AgriPath: A Systematic Exploration of Architectural Trade-offs for Crop Disease Classification

Reliable crop disease detection requires models that perform consistently across diverse acquisition conditions, yet existing evaluations often focus on single architectural families or lab-generated datasets. This work presents a systematic empirical comparison of three model paradigms for fine-grained crop disease classification: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), contrastive Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and generative VLMs. To enable controlled analysis of domain effects, we introduce AgriPath-LF16, a benchmark containing 111k images spanning 16 crops and 41 diseases with explicit separation between laboratory and field imagery, alongside a balanced 30k subset for standardized training and evaluation. All models are trained and evaluated under unified protocols across full, lab-only, and field-only training regimes using macro-F1 and Parse Success Rate (PSR) to account for generative reliability. The results reveal distinct performance profiles. CNNs achieve the highest accuracy on lab imagery but degrade under domain shift. Contrastive VLMs provide a robust and parameter-efficient alternative with competitive cross-domain performance. Generative VLMs demonstrate the strongest resilience to distributional variation, albeit with additional failure modes stemming from free-text generation. These findings highlight that architectural choice should be guided by deployment context rather than aggregate accuracy alone.

Enhancing Mental Health Classification with Layer-Attentive Residuals and Contrastive Feature Learning

The classification of mental health is challenging for a variety of reasons. For one, there is overlap between the mental health issues. In addition, the signs of mental health issues depend on the context of the situation, making classification difficult. Although fine-tuning transformers has improved the performance for mental health classification, standard cross-entropy training tends to create entangled feature spaces and fails to utilize all the information the transformers contain. We present a new framework that focuses on representations to improve mental health classification. This is done using two methods. First, \textbf{layer-attentive residual aggregation} which works on residual connections to to weigh and fuse representations from all transformer layers while maintaining high-level semantics. Second, \textbf{supervised contrastive feature learning} uses temperature-scaled supervised contrastive learning with progressive weighting to increase the geometric margin between confusable mental health problems and decrease class overlap by restructuring the feature space. With a score of \textbf{74.36\%}, the proposed method is the best performing on the SWMH benchmark and outperforms models that are domain-specialized, such as \textit{MentalBERT} and \textit{MentalRoBERTa} by margins of (3.25\% - 2.2\%) and 2.41 recall points over the highest achieving model. These findings show that domain-adaptive pretraining for mental health text classification can be surpassed by carefully designed representation geometry and layer-aware residual integration, which also provide enhanced interpretability through learnt layer importance.

Dataset Diversity Metrics and Impact on Classification Models

The diversity of training datasets is usually perceived as an important aspect to obtain a robust model. However, the definition of diversity is often not defined or differs across papers, and while some metrics exist, the quantification of this diversity is often overlooked when developing new algorithms. In this work, we study the behaviour of multiple dataset diversity metrics for image, text and metadata using MorphoMNIST, a toy dataset with controlled perturbations, and PadChest, a publicly available chest X-ray dataset. We evaluate whether these metrics correlate with each other but also with the intuition of a clinical expert. We also assess whether they correlate with downstream-task performance and how they impact the training dynamic of the models. We find limited correlations between the AUC and image or metadata reference-free diversity metrics, but higher correlations with the FID and the semantic diversity metrics. Finally, the clinical expert indicates that scanners are the main source of diversity in practice. However, we find that the addition of another scanner to the training set leads to shortcut learning. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/TheoSourget/dataset_diversity_evaluation

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.

ContiGuard: A Framework for Continual Toxicity Detection Against Evolving Evasive Perturbations

Toxicity detection mitigates the dissemination of toxic content (e.g., hateful comments, posts, and messages within online social actions) to safeguard a healthy online social environment. However, malicious users persistently develop evasive perturbations to disguise toxic content and evade detectors. Traditional detectors or methods are static over time and are inadequate in addressing these evolving evasion tactics. Thus, continual learning emerges as a logical approach to dynamically update detection ability against evolving perturbations. Nevertheless, disparities across perturbations hinder the detector's continual learning on perturbed text. More importantly, perturbation-induced noises distort semantics to degrade comprehension and also impair critical feature learning to render detection sensitive to perturbations. These amplify the challenge of continual learning against evolving perturbations. In this work, we present ContiGuard, the first framework tailored for continual learning of the detector on time-evolving perturbed text (termed continual toxicity detection) to enable the detector to continually update capability and maintain sustained resilience against evolving perturbations. Specifically, to boost the comprehension, we present an LLM-powered semantic enriching strategy, where we dynamically incorporate possible meaning and toxicity-related clues excavated by LLM into the perturbed text to improve the comprehension. To mitigate non-critical features and amplify critical ones, we propose a discriminability-driven feature learning strategy, where we strengthen discriminative features while suppressing the less-discriminative ones to shape a robust classification boundary for detection...

Mind the Shift: Decoding Monetary Policy Stance from FOMC Statements with Large Language Models

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements are a major source of monetary-policy information, and even subtle changes in their wording can move global financial markets. A central task is therefore to measure the hawkish--dovish stance conveyed in these texts. Existing approaches typically treat stance detection as a standard classification problem, labeling each statement in isolation. However, the interpretation of monetary-policy communication is inherently relative: market reactions depend not only on the tone of a statement, but also on how that tone shifts across meetings. We introduce Delta-Consistent Scoring (DCS), an annotation-free framework that maps frozen large language model (LLM) representations to continuous stance scores by jointly modeling absolute stance and relative inter-meeting shifts. Rather than relying on manual hawkish--dovish labels, DCS uses consecutive meetings as a source of self-supervision. It learns an absolute stance score for each statement and a relative shift score between consecutive statements. A delta-consistency objective encourages changes in absolute scores to align with the relative shifts. This allows DCS to recover a temporally coherent stance trajectory without manual labels. Across four LLM backbones, DCS consistently outperforms supervised probes and LLM-as-judge baselines, achieving up to 71.1% accuracy on sentence-level hawkish--dovish classification. The resulting meeting-level scores are also economically meaningful: they correlate strongly with inflation indicators and are significantly associated with Treasury yield movements. Overall, the results suggest that LLM representations encode monetary-policy signals that can be recovered through relative temporal structure.

BTZSC: A Benchmark for Zero-Shot Text Classification Across Cross-Encoders, Embedding Models, Rerankers and LLMs

Zero-shot text classification (ZSC) offers the promise of eliminating costly task-specific annotation by matching texts directly to human-readable label descriptions. While early approaches have predominantly relied on cross-encoder models fine-tuned for natural language inference (NLI), recent advances in text-embedding models, rerankers, and instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have challenged the dominance of NLI-based architectures. Yet, systematically comparing these diverse approaches remains difficult. Existing evaluations, such as MTEB, often incorporate labeled examples through supervised probes or fine-tuning, leaving genuine zero-shot capabilities underexplored. To address this, we introduce BTZSC, a comprehensive benchmark of 22 public datasets spanning sentiment, topic, intent, and emotion classification, capturing diverse domains, class cardinalities, and document lengths. Leveraging BTZSC, we conduct a systematic comparison across four major model families, NLI cross-encoders, embedding models, rerankers and instruction-tuned LLMs, encompassing 38 public and custom checkpoints. Our results show that: (i) modern rerankers, exemplified by Qwen3-Reranker-8B, set a new state-of-the-art with macro F1 = 0.72; (ii) strong embedding models such as GTE-large-en-v1.5 substantially close the accuracy gap while offering the best trade-off between accuracy and latency; (iii) instruction-tuned LLMs at 4--12B parameters achieve competitive performance (macro F1 up to 0.67), excelling particularly on topic classification but trailing specialized rerankers; (iv) NLI cross-encoders plateau even as backbone size increases; and (v) scaling primarily benefits rerankers and LLMs over embedding models. BTZSC and accompanying evaluation code are publicly released to support fair and reproducible progress in zero-shot text understanding.

A Closed-Form Solution for Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Utility Guarantees Across Modalities and Tasks

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse downstream tasks, recent studies have shown that they can inherit social biases from the training data and further propagate them into downstream applications. To address this issue, various debiasing approaches have been proposed, yet most of them aim to improve fairness without having a theoretical guarantee that the utility of the model is preserved. In this paper, we introduce a debiasing method that yields a \textbf{closed-form} solution in the cross-modal space, achieving Pareto-optimal fairness with \textbf{bounded utility losses}. Our method is \textbf{training-free}, requires \textbf{no annotated data}, and can jointly debias both visual and textual modalities across downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in debiasing VLMs across diverse fairness metrics and datasets for both group and \textbf{intersectional} fairness in downstream tasks such as zero-shot image classification, text-to-image retrieval, and text-to-image generation while preserving task performance.

DamageArbiter: A CLIP-Enhanced Multimodal Arbitration Framework for Hurricane Damage Assessment from Street-View Imagery

Analyzing street-view imagery with computer vision models for rapid, hyperlocal damage assessment is becoming popular and valuable in emergency response and recovery, but traditional models often act like black boxes, lacking interpretability and reliability. This study proposes a multimodal disagreement-driven Arbitration framework powered by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models, DamageArbiter, to improve the accuracy, interpretability, and robustness of damage estimation from street-view imagery. DamageArbiter leverages the complementary strengths of unimodal and multimodal models, employing a lightweight logistic regression meta-classifier to arbitrate cases of disagreement. Using 2,556 post-disaster street-view images, paired with both manually generated and large language model (LLM)-generated text descriptions, we systematically compared the performance of unimodal models (including image-only and text-only models), multimodal CLIP-based models, and DamageArbiter. Notably, DamageArbiter improved the accuracy from 74.33% (ViT-B/32, image-only) to 82.79%, surpassing the 80% accuracy threshold and achieving an absolute improvement of 8.46% compared to the strongest baseline model. Beyond improvements in overall accuracy, compared to visual models relying solely on images, DamageArbiter, through arbitration of discrepancies between unimodal and multimodal predictions, mitigates common overconfidence errors in visual models, especially in situations where disaster visual cues are ambiguous or subject to interference, reducing overconfidence but incorrect predictions. We further mapped and analyzed geo-referenced predictions and misclassifications to compare model performance across locations. Overall, this work advances street-view-based disaster assessment from coarse severity classification toward a more reliable and interpretable framework.

Extending Minimal Pairs with Ordinal Surprisal Curves and Entropy Across Applied Domains

The minimal pairs paradigm of comparing model probabilities for contrasting completions has proven useful for evaluating linguistic knowledge in language models, yet its application has largely been confined to binary grammaticality judgments over syntactic phenomena. Additionally, standard prompting-based evaluation requires expensive text generation, may elicit post-hoc rationalizations rather than model judgments, and discards information about model uncertainty. We address both limitations by extending surprisal-based evaluation from binary grammaticality contrasts to ordinal-scaled classification and scoring tasks across multiple domains. Rather than asking models to generate answers, we measure the information-theoretic "surprise" (negative log probability) they assign to each position on rating scales (e.g., 1-5 or 1-9), yielding full surprisal curves that reveal both the model's preferred response and its uncertainty via entropy. We explore this framework across four domains: social-ecological-technological systems classification, causal statement identification (binary and scaled), figurative language detection, and deductive qualitative coding. Across these domains, surprisal curves produce interpretable classification signals with clear minima near expected ordinal scale positions, and entropy over the completion tended to distinguish genuinely ambiguous items from easier items.