LLM-based Semantic Augmentation for Harmful Content Detection

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on simple text classification tasks, frequently under zero-shot settings. However, their efficacy declines when tackling complex social media challenges such as propaganda detection, hateful meme classification, and toxicity identification. Much of the existing work has focused on using LLMs to generate synthetic training data, overlooking the potential of LLM-based text preprocessing and semantic augmentation. In this paper, we introduce an approach that prompts LLMs to clean noisy text and provide context-rich explanations, thereby enhancing training sets without substantial increases in data volume. We systematically evaluate on the SemEval 2024 multi-label Persuasive Meme dataset and further validate on the Google Jigsaw toxic comments and Facebook hateful memes datasets to assess generalizability. Our results reveal that zero-shot LLM classification underperforms on these high-context tasks compared to supervised models. In contrast, integrating LLM-based semantic augmentation yields performance on par with approaches that rely on human-annotated data, at a fraction of the cost. These findings underscore the importance of strategically incorporating LLMs into machine learning (ML) pipeline for social media classification tasks, offering broad implications for combating harmful content online.

Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness

We study whether and how the choice of optimization algorithm can impact group fairness in deep neural networks. Through stochastic differential equation analysis of optimization dynamics in an analytically tractable setup, we demonstrate that the choice of optimization algorithm indeed influences fairness outcomes, particularly under severe imbalance. Furthermore, we show that when comparing two categories of optimizers, adaptive methods and stochastic methods, RMSProp (from the adaptive category) has a higher likelihood of converging to fairer minima than SGD (from the stochastic category). Building on this insight, we derive two new theoretical guarantees showing that, under appropriate conditions, RMSProp exhibits fairer parameter updates and improved fairness in a single optimization step compared to SGD. We then validate these findings through extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely CelebA, FairFace, and MS-COCO, across different tasks as facial expression recognition, gender classification, and multi-label classification, using various backbones. Considering multiple fairness definitions including equalized odds, equal opportunity, and demographic parity, adaptive optimizers like RMSProp and Adam consistently outperform SGD in terms of group fairness, while maintaining comparable predictive accuracy. Our results highlight the role of adaptive updates as a crucial yet overlooked mechanism for promoting fair outcomes.

Locating and Mitigating Gradient Conflicts in Point Cloud Domain Adaptation via Saliency Map Skewness

Object classification models utilizing point cloud data are fundamental for 3D media understanding, yet they often struggle with unseen or out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Existing point cloud unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods typically employ a multi-task learning (MTL) framework that combines primary classification tasks with auxiliary self-supervision tasks to bridge the gap between cross-domain feature distributions. However, our further experiments demonstrate that not all gradients from self-supervision tasks are beneficial and some may negatively impact the classification performance. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, termed Saliency Map-based Data Sampling Block (SM-DSB), to mitigate these gradient conflicts. Specifically, our method designs a new scoring mechanism based on the skewness of 3D saliency maps to estimate gradient conflicts without requiring target labels. Leveraging this, we develop a sample selection strategy that dynamically filters out samples whose self-supervision gradients are not beneficial for the classification. Our approach is scalable, introducing modest computational overhead, and can be integrated into all the point cloud UDA MTL frameworks. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we provide a new perspective on understanding the UDA problem through back-propagation analysis.

Automated Measurement of Eczema Severity with Self-Supervised Learning

Automated diagnosis of eczema using images acquired from digital camera can enable individuals to self-monitor their recovery. The process entails first segmenting out the eczema region from the image and then measuring the severity of eczema in the segmented region. The state-of-the-art methods for automated eczema diagnosis rely on deep neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and have shown impressive performance in accurately measuring the severity of eczema. However, these methods require massive volume of annotated data to train which can be hard to obtain. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning framework for automated eczema diagnosis under limited training data regime. Our framework consists of two stages: i) Segmentation, where we use an in-context learning based algorithm called SegGPT for few-shot segmentation of eczema region from the image; ii) Feature extraction and classification, where we extract DINO features from the segmented regions and feed it to a multi-layered perceptron (MLP) for 4-class classification of eczema severity. When evaluated on a dataset of annotated "in-the-wild" eczema images, we show that our method outperforms (Weighted F1: 0.67 $\pm$ 0.01) the state-of-the-art deep learning methods such as finetuned Resnet-18 (Weighted F1: 0.44 $\pm$ 0.16) and Vision Transformer (Weighted F1: 0.40 $\pm$ 0.22). Our results show that self-supervised learning can be a viable solution for automated skin diagnosis where labeled data is scarce.

Can Masked Autoencoders Also Listen to Birds?

Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) pretrained on AudioSet fail to capture the fine-grained acoustic characteristics of specialized domains such as bioacoustic monitoring. Bird sound classification is critical for assessing environmental health, yet general-purpose models inadequately address its unique acoustic challenges. To address this, we introduce Bird-MAE, a domain-specialized MAE pretrained on the large-scale BirdSet dataset. We explore adjustments to pretraining, fine-tuning and utilizing frozen representations. Bird-MAE achieves state-of-the-art results across all BirdSet downstream tasks, substantially improving multi-label classification performance compared to the general-purpose Audio-MAE baseline. Additionally, we propose prototypical probing, a parameter-efficient method for leveraging MAEs' frozen representations. Bird-MAE's prototypical probes outperform linear probing by up to 37\% in MAP and narrow the gap to fine-tuning to approximately 3\% on average on BirdSet.

Fine-Grained Rib Fracture Diagnosis with Hyperbolic Embeddings: A Detailed Annotation Framework and Multi-Label Classification Model

Accurate rib fracture identification and classification are essential for treatment planning. However, existing datasets often lack fine-grained annotations, particularly regarding rib fracture characterization, type, and precise anatomical location on individual ribs. To address this, we introduce a novel rib fracture annotation protocol tailored for fracture classification. Further, we enhance fracture classification by leveraging cross-modal embeddings that bridge radiological images and clinical descriptions. Our approach employs hyperbolic embeddings to capture the hierarchical nature of fracture, mapping visual features and textual descriptions into a shared non-Euclidean manifold. This framework enables more nuanced similarity computations between imaging characteristics and clinical descriptions, accounting for the inherent hierarchical relationships in fracture taxonomy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods across multiple classification tasks, with average recall improvements of 6% on the AirRib dataset and 17.5% on the public RibFrac dataset.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class and Multi-Label Detection of Drug Use and Overdose Symptoms on Social Media

Drug overdose remains a critical global health issue, often driven by misuse of opioids, painkillers, and psychiatric medications. Traditional research methods face limitations, whereas social media offers real-time insights into self-reported substance use and overdose symptoms. This study proposes an AI-driven NLP framework trained on annotated social media data to detect commonly used drugs and associated overdose symptoms. Using a hybrid annotation strategy with LLMs and human annotators, we applied traditional ML models, neural networks, and advanced transformer-based models. Our framework achieved 98% accuracy in multi-class and 97% in multi-label classification, outperforming baseline models by up to 8%. These findings highlight the potential of AI for supporting public health surveillance and personalized intervention strategies.

ProtoECGNet: Case-Based Interpretable Deep Learning for Multi-Label ECG Classification with Contrastive Learning

Deep learning-based electrocardiogram (ECG) classification has shown impressive performance but clinical adoption has been slowed by the lack of transparent and faithful explanations. Post hoc methods such as saliency maps may fail to reflect a model's true decision process. Prototype-based reasoning offers a more transparent alternative by grounding decisions in similarity to learned representations of real ECG segments, enabling faithful, case-based explanations. We introduce ProtoECGNet, a prototype-based deep learning model for interpretable, multi-label ECG classification. ProtoECGNet employs a structured, multi-branch architecture that reflects clinical interpretation workflows: it integrates a 1D CNN with global prototypes for rhythm classification, a 2D CNN with time-localized prototypes for morphology-based reasoning, and a 2D CNN with global prototypes for diffuse abnormalities. Each branch is trained with a prototype loss designed for multi-label learning, combining clustering, separation, diversity, and a novel contrastive loss that encourages appropriate separation between prototypes of unrelated classes while allowing clustering for frequently co-occurring diagnoses. We evaluate ProtoECGNet on all 71 diagnostic labels from the PTB-XL dataset, demonstrating competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art black-box models while providing structured, case-based explanations. To assess prototype quality, we conduct a structured clinician review of the final model's projected prototypes, finding that they are rated as representative and clear. ProtoECGNet shows that prototype learning can be effectively scaled to complex, multi-label time-series classification, offering a practical path toward transparent and trustworthy deep learning models for clinical decision support.

AFiRe: Anatomy-Driven Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Representation in Radiographic Images

Current self-supervised methods, such as contrastive learning, predominantly focus on global discrimination, neglecting the critical fine-grained anatomical details required for accurate radiographic analysis. To address this challenge, we propose an Anatomy-driven self-supervised framework for enhancing Fine-grained Representation in radiographic image analysis (AFiRe). The core idea of AFiRe is to align the anatomical consistency with the unique token-processing characteristics of Vision Transformer. Specifically, AFiRe synergistically performs two self-supervised schemes: (i) Token-wise anatomy-guided contrastive learning, which aligns image tokens based on structural and categorical consistency, thereby enhancing fine-grained spatial-anatomical discrimination; (ii) Pixel-level anomaly-removal restoration, which particularly focuses on local anomalies, thereby refining the learned discrimination with detailed geometrical information. Additionally, we propose Synthetic Lesion Mask to enhance anatomical diversity while preserving intra-consistency, which is typically corrupted by traditional data augmentations, such as Cropping and Affine transformations. Experimental results show that AFiRe: (i) provides robust anatomical discrimination, achieving more cohesive feature clusters compared to state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods; (ii) demonstrates superior generalization, surpassing 7 radiography-specific self-supervised methods in multi-label classification tasks with limited labeling; and (iii) integrates fine-grained information, enabling precise anomaly detection using only image-level annotations.

Multi-output Classification Framework and Frequency Layer Normalization for Compound Fault Diagnosis in Motor

This work introduces a multi-output classification (MOC) framework designed for domain adaptation in fault diagnosis, particularly under partially labeled (PL) target domain scenarios and compound fault conditions in rotating machinery. Unlike traditional multi-class classification (MCC) methods that treat each fault combination as a distinct class, the proposed approach independently estimates the severity of each fault type, improving both interpretability and diagnostic accuracy. The model incorporates multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) and entropy minimization (EM) losses to facilitate feature transfer from the source to the target domain. In addition, frequency layer normalization (FLN) is applied to preserve structural properties in the frequency domain, which are strongly influenced by system dynamics and are often stationary with respect to changes in rpm. Evaluations across six domain adaptation cases with PL data demonstrate that MOC outperforms baseline models in macro F1 score. Moreover, MOC consistently achieves better classification performance for individual fault types, and FLN shows superior adaptability compared to other normalization techniques.