CoSwin: Convolution Enhanced Hierarchical Shifted Window Attention For Small-Scale Vision

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive results in computer vision by leveraging self-attention to model long-range dependencies. However, their emphasis on global context often comes at the expense of local feature extraction in small datasets, particularly due to the lack of key inductive biases such as locality and translation equivariance. To mitigate this, we propose CoSwin, a novel feature-fusion architecture that augments the hierarchical shifted window attention with localized convolutional feature learning. Specifically, CoSwin integrates a learnable local feature enhancement module into each attention block, enabling the model to simultaneously capture fine-grained spatial details and global semantic structure. We evaluate CoSwin on multiple image classification benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet. Our experimental results show consistent performance gains over state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer-based models. Notably, CoSwin achieves improvements of 2.17% on CIFAR-10, 4.92% on CIFAR-100, 0.10% on MNIST, 0.26% on SVHN, and 4.47% on Tiny ImageNet over the baseline Swin Transformer. These improvements underscore the effectiveness of local-global feature fusion in enhancing the generalization and robustness of transformers for small-scale vision. Code and pretrained weights available at https://github.com/puskal-khadka/coswin

Ecologically Valid Benchmarking and Adaptive Attention: Scalable Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring (UPAM) provides rich spatiotemporal data for long-term ecological analysis, but intrinsic noise and complex signal dependencies hinder model stability and generalization. Multilayered windowing has improved target sound localization, yet variability from shifting ambient noise, diverse propagation effects, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources demands robust architectures and rigorous evaluation. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework designed to quantify model stability under ecologically realistic variability. Data are partitioned into distinct site-year segments, preserving recording heterogeneity and ensuring each validation fold reflects a unique environmental subset, reducing overfitting to localized noise and sensor artifacts. Site-year blocking enforces evaluation against genuine environmental diversity, while standard cross-validation on random subsets measures generalization across UPAM's full signal distribution, a dimension absent from current benchmarks. Using GetNetUPAM as the evaluation backbone, we propose the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a neural architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. Adaptive pooling with spatial attention extends the receptive field, capturing global context without excessive parameters. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N achieves a 14.4% gain in average precision over DenseNet baselines and a log2-scale order-of-magnitude drop in variability across all metrics, enabling consistent detection across site-year folds and advancing scalable, accurate bioacoustic monitoring.

Bi-cephalic self-attended model to classify Parkinson's disease patients with freezing of gait

Parkinson Disease (PD) often results in motor and cognitive impairments, including gait dysfunction, particularly in patients with freezing of gait (FOG). Current detection methods are either subjective or reliant on specialized gait analysis tools. This study aims to develop an objective, data-driven, and multi-modal classification model to detect gait dysfunction in PD patients using resting-state EEG signals combined with demographic and clinical variables. We utilized a dataset of 124 participants: 42 PD patients with FOG (PDFOG+), 41 without FOG (PDFOG-), and 41 age-matched healthy controls. Features extracted from resting-state EEG and descriptive variables (age, education, disease duration) were used to train a novel Bi-cephalic Self-Attention Model (BiSAM). We tested three modalities: signal-only, descriptive-only, and multi-modal, across different EEG channel subsets (BiSAM-63, -16, -8, and -4). Signal-only and descriptive-only models showed limited performance, achieving a maximum accuracy of 55% and 68%, respectively. In contrast, the multi-modal models significantly outperformed both, with BiSAM-8 and BiSAM-4 achieving the highest classification accuracy of 88%. These results demonstrate the value of integrating EEG with objective descriptive features for robust PDFOG+ detection. This study introduces a multi-modal, attention-based architecture that objectively classifies PDFOG+ using minimal EEG channels and descriptive variables. This approach offers a scalable and efficient alternative to traditional assessments, with potential applications in routine clinical monitoring and early diagnosis of PD-related gait dysfunction.