EmoLoom-2B: Fast Base-Model Screening for Emotion Classification and VAD with Lexicon-Weak Supervision and KV-Off Evaluation

We introduce EmoLoom-2B, a lightweight and reproducible pipeline that turns small language models under 2B parameters into fast screening candidates for joint emotion classification and Valence-Arousal-Dominance prediction. To ensure protocol-faithful and fair evaluation, we unify data loading, training, and inference under a single JSON input-output contract and remove avoidable variance by adopting KV-off decoding as the default setting. We incorporate two orthogonal semantic regularizers: a VAD-preserving constraint that aligns generated text with target VAD triples, and a lightweight external appraisal classifier that provides training-time guidance on goal attainment, controllability, certainty, and fairness without injecting long rationales. To improve polarity sensitivity, we introduce Valence Flip augmentation based on mirrored emotional pairs. During supervised fine-tuning, we apply A/B mixture sampling with entropy-aware temperature scheduling to balance coverage and convergence. Using Qwen-1.8B-Chat as the base model, EmoLoom-2B achieves strong performance on GoEmotions and EmpatheticDialogues, and demonstrates robust cross-corpus generalization on DailyDialog. The proposed recipe is budget-aware, auditable, and re-entrant, serving as a dependable screening pass before heavier training or multimodal fusion.

Comparative Efficiency Analysis of Lightweight Transformer Models: A Multi-Domain Empirical Benchmark for Enterprise NLP Deployment

In the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise natural language processing (NLP), the demand for efficient, lightweight models capable of handling multi-domain text automation tasks has intensified. This study conducts a comparative analysis of three prominent lightweight Transformer models - DistilBERT, MiniLM, and ALBERT - across three distinct domains: customer sentiment classification, news topic classification, and toxicity and hate speech detection. Utilizing datasets from IMDB, AG News, and the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, we evaluated performance using accuracy-based metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, as well as efficiency metrics such as model size, inference time, throughput, and memory usage. Key findings reveal that no single model dominates all performance dimensions. ALBERT achieves the highest task-specific accuracy in multiple domains, MiniLM excels in inference speed and throughput, and DistilBERT demonstrates the most consistent accuracy across tasks while maintaining competitive efficiency. All results reflect controlled fine-tuning under fixed enterprise-oriented constraints rather than exhaustive hyperparameter optimization. These results highlight trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, recommending MiniLM for latency-sensitive enterprise applications, DistilBERT for balanced performance, and ALBERT for resource-constrained environments.

Blog Data Showdown: Machine Learning vs Neuro-Symbolic Models for Gender Classification

Text classification problems, such as gender classification from a blog, have been a well-matured research area that has been well studied using machine learning algorithms. It has several application domains in market analysis, customer recommendation, and recommendation systems. This study presents a comparative analysis of the widely used machine learning algorithms, namely Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR), AdaBoost, XGBoost, and an SVM variant (SVM_R) with neuro-symbolic AI (NeSy). The paper also explores the effect of text representations such as TF-IDF, the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), and RoBERTa. Additionally, various feature extraction techniques, including Chi-Square, Mutual Information, and Principal Component Analysis, are explored. Building on these, we introduce a comparative analysis of the machine learning and deep learning approaches in comparison to the NeSy. The experimental results show that the use of the NeSy approach matched strong MLP results despite a limited dataset. Future work on this research will expand the knowledge base, the scope of embedding types, and the hyperparameter configuration to further study the effectiveness of the NeSy approach.

Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

We present a training-free method for detecting valid mathematical reasoning in large language models through spectral analysis of attention patterns. By treating attention matrices as adjacency matrices of dynamic graphs over tokens, we extract four interpretable spectral diagnostics, the Fiedler value (algebraic connectivity), high-frequency energy ratio (HFER), graph signal smoothness, and spectral entropy, that exhibit statistically significant differences between valid and invalid mathematical proofs. Experiments across seven transformer models from four independent architectural families (Meta Llama, Alibaba Qwen, Microsoft Phi, and Mistral AI) demonstrate that this spectral signature produces effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling 85.0--95.6\% classification accuracy under rigorous evaluation, with calibrated thresholds reaching 93--95\% on the full dataset. The method requires no training data, fine-tuning, or learned classifiers: a single threshold on a spectral metric suffices for high accuracy. Through systematic label correction, we discover that the spectral method detects logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, identifying mathematically valid proofs that formal verifiers reject due to technical failures. We further identify an architectural dependency: Mistral-7B's Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative signal from HFER to late-layer Smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p_{\text{MW}} = 1.16 \times 10^{-48}$), revealing that attention mechanism design affects which spectral features capture reasoning validity. These findings establish spectral graph analysis as a principled framework for reasoning verification with immediate applications to hallucination detection and AI safety monitoring.

Hierarchy-Aware Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) learn powerful multimodal representations through large-scale image-text pretraining, but adapting them to hierarchical classification is underexplored. Standard approaches treat labels as flat categories and require full fine-tuning, which is expensive and produces inconsistent predictions across taxonomy levels. We propose an efficient hierarchy-aware fine-tuning framework that updates a few parameters while enforcing structural consistency. We combine two objectives: Tree-Path KL Divergence (TP-KL) aligns predictions along the ground-truth label path for vertical coherence, while Hierarchy-Sibling Smoothed Cross-Entropy (HiSCE) encourages consistent predictions among sibling classes. Both losses work in the VLM's shared embedding space and integrate with lightweight LoRA adaptation. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show consistent improvements in Full-Path Accuracy and Tree-based Inconsistency Error with minimal parameter overhead. Our approach provides an efficient strategy for adapting VLMs to structured taxonomies.

Research on a hybrid LSTM-CNN-Attention model for text-based web content classification

This study presents a hybrid deep learning architecture that integrates LSTM, CNN, and an Attention mechanism to enhance the classification of web content based on text. Pretrained GloVe embeddings are used to represent words as dense vectors that preserve semantic similarity. The CNN layer extracts local n-gram patterns and lexical features, while the LSTM layer models long-range dependencies and sequential structure. The integrated Attention mechanism enables the model to focus selectively on the most informative parts of the input sequence. A 5-fold cross-validation setup was used to assess the robustness and generalizability of the proposed solution. Experimental results show that the hybrid LSTM-CNN-Attention model achieved outstanding performance, with an accuracy of 0.98, precision of 0.94, recall of 0.92, and F1-score of 0.93. These results surpass the performance of baseline models based solely on CNNs, LSTMs, or transformer-based classifiers such as BERT. The combination of neural network components enabled the model to effectively capture both fine-grained text structures and broader semantic context. Furthermore, the use of GloVe embeddings provided an efficient and effective representation of textual data, making the model suitable for integration into systems with real-time or near-real-time requirements. The proposed hybrid architecture demonstrates high effectiveness in text-based web content classification, particularly in tasks requiring both syntactic feature extraction and semantic interpretation. By combining presented mechanisms, the model addresses the limitations of individual architectures and achieves improved generalization. These findings support the broader use of hybrid deep learning approaches in NLP applications, especially where complex, unstructured textual data must be processed and classified with high reliability.

Beyond CLIP: Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Transformers for Cross-Modal Alignment in Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide, demanding accurate automated diagnostic systems. While general-domain vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) perform well on natural image tasks, they struggle in medical domain applications, particularly in cross-modal retrieval for ophthalmological images. We propose a novel knowledge-enhanced joint embedding framework that integrates retinal fundus images, clinical text, and structured patient data through a multimodal transformer architecture to address the critical gap in medical image-text alignment. Our approach employs separate encoders for each modality: a Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) for retinal images, Bio-ClinicalBERT for clinical narratives, and a multilayer perceptron for structured demographic and clinical features. These modalities are fused through a joint transformer with modality-specific embeddings, trained using multiple objectives including contrastive losses between modality pairs, reconstruction losses for images and text, and classification losses for DR severity grading according to ICDR and SDRG schemes. Experimental results on the Brazilian Multilabel Ophthalmological Dataset (BRSET) demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models. Our framework achieves near-perfect text-to-image retrieval performance with Recall@1 of 99.94% compared to fine-tuned CLIP's 1.29%, while maintaining state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 97.05% for SDRG and 97.97% for ICDR. Furthermore, zero-shot evaluation on the unseen DeepEyeNet dataset validates strong generalizability with 93.95% Recall@1 versus 0.22% for fine-tuned CLIP. These results demonstrate that our multimodal training approach effectively captures cross-modal relationships in the medical domain, establishing both superior retrieval capabilities and robust diagnostic performance.

Generative Classifiers Avoid Shortcut Solutions

Discriminative approaches to classification often learn shortcuts that hold in-distribution but fail even under minor distribution shift. This failure mode stems from an overreliance on features that are spuriously correlated with the label. We show that generative classifiers, which use class-conditional generative models, can avoid this issue by modeling all features, both core and spurious, instead of mainly spurious ones. These generative classifiers are simple to train, avoiding the need for specialized augmentations, strong regularization, extra hyperparameters, or knowledge of the specific spurious correlations to avoid. We find that diffusion-based and autoregressive generative classifiers achieve state-of-the-art performance on five standard image and text distribution shift benchmarks and reduce the impact of spurious correlations in realistic applications, such as medical or satellite datasets. Finally, we carefully analyze a Gaussian toy setting to understand the inductive biases of generative classifiers, as well as the data properties that determine when generative classifiers outperform discriminative ones.

Towards Open-Vocabulary Industrial Defect Understanding with a Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset

We present IMDD-1M, the first large-scale Industrial Multimodal Defect Dataset comprising 1,000,000 aligned image-text pairs, designed to advance multimodal learning for manufacturing and quality inspection. IMDD-1M contains high-resolution real-world defects spanning over 60 material categories and more than 400 defect types, each accompanied by expert-verified annotations and fine-grained textual descriptions detailing defect location, severity, and contextual attributes. This dataset enables a wide spectrum of applications, including classification, segmentation, retrieval, captioning, and generative modeling. Building upon IMDD-1M, we train a diffusion-based vision-language foundation model from scratch, specifically tailored for industrial scenarios. The model serves as a generalizable foundation that can be efficiently adapted to specialized domains through lightweight fine-tuning. With less than 5% of the task-specific data required by dedicated expert models, it achieves comparable performance, highlighting the potential of data-efficient foundation model adaptation for industrial inspection and generation, paving the way for scalable, domain-adaptive, and knowledge-grounded manufacturing intelligence.

Fine-Tuning Causal LLMs for Text Classification: Embedding-Based vs. Instruction-Based Approaches

We explore efficient strategies to fine-tune decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream text classification under resource constraints. Two approaches are investigated: (1) attaching a classification head to a pre-trained causal LLM and fine-tuning on the task (using the LLM's final token embedding as a sequence representation), and (2) instruction-tuning the LLM in a prompt->response format for classification. To enable single-GPU fine-tuning of models up to 8B parameters, we combine 4-bit model quantization with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient training. Experiments on two datasets - a proprietary single-label dataset and the public WIPO-Alpha patent dataset (extreme multi-label classification) - show that the embedding-based method significantly outperforms the instruction-tuned method in F1-score, and is very competitive with - even surpassing - fine-tuned domain-specific models (e.g. BERT) on the same tasks. These results demonstrate that directly leveraging the internal representations of causal LLMs, along with efficient fine-tuning techniques, yields impressive classification performance under limited computational resources. We discuss the advantages of each approach while outlining practical guidelines and future directions for optimizing LLM fine-tuning in classification scenarios.