--Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a model using data from one or multiple related but distinct source domains that can generalize well to unseen out-of-distribution target domains. Inspired by the success of large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), prompt tuning has emerged as an effective generalization strategy. However, it often struggles to capture domain-specific features due to its reliance on manually or fixed prompt inputs. Recently, some prompt generation methods have addressed this limitation by dynamically generating instance-specific and domain-specific prompts for each input, enriching domain information and demonstrating potential for enhanced generalization. Through further investigation, we identify a notable issue in existing prompt generation methods: the same input often yields significantly different and suboptimal prompts across different random seeds, a phenomenon we term Prompt V ariability. T o address this, we introduce negative learning into the prompt generation process and propose Dual-Path Stable Soft Prompt Generation (DPSPG), a transformer-based framework designed to improve both the stability and generalization of prompts. Specifically, DPSPG incorporates a complementary prompt generator to produce negative prompts, thereby reducing the risk of introducing misleading information. Both theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate that negative learning leads to more robust and effective prompts by increasing the effective margin and reducing the upper bound of the gradient norm. Extensive experiments on five DG benchmark datasets show that DPSPG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining prompt stability. The code is available at https://github.com/renytek13/

--With the advancement of energy Internet and energy system integration, the increasing adoption of distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems presents new challenges on smart monitoring and measurement for utility companies, particularly in separating PV generation from net electricity load. This paper proposes a PV disaggregation method that integrates Hierarchical Interpolation (HI) and multi-head self-attention mechanisms. By using HI to extract net load features and multi-head self-attention to capture the complex dependencies between weather factors, the method achieves precise PV generation predictions. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world data, supporting improved monitoring and management of distributed energy systems. With the increasing adoption of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, an expanding number of residential prosumers, who both produce and consume electricity, are generating electricity through their PV installations.

Natural images exhibit label diversity (clean vs. noisy) in noisy-labeled image classification and prevalence diversity (abundant vs. sparse) in long-tailed image classification. Similarly, medical images in universal lesion detection (ULD) exhibit substantial variations in image quality, encompassing attributes such as clarity and label correctness. How to effectively leverage training images with diverse qualities becomes a problem in learning deep models. Conventional training mechanisms, such as self-paced curriculum learning (SCL) and online hard example mining (OHEM), relieve this problem by reweighting images with high loss values. Despite their success, these methods still confront two challenges: (i) the loss-based measure of sample hardness is imprecise, preventing optimum handling of different cases, and (ii) there exists under-utilization in SCL or over-utilization OHEM with the identified hard samples. To address these issues, this paper revisits the minibatch sampling (MBS), a technique widely used in deep network training but largely unexplored concerning the handling of diverse-quality training samples. We discover that the samples within a minibatch influence each other during training; thus, we propose a novel Mixed-order Minibatch Sampling (MoMBS) method to optimize the use of training samples with diverse qualities. MoMBS introduces a measure that takes both loss and uncertainty into account to surpass a sole reliance on loss and allows for a more refined categorization of high-loss samples by distinguishing them as either poorly labeled and under represented or well represented and overfitted. We prioritize under represented samples as the main gradient contributors in a minibatch and keep them from the negative influences of poorly labeled or overfitted samples with a mixed-order minibatch sampling design.

The recent success of State-Space Models (SSMs) in sequence modeling has motivated their adaptation to graph learning, giving rise to Graph State-Space Models (GSSMs). However, existing GSSMs operate by applying SSM modules to sequences extracted from graphs, often compromising core properties such as permutation equivariance, message-passing compatibility, and computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective by embedding the key principles of modern SSM computation directly into the Message-Passing Neural Network framework, resulting in a unified methodology for both static and temporal graphs. Our approach, MP-SSM, enables efficient, permutation-equivariant, and long-range information propagation while preserving the architectural simplicity of message passing. Crucially, MP-SSM enables an exact sensitivity analysis, which we use to theoretically characterize information flow and evaluate issues like vanishing gradients and over-squashing in the deep regime. Furthermore, our design choices allow for a highly optimized parallel implementation akin to modern SSMs. We validate MP-SSM across a wide range of tasks, including node classification, graph property prediction, long-range benchmarks, and spatiotemporal forecasting, demonstrating both its versatility and strong empirical performance.

Regulatory affairs, which sits at the intersection of medicine and law, can benefit significantly from AI-enabled automation. Classification task is the initial step in which manufacturers position their products to regulatory authorities, and it plays a critical role in determining market access, regulatory scrutiny, and ultimately, patient safety. In this study, we investigate a broad range of AI models -- including traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms, deep learning architectures, and large language models -- using a regulatory dataset of medical device descriptions. We evaluate each model along three key dimensions: accuracy, interpretability, and computational cost.

We introduce an encoder-only approach to learn the evolution operators of large-scale non-linear dynamical systems, such as those describing complex natural phenomena. Evolution operators are particularly well-suited for analyzing systems that exhibit complex spatio-temporal patterns and have become a key analytical tool across various scientific communities. As terabyte-scale weather datasets and simulation tools capable of running millions of molecular dynamics steps per day are becoming commodities, our approach provides an effective tool to make sense of them from a data-driven perspective. The core of it lies in a remarkable connection between self-supervised representation learning methods and the recently established learning theory of evolution operators. To show the usefulness of the proposed method, we test it across multiple scientific domains: explaining the folding dynamics of small proteins, the binding process of drug-like molecules in host sites, and autonomously finding patterns in climate data. Code and data to reproduce the experiments are made available open source.

Ransomware remains a critical threat to cybersecurity, yet publicly available datasets for training machine learning-based ransomware detection models are scarce and often have limited sample size, diversity, and reproducibility. In this paper, we introduce MLRan, a behavioural ransomware dataset, comprising over 4,800 samples across 64 ransomware families and a balanced set of goodware samples. The samples span from 2006 to 2024 and encompass the four major types of ransomware: locker, crypto, ransomware-as-a-service, and modern variants. We also propose guidelines (GUIDE-MLRan), inspired by previous work, for constructing high-quality behavioural ransomware datasets, which informed the curation of our dataset. We evaluated the ransomware detection performance of several machine learning (ML) models using MLRan. For this purpose, we performed feature selection by conducting mutual information filtering to reduce the initial 6.4 million features to 24,162, followed by recursive feature elimination, yielding 483 highly informative features. The ML models achieved an accuracy, precision and recall of up to 98.7%, 98.9%, 98.5%, respectively. Using SHAP and LIME, we identified critical indicators of malicious behaviour, including registry tampering, strings, and API misuse. The dataset and source code for feature extraction, selection, ML training, and evaluation are available publicly to support replicability and encourage future research, which can be found at https://github.com/faithfulco/mlran.

Machine learning (ML)-based malware detection systems often fail to account for the dynamic nature of real-world training and test data distributions. In practice, these distributions evolve due to frequent changes in the Android ecosystem, adversarial development of new malware families, and the continuous emergence of both benign and malicious applications. Prior studies have shown that such concept drift -- distributional shifts in benign and malicious samples, leads to significant degradation in detection performance over time. Despite the practical importance of this issue, existing datasets are often outdated and limited in temporal scope, diversity of malware families, and sample scale, making them insufficient for the systematic evaluation of concept drift in malware detection. To address this gap, we present LAMDA, the largest and most temporally diverse Android malware benchmark to date, designed specifically for concept drift analysis. LAMDA spans 12 years (2013-2025, excluding 2015), includes over 1 million samples (approximately 37% labeled as malware), and covers 1,380 malware families and 150,000 singleton samples, reflecting the natural distribution and evolution of real-world Android applications. We empirically demonstrate LAMDA's utility by quantifying the performance degradation of standard ML models over time and analyzing feature stability across years. As the most comprehensive Android malware dataset to date, LAMDA enables in-depth research into temporal drift, generalization, explainability, and evolving detection challenges. The dataset and code are available at: https://iqsec-lab.github.io/LAMDA/.

--Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a critical indicator of soil health, but its accurate estimation from satellite imagery is hindered in vegetated regions due to spectral contamination from plant cover, which obscures soil reflectance and reduces model reliability. This study proposes the Reflectance Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (ReflectGAN), a novel paired GAN-based framework designed to reconstruct accurate bare soil reflectance from vegetated soil satellite observations. Using the LUCAS 2018 dataset and corresponding Landsat 8 imagery, we trained multiple learning-based models on both original and ReflectGAN-reconstructed reflectance inputs. Models trained on ReflectGAN outputs consistently outperformed those using existing vegetation correction methods. The performance of the models with ReflectGAN is also better compared to their counterparts when applied to another dataset, i.e., Sentinel-2 imagery. These findings demonstrate the potential of ReflectGAN to improve SOC estimation accuracy in vegetated landscapes, supporting more reliable soil monitoring. OIL organic carbon (SOC) is a fundamental indicator of soil health, influencing agricultural productivity, carbon sequestration, improved soil moisture retention and overall ecosystem sustainability. Accurate estimation of SOC is essential for promoting sustainable agriculture, improving soil management practices, and monitoring environmental changes [1], [2]. Traditional methods for estimating SOC rely on laboratory-based soil analyses, which, although precise, are labor-intensive, costly, and limited in spatial coverage [3], [4]. D. Datta and M. Paul are with the School of Computing, Mathematics, and Engineering, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW 2795, Australia, and also with the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia (e-mail: ddatta@csu.edu.au; M. Murshed is with the School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia (e-mail: manzur.murshed@deakin.edu.au). S. W . Teng is with the Institute of Innovation, Science and Sustainability, Federation University, Mount Helen, VIC 3350, Australia, and also with the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia (e-mail: s.w.teng@federation.edu.au). Laboratory-based hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides a powerful tool for SOC estimation by offering high spatial and spectral resolution, enabling detailed analysis of soil properties without the need for destructive sampling [5]-[7]. Numerous studies have validated the effectiveness of HSI in accurately estimating SOC levels [7], [8]. However, the widespread deployment of HSI is constrained by the high cost of equipment and limited accessibility, making it impractical for large-scale applications.

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a key metric for classification, especially under class imbalance, with growing research focus on optimizing AUC over accuracy in applications like medical image analysis and deepfake detection. This leads to fairness in AUC optimization becoming crucial as biases can impact protected groups. While various fairness mitigation techniques exist, fairness considerations in AUC optimization remain in their early stages, with most research focusing on improving AUC fairness under the assumption of clean protected groups. However, these studies often overlook the impact of noisy protected groups, leading to fairness violations in practice. To address this, we propose the first robust AUC fairness approach under noisy protected groups with fairness theoretical guarantees using distributionally robust optimization. Extensive experiments on tabular and image datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in preserving AUC fairness. The code is in https://github.com/Purdue-M2/AUC_Fairness_with_Noisy_Groups.