Adamu Lawan

Adamu Lawan, Juhua Pu, Haruna Yunusa et al.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) evaluates sentiments toward specific aspects of entities within the text. However, attention mechanisms and neural network models struggle with syntactic constraints. The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms also limits their adoption for capturing long-range dependencies between aspect and opinion words in ABSA. This complexity can lead to the misinterpretation of irrelevant contextual words, restricting their effectiveness to short-range dependencies. To address the above problem, we present a novel approach to enhance long-range dependencies between aspect and opinion words in ABSA (MambaForGCN). This approach incorporates syntax-based Graph Convolutional Network (SynGCN) and MambaFormer (Mamba-Transformer) modules to encode input with dependency relations and semantic information. The Multihead Attention (MHA) and Selective State Space model (Mamba) blocks in the MambaFormer module serve as channels to enhance the model with short and long-range dependencies between aspect and opinion words. We also introduce the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) gated fusion, an adaptive feature representation system that integrates SynGCN and MambaFormer and captures non-linear, complex dependencies. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate MambaForGCN's effectiveness, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline models.

Haruna Yunusa, Qin Shiyin, Abdulrahman Hamman Adama Chukkol et al.

The recent emergence of hybrid models has introduced a transformative approach to computer vision, gradually moving beyond conventional convolutional neural net-works and vision transformers. However, efficiently combining these two paradigms to better capture long-range dependencies in complex images remains a challenge. In this paper, we present iiANET (Inception Inspired Attention Network), an efficient hybrid visual backbone designed to improve the modeling of long-range dependen-cies. The core innovation of iiANET is the iiABlock, a unified building block that in-tegrates global r-MHSA (Multi-Head Self-Attention) and convolutional layers in paral-lel. This design enables iiABlock to simultaneously capture global context and local details, making it highly effective for extracting rich and diverse features. By effi-ciently fusing these complementary representations, iiABlock allows iiANET to achieve strong feature interaction while maintaining computational efficiency. Exten-sive qualitative and quantitative evaluations across various benchmarks show im-proved performance over several state-of-the-art models.

Haruna Yunusa, Qin Shiyin, Adamu Lawan et al.

Crop field detection is a critical component of precision agriculture, essential for optimizing resource allocation and enhancing agricultural productivity. This study introduces KonvLiNA, a novel framework that integrates Convolutional Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (cKAN) with Nyström attention mechanisms for effective crop field detection. Leveraging KAN adaptive activation functions and the efficiency of Nyström attention in handling largescale data, KonvLiNA significantly enhances feature extraction, enabling the model to capture intricate patterns in complex agricultural environments. Experimental results on rice crop dataset demonstrate KonvLiNA superiority over state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 0.415 AP and 0.459 AR with the Swin-L backbone, outperforming traditional YOLOv8 by significant margins. Additionally, evaluation on the COCO dataset showcases competitive performance across small, medium, and large objects, highlighting KonvLiNA efficacy in diverse agricultural settings. This work highlights the potential of hybrid KAN and attention mechanisms for advancing precision agriculture through improved crop field detection and management.

Adamu Lawan, Juhua Pu, Haruna Yunusa et al.

Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) enhances sentiment detection by integrating textual data with complementary modalities, such as images, to provide a more refined and comprehensive understanding of sentiment. However, conventional attention mechanisms, despite notable benchmarks, are hindered by quadratic complexity, limiting their ability to fully capture global contextual dependencies and rich semantic information in both modalities. To address this limitation, we introduce DualKanbaFormer, a novel framework that leverages parallel Textual and Visual KanbaFormer modules for robust multimodal analysis. Our approach incorporates Aspect-Driven Sparse Attention (ADSA) to dynamically balance coarse-grained aggregation and fine-grained selection for aspect-focused precision, ensuring the preservation of both global context awareness and local precision in textual and visual representations. Additionally, we utilize the Selective State Space Model (Mamba) to capture extensive global semantic information across both modalities. Furthermore, We replace traditional feed-forward networks and normalization with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and Dynamic Tanh (DyT) to enhance non-linear expressivity and inference stability. To facilitate the effective integration of textual and visual features, we design a multimodal gated fusion layer that dynamically optimizes inter-modality interactions, significantly enhancing the models efficacy in MABSA tasks. Comprehensive experiments on two publicly available datasets reveal that DualKanbaFormer consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models.

Haruna Yunusa, Shiyin Qin, Abdulrahman Hamman Adama Chukkol et al.

The hybrid of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViT) architectures has emerged as a groundbreaking approach, pushing the boundaries of computer vision (CV). This comprehensive review provides a thorough examination of the literature on state-of-the-art hybrid CNN-ViT architectures, exploring the synergies between these two approaches. The main content of this survey includes: (1) a background on the vanilla CNN and ViT, (2) systematic review of various taxonomic hybrid designs to explore the synergy achieved through merging CNNs and ViTs models, (3) comparative analysis and application task-specific synergy between different hybrid architectures, (4) challenges and future directions for hybrid models, (5) lastly, the survey concludes with a summary of key findings and recommendations. Through this exploration of hybrid CV architectures, the survey aims to serve as a guiding resource, fostering a deeper understanding of the intricate dynamics between CNNs and ViTs and their collective impact on shaping the future of CV architectures.

Yunusa Haruna, Adamu Lawan, Ibrahim Haruna Abdulhamid et al.

Machine unlearning enables models to selectively forget training data, driven by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. However, its fairness implications remain underexplored: when a model forgets a demographic group, does it neutralize that concept or redistribute it to correlated groups, potentially amplifying bias? We investigate this bias redistribution phenomenon on CelebA using CLIP models (ViT/B-32, ViT-L/14, ViT-B/16) under a zero-shot classification setting across intersectional groups defined by age and gender. We evaluate three unlearning methods, Prompt Erasure, Prompt Reweighting, and Refusal Vector using per-group accuracy shifts, demographic parity gaps, and a redistribution score. Our results show that unlearning does not eliminate bias but redistributes it primarily along gender rather than age boundaries. In particular, removing the dominant Young Female group consistently transfers performance to Old Female across all model scales, revealing a gender-dominant structure in CLIP's embedding space. While the Refusal Vector method reduces redistribution, it fails to achieve complete forgetting and significantly degrades retained performance. These findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current unlearning methods: without accounting for embedding geometry, they risk amplifying bias in retained groups.

Adamu Lawan, Juhua Pu, Haruna Yunusa et al.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is increasingly crucial in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for applications such as customer feedback analysis and product recommendation systems. ABSA goes beyond traditional sentiment analysis by extracting sentiments related to specific aspects mentioned in the text; existing attention-based models often need help to effectively connect aspects with context due to language complexity and multiple sentiment polarities in a single sentence. Recent research underscores the value of integrating syntactic information, such as dependency trees, to understand long-range syntactic relationships better and link aspects with context. Despite these advantages, challenges persist, including sensitivity to parsing errors and increased computational complexity when combining syntactic and semantic information. To address these issues, we propose Amplifying Aspect-Sentence Awareness (A3SN), a novel technique designed to enhance ABSA through amplifying aspect-sentence awareness attention. Following the transformer's standard process, our innovative approach incorporates multi-head attention mechanisms to augment the model with sentence and aspect semantic information. We added another multi-head attention module: amplify aspect-sentence awareness attention. By doubling its focus between the sentence and aspect, we effectively highlighted aspect importance within the sentence context. This enables accurate capture of subtle relationships and dependencies. Additionally, gated fusion integrates feature representations from multi-head and amplified aspect-sentence awareness attention mechanisms, which is essential for ABSA. Experimental results across three benchmark datasets demonstrate A3SN's effectiveness and outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline models.

Yunusa Haruna, Shiyin Qin, Abdulrahman Hamman Adama Chukkol et al.

Detecting objects across varying scales is still a challenge in computer vision, particularly in agricultural applications like Rice Leaf Disease (RLD) detection, where objects exhibit significant scale variations (SV). Conventional object detection (OD) like Faster R-CNN, SSD, and YOLO methods often fail to effectively address SV, leading to reduced accuracy and missed detections. To tackle this, we propose SaRPFF (Self-Attention with Register-based Pyramid Feature Fusion), a novel module designed to enhance multi-scale object detection. SaRPFF integrates 2D-Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) with Register tokens, improving feature interpretability by mitigating artifacts within MHSA. Additionally, it integrates efficient attention atrous convolutions into the pyramid feature fusion and introduce a deconvolutional layer for refined up-sampling. We evaluate SaRPFF on YOLOv7 using the MRLD and COCO datasets. Our approach demonstrates a +2.61% improvement in Average Precision (AP) on the MRLD dataset compared to the baseline FPN method in YOLOv7. Furthermore, SaRPFF outperforms other FPN variants, including BiFPN, NAS-FPN, and PANET, showcasing its versatility and potential to advance OD techniques. This study highlights SaRPFF effectiveness in addressing SV challenges and its adaptability across FPN-based OD models.

Adamu Lawan, Haruna Yunusa

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has recently advanced into the multimodal domain, where user-generated content often combines text and images. However, existing multimodal ABSA (MABSA) models struggle to filter noisy visual signals, and effectively align aspects with opinion-bearing content across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose GateMABSA, a novel gated multimodal architecture that integrates syntactic, semantic, and fusion-aware mLSTM. Specifically, GateMABSA introduces three specialized mLSTMs: Syn-mLSTM to incorporate syntactic structure, Sem-mLSTM to emphasize aspect--semantic relevance, and Fuse-mLSTM to perform selective multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments on two benchmark Twitter datasets demonstrate that GateMABSA outperforms several baselines.

Adamu Lawan, Juhua Pu, Haruna Yunusa et al.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a crucial NLP task that extracts fine-grained opinions and sentiments from text, such as product reviews and customer feedback. Existing methods often trade off efficiency for performance: traditional LSTM or RNN models struggle to capture long-range dependencies, transformer-based methods are computationally costly, and Mamba-based approaches rely on CUDA and weaken local dependency modeling. The recently proposed Extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) model offers a promising alternative by effectively capturing long-range dependencies through exponential gating and enhanced memory variants, sLSTM for modeling local dependencies, and mLSTM for scalable, parallelizable memory. However, xLSTM's application in ABSA remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce Aspect-aware Flip-and-Fuse xLSTM (AF-MAT), a framework that leverages xLSTM's strengths. AF-MAT features an Aspect-aware matrix LSTM (AA-mLSTM) mechanism that introduces a dedicated aspect gate, enabling the model to selectively emphasize tokens semantically relevant to the target aspect during memory updates. To model multi-scale context, we incorporate a FlipMix block that sequentially applies a partially flipped Conv1D (pf-Conv1D) to capture short-range dependencies in reverse order, followed by a fully flipped mLSTM (ff-mLSTM) to model long-range dependencies via full sequence reversal. Additionally, we propose MC2F, a lightweight Multihead Cross-Feature Fusion based on mLSTM gating, which dynamically fuses AA-mLSTM outputs (queries and keys) with FlipMix outputs (values) for adaptive representation integration. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AF-MAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher accuracy in ABSA tasks.

Yunusa Haruna, Adamu Lawan

Capturing long-range dependencies efficiently is essential for visual recognition tasks, yet existing methods face limitations. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) struggle with restricted receptive fields, while Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve global context and long-range modeling at a high computational cost. State-space models (SSMs) offer an alternative, but their application in vision remains underexplored. This work introduces vGamba, a hybrid vision backbone that integrates SSMs with attention mechanisms to enhance efficiency and expressiveness. At its core, the Gamba bottleneck block that includes, Gamba Cell, an adaptation of Mamba for 2D spatial structures, alongside a Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism and a Gated Fusion Module for effective feature representation. The interplay of these components ensures that vGamba leverages the low computational demands of SSMs while maintaining the accuracy of attention mechanisms for modeling long-range dependencies in vision tasks. Additionally, the Fusion module enables seamless interaction between these components. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks demonstrate that vGamba achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming several existing models.

Aliyu Umar, Maaruf Lawan, Adamu Lawan et al.

Dark patterns in user interfaces represent deceptive design practices intended to manipulate users' behavior, often leading to unintended consequences such as coerced purchases, involuntary data disclosures, or user frustration. Detecting and mitigating these dark patterns is crucial for promoting transparency, trust, and ethical design practices in digital environments. This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting dark patterns in user interfaces using logistic regression and bag-of-words representation. Our methodology involves collecting a diverse dataset of user interface text samples, preprocessing the data, extracting text features using the bag-of-words representation, training a logistic regression model, and evaluating its performance using various metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in accurately identifying instances of dark patterns, with high predictive performance and robustness to variations in dataset composition and model parameters. The insights gained from this study contribute to the growing body of knowledge on dark patterns detection and classification, offering practical implications for designers, developers, and policymakers in promoting ethical design practices and protecting user rights in digital environments.