Emily Johnson

Michael Schirner, Lia Domide, Dionysios Perdikis et al.

The Virtual Brain (TVB) is now available as open-source cloud ecosystem on EBRAINS, a shared digital research platform for brain science. It offers services for constructing, simulating and analysing brain network models (BNMs) including the TVB network simulator; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) processing pipelines to extract structural and functional connectomes; multiscale co-simulation of spiking and large-scale networks; a domain specific language for automatic high-performance code generation from user-specified models; simulation-ready BNMs of patients and healthy volunteers; Bayesian inference of epilepsy spread; data and code for mouse brain simulation; and extensive educational material. TVB cloud services facilitate reproducible online collaboration and discovery of data assets, models, and software embedded in scalable and secure workflows, a precondition for research on large cohort data sets, better generalizability and clinical translation.

Emily Johnson, Noah Wilson

The integration of artificial intelligence into agricultural practices, specifically through Consultation on Intelligent Agricultural Machinery Management (CIAMM), has the potential to revolutionize efficiency and sustainability in farming. This paper introduces a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4, combined with multi-round prompt engineering to enhance decision-making processes in agricultural machinery management. We systematically developed and refined prompts to guide the LLMs in generating precise and contextually relevant outputs. Our approach was evaluated using a manually curated dataset from various online sources, and performance was assessed with accuracy and GPT-4 Scores. Comparative experiments were conducted using LLama-2-70B, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 models, alongside baseline and state-of-the-art methods such as Chain of Thought (CoT) and Thought of Thought (ThoT). The results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms these approaches, achieving higher accuracy and relevance in generated responses. This paper highlights the potential of advanced prompt engineering techniques in improving the robustness and applicability of AI in agricultural contexts.

Ruirui Gao, Emily Johnson, Bowen Tan et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) hold immense potential for complex multimodal instruction following, yet their development is often hindered by the high cost and inconsistency of human annotation required for effective fine-tuning and preference alignment. Traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and existing preference optimization methods like RLHF and DPO frequently struggle to efficiently leverage the model's own generation space to identify highly informative "hard negative" samples. To address these challenges, we propose Multimodal-Model-Guided Preference Optimization (M3PO), a novel and data-efficient method designed to enhance LVLMs' capabilities in visual instruction following. M3PO intelligently selects the most "learning-valuable" preference sample pairs from a diverse pool of LVLM-generated candidates. This selection is driven by a sophisticated mechanism that integrates two crucial signals: a Multimodal Alignment Score (MAS) to assess external quality and the model's Self-Consistency / Confidence (log-probability) to gauge internal belief. These are combined into a novel M3P-Score, which specifically identifies preferred responses and challenging dispreferred responses that the model might confidently generate despite being incorrect. These high-quality preference pairs are then used for efficient Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tuning on base LVLMs like LLaVA-1.5 (7B/13B) using LoRA. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that M3PO consistently outperforms strong baselines, including SFT, simulated RLHF, vanilla DPO, and RM-DPO, across a comprehensive suite of multimodal instruction following benchmarks (MME-Bench, POPE, IFT, Human Pref. Score).

Alan Mitkiy, James Smith, Hana Satou et al.

Adversarial training is among the most effective strategies for defending deep neural networks against adversarial examples. A key limitation of existing adversarial training approaches lies in their reliance on a fixed perturbation budget, which fails to account for instance-specific robustness characteristics. While prior works such as IAAT and MMA introduce instance-level adaptations, they often rely on heuristic or static approximations of data robustness. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Epsilon Scheduling (DES), a novel framework that adaptively adjusts the adversarial perturbation budget per instance and per training iteration. DES integrates three key factors: (1) the distance to the decision boundary approximated via gradient-based proxies, (2) prediction confidence derived from softmax entropy, and (3) model uncertainty estimated via Monte Carlo dropout. By combining these cues into a unified scheduling strategy, DES tailors the perturbation budget dynamically to guide more effective adversarial learning. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show that our method consistently improves both adversarial robustness and standard accuracy compared to fixed-epsilon baselines and prior adaptive methods. Moreover, we provide theoretical insights into the stability and convergence of our scheduling policy. This work opens a new avenue for instance-aware, data-driven adversarial training methods.

Emily Johnson, Xavier Holt, Noah Wilson

Legal multi-label classification is a critical task for organizing and accessing the vast amount of legal documentation. Despite its importance, it faces challenges such as the complexity of legal language, intricate label dependencies, and significant label imbalance. In this paper, we propose Legal-LLM, a novel approach that leverages the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through fine-tuning. We reframe the multi-label classification task as a structured generation problem, instructing the LLM to directly output the relevant legal categories for a given document. We evaluate our method on two benchmark datasets, POSTURE50K and EURLEX57K, using micro-F1 and macro-F1 scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that Legal-LLM outperforms a range of strong baseline models, including traditional methods and other Transformer-based approaches. Furthermore, ablation studies and human evaluations validate the effectiveness of our approach, particularly in handling label imbalance and generating relevant and accurate legal labels.

Emily Johnson, Noah Wilson

Text-to-image generation has witnessed significant advancements with the integration of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), yet challenges remain in aligning complex textual descriptions with high-quality, visually coherent images. This paper introduces the Vision-Language Aligned Diffusion (VLAD) model, a generative framework that addresses these challenges through a dual-stream strategy combining semantic alignment and hierarchical diffusion. VLAD utilizes a Contextual Composition Module (CCM) to decompose textual prompts into global and local representations, ensuring precise alignment with visual features. Furthermore, it incorporates a multi-stage diffusion process with hierarchical guidance to generate high-fidelity images. Experiments conducted on MARIO-Eval and INNOVATOR-Eval benchmarks demonstrate that VLAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of image quality, semantic alignment, and text rendering accuracy. Human evaluations further validate the superior performance of VLAD, making it a promising approach for text-to-image generation in complex scenarios.