Private Evolution (PE) is a promising training-free method for differentially private (DP) synthetic data generation. While it achieves strong performance in some domains (e.g., images and text), its behavior in others (e.g., tabular data) is less consistent. To date, the only theoretical analysis of the convergence of PE depends on unrealistic assumptions about both the algorithm's behavior and the structure of the sensitive dataset. In this work, we develop a new theoretical framework to understand PE's practical behavior and identify sufficient conditions for its convergence. For d-dimensional sensitive datasets with n data points from a convex and compact domain, we prove that under the right hyperparameter settings and given access to the Gaussian variation API proposed in [33], PE produces an (ε,δ)-DP synthetic dataset with expected 1-Wasserstein distance O(d(nε) 1/d) from the original; this establishes worst-case convergence of the algorithm as n . Our analysis extends to general Banach spaces as well. We also connect PE to the Private Signed Measure Mechanism, a method for DP synthetic data generation that has thus far not seen much practical adoption. We demonstrate the practical relevance of our theoretical findings in experiments.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve strong performance in node classification tasks but exhibit substantial performance degradation under label noise. Despite recent advances in noise-robust learning, a principled approach that exploits the node-neighbor interdependencies inherent in graph data for label noise detection remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose GD2, a noise-aware Graph learning framework that detects label noise by leveraging Dual-view prediction Discrepancies. The framework contrasts the ego-view, constructed from node-specific features, with the structure-view, derived through the aggregation of neighboring representations.

Although today's pretrained discriminative vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have demonstrated strong perception abilities, such as zero-shot image classification, they also suffer from the bag-of-words problem and spurious bias. To mitigate these problems, some pioneering studies leverage powerful generative models (e.g., pretrained diffusion models) to realize generalizable image classification, dubbed Diffusion Classifier (DC). Specifically, by randomly sampling a Gaussian noise, DC utilizes the differences of denoising effects with different category conditions to classify categories. Unfortunately, an inherent and notorious weakness of existing DCs is noise instability: different random sampled noises lead to significant performance changes. To achieve stable classification performance, existing DCs always ensemble the results of hundreds of sampled noises, which significantly reduces the classification speed.

In real world, the observed label distribution of a dataset often mismatches its true distribution due to noisy labels. In this situation, noisy labels learning (NLL) methods directly integrated with long-tailed learning (LTL) methods tend to fail due to a dilemma: NLL methods normally rely on unbiased model predictions to recover true distribution by selecting and correcting noisy labels; while LTL methods like logit adjustment depends on true distributions to adjust biased predictions, leading to a deadlock of mutual dependency defined in this paper. To address this, we propose Unlocker, a bilevel optimization framework that integrates NLL methods and LTL methods to iteratively disentangle this deadlock. The inner optimization leverages NLL to train the model, incorporating LTL methods to fairly select and correct noisy labels. The outer optimization adaptively determines an adjustment strength, mitigating model bias from over-or under-adjustment. We also theoretically prove that this bilevel optimization problem is convergent by transferring the outer optimization target to an equivalent problem with a closed-form solution. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in alleviating model bias and handling long-tailed noisy label data. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenShu248/Unlocker.

Existing video steganography methods primarily embed secret information by modifying video content in the spatial or compressed domains. However, such methods are prone to distortion drift and are easily detected by steganalysis. Generative steganography, which avoids direct modification of the cover data, offers a promising alternative. Despite recent advances, most generative steganography studies focus on images and are difficult to extend to videos because of compression-induced distortions and the unique architecture of video generation models. To address these challenges, we propose LD-RoViS, a training-free and robust video steganography framework for the deterministic latent diffusion model. By modulating implicit conditional parameters during the diffusion process, LD-RoViS constructs a dedicated steganographic channel. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-mask mechanism to mitigate errors caused by video compression and post-processing. The experimental results demonstrate that LD-RoViS can embed approximately 12,000 bits of data into a 5-second video with an extraction accuracy exceeding 99%.

How precisely does circuit wiring specify function? This fundamental question is particularly relevant for modern neuroscience, as large-scale electron microscopy now enables the reconstruction of neural circuits at single-synapse resolution across many organisms. To interpret circuit function from such datasets, we must understand the extent to which the measured structure constrains dynamics. We investigate this question in the Drosophila head direction (HD) circuit, which maintains an internal heading estimate through attractor dynamics that integrate self-motion velocity cues. This circuit serves as a sensitive assay for functional specification: continuous attractor networks are theoretically known to require finely tuned wiring symmetries, whereas connectomes omit key cellular parameters such as synaptic gains, neuronal thresholds, and time constants, and reveal that biological wiring can be heterogeneous. We introduce a method that combines selfsupervised and unsupervised learning objectives to estimate unknown parameters at the level of cell types, rather than individual neurons and synapses. Starting from the raw connectivity matrix, our approach recovers a network that exhibits continuous attractor dynamics and accurately integrates a range of velocity inputs, despite minimal parameter tuning on a connectome that notably departs from the symmetric regularity of an idealized ring attractor. We characterize how deviations from the original connectome shape the space of viable solutions. We also perform in-silico ablation experiments to probe the distinct functional roles of specific cell types in the circuit, demonstrating how connectome-derived structure, when augmented with minimal, biologically grounded tuning, can replicate known physiology and elucidate circuit function.

Network traffic classification is essential for network management and security. In recent years, deep learning (DL) algorithms have emerged as essential tools for classifying complex traffic. However, they rely heavily on high-quality labeled training data. In practice, traffic data is often noisy due to human error or inaccurate automated labeling, which could render classification unreliable and lead to severe consequences. Although some studies have alleviated the label noise issue in specific scenarios, they are difficult to generalize to general traffic classification tasks due to the inherent semantic complexity of traffic data.

Real-world classification datasets often contain label bias, where observed labels differ systematically from the true labels at different rates for different demographic groups. Machine learning models trained on such datasets may then exhibit disparities in predictive performance across these groups. In this work, we characterize the problem of learning fair classification models with respect to the underlying ground truth labels when given only label biased data. We focus on the particular fairness definition of group sufficiency, i.e. equal calibration of risk scores across protected groups. We theoretically show that enforcing fairness with respect to label biased data necessarily results in group miscalibration with respect to the true labels. We then propose a regularizer which minimizes an upper bound on the sufficiency gap by penalizing a conditional mutual information term. Across experiments on eight tabular, image, and text datasets with both synthetic and real label noise, we find that our method reduces the sufficiency gap by up to 7.2% with no significant decrease in overall accuracy.

This paper examines the performance of ridge regression in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces in the presence of noise that exhibits a finite number of higher moments. We establish excess risk bounds consisting of subgaussian and polynomial terms based on the well known integral operator framework. The dominant subgaussian component allows to achieve convergence rates that have previously only been derived under subexponential noise--a prevalent assumption in related work from the last two decades. These rates are optimal under standard eigenvalue decay conditions, demonstrating the asymptotic robustness of regularized least squares against heavy-tailed noise. Our derivations are based on a Fuk-Nagaev inequality for Hilbert-space valued random variables.

Boosting methods often achieve excellent classification accuracy, but can experience notable performance degradation in the presence of label noise. Existing robust methods for boosting provide theoretical robustness guarantees for certain types of label noise, and can exhibit only moderate performance degradation. However, previous theoretical results do not account for realistic types of noise and finite training sizes, and existing robust methods can provide unsatisfactory accuracies, even without noise. This paper presents methods for robust minimax boosting (RMBoost) that minimize worst-case error probabilities and are robust to general types of label noise. In addition, we provide finite-sample performance guarantees for RMBoost with respect to the error obtained without noise and with respect to the best possible error (Bayes risk). The experimental results corroborate that RMBoost is not only resilient to label noise but can also provide strong classification accuracy.