Syed Javed

Shriyank Somvanshi, Subasish Das, Syed Aaqib Javed et al.

Tabular data, widely used in industries like healthcare, finance, and transportation, presents unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous nature and lack of spatial structure. This survey reviews the evolution of deep learning models for tabular data, from early fully connected networks (FCNs) to advanced architectures like TabNet, SAINT, TabTranSELU, and MambaNet. These models incorporate attention mechanisms, feature embeddings, and hybrid architectures to address tabular data complexities. TabNet uses sequential attention for instance-wise feature selection, improving interpretability, while SAINT combines self-attention and intersample attention to capture complex interactions across features and data points, both advancing scalability and reducing computational overhead. Hybrid architectures such as TabTransformer and FT-Transformer integrate attention mechanisms with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to handle categorical and numerical data, with FT-Transformer adapting transformers for tabular datasets. Research continues to balance performance and efficiency for large datasets. Graph-based models like GNN4TDL and GANDALF combine neural networks with decision trees or graph structures, enhancing feature representation and mitigating overfitting in small datasets through advanced regularization techniques. Diffusion-based models like the Tabular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (TabDDPM) generate synthetic data to address data scarcity, improving model robustness. Similarly, models like TabPFN and Ptab leverage pre-trained language models, incorporating transfer learning and self-supervised techniques into tabular tasks. This survey highlights key advancements and outlines future research directions on scalability, generalization, and interpretability in diverse tabular data applications.

Shriyank Somvanshi, Md Monzurul Islam, Syed Aaqib Javed et al.

Bio-inspired algorithms utilize natural processes such as evolution, swarm behavior, foraging, and plant growth to solve complex, nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization problems. However, a plethora of these algorithms require a more rigorous review before making them applicable to the relevant fields. This survey categorizes these algorithms into eight groups: evolutionary, swarm intelligence, physics-inspired, ecosystem and plant-based, predator-prey, neural-inspired, human-inspired, and hybrid approaches, and reviews their principles, strengths, novelty, and critical limitations. We provide a critique on the novelty issues of many of these algorithms. We illustrate some of the suitable usage of the prominent algorithms in machine learning, engineering design, bioinformatics, and intelligent systems, and highlight recent advances in hybridization, parameter tuning, and adaptive strategies. Finally, we identify open challenges such as scalability, convergence, reliability, and interpretability to suggest directions for future research. This work aims to serve as a resource for both researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the current landscape and future directions of reliable and authentic advancement of bio-inspired algorithms.

Waqas Sultani, Wajahat Nawaz, Syed Javed et al.

Malaria, a fatal but curable disease claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Early and correct diagnosis is vital to avoid health complexities, however, it depends upon the availability of costly microscopes and trained experts to analyze blood-smear slides. Deep learning-based methods have the potential to not only decrease the burden of experts but also improve diagnostic accuracy on low-cost microscopes. However, this is hampered by the absence of a reasonable size dataset. One of the most challenging aspects is the reluctance of the experts to annotate the dataset at low magnification on low-cost microscopes. We present a dataset to further the research on malaria microscopy over the low-cost microscopes at low magnification. Our large-scale dataset consists of images of blood-smear slides from several malaria-infected patients, collected through microscopes at two different cost spectrums and multiple magnifications. Malarial cells are annotated for the localization and life-stage classification task on the images collected through the high-cost microscope at high magnification. We design a mechanism to transfer these annotations from the high-cost microscope at high magnification to the low-cost microscope, at multiple magnifications. Multiple object detectors and domain adaptation methods are presented as the baselines. Furthermore, a partially supervised domain adaptation method is introduced to adapt the object-detector to work on the images collected from the low-cost microscope. The dataset will be made publicly available after publication.