Generative Adversarial Networks Bridging Art and Machine Intelligence

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have greatly influenced the development of computer vision and artificial intelligence in the past decade and also connected art and machine intelligence together. This book begins with a detailed introduction to the fundamental principles and historical development of GANs, contrasting them with traditional generative models and elucidating the core adversarial mechanisms through illustrative Python examples. The text systematically addresses the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings including probability theory, statistics, and game theory providing a solid framework for understanding the objectives, loss functions, and optimisation challenges inherent to GAN training. Subsequent chapters review classic variants such as Conditional GANs, DCGANs, InfoGAN, and LAPGAN before progressing to advanced training methodologies like Wasserstein GANs, GANs with gradient penalty, least squares GANs, and spectral normalisation techniques. The book further examines architectural enhancements and task-specific adaptations in generators and discriminators, showcasing practical implementations in high resolution image generation, artistic style transfer, video synthesis, text to image generation and other multimedia applications. The concluding sections offer insights into emerging research trends, including self-attention mechanisms, transformer-based generative models, and a comparative analysis with diffusion models, thus charting promising directions for future developments in both academic and applied settings.

Uplink Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Mobile Edge Computing with Short-Packet Communications

In this paper, a Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) scheme is proposed to assist a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) system where local computation tasks from two users are offloaded to the MEC server, facilitated by uplink RSMA for processing. The efficiency of the MEC service is hence primarily influenced by the RSMA-aided task offloading phase and the subsequent task computation phase, where reliable and low-latency communication is required. For this practical consideration, short-packet communication in the Finite Blocklength (FBL) regime is introduced. In this context, we propose a novel uplink RSMA-aided MEC framework and derive the overall Successful Computation Probability (SCP) with FBL consideration. To maximize the SCP of our proposed RSMA-aided MEC, we strategically optimize: (1) the task offloading factor which determines the number of tasks to be offloaded and processed by the MEC server; (2) the transmit power allocation between different RSMA streams; and (3) the task-splitting factor which decides how many tasks are allocated to splitting streams, while adhering to FBL constraints. To address the strong coupling between these variables in the SCP expression, we apply the Alternative Optimization method, which formulates tractable subproblems to optimize each variable iteratively. The resultant non-convex subproblems are then tackled by Successive Convex Approximation. Numerical results demonstrate that applying uplink RSMA in the MEC system with FBL constraints can not only improve the SCP performance but also provide lower latency in comparison to conventional transmission scheme such as Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA).

LLM-TA: An LLM-Enhanced Thematic Analysis Pipeline for Transcripts from Parents of Children with Congenital Heart Disease

Thematic Analysis (TA) is a fundamental method in healthcare research for analyzing transcript data, but it is resource-intensive and difficult to scale for large, complex datasets. This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to augment the inductive TA process in high-stakes healthcare settings. Focusing on interview transcripts from parents of children with Anomalous Aortic Origin of a Coronary Artery (AAOCA), a rare congenital heart disease, we propose an LLM-Enhanced Thematic Analysis (LLM-TA) pipeline. Our pipeline integrates an affordable state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-4o mini), LangChain, and prompt engineering with chunking techniques to analyze nine detailed transcripts following the inductive TA framework. We evaluate the LLM-generated themes against human-generated results using thematic similarity metrics, LLM-assisted assessments, and expert reviews. Results demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms existing LLM-assisted TA methods significantly. While the pipeline alone has not yet reached human-level quality in inductive TA, it shows great potential to improve scalability, efficiency, and accuracy while reducing analyst workload when working collaboratively with domain experts. We provide practical recommendations for incorporating LLMs into high-stakes TA workflows and emphasize the importance of close collaboration with domain experts to address challenges related to real-world applicability and dataset complexity. https://github.com/jiaweixu98/LLM-TA

Deep Learning Model Security: Threats and Defenses

Deep learning has transformed AI applications but faces critical security challenges, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, model theft, and privacy leakage. This survey examines these vulnerabilities, detailing their mechanisms and impact on model integrity and confidentiality. Practical implementations, including adversarial examples, label flipping, and backdoor attacks, are explored alongside defenses such as adversarial training, differential privacy, and federated learning, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Advanced methods like contrastive and self-supervised learning are presented for enhancing robustness. The survey concludes with future directions, emphasizing automated defenses, zero-trust architectures, and the security challenges of large AI models. A balanced approach to performance and security is essential for developing reliable deep learning systems.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Advancing Big Data Analytics and Management

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

A Comprehensive Guide to Explainable AI: From Classical Models to LLMs

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) addresses the growing need for transparency and interpretability in AI systems, enabling trust and accountability in decision-making processes. This book offers a comprehensive guide to XAI, bridging foundational concepts with advanced methodologies. It explores interpretability in traditional models such as Decision Trees, Linear Regression, and Support Vector Machines, alongside the challenges of explaining deep learning architectures like CNNs, RNNs, and Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, GPT, and T5. The book presents practical techniques such as SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, counterfactual explanations, and causal inference, supported by Python code examples for real-world applications. Case studies illustrate XAI's role in healthcare, finance, and policymaking, demonstrating its impact on fairness and decision support. The book also covers evaluation metrics for explanation quality, an overview of cutting-edge XAI tools and frameworks, and emerging research directions, such as interpretability in federated learning and ethical AI considerations. Designed for a broad audience, this resource equips readers with the theoretical insights and practical skills needed to master XAI. Hands-on examples and additional resources are available at the companion GitHub repository: https://github.com/Echoslayer/XAI_From_Classical_Models_to_LLMs.

Path-RAG: Knowledge-Guided Key Region Retrieval for Open-ended Pathology Visual Question Answering

Accurate diagnosis and prognosis assisted by pathology images are essential for cancer treatment selection and planning. Despite the recent trend of adopting deep-learning approaches for analyzing complex pathology images, they fall short as they often overlook the domain-expert understanding of tissue structure and cell composition. In this work, we focus on a challenging Open-ended Pathology VQA (PathVQA-Open) task and propose a novel framework named Path-RAG, which leverages HistoCartography to retrieve relevant domain knowledge from pathology images and significantly improves performance on PathVQA-Open. Admitting the complexity of pathology image analysis, Path-RAG adopts a human-centered AI approach by retrieving domain knowledge using HistoCartography to select the relevant patches from pathology images. Our experiments suggest that domain guidance can significantly boost the accuracy of LLaVA-Med from 38% to 47%, with a notable gain of 28% for H&E-stained pathology images in the PathVQA-Open dataset. For longer-form question and answer pairs, our model consistently achieves significant improvements of 32.5% in ARCH-Open PubMed and 30.6% in ARCH-Open Books on H\&E images. Our code and dataset is available here (https://github.com/embedded-robotics/path-rag).

Deep Learning and Machine Learning -- Natural Language Processing: From Theory to Application

With a focus on natural language processing (NLP) and the role of large language models (LLMs), we explore the intersection of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize fields from healthcare to finance, NLP techniques such as tokenization, text classification, and entity recognition are essential for processing and understanding human language. This paper discusses advanced data preprocessing techniques and the use of frameworks like Hugging Face for implementing transformer-based models. Additionally, it highlights challenges such as handling multilingual data, reducing bias, and ensuring model robustness. By addressing key aspects of data processing and model fine-tuning, this work aims to provide insights into deploying effective and ethically sound AI solutions.

Grid4D: 4D Decomposed Hash Encoding for High-fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

Recently, Gaussian splatting has received more and more attention in the field of static scene rendering. Due to the low computational overhead and inherent flexibility of explicit representations, plane-based explicit methods are popular ways to predict deformations for Gaussian-based dynamic scene rendering models. However, plane-based methods rely on the inappropriate low-rank assumption and excessively decompose the space-time 4D encoding, resulting in overmuch feature overlap and unsatisfactory rendering quality. To tackle these problems, we propose Grid4D, a dynamic scene rendering model based on Gaussian splatting and employing a novel explicit encoding method for the 4D input through the hash encoding. Different from plane-based explicit representations, we decompose the 4D encoding into one spatial and three temporal 3D hash encodings without the low-rank assumption. Additionally, we design a novel attention module that generates the attention scores in a directional range to aggregate the spatial and temporal features. The directional attention enables Grid4D to more accurately fit the diverse deformations across distinct scene components based on the spatial encoded features. Moreover, to mitigate the inherent lack of smoothness in explicit representation methods, we introduce a smooth regularization term that keeps our model from the chaos of deformation prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that Grid4D significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models in visual quality and rendering speed.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning -- Digital Signal and Image Processing: From Theory to Application

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Digital Image Processing (DIP) with Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) are popular research areas in Computer Vision and related fields. We highlight transformative applications in image enhancement, filtering techniques, and pattern recognition. By integrating frameworks like the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), Z-Transform, and Fourier Transform methods, we enable robust data manipulation and feature extraction essential for AI-driven tasks. Using Python, we implement algorithms that optimize real-time data processing, forming a foundation for scalable, high-performance solutions in computer vision. This work illustrates the potential of ML and DL to advance DSP and DIP methodologies, contributing to artificial intelligence, automated feature extraction, and applications across diverse domains.