Muhammad Saqib

Humza Naveed, Asad Ullah Khan, Shi Qiu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations, better training strategies, context length improvements, fine-tuning, multi-modal LLMs, robotics, datasets, benchmarking, efficiency, and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides an overview of the existing literature on a broad range of LLM-related concepts. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of research in LLMs. This review article is intended to not only provide a systematic survey but also a quick comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research.

Md Tanvir Islam, Nasir Rahim, Saeed Anwar et al.

Reducing the atmospheric haze and enhancing image clarity is crucial for computer vision applications. The lack of real-life hazy ground truth images necessitates synthetic datasets, which often lack diverse haze types, impeding effective haze type classification and dehazing algorithm selection. This research introduces the HazeSpace2M dataset, a collection of over 2 million images designed to enhance dehazing through haze type classification. HazeSpace2M includes diverse scenes with 10 haze intensity levels, featuring Fog, Cloud, and Environmental Haze (EH). Using the dataset, we introduce a technique of haze type classification followed by specialized dehazers to clear hazy images. Unlike conventional methods, our approach classifies haze types before applying type-specific dehazing, improving clarity in real-life hazy images. Benchmarking with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, ResNet50 and AlexNet achieve 92.75\% and 92.50\% accuracy, respectively, against existing synthetic datasets. However, these models achieve only 80% and 70% accuracy, respectively, against our Real Hazy Testset (RHT), highlighting the challenging nature of our HazeSpace2M dataset. Additional experiments show that haze type classification followed by specialized dehazing improves results by 2.41% in PSNR, 17.14% in SSIM, and 10.2\% in MSE over general dehazers. Moreover, when testing with SOTA dehazing models, we found that applying our proposed framework significantly improves their performance. These results underscore the significance of HazeSpace2M and our proposed framework in addressing atmospheric haze in multimedia processing. Complete code and dataset is available on \href{https://github.com/tanvirnwu/HazeSpace2M} {\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{GitHub}}}.

Tejas Karkera, Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay et al.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is considered one of the significant concerns worldwide, primarily due to its impact on causing vision loss among most people with diabetes. The severity of DR is typically comprehended manually by ophthalmologists from fundus photography-based retina images. This paper deals with an automated understanding of the severity stages of DR. In the literature, researchers have focused on this automation using traditional machine learning-based algorithms and convolutional architectures. However, the past works hardly focused on essential parts of the retinal image to improve the model performance. In this study, we adopt and fine-tune transformer-based learning models to capture the crucial features of retinal images for a more nuanced understanding of DR severity. Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of image transformers to infer the degree of DR severity from fundus photographs. For experiments, we utilized the publicly available APTOS-2019 blindness detection dataset, where the performances of the transformer-based models were quite encouraging.

Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Muhammad Saqib

With the proliferation of the e-commerce industry, analyzing customer feedback is becoming indispensable to a service provider. In recent days, it can be noticed that customers upload the purchased product images with their review scores. In this paper, we undertake the task of analyzing such visual reviews, which is very new of its kind. In the past, the researchers worked on analyzing language feedback, but here we do not take any assistance from linguistic reviews that may be absent, since a recent trend can be observed where customers prefer to quickly upload the visual feedback instead of typing language feedback. We propose a hierarchical architecture, where the higher-level model engages in product categorization, and the lower-level model pays attention to predicting the review score from a customer-provided product image. We generated a database by procuring real visual product reviews, which was quite challenging. Our architecture obtained some promising results by performing extensive experiments on the employed database. The proposed hierarchical architecture attained a 57.48% performance improvement over the single-level best comparable architecture.

Asma Alkalbani, Muhammad Saqib, Ahmed Salim Alrawahi et al.

Road damage detection and assessment are crucial components of infrastructure maintenance. However, current methods often struggle with detecting multiple types of road damage in a single image, particularly at varying scales. This is due to the lack of road datasets with various damage types having varying scales. To overcome this deficiency, first, we present a novel dataset called Diverse Road Damage Dataset (DRDD) for road damage detection that captures the diverse road damage types in individual images, addressing a crucial gap in existing datasets. Then, we provide our model, RDD4D, that exploits Attention4D blocks, enabling better feature refinement across multiple scales. The Attention4D module processes feature maps through an attention mechanism combining positional encoding and "Talking Head" components to capture local and global contextual information. In our comprehensive experimental analysis comparing various state-of-the-art models on our proposed, our enhanced model demonstrated superior performance in detecting large-sized road cracks with an Average Precision (AP) of 0.458 and maintained competitive performance with an overall AP of 0.445. Moreover, we also provide results on the CrackTinyNet dataset; our model achieved around a 0.21 increase in performance. The code, model weights, dataset, and our results are available on \href{https://github.com/msaqib17/Road_Damage_Detection}{https://github.com/msaqib17/Road\_Damage\_Detection}.

Haoxin Lv, Ijazul Haq, Jin Du et al.

The advancement of artificial intelligence in oral healthcare relies on the availability of large-scale multimodal datasets that capture the complexity of clinical practice. In this paper, we present a comprehensive multimodal dataset, comprising 8775 dental checkups from 4800 patients collected over eight years (2018-2025), with patients ranging from 10 to 90 years of age. The dataset includes 50000 intraoral images, 8056 radiographs, and detailed textual records, including diagnoses, treatment plans, and follow-up notes. The data were collected under standard ethical guidelines and annotated for benchmarking. To demonstrate its utility, we fine-tuned state-of-the-art large vision-language models, Qwen-VL 3B and 7B, and evaluated them on two tasks: classification of six oro-dental anomalies and generation of complete diagnostic reports from multimodal inputs. We compared the fine-tuned models with their base counterparts and GPT-4o. The fine-tuned models achieved substantial gains over these baselines, validating the dataset and underscoring its effectiveness in advancing AI-driven oro-dental healthcare solutions. The dataset is publicly available, providing an essential resource for future research in AI dentistry.

Shubham Malhotra, Fnu Yashu, Muhammad Saqib et al.

This report investigates the application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms for dynamic resource allocation in wireless communication systems. An environment that includes a base station, multiple antennas, and user equipment is created. Using the RLlib library, various DRL algorithms such as Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are then applied. These algorithms are compared based on their ability to optimize resource allocation, focusing on the impact of different learning rates and scheduling policies. The findings demonstrate that the choice of algorithm and learning rate significantly influences system performance, with DRL providing more efficient resource allocation compared to traditional methods.

Muhammad Saqib, Dipkumar Mehta, Fnu Yashu et al.

The security of cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), is complex and dynamic. Static security policies have become inadequate as threats evolve and cloud resources exhibit elasticity [1]. This paper addresses the limitations of static policies by proposing a security policy management framework that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to adapt dynamically. Specifically, we employ deep reinforcement learning algorithms, including deep Q Networks and proximal policy optimization, enabling the learning and continuous adjustment of controls such as firewall rules and Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. The proposed RL based solution leverages cloud telemetry data (AWS Cloud Trail logs, network traffic data, threat intelligence feeds) to continuously refine security policies, maximizing threat mitigation, and compliance while minimizing resource impact. Experimental results demonstrate that our adaptive RL based framework significantly outperforms static policies, achieving higher intrusion detection rates (92% compared to 82% for static policies) and substantially reducing incident detection and response times by 58%. In addition, it maintains high conformity with security requirements and efficient resource usage. These findings validate the effectiveness of adaptive reinforcement learning approaches in improving cloud security policy management.

Khawlah Bajbaa, Abbas Anwar, Muhammad Saqib et al.

Street view imagery has become an essential source for geospatial data collection and urban analytics, enabling the extraction of valuable insights that support informed decision-making. However, synthesizing street-view images from corresponding satellite imagery presents significant challenges due to substantial differences in appearance and viewing perspective between these two domains. This paper presents a hybrid framework that integrates diffusion-based models and conditional generative adversarial networks to generate geographically consistent street-view images from satellite imagery. Our approach uses a multi-stage training strategy that incorporates Stable Diffusion as the core component within a dual-branch architecture. To enhance the framework's capabilities, we integrate a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that enables the generation of geographically consistent panoramic street views. Furthermore, we implement a fusion strategy that leverages the strengths of both models to create robust representations, thereby improving the geometric consistency and visual quality of the generated street-view images. The proposed framework is evaluated on the challenging Cross-View USA (CVUSA) dataset, a standard benchmark for cross-view image synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid approach outperforms diffusion-only methods across multiple evaluation metrics and achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. The framework successfully generates realistic and geometrically consistent street-view images while preserving fine-grained local details, including street markings, secondary roads, and atmospheric elements such as clouds.

Ijazul Haq, Muhammad Saqib, Yingjie Zhang

Spatial grounding, the process of associating natural language expressions with corresponding image regions, has rapidly advanced due to the introduction of transformer-based models, significantly enhancing multimodal representation and cross-modal alignment. Despite this progress, the field lacks a comprehensive synthesis of current methodologies, dataset usage, evaluation metrics, and industrial applicability. This paper presents a systematic literature review of transformer-based spatial grounding approaches from 2018 to 2025. Our analysis identifies dominant model architectures, prevalent datasets, and widely adopted evaluation metrics, alongside highlighting key methodological trends and best practices. This study provides essential insights and structured guidance for researchers and practitioners, facilitating the development of robust, reliable, and industry-ready transformer-based spatial grounding models.

Dawei Du, Longyin Wen, Pengfei Zhu et al.

Crowd counting on the drone platform is an interesting topic in computer vision, which brings new challenges such as small object inference, background clutter and wide viewpoint. However, there are few algorithms focusing on crowd counting on the drone-captured data due to the lack of comprehensive datasets. To this end, we collect a large-scale dataset and organize the Vision Meets Drone Crowd Counting Challenge (VisDrone-CC2020) in conjunction with the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2020) to promote the developments in the related fields. The collected dataset is formed by $3,360$ images, including $2,460$ images for training, and $900$ images for testing. Specifically, we manually annotate persons with points in each video frame. There are $14$ algorithms from $15$ institutes submitted to the VisDrone-CC2020 Challenge. We provide a detailed analysis of the evaluation results and conclude the challenge. More information can be found at the website: \url{http://www.aiskyeye.com/}.

Rauf Momin, Ali Shan Momin, Khalid Rasheed et al.

Facial expressions are the most common universal forms of body language. In the past few years, automatic facial expression recognition (FER) has been an active field of research. However, it is still a challenging task due to different uncertainties and complications. Nevertheless, efficiency and performance are yet essential aspects for building robust systems. We proposed two models, EmoXNet which is an ensemble learning technique for learning convoluted facial representations, and EmoXNetLite which is a distillation technique that is useful for transferring the knowledge from our ensemble model to an efficient deep neural network using label-smoothen soft labels for able to effectively detect expressions in real-time. Both of the techniques performed quite well, where the ensemble model (EmoXNet) helped to achieve 85.07% test accuracy on FER2013 with FER+ annotations and 86.25% test accuracy on RAF-DB. Moreover, the distilled model (EmoXNetLite) showed 82.07% test accuracy on FER2013 with FER+ annotations and 81.78% test accuracy on RAF-DB. Results show that our models seem to generalize well on new data and are learned to focus on relevant facial representations for expressions recognition.

Abbas Anwar, Saira Kanwal, Muhammad Tahir et al.

Automatic image aesthetics assessment is a computer vision problem dealing with categorizing images into different aesthetic levels. The categorization is usually done by analyzing an input image and computing some measure of the degree to which the image adheres to the fundamental principles of photography such as balance, rhythm, harmony, contrast, unity, look, feel, tone and texture. Due to its diverse applications in many areas, automatic image aesthetic assessment has gained significant research attention in recent years. This article presents a review of the contemporary automatic image aesthetics assessment techniques. Many traditional hand-crafted and deep learning-based approaches are reviewed, and critical problem aspects are discussed, including why some features or models perform better than others and the limitations. A comparison of the quantitative results of different methods is also provided.

Sultan Daud Khan, Muhammad Saqib, Michael Blumenstein

As the population of world is increasing, and even more concentrated in urban areas, ensuring public safety is becoming a taunting job for security personnel and crowd managers. Mass events like sports, festivals, concerts, political gatherings attract thousand of people in a constraint environment,therefore adequate safety measures should be adopted. Despite safety measures, crowd disasters still occur frequently. Understanding underlying dynamics and behavior of crowd is becoming areas of interest for most of computer scientists. In recent years, researchers developed several models for understanding crowd dynamics. These models should be properly calibrated and validated by means of data acquired in the field. In this paper, we developed a computer vision tool set that can be helpful not only in initializing the crowd simulation models but can also validate the simulation results. The main features of proposed tool set are: (1) Crowd flow segmentation and crowd counting, (2) Identifying source/sink location for understanding crowd behavior, (3) Group detection and tracking in crowds.