Comparative study of deep learning architectures and vision transformers for lemon leaf disease classification

AI-based emotion recognition has emerged as a critical component of affect-aware educational technologies, particularly in online, large-scale, and technology-mediated learning environments where direct observation of learners’ emotional states is limited. By leveraging facial expressions, speech, physiological signals, and interaction data, emotion-aware systems aim to support adaptive instruction, learner engagement, and instructional decision-making. Despite rapid technical progress, the integration of emotion recognition into authentic educational practice remains constrained by dataset limitations, cultural bias, weak pedagogical alignment, and unresolved ethical concerns. This article presents a critical and theory-informed review of recent advances in AI-based emotion recognition in education, with particular emphasis on deep learning architectures and multimodal fusion approaches, while highlighting persistent challenges and future research directions.Purpose:This study aims to critically examine the current state of AI-based emotion recognition in educational contexts by analyzing dominant modeling paradigms, sensing modalities, application domains, and ethical implications, in order to identify key gaps between technical development and pedagogical practice.Methods/Study design/approach:The study adopts a narrative literature review approach grounded in educational and affective computing theories. Representative and influential studies were analyzed across facial, speech, physiological, and multimodal emotion recognition systems, with emphasis on deep learning, attention-based, and transformer architectures. The review synthesizes findings related to system performance, educational applications, dataset characteristics, and ethical considerations.Result/Findings:The findings indicate that multimodal emotion recognition systems generally outperform unimodal approaches in detecting learning-relevant affective states such as engagement, frustration, and confusion. Advances in deep learning, particularly attention-based and transformer models, improve temporal modeling and robustness. However, most systems rely on non-educational datasets, demonstrate limited cultural generalizability, and prioritize recognition accuracy over pedagogical interpretability and long-term educational impact. Ethical challenges related to privacy, consent, bias, and emotional surveillance remain insufficiently addressed.Novelty/Originality/Value:This study provides an integrative and pedagogically grounded synthesis that bridges affective computing research with educational theory and governance perspectives. By reframing AI-based emotion recognition as a decision-support mechanism rather than an automated control system, the article offers a conceptual foundation for responsible, culturally inclusive, and ethically aligned deployment of emotion-aware AI in education, serving as a reference for future interdisciplinary research and policy development.

This study compared popular Deep Learning (DL) architectures to classify machining surface roughness using sound and force data. The DL architectures considered in this study include Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolution Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and transformer. The classification was performed on the sound and force data generated during machining aluminum sheets for different levels of spindle speed, feed rate, depth of cut, and end-mill diameter, and it was trained on 30 s machining data (10–40 s) of the machining experiments. Since a raw audio waveform is seldom used in DL models, Mel-Spectrogram and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) audio feature extraction techniques were used in the DL models. The results of DL models were compared for the training–validation accuracy, training epochs, and training parameters of each model. Although the roughness classification by all the DL models was satisfactory (except for CNN with Mel-Spectrogram), the transformer-based modes had the highest training (>96%) and validation accuracies (≈90%). The CNN model with Mel-Spectrogram exhibited the worst training and inference accuracy, which is influenced by limited training data. Confusion matrices were plotted to observe the classification accuracy visually. The confusion matrices showed that the transformer model trained on Mel-Spectrogram and the transformer model trained on MFCCs correctly predicted 366 (or 91.5%) and 371 (or 92.7%) out of 400 test samples. This study also highlights the suitability and superiority of the transformer model for time series sound and force data and over other DL models.

PurposeTo conduct a head-to-head comparison between deep learning (DL) and radiomics models across institutions for predicting microvascular invasion (MVI) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and to investigate the model robustness and generalizability through rigorous internal and external validation.MethodsThis retrospective study included 2304 preoperative images of 576 HCC lesions from two centers, with MVI status determined by postoperative histopathology. We developed DL and radiomics models for predicting the presence of MVI using B-mode ultrasound, contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) at the arterial, portal, and delayed phases, and a combined modality (B + CEUS). For radiomics, we constructed models with enlarged vs. original regions of interest (ROIs). A cross-validation approach was performed by training models on one center’s dataset and validating the other, and vice versa. This allowed assessment of the validity of different ultrasound modalities and the cross-center robustness of the models. The optimal model combined with alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) was also validated. The head-to-head comparison was based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).ResultsThirteen DL models and 25 radiomics models using different ultrasound modalities were constructed and compared. B + CEUS was the optimal modality for both DL and radiomics models. The DL model achieved AUCs of 0.802–0.818 internally and 0.667–0.688 externally across the two centers, whereas radiomics achieved AUCs of 0.749–0.869 internally and 0.646–0.697 externally. The radiomics models showed overall improvement with enlarged ROIs (P < 0.05 for both CEUS and B + CEUS modalities). The DL models showed good cross-institutional robustness (P > 0.05 for all modalities, 1.6–2.1% differences in AUC for the optimal modality), whereas the radiomics models had relatively limited robustness across the two centers (12% drop-off in AUC for the optimal modality). Adding AFP improved the DL models (P < 0.05 externally) and well maintained the robustness, but did not benefit the radiomics model (P > 0.05).ConclusionCross-institutional validation indicated that DL demonstrated better robustness than radiomics for preoperative MVI prediction in patients with HCC, representing a promising solution to non-standardized ultrasound examination procedures.

This study proposes a compact deep learning (DL) architecture and a highly parallelized computing hardware platform to reconstruct the blood flow index (BFi) in diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS). We leveraged a rigorous analytical model to generate autocorrelation functions (ACFs) to train the DL network. We assessed the accuracy of the proposed DL using simulated and milk phantom data. Compared to convolutional neural networks (CNN), our lightweight DL architecture achieves 66.7% and 18.5% improvement in MSE for BFi and the coherence factor β, using synthetic data evaluation. The accuracy of rBFi over different algorithms was also investigated. We further simplified the DL computing primitives using subtraction for feature extraction, considering further hardware implementation. We extensively explored computing parallelism and fixed-point quantization within the DL architecture. With the DL model's compact size, we employed unrolling and pipelining optimizations for computation-intensive for-loops in the DL model while storing all learned parameters in on-chip BRAMs. We also achieved pixel-wise parallelism, enabling simultaneous, real-time processing of 10 and 15 autocorrelation functions on Zynq-7000 and Zynq-UltraScale+ field programmable gate array (FPGA), respectively. Unlike existing FPGA accelerators that produce BFi and the β from autocorrelation functions on standalone hardware, our approach is an encapsulated, end-to-end on-chip conversion process from intensity photon data to the temporal intensity ACF and subsequently reconstructing BFi and β. This hardware platform achieves an on-chip solution to replace post-processing and miniaturize modern DCS systems that use single-photon cameras. We also comprehensively compared the computational efficiency of our FPGA accelerator to CPU and GPU solutions.

Research in many fields has shown that transfer learning (TL) is well-suited to improve the performance of deep learning (DL) models in datasets with small numbers of samples. This empirical success has triggered interest in the application of TL to cognitive decoding analyses with functional neuroimaging data. Here, we systematically evaluate TL for the application of DL models to the decoding of cognitive states (e.g., viewing images of faces or houses) from whole-brain functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. We first pre-train two DL architectures on a large, public fMRI dataset and subsequently evaluate their performance in an independent experimental task and a fully independent dataset. The pre-trained DL models consistently achieve higher decoding accuracies and generally require less training time and data than model variants that were not pre-trained, while also outperforming linear baseline models trained from scratch, clearly underlining the benefits of pre-training. We demonstrate that these benefits arise from the ability of the pre-trained models to reuse many of their learned features when training with new data, providing deeper insights into the mechanisms giving rise to the benefits of pre-training. Yet, we also surface nuanced challenges for whole-brain cognitive decoding with DL models when interpreting the decoding decisions of the pre-trained models, as these have learned to utilize the fMRI data in unforeseen and counterintuitive ways to identify individual cognitive states.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches are crucial in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for various medical applications. Their ability to quickly and accurately learn from complex data is remarkable. Deep learning (DL) models have shown promising results in accurately classifying Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its related cognitive states, Early Mild Cognitive Impairment (EMCI) and Late Mild Cognitive Impairment (LMCI), along with the healthy conditions known as Cognitively Normal (CN). This offers valuable insights into disease progression and diagnosis. However, certain traditional machine learning (ML) classifiers perform equally well or even better than DL models, requiring less training data. This is particularly valuable in CAD in situations with limited labeled datasets. In this paper, we propose an ensemble classifier based on ML models for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, which achieved an impressive accuracy of 96.52%. This represents a 3-5% improvement over the best individual classifier. We evaluated popular ML classifiers for AD classification under both data-scarce and data-rich conditions using the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and Open Access Series of Imaging Studies datasets. By comparing the results to state-of-the-art CNN-centric DL algorithms, we gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. This work will help users to select the most suitable algorithm for AD classification based on data availability.

COVID-19 is highly infectious and causes acute respiratory disease. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models are vital in detecting disease from computerized chest tomography (CT) scans. The DL models outperformed the ML models. For COVID-19 detection from CT scan images, DL models are used as end-to-end models. Thus, the performance of the model is evaluated for the quality of the extracted feature and classification accuracy. There are four contributions included in this work. First, this research is motivated by studying the quality of the extracted feature from the DL by feeding these extracted to an ML model. In other words, we proposed comparing the end-to-end DL model performance against the approach of using DL for feature extraction and ML for the classification of COVID-19 CT scan images. Second, we proposed studying the effect of fusing extracted features from image descriptors, e.g., Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), with extracted features from DL models. Third, we proposed a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to be trained from scratch and then compared to the deep transfer learning on the same classification problem. Finally, we studied the performance gap between classic ML models against ensemble learning models. The proposed framework is evaluated using a CT dataset, where the obtained results are evaluated using five different metrics The obtained results revealed that using the proposed CNN model is better than using the well-known DL model for the purpose of feature extraction. Moreover, using a DL model for feature extraction and an ML model for the classification task achieved better results in comparison to using an end-to-end DL model for detecting COVID-19 CT scan images. Of note, the accuracy rate of the former method improved by using ensemble learning models instead of the classic ML models. The proposed method achieved the best accuracy rate of 99.39%.

Background: Plant diseases affect agricultural output, quality and profitability, making them serious obstacles for agriculture. It is essential to detect diseases early in order to reduce losses while retaining sustainable practices. Plant disease detection has benefited greatly from the use of computer vision and deep learning in recent years because of their outstanding precision and computing capability. Objective: In this paper, we intend to investigate the role of deep learning in computer vision for plant disease detection while looking into how these techniques address complex disease identification problems. A variety of deep learning architectures were reviewed, and the contribution of frameworks such as Tensorflow, Keras, Caffe and PyTorch to the researchers' model construction was studied as well. Additionally, the usage of open repositories such as PlantVillage and Kaggle along with the customized datasets were discussed. Methods: We gathered the most recent developments in deep learning techniques for leaf disease detection through a systematic literature review of research papers published over the past decade, using reputable academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method for guidance. Results: This study finds that researchers consistently enhance existing deep learning architectures to improve prediction accuracy in plant disease detection, often by introducing novel architectures and employing transfer learning methods. Frameworks like TensorFlow, Keras, Caffe, and PyTorch are widely favored for their efficiency in development. Additionally, most studies opt for public datasets such as PlantVillage, Kaggle, and ImageNet, which offer an abundance of labelled data for training and testing deep learning models. Conclusion: While no singular ‘best' model emerges, the adaptability of deep learning and computer vision demonstrates the dynamic nature of plant disease recognition area, and this paper provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning's transformative impact on plant disease recognition by bringing together information from different studies. Keywords: Deep learning, Computer vision, Plant disease, Systematic literature review

Electricity load forecasting is a crucial undertaking within all the deregulated markets globally. Among the research challenges on a global scale, the investigation of deep transfer learning (DTL) in the field of electricity load forecasting represents a fundamental effort that can inform artificial intelligence applications in general. In this paper, a comprehensive study is reported regarding day-ahead electricity load forecasting. For this purpose, three sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) deep learning (DL) models are used, namely the multilayer perceptron (MLP), the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the ensemble learning model (ELM), which consists of the weighted combination of the outputs of MLP and CNN models. Also, the study focuses on the development of different forecasting strategies based on DTL, emphasizing the way the datasets are trained and fine-tuned for higher forecasting accuracy. In order to implement the forecasting strategies using deep learning models, load datasets from three Greek islands, Rhodes, Lesvos, and Chios, are used. The main purpose is to apply DTL for day-ahead predictions (1–24 h) for each month of the year for the Chios dataset after training and fine-tuning the models using the datasets of the three islands in various combinations. Four DTL strategies are illustrated. In the first strategy (DTL Case 1), each of the three DL models is trained using only the Lesvos dataset, while fine-tuning is performed on the dataset of Chios island, in order to create day-ahead predictions for the Chios load. In the second strategy (DTL Case 2), data from both Lesvos and Rhodes concurrently are used for the DL model training period, and fine-tuning is performed on the data from Chios. The third DTL strategy (DTL Case 3) involves the training of the DL models using the Lesvos dataset, and the testing period is performed directly on the Chios dataset without fine-tuning. The fourth strategy is a multi-task deep learning (MTDL) approach, which has been extensively studied in recent years. In MTDL, the three DL models are trained simultaneously on all three datasets and the final predictions are made on the unknown part of the dataset of Chios. The results obtained demonstrate that DTL can be applied with high efficiency for day-ahead load forecasting. Specifically, DTL Case 1 and 2 outperformed MTDL in terms of load prediction accuracy. Regarding the DL models, all three exhibit very high prediction accuracy, especially in the two cases with fine-tuning. The ELM excels compared to the single models. More specifically, for conducting day-ahead predictions, it is concluded that the MLP model presents the best monthly forecasts with MAPE values of 6.24% and 6.01% for the first two cases, the CNN model presents the best monthly forecasts with MAPE values of 5.57% and 5.60%, respectively, and the ELM model achieves the best monthly forecasts with MAPE values of 5.29% and 5.31%, respectively, indicating the very high accuracy it can achieve.

We developed a multimodal ultrasound (US) deep learning (DL) fusion model to automatically classify early fibrosis in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). This prospective study included patients with CKD who underwent continuous gray-scale US, superb microvascular imaging, and strain elastography from May to November 2022. According to the pathological tubular atrophy and interstitial fibrosis score, patients were divided into minimal and mild groups (affected area ≤10% and 11 − 25% of the total cortical volume, respectively). The dataset was divided into training (70%) and test (30%) sets. A DL model combining the features of the three US modes was developed to predict early fibrosis in patients with CKD. We compared these findings with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the clinical model by analyzing the receiver operating characteristic curve in the test set. The AUC of single-mode DL based on gray-scale US, superb microvascular imaging, and strain elastography was 0.682, 0.745, and 0.648, respectively, while that of the multimodal US DL model was 0.86. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of the multimodal US DL model were 0.779, 0.767, and 0.796, respectively, and the negative and positive predictive values were 0.842 and 0.706, respectively. The AUC of the multimodal US DL model was significantly better than that of the single-mode DL and clinical models. The DL algorithm developed using multimodal US images can effectively predict early fibrosis in patients with CKD with significantly greater accuracy than single-mode DL or clinical models.

We aimed at comparing intratumoral and peritumoral deep learning, radiomics, and fusion models in predicting KRAS mutations in rectal cancer using endorectal ultrasound imaging. This study included 304 patients with rectal cancer from Fujian Medical University Union Hospital. The patients were randomly divided into a training group (213 patients) and a test group (91 patients) at a 7:3 ratio. Radiomics and deep learning models were established using primary tumor and peritumoral images. In the optimally performing regions-of-interest, two fusion strategies, a feature-based and a decision-based model, were employed to build the fusion models. The Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) method was used to evaluate the significance of features in the optimal radiomics, deep learning, and fusion models. The performance of each model was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and decision curve analysis (DCA). In the test cohort, both the radiomics and deep learning models exhibited optimal performance with a 10-pixel patch extension, yielding AUC values of 0.824 and 0.856, respectively. The feature-based DLRexpand10_FB model attained the highest AUC (0.896) across all study sets. In addition, the DLRexpand10_FB model demonstrated excellent sensitivity, specificity, and DCA. SHAP analysis underscored the deep learning feature (DL_1) as the most significant factor in the hybrid model. The feature-based fusion model DLRexpand10_FB can be employed to predict KRAS gene mutations based on pretreatment endorectal ultrasound images of rectal cancer. The integration of peritumoral regions enhanced the predictive performance of both the radiomics and deep learning models.

Deep learning breast cancer risk models demonstrate improved accuracy compared with traditional risk models but have not been prospectively tested. We compared the accuracy of a deep learning risk score derived from the patient's prior mammogram to traditional risk scores to prospectively identify patients with cancer in a cohort due for screening. We collected data on 119 139 bilateral screening mammograms in 57 617 consecutive patients screened at 5 facilities between September 18, 2017, and February 1, 2021. Patient demographics were retrieved from electronic medical records, cancer outcomes determined through regional tumor registry linkage, and comparisons made across risk models using Wilcoxon and Pearson χ2 2-sided tests. Deep learning, Tyrer-Cuzick, and National Cancer Institute Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool (NCI BCRAT) risk models were compared with respect to performance metrics and area under the receiver operating characteristic curves. Cancers detected per thousand patients screened were higher in patients at increased risk by the deep learning model (8.6, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 7.9 to 9.4) compared with Tyrer-Cuzick (4.4, 95% CI = 3.9 to 4.9) and NCI BCRAT (3.8, 95% CI = 3.3 to 4.3) models (P &lt; .001). Area under the receiver operating characteristic curves of the deep learning model (0.68, 95% CI = 0.66 to 0.70) was higher compared with Tyrer-Cuzick (0.57, 95% CI = 0.54 to 0.60) and NCI BCRAT (0.57, 95% CI = 0.54 to 0.60) models. Simulated screening of the top 50th percentile risk by the deep learning model captured statistically significantly more patients with cancer compared with Tyrer-Cuzick and NCI BCRAT models (P &lt; .001). A deep learning model to assess breast cancer risk can support feasible and effective risk-based screening and is superior to traditional models to identify patients destined to develop cancer in large screening cohorts.

In recent years, plant leaf diseases has become a widespread problem for which an accurate research and rapid application of deep learning in plant disease classification is required, tomato is also one of the most important plants and seeds which are used worldwide for cooking in either dried or fresh form, tomato are a great source of protein that offer many health benefits, but there are a lot of diseases associated with tomato leaf which hinder its production. Thus, an accurate classification of tomato leaf diseases is needed to solve the problem in the early stage. A deep learning approach is proposed to identify and classify leaf disease by using public dataset of leaf image and CNN model with the open source library TensorFlow. In this project, we proposed a method to classify tomato leaf disease and to find and describe the efficient network architecture (hyper parameters and optimization methods). Moreover, after applying each architecture separately, we compared their obtained results to find out the best architecture configuration for classifying tomato leaf diseases and their results. Furthermore, to satisfy the classification requirements, the model was trained using CNN architecture check if we could get faster training times, higher accuracy and easier retraining. Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence. In recent years, with the advantages of automatic learning and feature extraction, it has been widely concerned by academic and industrial circles. It has been widely used in image and video processing, voice processing, and natural language processing. At the same time, it has also become a research hotspot in the field of agricultural plant protection, such as plant disease recognition. The application of deep learning in plant disease recognition can avoid the disadvantages caused by artificial selection of disease spot features, make plant disease feature extraction more objective, and improve the research efficiency and technology transformation speed. This review provides the research progress of deep learning technology in the field of crop leaf disease identification in recent years. In this project, we present the current trends and challenges for the detection of plant leaf disease using deep learning and advanced imaging techniques. We hope that this project will be a valuable resource for researchers who study the detection of plant diseases. At the same time, we also discussed some of the current challenges and problems that need to be resolved.

The past few years have seen a surge of applying Deep Learning (DL) models for a wide array of tasks such as image classification, object detection, machine translation, etc. While DL models provide an opportunity to solve otherwise intractable tasks, their adoption relies on them being optimized to meet latency and resource requirements. Benchmarking is a key step in this process but has been hampered in part due to the lack of representative and up-to-date benchmarking suites. This is exacerbated by the fast-evolving pace of DL models. This paper proposes DLBricks, a composable benchmark generation design that reduces the effort of developing, maintaining, and running DL benchmarks on CPUs. DLBricks decomposes DL models into a set of unique runnable networks and constructs the original model's performance using the performance of the generated benchmarks. DLBricks leverages two key observations: DL layers are the performance building blocks of DL models and layers are extensively repeated within and across DL models. Since benchmarks are generated automatically and the benchmarking time is minimized, DLBricks can keep up-to-date with the latest proposed models, relieving the pressure of selecting representative DL models. Moreover, DLBricks allows users to represent proprietary models within benchmark suites. We evaluate DLBricks using $50$ MXNet models spanning $5$ DL tasks on $4$ representative CPU systems. We show that DLBricks provides an accurate performance estimate for the DL models and reduces the benchmarking time across systems (e.g. within $95\%$ accuracy and up to $4.4\times$ benchmarking time speedup on Amazon EC2 c5.xlarge).

This article investigates the identification of hate speech on social media using machine learning and deep learning techniques. The research uses metrics such as F-measure, AUC-ROC, precision, accuracy, and recall assessing the effectiveness of various tactics. The findings indicate that deep learning models, particularly the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) architecture, consistently outperform other methods in categorization tasks. The research emphasizes the importance of sophisticated neural network designs in identifying the intricacies of hostile and offensive content online. The study offers insights for promoting early identification and prevention of cyberbullying, improving secure and inclusive online environments. Future research may explore real-time detection systems, hybrid approaches, or the integration of complementary components to enhance and improve innovative technology in tackling this significant social issue. A sample tweet was annotated by specialists who categorize tweets as hate speech, offensive language, or neutral. The researchers applied shallow learning methodologies and integrated word embeddings like Word2Vec and GloVe to enhance the efficacy of deep learning models. The results indicate that BiLSTM surpasses shallow learning methods in detecting hate speech on Twitter, highlighting the efficacy of deep learning approaches in recognizing and tracking hate speech on social media platforms. When comparing different deep learning and machine learning models on different datasets, the results reveal that deep learning techniques are usually more effective. A reasonably high level of accuracy is achieved by KNN and SVM among classical algorithms, whereas Naïve Bayes performs the poorest. While deep learning approaches provide better results, tree-based models such as Random Forest and Decision Trees offer more consistent accuracy. Models based on neural networks, such as LSTM, CNN, and BI-LSTM, perform well, with LSTM-based methods excelling in particular. The most successful strategy for classification problems is the model presented, which obtains the greatest accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score of 95%. The research aids in the development of advanced tools and methodologies to mitigate hate speech on social media and foster positive online interactions. Future research may investigate alternative deep learning architectures, such as transformers, to enhance hate speech detection efficacy. The advancement of interpretable AI methodologies for identifying hate speech and delivering transparent forecasts might enhance user confidence and facilitate better content moderation decisions.