MorphXAI: An Explainable Framework for Morphological Analysis of Parasites in Blood Smear Images

Parasitic infections remain a pressing global health challenge, particularly in low-resource settings where diagnosis still depends on labor-intensive manual inspection of blood smears and the availability of expert domain knowledge. While deep learning models have shown strong performance in automating parasite detection, their clinical usefulness is constrained by limited interpretability. Existing explainability methods are largely restricted to visual heatmaps or attention maps, which highlight regions of interest but fail to capture the morphological traits that clinicians rely on for diagnosis. In this work, we present MorphXAI, an explainable framework that unifies parasite detection with fine-grained morphological analysis. MorphXAI integrates morphological supervision directly into the prediction pipeline, enabling the model to localize parasites while simultaneously characterizing clinically relevant attributes such as shape, curvature, visible dot count, flagellum presence, and developmental stage. To support this task, we curate a clinician-annotated dataset of three parasite species (Leishmania, Trypanosoma brucei, and Trypanosoma cruzi) with detailed morphological labels, establishing a new benchmark for interpretable parasite analysis. Experimental results show that MorphXAI not only improves detection performance over the baseline but also provides structured, biologically meaningful explanations.

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks: A Mutual Learning Approach

Knowledge distillation (KD) techniques have emerged as a powerful tool for transferring expertise from complex teacher models to lightweight student models, particularly beneficial for deploying high-performance models in resource-constrained devices. This approach has been successfully applied to graph neural networks (GNNs), harnessing their expressive capabilities to generate node embeddings that capture structural and feature-related information. In this study, we depart from the conventional KD approach by exploring the potential of collaborative learning among GNNs. In the absence of a pre-trained teacher model, we show that relatively simple and shallow GNN architectures can synergetically learn efficient models capable of performing better during inference, particularly in tackling multiple tasks. We propose a collaborative learning framework where ensembles of student GNNs mutually teach each other throughout the training process. We introduce an adaptive logit weighting unit to facilitate efficient knowledge exchange among models and an entropy enhancement technique to improve mutual learning. These components dynamically empower the models to adapt their learning strategies during training, optimizing their performance for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets each for node and graph classification demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

FedVLM: Scalable Personalized Vision-Language Models through Federated Learning

Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities, making them essential for several downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning these models at scale remains challenging, particularly in federated environments where data is decentralized and non-iid across clients. Existing parameter-efficient tuning methods like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) reduce computational overhead but struggle with heterogeneous client data, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose FedVLM, a federated LoRA fine-tuning framework that enables decentralized adaptation of VLMs while preserving model privacy and reducing reliance on centralized training. To further tackle data heterogeneity, we introduce personalized LoRA (pLoRA), which dynamically adapts LoRA parameters to each client's unique data distribution, significantly improving local adaptation while maintaining global model aggregation. Experiments on the RLAIF-V dataset show that pLoRA improves client-specific performance by 24.5% over standard LoRA, demonstrating superior adaptation in non-iid settings. FedVLM provides a scalable and efficient solution for fine-tuning VLMs in federated settings, advancing personalized adaptation in distributed learning scenarios.

On the Natural Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Visual Perception Attacks in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) for critical tasks such as traffic sign recognition (TSR), automated lane centering (ALC), and vehicle detection (VD). However, these models are vulnerable to attacks that can cause misclassifications and compromise safety. Traditional defense mechanisms, including adversarial training, often degrade benign accuracy and fail to generalize against unseen attacks. In this work, we introduce Vehicle Vision Language Models (V2LMs), fine-tuned vision-language models specialized for AV perception. Our findings demonstrate that V2LMs inherently exhibit superior robustness against unseen attacks without requiring adversarial training, maintaining significantly higher accuracy than conventional DNNs under adversarial conditions. We evaluate two deployment strategies: Solo Mode, where individual V2LMs handle specific perception tasks, and Tandem Mode, where a single unified V2LM is fine-tuned for multiple tasks simultaneously. Experimental results reveal that DNNs suffer performance drops of 33% to 46% under attacks, whereas V2LMs maintain adversarial accuracy with reductions of less than 8% on average. The Tandem Mode further offers a memory-efficient alternative while achieving comparable robustness to Solo Mode. We also explore integrating V2LMs as parallel components to AV perception to enhance resilience against adversarial threats. Our results suggest that V2LMs offer a promising path toward more secure and resilient AV perception systems.