GodsGift Uzor

Michael Beebe, GodsGift Uzor, Manasa Chepuri et al.

Small datasets like MNIST have historically been instrumental in advancing machine learning research by providing a controlled environment for rapid experimentation and model evaluation. However, their simplicity often limits their utility for distinguishing between advanced neural network architectures. To address these challenges, Greydanus et al. introduced the MNIST-1D dataset, a one-dimensional adaptation of MNIST designed to explore inductive biases in sequential data. This dataset maintains the advantages of small-scale datasets while introducing variability and complexity that make it ideal for studying advanced architectures. In this paper, we extend the exploration of MNIST-1D by evaluating the performance of Residual Networks (ResNet), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN). These models, known for their ability to capture sequential patterns and hierarchical features, were implemented and benchmarked alongside previously tested architectures such as logistic regression, MLPs, CNNs, and GRUs. Our experimental results demonstrate that advanced architectures like TCN and DCNN consistently outperform simpler models, achieving near-human performance on MNIST-1D. ResNet also shows significant improvements, highlighting the importance of leveraging inductive biases and hierarchical feature extraction in small structured datasets. Through this study, we validate the utility of MNIST-1D as a robust benchmark for evaluating machine learning architectures under computational constraints. Our findings emphasize the role of architectural innovations in improving model performance and offer insights into optimizing deep learning models for resource-limited environments.

GodsGift Uzor, Hasan Al-Qudah, Ynes Ineza et al.

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs), which closely track user data and context, has prompted users to share personal and private information in unprecedented ways. Even when users opt out of allowing their data to be used for training, these privacy settings offer limited protection when LLM providers operate in jurisdictions with weak privacy laws, invasive government surveillance, or poor data security practices. In such cases, the risk of sensitive information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), being mishandled or exposed remains high. To address this, we propose the concept of an "LLM gatekeeper", a lightweight, locally run model that filters out sensitive information from user queries before they are sent to the potentially untrustworthy, though highly capable, cloud-based LLM. Through experiments with human subjects, we demonstrate that this dual-model approach introduces minimal overhead while significantly enhancing user privacy, without compromising the quality of LLM responses.

GodsGift Uzor, Tania-Amanda Nkoyo Fredrick Eneye, Chukwuebuka Ijezue

Brain tumor segmentation is a critical pre-processing step in the medical image analysis pipeline that involves precise delineation of tumor regions from healthy brain tissue in medical imaging data, particularly MRI scans. An efficient and effective decoding mechanism is crucial in brain tumor segmentation especially in scenarios with limited computational resources. However these decoding mechanisms usually come with high computational costs. To address this concern EMCAD a new efficient multi-scale convolutional attention decoder designed was utilized to optimize both performance and computational efficiency for brain tumor segmentation on the BraTs2020 dataset consisting of MRI scans from 369 brain tumor patients. The preliminary result obtained by the model achieved a best Dice score of 0.31 and maintained a stable mean Dice score of 0.285 plus/minus 0.015 throughout the training process which is moderate. The initial model maintained consistent performance across the validation set without showing signs of over-fitting.