Zahraa Al Sahili

Zahraa Al Sahili, Mariette Awad

Graph Neural Networks have gained huge interest in the past few years. These powerful algorithms expanded deep learning models to non-Euclidean space and were able to achieve state of art performance in various applications including recommender systems and social networks. However, this performance is based on static graph structures assumption which limits the Graph Neural Networks performance when the data varies with time. Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks are extension of Graph Neural Networks that takes the time factor into account. Recently, various Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network algorithms were proposed and achieved superior performance compared to other deep learning algorithms in several time dependent applications. This survey discusses interesting topics related to Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks, including algorithms, applications, and open challenges.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Mariette Awad

Advances in deep learning and transfer learning have paved the way for various automation classification tasks in agriculture, including plant diseases, pests, weeds, and plant species detection. However, agriculture automation still faces various challenges, such as the limited size of datasets and the absence of plant-domain-specific pretrained models. Domain specific pretrained models have shown state of art performance in various computer vision tasks including face recognition and medical imaging diagnosis. In this paper, we propose AgriNet dataset, a collection of 160k agricultural images from more than 19 geographical locations, several images captioning devices, and more than 423 classes of plant species and diseases. We also introduce AgriNet models, a set of pretrained models on five ImageNet architectures: VGG16, VGG19, Inception-v3, InceptionResNet-v2, and Xception. AgriNet-VGG19 achieved the highest classification accuracy of 94 % and the highest F1-score of 92%. Additionally, all proposed models were found to accurately classify the 423 classes of plant species, diseases, pests, and weeds with a minimum accuracy of 87% for the Inception-v3 model.Finally, experiments to evaluate of superiority of AgriNet models compared to ImageNet models were conducted on two external datasets: pest and plant diseases dataset from Bangladesh and a plant diseases dataset from Kashmir.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, Matthew Purver

Multimodal machine learning (MML) is rapidly reshaping the way mental-health disorders are detected, characterized, and longitudinally monitored. Whereas early studies relied on isolated data streams -- such as speech, text, or wearable signals -- recent research has converged on architectures that integrate heterogeneous modalities to capture the rich, complex signatures of psychiatric conditions. This survey provides the first comprehensive, clinically grounded synthesis of MML for mental health. We (i) catalog 26 public datasets spanning audio, visual, physiological signals, and text modalities; (ii) systematically compare transformer, graph, and hybrid-based fusion strategies across 28 models, highlighting trends in representation learning and cross-modal alignment. Beyond summarizing current capabilities, we interrogate open challenges: data governance and privacy, demographic and intersectional fairness, evaluation explainability, and the complexity of mental health disorders in multimodal settings. By bridging methodological innovation with psychiatric utility, this survey aims to orient both ML researchers and mental-health practitioners toward the next generation of trustworthy, multimodal decision-support systems.

Xianyuan Liu, Jiayang Zhang, Shuo Zhou et al.

Multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) integrates diverse types of data via machine learning to improve understanding, prediction, and decision-making across disciplines such as healthcare, science, and engineering. However, most multimodal AI advances focus on models for vision and language data, while their deployability remains a key challenge. We advocate a deployment-centric workflow that incorporates deployment constraints early to reduce the likelihood of undeployable solutions, complementing data-centric and model-centric approaches. We also emphasise deeper integration across multiple levels of multimodality and multidisciplinary collaboration to significantly broaden the research scope beyond vision and language. To facilitate this approach, we identify common multimodal-AI-specific challenges shared across disciplines and examine three real-world use cases: pandemic response, self-driving car design, and climate change adaptation, drawing expertise from healthcare, social science, engineering, science, sustainability, and finance. By fostering multidisciplinary dialogue and open research practices, our community can accelerate deployment-centric development for broad societal impact.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, Matthew Purver

Vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong zero-shot recognition but frequently inherit social biases from their training data. We systematically disentangle three design factors -- model size, training-data scale, and training-data source -- by comparing CLIP and OpenCLIP, two models that share an identical contrastive objective yet differ in encoder width and in the image-text corpora on which they are pre-trained (400M proprietary pairs vs. 400M/2B LAION). Across balanced face-analysis benchmarks, enlarging the encoder reduces gender skew in CLIP but amplifies both gender and racial skew in OpenCLIP; increasing the LAION corpus from 400M to 2B further increases OpenCLIP bias. At matched model and data budgets, substituting proprietary data with LAION improves gender fairness while increasing racial skew, underscoring data source as the primary driver of bias patterns. We also evaluate three post-hoc, test-time debiasing strategies -- Bias Prompts, Prompt Array, and SANER. Debiasing reduces but does not eliminate harm, and its effectiveness is source- and size-dependent: Bias Prompts most effectively reduce gender skew in CLIP at smaller model sizes, whereas Prompt Array and SANER more reliably reduce racial skew in OpenCLIP; scaling LAION reconfigures which method is most fair. Taken together, these findings challenge the assumption that bigger models or datasets are automatically fairer and foreground training data source as the key determinant of both bias and mitigation efficacy. We release code and evaluation scripts to enable transparent, reproducible auditing of future VLMs.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Maryam Fetanat, Maimuna Nowaz et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) systems lack simple, reproducible ways to evaluate how well images match prompts and how models treat social attributes. Common proxies -- face classifiers and contrastive similarity -- reward surface cues, lack calibrated abstention, and miss attributes only weakly visible (for example, religion, culture, disability). We present FairJudge, a lightweight protocol that treats instruction-following multimodal LLMs as fair judges. It scores alignment with an explanation-oriented rubric mapped to [-1, 1]; constrains judgments to a closed label set; requires evidence grounded in the visible content; and mandates abstention when cues are insufficient. Unlike CLIP-only pipelines, FairJudge yields accountable, evidence-aware decisions; unlike mitigation that alters generators, it targets evaluation fairness. We evaluate gender, race, and age on FairFace, PaTA, and FairCoT; extend to religion, culture, and disability; and assess profession correctness and alignment on IdenProf, FairCoT-Professions, and our new DIVERSIFY-Professions. We also release DIVERSIFY, a 469-image corpus of diverse, non-iconic scenes. Across datasets, judge models outperform contrastive and face-centric baselines on demographic prediction and improve mean alignment while maintaining high profession accuracy, enabling more reliable, reproducible fairness audits.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, Matthew Purver

Multilingual vision-language models (VLMs) promise universal image-text retrieval, yet their social biases remain underexplored. We perform the first systematic audit of four public multilingual CLIP variants: M-CLIP, NLLB-CLIP, CAPIVARA-CLIP, and the debiased SigLIP-2, covering ten languages that differ in resource availability and morphological gender marking. Using balanced subsets of FairFace and the PATA stereotype suite in a zero-shot setting, we quantify race and gender bias and measure stereotype amplification. Contrary to the intuition that multilinguality mitigates bias, every model exhibits stronger gender skew than its English-only baseline. CAPIVARA-CLIP shows its largest biases precisely in the low-resource languages it targets, while the shared encoder of NLLB-CLIP and SigLIP-2 transfers English gender stereotypes into gender-neutral languages; loosely coupled encoders largely avoid this leakage. Although SigLIP-2 reduces agency and communion skews, it inherits -- and in caption-sparse contexts (e.g., Xhosa) amplifies -- the English anchor's crime associations. Highly gendered languages consistently magnify all bias types, yet gender-neutral languages remain vulnerable whenever cross-lingual weight sharing imports foreign stereotypes. Aggregated metrics thus mask language-specific hot spots, underscoring the need for fine-grained, language-aware bias evaluation in future multilingual VLM research.

Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, Matthew Purver

In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in text to image models through Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models. FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement to systematically mitigate biases, and dynamically adjusts textual prompts in real time, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across popular text-to-image systems including DALLE and various Stable Diffusion variants, demonstrate that FairCoT significantly enhances fairness and diversity without sacrificing image quality or semantic fidelity. By combining robust reasoning, lightweight deployment, and extensibility to multiple models, FairCoT represents a promising step toward more socially responsible and transparent AI driven content generation.