Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

Tadesse K. Bahiru, Haileleol Tibebu, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

Artificial intelligence has transformed numerous industries, from healthcare to finance, enhancing decision-making through automated systems. However, the reliability of these systems is mainly dependent on the quality of the underlying datasets, raising ongoing concerns about transparency, accountability, and potential biases. This paper introduces a scorecard designed to evaluate the development of AI datasets, focusing on five key areas from the system card framework data development life cycle: data dictionary, collection process, composition, motivation, and pre-processing. The method follows a structured approach, using an intake form and scoring criteria to assess the quality and completeness of the data set. Applied to four diverse datasets, the methodology reveals strengths and improvement areas. The results are compiled using a scoring system that provides tailored recommendations to enhance the transparency and integrity of the data set. The scorecard addresses technical and ethical aspects, offering a holistic evaluation of data practices. This approach aims to improve the quality of the data set. It offers practical guidance to curators and researchers in developing responsible AI systems, ensuring fairness and accountability in decision support systems.

Athina Bikaki, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in common-sense reasoning tasks. This ability is fundamental to understanding social dynamics, interactions, and communication. However, the potential of integrating computers with these social capabilities is still relatively unexplored. However, the potential of integrating computers with these social capabilities is still relatively unexplored. This paper introduces MuSA, a multimodal LLM-based agent that analyzes text-rich social content tailored to address selected human-centric content analysis tasks, such as question answering, visual question answering, title generation, and categorization. It uses planning, reasoning, acting, optimizing, criticizing, and refining strategies to complete a task. Our approach demonstrates that MuSA can automate and improve social content analysis, helping decision-making processes across various applications. We have evaluated our agent's capabilities in question answering, title generation, and content categorization tasks. MuSA performs substantially better than our baselines.

Ali Memariani, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

Clostridioides difficile infection (C. diff) is the most common cause of death due to secondary infection in hospital patients in the United States. Detection of C. diff cells in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images is an important task to quantify the efficacy of the under-development treatments. However, detecting C. diff cells in SEM images is a challenging problem due to the presence of inhomogeneous illumination and occlusion. An Illumination normalization pre-processing step destroys the texture and adds noise to the image. Furthermore, cells are often clustered together resulting in touching cells and occlusion. In this paper, DETCID, a deep cell detection method using adversarial training, specifically robust to inhomogeneous illumination and occlusion, is proposed. An adversarial network is developed to provide region proposals and pass the proposals to a feature extraction network. Furthermore, a modified IoU metric is developed to allow the detection of touching cells in various orientations. The results indicate that DETCID outperforms the state-of-the-art in detection of touching cells in SEM images by at least 20 percent improvement of mean average precision.

Yuhang Wu, Le Anh Vu Ha, Xiang Xu et al.

We present a robust method for estimating the facial pose and shape information from a densely annotated facial image. The method relies on Convolutional Point-set Representation (CPR), a carefully designed matrix representation to summarize different layers of information encoded in the set of detected points in the annotated image. The CPR disentangles the dependencies of shape and different pose parameters and enables updating different parameters in a sequential manner via convolutional neural networks and recurrent layers. When updating the pose parameters, we sample reprojection errors along with a predicted direction and update the parameters based on the pattern of reprojection errors. This technique boosts the model's capability in searching a local minimum under challenging scenarios. We also demonstrate that annotation from different sources can be merged under the framework of CPR and contributes to outperforming the current state-of-the-art solutions for 3D face alignment. Experiments indicate the proposed CPRFA (CPR-based Face Alignment) significantly improves 3D alignment accuracy when the densely annotated image contains noise and missing values, which is common under "in-the-wild" acquisition scenarios.

Pengfei Dou, Shishir K. Shah, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

Monocular 3D facial shape reconstruction from a single 2D facial image has been an active research area due to its wide applications. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNN), we propose a DNN-based approach for End-to-End 3D FAce Reconstruction (UH-E2FAR) from a single 2D image. Different from recent works that reconstruct and refine the 3D face in an iterative manner using both an RGB image and an initial 3D facial shape rendering, our DNN model is end-to-end, and thus the complicated 3D rendering process can be avoided. Moreover, we integrate in the DNN architecture two components, namely a multi-task loss function and a fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve facial expression reconstruction. With the multi-task loss function, 3D face reconstruction is divided into neutral 3D facial shape reconstruction and expressive 3D facial shape reconstruction. The neutral 3D facial shape is class-specific. Therefore, higher layer features are useful. In comparison, the expressive 3D facial shape favors lower or intermediate layer features. With the fusion-CNN, features from different intermediate layers are fused and transformed for predicting the 3D expressive facial shape. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our end-to-end framework in improving the accuracy of 3D face reconstruction.