Minjong Cheon

Minjong Cheon, Minseon Kim, Hanseon Joo

The Korean wave, which denotes the global popularity of South Korea's cultural economy, contributes to the increasing demand for the Korean language. However, as there does not exist any application for foreigners to learn Korean, this paper suggested a design of a novel Korean learning application. Speech recognition, speech-to-text, and speech-to-waveform are the three key systems in the proposed system. The Google API and the librosa library will transform the user's voice into a sentence and MFCC. The software will then display the user's phrase and answer, with mispronounced elements highlighted in red, allowing users to more easily recognize the incorrect parts of their pronunciation. Furthermore, the Siamese network might utilize those translated spectrograms to provide a similarity score, which could subsequently be used to offer feedback to the user. Despite the fact that we were unable to collect sufficient foreigner data for this research, it is notable that we presented a novel Korean pronunciation correction method for foreigners.

Minjong Cheon

Remote sensing image classification is essential for Earth observation, yet standard CNNs and Transformers often function as uninterpretable black-boxes. We propose RepKAN, a novel architecture that integrates the structural efficiency of CNNs with the non-linear representational power of KANs. By utilizing a dual-path design -- Spatial Linear and Spectral Non-linear -- RepKAN enables the autonomous discovery of class-specific spectral fingerprints and physical interaction manifolds. Experimental results on the EuroSAT and NWPU-RESISC45 datasets demonstrate that RepKAN provides explicit physically interpretable reasoning while outperforming state-of-the-art models. These findings indicate that RepKAN holds significant potential to serve as the backbone for future interpretable visual foundation models.

Minjong Cheon, Yo-Hwan Choi, Seon-Yu Kang et al.

Deep learning-based, data-driven models are gaining prevalence in climate research, particularly for global weather prediction. However, training the global weather data at high resolution requires massive computational resources. Therefore, we present a new model named KARINA to overcome the substantial computational demands typical of this field. This model achieves forecasting accuracy comparable to higher-resolution counterparts with significantly less computational resources, requiring only 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs and less than 12 hours of training. KARINA combines ConvNext, SENet, and Geocyclic Padding to enhance weather forecasting at a 2.5° resolution, which could filter out high-frequency noise. Geocyclic Padding preserves pixels at the lateral boundary of the input image, thereby maintaining atmospheric flow continuity in the spherical Earth. SENet dynamically improves feature response, advancing atmospheric process modeling, particularly in the vertical column process as numerous channels. In this vein, KARINA sets new benchmarks in weather forecasting accuracy, surpassing existing models like the ECMWF S2S reforecasts at a lead time of up to 7 days. Remarkably, KARINA achieved competitive performance even when compared to the recently developed models (Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, ClimaX, and FourCastNet) trained with high-resolution data having 100 times larger pixels. Conclusively, KARINA significantly advances global weather forecasting by efficiently modeling Earth's atmosphere with improved accuracy and resource efficiency.

Yo-Hwan Choi, Seon-Yu Kang, Minjong Cheon

As global warming increases the complexity of weather patterns; the precision of weather forecasting becomes increasingly important. Our study proposes a novel preprocessing method and convolutional autoencoder model developed to improve the interpretation of synoptic weather maps. These are critical for meteorologists seeking a thorough understanding of weather conditions. This model could recognize historical synoptic weather maps that nearly match current atmospheric conditions, marking a significant step forward in modern technology in meteorological forecasting. This comprises unsupervised learning models like VQ-VQE, as well as supervised learning models like VGG16, VGG19, Xception, InceptionV3, and ResNet50 trained on the ImageNet dataset, as well as research into newer models like EfficientNet and ConvNeXt. Our findings proved that, while these models perform well in various settings, their ability to identify comparable synoptic weather maps has certain limits. Our research, motivated by the primary goal of significantly increasing meteorologists' efficiency in labor-intensive tasks, discovered that cosine similarity is the most effective metric, as determined by a combination of quantitative and qualitative assessments to accurately identify relevant historical weather patterns. This study broadens our understanding by shifting the emphasis from numerical precision to practical application, ensuring that our model is effective in theory practical, and accessible in the complex and dynamic field of meteorology.

Hanseon Joo, Hayoung Choi, Ook Lee et al.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have garnered attention for replacing fixed activation functions with learnable univariate functions, but they exhibit practical limitations, including high computational costs and performance deficits in general classification tasks. In this paper, we propose the Modulation Joint KAN (MJKAN), a novel neural network layer designed to overcome these challenges. MJKAN integrates a FiLM (Feature-wise Linear Modulation)-like mechanism with Radial Basis Function (RBF) activations, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the non-linear expressive power of KANs with the efficiency of Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). We empirically validated MJKAN's performance across a diverse set of benchmarks, including function regression, image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10/100), and natural language processing (AG News, SMS Spam). The results demonstrate that MJKAN achieves superior approximation capabilities in function regression tasks, significantly outperforming MLPs, with performance improving as the number of basis functions increases. Conversely, in image and text classification, its performance was competitive with MLPs but revealed a critical dependency on the number of basis functions. We found that a smaller basis size was crucial for better generalization, highlighting that the model's capacity must be carefully tuned to the complexity of the data to prevent overfitting. In conclusion, MJKAN offers a flexible architecture that inherits the theoretical advantages of KANs while improving computational efficiency and practical viability.

Minjong Cheon, Changbae Mun

Recent advances in deep learning for vision tasks have seen the rise of State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba, celebrated for their linear scalability. However, their adaptation to 2D visual data often necessitates complex modifications that may diminish efficiency. In this paper, we introduce MambaOutRS, a novel hybrid convolutional architecture for remote sensing image classification that re-evaluates the necessity of recurrent SSMs. MambaOutRS builds upon stacked Gated CNN blocks for local feature extraction and introduces a novel Fourier Filter Gate (FFG) module that operates in the frequency domain to capture global contextual information efficiently. Our architecture employs a four-stage hierarchical design and was extensively evaluated on challenging remote sensing datasets: UC Merced, AID, NWPU-RESISC45, and EuroSAT. MambaOutRS consistently achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across these benchmarks. Notably, our MambaOutRS-t variant (24.0M parameters) attained the highest F1-scores of 98.41\% on UC Merced and 95.99\% on AID, significantly outperforming existing baselines, including larger transformer models and Mamba-based architectures, despite using considerably fewer parameters. An ablation study conclusively demonstrates the critical role of the Fourier Filter Gate in enhancing the model's ability to capture global spatial patterns, leading to robust and accurate classification. These results strongly suggest that the complexities of recurrent SSMs can be effectively superseded by a judicious combination of gated convolutions for spatial mixing and frequency-based gates for spectral global context. Thus, MambaOutRS provides a compelling and efficient paradigm for developing high-performance deep learning models in remote sensing and other vision domains, particularly where computational efficiency is paramount.

Minjong Cheon

The advent of Large Weather Models (LWMs) has marked a turning point in data-driven forecasting, with many models now outperforming traditional numerical systems in the medium range. However, achieving stable, long-range autoregressive forecasts beyond a few weeks remains a significant challenge. Prevailing state-of-the-art models that achieve year-long stability, such as SFNO and DLWP-HPX, have relied on transforming input data onto non-standard spatial domains like spherical harmonics or HEALPix meshes. This has led to the prevailing assumption that such representations are necessary to enforce physical consistency and long-term stability. This paper challenges that assumption by investigating whether comparable long-range performance can be achieved on the standard latitude-longitude grid. We introduce AtmosMJ, a deep convolutional network that operates directly on ERA5 data without any spherical remapping. The model's stability is enabled by a novel Gated Residual Fusion (GRF) mechanism, which adaptively moderates feature updates to prevent error accumulation over long recursive simulations. Our results demonstrate that AtmosMJ produces stable and physically plausible forecasts for about 500 days. In quantitative evaluations, it achieves competitive 10-day forecast accuracy against models like Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, all while requiring a remarkably low training budget of 5.7 days on a V100 GPU. Our findings suggest that efficient architectural design, rather than non-standard data representation, can be the key to unlocking stable and computationally efficient long-range weather prediction.

Minjong Cheon

In the realm of deep learning, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) has emerged as a potential alternative to multilayer projections (MLPs). However, its applicability to vision tasks has not been extensively validated. In our study, we demonstrated the effectiveness of KAN for vision tasks through multiple trials on the MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 datasets, using a training batch size of 32. Our results showed that while KAN outperformed the original MLP-Mixer on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, it performed slightly worse than the state-of-the-art ResNet-18. These findings suggest that KAN holds significant promise for vision tasks, and further modifications could enhance its performance in future evaluations.Our contributions are threefold: first, we showcase the efficiency of KAN-based algorithms for visual tasks; second, we provide extensive empirical assessments across various vision benchmarks, comparing KAN's performance with MLP-Mixer, CNNs, and Vision Transformers (ViT); and third, we pioneer the use of natural KAN layers in visual tasks, addressing a gap in previous research. This paper lays the foundation for future studies on KANs, highlighting their potential as a reliable alternative for image classification tasks.

Minjong Cheon

In this research, we propose the first approach for integrating the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with various pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for remote sensing (RS) scene classification tasks using the EuroSAT dataset. Our novel methodology, named KCN, aims to replace traditional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with KAN to enhance classification performance. We employed multiple CNN-based models, including VGG16, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, ResNet101, and Vision Transformer (ViT), and evaluated their performance when paired with KAN. Our experiments demonstrated that KAN achieved high accuracy with fewer training epochs and parameters. Specifically, ConvNeXt paired with KAN showed the best performance, achieving 94% accuracy in the first epoch, which increased to 96% and remained consistent across subsequent epochs. The results indicated that KAN and MLP both achieved similar accuracy, with KAN performing slightly better in later epochs. By utilizing the EuroSAT dataset, we provided a robust testbed to investigate whether KAN is suitable for remote sensing classification tasks. Given that KAN is a novel algorithm, there is substantial capacity for further development and optimization, suggesting that KCN offers a promising alternative for efficient image analysis in the RS field.