Early Prediction of Alzheimer's and Related Dementias: A Machine Learning Approach Utilizing Social Determinants of Health Data

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) represent a growing healthcare crisis affecting over 6 million Americans. While genetic factors play a crucial role, emerging research reveals that social determinants of health (SDOH) significantly influence both the risk and progression of cognitive functioning, such as cognitive scores and cognitive decline. This report examines how these social, environmental, and structural factors impact cognitive health trajectories, with a particular focus on Hispanic populations, who face disproportionate risk for AD/ADRD. Using data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) and its cognitive assessment sub study (Mex-Cog), we employed ensemble of regression trees models to predict 4-year and 9-year cognitive scores and cognitive decline based on SDOH. This approach identified key predictive SDOH factors to inform potential multilevel interventions to address cognitive health disparities in this population.

AF-KAN: Activation Function-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient Representation Learning

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have inspired numerous works exploring their applications across a wide range of scientific problems, with the potential to replace Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). While many KANs are designed using basis and polynomial functions, such as B-splines, ReLU-KAN utilizes a combination of ReLU functions to mimic the structure of B-splines and take advantage of ReLU's speed. However, ReLU-KAN is not built for multiple inputs, and its limitations stem from ReLU's handling of negative values, which can restrict feature extraction. To address these issues, we introduce Activation Function-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (AF-KAN), expanding ReLU-KAN with various activations and their function combinations. This novel KAN also incorporates parameter reduction methods, primarily attention mechanisms and data normalization, to enhance performance on image classification datasets. We explore different activation functions, function combinations, grid sizes, and spline orders to validate the effectiveness of AF-KAN and determine its optimal configuration. In the experiments, AF-KAN significantly outperforms MLP, ReLU-KAN, and other KANs with the same parameter count. It also remains competitive even when using fewer than 6 to 10 times the parameters while maintaining the same network structure. However, AF-KAN requires a longer training time and consumes more FLOPs. The repository for this work is available at https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN.

PRKAN: Parameter-Reduced Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) represent an innovation in neural network architectures, offering a compelling alternative to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) in models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. By advancing network design, KANs are driving groundbreaking research and enabling transformative applications across various scientific domains involving neural networks. However, existing KANs often require significantly more parameters in their network layers compared to MLPs. To address this limitation, this paper introduces PRKANs (\textbf{P}arameter-\textbf{R}educed \textbf{K}olmogorov-\textbf{A}rnold \textbf{N}etworks), which employ several methods to reduce the parameter count in KAN layers, making them comparable to MLP layers. Experimental results on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets demonstrate that PRKANs with attention mechanisms outperform several existing KANs and rival the performance of MLPs, albeit with slightly longer training times. Furthermore, the study highlights the advantages of Gaussian Radial Basis Functions (GRBFs) and layer normalization in KAN designs. The repository for this work is available at: \url{https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN}.

Semise: Semi-supervised learning for severity representation in medical image

This paper introduces SEMISE, a novel method for representation learning in medical imaging that combines self-supervised and supervised learning. By leveraging both labeled and augmented data, SEMISE addresses the challenge of data scarcity and enhances the encoder's ability to extract meaningful features. This integrated approach leads to more informative representations, improving performance on downstream tasks. As result, our approach achieved a 12% improvement in classification and a 3% improvement in segmentation, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate the potential of SIMESE to advance medical image analysis and offer more accurate solutions for healthcare applications, particularly in contexts where labeled data is limited.

Enhancing Fine-grained Image Classification through Attentive Batch Training

Fine-grained image classification, which is a challenging task in computer vision, requires precise differentiation among visually similar object categories. In this paper, we propose 1) a novel module called Residual Relationship Attention (RRA) that leverages the relationships between images within each training batch to effectively integrate visual feature vectors of batch images and 2) a novel technique called Relationship Position Encoding (RPE), which encodes the positions of relationships between original images in a batch and effectively preserves the relationship information between images within the batch. Additionally, we design a novel framework, namely Relationship Batch Integration (RBI), which utilizes RRA in conjunction with RPE, allowing the discernment of vital visual features that may remain elusive when examining a singular image representative of a particular class. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method demonstrates significant improvements in the accuracy of different fine-grained classifiers, with an average increase of $(+2.78\%)$ and $(+3.83\%)$ on the CUB200-2011 and Stanford Dog datasets, respectively, while achieving a state-of-the-art results $(95.79\%)$ on the Stanford Dog dataset. Despite not achieving the same level of improvement as in fine-grained image classification, our method still demonstrates its prowess in leveraging general image classification by attaining a state-of-the-art result of $(93.71\%)$ on the Tiny-Imagenet dataset. Furthermore, our method serves as a plug-in refinement module and can be easily integrated into different networks.

Self-Corrected Flow Distillation for Consistent One-Step and Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation

Flow matching has emerged as a promising framework for training generative models, demonstrating impressive empirical performance while offering relative ease of training compared to diffusion-based models. However, this method still requires numerous function evaluations in the sampling process. To address these limitations, we introduce a self-corrected flow distillation method that effectively integrates consistency models and adversarial training within the flow-matching framework. This work is a pioneer in achieving consistent generation quality in both few-step and one-step sampling. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, yielding superior results both quantitatively and qualitatively on CelebA-HQ and zero-shot benchmarks on the COCO dataset. Our implementation is released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/SCFlow

SwiftEdit: Lightning Fast Text-Guided Image Editing via One-Step Diffusion

Recent advances in text-guided image editing enable users to perform image edits through simple text inputs, leveraging the extensive priors of multi-step diffusion-based text-to-image models. However, these methods often fall short of the speed demands required for real-world and on-device applications due to the costly multi-step inversion and sampling process involved. In response to this, we introduce SwiftEdit, a simple yet highly efficient editing tool that achieve instant text-guided image editing (in 0.23s). The advancement of SwiftEdit lies in its two novel contributions: a one-step inversion framework that enables one-step image reconstruction via inversion and a mask-guided editing technique with our proposed attention rescaling mechanism to perform localized image editing. Extensive experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SwiftEdit. In particular, SwiftEdit enables instant text-guided image editing, which is extremely faster than previous multi-step methods (at least 50 times faster) while maintain a competitive performance in editing results. Our project page is at: https://swift-edit.github.io/

EditScout: Locating Forged Regions from Diffusion-based Edited Images with Multimodal LLM

Image editing technologies are tools used to transform, adjust, remove, or otherwise alter images. Recent research has significantly improved the capabilities of image editing tools, enabling the creation of photorealistic and semantically informed forged regions that are nearly indistinguishable from authentic imagery, presenting new challenges in digital forensics and media credibility. While current image forensic techniques are adept at localizing forged regions produced by traditional image manipulation methods, current capabilities struggle to localize regions created by diffusion-based techniques. To bridge this gap, we present a novel framework that integrates a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for enhanced reasoning capabilities to localize tampered regions in images produced by diffusion model-based editing methods. By leveraging the contextual and semantic strengths of LLMs, our framework achieves promising results on MagicBrush, AutoSplice, and PerfBrush (novel diffusion-based dataset) datasets, outperforming previous approaches in mIoU and F1-score metrics. Notably, our method excels on the PerfBrush dataset, a self-constructed test set featuring previously unseen types of edits. Here, where traditional methods typically falter, achieving markedly low scores, our approach demonstrates promising performance.

SNOOPI: Supercharged One-step Diffusion Distillation with Proper Guidance

Recent approaches have yielded promising results in distilling multi-step text-to-image diffusion models into one-step ones. The state-of-the-art efficient distillation technique, i.e., SwiftBrushv2 (SBv2), even surpasses the teacher model's performance with limited resources. However, our study reveals its instability when handling different diffusion model backbones due to using a fixed guidance scale within the Variational Score Distillation (VSD) loss. Another weakness of the existing one-step diffusion models is the missing support for negative prompt guidance, which is crucial in practical image generation. This paper presents SNOOPI, a novel framework designed to address these limitations by enhancing the guidance in one-step diffusion models during both training and inference. First, we effectively enhance training stability through Proper Guidance-SwiftBrush (PG-SB), which employs a random-scale classifier-free guidance approach. By varying the guidance scale of both teacher models, we broaden their output distributions, resulting in a more robust VSD loss that enables SB to perform effectively across diverse backbones while maintaining competitive performance. Second, we propose a training-free method called Negative-Away Steer Attention (NASA), which integrates negative prompts into one-step diffusion models via cross-attention to suppress undesired elements in generated images. Our experimental results show that our proposed methods significantly improve baseline models across various metrics. Remarkably, we achieve an HPSv2 score of 31.08, setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark for one-step diffusion models.

Any3DIS: Class-Agnostic 3D Instance Segmentation by 2D Mask Tracking

Existing 3D instance segmentation methods frequently encounter issues with over-segmentation, leading to redundant and inaccurate 3D proposals that complicate downstream tasks. This challenge arises from their unsupervised merging approach, where dense 2D instance masks are lifted across frames into point clouds to form 3D candidate proposals without direct supervision. These candidates are then hierarchically merged based on heuristic criteria, often resulting in numerous redundant segments that fail to combine into precise 3D proposals. To overcome these limitations, we propose a 3D-Aware 2D Mask Tracking module that uses robust 3D priors from a 2D mask segmentation and tracking foundation model (SAM-2) to ensure consistent object masks across video frames. Rather than merging all visible superpoints across views to create a 3D mask, our 3D Mask Optimization module leverages a dynamic programming algorithm to select an optimal set of views, refining the superpoints to produce a final 3D proposal for each object. Our approach achieves comprehensive object coverage within the scene while reducing unnecessary proposals, which could otherwise impair downstream applications. Evaluations on ScanNet200 and ScanNet++ confirm the effectiveness of our method, with improvements across Class-Agnostic, Open-Vocabulary, and Open-Ended 3D Instance Segmentation tasks.