In today's business landscape, organizations need to find the right balance between using their customers' data ethically to power AI solutions and being compliant regarding data privacy and data usage regulations. In this paper, we discuss synthetic data as a possible solution to this dilemma. Synthetic data is simulated data that mimics the real data. We explore how organizations in heavily regulated industries, such as financial institutions or healthcare organizations, can leverage synthetic data to build robust AI solutions while staying compliant. We demonstrate that synthetic data offers two significant advantages by allowing AI models to learn from more diverse data and by helping organizations stay compliant against data privacy laws with the use of synthetic data instead of customer information. We discuss case studies to show how synthetic data can be effectively used in the finance and healthcare sector while discussing the challenges of using synthetic data and some ethical questions it raises. Our research finds that synthetic data could be a game-changer for AI in regulated industries. The potential can be realized when industry, academia, and regulators collaborate to build solutions. We aim to initiate discussions on the use of synthetic data to build ethical, responsible, and effective AI systems in regulated enterprise industries.

Precise cell classification is essential in biomedical diagnostics and therapeutic monitoring, particularly for identifying diverse cell types involved in various diseases. Traditional cell classification methods such as flow cytometry depend on molecular labeling which is often costly, time-intensive, and can alter cell integrity. To overcome these limitations, we present a label-free machine learning framework for cell classification, designed for real-time sorting applications using bright-field microscopy images. This approach leverages a teacher-student model architecture enhanced by knowledge distillation, achieving high efficiency and scalability across different cell types. Demonstrated through a use case of classifying lymphocyte subsets, our framework accurately classifies T4, T8, and B cell types with a dataset of 80,000 preprocessed images, accessible via an open-source Python package for easy adaptation. Our teacher model attained 98\% accuracy in differentiating T4 cells from B cells and 93\% accuracy in zero-shot classification between T8 and B cells. Remarkably, our student model operates with only 0.02\% of the teacher model's parameters, enabling field-programmable gate array (FPGA) deployment. Our FPGA-accelerated student model achieves an ultra-low inference latency of just 14.5~$\mu$s and a complete cell detection-to-sorting trigger time of 24.7~$\mu$s, delivering 12x and 40x improvements over the previous state-of-the-art real-time cell analysis algorithm in inference and total latency, respectively, while preserving accuracy comparable to the teacher model. This framework provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for lymphocyte classification, as well as a new SOTA real-time cell sorting implementation for rapid identification of subsets using in situ deep learning on off-the-shelf computing hardware.

Malicious users attempt to replicate commercial models functionally at low cost by training a clone model with query responses. It is challenging to timely prevent such model-stealing attacks to achieve strong protection and maintain utility. In this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric detector called Account-aware Distribution Discrepancy (ADD) to recognize queries from malicious users by leveraging account-wise local dependency. We formulate each class as a Multivariate Normal distribution (MVN) in the feature space and measure the malicious score as the sum of weighted class-wise distribution discrepancy. The ADD detector is combined with random-based prediction poisoning to yield a plug-and-play defense module named D-ADD for image classification models. Results of extensive experimental studies show that D-ADD achieves strong defense against different types of attacks with little interference in serving benign users for both soft and hard-label settings.

Identifying transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) is crucial for understanding gene regulation, as these sites enable transcription factors (TFs) to bind to DNA and modulate gene expression. Despite advances in high-throughput sequencing, accurately identifying TFBS remains challenging due to the vast genomic data and complex binding patterns. GCBLANE, a graph-enhanced convolutional bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) attention network, is introduced to address this issue. It integrates convolutional, multi-head attention, and recurrent layers with a graph neural network to detect key features for TFBS prediction. On 690 ENCODE ChIP-Seq datasets, GCBLANE achieved an average AUC of 0.943, and on 165 ENCODE datasets, it reached an AUC of 0.9495, outperforming advanced models that utilize multimodal approaches, including DNA shape information. This result underscores GCBLANE's effectiveness compared to other methods. By combining graph-based learning with sequence analysis, GCBLANE significantly advances TFBS prediction.

This study introduces a cutting-edge regional weather forecasting model based on the SwinTransformer 3D architecture. This model is specifically designed to deliver precise hourly weather predictions ranging from 1 hour to 5 days, significantly improving the reliability and practicality of short-term weather forecasts. Our model has demonstrated generally superior performance when compared to Pangu, a well-established global model. The evaluation indicates that our model excels in predicting most weather variables, highlighting its potential as a more effective alternative in the field of limited area modeling. A noteworthy feature of this model is the integration of enhanced boundary conditions, inspired by traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) techniques. This integration has substantially improved the model's predictive accuracy. Additionally, the model includes an innovative approach for diagnosing hourly total precipitation at a high spatial resolution of approximately 5 kilometers. This is achieved through a latent diffusion model, offering an alternative method for generating high-resolution precipitation data.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are increasingly explored for their energy efficiency and robustness in real-world applications, yet their privacy risks remain largely unexamined. In this work, we investigate the susceptibility of SNNs to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) -- a major privacy threat where an adversary attempts to determine whether a given sample was part of the training dataset. While prior work suggests that SNNs may offer inherent robustness due to their discrete, event-driven nature, we find that its resilience diminishes as latency (T) increases. Furthermore, we introduce an input dropout strategy under black box setting, that significantly enhances membership inference in SNNs. Our findings challenge the assumption that SNNs are inherently more secure, and even though they are expected to be better, our results reveal that SNNs exhibit privacy vulnerabilities that are equally comparable to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIA_SNN-3610.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly improved medical screening accuracy, particularly in cancer detection and risk assessment. However, traditional classification metrics often fail to account for imbalanced data, varying performance across cohorts, and patient-level inconsistencies, leading to biased evaluations. We propose the Cohort-Attention Evaluation Metrics (CAT) framework to address these challenges. CAT introduces patient-level assessment, entropy-based distribution weighting, and cohort-weighted sensitivity and specificity. Key metrics like CATSensitivity (CATSen), CATSpecificity (CATSpe), and CATMean ensure balanced and fair evaluation across diverse populations. This approach enhances predictive reliability, fairness, and interpretability, providing a robust evaluation method for AI-driven medical screening models.

This work introduces a novel deep learning-based approach for gravitational wave anomaly detection, aiming to overcome the limitations of traditional matched filtering techniques in identifying unknown waveform gravitational wave signals. We introduce a modified convolutional neural network architecture inspired by ResNet that leverages residual blocks to extract high-dimensional features, effectively capturing subtle differences between background noise and gravitational wave signals. This network architecture learns a high-dimensional projection while preserving discrepancies with the original input, facilitating precise identification of gravitational wave signals. In our experiments, we implement an innovative data augmentation strategy that generates new data by computing the arithmetic mean of multiple signal samples while retaining the key features of the original signals. In the NSF HDR A3D3: Detecting Anomalous Gravitational Wave Signals competition, it is honorable for us (group name: easonyan123) to get to the first place at the end with our model achieving a true negative rate (TNR) of 0.9708 during development/validation phase and 0.9832 on an unseen challenge dataset during final/testing phase, the highest among all competitors. These results demonstrate that our method not only achieves excellent generalization performance but also maintains robust adaptability in addressing the complex uncertainties inherent in gravitational wave anomaly detection.

Tabular data synthesis using diffusion models has gained significant attention for its potential to balance data utility and privacy. However, existing privacy evaluations often rely on heuristic metrics or weak membership inference attacks (MIA), leaving privacy risks inadequately assessed. In this work, we conduct a rigorous MIA study on diffusion-based tabular synthesis, revealing that state-of-the-art attacks designed for image models fail in this setting. We identify noise initialization as a key factor influencing attack efficacy and propose a machine-learning-driven approach that leverages loss features across different noises and time steps. Our method, implemented with a lightweight MLP, effectively learns membership signals, eliminating the need for manual optimization. Experimental results from the MIDST Challenge @ SaTML 2025 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, securing first place across all tracks. Code is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/Tartan_Federer_MIDST.

Accurate illness diagnosis is vital for effective treatment and patient safety. Machine learning models are widely used for cancer diagnosis based on historical medical data. However, data imbalance remains a major challenge, leading to hindering classifier performance and reliability. The SMOTEBoost method addresses this issue by generating synthetic data to balance the dataset, but it may overlook crucial overlapping regions near the decision boundary and can produce noisy samples. This paper proposes RE-SMOTEBoost, an enhanced version of SMOTEBoost, designed to overcome these limitations. Firstly, RE-SMOTEBoost focuses on generating synthetic samples in overlapping regions to better capture the decision boundary using roulette wheel selection. Secondly, it incorporates a filtering mechanism based on information entropy to reduce noise, and borderline cases and improve the quality of generated data. Thirdly, we introduce a double regularization penalty to control the synthetic samples proximity to the decision boundary and avoid class overlap. These enhancements enable higher-quality oversampling of the minority class, resulting in a more balanced and effective training dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques when evaluated on imbalanced datasets. Compared to the top-performing sampling algorithms, RE-SMOTEBoost demonstrates a notable improvement of 3.22\% in accuracy and a variance reduction of 88.8\%. These results indicate that the proposed model offers a solid solution for medical settings, effectively overcoming data scarcity and severe imbalance caused by limited samples, data collection difficulties, and privacy constraints.