Yue Sun

El Amine Cherrat, Snehal Raj, Iordanis Kerenidis et al.

Quantum machine learning has the potential for a transformative impact across industry sectors and in particular in finance. In our work we look at the problem of hedging where deep reinforcement learning offers a powerful framework for real markets. We develop quantum reinforcement learning methods based on policy-search and distributional actor-critic algorithms that use quantum neural network architectures with orthogonal and compound layers for the policy and value functions. We prove that the quantum neural networks we use are trainable, and we perform extensive simulations that show that quantum models can reduce the number of trainable parameters while achieving comparable performance and that the distributional approach obtains better performance than other standard approaches, both classical and quantum. We successfully implement the proposed models on a trapped-ion quantum processor, utilizing circuits with up to $16$ qubits, and observe performance that agrees well with noiseless simulation. Our quantum techniques are general and can be applied to other reinforcement learning problems beyond hedging.

Yue Sun, Honggang Zhang, Zhuoming Huang et al.

Recent research has shown the effectiveness of mmWave radar sensing for object detection in low visibility environments, which makes it an ideal technique in autonomous navigation systems. In this paper, we introduce Radar to Point Cloud (R2P), a deep learning model that generates smooth, dense, and highly accurate point cloud representation of a 3D object with fine geometry details, based on rough and sparse point clouds with incorrect points obtained from mmWave radar. These input point clouds are converted from the 2D depth images that are generated from raw mmWave radar sensor data, characterized by inconsistency, and orientation and shape errors. R2P utilizes an architecture of two sequential deep learning encoder-decoder blocks to extract the essential features of those radar-based input point clouds of an object when observed from multiple viewpoints, and to ensure the internal consistency of a generated output point cloud and its accurate and detailed shape reconstruction of the original object. We implement R2P to replace Stage 2 of our recently proposed 3DRIMR (3D Reconstruction and Imaging via mmWave Radar) system. Our experiments demonstrate the significant performance improvement of R2P over the popular existing methods such as PointNet, PCN, and the original 3DRIMR design.

Shaoyi Huang, Bowen Lei, Dongkuan Xu et al.

Over-parameterization of deep neural networks (DNNs) has shown high prediction accuracy for many applications. Although effective, the large number of parameters hinders its popularity on resource-limited devices and has an outsize environmental impact. Sparse training (using a fixed number of nonzero weights in each iteration) could significantly mitigate the training costs by reducing the model size. However, existing sparse training methods mainly use either random-based or greedy-based drop-and-grow strategies, resulting in local minimal and low accuracy. In this work, we consider the dynamic sparse training as a sparse connectivity search problem and design an exploitation and exploration acquisition function to escape from local optima and saddle points. We further design an acquisition function and provide the theoretical guarantees for the proposed method and clarify its convergence property. Experimental results show that sparse models (up to 98\% sparsity) obtained by our proposed method outperform the SOTA sparse training methods on a wide variety of deep learning tasks. On VGG-19 / CIFAR-100, ResNet-50 / CIFAR-10, ResNet-50 / CIFAR-100, our method has even higher accuracy than dense models. On ResNet-50 / ImageNet, the proposed method has up to 8.2\% accuracy improvement compared to SOTA sparse training methods.

Yanfeng Li, Yue Sun, Keren Fu et al.

Existing multi-object image generation methods face difficulties in achieving precise alignment between localized image generation regions and their corresponding semantics based on language descriptions, frequently resulting in inconsistent object quantities and attribute aliasing. To mitigate this limitation, mainstream approaches typically rely on external control signals to explicitly constrain the spatial layout, local semantic and visual attributes of images. However, this strong dependency makes the input format rigid, rendering it incompatible with the heterogeneous resource conditions of users and diverse constraint requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MoGen, a user-friendly multi-object image generation method. First, we design a Regional Semantic Anchor (RSA) module that precisely anchors phrase units in language descriptions to their corresponding image regions during the generation process, enabling text-to-image generation that follows quantity specifications for multiple objects. Building upon this foundation, we further introduce an Adaptive Multi-modal Guidance (AMG) module, which adaptively parses and integrates various combinations of multi-source control signals to formulate corresponding structured intent. This intent subsequently guides selective constraints on scene layouts and object attributes, achieving dynamic fine-grained control. Experimental results demonstrate that MoGen significantly outperforms existing methods in generation quality, quantity consistency, and fine-grained control, while exhibiting superior accessibility and control flexibility. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoGen/tree/master.

Cuiping Li, Xiao-Yang Liu, Yue Sun

The problem of testing whether a signal lies within a given subspace, also named matched subspace detection, has been well studied when the signal is represented as a vector. However, the matched subspace detection methods based on vectors can not be applied to the situations that signals are naturally represented as multi-dimensional data arrays or tensors. Considering that tensor subspaces and orthogonal projections onto these subspaces are well defined in the recently proposed transform-based tensor model, which motivates us to investigate the problem of matched subspace detection in high dimensional case. In this paper, we propose an approach for tensor matched subspace detection based on the transform-based tensor model with tubal-sampling and elementwise-sampling, respectively. First, we construct estimators based on tubal-sampling and elementwise-sampling to estimate the energy of a signal outside a given subspace of a third-order tensor and then give the probability bounds of our estimators, which show that our estimators work effectively when the sample size is greater than a constant. Secondly, the detectors both for noiseless data and noisy data are given, and the corresponding detection performance analyses are also provided. Finally, based on discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT), the performance of our estimators and detectors are evaluated by several simulations, and simulation results verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Xiangyu Xiong, Yue Sun, Xiaohong Liu et al.

Although current data augmentation methods are successful to alleviate the data insufficiency, conventional augmentation are primarily intra-domain while advanced generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate images remaining uncertain, particularly in small-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a parameterized GAN (ParaGAN) that effectively controls the changes of synthetic samples among domains and highlights the attention regions for downstream classification. Specifically, ParaGAN incorporates projection distance parameters in cyclic projection and projects the source images to the decision boundary to obtain the class-difference maps. Our experiments show that ParaGAN can consistently outperform the existing augmentation methods with explainable classification on two small-scale medical datasets.

Pol van Rijn, Yue Sun, Harin Lee et al.

Conducting experiments with diverse participants in their native languages can uncover insights into culture, cognition, and language that may not be revealed otherwise. However, conducting these experiments online makes it difficult to validate self-reported language proficiency. Furthermore, existing proficiency tests are small and cover only a few languages. We present an automated pipeline to generate vocabulary tests using text from Wikipedia. Our pipeline samples rare nouns and creates pseudowords with the same low-level statistics. Six behavioral experiments (N=236) in six countries and eight languages show that (a) our test can distinguish between native speakers of closely related languages, (b) the test is reliable ($r=0.82$), and (c) performance strongly correlates with existing tests (LexTale) and self-reports. We further show that test accuracy is negatively correlated with the linguistic distance between the tested and the native language. Our test, available in eight languages, can easily be extended to other languages.

Tianyu Zhang, Xinglong Liang, Jarek van Dijk et al.

Synthesizing high fidelity contrast enhanced MRI is clinically valuable for safer and more efficient breast cancer screening, yet remains challenging due to complex lesion textures and heterogeneous enhancement patterns.

Mengyuan Hu, An Zhang, Yong Chen et al.

We study the problem of covering the maximum number of vertices in a graph by a collection of vertex-disjoint stars, each with a number of satellites in a given interval $[k, \ell]$, where $1 \le k < \ell$ and $\ell$ can be infinity. This is referred to as sequential {\sc $[k, \ell]$-Star Packing} problem. It is solvable in polynomial time when $k = 1$, but becomes strongly NP-hard when $k \ge 2$. In this paper, we propose either the first or an improved approximation algorithm for the following four sequential settings: 1) a $\frac {k+1}2$-approximation algorithm when $k \ge 3$ and $\ell = \infty$, improving the previous best ratio of $\frac {(k+1)^2}{2k+1}$; 2) a $\frac 43$-approximation algorithm when $k = 2$ and $\ell = \infty$, improving the previous best ratio of $\frac 32$; 3) the first $(1 + \frac \ell{\ell+1})$-approximation algorithm when $2 = k < \ell$; and 4) the first $(1 + \max\left\{\frac {k-1}2, \frac {(k+1) \ell}{3 (\ell+1)}\right\})$-approximation algorithm when $3 \le k < \ell$. Besides the main algorithmic techniques being local search coupled with amortized analysis, we observe augmenting configurations to bridge two distant neighborhoods for a local improvement operation. Additionally, the problem has been shown APX-hard when $k \ge 3$; we prove its APX-hardness for the last remaining case where $k = 2$.

Yue Sun, Zhuoming Huang, Honggang Zhang et al.

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of utilizing a mmWave radar sensor installed on a UAV to reconstruct the 3D shapes of multiple objects in a space. The UAV hovers at various locations in the space, and its onboard radar senor collects raw radar data via scanning the space with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operation. The radar data is sent to a deep neural network model, which outputs the point cloud reconstruction of the multiple objects in the space. We evaluate two different models. Model 1 is our recently proposed 3DRIMR/R2P model, and Model 2 is formed by adding a segmentation stage in the processing pipeline of Model 1. Our experiments have demonstrated that both models are promising in solving the multiple object reconstruction problem. We also show that Model 2, despite producing denser and smoother point clouds, can lead to higher reconstruction loss or even loss of objects. In addition, we find that both models are robust to the highly noisy radar data obtained by unstable SAR operation due to the instability or vibration of a small UAV hovering at its intended scanning point. Our exploratory study has shown a promising direction of applying mmWave radar sensing in 3D object reconstruction.

Qilang Ye, Yu Zhou, Lian He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold rich implicit knowledge and powerful transferability. In this paper, we explore the combination of LLMs with the human skeleton to perform action classification and description. However, when treating LLM as a recognizer, two questions arise: 1) How can LLMs understand skeleton? 2) How can LLMs distinguish among actions? To address these problems, we introduce a novel paradigm named learning Skeleton representation with visUal-motion knowledGe for Action Recognition (SUGAR). In our pipeline, we first utilize off-the-shelf large-scale video models as a knowledge base to generate visual, motion information related to actions. Then, we propose to supervise skeleton learning through this prior knowledge to yield discrete representations. Finally, we use the LLM with untouched pre-training weights to understand these representations and generate the desired action targets and descriptions. Notably, we present a Temporal Query Projection (TQP) module to continuously model the skeleton signals with long sequences. Experiments on several skeleton-based action classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our SUGAR. Moreover, experiments on zero-shot scenarios show that SUGAR is more versatile than linear-based methods.

Xuanle Zhao, Yue Sun, Tielin Zhang et al.

Neural operators improve conventional neural networks by expanding their capabilities of functional mappings between different function spaces to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). One of the most notable methods is the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), which draws inspiration from Green's function method and directly approximates operator kernels in the frequency domain. However, after empirical observation followed by theoretical validation, we demonstrate that the FNO approximates kernels primarily in a relatively low-frequency domain. This suggests a limited capability in solving complex PDEs, particularly those characterized by rapid coefficient changes and oscillations in the solution space. Such cases are crucial in specific scenarios, like atmospheric convection and ocean circulation. To address this challenge, inspired by the translation equivariant of the convolution kernel, we propose a novel hierarchical Fourier neural operator along with convolution-residual layers and attention mechanisms to make them complementary in the frequency domain to solve complex PDEs. We perform experiments on forward and reverse problems of multiscale elliptic equations, Navier-Stokes equations, and other physical scenarios, and find that the proposed method achieves superior performance in these PDE benchmarks, especially for equations characterized by rapid coefficient variations.

Tianrun Xu, Yue Sun, Qixun Wang et al.

Multimodal latent-space reasoning aims to replace explicit thinking with images by performing visual reasoning directly in a compact latent space. However, existing approaches largely rely on visual supervision and produce latent representations that lack sufficient semantic richness, limiting their ability to support diverse region-level reasoning tasks. In this work, we introduce Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning (SLVR), a two-stage learning framework that enriches latent representations with attribute-level visual semantics and aligns them with diverse reasoning objectives. In the first stage, SLVR learns semantically enriched region-centric latents under fine-grained attribute supervision. In the second stage, we design Multi-query Group Relative Policy Optimization (M-GRPO) to align latent representations across multiple queries grounded in the same region. To support this framework, we construct SLV-Set, comprising approximately 400K region-level attribute annotations and 800K multi-query question answering samples, and introduce SV-QA, a benchmark that evaluates latent reasoning under semantic variation. Experiments demonstrate that SLVR improves the robustness and semantic consistency of latent visual reasoning compared to existing baselines.

Dong Liang, Yue Sun, Yun Du et al.

Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods primarily focus on transferring various structured knowledge and designing corresponding optimization goals to encourage the student network to imitate the output of the teacher network. However, introducing too many additional optimization objectives may lead to unstable training, such as gradient conflicts. Moreover, these methods ignored the guidelines of relative learning difficulty between the teacher and student networks. Inspired by human cognitive science, in this paper, we redefine knowledge from a new perspective -- the student and teacher networks' relative difficulty of samples, and propose a pixel-level KD paradigm for semantic segmentation named Relative Difficulty Distillation (RDD). We propose a two-stage RDD framework: Teacher-Full Evaluated RDD (TFE-RDD) and Teacher-Student Evaluated RDD (TSE-RDD). RDD allows the teacher network to provide effective guidance on learning focus without additional optimization goals, thus avoiding adjusting learning weights for multiple losses. Extensive experimental evaluations using a general distillation loss function on popular datasets such as Cityscapes, CamVid, Pascal VOC, and ADE20k demonstrate the effectiveness of RDD against state-of-the-art KD methods. Additionally, our research showcases that RDD can integrate with existing KD methods to improve their upper performance bound.

Ruiqi Li, Maowei Jiang, Kai Wang et al.

Time Series Forecasting plays a crucial role in various fields such as industrial equipment maintenance, meteorology, energy consumption, traffic flow and financial investment. However, despite their considerable advantages over traditional statistical approaches, current deep learning-based predictive models often exhibit a significant deviation between their forecasting outcomes and the ground truth. This discrepancy is largely due to an insufficient emphasis on extracting the sequence's latent information, particularly its global information within the frequency domain and the relationship between different variables. To address this issue, we propose a novel model Frequency-domain Attention In Two Horizons, which decomposes time series into trend and seasonal components using a multi-scale sequence adaptive decomposition and fusion architecture, and processes them separately. FAITH utilizes Frequency Channel feature Extraction Module and Frequency Temporal feature Extraction Module to capture inter-channel relationships and temporal global information in the sequence, significantly improving its ability to handle long-term dependencies and complex patterns. Furthermore, FAITH achieves theoretically linear complexity by modifying the time-frequency domain transformation method, effectively reducing computational costs. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks for long-term forecasting and 3 benchmarks for short-term forecasting demonstrate that FAITH outperforms existing models in many fields, such as electricity, weather and traffic, proving its effectiveness and superiority both in long-term and short-term time series forecasting tasks. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/LRQ577/FAITH.

Pujun Feng, Xiaoyu Guo, Seyed Ehsan Saffari et al.

Clinical decision-making is a feedback system where risk estimates influence treatment, which in turn changes disease trajectories, and both shape clinicians' measurement practices. Static prediction often fails clinically: models trained on observational care logs conflate disease biology with clinician behavior, particularly under treatment confounder feedback and irregular or informative observation. This Review focuses on intervention-aware disease trajectory modeling in clinical AI--methods estimating patient-specific longitudinal disease evolution and assessing trajectory changes under alternative treatments. We organize the field around six linked components: three decision tasks (factual forecasting, counterfactual estimation, policy evaluation) and three data-generating mechanisms (disease evolution, treatment assignment, observation process) that determine identifiability. We present the first unified framework bridging forecasting, counterfactual trajectories, and policy evaluation across discrete/continuous time, explicitly addressing treatment assignment, time-varying confounding, and observation bias. We synthesize key method families (multistate/joint models, temporal point-process, deep sequence architectures, longitudinal causal inference), map them to relevant components, and align evaluation with claim strength via overlap diagnostics, uncertainty quantification, off-policy robustness, and target-trial validation. This synthesis advances benchmark prediction to decision-grade clinical evidence, enabling treatment-sensitive individualized futures, pre-deployment policy stress-testing, and safer closed-loop learning health systems that adapt/abstain when evidence is insufficient.

Yanfeng Li, Kahou Chan, Yue Sun et al.

Multi-object images are prevalent in various real-world scenarios, including augmented reality, advertisement design, and medical imaging. Efficient and precise editing of these images is critical for these applications. With the advent of Stable Diffusion (SD), high-quality image generation and editing have entered a new era. However, existing methods often struggle to consider each object both individually and part of the whole image editing, both of which are crucial for ensuring consistent quantity perception, resulting in suboptimal perceptual performance. To address these challenges, we propose MoEdit, an auxiliary-free multi-object image editing framework. MoEdit facilitates high-quality multi-object image editing in terms of style transfer, object reinvention, and background regeneration, while ensuring consistent quantity perception between inputs and outputs, even with a large number of objects. To achieve this, we introduce the Feature Compensation (FeCom) module, which ensures the distinction and separability of each object attribute by minimizing the in-between interlacing. Additionally, we present the Quantity Attention (QTTN) module, which perceives and preserves quantity consistency by effective control in editing, without relying on auxiliary tools. By leveraging the SD model, MoEdit enables customized preservation and modification of specific concepts in inputs with high quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our MoEdit achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance in multi-object image editing. Data and codes will be available at https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoEdit.

Yue Sun, Yeqiang Qian, Zhe Wang et al.

Reliable perception is essential for autonomous driving systems to operate safely under diverse real-world traffic conditions. However, camera- and LiDAR-based perception systems suffer from performance degradation under adverse weather and lighting conditions, limiting their robustness and large-scale deployment in intelligent transportation systems. Radar-vision fusion provides a promising alternative by combining the environmental robustness and cost efficiency of millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar with the rich semantic information captured by cameras. Nevertheless, conventional 3D radar measurements lack height resolution and remain highly sparse, while emerging 4D mmWave radar introduces elevation information but also brings challenges such as signal noise and large data volume. To address these issues, this paper proposes RadarXFormer, a 3D object detection framework that enables efficient cross-modal fusion between 4D radar spectra and RGB images. Instead of relying on sparse radar point clouds, RadarXFormer directly leverages raw radar spectra and constructs an efficient 3D representation that reduces data volume while preserving complete 3D spatial information. The "X" highlights the proposed cross-dimension (3D-2D) fusion mechanism, in which multi-scale 3D spherical radar feature cubes are fused with complementary 2D image feature maps. Experiments on the K-Radar dataset demonstrate improved detection accuracy and robustness under challenging conditions while maintaining real-time inference capability.

Edison Guo, Maruf Ahmed, Yue Sun et al.

FourCastNeXt is an optimization of FourCastNet - a global machine learning weather forecasting model - that performs with a comparable level of accuracy and can be trained using around 5% of the original FourCastNet computational requirements. This technical report presents strategies for model optimization that maintain similar performance as measured by the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the modelled variables. By providing a model with very low comparative training costs, FourCastNeXt makes Neural Earth System Modelling much more accessible to researchers looking to conduct training experiments and ablation studies. FourCastNeXt training and inference code are available at https://github.com/nci/FourCastNeXt

Xin Wang, Yuan Gao, George Yiasemis et al.

Efficient and explainable breast cancer (BC) risk prediction is critical for large-scale population-based screening. Breast MRI provides functional information for personalized risk assessment. Yet effective modeling remains challenging as fully 3D CNNs capture volumetric context at high computational cost, whereas lightweight 2D CNNs fail to model inter-slice continuity. Importantly, breast MRI modeling for shor- and long-term BC risk stratification remains underexplored. In this study, we propose LoGo-MR, a 2.5D local-global structural modeling framework for five-year BC risk prediction. Aligned with clinical interpretation, our framework first employs neighbor-slice encoding to capture subtle local cues linked to short-term risk. It then integrates transformer-enhanced multiple-instance learning (MIL) to model distributed global patterns related to long-term risk and provide interpretable slice importance. We further apply this framework across axial, sagittal, and coronal planes as LoGo3-MR to capture complementary volumetric information. This multi-plane formulation enables voxel-level risk saliency mapping, which may assist radiologists in localizing risk-relevant regions during breast MRI interpretation. Evaluated on a large breast MRI screening cohort (~7.5K), our method outperforms 2D/3D baselines and existing SOTA MIL methods, achieving AUCs of 0.77-0.69 for 1- to 5-year prediction and improving C-index by ~6% over 3D CNNs. LoGo3-MR further improves overall performance with interpretable localization across three planes, and validation across seven backbones shows consistent gains. These results highlight the clinical potential of efficient MRI-based BC risk stratification for large-scale screening. Code will be released publicly.

Yanfeng Li, Tao Tan, Qingquan Gao et al.

High-fidelity 3D meshes can be tokenized into one-dimension (1D) sequences and directly modeled using autoregressive approaches for faces and vertices. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient resource utilization, resulting in slow inference and the ability to handle only small-scale sequences, which severely constrains the expressible structural details. We introduce the Latent Autoregressive Network (LANE), which incorporates compact autoregressive dependencies in the generation process, achieving a $6\times$ improvement in maximum generatable sequence length compared to existing methods. To further accelerate inference, we propose the Adaptive Computation Graph Reconfiguration (AdaGraph) strategy, which effectively overcomes the efficiency bottleneck of traditional serial inference through spatiotemporal decoupling in the generation process. Experimental validation demonstrates that LANE achieves superior performance across generation speed, structural detail, and geometric consistency, providing an effective solution for high-quality 3D mesh generation.

Zehui Lin, Zhuoneng Zhang, Xindi Hu et al.

Ultrasound is widely used in clinical practice due to its affordability, portability, and safety. However, current AI research often overlooks combined disease prediction and tissue segmentation. We propose UniUSNet, a universal framework for ultrasound image classification and segmentation. This model handles various ultrasound types, anatomical positions, and input formats, excelling in both segmentation and classification tasks. Trained on a comprehensive dataset with over 9.7K annotations from 7 distinct anatomical positions, our model matches state-of-the-art performance and surpasses single-dataset and ablated models. Zero-shot and fine-tuning experiments show strong generalization and adaptability with minimal fine-tuning. We plan to expand our dataset and refine the prompting mechanism, with model weights and code available at (https://github.com/Zehui-Lin/UniUSNet).

Junzhe Cao, Bo Zhao, Zhiyi Niu et al.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless measurement of heart rate and other vital signs by analyzing subtle color variations in facial skin induced by cardiac pulsation. Current rPPG methods are mainly based on either end-to-end modeling from raw videos or intermediate spatial-temporal map (STMap) representations. The former preserves complete spatiotemporal information and can capture subtle heartbeat-related signals, but it also introduces substantial noise from motion artifacts and illumination variations. The latter stacks the temporal color changes of multiple facial regions of interest into compact two-dimensional representations, significantly reducing data volume and computational complexity, although some high-frequency details may be lost. To effectively integrate the mutual strengths, we propose PhysNeXt, a dual-input deep learning framework that jointly exploits video frames and STMap representations. By incorporating a spatio-temporal difference modeling unit, a cross-modal interaction module, and a structured attention-based decoder, PhysNeXt collaboratively enhances the robustness of pulse signal extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that PhysNeXt achieves more stable and fine-grained rPPG signal recovery under challenging conditions, validating the effectiveness of joint modeling of video and STMap representations. The codes will be released.

Zehui Lin, Luyi Han, Xin Wang et al.

IMPORTANCE: Modern ultrasound systems are universal diagnostic tools capable of imaging the entire body. However, current AI solutions remain fragmented into single-task tools. This critical gap between hardware versatility and software specificity limits workflow integration and clinical utility. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy, versatility, and efficiency of single general-purpose deep learning models for multi-organ classification and segmentation. DESIGN: The Universal UltraSound Image Challenge 2025 (UUSIC25) involved developing algorithms on 11,644 images aggregated from 12 sources (9 public, 3 private). Evaluation used an independent, multi-center private test set of 2,479 images, including data from a center completely unseen during training to assess generalization. OUTCOMES: Diagnostic performance (Dice Similarity Coefficient [DSC]; Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve [AUC]) and computational efficiency (inference time, GPU memory). RESULTS: Of 15 valid algorithms, the top model (SMART) achieved a macro-averaged DSC of 0.854 across 5 segmentation tasks and AUC of 0.766 for binary classification. Models demonstrated high capability in anatomical segmentation (e.g., fetal head DSC: 0.942) but variability in complex diagnostic tasks subject to domain shift. Specifically, in breast cancer molecular subtyping, the top model's performance dropped from an AUC of 0.571 (internal) to 0.508 (unseen external center), highlighting the challenge of generalization. CONCLUSIONS: General-purpose AI models can achieve high accuracy and efficiency across multiple tasks using a single architecture. However, significant performance degradation on unseen data suggests domain generalization is critical for future clinical deployment.

Yue Sun, Likai Wang, Rick S. Blum et al.

Anomaly detection and root cause analysis (RCA) are critical for ensuring the safety and resilience of cyber-physical systems such as power grids. However, existing machine learning models for time series anomaly detection often operate as black boxes, offering only binary outputs without any explanation, such as identifying anomaly type and origin. To address this challenge, we propose Power Interpretable Causality Ordinary Differential Equation (PICODE) Networks, a unified, causality-informed architecture that jointly performs anomaly detection along with the explanation why it is detected as an anomaly, including root cause localization, anomaly type classification, and anomaly shape characterization. Experimental results in power systems demonstrate that PICODE achieves competitive detection performance while offering improved interpretability and reduced reliance on labeled data or external causal graphs. We provide theoretical results demonstrating the alignment between the shape of anomaly functions and the changes in the weights of the extracted causal graphs.

Tong Chen, Xinyu Ma, Long Bai et al.

Endoscopic images often suffer from diverse and co-occurring degradations such as low lighting, smoke, and bleeding, which obscure critical clinical details. Existing restoration methods are typically task-specific and often require prior knowledge of the degradation type, limiting their robustness in real-world clinical use. We propose EndoIR, an all-in-one, degradation-agnostic diffusion-based framework that restores multiple degradation types using a single model. EndoIR introduces a Dual-Domain Prompter that extracts joint spatial-frequency features, coupled with an adaptive embedding that encodes both shared and task-specific cues as conditioning for denoising. To mitigate feature confusion in conventional concatenation-based conditioning, we design a Dual-Stream Diffusion architecture that processes clean and degraded inputs separately, with a Rectified Fusion Block integrating them in a structured, degradation-aware manner. Furthermore, Noise-Aware Routing Block improves efficiency by dynamically selecting only noise-relevant features during denoising. Experiments on SegSTRONG-C and CEC datasets demonstrate that EndoIR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple degradation scenarios while using fewer parameters than strong baselines, and downstream segmentation experiments confirm its clinical utility.

Junkun Jiao, Tong Liu, Ke Li et al.

The escalating data scale in High-Energy Physics (HEP) fuels a growing aspiration for higher analytical efficiency. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a path toward automation via agentic AI, they struggle with complex scientific workflows that require deep domain knowledge and are tightly coupled to experiment-specific codebases. To address this, we introduce a methodology centered on HepScript, a dual-use Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for HEP data analysis workflows. HepScript serves as a shared formal interface, abstracting HEP analysis logic into a constrained syntax that is both intuitive for human experts and reliably generable by AI agents. First developed for the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) experiment, HepScript hides the complexity of the underlying software stack, translating high-level analysis intent into low-level, production-ready code. In our case studies, this abstraction reduces the required human-written code by 93\%. Crucially, HepScript's constrained grammar defines a tractable action space, enabling AI agents to autonomously generate executable specifications for core analysis stages directly from published literature with a 95\% success rate. Our work demonstrates a scalable pathway toward human-AI collaborative systems, where a formally specified DSL acts as an unambiguous translation layer between human expertise, AI automation, and production environment, rendering previously intractable automation problems solvable.

Marcos V. Conde, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 RAW Image Super-Resolution Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. New methods for RAW Super-Resolution could be essential in modern Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipelines, however, this problem is not as explored as in the RGB domain. Th goal of this challenge is to upscale RAW Bayer images by 2x, considering unknown degradations such as noise and blur. In the challenge, a total of 230 participants registered, and 45 submitted results during thee challenge period. The performance of the top-5 submissions is reviewed and provided here as a gauge for the current state-of-the-art in RAW Image Super-Resolution.

Rui Xu, Chao Chen, Yue Sun et al.

Conformal prediction yields a prediction set with guaranteed $1-α$ coverage of the true target under the i.i.d. assumption, which may not hold and lead to a gap between $1-α$ and the actual coverage. Prior studies bound the gap using total variation distance, which cannot identify the gap changes under distribution shift at a given $α$. Besides, existing methods are mostly limited to covariate shift,while general joint distribution shifts are more common in practice but less researched.In response, we first propose a Wasserstein distance-based upper bound of the coverage gap and analyze the bound using probability measure pushforwards between the shifted joint data and conformal score distributions, enabling a separation of the effect of covariate and concept shifts over the coverage gap. We exploit the separation to design an algorithm based on importance weighting and regularized representation learning (WR-CP) to reduce the Wasserstein bound with a finite-sample error bound.WR-CP achieves a controllable balance between conformal prediction accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on six datasets prove that WR-CP can reduce coverage gaps to $3.2\%$ across different confidence levels and outputs prediction sets 37$\%$ smaller than the worst-case approach on average.

Zhendong Mi, Renming Zheng, Haowen Zhong et al.

Recent advances in agentic LLMs have demonstrated great capabilities in Verilog code generation. However, existing approaches either use LLM-assisted single-agent prompting or cooperation-only multi-agent learning, which will lead to: (i) Degeneration issue for single-agent learning: characterized by diminished error detection and correction capabilities; (ii) Error propagation in cooperation-only multi-agent learning: erroneous information from the former agent will be propagated to the latter through prompts, which can make the latter agents generate buggy code. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based coopetitive multi-agent prompting framework, in which the agents cannot collaborate with each other to form the generation pipeline, but also create a healthy competitive mechanism to improve the generating quality. Our experimental results show that the coopetitive multi-agent framework can effectively mitigate the degeneration risk and reduce the error propagation while improving code error correction capabilities, resulting in higher quality Verilog code generation. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through extensive experiments. On VerilogEval Machine and Human dataset, CoopetitiveV+GPT-4 achieves 99.2% and 99.1% pass@10 scores, respectively. While on RTLLM, CoopetitiveV+GPT-4 obtains 100% syntax and 99.9% functionality pass@5 scores.

Yue Sun, Chao Chen, Yuesheng Xu et al.

Ensuring both accuracy and robustness in time series prediction is critical to many applications, ranging from urban planning to pandemic management. With sufficient training data where all spatiotemporal patterns are well-represented, existing deep-learning models can make reasonably accurate predictions. However, existing methods fail when the training data are drawn from different circumstances (e.g., traffic patterns on regular days) compared to test data (e.g., traffic patterns after a natural disaster). Such challenges are usually classified under domain generalization. In this work, we show that one way to address this challenge in the context of spatiotemporal prediction is by incorporating domain differential equations into Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). We theoretically derive conditions where GCNs incorporating such domain differential equations are robust to mismatched training and testing data compared to baseline domain agnostic models. To support our theory, we propose two domain-differential-equation-informed networks called Reaction-Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (RDGCN), which incorporates differential equations for traffic speed evolution, and Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered Graph Convolutional Network (SIRGCN), which incorporates a disease propagation model. Both RDGCN and SIRGCN are based on reliable and interpretable domain differential equations that allow the models to generalize to unseen patterns. We experimentally show that RDGCN and SIRGCN are more robust with mismatched testing data than the state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Rui Xu, Yue Sun, Chao Chen et al.

Uncertainty is critical to reliable decision-making with machine learning. Conformal prediction (CP) handles uncertainty by predicting a set on a test input, hoping the set to cover the true label with at least $(1-α)$ confidence. This coverage can be guaranteed on test data even if the marginal distributions $P_X$ differ between calibration and test datasets. However, as it is common in practice, when the conditional distribution $P_{Y|X}$ is different on calibration and test data, the coverage is not guaranteed and it is essential to measure and minimize the coverage loss under distributional shift at \textit{all} possible confidence levels. To address these issues, we upper bound the coverage difference at all levels using the cumulative density functions of calibration and test conformal scores and Wasserstein distance. Inspired by the invariance of physics across data distributions, we propose a physics-informed structural causal model (PI-SCM) to reduce the upper bound. We validated that PI-SCM can improve coverage robustness along confidence level and test domain on a traffic speed prediction task and an epidemic spread task with multiple real-world datasets.

Yiping Xie, Bo Zhao, Mingtong Dai et al.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact physiological measurement but remains highly susceptible to illumination changes, motion artifacts, and limited temporal modeling. Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at capturing long-range dependencies, offering a potential solution but struggle with the continuous, noise-sensitive nature of rPPG signals due to their text-centric design. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysLLM, a collaborative optimization framework that synergizes LLMs with domain-specific rPPG components. Specifically, the Text Prototype Guidance (TPG) strategy is proposed to establish cross-modal alignment by projecting hemodynamic features into LLM-interpretable semantic space, effectively bridging the representational gap between physiological signals and linguistic tokens. Besides, a novel Dual-Domain Stationary (DDS) Algorithm is proposed for resolving signal instability through adaptive time-frequency domain feature re-weighting. Finally, rPPG task-specific cues systematically inject physiological priors through physiological statistics, environmental contextual answering, and task description, leveraging cross-modal learning to integrate both visual and textual information, enabling dynamic adaptation to challenging scenarios like variable illumination and subject movements. Evaluation on four benchmark datasets, PhysLLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness, demonstrating superior generalization across lighting variations and motion scenarios.

Xuanle Zhao, Yue Sun, Tielin Zhang et al.

Spatiotemporal prediction plays an important role in solving natural problems and processing video frames, especially in weather forecasting and human action recognition. Recent advances attempt to incorporate prior physical knowledge into the deep learning framework to estimate the unknown governing partial differential equations (PDEs), which have shown promising results in spatiotemporal prediction tasks. However, previous approaches only restrict neural network architectures or loss functions to acquire physical or PDE features, which decreases the representative capacity of a neural network. Meanwhile, the updating process of the physical state cannot be effectively estimated. To solve the above mentioned problems, this paper proposes a physical-guided neural network, which utilizes the frequency-enhanced Fourier module and moment loss to strengthen the model's ability to estimate the spatiotemporal dynamics. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive second-order Runge-Kutta method with physical constraints to model the physical states more precisely. We evaluate our model on both spatiotemporal and video prediction tasks. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and performs best in several datasets, with a much smaller parameter count.

Minhui Zhu, Minyang Tian, Xiaocheng Yang et al.

While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 5.7%, achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.

Siyi Xun, Yue Sun, Jingkun Chen et al.

Rapid advances in medical imaging technology underscore the critical need for precise and automated image quality assessment (IQA) to ensure diagnostic accuracy. Existing medical IQA methods, however, struggle to generalize across diverse modalities and clinical scenarios. In response, we introduce MedIQA, the first comprehensive foundation model for medical IQA, designed to handle variability in image dimensions, modalities, anatomical regions, and types. We developed a large-scale multi-modality dataset with plentiful manually annotated quality scores to support this. Our model integrates a salient slice assessment module to focus on diagnostically relevant regions feature retrieval and employs an automatic prompt strategy that aligns upstream physical parameter pre-training with downstream expert annotation fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MedIQA significantly outperforms baselines in multiple downstream tasks, establishing a scalable framework for medical IQA and advancing diagnostic workflows and clinical decision-making.

Hao Yang, Xinlong Liang, Zhang Li et al.

Deep learning offers transformative potential in medical imaging, yet its clinical adoption is frequently hampered by challenges such as data scarcity, distribution shifts, and the need for robust task generalization. Prompt-based methodologies have emerged as a pivotal strategy to guide deep learning models, providing flexible, domain-specific adaptations that significantly enhance model performance and adaptability without extensive retraining. This systematic review critically examines the burgeoning landscape of prompt engineering in medical imaging. We dissect diverse prompt modalities, including textual instructions, visual prompts, and learnable embeddings, and analyze their integration for core tasks such as image generation, segmentation, and classification. Our synthesis reveals how these mechanisms improve task-specific outcomes by enhancing accuracy, robustness, and data efficiency and reducing reliance on manual feature engineering while fostering greater model interpretability by making the model's guidance explicit. Despite substantial advancements, we identify persistent challenges, particularly in prompt design optimization, data heterogeneity, and ensuring scalability for clinical deployment. Finally, this review outlines promising future trajectories, including advanced multimodal prompting and robust clinical integration, underscoring the critical role of prompt-driven AI in accelerating the revolution of diagnostics and personalized treatment planning in medicine.

Yue Sun, Rick S. Blum, Parv Venkitasubramaniam

Dynamical systems, prevalent in various scientific and engineering domains, are susceptible to anomalies that can significantly impact their performance and reliability. This paper addresses the critical challenges of anomaly detection, root cause localization, and anomaly type classification in dynamical systems governed by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We define two categories of anomalies: cyber anomalies, which propagate through interconnected variables, and measurement anomalies, which remain localized to individual variables. To address these challenges, we propose the Interpretable Causality Ordinary Differential Equation (ICODE) Networks, a model-intrinsic explainable learning framework. ICODE leverages Neural ODEs for anomaly detection while employing causality inference through an explanation channel to perform root cause analysis (RCA), elucidating why specific time periods are flagged as anomalous. ICODE is designed to simultaneously perform anomaly detection, RCA, and anomaly type classification within a single, interpretable framework. Our approach is grounded in the hypothesis that anomalies alter the underlying ODEs of the system, manifesting as changes in causal relationships between variables. We provide a theoretical analysis of how perturbations in learned model parameters can be utilized to identify anomalies and their root causes in time series data. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of ICODE across various dynamical systems, showcasing its ability to accurately detect anomalies, classify their types, and pinpoint their origins.

Mude Hui, Xin Huang, Jaime Campos Salas et al.

Reasoning LLMs produce longer outputs, requiring speculative decoding drafters trained on extended sequences. Parallel drafting - predicting multiple tokens per forward pass - offers latency benefits over sequential generation, but training complexity scales quadratically with the product of sequence length and parallel positions, rendering long-context training impractical. We present P(arallel)-EAGLE, which transforms EAGLE from autoregressive to parallel multi-token prediction via a learnable shared hidden state. To scale training to long contexts, we develop a framework featuring attention mask pre-computation and sequence partitioning techniques, enabling gradient accumulation within individual sequences for parallel-prediction training. We implement P-EAGLE in vLLM and demonstrate speedups of 1.10-1.36x over autoregressive EAGLE-3 across GPT-OSS 120B, 20B, and Qwen3-Coder 30B.

Zhengbo Zhang, Yihe Tian, Wanke Xia et al.

Accurate extraction of rural roads from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for infrastructure planning and sustainable development. However, this task presents unique challenges in rural settings due to several factors. These include high intra-class variability and low inter-class separability from diverse surface materials, frequent vegetation occlusions that disrupt spatial continuity, and narrow road widths that exacerbate detection difficulties. Existing methods, primarily optimized for structured urban environments, often underperform in these scenarios as they overlook such distinctive characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose DSFC-Net, a dual-encoder framework that synergistically fuses spatial and frequency-domain information. Specifically, a CNN branch is employed to capture fine-grained local road boundaries and short-range continuity, while a novel Spatial-Frequency Hybrid Transformer (SFT) is introduced to robustly model global topological dependencies against vegetation occlusions. Distinct from standard attention mechanisms that suffer from frequency bias, the SFT incorporates a Cross-Frequency Interaction Attention (CFIA) module that explicitly decouples high- and low-frequency information via a Laplacian Pyramid strategy. This design enables the dynamic interaction between spatial details and frequency-aware global contexts, effectively preserving the connectivity of narrow roads. Furthermore, a Channel Feature Fusion Module (CFFM) is proposed to bridge the two branches by adaptively recalibrating channel-wise feature responses, seamlessly integrating local textures with global semantics for accurate segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on the WHU-RuR+, DeepGlobe, and Massachusetts datasets validate the superiority of DSFC-Net over state-of-the-art approaches.

Bo Zhao, Dan Guo, Junzhe Cao et al.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) measurement enables non-contact physiological monitoring but suffers from accuracy degradation under head motion and illumination changes. Existing deep learning methods are mostly heuristic and lack theoretical grounding, which limits robustness and interpretability. In this work, we propose a physics-informed rPPG paradigm derived from the Navier-Stokes equations of hemodynamics, showing that the pulse signal follows a second-order dynamical system whose discrete solution naturally leads to a causal convolution. This provides a theoretical justification for using a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Based on this principle, we design PHASE-Net, a lightweight model with three key components: (1) Zero-FLOPs Axial Swapper module, which swaps or transposes a few spatial channels to mix distant facial regions and enhance cross-region feature interaction without breaking temporal order; (2) Adaptive Spatial Filter, which learns a soft spatial mask per frame to highlight signal-rich areas and suppress noise; and (3) Gated TCN, a causal dilated TCN with gating that models long-range temporal dynamics for accurate pulse recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PHASE-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with strong efficiency, offering a theoretically grounded and deployment-ready rPPG solution.

Hui Xie, Haiqin Hu, Lijuan Ding et al.

Radiotherapy treatment planning often relies on time-consuming, trial-and-error adjustments that heavily depend on the expertise of specialists, while existing deep learning methods face limitations in generalization, prediction accuracy, and clinical applicability. To tackle these challenges, we propose ADDiff-Dose, an Anatomical-Dose Dual Constraints Conditional Diffusion Model for end-to-end multi-tumor dose prediction. The model employs LightweightVAE3D to compress high-dimensional CT data and integrates multimodal inputs, including target and organ-at-risk (OAR) masks and beam parameters, within a progressive noise addition and denoising framework. It incorporates conditional features via a multi-head attention mechanism and utilizes a composite loss function combining MSE, conditional terms, and KL divergence to ensure both dosimetric accuracy and compliance with clinical constraints. Evaluation on a large-scale public dataset (2,877 cases) and three external institutional cohorts (450 cases in total) demonstrates that ADDiff-Dose significantly outperforms traditional baselines, achieving an MAE of 0.101-0.154 (compared to 0.316 for UNet and 0.169 for GAN models), a DICE coefficient of 0.927 (a 6.8% improvement), and limiting spinal cord maximum dose error to within 0.1 Gy. The average plan generation time per case is reduced to 22 seconds. Ablation studies confirm that the structural encoder enhances compliance with clinical dose constraints by 28.5%. To our knowledge, this is the first study to introduce a conditional diffusion model framework for radiotherapy dose prediction, offering a generalizable and efficient solution for automated treatment planning across diverse tumor sites, with the potential to substantially reduce planning time and improve clinical workflow efficiency.

Hao Yang, Tao Tan, Shuai Tan et al.

Modelling disease progression in precision medicine requires capturing complex spatio-temporal dynamics while preserving anatomical integrity. Existing methods often struggle with longitudinal dependencies and structural consistency in progressive disorders. To address these limitations, we introduce MambaControl, a novel framework that integrates selective state-space modelling with diffusion processes for high-fidelity prediction of medical image trajectories. To better capture subtle structural changes over time while maintaining anatomical consistency, MambaControl combines Mamba-based long-range modelling with graph-guided anatomical control to more effectively represent anatomical correlations. Furthermore, we introduce Fourier-enhanced spectral graph representations to capture spatial coherence and multiscale detail, enabling MambaControl to achieve state-of-the-art performance in Alzheimer's disease prediction. Quantitative and regional evaluations demonstrate improved progression prediction quality and anatomical fidelity, highlighting its potential for personalised prognosis and clinical decision support.

Yue Sun, Yeqiang Qian, Chunxiang Wang et al.

Safety and reliability are crucial for the public acceptance of autonomous driving. To ensure accurate and reliable environmental perception, intelligent vehicles must exhibit accuracy and robustness in various environments. Millimeter-wave radar, known for its high penetration capability, can operate effectively in adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow, and fog. Traditional 3D millimeter-wave radars can only provide range, Doppler, and azimuth information for objects. Although the recent emergence of 4D millimeter-wave radars has added elevation resolution, the radar point clouds remain sparse due to Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) operations. In contrast, cameras offer rich semantic details but are sensitive to lighting and weather conditions. Hence, this paper leverages these two highly complementary and cost-effective sensors, 4D millimeter-wave radar and camera. By integrating 4D radar spectra with depth-aware camera images and employing attention mechanisms, we fuse texture-rich images with depth-rich radar data in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) perspective, enhancing 3D object detection. Additionally, we propose using GAN-based networks to generate depth images from radar spectra in the absence of depth sensors, further improving detection accuracy.

Jie Song, Yue Sun, Ziyun Cai et al.

The challenges of road network segmentation demand an algorithm capable of adapting to the sparse and irregular shapes, as well as the diverse context, which often leads traditional encoding-decoding methods and simple Transformer embeddings to failure. We introduce a computationally efficient and powerful framework for elegant road-aware segmentation. Our method, called URoadNet, effectively encodes fine-grained local road connectivity and holistic global topological semantics while decoding multiscale road network information. URoadNet offers a novel alternative to the U-Net architecture by integrating connectivity attention, which can exploit intra-road interactions across multi-level sampling features with reduced computational complexity. This local interaction serves as valuable prior information for learning global interactions between road networks and the background through another integrality attention mechanism. The two forms of sparse attention are arranged alternatively and complementarily, and trained jointly, resulting in performance improvements without significant increases in computational complexity. Extensive experiments on various datasets with different resolutions, including Massachusetts, DeepGlobe, SpaceNet, and Large-Scale remote sensing images, demonstrate that URoadNet outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. Our approach represents a significant advancement in the field of road network extraction, providing a computationally feasible solution that achieves high-quality segmentation results.

Xiangyu Xiong, Yue Sun, Xiaohong Liu et al.

Despite the potential benefits of data augmentation for mitigating the data insufficiency, traditional augmentation methods primarily rely on the prior intra-domain knowledge. On the other hand, advanced generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate inter-domain samples with limited variety. These previous methods make limited contributions to describing the decision boundaries for binary classification. In this paper, we propose a distance guided GAN (DisGAN) which controls the variation degrees of generated samples in the hyperplane space. Specifically, we instantiate the idea of DisGAN by combining two ways. The first way is vertical distance GAN (VerDisGAN) where the inter-domain generation is conditioned on the vertical distances. The second way is horizontal distance GAN (HorDisGAN) where the intra-domain generation is conditioned on the horizontal distances. Furthermore, VerDisGAN can produce the class-specific regions by mapping the source images to the hyperplane. Experimental results show that DisGAN consistently outperforms the GAN-based augmentation methods with explainable binary classification. The proposed method can apply to different classification architectures and has potential to extend to multi-class classification.

Yue Sun, Samet Oymak, Maryam Fazel

This paper studies the problem of identifying low-order linear systems via Hankel nuclear norm regularization. Hankel regularization encourages the low-rankness of the Hankel matrix, which maps to the low-orderness of the system. We provide novel statistical analysis for this regularization and carefully contrast it with the unregularized ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimator. Our analysis leads to new bounds on estimating the impulse response and the Hankel matrix associated with the linear system. We first design an input excitation and show that Hankel regularization enables one to recover the system using optimal number of observations in the true system order and achieve strong statistical estimation rates. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that the input design indeed matters, by showing that intuitive choices such as i.i.d. Gaussian input leads to provably sub-optimal sample complexity. To better understand the benefits of regularization, we also revisit the OLS estimator. Besides refining existing bounds, we experimentally identify when regularized approach improves over OLS: (1) For low-order systems with slow impulse-response decay, OLS method performs poorly in terms of sample complexity, (2) Hankel matrix returned by regularization has a more clear singular value gap that ease identification of the system order, (3) Hankel regularization is less sensitive to hyperparameter choice. Finally, we establish model selection guarantees through a joint train-validation procedure where we tune the regularization parameter for near-optimal estimation.

Yue Sun, Adhyyan Narang, Halil Ibrahim Gulluk et al.

An overarching goal in machine learning is to build a generalizable model with few samples. To this end, overparameterization has been the subject of immense interest to explain the generalization ability of deep nets even when the size of the dataset is smaller than that of the model. While the prior literature focuses on the classical supervised setting, this paper aims to demystify overparameterization for meta-learning. Here we have a sequence of linear-regression tasks and we ask: (1) Given earlier tasks, what is the optimal linear representation of features for a new downstream task? and (2) How many samples do we need to build this representation? This work shows that surprisingly, overparameterization arises as a natural answer to these fundamental meta-learning questions. Specifically, for (1), we first show that learning the optimal representation coincides with the problem of designing a task-aware regularization to promote inductive bias. We leverage this inductive bias to explain how the downstream task actually benefits from overparameterization, in contrast to prior works on few-shot learning. For (2), we develop a theory to explain how feature covariance can implicitly help reduce the sample complexity well below the degrees of freedom and lead to small estimation error. We then integrate these findings to obtain an overall performance guarantee for our meta-learning algorithm. Numerical experiments on real and synthetic data verify our insights on overparameterized meta-learning.

Yue Sun, Honggang Zhang, Zhuoming Huang et al.

Recent research has shown that mmWave radar sensing is effective for object detection in low visibility environments, which makes it an ideal technique in autonomous navigation systems such as autonomous vehicles. However, due to the characteristics of radar signals such as sparsity, low resolution, specularity, and high noise, it is still quite challenging to reconstruct 3D object shapes via mmWave radar sensing. Built on our recent proposed 3DRIMR (3D Reconstruction and Imaging via mmWave Radar), we introduce in this paper DeepPoint, a deep learning model that generates 3D objects in point cloud format that significantly outperforms the original 3DRIMR design. The model adopts a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based deep neural network architecture. It takes as input the 2D depth images of an object generated by 3DRIMR's Stage 1, and outputs smooth and dense 3D point clouds of the object. The model consists of a novel generator network that utilizes a sequence of DeepPoint blocks or layers to extract essential features of the union of multiple rough and sparse input point clouds of an object when observed from various viewpoints, given that those input point clouds may contain many incorrect points due to the imperfect generation process of 3DRIMR's Stage 1. The design of DeepPoint adopts a deep structure to capture the global features of input point clouds, and it relies on an optimally chosen number of DeepPoint blocks and skip connections to achieve performance improvement over the original 3DRIMR design. Our experiments have demonstrated that this model significantly outperforms the original 3DRIMR and other standard techniques in reconstructing 3D objects.

Marco Pistoia, Syed Farhan Ahmad, Akshay Ajagekar et al.

Quantum computers are expected to surpass the computational capabilities of classical computers during this decade, and achieve disruptive impact on numerous industry sectors, particularly finance. In fact, finance is estimated to be the first industry sector to benefit from Quantum Computing not only in the medium and long terms, but even in the short term. This review paper presents the state of the art of quantum algorithms for financial applications, with particular focus to those use cases that can be solved via Machine Learning.