ransaction
Quantum Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks for Cross-Sectional Equity Return Prediction: A Comparative Benchmark Study
Chen, Chi-Sheng, Zhang, Xinyu, Fu, Rong, Xie, Qiuzhe, Zhang, Fan
Quantum machine learning offers a promising pathway for enhancing stock market prediction, particularly under complex, noisy, and highly dynamic financial environments. However, many classical forecasting models struggle with noisy input, regime shifts, and limited generalization capacity. To address these challenges, we propose a Quantum Temporal Convolutional Neural Network (QTCNN) that combines a classical temporal encoder with parameter-efficient quantum convolution circuits for cross-sectional equity return prediction. The temporal encoder extracts multi-scale patterns from sequential technical indicators, while the quantum processing leverages superposition and entanglement to enhance feature representation and suppress overfitting. We conduct a comprehensive benchmarking study on the JPX Tokyo Stock Exchange dataset and evaluate predictions through long-short portfolio construction using out-of-sample Sharpe ratio as the primary performance metric. QTCNN achieves a Sharpe ratio of 0.538, outperforming the best classical baseline by approximately 72\%. These results highlight the practical potential of quantum-enhanced forecasting model, QTCNN, for robust decision-making in quantitative finance.
ARPGNet: Appearance- and Relation-aware Parallel Graph Attention Fusion Network for Facial Expression Recognition
Li, Yan, Zhao, Yong, Xia, Xiaohan, Jiang, Dongmei
The key to facial expression recognition is to learn discriminative spatial-temporal representations that embed facial expression dynamics. Previous studies predominantly rely on pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to learn facial appearance representations, overlooking the relationships between facial regions. To address this issue, this paper presents an Appearance- and Relation-aware Parallel Graph attention fusion Network (ARPGNet) to learn mutually enhanced spatial-temporal representations of appearance and relation information. Specifically, we construct a facial region relation graph and leverage the graph attention mechanism to model the relationships between facial regions. The resulting relational representation sequences, along with CNN-based appearance representation sequences, are then fed into a parallel graph attention fusion module for mutual interaction and enhancement. This module simultaneously explores the complementarity between different representation sequences and the temporal dynamics within each sequence. Experimental results on three facial expression recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed ARPGNet outperforms or is comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
Safe and Economical UAV Trajectory Planning in Low-Altitude Airspace: A Hybrid DRL-LLM Approach with Compliance Awareness
Gong, Yanwei, Fan, Junchao, Zhang, Ruichen, Niyato, Dusit, Yao, Yingying, Chang, Xiaolin
The rapid growth of the low-altitude economy has driven the widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This growing deployment presents new challenges for UAV trajectory planning in complex urban environments. However, existing studies often overlook key factors, such as urban airspace constraints and economic efficiency, which are essential in low-altitude economy contexts. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is regarded as a promising solution to these issues, while its practical adoption remains limited by low learning efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel UAV trajectory planning framework that combines DRL with large language model (LLM) reasoning to enable safe, compliant, and economically viable path planning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines across multiple metrics, including data collection rate, collision avoidance, successful landing, regulatory compliance, and energy efficiency. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach in addressing UAV trajectory planning key challenges under constraints of the low-altitude economy networking.
Beyond Correlation: Causal Multi-View Unsupervised Feature Selection Learning
Shen, Zongxin, Huang, Yanyong, Wang, Bin, Chang, Jinyuan, Liu, Shiyu, Li, Tianrui
Multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has recently received increasing attention for its promising ability in dimensionality reduction on multi-view unlabeled data. Existing MUFS methods typically select discriminative features by capturing correlations between features and clustering labels. However, an important yet underexplored question remains: \textit{Are such correlations sufficiently reliable to guide feature selection?} In this paper, we analyze MUFS from a causal perspective by introducing a novel structural causal model, which reveals that existing methods may select irrelevant features because they overlook spurious correlations caused by confounders. Building on this causal perspective, we propose a novel MUFS method called CAusal multi-view Unsupervised feature Selection leArning (CAUSA). Specifically, we first employ a generalized unsupervised spectral regression model that identifies informative features by capturing dependencies between features and consensus clustering labels. We then introduce a causal regularization module that can adaptively separate confounders from multi-view data and simultaneously learn view-shared sample weights to balance confounder distributions, thereby mitigating spurious correlations. Thereafter, integrating both into a unified learning framework enables CAUSA to select causally informative features. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that CAUSA outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth study of causal multi-view feature selection in the unsupervised setting.
Designing Non-monetary Intersection Control Mechanisms for Efficient Selfish Routing
Saltan, Yusuf, Wang, Jyun-Jhe, Kosay, Arda, Lin, Chung-Wei, Sayin, Muhammed O.
Urban traffic congestion stems from the misalignment between self-interested routing decisions and socially optimal flows. Intersections, as critical bottlenecks, amplify these inefficiencies because existing control schemes often neglect drivers' strategic behavior. Autonomous intersections, enabled by vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, permit vehicle-level scheduling based on individual requests. Leveraging this fine-grained control, we propose a non-monetary mechanism that strategically adjusts request timestamps-delaying or advancing passage times-to incentivize socially efficient routing. We present a hierarchical architecture separating local scheduling by roadside units from network-wide timestamp adjustments by a central planner. We establish an experimentally validated analytical model, prove the existence and essential uniqueness of equilibrium flows and formulate the planner's problem as an offline bilevel optimization program solvable with standard tools. Experiments on the Sioux Falls network show up to a 68% reduction in the efficiency gap between equilibrium and optimal flows, demonstrating scalability and effectiveness.
What Can Be Recovered Under Sparse Adversarial Corruption? Assumption-Free Theory for Linear Measurements
Halder, Vishal, Reiffers-Masson, Alexandre, Aïssa-El-Bey, Abdeldjalil, Thoppe, Gugan
Let $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ be an arbitrary, known matrix and $e$ a $q$-sparse adversarial vector. Given $y = A x^\star + e$ and $q$, we seek the smallest set containing $x^\star$ -- hence the one conveying maximal information about $x^\star$ -- that is uniformly recoverable from $y$ without knowing $e$. While exact recovery of $x^\star$ via strong (and often impractical) structural assumptions on $A$ or $x^\star$ (e.g., restricted isometry, sparsity) is well studied, recoverability for arbitrary $A$ and $x^\star$ remains open. Our main result shows that the best that one can hope to recover is $x^\star + \ker(U)$, where $U$ is the unique projection matrix onto the intersection of rowspaces of all possible submatrices of $A$ obtained by deleting $2q$ rows. Moreover, we prove that every $x$ that minimizes the $\ell_0$-norm of $y - A x$ lies in $x^\star + \ker(U)$, which then gives a constructive approach to recover this set.
Unsupervised Active Learning via Natural Feature Progressive Framework
Liu, Yuxi, Lalman, Catherine, Yang, Yimin
The effectiveness of modern deep learning models is predicated on the availability of large-scale, human-annotated datasets, a process that is notoriously expensive and time-consuming. While Active Learning (AL) offers a strategic solution by labeling only the most informative and representative data, its iterative nature still necessitates significant human involvement. Unsupervised Active Learning (UAL) presents an alternative by shifting the annotation burden to a single, post-selection step. Unfortunately, prevailing UAL methods struggle to achieve state-of-the-art performance. These approaches typically rely on local, gradient-based scoring for sample importance estimation, which not only makes them vulnerable to ambiguous and noisy data but also hinders their capacity to select samples that adequately represent the full data distribution. Moreover, their use of shallow, one-shot linear selection falls short of a true UAL paradigm. In this paper, we propose the Natural Feature Progressive Framework (NFPF), a UAL method that revolutionizes how sample importance is measured. At its core, NFPF employs a Specific Feature Learning Machine (SFLM) to effectively quantify each sample's contribution to model performance. We further utilize the SFLM to define a powerful Reconstruction Difference metric for initial sample selection. Our comprehensive experiments show that NFPF significantly outperforms all established UAL methods and achieves performance on par with supervised AL methods on vision datasets. Detailed ablation studies and qualitative visualizations provide compelling evidence for NFPF's superior performance, enhanced robustness, and improved data distribution coverage.
Joint AoI and Handover Optimization in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network
Lang, Zifan, Liu, Guixia, Sun, Geng, Li, Jiahui, Wang, Jiacheng, Yuan, Weijie, Niyato, Dusit, Kim, Dong In
Despite the widespread deployment of terrestrial networks, providing reliable communication services to remote areas and maintaining connectivity during emergencies remains challenging. Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations offer promising solutions with their global coverage capabilities and reduced latency, yet struggle with intermittent coverage and limited communication windows due to orbital dynamics. This paper introduces an age of information (AoI)-aware space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) architecture that leverages a high-altitude platform (HAP) as intelligent relay between the LEO satellites and ground terminals. Our three-layer design employs hybrid free-space optical (FSO) links for high-capacity satellite-to-HAP communication and reliable radio frequency (RF) links for HAP-to-ground transmission, and thus addressing the temporal discontinuity in LEO satellite coverage while serving diverse user priorities. Specifically, we formulate a joint optimization problem to simultaneously minimize the AoI and satellite handover frequency through optimal transmit power distribution and satellite selection decisions. This highly dynamic, non-convex problem with time-coupled constraints presents significant computational challenges for traditional approaches. To address these difficulties, we propose a novel diffusion model (DM)-enhanced dueling double deep Q-network with action decomposition and state transformer encoder (DD3QN-AS) algorithm that incorporates transformer-based temporal feature extraction and employs a DM-based latent prompt generative module to refine state-action representations through conditional denoising. Simulation results highlight the superior performance of the proposed approach compared with policy-based methods and some other deep reinforcement learning (DRL) benchmarks.
HiddenObject: Modality-Agnostic Fusion for Multimodal Hidden Object Detection
Song, Harris, Vu, Tuan-Anh, Menon, Sanjith, Narasimhan, Sriram, Jawed, M. Khalid
Detecting hidden or partially concealed objects remains a fundamental challenge in multimodal environments, where factors like occlusion, camouflage, and lighting variations significantly hinder performance. Traditional RGB-based detection methods often fail under such adverse conditions, motivating the need for more robust, modality-agnostic approaches. In this work, we present HiddenObject, a fusion framework that integrates RGB, thermal, and depth data using a Mamba-based fusion mechanism. Our method captures complementary signals across modalities, enabling enhanced detection of obscured or camouflaged targets. Specifically, the proposed approach identifies modality-specific features and fuses them in a unified representation that generalizes well across challenging scenarios. We validate HiddenObject across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art or competitive performance compared to existing methods. These results highlight the efficacy of our fusion design and expose key limitations in current unimodal and naïve fusion strategies. More broadly, our findings suggest that Mamba-based fusion architectures can significantly advance the field of multimodal object detection, especially under visually degraded or complex conditions.
MoRPI-PINN: A Physics-Informed Framework for Mobile Robot Pure Inertial Navigation
Sahoo, Arup Kumar, Klein, Itzik
A fundamental requirement for full autonomy in mobile robots is accurate navigation even in situations where satellite navigation or cameras are unavailable. In such practical situations, relying only on inertial sensors will result in navigation solution drift due to the sensors' inherent noise and error terms. One of the emerging solutions to mitigate drift is to maneuver the robot in a snake-like slithering motion to increase the inertial signal-to-noise ratio, allowing the regression of the mobile robot position. In this work, we propose MoRPI-PINN as a physics-informed neural network framework for accurate inertial-based mobile robot navigation. By embedding physical laws and constraints into the training process, MoRPI-PINN is capable of providing an accurate and robust navigation solution. Using real-world experiments, we show accuracy improvements of over 85% compared to other approaches. MoRPI-PINN is a lightweight approach that can be implemented even on edge devices and used in any typical mobile robot application.