Cross-domain facial expression recognition (CD-FER) remains difficult due to severe domain shift between training and deployment data. We propose Graph-Attention Network with Adversarial Domain Alignment (GAT-ADA), a hybrid framework that couples a ResNet-50 as backbone with a batch-level Graph Attention Network (GAT) to model inter-sample relations under shift. Each mini-batch is cast as a sparse ring graph so that attention aggregates cross-sample cues that are informative for adaptation. To align distributions, GAT-ADA combines adversarial learning via a Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL) with statistical alignment using CORAL and MMD. GAT-ADA is evaluated under a standard unsupervised domain adaptation protocol: training on one labeled source (RAF-DB) and adapting to multiple unlabeled targets (CK+, JAFFE, SFEW 2.0, FER2013, and ExpW). GAT-ADA attains 74.39% mean cross-domain accuracy. On RAF-DB to FER2013, it reaches 98.0% accuracy, corresponding to approximately a 36-point improvement over the best baseline we re-implemented with the same backbone and preprocessing.

The increasing prevalence of thyroid cancer globally has led to the development of various computer-aided detection methods. Accurate segmentation of thyroid nodules is a critical first step in the development of AI-assisted clinical decision support systems. This study focuses on instance segmentation of thyroid nodules using YOLOv5 algorithms on ultrasound images. We evaluated multiple YOLOv5 variants (Nano, Small, Medium, Large, and XLarge) across two dataset versions, with and without doppler images. The YOLOv5-Large algorithm achieved the highest performance with a dice score of 91\% and mAP of 0.87 on the dataset including doppler images. Notably, our results demonstrate that doppler images, typically excluded by physicians, can significantly improve segmentation performance. The YOLOv5-Small model achieved 79\% dice score when doppler images were excluded, while including them improved performance across all model variants. These findings suggest that instance segmentation with YOLOv5 provides an effective real-time approach for thyroid nodule detection, with potential clinical applications in automated diagnostic systems.

We introduce DP-FinDiff, a differentially private diffusion framework for synthesizing mixed-type tabular data. DP-FinDiff employs embedding-based representations for categorical features, reducing encoding overhead and scaling to high-dimensional datasets. To adapt DP-training to the diffusion process, we propose two privacy-aware training strategies: an adaptive timestep sampler that aligns updates with diffusion dynamics, and a feature-aggregated loss that mitigates clipping-induced bias. Together, these enhancements improve fidelity and downstream utility without weakening privacy guarantees. On financial and medical datasets, DP-FinDiff achieves 16-42% higher utility than DP baselines at comparable privacy levels, demonstrating its promise for safe and effective data sharing in sensitive domains.

Financial text classification has increasingly become an important aspect in quantitative trading systems and related tasks, such as financial sentiment analysis and the classification of financial news. In this paper, we assess the performance of the large language model Qwen3-8B on both tasks. Qwen3-8B is a state-of-the-art model that exhibits strong instruction-following and multilingual capabilities, and is distinct from standard models, primarily because it is specifically optimized for efficient fine tuning and high performance on reasoning-based benchmarks, making it suitable for financial applications. To adapt this model, we apply Noisy Embedding Instruction Finetuning and based on our previous work, this method increases robustness by injecting controlled noise into the embedding layers during supervised adaptation. We improve efficiency further with Rank-stabilized Low-Rank Adaptation low-rank optimization approach, and FlashAttention, which allow for faster training with lower GPU memory. For both tasks, we benchmark Qwen3-8B against standard classical transformer models, such as T5, BERT, and RoBERTa, and large models at scale, such as LLaMA1-7B, LLaMA2-7B, and Baichuan2-7B. The findings reveal that Qwen3-8B consistently surpasses these baselines by obtaining better classification accuracy and needing fewer training epochs. The synergy of instruction-based fine-tuning and memory-efficient optimization methods suggests Qwen3-8B can potentially serve as a scalable, economical option for real-time financial NLP applications. Qwen3-8B provides a very promising base for advancing dynamic quantitative trading systems in the future.

Pith detection in tree cross-sections is essential for forestry and wood quality analysis but remains a manual, error-prone task. This study evaluates deep learning models -- YOLOv9, U-Net, Swin Transformer, DeepLabV3, and Mask R-CNN -- to automate the process efficiently. A dataset of 582 labeled images was dynamically augmented to improve generalization. Swin Transformer achieved the highest accuracy (0.94), excelling in fine segmentation. YOLOv9 performed well for bounding box detection but struggled with boundary precision. U-Net was effective for structured patterns, while DeepLabV3 captured multi-scale features with slight boundary imprecision. Mask R-CNN initially underperformed due to overlapping detections, but applying Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) improved its IoU from 0.45 to 0.80. Generalizability was next tested using an oak dataset of 11 images from Oregon State University's Tree Ring Lab. Additionally, for exploratory analysis purposes, an additional dataset of 64 labeled tree cross-sections was used to train the worst-performing model to see if this would improve its performance generalizing to the unseen oak dataset. Key challenges included tensor mismatches and boundary inconsistencies, addressed through hyperparameter tuning and augmentation. Our results highlight deep learning's potential for tree cross-section pith detection, with model choice depending on dataset characteristics and application needs.

The rapid evolution of end-to-end AI music generation poses an escalating threat to artistic authenticity and copyright, demanding detection methods that can keep pace. While foundational, existing models like SpecTTTra falter when faced with the diverse and rapidly advancing ecosystem of new generators, exhibiting significant performance drops on out-of-distribution (OOD) content. This generalization failure highlights a critical gap: the need for more challenging benchmarks and more robust detection architectures. To address this, we first introduce Melody or Machine (MoM), a new large-scale benchmark of over 130,000 songs (6,665 hours). MoM is the most diverse dataset to date, built with a mix of open and closed-source models and a curated OOD test set designed specifically to foster the development of truly generalizable detectors. Alongside this benchmark, we introduce CLAM, a novel dual-stream detection architecture. We hypothesize that subtle, machine-induced inconsistencies between vocal and instrumental elements, often imperceptible in a mixed signal, offer a powerful tell-tale sign of synthesis. CLAM is designed to test this hypothesis by employing two distinct pre-trained audio encoders (MERT and Wave2Vec2) to create parallel representations of the audio. These representations are fused by a learnable cross-aggregation module that models their inter-dependencies. The model is trained with a dual-loss objective: a standard binary cross-entropy loss for classification, complemented by a contrastive triplet loss which trains the model to distinguish between coherent and artificially mismatched stream pairings, enhancing its sensitivity to synthetic artifacts without presuming a simple feature alignment. CLAM establishes a new state-of-the-art in synthetic music forensics. It achieves an F1 score of 0.925 on our challenging MoM benchmark.

Graph link prediction has long been a central problem in graph representation learning in both network analysis and generative modeling. Recent progress in deep learning has introduced increasingly sophisticated architectures for capturing relational dependencies within graph-structured data. In this work, we propose the Generalized Graph Transformer Variational Autoencoder (GGT-VAE). Our model integrates Generalized Graph Transformer Architecture with Variational Autoencoder framework for link prediction. Unlike prior GraphVAE, GCN, or GNN approaches, GGT-VAE leverages transformer style global self-attention mechanism along with laplacian positional encoding to model structural patterns across nodes into a latent space without relying on message passing. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that GGT-VAE consistently achieves above-baseline performance in terms of ROC-AUC and Average Precision. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first studies to explore graph structure generation using a generalized graph transformer backbone in a variational framework.

The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a pivotal standard for automating data rights management. However, the inherent logical complexity of authorization policies, combined with the scarcity of high-quality "Natural Language-to-ODRL" training datasets, impedes the ability of current methods to efficiently and accurately translate complex rules from natural language into the ODRL format. To address this challenge, this research leverages the potent comprehension and generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve both automation and high fidelity in this translation process. We introduce AgentODRL, a multi-agent system based on an Orchestrator-Workers architecture. The architecture consists of specialized Workers, including a Generator for ODRL policy creation, a Decomposer for breaking down complex use cases, and a Rewriter for simplifying nested logical relationships. The Orchestrator agent dynamically coordinates these Workers, assembling an optimal pathway based on the complexity of the input use case. Specifically, we enhance the ODRL Generator by incorporating a validator-based syntax strategy and a semantic reflection mechanism powered by a LoRA-finetuned model, significantly elevating the quality of the generated policies. Extensive experiments were conducted on a newly constructed dataset comprising 770 use cases of varying complexity, all situated within the context of data spaces. The results, evaluated using ODRL syntax and semantic scores, demonstrate that our proposed Orchestrator-Workers system, enhanced with these strategies, achieves superior performance on the ODRL generation task.

Modern AI inference faces an irreducible tension: no single computational resource simultaneously maximizes performance, preserves privacy, minimizes cost, and maintains trust. Existing orchestration frameworks optimize single dimensions (Kubernetes prioritizes latency, federated learning preserves privacy, edge computing reduces network distance), creating solutions that struggle under real-world heterogeneity. We present IslandRun, a multi-objective orchestration system that treats computational resources as autonomous "islands" spanning personal devices, private edge servers, and public cloud. Our key insights: (1) request-level heterogeneity demands policy-constrained multi-objective optimization, (2) data locality enables routing compute to data rather than data to compute, and (3) typed placeholder sanitization preserves context semantics across trust boundaries. IslandRun introduces agent-based routing, tiered island groups with differential trust, and reversible anonymization. This establishes a new paradigm for privacy-aware, decentralized inference orchestration across heterogeneous personal computing ecosystems.

Autonomous navigation in partially observable environments requires agents to reason beyond immediate sensor input, exploit occlusion, and ensure safety while progressing toward a goal. These challenges arise in many robotics domains, from urban driving and warehouse automation to defense and surveillance. Classical path planning approaches and memoryless reinforcement learning often fail under limited fields of view (FoVs) and occlusions, committing to unsafe or inefficient maneuvers. We propose a hierarchical navigation framework that integrates a Deep Transformer Q-Network (DTQN) as a high-level subgoal selector with a modular low-level controller for waypoint execution. The DTQN consumes short histories of task-aware features, encoding odometry, goal direction, obstacle proximity, and visibility cues, and outputs Q-values to rank candidate subgoals. Visibility-aware candidate generation introduces masking and exposure penalties, rewarding the use of cover and anticipatory safety. A low-level potential field controller then tracks the selected subgoal, ensuring smooth short-horizon obstacle avoidance. We validate our approach in 2D simulation and extend it directly to a 3D Unity-ROS environment by projecting point-cloud perception into the same feature schema, enabling transfer without architectural changes. Results show consistent improvements over classical planners and RL baselines in success rate, safety margins, and time to goal, with ablations confirming the value of temporal memory and visibility-aware candidate design. These findings highlight a generalizable framework for safe navigation under uncertainty, with broad relevance across robotic platforms.