The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has led to an unprecedented volume of multivariate time series (MTS) data, requiring efficient and accurate processing for timely decision-making in resource-constrained edge environments. Hyperdimensional (HD) computing, with its inherent efficiency and parallelizability, has shown promise in classification tasks but struggles to capture complex temporal patterns, while Transformers excel at sequence modeling but incur high computational and memory overhead. We introduce BiHDTrans, an efficient neurosymbolic binary hyperdimensional Transformer that integrates self-attention into the HD computing paradigm, unifying the representational efficiency of HD computing with the temporal modeling power of Transformers. Empirically, BiHDTrans outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) HD computing models by at least 14.47% and achieves 6.67% higher accuracy on average than SOTA binary Transformers. With hardware acceleration on FPGA, our pipelined implementation leverages the independent and identically distributed properties of high-dimensional representations, delivering 39.4 times lower inference latency than SOTA binary Transformers. Theoretical analysis shows that binarizing in holographic high-dimensional space incurs significantly less information distortion than directly binarizing neural networks, explaining BiHDTrans's superior accuracy. Furthermore, dimensionality experiments confirm that BiHDTrans remains competitive even with a 64% reduction in hyperspace dimensionality, surpassing SOTA binary Transformers by 1-2% in accuracy with 4.4 times less model size, as well as further reducing the latency by 49.8% compare to the full-dimensional baseline. Together, these contributions bridge the gap between the expressiveness of Transformers and the efficiency of HD computing, enabling accurate, scalable, and low-latency MTS classification.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification systems are increasingly deployed on platforms with strict computational budgets, such as UAVs and small spaceborne sensors. In these settings, accuracy alone is not enough; the model must also run within tight latency and memory constraints. Most recent HSI classifiers, however, focus on accuracy and pay relatively little attention to these constraints. We propose BCG-Former, a lightweight CNN-Transformer hybrid that targets this trade-off. The model introduces three innovations: (1) Band-Contextual Gating (BCG) for adaptive spectral recalibration using local inter-band context and learnable temperature sharpening, (2) a spectral summary token that bridges spectral and spatial features, and (3) single-pass Band-RoPE combined with linear attention for efficient joint representation learning. Evaluated on classical airborne (Pavia University, Salinas, Indian Pines, Houston 2013/2018) and UAV-borne benchmark datasets (WHU-Hi-LongKou, HongHu, and HanChuan), BCG-Former achieves over-all accuracy ranging from 91.51% on Houston 2018 to 99.49% on Houston 2013, while maintaining sub-millisecond inference latency (0.91-0.95ms) and using only 0.10-0.23M parameters. Across all eight benchmarks, BCG-Former consistently resides on or near the Pareto frontier of accuracy versus latency, outperforming or matching recent CNN-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based methods at a fraction of their computational cost. Ablation studies confirm that all three components are complementary, with BCG providing the largest individual contribution. These results establish BCG-Former as a strong accuracy-efficiency Pareto candidate for real-time and large-scale remote sensing applications.
Time series classification is central to domains like medical signal analysis, industrial monitoring, and sensor-based activity recognition, where class information manifests as localized shapes, specific frequencies, temporal shifts, or complex cross-channel interactions. Random convolutional transforms efficiently map these sequences to fixed-dimensional tabular features but are traditionally paired with simple linear classifiers. We investigate whether a pretrained tabular foundation model can more effectively harness these rich representations. We propose MASHT, a pipeline that marries MultiRocket and Hydra features with the power of in-context tabular foundation models. By leveraging a pretrained tabular foundation model, our approach completely bypasses task-specific model training, requiring only feature extraction and direct inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MASHT matches state-of-the-art time series classification baselines on univariate tasks, achieving a lower average rank than HIVE-COTE 2.0. On multivariate datasets, MASHT remains highly competitive with the strongest reference methods.
On-device fault detection enables real-time diagnostics without cloud dependency, but deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained hardware demands careful tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and model size. We present a benchmark comparing traditional ML methods (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, Logistic Regression) against lightweight transformer architectures (DistilBERT, TinyBERT-6L, TinyBERT-4L, MobileBERT) for binary fault detection across three public datasets: NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation, SECOM semiconductor manufacturing, and UCI AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance. We evaluate classification performance (F1-score, AUC), model size, and CPU inference latency, and further assess INT8 dynamic quantization and a two-stage adaptive inference pipeline. Our results reveal that on well-separated sensor data (C-MAPSS), lightweight transformers match traditional ML at 87.8% F1 but at 100x the model size and 9000x the latency. TinyBERT-4L emerges as the most deployment-friendly transformer at 55 MB and 18 ms CPU latency. INT8 quantization reduces size by 25% while preserving 86.9% F1. Our adaptive pipeline, routing 97.9% of predictions through a quantized triage model and only 2.1% to a larger expert, achieves 87.6% F1 at 19.5 ms average latency. On severely imbalanced datasets (SECOM, UCI-PM), both traditional and transformer methods struggle significantly, highlighting fundamental limitations of current approaches for extreme class imbalance in fault detection. All code is publicly available.