Effective multi-organ segmentation in surgical data requires learning the intricate anatomical features and alleviating the challenge of class imbalance, which results from relatively lower proportions of small and limitedly exposed structures. Recent works on laparoscopic multi-organ segmentation focus on learning structure-specific features through class-specific decoder architectures and report favorable results. This work extends the decoder-focused architectures to investigate knowledge sharing in the cross-surgical domain. We utilize two datasets representing different surgical domains, rectal and cholecystectomy surgeries, to explore how surgical conceptual knowledge transfers under partially common anatomical representations. Additionally, we compare the feature adaptation for the encoder and decoder at different training stages to analyse the knowledge adaptation and retention in the network. Our results corroborate previous findings on decoder-specific architectures and demonstrate that the organ-specific decoder model (CEMD), fully fine-tuned after cross-domain pre-training, achieves the highest segmentation performance (62.4\% dice) while converging substantially faster than training from scratch. However, we also find that class imbalance in surgical data remains a persistent challenge that transfer learning does not fully resolve for underrepresented anatomical structures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29509
Acne vulgaris affects most adolescents and many adults. Accurate severity grading guides treatment, monitoring, and clinical trial endpoints, but manual assessment using the Investigator's Global Assessment or Hayashi criteria is limited by inter-rater variability and inconsistent imaging conditions. We developed a four-class acne severity classifier based on the Hayashi criteria using transfer learning with an ImageNet-pretrained EfficientNet-B0 model. The model was fine-tuned on the public ACNE04 dataset of 2,983 labeled images using AdamW optimization, geometric and photometric augmentation, and checkpoint selection based on validation macro-F1. On a held-out stratified 15 percent test set, the classifier achieved 93.5 percent accuracy and 94.4 percent macro-F1, with per-class F1 scores from 0.92 to 0.97. Eighty-three percent of errors occurred between adjacent grades. Quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa was 0.956, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.935 to 0.973. Bootstrap confidence intervals indicated stable performance. Grad-CAM visualizations from the final convolutional block focused on clinically relevant facial regions, including the forehead, cheeks, and chin. The complete pipeline is provided as functionally equivalent open-source implementations in Python using PyTorch and timm, and in MATLAB R2026a. The software includes a clinician-facing inference interface and a fallback backbone option that supports operation without specialized pretrained-weight packages. These results show that lightweight transfer learning can provide accurate, balanced, and interpretable acne severity grading while offering a reproducible cross-platform reference for future prospective and device-stratified clinical validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26461
Stock recommendation systems face the dual challenge of adapting to rapidly changing market conditions while maintaining low-latency predictions for end users. Traditional batch-trained models fail to capture concept drift, and monolithic architectures struggle to provide fault tolerance under load. This paper presents a scalable online deep learning-based stock recommendation system built on a distributed microservices architecture using Kubernetes, Docker, and RabbitMQ. The system employs a hybrid leader-follower architecture where a primary model continuously trains on streaming financial data, including EPS, MACD, and price, from the Alpha Vantage API while multiple replica models serve user-facing recommendations in parallel. A multilayer perceptron implemented with TensorFlow Recommenders generates content-based recommendations using explicit user ratings (1-5) and transfer learning. The architecture ensures high availability. The leader persists model weights to Google Cloud Object Storage, allowing replicas to recover seamlessly upon failure, while RabbitMQ provides message durability and replay. Results demonstrate that the system serves stock recommendations in 23 seconds per request and processes up to 500 portfolio addition requests per second per follower. Key limitations include data staleness (up to 150 minutes due to API rate limits) and the absence of a service mesh for inter-cluster security. This work contributes a production-ready reference architecture for online recommender systems that balances consistency, availability, and scalability in a financial domain context
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23120
High-resolution satellite imagery is the backbone of good land-cover classification, and without that, environmental monitoring, urban planning, and sustainable resource management all fall short. Deep learning architectures perform well in semantic segmentation, but the efficiency-accuracy trade-off across classical convolutional encoders is not well quantified under controlled, reproducible conditions. This study compares five architectures VGG16, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, AlexNet, and CNN on the DeepGlobe Land Cover Classification dataset using three progressively optimized iterations to isolate regularisation, transfer learning, and architectural depth. To ensure performance differentials reflect architectural properties, all experiments used identical preprocessing, hyperparameter, and training protocols without data augmentation or class-imbalance correction. At 24.98 MB, MobileNetV2_v1 had the highest overall accuracy (0.7906) and mean Intersection over Union (0.4625), outperforming deeper alternatives like InceptionV3_v2 (125.17 MB, accuracy 0.7610) and VGG16_v2 (71.13 MB, accuracy 0.7653). Class-wise analysis showed strength in urban, agricultural, and water categories, but rangeland-barren confusion showed that architectural optimization alone cannot optimize spectrally similar minority classes. Strong spatial generalization and crisp boundary delineation were confirmed on held-out test imagery, validating operational applicability. These results show that lightweight, transfer-learned models can match or outperform deeper models in resource-constrained remote-sensing environments, enabling scalable land-cover mapping.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23024
Multi-task learning (MTL) is a promising approach for prediction tasks derived from video game state data, as modern game telemetry provides multiple related supervision signals from the same structured observations. We study whether a shared model trained jointly across tasks in team-based multiplayer games can improve generalization while reducing training and inference cost compared to specialized single-task models. We adapt a multimodal architecture for endpoint prediction to a general multi-task setting that combines rasterized vision inputs, global match context, and per-unit state information through an image encoder and attention-based interaction modeling. Experiments on a large proprietary World of Tanks dataset compare single-task and multi-task training, evaluate weighting strategies for mixed losses and conflicting gradients, and test pre-training/fine-tuning under limited target-data regimes. We also examine within-game transfer across game maps under structured environment shift.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21290
By leveraging standard RISC-V extensions, namely Zfh (scalar float16) and Zvfh (vector float16), this work proposes an open-source framework to enable complete on-device training on resource-constrained RISC-V single-core. Our approach allows memory footprint reduction by about 50% as compared to using float32 and with minimal model performance degradation. We also facilitate transfer learning and fine-tuning scenarios by incorporating layer-freezing capabilities. Our work builds onto AIfES, an open-source, modular and generic DNN training and inference framework for embedded systems that can be extended with custom hardware-specific functions. The benefits of float16 is further emphasized by outlining the low area overhead of Zfh on a RV64GC super-scalar out-of-order FPGA softcore (+1.15% LUT6 and +0.05% FF at 175MHz). Finally, we discuss the architecture of a Zvfh implementation within the same RISC-V core.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21130
The Traffic Assignment Problem is a fundamental but computationally expensive component of transportation planning. While Graph Neural Networks have emerged as fast, data-driven surrogates, their practical deployment is severely constrained by a spatial generalization gap. Standard models rely on transductive feature initializations that tie travel demand to fixed network topologies, preventing seamless transfer to new urban environments. To overcome this structural limitation, this research proposes a network-agnostic initialization layer, termed Geometrically Unconstrained Inductive Demand EmbeDding (GUIDED). By injecting travel demand as a scalar attribute on auxiliary virtual links rather than as specific node features, this modular framework standardizes the input space regardless of network scale. Extensive experimental evaluation across multiple urban topologies demonstrates that a Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (HetGAT) model integrated with the proposed GUIDED layer maintains state-of-the-art predictive accuracy on single-network tasks, while demonstrating superior robustness to out-of-distribution demand patterns and maintaining a distinct performance advantage over the baseline even under severe data scarcity. Notably, the proposed feature initialization enables highly parameter-efficient domain adaptation for inter-network transfer learning without artificial input homogenization, establishing a robust foundation for truly inductive models. At the same time, the optimized scatter operations of the initialization layer yield an approximate 50% reduction in training time per epoch compared to the baseline approach. Furthermore, while demonstrated on vehicular traffic, this fundamental abstraction of spatial topology provides a versatile blueprint for generalized origin-destination spatial problems, such as freight logistics and multimodal network optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19270
Cement production underpins global infrastructure but contributes approximately 7% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, making accurate monitoring of production facilities essential for sustainable development. Existing remote sensing approaches rely predominantly on thermal signatures from kiln operations, which can be confounded by background heat sources and fail to capture persistent environmental alterations. This study introduces a physics-informed methodology that exploits multi-spectral features, particularly a geological Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) ratio, to detect soil property changes induced by sustained industrial heat emissions. This work proposes FusionNet, an intermediate multi-spectral data fusion framework that integrates Thermal Infrared (TIR) and SWIR inputs through a specialised backbone, embedding differential signal processing priors within a convolutional layer, mixed pooling, and wider receptive field. Systematic ablation studies confirm that each architectural component contributes to performance gains, with DGCNN achieving a 4.1-6.8% accuracy improvement over conventional CNNs. On the SWIR ratio dataset, FusionNet attains a maximum of 90.6%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across five spectral configurations and exceeding the strongest unimodal model by 1.1%. Transfer learning experiments reveal that ImageNet pretraining degrades TIR and SWIR performance, underscoring the importance of modality-aware training for cross-spectral applications. Overall, the results demonstrate that combining physics-aware feature selection with principled deep learning architectures enables robust, high-accuracy detection of cement production facilities, offering a reliable framework for industrial infrastructure monitoring
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19504
Behavioural shifts in wild great ape populations, particularly the breakdown of social structures, can serve as an early indicator of population decline. Automating the detection of behaviours indicative of these shifts is therefore a critical task for conservation. Several valuable datasets have recently been introduced for the automated recognition of great ape behaviour, yet few include fine-grained social behaviour annotations, and those that do are captured either in captive settings or via aerial platforms such as UAVs. We address this gap by introducing PanAf-SBR, the first wild great ape camera trap dataset annotated with social behaviours. PanAf-SBR extends PanAf500 with 100 additional videos covering 36,063 frames. These come with 81,096 annotations including bounding boxes, segmentation masks, intra-video identities, and seven social behaviour classes defined under the action giver and receiver convention of ChimpACT. We use this data together with the AlphaChimp architecture to establish the first benchmarks for fine-grained social behaviour recognition in wild great apes from camera trap footage. We further conduct bidirectional transfer learning experiments between PanAf-SBR and the captive ChimpACT dataset, finding that cross-dataset pre-training is highly beneficial for specific classes rather than of uniform benefit. Finally, we examine the role of background context by inverting the segmentation masks to suppress non-ape pixels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17399
Data-driven pre-fault dynamic security assessment (DSA) rapidly evaluates the dynamic risk of credible contingencies on a power system using machine learning. Existing approaches face two limitations. First, they require a large labelled database for training, with a separate model trained, tuned, and maintained for each contingency in a potentially long list of credible contingencies. Second, the trained models generalize poorly to unseen contingencies. This work addresses the limitations by using a tabular foundation model (TFM) that assesses stability through in-context learning, requiring no retraining or hyperparameter optimization. A single TFM can assess many contingencies at once, removing the need for one model per classifier. We also characterize when the use of electrical distance coordinates (EDC) as continuous features enables generalization of TFM to unseen contingencies and when they do not, demonstrating how a few labelled samples can reliably improve generalization. Through comprehensive case studies on the IEEE 68-bus system, we show that a single TFM attains an average Macro F1 score of about 90% with only 120 labelled samples per contingency, roughly two orders of magnitude fewer than conventionally assumed, without any model retraining or hyperparameter tuning. For new/unseen contingencies, we show that using just 10 labelled samples of the new contingency with EDC encoding matches the best achievable transfer learning oracle model, which requires fully labelled data and is not deployable in practice. Overall, this initial study paves the way towards developing and deploying foundation models for power system operations, with possible applications across multiple operational tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16031
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood. Standard SAM implicitly allocates its global perturbation budget across parameter blocks according to instantaneous minibatch gradient norms. Such an allocation can be noisy and may not reflect the sensitivity that blocks accumulate throughout training. We propose Gradient-Energy Adaptive Radius SAM (GEAR-SAM), which maintains an exponential moving average (EMA) of squared block gradients as a lightweight, curvature-related sensitivity signal and allocates the fixed SAM budget through a closed-form constrained optimization. GEAR-SAM preserves the global SAM radius, requires no Hessian-vector products or explicit Fisher estimation, and adds only scalar state beyond SAM. Experiments on image classification, transfer learning, noisy-label learning, and partition studies demonstrate improved generalization and robustness across architectures and tasks. More broadly, GEAR-SAM provides a dynamic view of sharpness-aware optimization: a fixed perturbation budget should be redistributed as the sensitivity of functional network blocks evolves during training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18306
Vision-language models trained with contrastive objectives have shown promise in medical image analysis. However, conventional global image-text alignment is ill-suited for mammography, where diagnostically relevant lesions are spatially localized and occupy only a small fraction of the image. Subtle morphological cues critical for malignancy assessment can be diluted when representations are learned at the whole-image level. In this work, we propose a novel region-grounded vision-language learning method for detection-guided mammographic lesion classification. The method mirrors radiologists' diagnostic paradigm. First, a region-text contrastive pretraining stage aligns lesion-specific features with structured clinical descriptors derived from radiology metadata. To mitigate semantic collapse and background bias in low-vocabulary settings, we introduce a multi-component objective incorporating positive alignment, fine-grained semantic hard negatives, and background suppression. Second, an auxiliary lesion detection head is jointly optimized with contrastive classification to preserve spatial sensitivity and enable localization-aware malignancy classification. Extensive experiments on two independent datasets, CBIS-DDSM and VinDr-Mammo, show superior performance of our method compared to related methods under in-domain, cross-dataset, and transfer learning settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15615
Large-scale Vision-Language Models have demonstrated impressive transfer learning capabilities across a wide range of tasks. For few-shot classification, we observe that VLMs exhibit a notable ability to filter candidate categories and thus achieve high Top-K accuracy. However, they often struggle with fine-grained discrimination among visually similar categories, resulting in unsatisfactory Top-1 performance, as shown in Figure 1. Existing studies on VLM adapters generally focus on global alignment between visual and textual representations in the feature space, but fail to exploit semantically similar categories to refine fine-grained visual representations. Based on these observations, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine VLM fine-tuning approach for few-shot learning that leverages quantum computation, termed the Multi-Modal Quantum Adapter (MQAdapter). Specifically, MQAdapter first retrieves the Top-K category candidates most similar to the input image and uses them as semantic anchors. It then employs a cross-modal quantum learning mechanism to refine visual features under the guidance of these anchors. The core of this mechanism is the encoding of visual and textual features into quantum states. By leveraging quantum entanglement and superposition in a high-dimensional Hilbert space, MQAdapter effectively models higher-order cross-modal interactions, producing more discriminative representations than traditional Euclidean adapters. MQAdapter is parameter-efficient and can be integrated with various existing fine-tuning algorithms to achieve further performance gains. Evaluations on 15 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MQAdapter while requiring fewer trainable parameters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12418
Language identification is an important step toward integrating endangered Australian Aboriginal languages (AALs) into speech technologies supporting language revitalisation and digital inclusion. However, extreme data scarcity limits model performance. Transfer learning from high-resource languages shows promise but often suffers from catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new languages. Continual learning (CL) can mitigate this issue, though it remains challenging with very limited data. To address this, we propose two hybrid continual learning methods: Replay Augmented Elastic Weight Consolidation and Constraint Guided Knowledge Distillation to adapt pretrained speech models for AAL identification while preserving previously learned knowledge. Experiments on Warlpiri, Dalabon and Dharawal show that the proposed methods outperform fine-tuning and existing CL baselines, improving adaptation to multiple AALs while maintaining performance on previously learnt high-resource languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11946
This paper investigates how language similarity can improve cross-lingual transfer for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in extremely low-resource settings. Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language, has very limited transcribed speech data, making transfer learning essential. We propose a framework combining acoustic similarity from pre-trained speech models with linguistic similarity based on typology, phoneme inventories, grammatical, and syntactic features to rank high-resource source languages and evaluate their effectiveness for ASR transfer to Warlpiri. Experiments with Whisper show that acoustically and typologically similar languages outperform monolingual and multilingual baselines. Assamese and Hindi achieve substantial reductions in word and character error rates. Correlation analysis further indicates that acoustic similarity is the strongest predictor of fine-tuning performance, while phoneme inventory and typological similarity better explain zero-shot transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10256
Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative learning scheme to train deep learning models, where collaborating parties can consolidate their models without sharing local data with other parties, hence preserving data privacy. Nevertheless, when implementing FL in Industrial visual inspection (IVI), the constraints posed by limited data availability and the intricate nature of the inspection tasks significantly impact the performance of the resulting model. This paper introduces FedTR, a novel FL framework incorporating transfer learning designed for Autonomous IVI, focusing on the challenging task of identifying label defects through end-to-end text recognition. Transfer learning is a method that leverages the knowledge of a pre-trained model to adapt to a different dataset. FedTR initially trains the model using a publicly available dataset, after which performs the essential federated learning process with model fine-tuning on the distributed and limited private data. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of FedTR on private ink cartridge datasets for label defect identification. FedTR achieves an end-to-end text recognition word-level accuracy of 95.5% and 94.2% on homogeneous and heterogeneous data respectively. Additionally, it attains performance levels that are on par with those achieved through centralized training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08014
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects over 75 million individuals worldwide, yet scalable computational methods for remote behavioral screening remain limited. This study addresses two complementary challenges in automated detection of autism-related self-stimulatory behaviors from video: (1) identifying the optimal sequence-based neural network architecture and temporal sampling rate, and (2) characterizing data augmentation strategies for training on small behavioral datasets. For the first objective, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models were trained on pose-derived features from the Self-Stimulatory Behavior Diagnosis (SSBD) dataset at frame sampling intervals of 1, 5, 15, 30, 45, and 90 frames. Both architectures exceeded prior convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines (62-76% accuracy), with peak accuracies of 97.5% (LSTM) and 98.75% (GRU) at a sampling interval of every 15 frames. For the second objective, ten data augmentation strategies were applied to an I3D transfer learning pipeline, with an ablation study quantifying the marginal contribution of each technique. Horizontal flip achieved the highest standalone accuracy (48.78%), while exclusion of upsampling from the augmentation pipeline produced the largest performance degradation, indicating its necessity for complex behavioral video augmentation. A personalized machine learning approach, in which per-subject models were trained and tested on temporally split segments of each video, produced consistent predictions (mean loss 1.84, SD 0.79). These results provide practitioners with concrete guidance on architecture selection, sampling rate, and augmentation strategy for video-based behavioral classification in data-scarce clinical domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07957
In forensic environments, automated identification of perpetrators is difficult due to pose changes, changes in light, occlusion, and lack of labeled data. This paper presents ForensicNet, a lightweight deep learning framework for forensic face recognition that enhances attention. The suggested model combines the MobileNetV2 backbone with Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM) to improve the learning of discriminative features while maintaining computational speed. A two-phase transfer learning strategy with adaptive layer unfreezing is used to improve domain adaptation and reduce overfitting. This study used publicly available datasets such as LFW and SCFace, with 15,000 facial images spanning 68 identity classes. The proposed model outperforms baseline architectures such as AlexNet, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2, with an accuracy of 92.4%, a precision of 90.8%, and a recall of 89.5%. Additionally, the framework requires only 2.1 GFLOPs per inference, and hence can be used in real-time forensic surveillance applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16273
Dhivehi, the national language of the Maldives, is currently under-resourced for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other NLP tasks. This study investigates whether cross-lingual transfer learning from Sinhala, a linguistically related, relatively well-resourced Insular Indo-Aryan language, can improve Dhivehi ASR. We conduct seventeen experiments across five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. However, the adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are equally critical for a successful transfer learning experiment. We conduct seventeen controlled experiments spanning five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control experiment using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. The Turkish control experiment confirms that observed improvements stem from linguistic relatedness; adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are also critical.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06289
Reliable seam segmentation is essential for autonomous robotic welding in construction, where harsh illumination, specular reflections, and thin weld geometries often degrade segmentation performance. This study proposes a reflection-robust seam segmentation framework that enhances a BiSeNetV2 backbone through transfer learning and a hybrid Cross-Entropy--Lovász loss. Rather than increasing architectural complexity, the proposed framework improves reflection robustness through learning-stability-oriented optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 81.76\% Joint IoU and 90.73\% mIoU, improving Joint IoU by +22.36 percentage points over the OHEM-based baseline while maintaining identical FLOPs, parameter count, and inference speed. The proposed approach also recovers 96.33\% of severe zero-IoU failure cases under reflective conditions. Comparative experiments across BiSeNetV2, DeepLabV3+, UNet, and SegFormer further demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy is particularly effective for lightweight real-time segmentation architectures. Qualitative analyses additionally show improved seam continuity and reflection robustness in challenging welding environments. These findings suggest that the proposed framework provides a practical and lightweight perception solution for robotic welding applications involving reflective metallic surfaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06150