Jordan J. Bird

Jordan J. Bird, Ahmad Lotfi

Recent technological advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability to recognise AI-generated images through computer vision. Initially, a synthetic dataset is generated that mirrors the ten classes of the already available CIFAR-10 dataset with latent diffusion which provides a contrasting set of images for comparison to real photographs. The model is capable of generating complex visual attributes, such as photorealistic reflections in water. The two sets of data present as a binary classification problem with regard to whether the photograph is real or generated by AI. This study then proposes the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the images into two categories; Real or Fake. Following hyperparameter tuning and the training of 36 individual network topologies, the optimal approach could correctly classify the images with 92.98% accuracy. Finally, this study implements explainable AI via Gradient Class Activation Mapping to explore which features within the images are useful for classification. Interpretation reveals interesting concepts within the image, in particular, noting that the actual entity itself does not hold useful information for classification; instead, the model focuses on small visual imperfections in the background of the images. The complete dataset engineered for this study, referred to as the CIFAKE dataset, is made publicly available to the research community for future work.

Ravidu Suien Rammuni Silva, Ahmad Lotfi, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle et al.

Generating programmatic animation using libraries such as Manim presents unique challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring spatial reasoning, temporal sequencing, and familiarity with domain-specific APIs that are underrepresented in general pre-training data. A systematic study of how training and inference strategies interact in this setting is lacking in current research. This study introduces ManimTrainer, a training pipeline that combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) using a unified reward signal that fuses code and visual assessment signals, and ManimAgent, an inference pipeline featuring Renderer-in-the-loop (RITL) and API documentation-augmented RITL (RITL-DOC) strategies. Using these techniques, this study presents the first unified training and inference study for text-to-code-to-video transformation with Manim. It evaluates 17 open-source sub-30B LLMs across nine combinations of training and inference strategies using ManimBench. Results show that SFT generally improves code quality, while GRPO enhances visual outputs and increases the models' responsiveness to extrinsic signals during self-correction at inference time. The Qwen 3 Coder 30B model with GRPO and RITL-DOC achieved the highest overall performance, with a 94% Render Success Rate (RSR) and 85.7% Visual Similarity (VS) to reference videos, surpassing the baseline GPT-4.1 model by +3 percentage points in VS. Additionally, the analysis shows that the correlation between code and visual metrics strengthens with SFT and GRPO but weakens with inference-time enhancements, highlighting the complementary roles of training and agentic inference strategies in Manim animation generation.

Jordan J. Bird, Ahmad Lotfi

There are growing implications surrounding generative AI in the speech domain that enable voice cloning and real-time voice conversion from one individual to another. This technology poses a significant ethical threat and could lead to breaches of privacy and misrepresentation, thus there is an urgent need for real-time detection of AI-generated speech for DeepFake Voice Conversion. To address the above emerging issues, the DEEP-VOICE dataset is generated in this study, comprised of real human speech from eight well-known figures and their speech converted to one another using Retrieval-based Voice Conversion. Presenting as a binary classification problem of whether the speech is real or AI-generated, statistical analysis of temporal audio features through t-testing reveals that there are significantly different distributions. Hyperparameter optimisation is implemented for machine learning models to identify the source of speech. Following the training of 208 individual machine learning models over 10-fold cross validation, it is found that the Extreme Gradient Boosting model can achieve an average classification accuracy of 99.3% and can classify speech in real-time, at around 0.004 milliseconds given one second of speech. All data generated for this study is released publicly for future research on AI speech detection.

Jordan J. Bird

This study explores how robots and generative approaches can be used to mount successful false-acceptance adversarial attacks on signature verification systems. Initially, a convolutional neural network topology and data augmentation strategy are explored and tuned, producing an 87.12% accurate model for the verification of 2,640 human signatures. Two robots are then tasked with forging 50 signatures, where 25 are used for the verification attack, and the remaining 25 are used for tuning of the model to defend against them. Adversarial attacks on the system show that there exists an information security risk; the Line-us robotic arm can fool the system 24% of the time and the iDraw 2.0 robot 32% of the time. A conditional GAN finds similar success, with around 30% forged signatures misclassified as genuine. Following fine-tune transfer learning of robotic and generative data, adversarial attacks are reduced below the model threshold by both robots and the GAN. It is observed that tuning the model reduces the risk of attack by robots to 8% and 12%, and that conditional generative adversarial attacks can be reduced to 4% when 25 images are presented and 5% when 1000 images are presented.

Daniel J. Buxton, Mufti Mahmud, Jordan J. Bird et al.

Digital Human Modelling (DHM) is increasingly shaped by advances in AI, wearable biosensing, and interactive digital environments, particularly in research addressing accessibility and inclusion. However, many AI-enabled DHM approaches remain tightly coupled to specific platforms, tasks, or interpretative pipelines, limiting reproducibility, scalability, and ethical reuse. This paper presents a platform-agnostic DHM framework designed to support AI-ready multimodal interaction research by explicitly separating sensing, interaction modelling, and inference readiness. The framework integrates the OpenBCI Galea headset as a unified multimodal sensing layer, providing concurrent EEG, EMG, EOG, PPG, and inertial data streams, alongside a reproducible, game-based interaction environment implemented using SuperTux. Rather than embedding AI models or behavioural inference, physiological signals are represented as structured, temporally aligned observables, enabling downstream AI methods to be applied under appropriate ethical approval. Interaction is modelled using computational task primitives and timestamped event markers, supporting consistent alignment across heterogeneous sensors and platforms. Technical verification via author self-instrumentation confirms data integrity, stream continuity, and synchronisation; no human-subjects evaluation or AI inference is reported. Scalability considerations are discussed with respect to data throughput, latency, and extension to additional sensors or interaction modalities. Illustrative use cases demonstrate how the framework can support AI-enabled DHM and HCI studies, including accessibility-oriented interaction design and adaptive systems research, without requiring architectural modifications. The proposed framework provides an emerging-technology-focused infrastructure for future ethics-approved, inclusive DHM research.

Ravidu Suien Rammuni Silva, Jordan J. Bird

Explainability is an aspect of modern AI that is vital for impact and usability in the real world. The main objective of this paper is to emphasise the need to understand the predictions of Computer Vision models, specifically Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models. Existing methods of explaining CNN predictions are mostly based on Gradient-weighted Class Activation Maps (Grad-CAM) and solely focus on a single target class. We show that from the point of the target class selection, we make an assumption on the prediction process, hence neglecting a large portion of the predictor CNN model's thinking process. In this paper, we present an exhaustive methodology called Fused Multi-class Gradient-weighted Class Activation Map (FM-G-CAM) that considers multiple top predicted classes, which provides a holistic explanation of the predictor CNN's thinking rationale. We also provide a detailed and comprehensive mathematical and algorithmic description of our method. Furthermore, along with a concise comparison of existing methods, we compare FM-G-CAM with Grad-CAM, highlighting its benefits through real-world practical use cases. Finally, we present an open-source Python library with FM-G-CAM implementation to conveniently generate saliency maps for CNN-based model predictions.

Ravidu Suien Rammuni Silva, Ahmad Lotfi, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle et al.

Recently, the quality of artworks generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased significantly, resulting in growing difficulties in detecting synthetic artworks. However, limited studies have been conducted on identifying the authenticity of synthetic artworks and their source. This paper introduces AI-ArtBench, a dataset featuring 185,015 artistic images across 10 art styles. It includes 125,015 AI-generated images and 60,000 pieces of human-created artwork. This paper also outlines a method to accurately detect AI-generated images and trace them to their source model. This work proposes a novel Convolutional Neural Network model based on the ConvNeXt model called AttentionConvNeXt. AttentionConvNeXt was implemented and trained to differentiate between the source of the artwork and its style with an F1-Score of 0.869. The accuracy of attribution to the generative model reaches 0.999. To combine the scientific contributions arising from this study, a web-based application named ArtBrain was developed to enable both technical and non-technical users to interact with the model. Finally, this study presents the results of an Artistic Turing Test conducted with 50 participants. The findings reveal that humans could identify AI-generated images with an accuracy of approximately 58%, while the model itself achieved a significantly higher accuracy of around 99%.

Matthew Gazzard, Helen Hicks, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle et al.

Blackgrass (Alopecurus myosuroides) is a competitive weed that has wide-ranging impacts on food security by reducing crop yields and increasing cultivation costs. In addition to the financial burden on agriculture, the application of herbicides as a preventive to blackgrass can negatively affect access to clean water and sanitation. The WeedScout project introduces a Real-Rime Autonomous Black-Grass Classification and Mapping (RT-ABGCM), a cutting-edge solution tailored for real-time detection of blackgrass, for precision weed management practices. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, the system processes live image feeds, infers blackgrass density, and covers two stages of maturation. The research investigates the deployment of You Only Look Once (YOLO) models, specifically the streamlined YOLOv8 and YOLO-NAS, accelerated at the edge with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano (NJN). By optimising inference speed and model performance, the project advances the integration of AI into agricultural practices, offering potential solutions to challenges such as herbicide resistance and environmental impact. Additionally, two datasets and model weights are made available to the research community, facilitating further advancements in weed detection and precision farming technologies.

Arsen Yermukan, Pedro Machado, Feliciano Domingos et al.

Traditional monitoring of bearded dragon (Pogona Viticeps) behaviour is time-consuming and prone to errors. This project introduces an automated system for real-time video analysis, using You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection models to identify two key behaviours: basking and hunting. We trained five YOLO variants (v5, v7, v8, v11, v12) on a custom, publicly available dataset of 1200 images, encompassing bearded dragons (600), heating lamps (500), and crickets (100). YOLOv8s was selected as the optimal model due to its superior balance of accuracy (mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.855) and speed. The system processes video footage by extracting per-frame object coordinates, applying temporal interpolation for continuity, and using rule-based logic to classify specific behaviours. Basking detection proved reliable. However, hunting detection was less accurate, primarily due to weak cricket detection (mAP@0.5 = 0.392). Future improvements will focus on enhancing cricket detection through expanded datasets or specialised small-object detectors. This automated system offers a scalable solution for monitoring reptile behaviour in controlled environments, significantly improving research efficiency and data quality.

Jordan J. Bird

The integration of new literature into the English curriculum remains a challenge since educators often lack scalable tools to rapidly evaluate readability and adapt texts for diverse classroom needs. This study proposes to address this gap through a multimodal approach that combines transformer-based text classification with linguistic feature analysis to align texts with UK Key Stages. Eight state-of-the-art Transformers were fine-tuned on segmented text data, with BERT achieving the highest unimodal F1 score of 0.75. In parallel, 500 deep neural network topologies were searched for the classification of linguistic characteristics, achieving an F1 score of 0.392. The fusion of these modalities shows a significant improvement, with every multimodal approach outperforming all unimodal models. In particular, the ELECTRA Transformer fused with the neural network achieved an F1 score of 0.996. Unimodal and multimodal approaches are shown to have statistically significant differences in all validation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score) except for inference time. The proposed approach is finally encapsulated in a stakeholder-facing web application, providing non-technical stakeholder access to real-time insights on text complexity, reading difficulty, curriculum alignment, and recommendations for learning age range. The application empowers data-driven decision making and reduces manual workload by integrating AI-based recommendations into lesson planning for English literature.

Ajay John Alex, Chloe M. Barnes, Pedro Machado et al.

In an era of rapid climate change and its adverse effects on food production, technological intervention to monitor pollinator conservation is of paramount importance for environmental monitoring and conservation for global food security. The survival of the human species depends on the conservation of pollinators. This article explores the use of Computer Vision and Object Recognition to autonomously track and report bee behaviour from images. A novel dataset of 9664 images containing bees is extracted from video streams and annotated with bounding boxes. With training, validation and testing sets (6722, 1915, and 997 images, respectively), the results of the COCO-based YOLO model fine-tuning approaches show that YOLOv5m is the most effective approach in terms of recognition accuracy. However, YOLOv5s was shown to be the most optimal for real-time bee detection with an average processing and inference time of 5.1ms per video frame at the cost of slightly lower ability. The trained model is then packaged within an explainable AI interface, which converts detection events into timestamped reports and charts, with the aim of facilitating use by non-technical users such as expert stakeholders from the apiculture industry towards informing responsible consumption and production.

Purna Kar, Jordan J. Bird, Yangang Xing et al.

Biophilia is an innate love for living things and nature itself that has been associated with a positive impact on mental health and well-being. This study explores the application of deep learning methods for the classification of Biophilic artwork, in order to learn and explain the different Biophilic characteristics present in a visual representation of a painting. Using the concept of Biophilia that postulates the deep connection of human beings with nature, we use an artificially intelligent algorithm to recognise the different patterns underlying the Biophilic features in an artwork. Our proposed method uses a lower-dimensional representation of an image and a decoder model to extract salient features of the image of each Biophilic trait, such as plants, water bodies, seasons, animals, etc., based on learnt factors such as shape, texture, and illumination. The proposed classification model is capable of extracting Biophilic artwork that not only helps artists, collectors, and researchers studying to interpret and exploit the effects of mental well-being on exposure to nature-inspired visual aesthetics but also enables a methodical exploration of the study of Biophilia and Biophilic artwork for aesthetic preferences. Using the proposed algorithms, we have also created a gallery of Biophilic collections comprising famous artworks from different European and American art galleries, which will soon be published on the Vieunite@ online community.

Dennis Monari, Jack Larkin, Pedro Machado et al.

Invasive signal crayfish have a detrimental impact on ecosystems. They spread the fungal-type crayfish plague disease (Aphanomyces astaci) that is lethal to the native white clawed crayfish, the only native crayfish species in Britain. Invasive signal crayfish extensively burrow, causing habitat destruction, erosion of river banks and adverse changes in water quality, while also competing with native species for resources and leading to declines in native populations. Moreover, pollution exacerbates the vulnerability of White-clawed crayfish, with their populations declining by over 90% in certain English counties, making them highly susceptible to extinction. To safeguard aquatic ecosystems, it is imperative to address the challenges posed by invasive species and discarded plastics in the United Kingdom's river ecosystem's. The UDEEP platform can play a crucial role in environmental monitoring by performing on-the-fly classification of Signal crayfish and plastic debris while leveraging the efficacy of AI, IoT devices and the power of edge computing (i.e., NJN). By providing accurate data on the presence, spread and abundance of these species, the UDEEP platform can contribute to monitoring efforts and aid in mitigating the spread of invasive species.

Jordan J. Bird

In modern society, people should not be identified based on their disability, rather, it is environments that can disable people with impairments. Improvements to automatic Sign Language Recognition (SLR) will lead to more enabling environments via digital technology. Many state-of-the-art approaches to SLR focus on the classification of static hand gestures, but communication is a temporal activity, which is reflected by many of the dynamic gestures present. Given this, temporal information during the delivery of a gesture is not often considered within SLR. The experiments in this work consider the problem of SL gesture recognition regarding how dynamic gestures change during their delivery, and this study aims to explore how single types of features as well as mixed features affect the classification ability of a machine learning model. 18 common gestures recorded via a Leap Motion Controller sensor provide a complex classification problem. Two sets of features are extracted from a 0.6 second time window, statistical descriptors and spatio-temporal attributes. Features from each set are compared by their ANOVA F-Scores and p-values, arranged into bins grown by 10 features per step to a limit of the 250 highest-ranked features. Results show that the best statistical model selected 240 features and scored 85.96% accuracy, the best spatio-temporal model selected 230 features and scored 80.98%, and the best mixed-feature model selected 240 features from each set leading to a classification accuracy of 86.75%. When all three sets of results are compared (146 individual machine learning models), the overall distribution shows that the minimum results are increased when inputs are any number of mixed features compared to any number of either of the two single sets of features.

Gledson Melotti, Cristiano Premebida, Jordan J. Bird et al.

In state-of-the-art deep learning for object recognition, SoftMax and Sigmoid functions are most commonly employed as the predictor outputs. Such layers often produce overconfident predictions rather than proper probabilistic scores, which can thus harm the decision-making of `critical' perception systems applied in autonomous driving and robotics. Given this, the experiments in this work propose a probabilistic approach based on distributions calculated out of the Logit layer scores of pre-trained networks. We demonstrate that Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Maximum a-Posteriori (MAP) functions are more suitable for probabilistic interpretations than SoftMax and Sigmoid-based predictions for object recognition. We explore distinct sensor modalities via RGB images and LiDARs (RV: range-view) data from the KITTI and Lyft Level-5 datasets, where our approach shows promising performance compared to the usual SoftMax and Sigmoid layers, with the benefit of enabling interpretable probabilistic predictions. Another advantage of the approach introduced in this paper is that the ML and MAP functions can be implemented in existing trained networks, that is, the approach benefits from the output of the Logit layer of pre-trained networks. Thus, there is no need to carry out a new training phase since the ML and MAP functions are used in the test/prediction phase.

Jordan J. Bird

With growing societal acceptance and increasing cost efficiency due to mass production, service robots are beginning to cross from the industrial to the social domain. Currently, customer service robots tend to be digital and emulate social interactions through on-screen text, but state-of-the-art research points towards physical robots soon providing customer service in person. This article explores two possibilities. Firstly, whether transfer learning can aid in the improvement of customer service chatbots between business domains. Second, the implementation of a framework for physical robots for in-person interaction. Modelled on social interaction with Twitter customer support accounts, transformer-based chatbot models are initially assigned to learn one domain from an initial random weight distribution. Given shared vocabulary, each model is then tasked with learning another domain by transferring knowledge from the previous. Following studies on 19 different businesses, results show that the majority of models are improved when transferring weights from at least one other domain, in particular those that are more data-scarce than others. General language transfer learning occurs, as well as higher-level transfer of similar domain knowledge, in several cases. The chatbots are finally implemented on Temi and Pepper robots, with feasibility issues encountered and solutions are proposed to overcome them.

Jordan J. Bird

Much of the state-of-the-art in image synthesis inspired by real artwork are either entirely generative by filtered random noise or inspired by the transfer of style. This work explores the application of image inpainting to continue famous artworks and produce generative art with a Conditional GAN. During the training stage of the process, the borders of images are cropped, leaving only the centre. An inpainting GAN is then tasked with learning to reconstruct the original image from the centre crop by way of minimising both adversarial and absolute difference losses, which are analysed by both their Fréchet Inception Distances and manual observations which are presented. Once the network is trained, images are then resized rather than cropped and presented as input to the generator. Following the learning process, the generator then creates new images by continuing from the edges of the original piece. Three experiments are performed with datasets of 4766 landscape paintings (impressionism and romanticism), 1167 Ukiyo-e works from the Japanese Edo period, and 4968 abstract artworks. Results show that geometry and texture (including canvas and paint) as well as scenery such as sky, clouds, water, land (including hills and mountains), grass, and flowers are implemented by the generator when extending real artworks. In the Ukiyo-e experiments, it was observed that features such as written text were generated even in cases where the original image did not have any, due to the presence of an unpainted border within the input image.

Jordan J. Bird, Chloe M. Barnes, Luis J. Manso et al.

Contemporary Artificial Intelligence technologies allow for the employment of Computer Vision to discern good crops from bad, providing a step in the pipeline of selecting healthy fruit from undesirable fruit, such as those which are mouldy or gangrenous. State-of-the-art works in the field report high accuracy results on small datasets (<1000 images), which are not representative of the population regarding real-world usage. The goals of this study are to further enable real-world usage by improving generalisation with data augmentation as well as to reduce overfitting and energy usage through model pruning. In this work, we suggest a machine learning pipeline that combines the ideas of fine-tuning, transfer learning, and generative model-based training data augmentation towards improving fruit quality image classification. A linear network topology search is performed to tune a VGG16 lemon quality classification model using a publicly-available dataset of 2690 images. We find that appending a 4096 neuron fully connected layer to the convolutional layers leads to an image classification accuracy of 83.77%. We then train a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network on the training data for 2000 epochs, and it learns to generate relatively realistic images. Grad-CAM analysis of the model trained on real photographs shows that the synthetic images can exhibit classifiable characteristics such as shape, mould, and gangrene. A higher image classification accuracy of 88.75% is then attained by augmenting the training with synthetic images, arguing that Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks have the ability to produce new data to alleviate issues of data scarcity. Finally, model pruning is performed via polynomial decay, where we find that the Conditional GAN-augmented classification network can retain 81.16% classification accuracy when compressed to 50% of its original size.

Jordan J. Bird, Anikó Ekárt, Diego R. Faria

In this work, we present the Chatbot Interaction with Artificial Intelligence (CI-AI) framework as an approach to the training of deep learning chatbots for task classification. The intelligent system augments human-sourced data via artificial paraphrasing in order to generate a large set of training data for further classical, attention, and language transformation-based learning approaches for Natural Language Processing. Human beings are asked to paraphrase commands and questions for task identification for further execution of a machine. The commands and questions are split into training and validation sets. A total of 483 responses were recorded. Secondly, the training set is paraphrased by the T5 model in order to augment it with further data. Seven state-of-the-art transformer-based text classification algorithms (BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, DistilRoBERTa, XLM, XLM-RoBERTa, and XLNet) are benchmarked for both sets after fine-tuning on the training data for two epochs. We find that all models are improved when training data is augmented by the T5 model, with an average increase of classification accuracy by 4.01%. The best result was the RoBERTa model trained on T5 augmented data which achieved 98.96% classification accuracy. Finally, we found that an ensemble of the five best-performing transformer models via Logistic Regression of output label predictions led to an accuracy of 99.59% on the dataset of human responses. A highly-performing model allows the intelligent system to interpret human commands at the social-interaction level through a chatbot-like interface (e.g. "Robot, can we have a conversation?") and allows for better accessibility to AI by non-technical users.

Jordan J. Bird, Diego R. Faria, Cristiano Premebida et al.

The novelty of this study consists in a multi-modality approach to scene classification, where image and audio complement each other in a process of deep late fusion. The approach is demonstrated on a difficult classification problem, consisting of two synchronised and balanced datasets of 16,000 data objects, encompassing 4.4 hours of video of 8 environments with varying degrees of similarity. We first extract video frames and accompanying audio at one second intervals. The image and the audio datasets are first classified independently, using a fine-tuned VGG16 and an evolutionary optimised deep neural network, with accuracies of 89.27% and 93.72%, respectively. This is followed by late fusion of the two neural networks to enable a higher order function, leading to accuracy of 96.81% in this multi-modality classifier with synchronised video frames and audio clips. The tertiary neural network implemented for late fusion outperforms classical state-of-the-art classifiers by around 3% when the two primary networks are considered as feature generators. We show that situations where a single-modality may be confused by anomalous data points are now corrected through an emerging higher order integration. Prominent examples include a water feature in a city misclassified as a river by the audio classifier alone and a densely crowded street misclassified as a forest by the image classifier alone. Both are examples which are correctly classified by our multi-modality approach.

Jordan J. Bird, Diego R. Faria, Anikó Ekárt et al.

In speech recognition problems, data scarcity often poses an issue due to the willingness of humans to provide large amounts of data for learning and classification. In this work, we take a set of 5 spoken Harvard sentences from 7 subjects and consider their MFCC attributes. Using character level LSTMs (supervised learning) and OpenAI's attention-based GPT-2 models, synthetic MFCCs are generated by learning from the data provided on a per-subject basis. A neural network is trained to classify the data against a large dataset of Flickr8k speakers and is then compared to a transfer learning network performing the same task but with an initial weight distribution dictated by learning from the synthetic data generated by the two models. The best result for all of the 7 subjects were networks that had been exposed to synthetic data, the model pre-trained with LSTM-produced data achieved the best result 3 times and the GPT-2 equivalent 5 times (since one subject had their best result from both models at a draw). Through these results, we argue that speaker classification can be improved by utilising a small amount of user data but with exposure to synthetically-generated MFCCs which then allow the networks to achieve near maximum classification scores.

Jordan J. Bird, Anikó Ekárt, Diego R. Faria

In this work, we argue that the implications of Pseudo and Quantum Random Number Generators (PRNG and QRNG) inexplicably affect the performances and behaviours of various machine learning models that require a random input. These implications are yet to be explored in Soft Computing until this work. We use a CPU and a QPU to generate random numbers for multiple Machine Learning techniques. Random numbers are employed in the random initial weight distributions of Dense and Convolutional Neural Networks, in which results show a profound difference in learning patterns for the two. In 50 Dense Neural Networks (25 PRNG/25 QRNG), QRNG increases over PRNG for accent classification at +0.1%, and QRNG exceeded PRNG for mental state EEG classification by +2.82%. In 50 Convolutional Neural Networks (25 PRNG/25 QRNG), the MNIST and CIFAR-10 problems are benchmarked, in MNIST the QRNG experiences a higher starting accuracy than the PRNG but ultimately only exceeds it by 0.02%. In CIFAR-10, the QRNG outperforms PRNG by +0.92%. The n-random split of a Random Tree is enhanced towards and new Quantum Random Tree (QRT) model, which has differing classification abilities to its classical counterpart, 200 trees are trained and compared (100 PRNG/100 QRNG). Using the accent and EEG classification datasets, a QRT seemed inferior to a RT as it performed on average worse by -0.12%. This pattern is also seen in the EEG classification problem, where a QRT performs worse than a RT by -0.28%. Finally, the QRT is ensembled into a Quantum Random Forest (QRF), which also has a noticeable effect when compared to the standard Random Forest (RF)... ABSTRACT SHORTENED DUE TO ARXIV LIMIT

Jordan J. Bird, Diego R. Faria, Luis J. Manso et al.

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations.