Domain-Invariant Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have transformed computer vision by aligning images and text in a shared feature space, enabling robust zero-shot transfer via prompting. Soft-prompting, such as Context Optimization (CoOp), effectively adapts these models for downstream recognition tasks by learning a set of context vectors. However, CoOp lacks explicit mechanisms for handling domain shifts across unseen distributions. To address this, we propose Domain-invariant Context Optimization (DiCoOp), an extension of CoOp optimized for domain generalization. By employing an adversarial training approach, DiCoOp forces the model to learn domain-invariant prompts while preserving discriminative power for classification. Experimental results show that DiCoOp consistently surpasses CoOp in domain generalization tasks across diverse visual domains.

Argument Mining as a Text-to-Text Generation Task

Argument Mining(AM) aims to uncover the argumentative structures within a text. Previous methods require several subtasks, such as span identification, component classification, and relation classification. Consequently, these methods need rule-based postprocessing to derive argumentative structures from the output of each subtask. This approach adds to the complexity of the model and expands the search space of the hyperparameters. To address this difficulty, we propose a simple yet strong method based on a text-to-text generation approach using a pretrained encoder-decoder language model. Our method simultaneously generates argumentatively annotated text for spans, components, and relations, eliminating the need for task-specific postprocessing and hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, because it is a straightforward text-to-text generation method, we can easily adapt our approach to various types of argumentative structures. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, as it achieves state-of-the-art performance on three different types of benchmark datasets: the Argument-annotated Essays Corpus(AAEC), AbstRCT, and the Cornell eRulemaking Corpus(CDCP)

ParaSpeechCLAP: A Dual-Encoder Speech-Text Model for Rich Stylistic Language-Audio Pretraining

We introduce ParaSpeechCLAP, a dual-encoder contrastive model that maps speech and text style captions into a common embedding space, supporting a wide range of intrinsic (speaker-level) and situational (utterance-level) descriptors (such as pitch, texture and emotion) far beyond the narrow set handled by existing models. We train specialized ParaSpeechCLAP-Intrinsic and ParaSpeechCLAP-Situational models alongside a unified ParaSpeechCLAP-Combined model, finding that specialization yields stronger performance on individual style dimensions while the unified model excels on compositional evaluation. We further show that ParaSpeechCLAP-Intrinsic benefits from an additional classification loss and class-balanced training. We demonstrate our models' performance on style caption retrieval, speech attribute classification and as an inference-time reward model that improves style-prompted TTS without additional training. ParaSpeechCLAP outperforms baselines on most metrics across all three applications. Our models and code are released at https://github.com/ajd12342/paraspeechclap .

Variational Encoder--Multi-Decoder (VE-MD) for Privacy-by-functional-design (Group) Emotion Recognition

Group Emotion Recognition (GER) aims to infer collective affect in social environments such as classrooms, crowds, and public events. Many existing approaches rely on explicit individual-level processing, including cropped faces, person tracking, or per-person feature extraction, which makes the analysis pipeline person-centric and raises privacy concerns in deployment scenarios where only group-level understanding is needed. This research proposes VE-MD, a Variational Encoder-Multi-Decoder framework for group emotion recognition under a privacy-aware functional design. Rather than providing formal anonymization or cryptographic privacy guarantees, VE-MD is designed to avoid explicit individual monitoring by constraining the model to predict only aggregate group-level affect, without identity recognition or per-person emotion outputs. VE-MD learns a shared latent representation jointly optimized for emotion classification and internal prediction of body and facial structural representations. Two structural decoding strategies are investigated: a transformer-based PersonQuery decoder and a dense Heatmap decoder that naturally accommodates variable group sizes. Experiments on six in-the-wild datasets, including two GER and four Individual Emotion Recognition (IER) benchmarks, show that structural supervision consistently improves representation learning. More importantly, the results reveal a clear distinction between GER and IER: optimizing the latent space alone is often insufficient for GER because it tends to attenuate interaction-related cues, whereas preserving explicit structural outputs improves collective affect inference. In contrast, projected structural representations seem to act as an effective denoising bottleneck for IER. VE-MD achieves state-of-the-art performance on GAF-3.0 (up to 90.06%) and VGAF (82.25% with multimodal fusion with audio). These results show that preserving interaction-related structural information is particularly beneficial for group-level affect modeling without relying on prior individual feature extraction. On IER datasets using multimodal fusion with audio modality, VE-MD outperforms SOTA on SamSemo (77.9%, adding text modality) while achieving competitive performances on MER-MULTI (63.8%), DFEW (70.7%) and EngageNet (69.0).

Explaining CLIP Zero-shot Predictions Through Concepts

Large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have achieved remarkable success in zero-shot image recognition, yet their predictions remain largely opaque to human understanding. In contrast, Concept Bottleneck Models provide interpretable intermediate representations by reasoning through human-defined concepts, but they rely on concept supervision and lack the ability to generalize to unseen classes. We introduce EZPC that bridges these two paradigms by explaining CLIP's zero-shot predictions through human-understandable concepts. Our method projects CLIP's joint image-text embeddings into a concept space learned from language descriptions, enabling faithful and transparent explanations without additional supervision. The model learns this projection via a combination of alignment and reconstruction objectives, ensuring that concept activations preserve CLIP's semantic structure while remaining interpretable. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, CIFAR-100, CUB-200-2011, Places365, ImageNet-100, and ImageNet-1k, demonstrate that our approach maintains CLIP's strong zero-shot classification accuracy while providing meaningful concept-level explanations. By grounding open-vocabulary predictions in explicit semantic concepts, our method offers a principled step toward interpretable and trustworthy vision-language models. Code is available at https://github.com/oonat/ezpc.

Is AI Catching Up to Human Expression? Exploring Emotion, Personality, Authorship, and Linguistic Style in English and Arabic with Six Large Language Models

The advancing fluency of LLMs raises important questions about their ability to emulate complex human traits, including emotional expression and personality, across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. This study investigates whether LLMs can convincingly mimic emotional nuance in English and personality markers in Arabic, a critical under-resourced language with unique linguistic and cultural characteristics. We conduct two tasks across six models:Jais, Mistral, LLaMA, GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek. First, we evaluate whether machine classifiers can reliably distinguish between human-authored and AI-generated texts. Second, we assess the extent to which LLM-generated texts exhibit emotional or personality traits comparable to those of humans. Our results demonstrate that AI-generated texts are distinguishable from human-authored ones (F1>0.95), though classification performance deteriorates on paraphrased samples, indicating a reliance on superficial stylistic cues. Emotion and personality classification experiments reveal significant generalization gaps: classifiers trained on human data perform poorly on AI-generated texts and vice versa, suggesting LLMs encode affective signals differently from humans. Importantly, augmenting training with AI-generated data enhances performance in the Arabic personality classification task, highlighting the potential of synthetic data to address challenges in under-resourced languages. Model-specific analyses show that GPT-4o and Gemini exhibit superior affective coherence. Linguistic and psycholinguistic analyses reveal measurable divergences in tone, authenticity, and textual complexity between human and AI texts. These findings have implications for affective computing, authorship attribution, and responsible AI deployment, particularly within underresourced language contexts where generative AI detection and alignment pose unique challenges.

Continual Learning for Food Category Classification Dataset: Enhancing Model Adaptability and Performance

Conventional machine learning pipelines often struggle to recognize categories absent from the original trainingset. This gap typically reduces accuracy, as fixed datasets rarely capture the full diversity of a domain. To address this, we propose a continual learning framework for text-guided food classification. Unlike approaches that require retraining from scratch, our method enables incremental updates, allowing new categories to be integrated without degrading prior knowledge. For example, a model trained on Western cuisines could later learn to classify dishes such as dosa or kimchi. Although further refinements are needed, this design shows promise for adaptive food recognition, with applications in dietary monitoring and personalized nutrition planning.

Selective Fine-Tuning of GPT Architectures for Parameter-Efficient Clinical Text Classification

The rapid expansion of electronic health record (EHR) systems has generated large volumes of unstructured clinical narratives that contain valuable information for disease identification, patient cohort discovery, and clinical decision support. Extracting structured knowledge from these free-text documents remains challenging because clinical language is highly specialized, labeled datasets are limited, and full fine-tuning of large pretrained language models can require substantial computational resources. Efficient adaptation strategies are therefore essential for practical clinical natural language processing applications. This study proposes a parameter-efficient selective fine-tuning framework for adapting GPT-2 to clinical text classification tasks. Instead of updating the entire pretrained model, the majority of network parameters are frozen, and only the final Transformer block, the final layer normalization module, and a lightweight classification head are updated during training. This design substantially reduces the number of trainable parameters while preserving the contextual representation capabilities learned during pretraining. The proposed approach is evaluated using radiology reports from the MIMIC-IV-Note dataset with automatically derived CheXpert-style labels. Experiments on 50,000 radiology reports demonstrate that selective fine-tuning achieves approximately 91% classification accuracy while updating fewer than 6% of the model parameters. Comparative experiments with head-only training and full-model fine-tuning show that the proposed method provides a favorable balance between predictive performance and computational efficiency. These results indicate that selective fine-tuning offers an efficient and scalable framework for clinical text classification.

An Automatic Text Classification Method Based on Hierarchical Taxonomies, Neural Networks and Document Embedding: The NETHIC Tool

This work describes an automatic text classification method implemented in a software tool called NETHIC, which takes advantage of the inner capabilities of highly-scalable neural networks combined with the expressiveness of hierarchical taxonomies. As such, NETHIC succeeds in bringing about a mechanism for text classification that proves to be significantly effective as well as efficient. The tool had undergone an experimentation process against both a generic and a domain-specific corpus, outputting promising results. On the basis of this experimentation, NETHIC has been now further refined and extended by adding a document embedding mechanism, which has shown improvements in terms of performance on the individual networks and on the whole hierarchical model.

AlignMamba-2: Enhancing Multimodal Fusion and Sentiment Analysis with Modality-Aware Mamba

In the era of large-scale pre-trained models, effectively adapting general knowledge to specific affective computing tasks remains a challenge, particularly regarding computational efficiency and multimodal heterogeneity. While Transformer-based methods have excelled at modeling inter-modal dependencies, their quadratic computational complexity limits their use with long-sequence data. Mamba-based models have emerged as a computationally efficient alternative; however, their inherent sequential scanning mechanism struggles to capture the global, non-sequential relationships that are crucial for effective cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{AlignMamba-2}, an effective and efficient framework for multimodal fusion and sentiment analysis. Our approach introduces a dual alignment strategy that regularizes the model using both Optimal Transport distance and Maximum Mean Discrepancy, promoting geometric and statistical consistency between modalities without incurring any inference-time overhead. More importantly, we design a Modality-Aware Mamba layer, which employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with modality-specific and modality-shared experts to explicitly handle data heterogeneity during the fusion process. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks, including dynamic time-series (on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI datasets) and static image-related tasks (on the NYU-Depth V2 and MVSA-Single datasets), demonstrate that AlignMamba-2 establishes a new state-of-the-art in both effectiveness and efficiency across diverse pattern recognition tasks, ranging from dynamic time-series analysis to static image-text classification.