Recently, a wide range of recommendation algorithms inspired by deep learning techniques have emerged as the performance leaders on several standard recommendation benchmarks. While these algorithms were built on different DL techniques (e.g., dropouts, autoencoder), they have similar performance and even similar cost functions. This paper studies whether the models' comparable performance are sheer coincidence, or they can be unified under a single framework. We find that all linear performance leaders effectively add only a nuclear-norm based regularizer, or a Frobenius-norm based regularizer. The former ones possess a (surprising) rigid structure that limits the models' predictive power but their solutions are low rank and have closed form. The latter ones are more expressive and more efficient for recommendation but their solutions are either full-rank or require executing hard-to-tune numeric procedures such as ADMM. Along this line of finding, we further propose two low-rank, closed-form solutions, derived from carefully generalizing Frobenius-norm based regularizers. The new solutions get the best of both nuclear-norm and Frobenius-norm world.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11876
Humans and machines often solve harder problems by spending more time on computation. In deep learning, looped models implement this idea during inference by recurrently updating a hidden state. In practice, however, their training backpropagates through only one or a few updates, making it hard to train early updates to support future ones. We propose looped flows, an approach that sidesteps this issue by training the recurrence with local denoising objectives. By imposing temporal association across denoising objectives through progressively decreasing noise levels and shared noise, the model is incentivized to learn recurrent states that transfer useful computation over time, even when gradients cover only a few updates. We then formulate inference as integrating the velocity of a probability flow parameterized by the learned denoiser, coupled with recurrent states. This allows solving harder problems by spending more computation through a finer temporal grid and enables multiple valid predictions from different initial noise samples. Across six reasoning benchmarks including two multi-solution benchmarks, looped flows outperform prior state-of-the-art looped models overall, achieving 58.8% test accuracy on ARC-AGI-1 and 12.2% on ARC-AGI-2.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11801
Reliable, low-latency perception is crucial for Formula Student Driverless vehicles, yet many existing pipelines rely on deep learning and multi-sensor fusion, often requiring GPU acceleration. This paper presents a lightweight LiDAR-only perception pipeline tailored for CPU execution, combining ground removal, IMU-based motion compensation, DBSCAN clustering, and geometric feature-based Random Forest classification. Feature importance analysis reduced the model input from 12 to 7 features while preserving performance. Evaluated on 2,371 labeled clusters collected from real FSD events, the pipeline achieves an F1-score of 98.33% and an end-to-end runtime of 3.13 ms on CPU-only hardware. The released dataset, labeling tool, and trained models provide a practical and reproducible baseline for other resource-constrained autonomous racing teams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11527
Automated classification of sewer defects is essential for infrastructure condition assessment and maintenance decision-making, but existing deep learning methods struggle to balance classification accuracy and computational complexity in large-scale multi-label scenarios. This study develops Sewer-Transformer-ML, a hierarchical vision Transformer with multi-level feature fusion, together with two lightweight architectures, Sewer-MobileNet-ML and Sewer-Mobile-TransNet, for resource-constrained inspection scenarios. On the Sewer-ML test set, Sewer-Transformer-ML-Base achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.68% and an $F1_{\text{Normal}}$ of 92.68%, ranking first on the public leaderboard and exceeding the second-ranked method by 7.6 percentage points in $F2_{\text{CIW}}$. Sewer-MobileNet-ML achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.73% with only 17 M parameters, representing an approximately 95% parameter reduction relative to the base model. Under the standard Sewer-Capsule data split, Sewer-Mobile-TransNet achieved 96.43% classification accuracy. When the training set was reduced to 1,177 images, pretraining on Sewer-ML consistently improved model performance. Ablation experiments further showed that direct concatenation was more effective for Transformer features, whereas attention-based fusion better supported multiscale CNN features. These findings provide a computational basis for automated sewer inspection, lightweight model design, and adaptation across civil infrastructure inspection platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11375
Deep learning models, notably Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), have demonstrated promising performance in channel estimation for high-mobility vehicular environments. However, their black-box nature and architectural overhead limit trustworthiness and efficiency. Classical explainable AI (XAI) methods rely on costly iterative processes, offering only input-level filtering without addressing architectural fine-tuning. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes the XAI-assisted Recurrent neural network Attribution for Channel Estimation (X-RACE) framework. X-RACE uses a low-complexity, one-shot dual-optimization strategy to simultaneously evaluate and prune irrelevant input subcarriers and internal hidden units. Furthermore, we propose novel temporal XAI metrics: Saturation Time, Importance Drift, and Relevance Contrast to characterize the LSTM's learning dynamics and memory convergence. Extensive simulations demonstrate that X-RACE reduces inference complexity by at least 44.1% while improving or preserving Bit Error Rate (BER) performance, outperforming classical XAI schemes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11211
Label-free virtual staining offers a compelling, non-destructive alternative to standard histopathology; however, its clinical adoption is hindered by the computational bottlenecks inherent to processing gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs). Current deep learning approaches require patch-based inference to avoid memory constraints, which disrupts global tissue continuity and introduces tiling artifacts--displaying visible seams and color shifts. To address this, we introduce the Consistency Memory Bank (COMB), a novel label-free virtual staining framework that enforces spatial and channel consistency across tiles without memory bottlenecks. COMB decouples context storage from computation, utilizing a dynamic retrieval mechanism to fetch feature representations from adjacent tiles. This enables a retrieval-based context integration strategy that adopts local padding to resolve spatial discontinuities and neighbor-aware channel attention to stabilize statistical drift. Further optimized with a sliding window schedule to ensure minimal memory overhead, our method demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, achieving significant improvements in both perceptual fidelity and tiling consistency, while suggesting its downstream utility in tumor segmentation. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10914
Detecting brain metastases in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging because lesions vary widely in size and appearance, with very small metastases occupying only a minute fraction of a three-dimensional input. We investigate whether combining different spatial fields of view (FOVs) improves lesion detection in multimodal MRI and present a scale-aware 3D deep-learning framework. The method uses independently trained $96^3$ and $64^3$ 3D U-Nets whose whole-volume probability maps are combined by weighted late fusion. This design allows us to study the effect of spatial context separately from image resolution and modality choice. On a 97-patient development cohort, cross-FOV fusion improved lesion-level precision and F1 while substantially reducing false positives relative to the individual models. A same-FOV ensemble control showed that these gains were not explained solely by averaging independently trained networks, supporting a contribution from complementary spatial context. An exploratory cross-FOV agreement filter reduced false positives but did not improve overall F1. These results support cross-FOV probability fusion as a simple and computationally practical strategy for improving the precision-false-positive trade-off in 3D brain-metastasis detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10825
The growing reliance on Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems has increased the need for intelligent methods capable of detecting cyberattacks across complex and dynamic space environments. Unlike conventional network intrusion detection, satellite systems generate heterogeneous information across radio-frequency (RF) links, onboard hardware, and orbital operations. However, many existing approaches either rely on terrestrial intrusion datasets or evaluate individual observations independently, limiting their ability to capture temporal attack behavior specific to LEO satellites. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of deep-learning-based cyberattack detection using the recently introduced satellite-specific UNSW-IoTSAT dataset. We investigate structured learning architectures that preserve hardware, orbital, and RF information, including a Subsystem-Fusion MLP and a hierarchical multimodal Transformer that models both cross-subsystem interactions and temporal evolution. We further evaluate leakage-resistant row-level and temporal settings, along with cross-satellite generalization, to characterize how model architecture and evaluation protocol influence satellite cyberattack detection. Experimental results demonstrate the value of structured multimodal modeling and rigorous evaluation, with the hierarchical Transformer achieving up to 91.66% accuracy and 85.63% macro F1 under the leakage-resistant evaluation protocol.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10746
Nanoscale imaging of mammalian brains is critical for connectomics. X-ray laminography enables high-throughput imaging of extended, plate-like biological specimens. However, the tilted acquisition geometry leads to incomplete Fourier-space coverage, giving rise to a missing-cone of information. Conventional reconstruction methods cannot recover unmeasured information within the cone, resulting in artifacts that distort fine brain structures. While resolving these requires modeling 3D structure, direct 3D deep learning approaches are limited by data scarcity and computational cost. Here we introduce LUCID (Laminography with Unified Consistent Diffusion), a framework that combines multi-view diffusion priors with projection-domain data consistency. LUCID integrates complementary 3D structural information while enforcing strict alignment with the laminography forward model. On simulated datasets, LUCID substantially improves spatial fidelity and restores missing Fourier components, outperforming baseline methods. Applied to experimental laminography data, LUCID generalizes robustly despite being trained exclusively on fully sampled tomographic volumes, and effectively recovers unmeasured Fourier information.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10456
Recent progress in deep learning has significantly advanced facial landmark detection. However, most existing methods process features in a spatial-domain manner under a dataset-specific training paradigm, which overlooks the fact that facial landmark detection is inherently geometry-driven and sensitive to frequency variations, thereby limiting cross-dataset generalization under complex scenarios and hindering the development of a facial landmark detection model. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{FreqFLD}, a \textbf{freq}uency-modulated framework towards All-in-One \textbf{f}acial \textbf{l}andmark \textbf{d}etection. Specifically, FreqFLD introduces a Frequency Modulation Module (FreqMoM) to explicitly induce the frequency prior by decoupling and modulating low- and high-frequency components, which is then injected into subsequent feature modeling to enable balanced modeling of global facial structure and local landmark details. Furthermore, FreqFLD employs a Frequency-Modulated Mixture-of-Experts (FreqMoE), with expert selection adaptively conditioned on frequency-modulated priors, enabling flexible modeling of heterogeneous facial landmark patterns under diverse and challenging scenarios. To regularize frequency-consistent modeling under the All-in-One paradigm, we further introduce a Frequency-Consistent Routing (FreqCR) loss, which constrains the routing and assignment of frequency-aware experts to promote balanced expert utilization across diverse facial scenarios, thereby enabling stable expert specialization and achieving robust facial landmark detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FreqFLD achieves comparable performance on popular datasets. The code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10278
Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and its early diagnosis is crucial to improving patients prognosis and quality of life. However, the process of interpreting medical images for the detection of lung cancer is complex and requires trained experts. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) emerge as potential tools to automate and optimize image analysis. The objective of this work is to review the most recent and relevant applications of AI and DL in the field of radiology for the detection of lung cancer. To this end, an exhaustive search was carried out in scientific databases such as PubMed,IEEEXPLORE, Scopus and Web of Science, and 96 articles published from 2015 to the present addressing the use of AI and DL in biomedical engineering were selected. Emphasis is placed on the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) with transfer learning and Data Augmentation as promising techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the image interpretation process. The results show that the use of AI and DL can offer an effective alternative for the early diagnosis of lung cancer, with high sensitivity and specificity. However, current limitations and challenges that must be addressed to guarantee its responsible and safe application in clinical practice are also identified, such as the lack of standardized data, the ex plainability of the models, patient privacy, and the ethical and social implications. It is concluded that the use of AI and DL can have a positive impact on the care of patients with lung cancer, but further research and regulation are required to ensure its quality and reliability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10652
Choosing a deep learning architecture for label-free single-cell classification remains an open question, with microscopy benchmarks reporting conflicting conclusions about CNNs versus transformers. We present a controlled benchmark on LIVECell phase-contrast microscopy data using source-image-disjoint train/validation/test splits to prevent parent-image leakage and matched optimisation, augmentation, and evaluation protocols across EfficientNet, Vision Transformer (ViT), and EVA-02 models. This allows the effects of architecture, pretraining, fine-tuning, tokenisation, and distillation to be disentangled. We find that the previously reported CNN advantage is largely explained by pretraining rather than architecture: the smallest pretrained model outperforms the strongest model trained from scratch despite far fewer parameters. Pretraining improves macro-F1 by 3-4 points, while the gap between the best pretrained CNN and transformer is below 0.5 points. Architectural choices nevertheless matter: ViT-S/8 outperforms ViT-S/16 and matches the four-times-larger ViT-B/16 at a quarter of the parameters, showing that finer tokenisation benefits small cell crops. Conversely, layer-wise learning-rate decay, central to the EVA-02 fine-tuning recipe, degrades performance, highlighting that transfer heuristics from natural-image recognition may not generalise to microscopy. Finally, knowledge distillation substantially improves the deployment frontier: compact EfficientNet-B0 students distilled from teacher councils outperform every individually trained backbone, including the EfficientNet-B5 and EVA-02 teachers. Overall, our results show that rigorous control of pretraining and evaluation is essential for interpreting biomedical architecture benchmarks, while distillation may be a more effective route to practical single-cell classification than architecture choice alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09863
Myocardial strain from echocardiography is a key biomarker for cardiac function. Recent deep learning methods show strong performance for myocardial motion tracking but often lack physiological constraints, leading to temporal drift across the cardiac cycle. Consequently, tracked points may not return to their relative initial positions at the end of each cardiac cycle, producing inaccurate strain estimates and even divergence in some cases. We propose a deep learning framework that compensates for drift during myocardial tracking. We extend a state-of-the-art echocardiographic tracking method (TAS-Net) with persistent memory tokens that share information across sliding windows over full cardiac cycles. A teacher-student fine-tuning strategy on real echocardiographic data then enforces physiologically consistent cyclic motion while preserving tracking accuracy. Experiments show reduced global and regional strain drift, improved agreement with clinical references, and better test-retest reproducibility, supporting more reliable myocardial strain estimation in clinical practice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09577
Physical-layer authentication (PLA) in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) is challenged by severe Doppler shifts, long delays, and fast channel variations, which cause distribution shifts and degrade conventional learning methods. Existing PLA schemes often rely on single features or generalize poorly to unseen environments. This paper proposes a secure adaptive framework for authentication in multi-zone networks (SAFA-MZ), a causal meta-learning framework for distributed PLA (DPLA) in NTNs. First, we design a multi-feature fingerprint that combines spatial, angular, combiner, subspace, and Doppler-delay features. The fingerprint is adaptive and distributed, as it fuses heterogeneous physical-layer features and measurements from multiple aerial nodes. Second, we formulate a structural causal model (SCM) to capture the relations among design choices, environmental factors, extracted features, and authentication outcomes. Third, we develop a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) strategy with invariant risk minimization (IRM) and causal consistency regularization for fast adaptation to unseen NTN environments with few labeled samples. Fourth, we propose a two-stage authentication scheme that performs local recognition and activates time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) localization with a graph attention (GAT) network only when needed, which reduces backhaul overhead. Simulations show that SAFA-MZ achieves 92% accuracy and 96% AUC, outperforming centralized deep learning and single-feature baselines across diverse environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09511
The proliferation of AI-generated audio (so-called "deepfake" audio) poses significant threats to information integrity, from voice cloning fraud to synthetic music copyright disputes. We present a temporal coherence analysis framework built upon Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) embeddings that spans speech, instrumental music, and music with vocals. By computing pairwise cosine similarities between audio segment embeddings and extracting statistical features from the resulting distributions, we train lightweight ensemble classifiers that reliably distinguish authentic from synthetic audio. Our work provides an interpretable, computationally efficient alternative to common deep learning methods while still achieving competitive performance across speech and music domains. Further, we reveal two notable empirical findings about audio deepfakes: (1) a feature-label inversion phenomenon in which 21 of 29 statistical features reverse their discriminative direction between training and in-the-wild deployment, and (2) a speech--music direction reversal in which entropy discriminates in opposite directions for speech and music deepfakes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09489
Near-field localization is a promising technique for high-resolution multi-user positioning in future wireless systems, but its performance is often degraded by scattering-induced coherent propagation. Existing near-field localization methods, which require separate parameter estimation and path/source association, suffer from high computation overhead and accumulated errors, and usually do not provide any guarantee on reliability. In this paper, we propose \emph{MUSIC-Net}, an end-to-end near-field positioning deep learning (DL) framework informed by two-stage MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) in mixed line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS (NLoS) multi-path scenarios, which embeds the two-stage MUSIC objects into training to isolate the LoS-related signal subspace and to identify a surrogate distance. The proposed framework directly recovers multi-user positions without the need for involved NLoS parameter estimation or path/source association. Furthermore, we introduce split conformal prediction (SCP) to move beyond point-estimation-based positioning towards statistically guaranteed (confidence) set estimation for all users. Numerical results show that the proposed MUSIC-Net achieves lower mean positioning error (MPER) than existing benchmarks and yields tighter SCP-calibrated prediction regions, demonstrating both accurate LoS localization and efficient uncertainty quantification (UQ) in coherent multi-path environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09409
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly emerging as a new paradigm for modeling social networks by representing users and their relationships and interactions through natural language. Unlike classical network models or deep learning approaches, LLMs can simulate context-aware social behavior and language-driven interactions, enabling more realistic modeling of network formation and dynamic social processes. However, existing studies are scattered across different research communities and lack a unified perspective. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of LLMs for social network modeling by organizing the literature into two broad categories: network generative models and dynamic process models. Network generative models are further classified into selection-based and interaction-based approaches, while dynamic process models are categorized into opinion dynamics, information diffusion, and rumor propagation, each with their underlying modeling mechanisms. LLMs enable rich textual social interactions and decision-making, but they also exhibit many limitations, including inherent social biases and prompt sensitivity. We outline these open research challenges and discuss future directions in LLM-based social network modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08049
Sign Language Translation has advanced with deep learning, yet evaluations remain largely signer-dependent, with overlapping signers across train/dev/test. This raises concerns about whether models truly generalise or instead rely on signer-specific regularities. We conduct signer-fold cross-validation on GFSLT-VLP, GASLT, and SignCL, three leading, publicly available, gloss-free SLT models, on CSL-Daily and PHOENIX14T. Under signer-independent evaluation, performance drops sharply: on PHOENIX14T, GFSLT-VLP falls from BLEU-4 21.44 to 3.59 and ROUGE-L 42.49 to 11.89; GASLT from 15.74 to 8.26; and SignCL from 22.74 to 3.66. We also observe that in CSL-Daily many target sentences are performed by multiple signers, so common splits can place identical sentences in both training and test, inflating absolute scores by rewarding recall of recurring sentences rather than genuine generalisation. These findings indicate that signer-dependent evaluation can substantially overestimate SLT capability. We recommend: (1) adopting signer-independent protocols to ensure generalisation to unseen signers; (2) restructuring datasets to include explicit signer-independent, sentence-disjoint splits for consistent benchmarking; and (3) reporting both signer-dependent and signer-independent results together with train-test sentence overlap to improve transparency and comparability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07965
Automated prediction of Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers plays a central role in functional annotation and computational drug discovery. However, standard multi-label machine learning pipelines frequently rely on default decision thresholds (t=0.50), assuming balanced prior distributions across target heads. In this study, we present a systematic empirical diagnostic of uncalibrated fixed decision boundaries operating under severe class imbalance across N = 14,096 annotated compounds categorized into six primary EC classes (EC1-EC6). Our results highlight a pronounced Accuracy Paradox: while the multi-label system achieves a deceivingly high mean accuracy of 77.16%, the macro F1-score (0.3976) and macro recall (0.3872) reveal severe predictive breakdown. Majority target classes suffer from hyper-sensitivity and over-prediction, whereas minority classes exhibit sharp recall decay, culminating in a total decision boundary collapse for EC6 (Recall = 0.00%) despite underlying discriminative power (ROC-AUC = 0.5857). Feature correlation analysis further reveals high linear redundancy among topological indices relative to fingerprint density metrics. Ultimately, this diagnostic study demonstrates that standard point predictions mask critical errors in bioinformatics workflows. We establish target-specific threshold optimization and post-hoc conformal calibration as essential, open-source post-processing safeguards for reliable applied machine learning and deep learning architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07897
Deep learning is an efficient technique to monitor the real time welding process, reducing post-welding repairs and production delays. This paper leverages the monitoring capability by proposing a multi modal temporal attention based deep learning defect detection model for internal defects that are challenging to detect, including porosity, lack of penetration and fusion, undercut, and cold lap during Gas Metal Arc Welding in fillet joints. The model is trained on collected welding images and sound data from an industrial collaborative welding robot. The results show that the attention module can improve the F1 Score to 0.99. We use explainable Artificial Intelligence to interpret the proposed models behavior and dataset distribution, determining potential important areas in image and sound spectrograms and preferred modality to detect each defect. This improves trust and reliability in Artificial Intelligence driven welding inspection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07893