Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz

Taye Akinrele, James Halgren, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz et al.

Watershed networks exhibit convergent topologies in which multiple tributaries merge into downstream channels,integrating diverse upstream hydrological processes. In ungauged basins, the absence of direct observations increases uncertainty and limits the ability to anticipate extreme events. This study evaluates whether an encoder-only Transformer provides an advantage over an LSTM for upstream streamflow inference under limited hydrologic information, using retrospective simulations from the NOAA National Water Model (NWM). Across both upstream-only and combined configurations, the LSTM showed stronger overall performance than the Transformer model across the two configurations. Incorporating downstream information further boosted performance for all models, increasing median NNSE by more than 60%. Rather than treating this as a leaderboard-style comparison, we interpret the experiments as a test of architectural inductive bias for hydrologic sequence inference. The results indicate that recurrent memory remains better aligned with this upstream reconstruction task than an encoder-only Transformer, while downstream hydrologic context provides a strong auxiliary constraint that substantially improves prediction skill across architectures

Gavin Money, Sindhuja Penchala, Jiacheng Li et al.

Standard transformer architectures learn fixed slow-weight representations during training and lack mechanisms for rapid adaptation within an episode. In contrast, biological neural systems address this through fast synaptic updates that form transient associative memories during inference, a property known as Hebbian plasticity. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of Hebbian Fast-Weight (HFW) modules integrated into multiple transformer backbones, including ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny. We evaluate six model variants: ViT, DeiT, Swin, ViT-Hebbian, DeiT-Hebbian, and Swin-Hebbian on 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot classification tasks using the Omniglot benchmark under a Prototypical Network meta-learning framework. We propose a single module placement strategy for Swin-Tiny in which one HFW module is applied to the final stage feature map after all hierarchical stages have completed. This design avoids the training instability caused by placing separate Hebbian modules at each stage and achieves the highest test accuracy across all six models (96.2\% at 1-shot; 99.2\% at 5-shot), outperforming its non-Hebbian baseline by $+0.3$ percentage points at 1-shot. We analyze the interaction between Swin's shifted window inductive bias and episode-level Hebbian binding, discuss why per-block placement fails for ViT and DeiT variants in a low-data regime, and situate the results within the wider literature on fast and slow-weight meta-learning.

Sobhana Jahan, Saydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi et al.

Deep cognitive attention is characterized by heightened gamma oscillations and coordinated visual behavior. Despite the physiological importance of these mechanisms, computational studies rarely synthesize these modalities or identify the neural regions most responsible for sustained focus. To address this gap, this work introduces Gamma2Patterns, a multimodal framework that characterizes deep cognitive attention by leveraging complementary Gamma and Alpha band EEG activity alongside Eye-tracking measurements. Using the SEED-IV dataset [1], we extract spectral power, burst-based temporal dynamics, and fixation-saccade-pupil signals across 62 channels or electrodes to analyze how neural activation differs between high-focus (Gamma-dominant) and low-focus (Alpha-dominant) states. Our findings reveal that frontopolar, temporal, anterior frontal, and parieto-occipital regions exhibit the strongest Gamma power and burst rates, indicating their dominant role in deep attentional engagement, while Eye-tracking signals confirm complementary contributions from frontal, frontopolar, and frontotemporal regions. Furthermore, we show that Gamma power and burst duration provide more discriminative markers of deep focus than Alpha power alone, demonstrating their value for attention decoding. Collectively, these results establish a multimodal, evidence-based map of cortical regions and oscillatory signatures underlying deep focus, providing a neurophysiological foundation for future brain-inspired attention mechanisms in AI systems.

Mohammed Yusuf Mujawar, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz

Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.

Subash Neupane, Elias Hossain, Jason Keith et al.

This paper presents BARKPLUG V.2, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbot system built using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines to enhance the user experience and access to information within academic settings.The objective of BARKPLUG V.2 is to provide information to users about various campus resources, including academic departments, programs, campus facilities, and student resources at a university setting in an interactive fashion. Our system leverages university data as an external data corpus and ingests it into our RAG pipelines for domain-specific question-answering tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system in generating accurate and pertinent responses for Mississippi State University, as a case study, using quantitative measures, employing frameworks such as Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment(RAGAS). Furthermore, we evaluate the usability of this system via subjective satisfaction surveys using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Our system demonstrates impressive quantitative performance, with a mean RAGAS score of 0.96, and experience, as validated by usability assessments.

Khoa Pham, Sindhuja Penchala, Jiacheng Li et al.

Medical image segmentation plays an important role in computer aided diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. U-Net has been widely used for biomedical image segmentation because of its encoder decoder structure and skip connections. However, conventional convolution based U-Net models may have limited ability to capture long range dependencies and global contextual information, which can affect performance in complex segmentation tasks. This paper presents a comparative study of five U-Net based architectures: U-Net 3D, Residual U-Net, Attention U-Net, UNETR, and Swin UNETR. The models are evaluated on two benchmark datasets: BraTS 2023 for brain tumor segmentation and DRIVE for retinal vessel segmentation. Experimental results show that Swin UNETR achieves the best overall performance, with Dice scores of 0.8965 on BraTS 2023 and 0.8078 on DRIVE. The results suggest that transformer based U-Net variants are effective for segmentation tasks requiring global contextual modeling, while residual learning remains useful for fine structure segmentation. This study provides practical insights into model selection for medical image segmentation across volumetric MRI and retinal imaging tasks.

Hassan S. Al Khatib, Subash Neupane, Harish Kumar Manchukonda et al.

Patient-Centric Knowledge Graphs (PCKGs) represent an important shift in healthcare that focuses on individualized patient care by mapping the patient's health information in a holistic and multi-dimensional way. PCKGs integrate various types of health data to provide healthcare professionals with a comprehensive understanding of a patient's health, enabling more personalized and effective care. This literature review explores the methodologies, challenges, and opportunities associated with PCKGs, focusing on their role in integrating disparate healthcare data and enhancing patient care through a unified health perspective. In addition, this review also discusses the complexities of PCKG development, including ontology design, data integration techniques, knowledge extraction, and structured representation of knowledge. It highlights advanced techniques such as reasoning, semantic search, and inference mechanisms essential in constructing and evaluating PCKGs for actionable healthcare insights. We further explore the practical applications of PCKGs in personalized medicine, emphasizing their significance in improving disease prediction and formulating effective treatment plans. Overall, this review provides a foundational perspective on the current state-of-the-art and best practices of PCKGs, guiding future research and applications in this dynamic field.

Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating human-like responses. However, their lack of domain-specific knowledge limits their applicability in healthcare settings, where contextual and comprehensive responses are vital. To address this challenge and enable the generation of patient-centric responses that are contextually relevant and comprehensive, we propose MedInsight:a novel retrieval augmented framework that augments LLM inputs (prompts) with relevant background information from multiple sources. MedInsight extracts pertinent details from the patient's medical record or consultation transcript. It then integrates information from authoritative medical textbooks and curated web resources based on the patient's health history and condition. By constructing an augmented context combining the patient's record with relevant medical knowledge, MedInsight generates enriched, patient-specific responses tailored for healthcare applications such as diagnosis, treatment recommendations, or patient education. Experiments on the MTSamples dataset validate MedInsight's effectiveness in generating contextually appropriate medical responses. Quantitative evaluation using the Ragas metric and TruLens for answer similarity and answer correctness demonstrates the model's efficacy. Furthermore, human evaluation studies involving Subject Matter Expert (SMEs) confirm MedInsight's utility, with moderate inter-rater agreement on the relevance and correctness of the generated responses.

Manish Kansana, Elias Hossain, Shahram Rahimi et al.

Surface material recognition is a key component in robotic perception and physical interaction, particularly when leveraging both tactile and visual sensory inputs. In this work, we propose Surformer v1, a transformer-based architecture designed for surface classification using structured tactile features and PCA-reduced visual embeddings extracted via ResNet-50. The model integrates modality-specific encoders with cross-modal attention layers, enabling rich interactions between vision and touch. Currently, state-of-the-art deep learning models for vision tasks have achieved remarkable performance. With this in mind, our first set of experiments focused exclusively on tactile-only surface classification. Using feature engineering, we trained and evaluated multiple machine learning models, assessing their accuracy and inference time. We then implemented an encoder-only Transformer model tailored for tactile features. This model not only achieved the highest accuracy but also demonstrated significantly faster inference time compared to other evaluated models, highlighting its potential for real-time applications. To extend this investigation, we introduced a multimodal fusion setup by combining vision and tactile inputs. We trained both Surformer v1 (using structured features) and Multimodal CNN (using raw images) to examine the impact of feature-based versus image-based multimodal learning on classification accuracy and computational efficiency. The results showed that Surformer v1 achieved 99.4% accuracy with an inference time of 0.77 ms, while the Multimodal CNN achieved slightly higher accuracy but required significantly more inference time. These findings suggest Surformer v1 offers a compelling balance between accuracy, efficiency, and computational cost for surface material recognition.

Raj Patel, Himanshu Tripathi, Jasper Stone et al.

The rapid adoption of machine learning (ML) technologies has driven organizations across diverse sectors to seek efficient and reliable methods to accelerate model development-to-deployment. Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) has emerged as an integrative approach addressing these requirements by unifying relevant roles and streamlining ML workflows. As the MLOps market continues to grow, securing these pipelines has become increasingly critical. However, the unified nature of MLOps ecosystem introduces vulnerabilities, making them susceptible to adversarial attacks where a single misconfiguration can lead to compromised credentials, severe financial losses, damaged public trust, and the poisoning of training data. Our paper presents a systematic application of the MITRE ATLAS (Adversarial Threat Landscape for Artificial-Intelligence Systems) framework, a comprehensive and continuously updated catalog of AI-focused attacks, to systematically assess attacks across different phases of the MLOps ecosystem. We begin by examining the preparatory phases during which adversaries acquire the essential intelligence required to initiate their attacks. We then present a structured taxonomy of attack techniques explicitly mapped to corresponding phases of the MLOps ecosystem, supported by examples drawn from red-teaming exercises and real-world incidents. This is followed by a taxonomy of mitigation strategies aligned with these attack categories, offering actionable early-stage defenses to strengthen the security of MLOps ecosystem. Given the rapid evolution and adoption of MLOps, we further highlight key research gaps that require immediate attention. Our work emphasizes the importance of implementing robust security protocols from the outset, empowering practitioners to safeguard MLOps ecosystem against evolving cyber attacks.

Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Elias Hossain, Abdoljalil Addeh et al.

In this paper, we discuss learning algorithms and their importance in different types of applications which includes training to identify important patterns and features in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner. We will review the main concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and hybrid models. Some important subsets of Machine Learning algorithms such as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning are also discussed in this paper. These techniques can be used for some important tasks like prediction, classification, and segmentation. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used for image and video processing and many more applications. We dive into the architecture of CNNs and how to integrate CNNs with ML algorithms to build hybrid models. This paper explores the vulnerability of learning algorithms to noise, leading to misclassification. We further discuss the integration of learning algorithms with Large Language Models (LLM) to generate coherent responses applicable to many domains such as healthcare, marketing, and finance by learning important patterns from large volumes of data. Furthermore, we discuss the next generation of learning algorithms and how we may have an unified Adaptive and Dynamic Network to perform important tasks. Overall, this article provides brief overview of learning algorithms, exploring their current state, applications and future direction.

Majid Memari, Khaled R. Ahmed, Shahram Rahimi et al.

This research addresses a critical challenge in the field of generative models, particularly in the generation and evaluation of synthetic images. Given the inherent complexity of generative models and the absence of a standardized procedure for their comparison, our study introduces a pioneering algorithm to objectively assess the realism of synthetic images. This approach significantly enhances the evaluation methodology by refining the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score, allowing for a more precise and subjective assessment of image quality. Our algorithm is particularly tailored to address the challenges in generating and evaluating realistic images of Arabic handwritten digits, a task that has traditionally been near-impossible due to the subjective nature of realism in image generation. By providing a systematic and objective framework, our method not only enables the comparison of different generative models but also paves the way for improvements in their design and output. This breakthrough in evaluation and comparison is crucial for advancing the field of OCR, especially for scripts that present unique complexities, and sets a new standard in the generation and assessment of high-quality synthetic images.

Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Sindhuja Penchala, Shahram Rahimi

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly across perception, language, reasoning, and multimodal domains. Yet despite these achievements, modern AI systems remain fundamentally limited in their ability to self-monitor, self-correct, and regulate their behavior autonomously in dynamic contexts. This paper identifies and analyzes seven core deficiencies that constrain contemporary AI models: the absence of intrinsic self-monitoring, lack of meta-cognitive awareness, fixed and non-adaptive learning mechanisms, inability to restructure goals, lack of representational maintenance, insufficient embodied feedback, and the absence of intrinsic agency. Alongside identifying these limitations, we also outline a forward-looking perspective on how AI may evolve beyond them through architectures that mirror neurocognitive principles. We argue that these structural limitations prevent current architectures, including deep learning and transformer-based systems, from achieving robust generalization, lifelong adaptability, and real-world autonomy. Drawing on a comparative analysis of artificial systems and biological cognition [7], and integrating insights from AI research, cognitive science, and neuroscience, we outline how these capabilities are absent in current models and why scaling alone cannot resolve them. We conclude by advocating for a paradigmatic shift toward cognitively grounded AI (cognitive autonomy) capable of self-directed adaptation, dynamic representation management, and intentional, goal-oriented behavior, paired with reformative oversight mechanisms [8] that ensure autonomous systems remain interpretable, governable, and aligned with human values.

Sindhuja Penchala, Gavin Money, Gabriel Marques et al.

Understanding material surfaces from sparse visual cues is critical for applications in robotics, simulation, and material perception. However, most existing methods rely on dense or full-scene observations, limiting their effectiveness in constrained or partial view environment. To address this challenge, we introduce SMARC, a unified model for Surface MAterial Reconstruction and Classification from minimal visual input. By giving only a single 10% contiguous patch of the image, SMARC recognizes and reconstructs the full RGB surface while simultaneously classifying the material category. Our architecture combines a Partial Convolutional U-Net with a classification head, enabling both spatial inpainting and semantic understanding under extreme observation sparsity. We compared SMARC against five models including convolutional autoencoders [17], Vision Transformer (ViT) [13], Masked Autoencoder (MAE) [5], Swin Transformer [9], and DETR [2] using Touch and Go dataset [16] of real-world surface textures. SMARC achieves state-of-the-art results with a PSNR of 17.55 dB and a material classification accuracy of 85.10%. Our findings highlight the advantages of partial convolution in spatial reasoning under missing data and establish a strong foundation for minimal-vision surface understanding.

Manish Kansana, Keyan Alexander Rahimi, Elias Hossain et al.

Adversarial noise introduces small perturbations in images, misleading deep learning models into misclassification and significantly impacting recognition accuracy. In this study, we analyzed the effects of Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial noise on image classification and investigated whether training on specific image features can improve robustness. We hypothesize that while adversarial noise perturbs various regions of an image, edges may remain relatively stable and provide essential structural information for classification. To test this, we conducted a series of experiments using brain tumor and COVID datasets. Initially, we trained the models on clean images and then introduced subtle adversarial perturbations, which caused deep learning models to significantly misclassify the images. Retraining on a combination of clean and noisy images led to improved performance. To evaluate the robustness of the edge features, we extracted edges from the original/clean images and trained the models exclusively on edge-based representations. When noise was introduced to the images, the edge-based models demonstrated greater resilience to adversarial attacks compared to those trained on the original or clean images. These results suggest that while adversarial noise is able to exploit complex non-edge regions significantly more than edges, the improvement in the accuracy after retraining is marginally more in the original data as compared to the edges. Thus, leveraging edge-based learning can improve the resilience of deep learning models against adversarial perturbations.

Elias Hossain, Tasfia Nuzhat, Shamsul Masum et al.

Accurate classification of cancer-related biomedical abstracts is critical for advancing cancer informatics and supporting decision-making in healthcare research. Yet progress in this domain is often constrained by limited availability of labeled corpora and the high computational demands of transformer-based approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a Residual Graph Attention Network (R-GAT) that integrates multi-head attention with residual connections to capture semantic and relational dependencies in biomedical texts. Evaluated on a curated dataset of 1,875 PubMed abstracts spanning thyroid, colon, lung, and generic cancer topics, R-GAT achieves stable and competitive performance, comparable to transformer-based models such as BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT and strong classical baselines like Logistic Regression, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Ablation studies confirm the importance of attention and residual connections in ensuring robustness under limited-data conditions. To support reproducibility and facilitate future research, we also release the curated dataset. Together, these contributions demonstrate the value of lightweight graph-based architectures as reliable and resource-efficient alternatives to computationally intensive transformers in biomedical NLP.