We explore the trade-off between privacy and statistical utility in private two-sample testing under local differential privacy (LDP) for both multinomial and continuous data. We begin by addressing the multinomial case, where we introduce private permutation tests using practical privacy mechanisms such as Laplace, discrete Laplace, and Google's RAPPOR. We then extend our multinomial approach to continuous data via binning and study its uniform separation rates under LDP over H\"older and Besov smoothness classes. The proposed tests for both discrete and continuous cases rigorously control the type I error for any finite sample size, strictly adhere to LDP constraints, and achieve minimax separation rates under LDP. The attained minimax rates reveal inherent privacy-utility trade-offs that are unavoidable in private testing. To address scenarios with unknown smoothness parameters in density testing, we propose an adaptive test based on a Bonferroni-type approach that ensures robust performance without prior knowledge of the smoothness parameters. We validate our theoretical findings with extensive numerical experiments and demonstrate the practical relevance and effectiveness of our proposed methods.

In this paper we describe an efficient method for providing a regression model with a sense of curiosity about its data. In the field of machine learning, our framework for representing curiosity is called active learning, which means automatically choosing data points for which to query labels in the semisupervised setting. The methods we propose are based on computing a "regularity tangent" vector that can be calculated (with only a constant slow-down) together with the model's parameter vector during training. We then take the inner product of this tangent vector with the gradient vector of the model's loss at a given data point to obtain a measure of the influence of that point on the complexity of the model. There is only a single regularity tangent vector, of the same dimension as the parameter vector. Thus, in the proposed technique, once training is complete, evaluating our "curiosity" about a potential query data point can be done as quickly as calculating the model's loss gradient at that point. The new vector only doubles the amount of storage required by the model. We show that the quantity computed by our technique is an example of an "influence function", and that it measures the expected squared change in model complexity incurred by up-weighting a given data point. We propose a number of ways for using this quantity to choose new training data for a model in the framework of active learning.

Diffusion models have shown the great potential in the point cloud registration (PCR) task, especially for enhancing the robustness to challenging cases. However, existing diffusion-based PCR methods primarily focus on instance-level scenarios and struggle with outdoor LiDAR points, where the sparsity, irregularity, and huge point scale inherent in LiDAR points pose challenges to establishing dense global point-to-point correspondences. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework named EADReg for efficient and robust registration of LiDAR point clouds based on autoregressive diffusion models. EADReg follows a coarse-to-fine registration paradigm. In the coarse stage, we employ a Bi-directional Gaussian Mixture Model (BGMM) to reject outlier points and obtain purified point cloud pairs. BGMM establishes correspondences between the Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) from the source and target frames, enabling reliable coarse registration based on filtered features and geometric information. In the fine stage, we treat diffusion-based PCR as an autoregressive process to generate robust point correspondences, which are then iteratively refined on upper layers. Despite common criticisms of diffusion-based methods regarding inference speed, EADReg achieves runtime comparable to convolutional-based methods. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and NuScenes benchmark datasets highlight the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Codes will be released upon publication.

Foundation models are trained on massive amounts of data to distinguish complex patterns and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks with minimal computational resources. Here, we develop a foundation model for prostate cancer digital pathology called HistoEncoder by pre-training on 48 million prostate tissue tile images. We demonstrate that HistoEncoder features extracted from tile images with similar histological patterns map closely together in the feature space. HistoEncoder outperforms models pre-trained with natural images, even without fine-tuning or with 1000 times less training data. We describe two use cases that leverage the capabilities of HistoEncoder by fine-tuning the model with a limited amount of data and computational resources. First, we show how HistoEncoder can be used to automatically annotate large-scale datasets with high accuracy. Second, we combine histomics with commonly used clinical nomograms, significantly improving prostate cancer-specific death survival models. Foundation models such as HistoEncoder can allow organizations with limited resources to build effective clinical software tools without needing extensive datasets or significant amounts of computing.

Precise energy load forecasting in residential households is crucial for mitigating carbon emissions and enhancing energy efficiency; indeed, accurate forecasting enables utility companies and policymakers, who advocate sustainable energy practices, to optimize resource utilization. Moreover, smart meters provide valuable information by allowing for granular insights into consumption patterns. Building upon available smart meter data, our study aims to cluster consumers into distinct groups according to their energy usage behaviours, effectively capturing a diverse spectrum of consumption patterns. Next, we design JITtrans (Just In Time transformer), a novel transformer deep learning model that significantly improves energy consumption forecasting accuracy, with respect to traditional forecasting methods. Extensive experimental results validate our claims using proprietary smart meter data. Our findings highlight the potential of advanced predictive technologies to revolutionize energy management and advance sustainable power systems: the development of efficient and eco-friendly energy solutions critically depends on such technologies.

In this study, we propose HOPER (HOlistic ProtEin Representation), a novel multimodal learning framework designed to enhance protein function prediction (PFP) in low-data settings. The challenge of predicting protein functions is compounded by the limited availability of labeled data. Traditional machine learning models already struggle in such cases, and while deep learning models excel with abundant data, they also face difficulties when data is scarce. HOPER addresses this issue by integrating three distinct modalities - protein sequences, biomedical text, and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks - to create a comprehensive protein representation. The model utilizes autoencoders to generate holistic embeddings, which are then employed for PFP tasks using transfer learning. HOPER outperforms existing methods on a benchmark dataset across all Gene Ontology categories, i.e., molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. Additionally, we demonstrate its practical utility by identifying new immune-escape proteins in lung adenocarcinoma, offering insights into potential therapeutic targets. Our results highlight the effectiveness of multimodal representation learning for overcoming data limitations in biological research, potentially enabling more accurate and scalable protein function prediction. HOPER source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/kansil/HOPER

The goal of multi-object tracking (MOT) is to detect and track all objects in a scene across frames, while maintaining a unique identity for each object. Most existing methods rely on the spatial-temporal motion features and appearance embedding features of the detected objects in consecutive frames. Effectively and robustly representing the spatial and appearance features of long trajectories has become a critical factor affecting the performance of MOT. We propose a novel approach for appearance and spatial-temporal motion feature representation, improving upon the hierarchical clustering association method MOT FCG. For spatialtemporal motion features, we first propose Diagonal Modulated GIoU, which more accurately represents the relationship between the position and shape of the objects. Second, Mean Constant Velocity Modeling is proposed to reduce the effect of observation noise on target motion state estimation. For appearance features, we utilize a dynamic appearance representation that incorporates confidence information, enabling the trajectory appearance features to be more robust and global. Based on the baseline model MOT FCG, we have realized further improvements in the performance of all.

Automating complex industrial robots requires precise nonlinear control and efficient energy management. This paper introduces a data-driven nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) framework to optimize control under multiple objectives. To enhance the prediction accuracy of the dynamic model, we design a single-shot multi-step prediction (SSMP) model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and multilayer perceptrons (MLP), which can directly obtain the predictive horizon without iterative repetition and reduce computational pressure. Moreover, we combine offline and online models to address disturbances stemming from environmental interactions, similar to the superposition of the robot's free and forced responses. The online model learns the system's variations from the prediction mismatches of the offline model and updates its weights in real time. The proposed hybrid predictive model simplifies the relationship between inputs and outputs into matrix multiplication, which can quickly obtain the derivative. Therefore, the solution for the control signal sequence employs a gradient descent method with an adaptive learning rate, allowing the NMPC cost function to be formulated as a convex function incorporating critical states. The learning rate is dynamically adjusted based on state errors to counteract the inherent prediction inaccuracies of neural networks. The controller outputs the average value of the control signal sequence instead of the first value. Simulations and experiments on a 22-ton hydraulic excavator have validated the effectiveness of our method, showing that the proposed NMPC approach can be widely applied to industrial systems, including nonlinear control and energy management.

Modern recommendation systems often create information cocoons, limiting users' exposure to diverse content. To enhance user experience, a crucial challenge is developing systems that can balance content exploration and exploitation, allowing users to adjust their recommendation preferences. Intuitively, this balance can be achieved through a tree-structured representation, where depth search facilitates exploitation and breadth search enables exploration. However, current works face two challenges to achieve this target: (1) Euclidean methods fail to fully capture hierarchical structures and lack flexibility in balancing exploration-exploitation, while (2) hyperbolic approaches, despite better hierarchical modeling, suffer from insufficient semantic alignment due to their reliance on Euclidean text encoders. To address these challenges, we propose HARec, a hyperbolic representation learning framework that jointly aligns user-item collaborative information with textual descriptions in hyperbolic space. Our framework introduces two key technique novelty: (1) a hierarchical-aware graph-llm alignment mechanism that enables better hierarchical representation, and (2) a hyperbolic hierarchical tree structure that facilitates user-adjustable exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HARec consistently outperforms both Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines, achieving up to 5.49% improvement in utility metrics and 11.39% increase in diversity metrics.

This study introduces a predictive maintenance strategy for high pressure industrial compressors using sensor data and features derived from unsupervised clustering integrated into classification models. The goal is to enhance model accuracy and efficiency in detecting compressor failures. After data pre processing, sensitive clustering parameters were tuned to identify algorithms that best capture the dataset's temporal and operational characteristics. Clustering algorithms were evaluated using quality metrics like Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) and Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), selecting those most effective at distinguishing between normal and non normal conditions. These features enriched regression models, improving failure detection accuracy by 4.87 percent on average. Although training time was reduced by 22.96 percent, the decrease was not statistically significant, varying across algorithms. Cross validation and key performance metrics confirmed the benefits of clustering based features in predictive maintenance models.