Pouya Shaeri

Pouya Shaeri, Ali Katanforoush

Micro-blogs and cyber-space social networks are the main communication mediums to receive and share news nowadays. As a side effect, however, the networks can disseminate fake news that harms individuals and the society. Several methods have been developed to detect fake news, but the majority require large sets of manually labeled data to attain the application-level accuracy. Due to the strict privacy policies, the required data are often inaccessible or limited to some specific topics. On the other side, quite diverse and abundant unlabeled data on social media suggests that with a few labeled data, the problem of detecting fake news could be tackled via semi-supervised learning. Here, we propose a semi-supervised self-learning method in which a sentiment analysis is acquired by some state-of-the-art pretrained models. Our learning model is trained in a semi-supervised fashion and incorporates LSTM with self-attention layers. We benchmark our model on a dataset with 20,000 news content along with their feedback, which shows better performance in precision, recall, and measures compared to competitive methods in fake news detection.

Pouya Shaeri, Saud AlKhaled, Ariane Middel

Outdoor thermal comfort is a critical determinant of urban livability, particularly in hot desert climates where extreme heat poses challenges to public health, energy consumption, and urban planning. Mean Radiant Temperature ($T_{mrt}$) is a key parameter for evaluating outdoor thermal comfort, especially in urban environments where radiation dynamics significantly impact human thermal exposure. Traditional methods of estimating $T_{mrt}$ rely on field measurements and computational simulations, both of which are resource intensive. This study introduces a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) approach that integrates shortwave and longwave radiation modeling with deep learning techniques. By leveraging a multimodal dataset that includes meteorological data, built environment characteristics, and fisheye image-derived shading information, our model enhances predictive accuracy while maintaining physical consistency. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PINN framework outperforms conventional deep learning models, with the best-performing configurations achieving an RMSE of 3.50 and an $R^2$ of 0.88. This approach highlights the potential of physics-informed machine learning in bridging the gap between computational modeling and real-world applications, offering a scalable and interpretable solution for urban thermal comfort assessments.

Pouya Shaeri, Arash Karimi, Ariane Middel

Neural networks are often benchmarked using standard datasets such as MNIST, FashionMNIST, or other variants of MNIST, which, while accessible, are limited to generic classes such as digits or clothing items. For researchers working on domain-specific tasks, such as classifying trees, food items, or other real-world objects, these data sets are insufficient and irrelevant. Additionally, creating and publishing a custom dataset can be time consuming, legally constrained, or beyond the scope of individual projects. We present MNIST-Gen, an automated, modular, and adaptive framework for generating MNIST-style image datasets tailored to user-specified categories using hierarchical semantic categorization. The system combines CLIP-based semantic understanding with reinforcement learning and human feedback to achieve intelligent categorization with minimal manual intervention. Our hierarchical approach supports complex category structures with semantic characteristics, enabling fine-grained subcategorization and multiple processing modes: individual review for maximum control, smart batch processing for large datasets, and fast batch processing for rapid creation. Inspired by category theory, MNIST-Gen models each data transformation stage as a composable morphism, enhancing clarity, modularity, and extensibility. As proof of concept, we generate and benchmark two novel datasets-\textit{Tree-MNIST} and \textit{Food-MNIST}-demonstrating MNIST-Gen's utility for producing task-specific evaluation data while achieving 85\% automatic categorization accuracy and 80\% time savings compared to manual approaches.

Pouya Shaeri, Ryan T. Woo, Yasaman Mohammadpour et al.

Segmentation models achieve high accuracy on benchmarks but often fail in real-world domains by relying on spurious correlations instead of true object boundaries. We propose a human-in-the-loop interactive framework that enables interventional learning through targeted human corrections of segmentation outputs. Our approach treats human corrections as interventional signals that show when reliance on superficial features (e.g., color or texture) is inappropriate. The system learns from these interventions by propagating correction-informed edits across visually similar images, effectively steering the model toward robust, semantically meaningful features rather than dataset-specific artifacts. Unlike traditional annotation approaches that simply provide more training data, our method explicitly identifies when and why the model fails and then systematically corrects these failure modes across the entire dataset. Through iterative human feedback, the system develops increasingly robust representations that generalize better to novel domains and resist artifactual correlations. We demonstrate that our framework improves segmentation accuracy by up to 9 mIoU points (12-15\% relative improvement) on challenging cubemap data and yields 3-4$\times$ reductions in annotation effort compared to standard retraining, while maintaining competitive performance on benchmark datasets. This work provides a practical framework for researchers and practitioners seeking to build segmentation systems that are accurate, robust to dataset biases, data-efficient, and adaptable to real-world domains such as urban climate monitoring and autonomous driving.

Mohsen Sheibanian, Pouya Shaeri, Alimohammad Beigi et al.

Deep neural networks are increasingly bottlenecked by the cost of optimization, both in terms of GPU memory and compute time. Existing acceleration techniques, such as mixed precision, second-order methods, and batch size scaling, are typically used in isolation. We present Tri-Accel, a unified optimization framework that co-adapts three acceleration strategies along with adaptive parameters during training: (1) Precision-Adaptive Updates that dynamically assign mixed-precision levels to layers based on curvature and gradient variance; (2) Sparse Second-Order Signals that exploit Hessian/Fisher sparsity patterns to guide precision and step size decisions; and (3) Memory-Elastic Batch Scaling that adjusts batch size in real time according to VRAM availability. On CIFAR-10 with ResNet-18 and EfficientNet-B0, Tri-Accel achieves up to 9.9% reduction in training time and 13.3% lower memory usage, while improving accuracy by +1.1 percentage points over FP32 baselines. Tested on CIFAR-10/100, our approach demonstrates adaptive learning behavior, with efficiency gradually improving over the course of training as the system learns to allocate resources more effectively. Compared to static mixed-precision training, Tri-Accel maintains 78.1% accuracy while reducing memory footprint from 0.35GB to 0.31GB on standard hardware. The framework is implemented with custom Triton kernels, whose hardware-aware adaptation enables automatic optimization without manual hyperparameter tuning, making it practical for deployment across diverse computational environments. This work demonstrates how algorithmic adaptivity and hardware awareness can be combined to improve scalability in resource-constrained settings, paving the way for more efficient neural network training on edge devices and cost-sensitive cloud deployments.