An Explorative Analysis of SVM Classifier and ResNet50 Architecture on African Food Classification

Food recognition systems has advanced significantly for Western cuisines, yet its application to African foods remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by evaluating both deep learning and traditional machine learning methods for African food classification. We compared the performance of a fine-tuned ResNet50 model with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The dataset comprises 1,658 images across six selected food categories that are known in Africa. To assess model effectiveness, we utilize five key evaluation metrics: Confusion matrix, F1-score, accuracy, recall and precision. Our findings offer valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of both approaches, contributing to the advancement of food recognition for African cuisines.

CNN and ViT Efficiency Study on Tiny ImageNet and DermaMNIST Datasets

This study evaluates the trade-offs between convolutional and transformer-based architectures on both medical and general-purpose image classification benchmarks. We use ResNet-18 as our baseline and introduce a fine-tuning strategy applied to four Vision Transformer variants (Tiny, Small, Base, Large) on DermatologyMNIST and TinyImageNet. Our goal is to reduce inference latency and model complexity with acceptable accuracy degradation. Through systematic hyperparameter variations, we demonstrate that appropriately fine-tuned Vision Transformers can match or exceed the baseline's performance, achieve faster inference, and operate with fewer parameters, highlighting their viability for deployment in resource-constrained environments.

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406).