Prior studies [18, 12] show that GAN often experiences generation failures with severely degraded generation performance when only limited training data is available. Specifically, with limited training data, the discriminator tends to discriminate via meaningless shortcuts by merely focusing on easy-to-discriminate image locations and spectra instead of holistic understanding of images. This can be viewed clearly in Figure 1, where the Gini Coefficient [4] of discriminator's spatial attentions increases quickly along the training iteration (when only limited training data is available). Note that the Gini coefficient [4] is negatively correlated with equality, i.e., the discriminator will pay more unevenly distributed attention to each spatial location while the Gini coefficient increases from '0' to '1'. For image generation with GAN, the large Gini coefficient (of discriminator's spatial attentions) thus means that the discriminator starts to focus on certain spatial locations (easy to discriminate) while ignoring other spatial locations (hard to discriminate), ultimately leading to an over-confident discriminator and training collapse. In another word, the Gini coefficient [4] of '0' expresses perfect equality where all values are the same (i.e., where the discriminator pays the same attention to every spatial location) while '1' expresses maximal inequality among values (i.e., the discriminator focuses on only one location while all others are ignored).

Strong gravitational lensing can reveal the influence of dark-matter substructure in galaxies, but analyzing these effects from noisy, low-resolution images poses a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a masked autoencoder (MAE) pretraining strategy on simulated strong-lensing images from the DeepLense ML4SCI benchmark to learn generalizable representations for two downstream tasks: (i) classifying the underlying dark matter model (cold dark matter, axion-like, or no substructure) and (ii) enhancing low-resolution lensed images via super-resolution. We pretrain a Vision Transformer encoder using a masked image modeling objective, then fine-tune the encoder separately for each task. Our results show that MAE pretraining, when combined with appropriate mask ratio tuning, yields a shared encoder that matches or exceeds a ViT trained from scratch. Specifically, at a 90% mask ratio, the fine-tuned classifier achieves macro AUC of 0.968 and accuracy of 88.65%, compared to the scratch baseline (AUC 0.957, accuracy 82.46%). For super-resolution (16x16 to 64x64), the MAE-pretrained model reconstructs images with PSNR ~33 dB and SSIM 0.961, modestly improving over scratch training. We ablate the MAE mask ratio, revealing a consistent trade-off: higher mask ratios improve classification but slightly degrade reconstruction fidelity. Our findings demonstrate that MAE pretraining on physics-rich simulations provides a flexible, reusable encoder for multiple strong-lensing analysis tasks.

Accurate diagnosis of spitzoid tumors (ST) is critical to ensure a favorable prognosis and to avoid both under- and over-treatment. Epigenetic data, particularly DNA methylation, provide a valuable source of information for this task. However, prior studies assume complete data, an unrealistic setting as methylation profiles frequently contain missing entries due to limited coverage and experimental artifacts. Our work challenges these favorable scenarios and introduces ReMAC, an extension of ReMasker designed to tackle classification tasks on high-dimensional data under complete and incomplete regimes. Evaluation on real clinical data demonstrates that ReMAC achieves strong and robust performance compared to competing classification methods in the stratification of ST. Code is available: https://github.com/roshni-mahtani/ReMAC.