Animal re-identification (ReID) in camera-trap surveys remains challenging due to low image quality, strong variation in illumination and viewpoint, and highly imbalanced numbers of observations per individual. As a result, current ReID performance is often insufficient for fully automated use, and practical workflows typically depend on expert review of algorithmically proposed candidate matches. Moreover, most existing approaches focus almost exclusively on visual cues and overlook auxiliary information routinely available in field studies, such as image timestamps and camera-trap locations. We introduce Spotted, a location-informed, human-in-the-loop animal ReID framework that integrates visual similarity with spatio-temporal feasibility priors derived from camera locations, thereby reducing the amount of required expert review. Our method (i) computes an image-model-agnostic feasibility score based on the minimum travel speed required for two detections to correspond to the same individual, (ii) uses these feasibility cues as pseudo-supervision to train a lightweight head on top of a frozen visual foundation model, and (iii) fuses adapted visual similarity with spatio-temporal
Accurate identification of individual leopards across camera trap images is critical for population monitoring and ecological studies. This paper introduces a deep learning framework to distinguish between individual leopards based on their unique spot patterns. This approach employs a novel adaptive angular margin method in the form of a modified CosFace architecture. In addition, I propose a preprocessing pipeline that combines RGB channels with an edge detection channel to underscore the critical features learned by the model. This approach significantly outperforms the Triplet Network baseline, achieving a Dynamic Top-5 Average Precision of 0.8814 and a Top-5 Rank Match Detection of 0.9533, demonstrating its potential for open-set learning in wildlife identification. While not surpassing the performance of the SIFT-based Hotspotter algorithm, this method represents a substantial advancement in applying deep learning to patterned wildlife identification. This research contributes to the field of computer vision and provides a valuable tool for biologists aiming to study and protect leopard populations. It also serves as a stepping stone for applying the power of deep learning in
This paper examines the challenges and advancements in recognizing seals within their natural habitats using conventional photography, underscored by the emergence of machine learning technologies. We used the leopard seal, \emph{Hydrurga leptonyx}, a key species within Antarctic ecosystems, to review the different available methods found. As apex predators, Leopard seals are characterized by their significant ecological role and elusive nature so studying them is crucial to understand the health of their ecosystem. Traditional methods of monitoring seal species are often constrained by the labor-intensive and time-consuming processes required for collecting data, compounded by the limited insights these methods provide. The advent of machine learning, particularly through the application of vision transformers, heralds a new era of efficiency and precision in species monitoring. By leveraging state-of-the-art approaches in detection, segmentation, and recognition within digital imaging, this paper presents a synthesis of the current landscape, highlighting both the cutting-edge methodologies and the predominant challenges faced in accurately identifying seals through photographic
Text-rich images, where text serves as the central visual element guiding the overall understanding, are prevalent in real-world applications, such as presentation slides, scanned documents, and webpage snapshots. Tasks involving multiple text-rich images are especially challenging, as they require not only understanding the content of individual images but reasoning about inter-relationships and logical flows across multiple visual inputs. Despite the importance of these scenarios, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle to handle such tasks due to two key challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning datasets for text-rich multi-image scenarios, and (2) the difficulty in balancing image resolution with visual feature sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose Leopard, an MLLM tailored for handling vision-language tasks involving multiple text-rich images. First, we curated about one million high-quality multimodal instruction-tuning data, tailored to text-rich, multi-image scenarios. Second, we proposed an adaptive high-resolution multi-image encoding module to dynamically optimize the allocation of visual sequence length based on
Little is known about clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), who have a vulnerable population that extends across southern Asia. We reviewed the literature and synthesized what is known about their ecology and behavior. Much of the published literature either note detections within and on the edges of their range, or are anecdotal observations, many of which are decades if not over a century old. Clouded leopards are a medium-sized felid, with distinctive cloud-shape markings, and notably long canines relative to skull size. Estimates for population densities range from 0.58 to 6.53 individuals per 100 km2. Only 7 clouded leopards have been tracked via radio-collars, and home range estimates range from 33.6-39.7 km2 for females and 35.5-43.5 km2 for males. Most accounts describe clouded leopards as nocturnal, but radio telemetry studies showed that clouded leopards have arrhythmic activity patterns, with highest activity in the morning followed by evening crepuscular hours. There has never been a targeted study of clouded leopard diet, but observations show that they consume a variety of animals, including ungulates, primates, and rodents. We encourage future study of their populati
Caffrey, Egge, Michel, Rubin and Ver Steegh recently introduced snow leopard permutations, which are the anti-Baxter permutations that are compatible with the doubly alternating Baxter permutations. Among other things, they showed that these permutations preserve parity, and that the number of snow leopard permutations of length $2n-1$ is the Catalan number $C_n$. In this paper we investigate the permutations that the snow leopard permutations induce on their even and odd entries; we call these the even threads and the odd threads, respectively. We give recursive bijections between these permutations and certain families of Catalan paths. We characterize the odd (resp. even) threads which form the other half of a snow leopard permutation whose even (resp. odd) thread is layered in terms of pattern avoidance, and we give a constructive bijection between the set of permutations of length $n$ which are both even threads and odd threads and the set of peakless Motzkin paths of length $n+1$.
Identifying potentially vulnerable locations in a code base is critical as a pre-step for effective vulnerability assessment; i.e., it can greatly help security experts put their time and effort to where it is needed most. Metric-based and pattern-based methods have been presented for identifying vulnerable code. The former relies on machine learning and cannot work well due to the severe imbalance between non-vulnerable and vulnerable code or lack of features to characterize vulnerabilities. The latter needs the prior knowledge of known vulnerabilities and can only identify similar but not new types of vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose and implement a generic, lightweight and extensible framework, LEOPARD, to identify potentially vulnerable functions through program metrics. LEOPARD requires no prior knowledge about known vulnerabilities. It has two steps by combining two sets of systematically derived metrics. First, it uses complexity metrics to group the functions in a target application into a set of bins. Then, it uses vulnerability metrics to rank the functions in each bin and identifies the top ones as potentially vulnerable. Our experimental results on 11 real-wor
With the emergence of large-scale decentralized applications, a scalable and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocol of hundreds of replicas is desirable. Although the throughput of existing leader-based BFT protocols has reached a high level of $10^5$ requests per second for a small scale of replicas, it drops significantly when the number of replicas increases, which leads to a lack of practicality. This paper focuses on the scalability of BFT protocols and identifies a major bottleneck to leader-based BFT protocols due to the excessive workload of the leader at large scales. A new metric of scaling factor is defined to capture whether a BFT protocol will get stuck when it scales out, which can be used to measure the performance of efficiency and scalability of BFT protocols. We propose "Leopard", the first leader-based BFT protocol that scales to multiple hundreds of replicas, and more importantly, preserves a high efficiency. We remove the bottleneck by introducing a technique of achieving a constant scaling factor, which takes full advantage of the idle resource and adaptively balances the workload of the leader among all replicas. We implement Leopard and evaluate i
LeoPARD supports the implementation of knowledge representation and reasoning tools for higher-order logic(s). It combines a sophisticated data structure layer (polymorphically typed λ-calculus with nameless spine notation, explicit substitutions, and perfect term sharing) with an ambitious multi-agent blackboard architecture (supporting prover parallelism at the term, clause, and search level). Further features of LeoPARD include a parser for all TPTP dialects, a command line interpreter, and generic means for the integration of external reasoners.
Automated testing improves the efficiency of testing practice at various levels of projects in the organization. Unfortunately, we do not have a common architecture or common standards for designing frameworks across different test levels, projects and test tools which can assist developers, testers and business analysts. To address the above problem, in this paper, I have first proposed a unique reference model and then a design architecture using the proposed model for designing any Data Driven Automation Frameworks. The reference model is K model which can be used for modeling any data-driven automation framework. The unique Design architecture, based on above model is Snow Leopard.
Photographs of wild animals in their natural habitats can be recorded unobtrusively via cameras that are triggered by motion nearby. The installation of such camera traps is becoming increasingly common across the world. Although this is a convenient source of invaluable data for biologists, ecologists and conservationists, the arduous task of poring through potentially millions of pictures each season introduces prohibitive costs and frustrating delays. We develop automatic algorithms that are able to detect animals, identify the species of animals and to recognize individual animals for two species. we propose the first fully-automatic tool that can recognize specific individuals of leopard and tiger due to their characteristic body markings. We adopt a class of supervised learning approach of machine learning where a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is trained using several instances of manually-labelled images for each of the three classification tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a data set of camera-trap images recorded in the jungles of Southern India.
Biochemical recurrence (BCR) after radical prostatectomy (RP) is a surrogate marker for aggressive prostate cancer with adverse outcomes, yet current prognostic tools remain imprecise. We trained an AI-based model on diagnostic prostate biopsy slides from the STHLM3 cohort (n = 676) to predict patient-specific risk of BCR, using foundation models and attention-based multiple instance learning. Generalizability was assessed across three external RP cohorts: LEOPARD (n = 508), CHIMERA (n = 95), and TCGA-PRAD (n = 379). The image-based approach achieved 5-year time-dependent AUCs of 0.64, 0.70, and 0.70, respectively. Integrating clinical variables added complementary prognostic value and enabled statistically significant risk stratification. Compared with guideline-based CAPRA-S, AI incrementally improved postoperative prognostication. These findings suggest biopsy-trained histopathology AI can generalize across specimen types to support preoperative and postoperative decision making, but the added value of AI-based multimodal approaches over simpler predictive models should be critically scrutinized in further studies.
Existing individual re-identification methods often struggle with the deformable nature of animal fur or skin patterns which undergo geometric distortions due to body movement and posture changes. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware texture mapping approach that unwarps pelage patterns, the unique markings found on an animal's skin or fur, into a canonical UV space, enabling more robust feature matching. Our method uses surface normal estimation to guide the unwrapping process while preserving the geometric consistency between the 3D surface and the 2D texture space. We focus on two challenging species: Saimaa ringed seals (Pusa hispida saimensis) and leopards (Panthera pardus). Both species have distinctive yet highly deformable fur patterns. By integrating our pattern-preserving UV mapping with existing re-identification techniques, we demonstrate improved accuracy across diverse poses and viewing angles. Our framework does not require ground truth UV annotations and can be trained in a self-supervised manner. Experiments on seal and leopard datasets show up to a 5.4% improvement in re-identification accuracy.
Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be used instead. However, existing approaches utilising both together are often ad-hoc, rely on domain-specific properties, or won't scale. We develop a new framing for learning from human data, \emph{reward-rational partial orderings over observations}, designed to be flexible and scalable. Based on this we introduce a practical algorithm, LEOPARD: Learning Estimated Objectives from Preferences And Ranked Demonstrations. LEOPARD can learn from a broad range of data, including negative demonstrations, to efficiently learn reward functions across a wide range of domains. We find that when a limited amount of preference and demonstration feedback is available, LEOPARD outperforms existing baselines by a significant margin. Furthermore, we use LEOPARD to investigate learning from many types of feedback compared to just a single one, and find that combining feedback types is often beneficial.
The PTPN11 gene encodes the Src homology 2 domain-containing protein tyrosine phosphatase (SHP2), a key regulator of cell growth, differentiation, and apoptosis through its modulation of various signaling pathways, including the RAS/MAPK signaling pathway. Missense variants in PTPN11 disrupt SHP2's proper catalytic activity and the regulation of signaling pathways, leading to disorders such as Noonan syndrome (NS), LEOPARD syndrome (LS), or juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML). These missense variants have molecular disruptions resulting in gains and losses of function at both the molecular and phenotypic levels. Depending on their location within SHP2, missense substitutions disrupt inter-domain regulation or impair phosphatase function, resulting in altered phosphatase activity. In this study, we investigate the molecular basis underlying the differential pathogenicity of PTPN11 missense variants and predict the structural consequences of these variants using MutPred2 and AlphaFold2. We find that LOF and GOF variants display distinct functional mechanisms in sodium and DNA binding, and that NS-associated missense variants identified in fetuses with ultrasound-detected anomalie
Protecting endangered wildlife from illegal poaching presents a critical challenge, particularly in vast and partially observable environments where real-time response is essential. This paper introduces a novel Expectation-Maximization (EM) based latent variable modeling approach in the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) coordination in wildlife protection. By modeling hidden environmental factors and inter-agent dynamics through latent variables, our method enhances exploration and coordination under uncertainty.We implement and evaluate our EM-MARL framework using a custom simulation involving 10 UAVs tasked with patrolling protected habitats of the endangered Iranian leopard. Extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance in detection accuracy, adaptability, and policy convergence when compared to standard algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Our findings underscore the potential of combining EM inference with MARL to improve decentralized decisionmaking in complex, high-stakes conservation scenarios. The full implementation, simulation environmen
Cellular automata are computers, similar to Turing machines. The main difference is that Turing machines use a one-dimensional tape, whereas cellular automata use a two-dimensional grid. The best-known cellular automaton is the Game of Life, which is a universal computer. It belongs to a family of cellular automata with 262,144 members. Playing the Game of Life generally involves engineering; that is, assembling a device composed of various parts that are combined to achieve a specific intended result. Instead of engineering cellular automata, we propose evolving cellular automata. Evolution applies mutation and selection to a population of organisms. If a mutation increases the fitness of an organism, it may have many descendants, displacing the less fit organisms. Unlike engineering, evolution does not work towards an imagined goal. Evolution works towards increasing fitness, with no expectations about the specific form of the final result. Mutation, selection, and fitness yield structures that appear to be more organic and life-like than engineered structures. In our experiments, the patterns resulting from evolving cellular automata look much like the spots on leopards and the
We present HotSpotter, a fast, accurate algorithm for identifying individual animals against a labeled database. It is not species specific and has been applied to Grevy's and plains zebras, giraffes, leopards, and lionfish. We describe two approaches, both based on extracting and matching keypoints or "hotspots". The first tests each new query image sequentially against each database image, generating a score for each database image in isolation, and ranking the results. The second, building on recent techniques for instance recognition, matches the query image against the database using a fast nearest neighbor search. It uses a competitive scoring mechanism derived from the Local Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor algorithm recently proposed for category recognition. We demonstrate results on databases of more than 1000 images, producing more accurate matches than published methods and matching each query image in just a few seconds.
Time to biochemical recurrence in prostate cancer is essential for prognostic monitoring of the progression of patients after prostatectomy, which assesses the efficacy of the surgery. In this work, we proposed to leverage multiple instance learning through a two-stage ``thinking fast \& slow'' strategy for the time to recurrence (TTR) prediction. The first (``thinking fast'') stage finds the most relevant WSI area for biochemical recurrence and the second (``thinking slow'') stage leverages higher resolution patches to predict TTR. Our approach reveals a mean C-index ($Ci$) of 0.733 ($θ=0.059$) on our internal validation and $Ci=0.603$ on the LEOPARD challenge validation set. Post hoc attention visualization shows that the most attentive area contributes to the TTR prediction.
We propose a diffusion model-based approach, FloAtControlNet to generate cinemagraphs composed of animations of human clothing. We focus on human clothing like dresses, skirts and pants. The input to our model is a text prompt depicting the type of clothing and the texture of clothing like leopard, striped, or plain, and a sequence of normal maps that capture the underlying animation that we desire in the output. The backbone of our method is a normal-map conditioned ControlNet which is operated in a training-free regime. The key observation is that the underlying animation is embedded in the flow of the normal maps. We utilize the flow thus obtained to manipulate the self-attention maps of appropriate layers. Specifically, the self-attention maps of a particular layer and frame are recomputed as a linear combination of itself and the self-attention maps of the same layer and the previous frame, warped by the flow on the normal maps of the two frames. We show that manipulating the self-attention maps greatly enhances the quality of the clothing animation, making it look more natural as well as suppressing the background artifacts. Through extensive experiments, we show that the met