Cuong Pham

Cuong Pham, Cuong C. Nguyen, Trung Le et al.

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer probability distributions for model parameters, enabling uncertainty quantification in predictions. However, they often underperform compared to deterministic neural networks. Utilizing mutual learning can effectively enhance the performance of peer BNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve BNNs performance through deep mutual learning. The proposed approaches aim to increase diversity in both network parameter distributions and feature distributions, promoting peer networks to acquire distinct features that capture different characteristics of the input, which enhances the effectiveness of mutual learning. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the classification accuracy, negative log-likelihood, and expected calibration error when compared to traditional mutual learning for BNNs.

Thai-Khanh Nguyen, Uyen Vo, Tan M. Nguyen et al.

Human activity recognition (HAR) from inertial sensors is essential for ubiquitous computing, mobile health, and ambient intelligence. Conventional deep models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and transformers have advanced HAR but remain limited by vanishing or exloding gradients, high computational cost, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Structured state-space models (SSMs) like Mamba address these challenges with linear complexity and effective temporal modeling, yet they are restricted to first-order dynamics without stable longterm memory mechanisms. We introduce Momentum Mamba, a momentum-augmented SSM that incorporates second-order dynamics to improve stability of information flow across time steps, robustness, and long-sequence modeling. Two extensions further expand its capacity: Complex Momentum Mamba for frequency-selective memory scaling. Experiments on multiple HAR benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over vanilla Mamba and Transformer baselines in accuracy, robustness, and convergence speed. With only moderate increases in training cost, momentum-augmented SSMs offer a favorable accuracy-efficiency balance, establishing them as a scalable paradigm for HAR and a promising principal framework for broader sequence modeling applications.

Yifeng Huang, Duc Duy Nguyen, Lam Nguyen et al.

This paper addresses the task of counting human actions of interest using sensor data from wearable devices. We propose a novel exemplar-based framework, allowing users to provide exemplars of the actions they want to count by vocalizing predefined sounds ''one'', ''two'', and ''three''. Our method first localizes temporal positions of these utterances from the audio sequence. These positions serve as the basis for identifying exemplars representing the action class of interest. A similarity map is then computed between the exemplars and the entire sensor data sequence, which is further fed into a density estimation module to generate a sequence of estimated density values. Summing these density values provides the final count. To develop and evaluate our approach, we introduce a diverse and realistic dataset consisting of real-world data from 37 subjects and 50 action categories, encompassing both sensor and audio data. The experiments on this dataset demonstrate the viability of the proposed method in counting instances of actions from new classes and subjects that were not part of the training data. On average, the discrepancy between the predicted count and the ground truth value is 7.47, significantly lower than the errors of the frequency-based and transformer-based methods. Our project, code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/ExRAC.

Trong-Tung Nguyen, Duc-Anh Nguyen, Anh Tran et al.

Our work addresses limitations seen in previous approaches for object-centric editing problems, such as unrealistic results due to shape discrepancies and limited control in object replacement or insertion. To this end, we introduce FlexEdit, a flexible and controllable editing framework for objects where we iteratively adjust latents at each denoising step using our FlexEdit block. Initially, we optimize latents at test time to align with specified object constraints. Then, our framework employs an adaptive mask, automatically extracted during denoising, to protect the background while seamlessly blending new content into the target image. We demonstrate the versatility of FlexEdit in various object editing tasks and curate an evaluation test suite with samples from both real and synthetic images, along with novel evaluation metrics designed for object-centric editing. We conduct extensive experiments on different editing scenarios, demonstrating the superiority of our editing framework over recent advanced text-guided image editing methods. Our project page is published at https://flex-edit.github.io/.

Kien Nguyen, Anh Tran, Cuong Pham

The rapid growth of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about their potential misuse in generating harmful or unauthorized contents. To address these issues, several Concept Erasure methods have been proposed. However, most of them fail to achieve both robustness, i.e., the ability to robustly remove the target concept., and effectiveness, i.e., maintaining image quality. While few recent techniques successfully achieve these goals for NSFW concepts, none could handle narrow concepts such as copyrighted characters or celebrities. Erasing these narrow concepts is critical in addressing copyright and legal concerns. However, erasing them is challenging due to their close distances to non-target neighboring concepts, requiring finer-grained manipulation. In this paper, we introduce Subspace Mapping (SuMa), a novel method specifically designed to achieve both robustness and effectiveness in easing these narrow concepts. SuMa first derives a target subspace representing the concept to be erased and then neutralizes it by mapping it to a reference subspace that minimizes the distance between the two. This mapping ensures the target concept is robustly erased while preserving image quality. We conduct extensive experiments with SuMa across four tasks: subclass erasure, celebrity erasure, artistic style erasure, and instance erasure and compare the results with current state-of-the-art methods. Our method achieves image quality comparable to approaches focused on effectiveness, while also yielding results that are on par with methods targeting completeness.

Bao Q. Bui, Tien T. T. Nguyen, Duy M. Le et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the classification and detection of Silicosis-related lung inflammation. Our main contributions include 1) the creation of a newly curated chest X-ray (CXR) image dataset named SVBCX that is tailored to the nuances of lung inflammation caused by distinct agents, providing a valuable resource for silicosis and pneumonia research community; and 2) we propose a novel deep-learning architecture that integrates graph transformer networks alongside a traditional deep neural network module for the effective classification of silicosis and pneumonia. Additionally, we employ the Balanced Cross-Entropy (BalCE) as a loss function to ensure more uniform learning across different classes, enhancing the model's ability to discern subtle differences in lung conditions. The proposed model architecture and loss function selection aim to improve the accuracy and reliability of inflammation detection, particularly in the context of Silicosis. Furthermore, our research explores the efficacy of an ensemble approach that combines the strengths of diverse model architectures. Experimental results on the constructed dataset demonstrate promising outcomes, showcasing substantial enhancements compared to baseline models. The ensemble of models achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.9749 and AUC ROC scores exceeding 0.99 for each class, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach in accurate and robust lung inflammation classification.

Quang Nguyen, Truong Vu, Cuong Pham et al.

In the ever-expanding digital landscape, safeguarding sensitive information remains paramount. This paper delves deep into digital protection, specifically focusing on steganography. While prior research predominantly fixated on individual bit decoding, we address this limitation by introducing ``message accuracy'', a novel metric evaluating the entirety of decoded messages for a more holistic evaluation. In addition, we propose an adaptive universal loss tailored to enhance message accuracy, named Log-Sum-Exponential (LSE) loss, thereby significantly improving the message accuracy of recent approaches. Furthermore, we also introduce a new latent-aware encoding technique in our framework named \Approach, harnessing pretrained Stable Diffusion for advanced steganographic image generation, giving rise to a better trade-off between image quality and message recovery. Throughout experimental results, we have demonstrated the superior performance of the new LSE loss and latent-aware encoding technique. This comprehensive approach marks a significant step in evolving evaluation metrics, refining loss functions, and innovating image concealment techniques, aiming for more robust and dependable information protection.

Ngan Dao Hoang, Dat Tran-Anh, Manh Luong et al.

Automatically classifying cough sounds is one of the most critical tasks for the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. However, collecting a huge amount of labeled cough dataset is challenging mainly due to high laborious expenses, data scarcity, and privacy concerns. In this work, our aim is to develop a framework that can effectively perform cough classification even in situations when enormous cough data is not available, while also addressing privacy concerns. Specifically, we formulate a new problem to tackle these challenges and adopt few-shot learning and federated learning to design a novel framework, termed F2LCough, for solving the newly formulated problem. We illustrate the superiority of our method compared with other approaches on COVID-19 Thermal Face & Cough dataset, in which F2LCough achieves an average F1-Score of 86%. Our results show the feasibility of few-shot learning combined with federated learning to build a classification model of cough sounds. This new methodology is able to classify cough sounds in data-scarce situations and maintain privacy properties. The outcomes of this work can be a fundamental framework for building support systems for the detection and diagnosis of cough-related diseases.