Artificial Intelligence Research

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Southern African Conference on Artificial Intelligence Research, SACAIR 2025, held in Cape Town, South Africa, during December 1 5, 2025.

The 36 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: Algorithmic and Data Driven AI; Socio-technical and Human-Centred AI; and Responsible and Ethical AI.

. - Algorithmic and Data Driven AI.

. - Which contextual topic modelling algorithm is the best? .

. - Leveraging Language Models for Document Type Classification in
Low-Resource Afrikaans Archives.

. - Hybrid Automatic Modulation Classification for Increased Robustness
under White-Box Adversarial Attacks.

. - Counterfactual Explanation Model for Personalised Dietary
Interventions in Anaemia Patients.

. - Feature extraction for plant growth estimation.

. - Exploring the impact of different loss functions for anomaly prediction
in a mineral processing plant.

. - Modifying class distributions to improve the classification of minority
group examples in a class-imbalanced dataset.

. - Evaluating OCR performance on food packaging labels in South Africa.

. - Investigating the Impact of Multilingual Pre-trained Speech Models on
Gender Bias in ASR for Low Resource African Languages.

. - A Two Stage Pipeline for Automated Caries Detection on Single Tooth
Images from Panoramic Radiographs.

. - Exploring syllable similarity across South African languages through
self-supervised speech representation.

. - Data Pruning: Redundant, Problematic, and Interdependent Samples.

. - Restoring Neural Network Plasticity for Faster Transfer Learning.

. - AfroXLMR-Comet: Multilingual Knowledge Distillation with Attention
Matching for Low-Resource Languages.

. - Code-Switch Pretraining for Improved Cross-Lingual Alignment in
Low-Resource Languages.

. - Identification of Social Media Users that Perpetuate Xenophobic
Attitudes and Hate Speech Narratives in South Africa.

. - HAPI-FedProx: Heterogeneity-Aware Adaptive Proximal Optimization
for Federated Learning.

. - Fog-Based Deep Learning for Real-Time Cold Chain Temperature
Prediction Using IoT Data.

. - Robust Driver Distraction Recognition via Lightweight Body-Part
Association and Object Context on NVIDIA Jetson.

. - Nearest-Class Mean and Logits Agreement for Wildlife Open-Set
Recognition.

. - Semi-Supervised Object Segmentation via Active Learning for Efficient
Ecological Monitoring.

. - Scaling behavior of Encoder Language Models in Low-Resource Settings.

. - Enhancing Target Re-Identification via Model Fusion and
Knowledge Distillation of Pre-trained Foundation Models.

. - Heart Disease Prediction: A Comparative Study of Optimizers
Performance in Deep Neural Networks.

. - Socio-technical and Human-Centred AI.

. - AI-Enabled Cybersecurity Implementation: A Case Study of Critical
Success Factors in a South African SOE.

. - Large Language Model Evaluation: From Model-Centric Benchmarks
to System-Level Metrics.

. - Exploring Postgraduate Students Use and Perceptions of Generative
AI as a Research Support Tool: A South African Case.

. - An Awareness Framework for Sustainable Selection of LLMs in Business.

. - Synthesizing Insights from AI in Africa: A Comprehensive Qualitative
Analysis.

. - Factors influencing the use of Autonomous Vehicles on Traditional
Road Infrastructure in The Western Cape.

. - An Agentic LLM-Powered Framework for Cholera Risk Prediction and
Actionable Insights from Explainable ML and Statistical Insights.

. - A Scoping Review on Generative AI prompting to optimize the
workflow of healthcare professionals in sub-Saharan Africa.

. - Detection Of Power Line Insulator Defects Using YOLOv10-N.

. - Responsible and Ethical AI.

. - Artificially Generated Minorities (AGMs): The Veneer of Algorithmic
Bias Correction.

. - Under-resourced and over-reseached: The ELSA approach to
transdisciplinary AI research in low-trust neighborhoods.

. - From Principles to Practice: Extracting Human-Centred AI
Components from Governance Frameworks.