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At least 631 records · Page 35Linked to original sources

Sequential Transfer Learning to Decode Heard and Imagined Timbre from fMRI Data

We present a sequential transfer learning framework for transformers on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data and demonstrate its significant benefits for decoding musical timbre. In the first of two phases, we pre-train our stacked-encoder transformer architecture on Next Thought Prediction, a self-supervised task of predicting whether or not one sequence of fMRI data follows another. This phase imparts a general understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics of neural activity, and can be applied to any fMRI dataset. In the second phase, we fine-tune the pre-trained models and train additional fresh models on the supervised task of predicting whether or not two sequences of fMRI data were recorded while listening to the same musical timbre. The fine-tuned models achieve significantly higher accuracy with shorter training times than the fresh models, demonstrating the efficacy of our framework for facilitating transfer learning on fMRI data. Additionally, our fine-tuning task achieves a level of classification granularity beyond standard methods. This work contributes to the growing literature on transformer architectures for sequential transfer learning on fMRI data, and provides evidence that our framework is an improvement over current methods for decoding timbre.

q-bio.QM↗

Hallucination as a Feature, not a Defect: Evaluating a multi-agent architecture to transform speculative language-model outputs into testable scientific hypotheses

Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned to suppress hallucinations, prioritizing factual retrieval over combinatorial creativity. While crucial for mitigating misinformation, this alignment may also restrict speculative Research and Development (R&D) by encouraging what this work operationally treats as semantic overfitting and diversity collapse. In this paper, we propose a Rust-based multi-agent orchestration that uses the contrast between narrative daydreaming and executive control as a functional analogy, not as a neurocognitive claim. The system instigates an Epistemological Friction loop between a high-entropy generating agent and a web-grounded evaluating agent, mediated by a low-entropy semantic bottleneck intended to reduce noise and repetition. Initial experiments generated diverse, viability-rated hypotheses across physical and social-science domains. We additionally report an exploratory paired baseline and ablation study comparing the full system against direct prompting, self-reflection, removal of the semantic filter, removal of search grounding, and removal of lateral lenses. The results place direct prompting among the weakest conditions across most observed metrics, but they do not show a general superiority of the full system over simple self-reflection. Instead, they suggest that each architecture shifts the balance between originality, feasibility, diversity, and empirical grounding in different ways, and that the full system provides its main advantages when hypotheses must survive strong physical, empirical, or institutional constraints. These findings do not show that hallucination is useful in isolation; they suggest that speculative generation gains value only when constrained by architecture, empirical grounding, and explicit evaluation.

cs.CL↗

SpectroFusion-ViT: A Lightweight Transformer for Speech Emotion Recognition Using Harmonic Mel-Chroma Fusion

Speech is a natural means of conveying emotions, making it an effective method for understanding and representing human feelings. Reliable speech emotion recognition (SER) is central to applications in human-computer interaction, healthcare, education, and customer service. However, most SER methods depend on heavy backbone models or hand-crafted features that fail to balance accuracy and efficiency, particularly for low-resource languages like Bangla. In this work, we present SpectroFusion-ViT, a lightweight SER framework built utilizing EfficientViT-b0, a compact Vision Transformer architecture equipped with self-attention to capture long-range temporal and spectral patterns. The model contains only 2.04M parameters and requires 0.1 GFLOPs, enabling deployment in resource-constrained settings without compromising accuracy. Our pipeline first performs preprocessing and augmentation on raw audio, then extracts Chroma and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features. These representations are fused into a complementary time-frequency descriptor that preserves both fine-grained spectral detail and broader harmonic structure. Using transfer learning, EfficientViT-b0 is fine-tuned for multi-class emotion classification. We evaluate the system on two benchmark Bangla emotional speech datasets, SUBESCO and BanglaSER, which vary in speaker diversity, recording conditions, and acoustic characteristics. The proposed approach achieves 92.56% accuracy on SUBESCO and 82.19% on BanglaSER, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. These findings demonstrate that lightweight transformer architectures can deliver robust SER performance while remaining computationally efficient for real-world deployment.

cs.SD↗

Evaluating the Performance of Deep Learning Models in Whole-body Dynamic 3D Posture Prediction During Load-reaching Activities

This study aimed to explore the application of deep neural networks for whole-body human posture prediction during dynamic load-reaching activities. Two time-series models were trained using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) and transformer architectures. The dataset consisted of 3D full-body plug-in gait dynamic coordinates from 20 normal-weight healthy male individuals each performing 204 load-reaching tasks from different load positions while adapting various lifting and handling techniques. The model inputs consisted of the 3D position of the hand-load position, lifting (stoop, full-squat and semi-squat) and handling (one- and two-handed) techniques, body weight and height, and the 3D coordinate data of the body posture from the first 25% of the task duration. These inputs were used by the models to predict body coordinates during the remaining 75% of the task period. Moreover, a novel method was proposed to improve the accuracy of the previous and present posture prediction networks by enforcing constant body segment lengths through the optimization of a new cost function. The results indicated that the new cost function decreased the prediction error of the models by approximately 8% and 21% for the arm and leg models, respectively. We indicated that utilizing the transformer architecture, with a root-mean-square-error of 41.4 mm, exhibited approximately 58% more accurate long-term performance than the BLSTM-based model. This study merits the use of neural networks that capture time series dependencies in 3D motion frames, providing a unique approach for understanding and predict motion dynamics during manual material handling activities.

cs.CV↗

Rethinking Decision Transformer via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Decision Transformer (DT) is an innovative algorithm leveraging recent advances of the transformer architecture in reinforcement learning (RL). However, a notable limitation of DT is its reliance on recalling trajectories from datasets, losing the capability to seamlessly stitch sub-optimal trajectories together. In this work we introduce a general sequence modeling framework for studying sequential decision making through the lens of Hierarchical RL. At the time of making decisions, a high-level policy first proposes an ideal prompt for the current state, a low-level policy subsequently generates an action conditioned on the given prompt. We show DT emerges as a special case of this framework with certain choices of high-level and low-level policies, and discuss the potential failure of these choices. Inspired by these observations, we study how to jointly optimize the high-level and low-level policies to enable the stitching ability, which further leads to the development of new offline RL algorithms. Our empirical results clearly show that the proposed algorithms significantly surpass DT on several control and navigation benchmarks. We hope our contributions can inspire the integration of transformer architectures within the field of RL.

cs.LG↗

Grouped Differential Attention

The self-attention mechanism, while foundational to modern Transformer architectures, suffers from a critical inefficiency: it frequently allocates substantial attention to redundant or noisy context. Differential Attention addressed this by using subtractive attention maps for signal and noise, but its required balanced head allocation imposes rigid constraints on representational flexibility and scalability. To overcome this, we propose Grouped Differential Attention (GDA), a novel approach that introduces unbalanced head allocation between signal-preserving and noise-control groups. GDA significantly enhances signal focus by strategically assigning more heads to signal extraction and fewer to noise-control, stabilizing the latter through controlled repetition (akin to GQA). This design achieves stronger signal fidelity with minimal computational overhead. We further extend this principle to group-differentiated growth, a scalable strategy that selectively replicates only the signal-focused heads, thereby ensuring efficient capacity expansion. Through large-scale pretraining and continual training experiments, we demonstrate that moderate imbalance ratios in GDA yield substantial improvements in generalization and stability compared to symmetric baselines. Our results collectively establish that ratio-aware head allocation and selective expansion offer an effective and practical path toward designing scalable, computation-efficient Transformer architectures.

cs.LG↗

Hybrid SLC-MLC RRAM Mixed-Signal Processing-in-Memory Architecture for Transformer Acceleration via Gradient Redistribution

Transformers, while revolutionary, face challenges due to their demanding computational cost and large data movement. To address this, we propose HyFlexPIM, a novel mixed-signal processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerator for inference that flexibly utilizes both single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) RRAM technologies to trade-off accuracy and efficiency. HyFlexPIM achieves efficient dual-mode operation by utilizing digital PIM for high-precision and write-intensive operations while analog PIM for high parallel and low-precision computations. The analog PIM further distributes tasks between SLC and MLC PIM operations, where a single analog PIM module can be reconfigured to switch between two operations (SLC/MLC) with minimal overhead (<1% for area & energy). Critical weights are allocated to SLC RRAM for high accuracy, while less critical weights are assigned to MLC RRAM to maximize capacity, power, and latency efficiency. However, despite employing such a hybrid mechanism, brute-force mapping on hardware fails to deliver significant benefits due to the limited proportion of weights accelerated by the MLC and the noticeable degradation in accuracy. To maximize the potential of our hybrid hardware architecture, we propose an algorithm co-optimization technique, called gradient redistribution, which uses Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to decompose and truncate matrices based on their importance, then fine-tune them to concentrate significance into a small subset of weights. By doing so, only 5-10% of the weights have dominantly large gradients, making it favorable for HyFlexPIM by minimizing the use of expensive SLC RRAM while maximizing the efficient MLC RRAM. Our evaluation shows that HyFlexPIM significantly enhances computational throughput and energy efficiency, achieving maximum 1.86X and 1.45X higher than state-of-the-art methods.

cs.AR↗

Peak Detection On Data Independent Acquisition Mass Spectrometry Data With Semisupervised Convolutional Transformers

Liquid Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) based methods are commonly used for high-throughput, quantitative measurements of the proteome (i.e. the set of all proteins in a sample at a given time). Targeted LC-MS produces data in the form of a two-dimensional time series spectrum, with the mass to charge ratio of analytes (m/z) on one axis, and the retention time from the chromatography on the other. The elution of a peptide of interest produces highly specific patterns across multiple fragment ion traces (extracted ion chromatograms, or XICs). In this paper, we formulate this peak detection problem as a multivariate time series segmentation problem, and propose a novel approach based on the Transformer architecture. Here we augment Transformers, which are capable of capturing long distance dependencies with a global view, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which can capture local context important to the task at hand, in the form of Transformers with Convolutional Self-Attention. We further train this model in a semisupervised manner by adapting state of the art semisupervised image classification techniques for multi-channel time series data. Experiments on a representative LC-MS dataset are benchmarked using manual annotations to showcase the encouraging performance of our method; it outperforms baseline neural network architectures and is competitive against the current state of the art in automated peak detection.

cs.CV↗

A Comparative Study of CNN, ResNet, and Vision Transformers for Multi-Classification of Chest Diseases

Large language models, notably utilizing Transformer architectures, have emerged as powerful tools due to their scalability and ability to process large amounts of data. Dosovitskiy et al. expanded this architecture to introduce Vision Transformers (ViT), extending its applicability to image processing tasks. Motivated by this advancement, we fine-tuned two variants of ViT models, one pre-trained on ImageNet and another trained from scratch, using the NIH Chest X-ray dataset containing over 100,000 frontal-view X-ray images. Our study evaluates the performance of these models in the multi-label classification of 14 distinct diseases, while using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and ResNet architectures as baseline models for comparison. Through rigorous assessment based on accuracy metrics, we identify that the pre-trained ViT model surpasses CNNs and ResNet in this multilabel classification task, highlighting its potential for accurate diagnosis of various lung conditions from chest X-ray images.

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Transformer Networks for Continuous Gravitational-wave Searches

Wide-parameter-space searches for continuous gravitational waves using semi-coherent matched-filter methods require enormous computing power, which limits their achievable sensitivity. Here we explore an alternative search method based on training neural networks as classifiers on detector strain data with minimal pre-processing. Contrary to previous studies using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we investigate the suitability of the transformer architecture, specifically the Vision Transformer (ViT). We establish sensitivity benchmarks using the matched-filter $\mathcal{F}$-statistic for ten targeted searches over a ten day timespan, and ten directed and six all-sky searches over a one day timespan. We train ViTs on each of these benchmark cases. The trained ViTs achieve essentially matched-filter sensitivity on the targeted benchmarks, and approach the $\mathcal{F}$-statistic detection probability of $p_{\mathrm{det}}$ = 90% on the directed ($p_{\mathrm{det}} \approx $ 85-89 %) and all-sky benchmarks ($p_{\mathrm{det}} \approx $ 78-88 %). Unlike the CNNs in our previous studies, which required extensive manual design and hyperparameter tuning, the ViT achieves better performance with a standard architecture and minimal tuning.

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SentiBERT: A Transferable Transformer-Based Architecture for Compositional Sentiment Semantics

We propose SentiBERT, a variant of BERT that effectively captures compositional sentiment semantics. The model incorporates contextualized representation with binary constituency parse tree to capture semantic composition. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SentiBERT achieves competitive performance on phrase-level sentiment classification. We further demonstrate that the sentiment composition learned from the phrase-level annotations on SST can be transferred to other sentiment analysis tasks as well as related tasks, such as emotion classification tasks. Moreover, we conduct ablation studies and design visualization methods to understand SentiBERT. We show that SentiBERT is better than baseline approaches in capturing negation and the contrastive relation and model the compositional sentiment semantics.

cs.CL↗

Multi-Head Attention: Collaborate Instead of Concatenate

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained, these networks show symptoms of over-parameterization. For instance, it is known that many attention heads can be pruned without impacting accuracy. This work aims to enhance current understanding on how multiple heads interact. Motivated by the observation that attention heads learn redundant key/query projections, we propose a collaborative multi-head attention layer that enables heads to learn shared projections. Our scheme decreases the number of parameters in an attention layer and can be used as a drop-in replacement in any transformer architecture. Our experiments confirm that sharing key/query dimensions can be exploited in language understanding, machine translation and vision. We also show that it is possible to re-parametrize a pre-trained multi-head attention layer into our collaborative attention layer. Collaborative multi-head attention reduces the size of the key and query projections by 4 for same accuracy and speed. Our code is public.

cs.LG↗

Pay Attention when Required

Transformer-based models consist of interleaved feed-forward blocks - that capture content meaning, and relatively more expensive self-attention blocks - that capture context meaning. In this paper, we explored trade-offs and ordering of the blocks to improve upon the current Transformer architecture and proposed PAR Transformer. It needs 35% lower compute time than Transformer-XL achieved by replacing ~63% of the self-attention blocks with feed-forward blocks, and retains the perplexity on WikiText-103 language modelling benchmark. We further validated our results on text8 and enwiki8 datasets, as well as on the BERT model.

cs.LG↗

PVG at WASSA 2021: A Multi-Input, Multi-Task, Transformer-Based Architecture for Empathy and Distress Prediction

Active research pertaining to the affective phenomenon of empathy and distress is invaluable for improving human-machine interaction. Predicting intensities of such complex emotions from textual data is difficult, as these constructs are deeply rooted in the psychological theory. Consequently, for better prediction, it becomes imperative to take into account ancillary factors such as the psychological test scores, demographic features, underlying latent primitive emotions, along with the text's undertone and its psychological complexity. This paper proffers team PVG's solution to the WASSA 2021 Shared Task on Predicting Empathy and Emotion in Reaction to News Stories. Leveraging the textual data, demographic features, psychological test score, and the intrinsic interdependencies of primitive emotions and empathy, we propose a multi-input, multi-task framework for the task of empathy score prediction. Here, the empathy score prediction is considered the primary task, while emotion and empathy classification are considered secondary auxiliary tasks. For the distress score prediction task, the system is further boosted by the addition of lexical features. Our submission ranked 1$^{st}$ based on the average correlation (0.545) as well as the distress correlation (0.574), and 2$^{nd}$ for the empathy Pearson correlation (0.517).

cs.CL↗

Paperswithtopic: Topic Identification from Paper Title Only

The deep learning field is growing rapidly as witnessed by the exponential growth of papers submitted to journals, conferences, and pre-print servers. To cope with the sheer number of papers, several text mining tools from natural language processing (NLP) have been proposed that enable researchers to keep track of recent findings. In this context, our paper makes two main contributions: first, we collected and annotated a dataset of papers paired by title and sub-field from the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and, second, we present results on how to predict a paper's AI sub-field from a given paper title only. Importantly, for the latter, short-text classification task we compare several algorithms from conventional machine learning all the way up to recent, larger transformer architectures. Finally, for the transformer models, we also present gradient-based, attention visualizations to further explain the model's classification process. All code can be found at \url{https://github.com/1pha/paperswithtopic}

cs.CL↗

Adaptive Token Sampling For Efficient Vision Transformers

While state-of-the-art vision transformer models achieve promising results in image classification, they are computationally expensive and require many GFLOPs. Although the GFLOPs of a vision transformer can be decreased by reducing the number of tokens in the network, there is no setting that is optimal for all input images. In this work, we therefore introduce a differentiable parameter-free Adaptive Token Sampler (ATS) module, which can be plugged into any existing vision transformer architecture. ATS empowers vision transformers by scoring and adaptively sampling significant tokens. As a result, the number of tokens is not constant anymore and varies for each input image. By integrating ATS as an additional layer within the current transformer blocks, we can convert them into much more efficient vision transformers with an adaptive number of tokens. Since ATS is a parameter-free module, it can be added to the off-the-shelf pre-trained vision transformers as a plug and play module, thus reducing their GFLOPs without any additional training. Moreover, due to its differentiable design, one can also train a vision transformer equipped with ATS. We evaluate the efficiency of our module in both image and video classification tasks by adding it to multiple SOTA vision transformers. Our proposed module improves the SOTA by reducing their computational costs (GFLOPs) by 2X, while preserving their accuracy on the ImageNet, Kinetics-400, and Kinetics-600 datasets.

cs.CV↗

LGT-Net: Indoor Panoramic Room Layout Estimation with Geometry-Aware Transformer Network

3D room layout estimation by a single panorama using deep neural networks has made great progress. However, previous approaches can not obtain efficient geometry awareness of room layout with the only latitude of boundaries or horizon-depth. We present that using horizon-depth along with room height can obtain omnidirectional-geometry awareness of room layout in both horizontal and vertical directions. In addition, we propose a planar-geometry aware loss function with normals and gradients of normals to supervise the planeness of walls and turning of corners. We propose an efficient network, LGT-Net, for room layout estimation, which contains a novel Transformer architecture called SWG-Transformer to model geometry relations. SWG-Transformer consists of (Shifted) Window Blocks and Global Blocks to combine the local and global geometry relations. Moreover, we design a novel relative position embedding of Transformer to enhance the spatial identification ability for the panorama. Experiments show that the proposed LGT-Net achieves better performance than current state-of-the-arts (SOTA) on benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

Multilinguals at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Transformer Based Architecture for Complex NER

We investigate the task of complex NER for the English language. The task is non-trivial due to the semantic ambiguity of the textual structure and the rarity of occurrence of such entities in the prevalent literature. Using pre-trained language models such as BERT, we obtain a competitive performance on this task. We qualitatively analyze the performance of multiple architectures for this task. All our models are able to outperform the baseline by a significant margin. Our best performing model beats the baseline F1-score by over 9%.

cs.CL↗