DiffStyle3D: Consistent 3D Gaussian Stylization via Attention Optimization

3D style transfer enables the creation of visually expressive 3D content, enriching the visual appearance of 3D scenes and objects. However, existing VGG- and CLIP-based methods struggle to model multi-view consistency within the model itself, while diffusion-based approaches can capture such consistency but rely on denoising directions, leading to unstable training. To address these limitations, we propose DiffStyle3D, a novel diffusion-based paradigm for 3DGS style transfer that directly optimizes in the latent space. Specifically, we introduce an Attention-Aware Loss that performs style transfer by aligning style features in the self-attention space, while preserving original content through content feature alignment. Inspired by the geometric invariance of 3D stylization, we propose a Geometry-Guided Multi-View Consistency method that integrates geometric information into self-attention to enable cross-view correspondence modeling. Based on geometric information, we additionally construct a geometry-aware mask to prevent redundant optimization in overlapping regions across views, which further improves multi-view consistency. Extensive experiments show that DiffStyle3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher stylization quality and visual realism.

Facial Emotion Recognition on FER-2013 using an EfficientNetB2-Based Approach

Detection of human emotions based on facial images in real-world scenarios is a difficult task due to low image quality, variations in lighting, pose changes, background distractions, small inter-class variations, noisy crowd-sourced labels, and severe class imbalance, as observed in the FER-2013 dataset of 48x48 grayscale images. Although recent approaches using large CNNs such as VGG and ResNet achieve reasonable accuracy, they are computationally expensive and memory-intensive, limiting their practicality for real-time applications. We address these challenges using a lightweight and efficient facial emotion recognition pipeline based on EfficientNetB2, trained using a two-stage warm-up and fine-tuning strategy. The model is enhanced with AdamW optimization, decoupled weight decay, label smoothing (epsilon = 0.06) to reduce annotation noise, and clipped class weights to mitigate class imbalance, along with dropout, mixed-precision training, and extensive real-time data augmentation. The model is trained using a stratified 87.5%/12.5% train-validation split while keeping the official test set intact, achieving a test accuracy of 68.78% with nearly ten times fewer parameters than VGG16-based baselines. Experimental results, including per-class metrics and learning dynamics, demonstrate stable training and strong generalization, making the proposed approach suitable for real-time and edge-based applications.

Revisiting Aerial Scene Classification on the AID Benchmark

Aerial images play a vital role in urban planning and environmental preservation, as they consist of various structures, representing different types of buildings, forests, mountains, and unoccupied lands. Due to its heterogeneous nature, developing robust models for scene classification remains a challenge. In this study, we conduct a literature review of various machine learning methods for aerial image classification. Our survey covers a range of approaches from handcrafted features (e.g., SIFT, LBP) to traditional CNNs (e.g., VGG, GoogLeNet), and advanced deep hybrid networks. In this connection, we have also designed Aerial-Y-Net, a spatial attention-enhanced CNN with multi-scale feature fusion mechanism, which acts as an attention-based model and helps us to better understand the complexities of aerial images. Evaluated on the AID dataset, our model achieves 91.72% accuracy, outperforming several baseline architectures.

QFed: Parameter-Compact Quantum-Classical Federated Learning

Organizations and enterprises across domains such as healthcare, finance, and scientific research are increasingly required to extract collective intelligence from distributed, siloed datasets while adhering to strict privacy, regulatory, and sovereignty requirements. Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model building without sharing sensitive raw data, but faces growing challenges posed by statistical heterogeneity, system diversity, and the computational burden from complex models. This study examines the potential of quantum-assisted federated learning, which could cut the number of parameters in classical models by polylogarithmic factors and thus lessen training overhead. Accordingly, we introduce QFed, a quantum-enabled federated learning framework aimed at boosting computational efficiency across edge device networks. We evaluate the proposed framework using the widely adopted FashionMNIST dataset. Experimental results show that QFed achieves a 77.6% reduction in the parameter count of a VGG-like model while maintaining an accuracy comparable to classical approaches in a scalable environment. These results point to the potential of leveraging quantum computing within a federated learning context to strengthen FL capabilities of edge devices.

VGG Induced Deep Hand Sign Language Detection

Hand gesture recognition is an important aspect of human-computer interaction. It forms the basis of sign language for the visually impaired people. This work proposes a novel hand gesture recognizing system for the differently-abled persons. The model uses a convolutional neural network, known as VGG-16 net, for building a trained model on a widely used image dataset by employing Python and Keras libraries. Furthermore, the result is validated by the NUS dataset, consisting of 10 classes of hand gestures, fed to the model as the validation set. Afterwards, a testing dataset of 10 classes is built by employing Google's open source Application Programming Interface (API) that captures different gestures of human hand and the efficacy is then measured by carrying out experiments. The experimental results show that by combining a transfer learning mechanism together with the image data augmentation, the VGG-16 net produced around 98% accuracy.

NOVAK: Unified adaptive optimizer for deep neural networks

This work introduces NOVAK, a modular gradient-based optimization algorithm that integrates adaptive moment estimation, rectified learning-rate scheduling, decoupled weight regularization, multiple variants of Nesterov momentum, and lookahead synchronization into a unified, performance-oriented framework. NOVAK adopts a dual-mode architecture consisting of a streamlined fast path designed for production. The optimizer employs custom CUDA kernels that deliver substantial speedups (3-5 for critical operations) while preserving numerical stability under standard stochastic-optimization assumptions. We provide fully developed mathematical formulations for rectified adaptive learning rates, a memory-efficient lookahead mechanism that reduces overhead from O(2p) to O(p + p/k), and the synergistic coupling of complementary optimization components. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees and elucidates the stability and variance-reduction properties of the method. Extensive empirical evaluation on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and ImageNette demonstrates NOVAK superiority over 14 contemporary optimizers, including Adam, AdamW, RAdam, Lion, and Adan. Across architectures such as ResNet-50, VGG-16, and ViT, NOVAK consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, and exceptional robustness, attaining very high accuracy on VGG-16/ImageNette demonstrating superior architectural robustness compared to contemporary optimizers. The results highlight that NOVAKs architectural contributions (particularly rectification, decoupled decay, and hybrid momentum) are crucial for reliable training of deep plain networks lacking skip connections, addressing a long-standing limitation of existing adaptive optimization methods.

Training a Custom CNN on Five Heterogeneous Image Datasets

Deep learning has transformed visual data analysis, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) becoming highly effective in learning meaningful feature representations directly from images. Unlike traditional manual feature engineering methods, CNNs automatically extract hierarchical visual patterns, enabling strong performance across diverse real-world contexts. This study investigates the effectiveness of CNN-based architectures across five heterogeneous datasets spanning agricultural and urban domains: mango variety classification, paddy variety identification, road surface condition assessment, auto-rickshaw detection, and footpath encroachment monitoring. These datasets introduce varying challenges, including differences in illumination, resolution, environmental complexity, and class imbalance, necessitating adaptable and robust learning models. We evaluate a lightweight, task-specific custom CNN alongside established deep architectures, including ResNet-18 and VGG-16, trained both from scratch and using transfer learning. Through systematic preprocessing, augmentation, and controlled experimentation, we analyze how architectural complexity, model depth, and pre-training influence convergence, generalization, and performance across datasets of differing scale and difficulty. The key contributions of this work are: (1) the development of an efficient custom CNN that achieves competitive performance across multiple application domains, and (2) a comprehensive comparative analysis highlighting when transfer learning and deep architectures provide substantial advantages, particularly in data-constrained environments. These findings offer practical insights for deploying deep learning models in resource-limited yet high-impact real-world visual classification tasks.

Performance Analysis of Image Classification on Bangladeshi Datasets

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in image classification tasks; however, the choice between designing a custom CNN from scratch and employing established pre-trained architectures remains an important practical consideration. In this work, we present a comparative analysis of a custom-designed CNN and several widely used deep learning architectures, including VGG-16, ResNet-50, and MobileNet, for an image classification task. The custom CNN is developed and trained from scratch, while the popular architectures are employed using transfer learning under identical experimental settings. All models are evaluated using standard performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Experimental results show that pre-trained CNN architectures consistently outperform the custom CNN in terms of classification accuracy and convergence speed, particularly when training data is limited. However, the custom CNN demonstrates competitive performance with significantly fewer parameters and reduced computational complexity. This study highlights the trade-offs between model complexity, performance, and computational efficiency, and provides practical insights into selecting appropriate CNN architectures for image classification problems.

Comparative Analysis of Custom CNN Architectures versus Pre-trained Models and Transfer Learning: A Study on Five Bangladesh Datasets

This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of custom-built Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) against popular pre-trained architectures (ResNet-18 and VGG-16) using both feature extraction and transfer learning approaches. We evaluated these models across five diverse image classification datasets from Bangladesh: Footpath Vision, Auto Rickshaw Detection, Mango Image Classification, Paddy Variety Recognition, and Road Damage Detection. Our experimental results demonstrate that transfer learning with fine-tuning consistently outperforms both custom CNNs built from scratch and feature extraction methods, achieving accuracy improvements ranging from 3% to 76% across different datasets. Notably, ResNet-18 with fine-tuning achieved perfect 100% accuracy on the Road Damage BD dataset. While custom CNNs offer advantages in model size (3.4M parameters vs. 11-134M for pre-trained models) and training efficiency on simpler tasks, pre-trained models with transfer learning provide superior performance, particularly on complex classification tasks with limited training data. This research provides practical insights for practitioners in selecting appropriate deep learning approaches based on dataset characteristics, computational resources, and performance requirements.

QuIC: A Quantum-Inspired Interaction Classifier for Revitalizing Shallow CNNs in Fine-Grained Recognition

Deploying deep learning models for Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) on resource-constrained edge devices remains a significant challenge. While deep architectures achieve high accuracy on benchmarks like CUB-200-2011, their computational cost is often prohibitive. Conversely, shallow networks (e.g., AlexNet, VGG) offer efficiency but fail to distinguish visually similar sub-categories. This is because standard Global Average Pooling (GAP) heads capture only first-order statistics, missing the subtle high-order feature interactions required for FGVC. While Bilinear CNNs address this, they suffer from high feature dimensionality and instability during training. To bridge this gap, we propose the Quantum-inspired Interaction Classifier (QuIC). Drawing inspiration from quantum mechanics, QuIC models feature channels as interacting quantum states and captures second-order feature covariance via a learnable observable operator. Designed as a lightweight, plug-and-play module, QuIC supports stable, single-stage end-to-end training without exploding feature dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that QuIC significantly revitalizes shallow backbones: it boosts the Top-1 accuracy of VGG16 by nearly 20% and outperforms state-of-the-art attention mechanisms (SE-Block) on ResNet18. Qualitative analysis, including t-SNE visualization, further confirms that QuIC resolves ambiguous cases by explicitly attending to fine-grained discriminative features and enforcing compact intra-class clustering.