Computers

The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence has enabled significant progress in image classification, with emerging approaches extending traditional deep learning paradigms. This article presents an extended version of a paper originally introduced at ICCSA 2025, providing a broader comparative analysis of classical, spline-based, and quantum machine learning architectures. The study evaluates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs), Convolutional KANs (CKANs), and Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) on the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset. In addition to these baselines, two novel architectures are introduced: a fully quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold model (F-QKAN) and a hybrid KAN–Quantum network (H-QKAN) that combines spline-based feature extraction with variational quantum classification. Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, the evaluation focuses on analyzing the behaviour of these architectures in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability under a unified experimental protocol. Results show that the fully quantum F-QKAN achieves a test accuracy above 80%. The hybrid H-QKAN obtains the best overall performance, exceeding 92% accuracy with rapid convergence and stable training dynamics. Classical CNNs models remain state-of-the-art in terms of predictive performance, whereas CKANs offer a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency. QCNNs show potential in ideal noise-free settings but are significantly affected by realistic noise conditions, motivating further investigation into hybrid quantum–classical designs.

Slow responding in International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) has received far less attention than rapid guessing, despite its potential to reveal heterogeneous response processes. Unlike disengaged rapid responders, slow responders may differ in time management, off-task behavior, or specific cognitive operations. This exploratory study uses sequence analysis of log-file data from a complex problem-solving item in PISA 2012 to examine whether slow responders can be grouped into homogeneous subtypes. The item required students to explore causal relations and externalize them in a diagram. Results indicate two distinct clusters among slow responders, each marked by characteristic interaction patterns and difficulties at different stages of the solution process. One cluster exhibited long pauses interspersed with repeated, inefficient attempts at representing causal relationships; the other showed shorter pauses coupled with inefficient exploratory actions targeting those relationships. These findings demonstrate that sequence analysis can parsimoniously identify clusters of action sequences associated with slow responding, offering a finer-grained account of aberrant behavior in low-stakes, digital assessments. More broadly, the approach illustrates how process data can be leveraged to differentiate mechanisms underlying slow response behaviors, with implications for validity arguments, diagnostic feedback, and the design of mitigation strategies in ILSAs. Directions for future research to better understand the differences among slow responders are provided.

Mobile edge-AI plant monitoring systems enable automated disease control in greenhouses and open fields, reducing dependence on manual inspection and the variability of visual diagnostics. This paper proposes a lightweight two-stage edge-AI system for strawberries, in which a YOLOv10n detector on board a mobile agricultural robot locates leaves affected by seven common diseases (including Leaf Spot) with real-time capability on an embedded platform. Patches are then automatically extracted for leaves classified as Leaf Spot and transmitted to the second module—a compact MobileViT-S-based classifier with ordinal output that assesses the severity of Leaf Spot on three levels (S1—mild, S2—moderate, S3—severe) on a specialised set of 373 manually labelled leaf patches. In a comparative experiment with lightweight architectures ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3-Small and Swin-Tiny, the proposed Ordinal MobileViT-S demonstrated the highest accuracy in assessing the severity of Leaf Spot (accuracy ≈ 0.97 with 4.9 million parameters), surpassing both the baseline models and the standard MobileViT-S with a cross-entropy loss function. On the original image set, the YOLOv10n detector achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.960, an F1 score of 0.93 and a recall of 0.917, ensuring reliable detection of affected leaves for subsequent Leaf Spot severity assessment. The results show that the “YOLOv10n + Ordinal MobileViT-S” cascade provides practical severity-aware Leaf Spot diagnosis on a mobile agricultural robot and can serve as the basis for real-time strawberry crop health monitoring systems.