An Ngo

Evan Kellener, Ihina Nath, An Ngo et al.

The introduction of saliency map algorithms as an approach for assessing the interoperability of images has allowed for a deeper understanding of current black-box models with Artificial Intelligence. Their rise in popularity has led to these algorithms being applied in multiple fields, including medical imaging. With a classification task as important as those in the medical domain, a need for rigorous testing of their capabilities arises. Current works examine capabilities through assessing the localization of saliency maps upon medical abnormalities within an image, through comparisons with human annotations. We propose utilizing Segment Anything Model (SAM) to both further the accuracy of such existing metrics, while also generalizing beyond the need for human annotations. Our results show both high degrees of similarity to existing metrics while also highlighting the capabilities of this methodology to beyond human-annotation. Furthermore, we explore the applications (and challenges) of SAM within the medical domain, including image pre-processing before segmenting, natural language proposals to SAM in the form of CLIP-SAM, and SAM accuracy across multiple medical imaging datasets.

An Ngo, Daniel Phelps, Derrick Lai et al.

Currently, digital avatars can be created manually using human images as reference. Systems such as Bitmoji are excellent producers of detailed avatar designs, with hundreds of choices for customization. A supervised learning model could be trained to generate avatars automatically, but the hundreds of possible options create difficulty in securing non-noisy data to train a model. As a solution, we train a model to produce avatars from human images using tag-based annotations. This method provides better annotator agreement, leading to less noisy data and higher quality model predictions. Our contribution is an application of tag-based annotation to train a model for avatar face creation. We design tags for 3 different facial facial features offered by Bitmoji, and train a model using tag-based annotation to predict the nose.

Dong Hyun Roh, Rajesh Kumar, An Ngo

This paper presents a keystroke-based framework for detecting LLM-assisted cheating in Korean, addressing key gaps in prior research regarding language coverage, cognitive context, and the granularity of LLM involvement. Our proposed dataset includes 69 participants who completed writing tasks under three conditions: Bona fide writing, paraphrasing ChatGPT responses, and transcribing ChatGPT responses. Each task spans six cognitive processes defined in Bloom's Taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create). We extract interpretable temporal and rhythmic features and evaluate multiple classifiers under both Cognition-Aware and Cognition-Unaware settings. Temporal features perform well under Cognition-Aware evaluation scenarios, while rhythmic features generalize better under cross-cognition scenarios. Moreover, detecting bona fide and transcribed responses was easier than paraphrased ones for both the proposed models and human evaluators, with the models significantly outperforming the humans. Our findings affirm that keystroke dynamics facilitate reliable detection of LLM-assisted writing across varying cognitive demands and writing strategies, including paraphrasing and transcribing LLM-generated responses.

Khai Le-Duc, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Phuong T. H. Trinh et al.

Faithful reasoning in medical vision-language models (VLMs) requires not only accurate predictions but also transparent alignment between textual rationales and visual evidence. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in medical visual question answering (VQA), no large-scale expert-level dataset has captured stepwise reasoning with precise visual grounding. We introduce S-Chain, the first large-scale dataset of 12,000 expert-annotated medical images with bounding boxes and structured visual CoT (SV-CoT), explicitly linking visual regions to reasoning steps. The dataset further supports 16 languages, totaling over 700k VQA pairs for broad multilingual applicability. Using S-Chain, we benchmark state-of-the-art medical VLMs (ExGra-Med, LLaVA-Med) and general-purpose VLMs (Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL2.5), showing that SV-CoT supervision significantly improves interpretability, grounding fidelity, and robustness. Beyond benchmarking, we study its synergy with retrieval-augmented generation, revealing how domain knowledge and visual grounding interact during autoregressive reasoning. Finally, we propose a new mechanism that strengthens the alignment between visual evidence and reasoning, improving both reliability and efficiency. S-Chain establishes a new benchmark for grounded medical reasoning and paves the way toward more trustworthy and explainable medical VLMs.