ISAC: Training-Free Instance-to-Semantic Attention Control for Improving Multi-Instance Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating single-instance scenes but struggle with multi-instance scenarios, often merging or omitting objects. Unlike previous training-free approaches that rely solely on semantic-level guidance without addressing instance individuation, our training-free method, Instance-to-Semantic Attention Control (ISAC), explicitly resolves incomplete instance formation and semantic entanglement through an instance-first modeling approach. This enables ISAC to effectively leverage a hierarchical, tree-structured prompt mechanism, disentangling multiple object instances and individually aligning them with their corresponding semantic labels. Without employing any external models, ISAC achieves up to 52% average multi-class accuracy and 83% average multi-instance accuracy by effectively forming disentangled instances. The code will be made available upon publication.

Unemployment Dynamics Forecasting with Machine Learning Regression Models

In this paper, I explored how a range of regression and machine learning techniques can be applied to monthly U.S. unemployment data to produce timely forecasts. I compared seven models: Linear Regression, SGDRegressor, Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, Support Vector Regression, and an LSTM network, training each on a historical span of data and then evaluating on a later hold-out period. Input features include macro indicators (GDP growth, CPI), labor market measures (job openings, initial claims), financial variables (interest rates, equity indices), and consumer sentiment. I tuned model hyperparameters via cross-validation and assessed performance with standard error metrics and the ability to predict the correct unemployment direction. Across the board, tree-based ensembles (and CatBoost in particular) deliver noticeably better forecasts than simple linear approaches, while the LSTM captures underlying temporal patterns more effectively than other nonlinear methods. SVR and SGDRegressor yield modest gains over standard regression but don't match the consistency of the ensemble and deep-learning models. Interpretability tools ,feature importance rankings and SHAP values, point to job openings and consumer sentiment as the most influential predictors across all methods. By directly comparing linear, ensemble, and deep-learning approaches on the same dataset, our study shows how modern machine-learning techniques can enhance real-time unemployment forecasting, offering economists and policymakers richer insights into labor market trends. In the comparative evaluation of the models, I employed a dataset comprising thirty distinct features over the period from January 2020 through December 2024.

DOSE : Drum One-Shot Extraction from Music Mixture

Drum one-shot samples are crucial for music production, particularly in sound design and electronic music. This paper introduces Drum One-Shot Extraction, a task in which the goal is to extract drum one-shots that are present in the music mixture. To facilitate this, we propose the Random Mixture One-shot Dataset (RMOD), comprising large-scale, randomly arranged music mixtures paired with corresponding drum one-shot samples. Our proposed model, Drum One- Shot Extractor (DOSE), leverages neural audio codec language models for end-to-end extraction, bypassing traditional source separation steps. Additionally, we introduce a novel onset loss, designed to encourage accurate prediction of the initial transient of drum one-shots, which is essential for capturing timbral characteristics. We compare this approach against a source separation-based extraction method as a baseline. The results, evaluated using Frechet Audio Distance (FAD) and Multi-Scale Spectral loss (MSS), demonstrate that DOSE, enhanced with onset loss, outperforms the baseline, providing more accurate and higher-quality drum one-shots from music mixtures. The code, model checkpoint, and audio examples are available at https://github.com/HSUNEH/DOSE

Early Timestep Zero-Shot Candidate Selection for Instruction-Guided Image Editing

Despite recent advances in diffusion models, achieving reliable image generation and editing remains challenging due to the inherent diversity induced by stochastic noise in the sampling process. Instruction-guided image editing with diffusion models offers user-friendly capabilities, yet editing failures, such as background distortion, frequently occur. Users often resort to trial and error, adjusting seeds or prompts to achieve satisfactory results, which is inefficient. While seed selection methods exist for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, they depend on external verifiers, limiting applicability, and evaluating multiple seeds increases computational complexity. To address this, we first establish a multiple-seed-based image editing baseline using background consistency scores, achieving Best-of-N performance without supervision. Building on this, we introduce ELECT (Early-timestep Latent Evaluation for Candidate Selection), a zero-shot framework that selects reliable seeds by estimating background mismatches at early diffusion timesteps, identifying the seed that retains the background while modifying only the foreground. ELECT ranks seed candidates by a background inconsistency score, filtering unsuitable samples early based on background consistency while preserving editability. Beyond standalone seed selection, ELECT integrates into instruction-guided editing pipelines and extends to Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLMs) for joint seed and prompt selection, further improving results when seed selection alone is insufficient. Experiments show that ELECT reduces computational costs (by 41 percent on average and up to 61 percent) while improving background consistency and instruction adherence, achieving around 40 percent success rates in previously failed cases - without any external supervision or training.

Forecasting Labor Demand: Predicting JOLT Job Openings using Deep Learning Model

This thesis studies the effectiveness of Long Short Term Memory model in forecasting future Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data in the United States. Drawing on multiple economic indicators from various sources, the data are fed directly into LSTM model to predict JOLT job openings in subsequent periods. The performance of the LSTM model is compared with conventional autoregressive approaches, including ARIMA, SARIMA, and Holt-Winters. Findings suggest that the LSTM model outperforms these traditional models in predicting JOLT job openings, as it not only captures the dependent variables trends but also harmonized with key economic factors. These results highlight the potential of deep learning techniques in capturing complex temporal dependencies in economic data, offering valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders in developing data-driven labor market strategies

COIN: Confidence Score-Guided Distillation for Annotation-Free Cell Segmentation

Cell instance segmentation (CIS) is crucial for identifying individual cell morphologies in histopathological images, providing valuable insights for biological and medical research. While unsupervised CIS (UCIS) models aim to reduce the heavy reliance on labor-intensive image annotations, they fail to accurately capture cell boundaries, causing missed detections and poor performance. Recognizing the absence of error-free instances as a key limitation, we present COIN (COnfidence score-guided INstance distillation), a novel annotation-free framework with three key steps: (1) Increasing the sensitivity for the presence of error-free instances via unsupervised semantic segmentation with optimal transport, leveraging its ability to discriminate spatially minor instances, (2) Instance-level confidence scoring to measure the consistency between model prediction and refined mask and identify highly confident instances, offering an alternative to ground truth annotations, and (3) Progressive expansion of confidence with recursive self-distillation. Extensive experiments across six datasets show COIN outperforming existing UCIS methods, even surpassing semi- and weakly-supervised approaches across all metrics on the MoNuSeg and TNBC datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/COIN.

DiffEGG: Diffusion-Driven Edge Generation as a Pixel-Annotation-Free Alternative for Instance Annotation

Achieving precise panoptic segmentation relies on pixel-wise instance annotations, but obtaining such datasets is costly. Unsupervised instance segmentation (UIS) eliminates annotation requirements but struggles with adjacent instance merging and single-instance fragmentation, largely due to the limitations of DINO-based backbones which lack strong instance separation cues. Weakly-supervised panoptic segmentation (WPS) reduces annotation costs using sparse labels (e.g., points, boxes), yet these annotations remain expensive and introduce human bias and boundary errors. To address these challenges, we propose DiffEGG (Diffusion-Driven EdGe Generation), a fully annotation-free method that extracts instance-aware features from pretrained diffusion models to generate precise instance edge maps. Unlike DINO-based UIS methods, diffusion models inherently capture fine-grained, instance-aware features, enabling more precise boundary delineation. For WPS, DiffEGG eliminates annotation costs and human bias by operating without any form of manual supervision, addressing the key limitations of prior best methods. Additionally, we introduce RIP, a post-processing technique that fuses DiffEGG's edge maps with segmentation masks in a task-agnostic manner. RIP allows DiffEGG to be seamlessly integrated into various segmentation frameworks. When applied to UIS, DiffEGG and RIP achieve an average $+4.4\text{ AP}$ improvement over prior best UIS methods. When combined with weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSS), DiffEGG enables WPS without instance annotations, outperforming prior best point-supervised WPS methods by $+1.7\text{ PQ}$. These results demonstrate that DiffEGG's edge maps serve as a cost-effective, annotation-free alternative to instance annotations, significantly improving segmentation without human intervention. Code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/DiffEGG.

OFF-CLIP: Improving Normal Detection Confidence in Radiology CLIP with Simple Off-Diagonal Term Auto-Adjustment

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) has enabled zero-shot classification in radiology, reducing reliance on manual annotations. However, conventional contrastive learning struggles with normal case detection due to its strict intra-sample alignment, which disrupts normal sample clustering and leads to high false positives (FPs) and false negatives (FNs). To address these issues, we propose OFF-CLIP, a contrastive learning refinement that improves normal detection by introducing an off-diagonal term loss to enhance normal sample clustering and applying sentence-level text filtering to mitigate FNs by removing misaligned normal statements from abnormal reports. OFF-CLIP can be applied to radiology CLIP models without requiring any architectural modifications. Experimental results show that OFF-CLIP significantly improves normal classification, achieving a 0.61 Area under the curve (AUC) increase on VinDr-CXR over CARZero, the state-of-the-art zero-shot classification baseline, while maintaining or improving abnormal classification performance. Additionally, OFF-CLIP enhances zero-shot grounding by improving pointing game accuracy, confirming better anomaly localization. These results demonstrate OFF-CLIP's effectiveness as a robust and efficient enhancement for medical vision-language models.

HybridLinker: Topology-Guided Posterior Sampling for Enhanced Diversity and Validity in 3D Molecular Linker Generation

Linker generation is critical in drug discovery applications such as lead optimization and PROTAC design, where molecular fragments are assembled into diverse drug candidates. Existing methods fall into PC-Free and PC-Aware categories based on their use of 3D point clouds (PC). PC-Free models prioritize diversity but suffer from lower validity due to overlooking PC constraints, while PC-Aware models ensure higher validity but restrict diversity by enforcing strict PC constraints. To overcome these trade-offs without additional training, we propose HybridLinker, a framework that enhances PC-Aware inference by providing diverse bonding topologies from a pretrained PC-Free model as guidance. At its core, we propose LinkerDPS, the first diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) method operating across PC-Free and PC-Aware spaces, bridging molecular topology with 3D point clouds via an energy-inspired function. By transferring the diverse sampling distribution of PC-Free models into the PC-Aware distribution, HybridLinker significantly and consistently surpasses baselines, improving both validity and diversity in foundational molecular design and applied property optimization tasks, establishing a new DPS framework in the molecular and graph domains beyond imaging.

TokenSynth: A Token-based Neural Synthesizer for Instrument Cloning and Text-to-Instrument

Recent advancements in neural audio codecs have enabled the use of tokenized audio representations in various audio generation tasks, such as text-to-speech, text-to-audio, and text-to-music generation. Leveraging this approach, we propose TokenSynth, a novel neural synthesizer that utilizes a decoder-only transformer to generate desired audio tokens from MIDI tokens and CLAP (Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining) embedding, which has timbre-related information. Our model is capable of performing instrument cloning, text-to-instrument synthesis, and text-guided timbre manipulation without any fine-tuning. This flexibility enables diverse sound design and intuitive timbre control. We evaluated the quality of the synthesized audio, the timbral similarity between synthesized and target audio/text, and synthesis accuracy (i.e., how accurately it follows the input MIDI) using objective measures. TokenSynth demonstrates the potential of leveraging advanced neural audio codecs and transformers to create powerful and versatile neural synthesizers. The source code, model weights, and audio demos are available at: https://github.com/KyungsuKim42/tokensynth