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
The rise of privacy-preserving artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted the focus of model adaptation and personalization towards on-device learning, where deep learning models are finetuned directly on edge hardware using local user data. However, this shift requires optimization of deep learning training on resource-constrained hardware to maximize throughput while maintaining predictive accuracy. This paper introduces a novel technique for on-device model training that incorporates an efficient Bayesian optimization-based batch size tuning approach to maximize hardware throughput. To evaluate the impact of this hyperparameter on the learning dynamics, we investigated two distinct paradigms: standard supervised learning (SL) and online continual learning (CL). Experimental results across various edge devices demonstrate a throughput ceiling, beyond which increasing the batch size yields no additional throughput gains. The proposed tuning approach identifies the optimal batch size, which, when combined with gradient accumulation and linear learning rate scaling, achieves up to a 2X increase in training throughput on platforms such as Raspberry Pi 4 compared to maximum batch sizes, without compromising model accuracy. Furthermore, in the CL paradigm, we demonstrate that optimal batch sizes maintain the stability-plasticity balance required for incremental learning, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while maximizing computational efficiency on edge-hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07444
Segmentation of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data is a fundamental task in biomedical research, but it often requires large amounts of precisely annotated data, making fully supervised approaches costly and difficult to scale. In this study, weakly supervised deep learning is investigated as a strategy to reduce annotation effort while maintaining accurate segmentation. A two-dimensional convolutional neural network based on the nnU-Net framework was adapted to a weak supervision setting using sparse dot-based annotations, complemented by a limited number of fully segmented images. The approach was evaluated on high-resolution microCT slices of rat kidneys, targeting the segmentation of renal glomeruli, which are small, low-contrast anatomical structures. Results indicate that weak supervision provides a meaningful learning signal, enabling reliable localization of glomeruli even in the absence of dense labels. Incorporating a small set of high-quality annotations substantially improves segmentation performance, approaching that of a fully supervised model. These findings highlight the potential of weakly supervised learning as an annotation-efficient strategy for the analysis of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data, and suggest that alternative loss formulations tailored to sparse annotations may further enhance performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07313
Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer, accounting for nearly 80% of skin cancer di- agnoses. Its optimal clinical management is guided by the distinct histopathologic subtype, with aggressive variants requiring more drastic measures. In current clinical practice, subtyping relies on skin biopsies, a procedure both costly and invasive. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary investigation into using deep learning for BCC subtyping, solely from a single dermatoscopic image of the lesion. Given the limited data at our disposal, we employ pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), a state-of-the-art family of models highly effective for challenging downstream tasks with limited labeled data. Through repeated stratified k-fold cross-validation, we demonstrate that ViTs can achieve superior performance (AUC 0.784 on a dataset of 1271 dermatoscopic images of various BCC subtypes) over standard CNN-based baselines as well as previously-reported human reader perfor- mance, on the task of differentiating aggressive BCCs from other subtype families. These initial findings highlight the potential of combining deep learning and dermatoscopy to provide a biopsy- free alternative for BCC subtyping, thus aiding in improving treatment planning and patient outcomes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07180
Real-world remote sensing image dehazing (RSID) remains challenging because atmospheric scattering, spatially non-uniform haze and colour distortion jointly degrade structural and spectral information. Most deep learning methods rely on RGB inputs and spatial-domain feature extraction, which limits their ability to separate global background haze from local surface details. Here, we propose DPSF-Net, a dual-prior spatial-frequency network built on MCAF-Net for real-world RSID. The network uses hazy RGB images and dark channel prior (DCP) maps as joint inputs, allowing physical degradation cues to guide end-to-end feature learning. A spatial-frequency residual interaction block introduces a FourierUnit branch into multi-directional spatial interaction to model large-scale haze components. A prior-guided feature attention module adaptively fuses prior and attention features to reduce colour shift and structural distortion. A selective kernel complementary fusion module screens multi-scale skip features through bidirectional residual complementary gating and selective kernel fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPSF-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the real-world RRSHID remote sensing image dehazing benchmark and remains competitive across multiple synthetic datasets. Moreover, the proposed method strikes a favourable balance among restoration quality, parameter count and computational complexity, supporting the effectiveness of dual-prior spatial-frequency modelling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06962
Glaucoma is a progressive optic neuropathy characterized by irreversible damage to the optic nerve, making timely diagnosis critical to prevent permanent vision loss. Although deep learning has demonstrated promising performance in automated glaucoma detection, existing approaches often overlook feature refinement, suffer from class imbalance, and rely on individual classifiers that limit prediction robustness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hybrid glaucoma detection framework that integrates attention-enhanced deep feature extraction with heterogeneous ensemble learning. Specifically, deep representations are extracted using InceptionV3 and subsequently refined by incorporating the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to enhance discriminative retinal features. To improve classification robustness, the extracted features are classified using multiple machine learning models together with Single-Level Ensemble (SLE) and Double-Level Ensemble (DLE) strategies, while SMOTE combined with Tomek Links (SMOTE+TL) is employed to alleviate class imbalance. Furthermore, a systematic comparison of handcrafted, deep, and attention-enhanced deep feature representations is conducted. Experimental evaluation on two public retinal fundus datasets demonstrates that deep feature-based methods consistently outperform handcrafted feature-based methods, while the proposed attention-enhanced framework achieves the best overall performance. Furthermore, Grad-CAM visualizations confirm that the proposed model focuses on clinically relevant retinal regions, providing interpretable evidence on the model's prediction process.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06699
Accurate aerodynamic prediction is critical for designing fuel-efficient and safe transportation systems such as aircraft and automobiles, yet traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations remain computationally expensive and expertise-intensive, severely limiting their use in iterative design and real-time analysis. Existing deep learning surrogates suffer from two major limitations: (i) they are evaluated on datasets with narrow flow-condition ranges, leaving their performance under complex flow conditions undemonstrated; (ii) they treat global flow conditions as a single vector injected uniformly across all surface points, ignoring that different geometric regions experience distinct local flow phenomena, which degrades prediction accuracy under complex flow conditions. To address these limitations, we propose the Flow State Attention Network (FSAN). FSAN separately encodes point cloud and flow conditions, then partitions the geometry into multiple flow states via learnable soft assignments, and uses flow features to update these state representations, which in turn influence point cloud features through state changes. This enables fine-grained, state-specific interaction between geometry and flow information. Extensive experiments on two well-recognized aerodynamic benchmarks demonstrate that FSAN achieves the highest accuracy among the methods compared in this work at a higher computational cost. On Emmi-Wing, FSAN reduces the Relative L2 (REL-L2) error by over 20\% compared to the strongest baseline (Transolver), and on DrivAerNet++, it achieves a 10\% reduction compared to the strongest baseline (AdaField). These results establish FSAN as a promising neural surrogate on public benchmarks with diverse flow conditions and geometries.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06660
Modern power systems are growing increasingly complex as they integrate diverse generation sources to meet rising demand, making accurate load forecasting challenging. Recent advances in time-series foundation models (TSFMs) resulted in promising performance in zero-shot univariate load forecasting tasks. However, real-world load forecasting often involves multiple target variables and requires the integration of exogenous variables, raising important questions about the utility of TSFMs in realistic settings. In this study, we position Chronos-2, a recently developed model by Amazon, as a representative multi-channel TSFM that supports univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed forecasting, and conduct a systematic investigation of how such models can be used for real-world load forecasting. While prior work has evaluated Chronos-2 on a limited number of energy-related tasks in a zero-shot setting, its performance relative to established task-specific deep learning models and its behavior when adapted using task-specific historical data remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we evaluate Chronos-2 on two real-world utility datasets, ISO New England and ENTSO-E, and benchmark it against widely used task-specific deep learning models. Our results show that Chronos-2 benefits substantially from task-specific fine-tuning and achieves strong short-horizon forecasting performance, but its zero-shot accuracy lags behind task-specific models and its forecasting error grows more rapidly with increasing forecast steps. Overall, this study provides a detailed characterization of the strengths and limitations of TSFMs such as Chronos-2 in grid load forecasting and offers practical insights into how a pretrained TSFM can be effectively adapted for operational load forecasting applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06656
Environmental identification in wireless sensing is essential for 6G integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems to achieve reliable situational awareness. However, deep learning (DL) models for this task often fail to generalize under domain shift across diverse environments. While the Inter-Instance Variational Auto-encoder (IIns-VAE) learns features of rich representation, its neural classifier remains vulnerable to these distribution changes. In this paper, we propose IIns-VAE+, a hybrid model that combines the IIns-VAE framework with Minimax Risk Classifiers (MRC) to improve adaptability in transfer learning scenarios. We use real-world datasets to evaluate our framework across three transfer learning scenarios, including general to specific room environments, high to low label resolutions, and mixed to specific environments. The experimental results indicate that IIns-VAE+ significantly outperforms baselines, demonstrating its critical value in building adaptable and robust perceptive networks in future 6G systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06131
The purpose of this research is to find data and methods using machine learning and deep learning to correctly predict the estimated travel time for transportation and logistics in a supply chain system. The supply chain ecosystem is very complex and heavily relies on the transportation and logistics of raw materials and finished goods. Accurate travel time estimation is critical because it helps supply chain members to improve logistics consistency and performance. This helps in planning, demand forecasting, lead time management and assembly planning. The logistics on the delivery side of the customer also plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction and voice of customer. With the collection of huge historical data and using novel techniques, the research builds an accurate model to predict travel time of inventory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38190
Understanding the joint dynamics of prices and trades is central to market microstructure, where returns and order flow interact through nonlinear and state-dependent mechanisms. Linear models are interpretable but may miss these effects, while deep neural networks improve forecasting at the cost of transparency. We use neural networks as tools for structural discovery rather than only for prediction. A deep feed-forward network is trained on high-frequency returns and signed volumes for large- and small-tick stocks and compared with a linear VAR benchmark. The neural network improves predictive performance, especially for returns, revealing nonlinear dependencies beyond the linear specification. Using Shapley-based explainability, we show that the dominant contributions are concentrated at the most recent lags. Model-implied responses are consistent with conditional averages reconstructed from the data. Unlike empirical averages, however, the neural-network decomposition isolates individual regressor contributions to the aggregate dependence. Lagged signed volume generates sign-preserving and saturating effects, consistent with nonlinear price impact and order-flow persistence. Lagged returns act as state variables: when the previous trade does not move the price, the model predicts continuation in the direction of past order flow, whereas non-zero returns generate attenuation or reversal. Building on these findings, we introduce a parsimonious SHAP-inspired nonlinear parametric model. It reproduces the main return-volume dependencies, outperforms the linear VAR benchmark, and achieves performance comparable to the neural network. A multi-lag extension captures residual longer-memory effects while preserving interpretability. Overall, explainability offers a route from black-box prediction to economically meaningful parametric models of price and trade dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06085
Deep learning for time series has progressed through successive architectural paradigms, from recurrent networks and transformers to structured state-space models, retrieval-augmented predictors, foundation models, and tool-using agents. These developments are typically studied in isolation, organized by architecture or modeling era. We argue that they can instead be viewed through a common question of \emph{how does a time-series model retain and access information beyond its immediate input?} This question is motivated by a fundamental limitation of conventional time-series modeling: information relevant to a prediction may lie far beyond a feasible input window, while compressing history into a fixed-size state can discard information that may become useful later. We formulate this challenge as a \emph{memory} problem and organize existing time-series methods along a spectrum from internal memory, encoded in parameters and fixed-size states, to external memory that is addressable, retrievable, and increasingly maintained by agents. We then develop a unified taxonomy of memory mechanisms and review three classes of external memory, including explicit modules, retrieval augmentation, and agentic stores, under a common framework for what is retained, how it is written and accessed, and how it persists. A cross-cutting analysis maps these mechanisms to time-series tasks and identifies gaps in both methods and evaluation. We conclude by outlining open problems in building memory systems that can selectively retain, retrieve, revise, and forget information as temporal environments evolve. The result is a framework for studying memory as a first-class dimension of time series modeling, independent of the underlying backbone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06006