Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in working-age adults. While screening reduces the risk of blindness, traditional imaging is often costly and inaccessible. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms present a scalable diagnostic solution, but concerns regarding fairness and generalization persist. This work evaluates the fairness and performance of image-trained models in DR prediction, as well as the impact of disentanglement as a bias mitigation technique, using the diverse mBRSET fundus dataset. Three models, ConvNeXt V2, DINOv2, and Swin V2, were trained on macula images to predict DR and sensitive attributes (SAs) (e.g., age and gender/sex). Fairness was assessed between subgroups of SAs, and disentanglement was applied to reduce bias. All models achieved high DR prediction performance in diagnosing (up to 94% AUROC) and could reasonably predict age and gender/sex (91% and 77% AUROC, respectively). Fairness assessment suggests disparities, such as a 10% AUROC gap between age groups in DINOv2. Disentangling SAs from DR prediction had varying results, depending on the model selected. Disentanglement improved DINOv2 performance (2% AUROC gain), but led to performance drops in ConvNeXt V2 and Swin V2 (7% and 3%, respectively). These findings highlight the complexity of disentangling fine-grained features in fundus imaging and emphasize the importance of fairness in medical imaging AI to ensure equitable and reliable healthcare solutions.

Driving trajectory data remains vulnerable to privacy breaches despite existing mitigation measures. Traditional methods for detecting driving trajectories typically rely on map-matching the path using Global Positioning System (GPS) data, which is susceptible to GPS data outage. This paper introduces CAN-Trace, a novel privacy attack mechanism that leverages Controller Area Network (CAN) messages to uncover driving trajectories, posing a significant risk to drivers' long-term privacy. A new trajectory reconstruction algorithm is proposed to transform the CAN messages, specifically vehicle speed and accelerator pedal position, into weighted graphs accommodating various driving statuses. CAN-Trace identifies driving trajectories using graph-matching algorithms applied to the created graphs in comparison to road networks. We also design a new metric to evaluate matched candidates, which allows for potential data gaps and matching inaccuracies. Empirical validation under various real-world conditions, encompassing different vehicles and driving regions, demonstrates the efficacy of CAN-Trace: it achieves an attack success rate of up to 90.59% in the urban region, and 99.41% in the suburban region.

This study explores the optimization of the DRAGON Longformer base model for clinical text classification, specifically targeting the binary classification of medical case descriptions. A dataset of 500 clinical cases containing structured medical observations was used, with 400 cases for training and 100 for validation. Enhancements to the pre - trained joeranbosma/dragon - longformer - base - mixed - domain model included hyperparameter tuning, domain - specific preprocessing, and architectural adjustments. Key modifications involved increasing sequence length from 512 to 1024 tokens, adjusting learning rates from 1e - 05 to 5e - 06, extending training epochs from 5 to 8, and incorporating specialized medical terminology. The optimized model achieved notable performance gains: accuracy improved from 72.0% to 85.2%, precision from 68.0% to 84.1%, recall from 75.0% to 86.3%, and F1 - score from 71.0% to 85.2%. Statistical analysis confirmed the significance of these improvements (p < .001). The model demonstrated enhanced capability in interpreting medical terminology, anatomical measurements, and clinical observations. These findings contribute to domain - specific language model research and offer practical implications for clinical natural language processing applications. The optimized model ' s strong performance across diverse medical conditions underscores its potential for broad use in healthcare settings. Enhancing Clinical Text Classification via Fine - Tuned DRAGON Longformer Models Introduction Natural language processing (NLP) in healthcare has continued to advance rapidly, revolutionizing the ability to analyze clinical texts and automate the extraction of valuable insights from massive amounts of medical documentation (Khurana, Koli, Khatter, & Singh, 2023). Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for gaining insight from and processing clinical narratives, creating capabilities that have never been seen before in medical text classification, entity recognition, and clinical decision support (Wang et al., 2018). The DRAGON (Deep Representation Analysis for General - domain Ontology Networks) framework was a specialized version of medical text processing out of all these models (Bosma et al., 2025). Beltagy, Peters, and Cohan (2020) state that the DRAGON longformer model, built on top of the Longformer architecture, addresses the quadratic computational complexity issue of traditional transformer models by processing long sequences.

Clinical monitoring of functional decline in ALS relies on periodic assessments that may miss critical changes occurring between visits. To address this gap, semi-supervised regression models were developed to estimate rates of decline in a case series cohort by targeting ALSFRS- R scale trajectories with continuous in-home sensor monitoring data. Our analysis compared three model paradigms (individual batch learning and cohort-level batch versus incremental fine-tuned transfer learning) across linear slope, cubic polynomial, and ensembled self-attention pseudo-label interpolations. Results revealed cohort homogeneity across functional domains responding to learning methods, with transfer learning improving prediction error for ALSFRS-R subscales in 28 of 32 contrasts (mean RMSE=0.20(0.04)), and individual batch learning for predicting the composite scale (mean RMSE=3.15(1.25)) in 2 of 3. Self-attention interpolation achieved the lowest prediction error for subscale-level models (mean RMSE=0.19(0.06)), capturing complex nonlinear progression patterns, outperforming linear and cubic interpolations in 20 of 32 contrasts, though linear interpolation proved more stable in all ALSFRS-R composite scale models (mean RMSE=0.23(0.10)). We identified distinct homogeneity-heterogeneity profiles across functional domains with respiratory and speech exhibiting patient-specific patterns benefiting from personalized incremental adaptation, while swallowing and dressing functions followed cohort-level trajectories suitable for transfer models. These findings suggest that matching learning and pseudo-labeling techniques to functional domain-specific homogeneity-heterogeneity profiles enhances predictive accuracy in ALS progression tracking. Integrating adaptive model selection within sensor monitoring platforms could enable timely interventions and scalable deployment in future multi-center studies.

In order to improve the accuracy of cross-platform advertisement recommendation, a graph neural network (GNN)- based advertisement recommendation method is analyzed. Through multi-dimensional modeling, user behavior data (e.g., click frequency, active duration) reveal temporal patterns of interest evolution, ad content (e.g., type, tag, duration) influences semantic preferences, and platform features (e.g., device type, usage context) shape the environment where interest transitions occur. These factors jointly enable the GNN to capture the latent pathways of user interest migration across platforms. The experimental results are based on the datasets of three platforms, and Platform B reaches 0.937 in AUC value, which is the best performance. Platform A and Platform C showed a slight decrease in precision and recall with uneven distribution of ad labels. By adjusting the hyperparameters such as learning rate, batch size and embedding dimension, the adaptability and robustness of the model in heterogeneous data are further improved.

We explore the use of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling as a probabilistic last layer approach for deep neural networks (DNNs). While HMC is widely regarded as a gold standard for uncertainty estimation, the computational demands limit its application to large-scale datasets and large DNN architectures. Although the predictions from the sampled DNN parameters can be parallelized, the computational cost still scales linearly with the number of samples (similar to an ensemble). Last layer HMC (LL--HMC) reduces the required computations by restricting the HMC sampling to the final layer of a DNN, making it applicable to more data-intensive scenarios with limited computational resources. In this paper, we compare LL-HMC against five last layer probabilistic deep learning (LL-PDL) methods across three real-world video datasets for driver action and intention. We evaluate the in-distribution classification performance, calibration, and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Due to the stochastic nature of the probabilistic evaluations, we performed five grid searches for different random seeds to avoid being reliant on a single initialization for the hyperparameter configurations. The results show that LL--HMC achieves competitive in-distribution classification and OOD detection performance. Additional sampled last layer parameters do not improve the classification performance, but can improve the OOD detection. Multiple chains or starting positions did not yield consistent improvements.

Out-of-Distribution (OoD) segmentation is critical for safety-sensitive applications like autonomous driving. However, existing mask-based methods often suffer from boundary imprecision, inconsistent anomaly scores within objects, and false positives from background noise. We propose \textbf{\textit{Objectomaly}}, an objectness-aware refinement framework that incorporates object-level priors. Objectomaly consists of three stages: (1) Coarse Anomaly Scoring (CAS) using an existing OoD backbone, (2) Objectness-Aware Score Calibration (OASC) leveraging SAM-generated instance masks for object-level score normalization, and (3) Meticulous Boundary Precision (MBP) applying Laplacian filtering and Gaussian smoothing for contour refinement. Objectomaly achieves state-of-the-art performance on key OoD segmentation benchmarks, including SMIYC AnomalyTrack/ObstacleTrack and RoadAnomaly, improving both pixel-level (AuPRC up to 96.99, FPR$_{95}$ down to 0.07) and component-level (F1$-$score up to 83.44) metrics. Ablation studies and qualitative results on real-world driving videos further validate the robustness and generalizability of our method. Code will be released upon publication.

The primary objective of human activity recognition (HAR) is to infer ongoing human actions from sensor data, a task that finds broad applications in health monitoring, safety protection, and sports analysis. Despite proliferating research, HAR still faces key challenges, including the scarcity of labeled samples for rare activities, insufficient extraction of high-level features, and suboptimal model performance on lightweight devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a comprehensive optimization approach centered on multi-attention interaction mechanisms. First, an unsupervised, statistics-guided diffusion model is employed to perform data augmentation, thereby alleviating the problems of labeled data scarcity and severe class imbalance. Second, a multi-branch spatio-temporal interaction network is designed, which captures multi-scale features of sequential data through parallel residual branches with 3*3, 5*5, and 7*7 convolutional kernels. Simultaneously, temporal attention mechanisms are incorporated to identify critical time points, while spatial attention enhances inter-sensor interactions. A cross-branch feature fusion unit is further introduced to improve the overall feature representation capability. Finally, an adaptive multi-loss function fusion strategy is integrated, allowing for dynamic adjustment of loss weights and overall model optimization. Experimental results on three public datasets, WISDM, PAMAP2, and OPPORTUNITY, demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised data augmentation spatio-temporal attention diffusion network (USAD) achieves accuracies of 98.84%, 93.81%, and 80.92% respectively, significantly outperforming existing approaches. Furthermore, practical deployment on embedded devices verifies the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed method.

Collaborative fairness is a crucial challenge in federated learning. However, existing approaches often overlook a practical yet complex form of heterogeneity: imbalanced covariate shift. We provide a theoretical analysis of this setting, which motivates the design of FedAKD (Federated Asynchronous Knowledge Distillation)- simple yet effective approach that balances accurate prediction with collaborative fairness. FedAKD consists of client and server updates. In the client update, we introduce a novel asynchronous knowledge distillation strategy based on our preliminary analysis, which reveals that while correctly predicted samples exhibit similar feature distributions across clients, incorrectly predicted samples show significant variability. This suggests that imbalanced covariate shift primarily arises from misclassified samples. Leveraging this insight, our approach first applies traditional knowledge distillation to update client models while keeping the global model fixed. Next, we select correctly predicted high-confidence samples and update the global model using these samples while keeping client models fixed. The server update simply aggregates all client models. We further provide a theoretical proof of FedAKD's convergence. Experimental results on public datasets (FashionMNIST and CIFAR10) and a real-world Electronic Health Records (EHR) dataset demonstrate that FedAKD significantly improves collaborative fairness, enhances predictive accuracy, and fosters client participation even under highly heterogeneous data distributions.

Quantum neural networks (QNN) hold immense potential for the future of quantum machine learning (QML). However, QNN security and robustness remain largely unexplored. In this work, we proposed novel Trojan attacks based on the quantum computing properties in a QNN-based binary classifier. Our proposed Quantum Properties Trojans (QuPTs) are based on the unitary property of quantum gates to insert noise and Hadamard gates to enable superposition to develop Trojans and attack QNNs. We showed that the proposed QuPTs are significantly stealthier and heavily impact the quantum circuits' performance, specifically QNNs. The most impactful QuPT caused a deterioration of 23% accuracy of the compromised QNN under the experimental setup. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the Trojan attack on a fully quantum neural network independent of any hybrid classical-quantum architecture.