Mobile edge crowdsensing (MECS) systems continuously generate and transmit user data in dynamic, resource-constrained environments, exposing users to significant privacy threats. In practice, many privacy-preserving mechanisms build on differential privacy (DP). However, static DP mechanisms often fail to adapt to evolving risks, for example, shifts in adversarial capabilities, resource constraints and task requirements, resulting in either excessive noise or inadequate protection. To address this challenge, we propose ALPINE, a lightweight, adaptive framework that empowers terminal devices to autonomously adjust differential privacy levels in real time. ALPINE operates as a closed-loop control system consisting of four modules: dynamic risk perception, privacy decision via twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), local privacy execution and performance verification from edge nodes. Based on environmental risk assessments, we design a reward function that balances privacy gains, data utility and energy cost, guiding the TD3 agent to adaptively tune noise magnitude across diverse risk scenarios and achieve a dynamic equilibrium among privacy, utility and cost. Both the collaborative risk model and pretrained TD3-based agent are designed for low-overhead deployment. Extensive theoretical analysis and real-world simulations demonstrate that ALPINE effectively mitigates inference attacks while preserving utility and cost, making it practical for large-scale edge applications.

Random permutation set (RPS) is a new formalism for reasoning with uncertainty involving order information. Measuring the conflict between two pieces of evidence represented by permutation mass functions remains an urgent research topic in order-structured uncertain information fusion. In this paper, a detailed analysis of conflicts in RPS is carried out from two different perspectives: random finite set (RFS) and Dempster-Shafer theory (DST). Starting from the observation of permutations, we first define an inconsistency measure between permutations inspired by the rank-biased overlap(RBO) measure and further propose a non-overlap-based conflict measure method for RPSs. This paper regards RPS theory (RPST) as an extension of DST. The order information newly added in focal sets indicates qualitative propensity, characterized by top-ranked elements occupying a more critical position. Some numerical examples are used to demonstrate the behavior and properties of the proposed conflict measure. The proposed method not only has the natural top-weightedness property and can effectively measure the conflict between RPSs from the DST view but also provides decision-makers with a flexible selection of weights, parameters, and truncated depths.

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which optimize performance against adversarial transition dynamics. Our focus is the online setting, where the agent has only limited interaction with the environment, making sample efficiency and exploration especially critical. Policy optimization, despite its success in standard RL, remains theoretically and empirically underexplored in robust RL. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{D}istributionally \textbf{R}obust \textbf{R}egularized \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization algorithm (DR-RPO), a model-free online policy optimization method that learns robust policies with sublinear regret. To enable tractable optimization within the softmax policy class, DR-RPO incorporates reference-policy regularization, yielding RMDP variants that are doubly constrained in both transitions and policies. To scale to large state-action spaces, we adopt the $d$-rectangular linear MDP formulation and combine linear function approximation with an upper confidence bonus for optimistic exploration. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that policy optimization can achieve polynomial suboptimality bounds and sample efficiency in robust RL, matching the performance of value-based approaches. Finally, empirical results across diverse domains corroborate our theory and demonstrate the robustness of DR-RPO.

Anemia, a condition marked by insufficient levels of red blood cells or hemoglobin, remains a widespread health issue affecting millions of individuals globally. Accurate and timely diagnosis is essential for effective management and treatment of anemia. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of artificial intelligence techniques, i.e., machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) for the detection, classification, and diagnosis of anemia. This paper provides a systematic review of the recent advancements in this field, with a focus on various models applied to anemia detection. The review also compares these models based on several performance metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision. By analyzing these metrics, the paper evaluates the strengths and limitation of discussed models in detecting and classifying anemia, emphasizing the importance of addressing these factors to improve diagnostic accuracy.

We present regret minimization algorithms for the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem over $K$ actions in the presence of delayed feedback, a scenario where loss observations arrive with delays chosen by an adversary. As a preliminary result, assuming direct access to a finite policy class $Π$ we establish an optimal expected regret bound of $ O (\sqrt{KT \log |Π|} + \sqrt{D \log |Π|)} $ where $D$ is the sum of delays. For our main contribution, we study the general function approximation setting over a (possibly infinite) contextual loss function class $ \mathcal{F} $ with access to an online least-square regression oracle $\mathcal{O}$ over $\mathcal{F}$. In this setting, we achieve an expected regret bound of $O(\sqrt{KT\mathcal{R}_T(\mathcal{O})} + \sqrt{ d_{\max} D β})$ assuming FIFO order, where $d_{\max}$ is the maximal delay, $\mathcal{R}_T(\mathcal{O})$ is an upper bound on the oracle's regret and $β$ is a stability parameter associated with the oracle. We complement this general result by presenting a novel stability analysis of a Hedge-based version of Vovk's aggregating forecaster as an oracle implementation for least-square regression over a finite function class $\mathcal{F}$ and show that its stability parameter $β$ is bounded by $\log |\mathcal{F}|$, resulting in an expected regret bound of $O(\sqrt{KT \log |\mathcal{F}|} + \sqrt{d_{\max} D \log |\mathcal{F}|})$ which is a $\sqrt{d_{\max}}$ factor away from the lower bound of $Ω(\sqrt{KT \log |\mathcal{F}|} + \sqrt{D \log |\mathcal{F}|})$ that we also present.

Neural network-based function approximation plays a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific computing and machine learning. Yet, training such models faces several challenges: (i) each target function often requires training a new model from scratch; (ii) performance is highly sensitive to architectural and hyperparameter choices; and (iii) models frequently generalize poorly beyond the training domain. To overcome these challenges, we propose a reusable initialization framework based on basis function pretraining. In this approach, basis neural networks are first trained to approximate families of polynomials on a reference domain. Their learned parameters are then used to initialize networks for more complex target functions. To enhance adaptability across arbitrary domains, we further introduce a domain mapping mechanism that transforms inputs into the reference domain, thereby preserving structural correspondence with the pretrained models. Extensive numerical experiments in one- and two-dimensional settings demonstrate substantial improvements in training efficiency, generalization, and model transferability, highlighting the promise of initialization-based strategies for scalable and modular neural function approximation. The full code is made publicly available on Gitee.

While agents' learning is data-driven, sampling from millions

As a prominent category of imitation learning methods, adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has garnered significant practical success powered by neural network approximation. However, existing theoretical studies on AIL are primarily limited to simplified scenarios such as tabular and linear function approximation and involve complex algorithmic designs that hinder practical implementation, highlighting a gap between theory and practice.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with function approximation has achieved remarkable success in various applications involving large state and action spaces, such as games [Silver et al., 2016],

Medical image classification requires not only high predictive performance but also interpretability to ensure clinical trust and adoption. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a powerful framework for modeling relational structures within datasets; however, standard GNNs often operate as black boxes, limiting transparency and usability, particularly in clinical settings. In this work, we present an interpretable graph-based learning framework named FireGNN that integrates trainable fuzzy rules into GNNs for medical image classification. These rules embed topological descriptors - node degree, clustering coefficient, and label agreement - using learnable thresholds and sharpness parameters to enable intrinsic symbolic reasoning. Additionally, we explore auxiliary self-supervised tasks (e.g., homophily prediction, similarity entropy) as a benchmark to evaluate the contribution of topological learning. Our fuzzy-rule-enhanced model achieves strong performance across five MedMNIST benchmarks and the synthetic dataset MorphoMNIST, while also generating interpretable rule-based explanations. To our knowledge, this is the first integration of trainable fuzzy rules within a GNN. Source Code: https://github.com/basiralab/FireGNN