arXiv subjects

Kriti Saini

Publications and source records attributed to Kriti Saini.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

FedXCrop: Privacy-Preserving Crop Disease Detection via Federated Learning with Post-Aggregation Explainability under Non-IID Farm Distributions

Deep learning can classify crop diseases accurately from benchmark leaf images, but centralized training requires farms to share raw data, and predictions without explanations offer limited support for treatment decisions. We present FedXCrop, a federated crop disease classification pipeline that quantitatively evaluates explanations of the aggregated global model. A MobileNetV2 model trained centrally on PlantVillage achieved 99.38% test accuracy (standard deviation 0.05 over three seeds) on a fixed test set of 5,428 images across 38 classes. Federated models initialized with ImageNet weights were trained for 30 rounds across five clients. FedAvg achieved 98.81% accuracy with identically distributed clients and 98.81%, 98.59%, and 97.78% under Dirichlet label skew (alpha = 1, 0.5, and 0.1, respectively). FedProx was not significantly different from FedAvg at any heterogeneity level (McNemar p > 0.3). Grad-CAM and SmoothGrad explanations were evaluated on 380 test images. Both attributed more energy to the leaf than chance (0.70-0.78 versus 0.60), while Grad-CAM maps from federated and centralized models showed Spearman correlations of 0.74-0.76. Agreement decreased as heterogeneity increased, lesion localization was only modestly above chance, and a model-randomization test indicated that SmoothGrad maps depended substantially on image structure rather than learned parameters. In this setting, label skew reduced federated accuracy by 0.6-1.6 percentage points relative to centralized training. FedAvg largely preserved Grad-CAM behavior, while FedProx provided no measurable benefit.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

The Split Protocol Decides the Result: Re-Evaluating Encrypted Traffic Classification

Encrypted traffic classifiers are routinely reported at 95-99% accuracy. We show that on one of two public corpora, the same model and code score macro-F1 0.992 under the evaluation protocol standard in the literature and 0.567 under a protocol that keeps flows from one packet capture on one side of the split. Nothing changes but the partition (gap 0.426 over eight seeds, p = 0.008 after Holm-Bonferroni correction). The inflation is not a property of random splitting as such. On a month of backbone QUIC traffic, we evaluate five split protocols at eight seeds each: random, temporal and client-disjoint splitting are statistically indistinguishable from session-disjoint, while server-disjoint splitting costs 0.192 macro-F1 (d = 17.0, p = 0.008). Which axis matters depends on how the corpus was collected, in a way invisible from its label space. We give a diagnostic that identifies the right axis before any model is trained: single-identifier probes. A decision tree on the capture identifier alone reaches 0.983 under a random split and exactly 0.000 under session-disjoint splitting. Under this evaluation, a metric-trained flow embedding leads four deep baselines but does not beat gradient-boosted trees on twenty packet sizes. Five of our own pre-registered architectural claims fail: distance-based rejection of unknown applications beats softmax thresholding, but ablating every metric objective makes rejection better, because class separation correlates at r = -0.88 with rejection quality. Few-shot enrollment is flat within a corpus but, across corpora, five labelled flows per class recover 91% of the deficit left by failed zero-shot transfer. All splits, results, code and negative findings are released.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

When Does Risk-Controlled Throughput Forecasting Actually Control Risk? A Reproduction Study on LEO Satellite Link

Risk-budgeted throughput forecasting converts a point forecast of LEO satellite capacity into a conservative bound whose overestimation rate is held at a user-specified budget, so that admission control can act on it safely. We reproduce the state of the art, BG-CFQS, on the three Starlink traces its authors used and on an independent fourth dataset, and report four findings. First, its risk guarantee is reproducible but conditional on the calibration split: under a random split we recover every published quantity, including risk-pass on 3 of 3 datasets, but under a contiguous temporal split, which is what a deployed terminal faces, it holds on 1 of 3. Second, independent of any split, the method cannot serve a risk budget below 0.15, the low end of its candidate quantile set. On all four datasets the achieved rate is identical at budgets of 0.05, 0.10 and 0.15, overshooting by 1.4x to 3.7x at the tightest. Third, static conformal calibration cannot improve a ranking, only shift an operating point; we confirm this exactly on latency spike detection, where online calibration improves AUPRC by up to 51%. Fourth, group-conditional online recalibration splits into two mechanisms. The online part replicates: it tracks the budget within 1% from 0.05 to 0.35, where static calibration is 16 to 21% off. The group-conditional part does not: on three of four datasets, conditioning on any available covariate, including measured serving-satellite geometry, is worse than not conditioning, and our attempt to predict which datasets benefit failed. What is new here is empirical, not algorithmic: we claim the findings, not the methods.

cs.LG↗