Mohannad Elhamod

Mohannad Elhamod, Mridul Khurana, Harish Babu Manogaran et al.

Discovering evolutionary traits that are heritable across species on the tree of life (also referred to as a phylogenetic tree) is of great interest to biologists to understand how organisms diversify and evolve. However, the measurement of traits is often a subjective and labor-intensive process, making trait discovery a highly label-scarce problem. We present a novel approach for discovering evolutionary traits directly from images without relying on trait labels. Our proposed approach, Phylo-NN, encodes the image of an organism into a sequence of quantized feature vectors -- or codes -- where different segments of the sequence capture evolutionary signals at varying ancestry levels in the phylogeny. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in producing biologically meaningful results in a number of downstream tasks including species image generation and species-to-species image translation, using fish species as a target example.

Mohannad Elhamod, Anuj Karpatne

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in visualizing the loss landscape of neural networks. Linear landscape visualization methods, such as principal component analysis, have become widely used as they intuitively help researchers study neural networks and their training process. However, these linear methods suffer from limitations and drawbacks due to their lack of flexibility and low fidelity at representing the high dimensional landscape. In this paper, we present a novel auto-encoder-based non-linear landscape visualization method called Neuro-Visualizer that addresses these shortcoming and provides useful insights about neural network loss landscapes. To demonstrate its potential, we run experiments on a variety of problems in two separate applications of knowledge-guided machine learning (KGML). Our findings show that Neuro-Visualizer outperforms other linear and non-linear baselines and helps corroborate, and sometime challenge, claims proposed by machine learning community. All code and data used in the experiments of this paper are available at an anonymous link https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NeuroVisualizer-FDD6

Ran Zhang, Mohannad Elhamod

The rapid advancement of LLMs has led to the creation of diverse agentic systems in data analysis, utilizing LLMs' capabilities to improve insight generation and visualization. In this paper, we present an agentic system that automates the data-to-dashboard pipeline through modular LLM agents capable of domain detection, concept extraction, multi-perspective analysis generation, and iterative self-reflection. Unlike existing chart QA systems, our framework simulates the analytical reasoning process of business analysts by retrieving domain-relevant knowledge and adapting to diverse datasets without relying on closed ontologies or question templates. We evaluate our system on three datasets across different domains. Benchmarked against GPT-4o with a single-prompt baseline, our approach shows improved insightfulness, domain relevance, and analytical depth, as measured by tailored evaluation metrics and qualitative human assessment. This work contributes a novel modular pipeline to bridge the path from raw data to visualization, and opens new opportunities for human-in-the-loop validation by domain experts in business analytics. All code can be found here: https://github.com/77luvC/D2D_Data2Dashboard

Mohannad Elhamod, Jie Bu, Christopher Singh et al.

Physics-guided Neural Networks (PGNNs) represent an emerging class of neural networks that are trained using physics-guided (PG) loss functions (capturing violations in network outputs with known physics), along with the supervision contained in data. Existing work in PGNNs has demonstrated the efficacy of adding single PG loss functions in the neural network objectives, using constant trade-off parameters, to ensure better generalizability. However, in the presence of multiple PG functions with competing gradient directions, there is a need to adaptively tune the contribution of different PG loss functions during the course of training to arrive at generalizable solutions. We demonstrate the presence of competing PG losses in the generic neural network problem of solving for the lowest (or highest) eigenvector of a physics-based eigenvalue equation, which is commonly encountered in many scientific problems. We present a novel approach to handle competing PG losses and demonstrate its efficacy in learning generalizable solutions in two motivating applications of quantum mechanics and electromagnetic propagation. All the code and data used in this work is available at https://github.com/jayroxis/Cophy-PGNN.