Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have been successfully applied to a wide range of problems, including low-dimensional Euclidean structural domains representing images, videos, and speech and high-dimensional non-Euclidean domains, such as social networks and chemical molecular structures. However, in computer vision, the existing GCNNs are not provided with positional information to distinguish between graphs of new structures; therefore, the performance of the image classification domain represented by arbitrary graphs is significantly poor. In this work, we introduce how to initialize the positional information through a random walk algorithm and continuously learn the additional position-embedded information of various graph structures represented over the superpixel images we choose for efficiency. We call this method the graph convolutional network with learnable positional embedding applied on images (IMGCN-LPE). We apply IMGCN-LPE to three graph convolutional models (the Chebyshev graph convolutional network, graph convolutional network, and graph attention network) to validate performance on various benchmark image datasets. As a result, although not as impressive as convolutional neural networks, the proposed method outperforms various other conventional convolutional methods and demonstrates its effectiveness among the same tasks in the field of GCNNs.

Smart factories merge various technologies in a manufacturing environment in order to improve factory performance and product quality. In recent years, these smart factories have received a lot of attention from researchers. In this paper, we introduce a defective product classification system based on deep learning for application in smart factories. The key component of the proposed system is a programmable logic controller (PLC) artificial intelligence (AI) embedded board; we call this an AI Edge-PLC module. A pre-trained defective product classification model is uploaded to a cloud service from where the AI Edge-PLC can access and download it for use on a certain product, in this case, electrical wiring. Next, we setup the system to collect electrical wiring data in a real-world factory environment. Then, we applied preprocessing to the collected data in order to extract a region of interest (ROI) from the images. Due to limitations on the availability of appropriate labeled data, we used the transfer learning method to re-train a classification model for our purposes. The pre-trained models were then optimized for applications on AI Edge-PLC boards. After carrying out classification tasks, on our electrical wire dataset and on a previously published casting dataset, using various deep neural networks including VGGNet, ResNet, DenseNet, and GoogLeNet, we analyzed the results achieved by our system. The experimental results show that our system is able to classify defective products quickly with high accuracy in a real-world manufacturing environment.

Vision–language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural image domains, yet their potential remains underexplored in agriculture due to the lack of high-quality, joint image–text datasets. To address this limitation, we introduce VL-PAW (Vision–Language dataset for Pear, Apple, and Weed), a dataset comprising 3.9 K image–caption pairs for two key agricultural tasks: weed species classification and fruit inspection. We fine-tune the CLIP model on VL-PAW and gain several insights. First, the model demonstrates impressive zero-shot performance, achieving 98.21% accuracy in classifying coarse labels. Second, for fine-grained categories, the vision–language model outperforms vision-only models in both few-shot settings and entire dataset training (1-shot: 56.79%; 2-shot: 72.82%; 3-shot: 74.49%; 10-shot: 83.85%). Third, using intuitive captions enhances fine-grained fruit inspection performance compared to using class names alone. These findings demonstrate the applicability of VLMs in future agricultural querying systems.

Data augmentation (DA) is a universal technique to reduce overfitting and improve the robustness of machine learning models by increasing the quantity and variety of the training dataset. Although data augmentation is essential in vision tasks, it is rarely applied to text datasets since it is less straightforward. Some studies have concerned text data augmentation, but most of them are for the majority languages, such as English or French. There have been only a few studies on data augmentation for minority languages, e.g., Korean. This study fills the gap by demonstrating several common data augmentation methods and Korean corpora with pre-trained language models. In short, we evaluate the performance of two text data augmentation approaches, known as text transformation and back translation. We compare these augmentations among Korean corpora on four downstream tasks: semantic textual similarity (STS), natural language inference (NLI), question duplication verification (QDV), and sentiment classification (STC). Compared to cases without augmentation, the performance gains when applying text data augmentation are 2.24%, 2.19%, 0.66%, and 0.08% on the STS, NLI, QDV, and STC tasks, respectively.

An imbalanced dataset is a significant challenge when training a deep neural network (DNN) model for deep learning problems, such as weeds classification. An imbalanced dataset may result in a model that behaves robustly on major classes and is overly sensitive to minor classes. This article proposes a yielding multi-fold training (YMufT) strategy to train a DNN model on an imbalanced dataset. This strategy reduces the bias in training through a min-class-max-bound procedure (MCMB), which divides samples in the training set into multiple folds. The model is consecutively trained on each one of these folds. In practice, we experiment with our proposed strategy on two small (PlantSeedlings, small PlantVillage) and two large (Chonnam National University (CNU), large PlantVillage) weeds datasets. With the same training configurations and approximate training steps used in conventional training methods, YMufT helps the DNN model to converge faster, thus requiring less training time. Despite a slight decrease in accuracy on the large dataset, YMufT increases the F1 score in the NASNet model to 0.9708 on the CNU dataset and 0.9928 when using the Mobilenet model training on the large PlantVillage dataset. YMufT shows outstanding performance in both accuracy and F1 score on small datasets, with values of (0.9981, 0.9970) using the Mobilenet model for training on small PlantVillage dataset and (0.9718, 0.9689) using Resnet to train on the PlantSeedlings dataset. Grad-CAM visualization shows that conventional training methods mainly concentrate on high-level features and may capture insignificant features. In contrast, YMufT guides the model to capture essential features on the leaf surface and properly localize the weeds targets.

Forecasting, commonly used in econometrics, meteorology, or energy consumption prediction, is the field of study that deals with time series data to predict future trends. Former studies have revealed that both traditional statistical models and recent deep learning-based approaches have achieved good performance in forecasting. In particular, temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) have proved their effectiveness in several time series benchmarks. However, presented TCN models are too heavy to deploy on resource-constrained systems, such as edge devices. As a resolution, this study proposes a stride–dilation mechanism for TCN that favors a lightweight model yet still achieves on-pair accuracy with the heavy counterparts. We also present the Chonnam National University (CNU) Electric Power Consumption dataset, the dataset of energy consumption measured at CNU by smart meters every hour. The experimental results indicate that our best model reduces the mean squared error by 32.7%, whereas the model size is only 1.6% compared to the baseline TCN.