirdCLEF+ 2026 validation labels while outperforming naive source pooling strategies. The strongest gains arise from passive acoustic monitoring datasets and biologically informed source selection. Our findings suggest that transfer learning in bioacoustics is fundamentally a weak supervision and negative transfer problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03977
This paper explores the challenges and the methodologies associated with learning quality representations in scenarios with unlabelled small or limited datasets for downstream information extraction task (Multidomain Named Entity Recognition (NER). The study adopts a Transfer Learning on small datasets. Traditional NER systems often rely on large, labelled data, which is impractical for many domains. This study, therefore, applies an unsupervised pre-training approach to precondition and identify entities without annotated datasets, then applies transfer learning models to different simulated limited datasets for a named entity recognition task. Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in natural language processing (NLP), it identifies and classifies related entities within the text. This study addresses the complexities of domain variability, data sparsity, and overfitting and investigates innovative approaches such as data augmentation, few-shot learning, and domain adversarial training. Integrating these techniques promises to enhance the performance and generalizability of NER systems across diverse and resource-constrained domains, paving the way for more efficient and adaptable NLP applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00984
Recently, Wi-Fi sensing has played a significant role in Human Activity Recognition (HAR), as it enables the detection of various activities using only Wi-Fi signals, ensuring privacy and remaining non-intrusive for the user. However, environmental characteristics such as reflective surfaces, hardware offsets, and other physical impairments affect recognition by the neural network, subsequently causing errors and significantly reducing model accuracy. To overcome this problem we present the WiFuse framework, a dual-stream Channel State Information (CSI) framework for human activity recognition (HAR) that pairs denoised time-domain amplitude variations with 2D-FFT-derived Delay-Doppler motion representations computed from the sanitized channel phase. The fused representation feeds a hybrid ResNet-Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) neural architecture augmented with channel and spatio-temporal attention, where the ResNet extracts spatial-spectral features and the TCN models long-range temporal dependencies; a decoupled two-stage transfer learning strategy is employed to improve optimization stability and feature reuse. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets, including comparisons against state-of-the-art methods and alternative hybrid architectures, ablation studies, and cross-dataset and domain-adaptation evaluations. The proposed framework reaches an overall accuracy of up to 95.28% across the four environments of the XRF55 dataset and up to 98.20% on the multi-user Wi-MIR dataset. Overall, the results indicate that combining amplitude and Delay-Doppler representations within a dual-stream strategy, enhanced by transfer learning, improves recognition performance under conditions that typically degrade deep neural networks, such as class overlap, multipath propagation, noise, and interference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00642