Urban Network Security Games (UNSGs), which model the strategic allocation of limited security resources on city road networks, are critical for urban safety. However, finding a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in large-scale UNSGs is challenging due to their massive and combinatorial action spaces. One common approach to addressing these games is the Policy-Space Response Oracle (PSRO) framework, which requires computing best responses (BR) at each iteration. However, precisely computing exact BRs is impractical in large-scale games, and employing reinforcement learning to approximate BRs inevitably introduces errors that limit the overall effectiveness of the PSRO methods. Recent advancements in leveraging non-convex stochastic optimization to approximate an NE offer a promising alternative to the burdensome BR computation. However, utilizing existing stochastic optimization techniques with an unbiased loss function for UNSGs remains challenging because the action spaces are too vast to be effectively represented by neural networks. To address these issues, we introduce Tree-based Stochastic Optimization (TSO), a framework that bridges the gap between the stochastic optimization paradigm for NE-finding and the demands of UNSGs. Specifically, we employ the tree-based action representation that maps the whole action space onto a tree structure, addressing the challenge faced by neural networks in representing actions when the action space cannot be enumerated. We then incorporate this representation into the loss function and theoretically demonstrate its equivalence to the unbiased loss function. To further enhance the quality of the converged solution, we introduce a sample-and-prune mechanism that reduces the risk of being trapped in suboptimal local optima. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of TSO over other baseline algorithms in addressing the UNSGs.
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Social bot detection is pivotal for safeguarding the integrity of online information ecosystems. Although recent graph neural network (GNN) solutions achieve strong results, they remain hindered by two practical challenges: (i) severe class imbalance arising from the high cost of generating bots, and (ii) topological noise introduced by bots that skillfully mimic human behavior and forge deceptive links. We propose the Reinforcement-guided graph Augmentation social Bot detector (RABot), a multi-granularity graph-augmentation framework that addresses both issues in a unified manner. RABot employs a neighborhood-aware oversampling strategy that linearly interpolates minority-class embeddings within local subgraphs, thereby stabilizing the decision boundary under low-resource regimes. Concurrently, a reinforcement-learning-driven edge-filtering module combines similarity-based edge features with adaptive threshold optimization to excise spurious interactions during message passing, yielding a cleaner topology. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks and four GNN backbones demonstrate that RABot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, since its augmentation and filtering modules are orthogonal to the underlying architecture, RABot can be seamlessly integrated into existing GNN pipelines to boost performance with minimal overhead.
Interpretable and Robust Behavior Abstraction via Environment-Disentangled Heterogeneous Graph
PDF ↗To identify the root causes of attacks, behavior abstraction (BA) converts audit logs into multiple behavior graphs and finds similar ones, which has proven effective in bridging the semantic gap and reducing manual workload. Existing works fail to achieve both interpretability and generalization, while also exhibiting limited robustness when facing adversarial attacks. In this paper, we give the first attempt at interpretable and robust behavior abstraction and propose a novel method called Environment-Disentangled Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (EDHGNN). Motivated by Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, we propose a Heterogeneous Subgraph Disentanglement (HSD) module to disentangle label-relevant and environmental subgraphs through single optimization. We also introduce an Adapted Graph-Level Attention (AGLA) module to extract minimal sufficient representations from label-relevant subgraphs, a Label-Guided Graph Reconstructor (LGGR) to maximize environmental information coverage via reconstruction, and a Relevance Discriminator (RD) to enhance disentanglement quality. Additionally, we construct a new dataset contains ground-truth explanations and 4,160 behavior graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDHGNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of interpretability and robustness against adversarial attacks.
Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are instrumental in many electronic design automation (EDA) tasks thanks to their compact representation of Boolean functions. In BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis, which is critical for quantum computing, the chosen variable ordering governs the number of BDD nodes and thus the key metrics of resource consumption, such as Quantum Cost. Because finding an optimal variable ordering for BDDs is an NP‑complete problem, existing heuristics often degrade as circuit complexity grows. We introduce BDD2Seq, a graph‑to‑sequence framework that couples a Graph Neural Network encoder with a Pointer‑Network decoder and Diverse Beam Search to predict high‑quality orderings. By treating the circuit netlist as a graph, BDD2Seq learns structural dependencies that conventional heuristics overlooked, yielding smaller BDDs and faster synthesis. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that BDD2Seq achieves around 1.4 times lower Quantum Cost and 3.7 times faster synthesis than modern heuristic algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the variable‑ordering problem in BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis with a graph‑based generative model and diversity‑promoting decoding.
There is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn representations of circuits, focusing primarily on their static characteristics. However, these models fail to capture circuit runtime behavior, which is crucial for tasks like circuit verification and optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce DR-GNN (DynamicRTL-GNN), a novel approach that learns RTL circuit representations by incorporating both static structures and multi-cycle execution behaviors. DR-GNN leverages an operator-level Control Data Flow Graph (CDFG) to represent Register Transfer Level (RTL) circuits, enabling the model to capture dynamic dependencies and runtime execution. To train and evaluate DR-GNN, we build the first comprehensive dynamic circuit dataset, comprising over 6,300 Verilog designs and 63,000 simulation traces. Our results demonstrate that DR-GNN outperforms existing models in branch hit prediction and toggle rate prediction. Furthermore, its learned representations transfer effectively to related dynamic circuit tasks, achieving strong performance in power estimation and assertion prediction.
When Genes Speak: A Semantic-Guided Framework for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data Clustering
PDF ↗Spatial transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling with spatial context, offering unprecedented insights into the tissue microenvironment. However, most computational models treat genes as isolated numerical features, ignoring the rich biological semantics encoded in their symbols. This prevents a truly deep understanding of critical biological characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we present SemST, a semantic-guided deep learning framework for spatial transcriptomics data clustering. SemST leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable genes to "speak" through their symbolic meanings, transforming gene sets within each tissue spot into biologically informed embeddings. These embeddings are then fused with the spatial neighborhood relationships captured by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), achieving a coherent integration of biological function and spatial structure. We further introduce the Fine-grained Semantic Modulation (FSM) module to optimally exploit these biological priors. The FSM module learns spot-specific affine transformations that empower the semantic embeddings to perform an element-wise calibration of the spatial features, thus dynamically injecting high-order biological knowledge into the spatial context. Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets show that SemST achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. Crucially, the FSM module exhibits plug-and-play versatility, consistently improving the performance when integrated into other baseline methods.
Modeling stochastic dynamics from discrete observations is a key interdisciplinary challenge. Existing methods often fail to estimate the continuous evolution of probability densities from trajectories or face the curse of dimensionality. To address these limitations, we presents a novel paradigm: modeling dynamics directly in the weight space of a neural network by projecting the evolving probability distribution. We first theoretically establish the connection between dynamic optimal transport in measure space and an equivalent energy functional in weight space. Subsequently, we design WeightFlow, which constructs the neural network weights into a graph and learns its evolution via a graph controlled differential equation. Experiments on interdisciplinary datasets show that WeightFlow improves performance by an average of 43.02\% over state-of-the-art methods, providing an effective and scalable solution for modeling high-dimensional stochastic dynamics.
VT-Intrinsic: Physics-Based Decomposition of Reflectance and Shading using a Single Visible-Thermal Image Pair
PDF ↗Decomposing a scene into its reflectance and shading is a challenge due to the lack of extensive ground-truth data for real-world scenes. We introduce a novel physics-based approach for intrinsic image decomposition using a pair of visible and thermal images. We leverage the principle that light not reflected from an opaque surface is absorbed and detected as heat by a thermal camera. This allows us to relate the ordinalities (or relative magnitudes) between visible and thermal image intensities to the ordinalities of shading and reflectance. The ordinalities enable dense self-supervision of an optimizing neural network to recover shading and reflectance. We perform quantitative evaluations with known reflectance and shading under natural and artificial lighting, and qualitative experiments across diverse scenes. The results demonstrate superior performance over both physics-based and recent learning-based methods, providing a path toward scalable real-world data curation with supervision.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized numerous industries, yet their decision-making processes remain largely opaque. Most existing explanation methods visualize the importance of image regions that influence a classifier's decisions, but they predominantly focus on identifying regions with positive contributions, often overlooking those with negative impacts. In this paper, we introduce a novel black-box explanation method, the Metropolis-Hastings Explainer (MHE), designed to provide confidence-faithful explanations. MHE enhances the fidelity of explanations by ensuring that the explained regions closely align with the original confidence score, sampling instances that best match the classifier's confidence. Furthermore, MHE improves sampling efficiency by utilizing existing valid samples to explore more potential valid ones, reducing computational overhead. To enhance the clarity of explanations, MHE prioritizes valid samples with smaller areas when other factors are equal, thereby reducing the explanation area. Building upon the MHE framework, we propose two extensions: MHE-e, which focuses exclusively on regions with positive contributions, and MHE-pro, which refines explanation quality by integrating multi-scale information. MHE-pro progressively regions, optimizing both sampling efficiency and explanation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that MHE delivers superior and stable explanation quality across various models, including ResNet50, VGG16, ViT, DINO, and CLIP, on datasets such as ImageNet, CUB-200-2011, and VOC2012, providing explanations that closely approximate the original classification confidence.
Sinusoidal neural networks (SIRENs) are powerful implicit neural representations (INRs) for low-dimensional signals in vision and graphics. By encoding input coordinates with sinusoidal functions, they enable high-frequency image and surface reconstruction. However, training SIRENs is often unstable and highly sensitive to frequency initialization: small frequencies produce overly smooth reconstructions in detailed regions, whereas large ones introduce spurious high-frequency components that manifest as noise in smooth areas such as image backgrounds. To address these challenges, we propose SASNet, a Spatially-Adaptive Sinusoidal Network that couples a frozen frequency embedding layer, which explicitly fixes the network's frequency support, with jointly learned spatial masks that localize neuron influence across the domain. This pairing stabilizes optimization, sharpens edges, and suppresses noise in smooth areas. Experiments on 2D image and 3D volumetric data fitting as well as signed distance field (SDF) reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that SASNet achieves faster convergence, superior reconstruction quality, and robust frequency localization--assigning low- and high-frequency neurons to smooth and detailed regions respectively--while maintaining parameter efficiency.
Coreset selection compresses large datasets into compact, representative subsets, reducing the energy and computational burden of training deep neural networks. Existing methods are either: (i) DNN-based, which are inherently coupled with network-specific parameters, inevitably introducing architectural bias and compromising generalization; or (ii) DNN-free, which utilize heuristics that lack rigorous theoretical guarantees for stability and accuracy. Neither approach explicitly constrains distributional equivalence of the representative subsets, largely because continuous distribution matching is broadly considered inapplicable to discrete dataset sampling. Furthermore, prevalent distribution metrics (e.g., MSE, KL, MMD, and CE) are often incapable of accurately capturing higher-order moment differences. These deficiencies lead to suboptimal coreset performance, preventing the selected coreset from being truly equivalent to the original dataset.In this work, we propose FAST (Frequency-domain Aligned Sampling via Topology), the first DNN-free distribution-matching coreset selection framework that formulates coreset selection as a graph-constrained optimization problem grounded in spectral graph theory and employs the Characteristic Function Distance (CFD) to capture full distributional information (i.e., all moments and intrinsic correlations) in the frequency domain. We further discover that naive CFD suffers from a "vanishing phase gradient" issue in medium and high-frequency regions; to address this, we introduce an Attenuated Phase-Decoupled CFD. Furthermore, for better convergence, we design a Progressive Discrepancy-Aware Sampling strategy that progressively schedules frequency selection from low to high. This preserves global structures before refining local details, enabling accurate matching with few frequencies while preventing overfitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAST significantly outperforms state-of-the-art coreset selection methods across all evaluated benchmarks, achieving an average accuracy gain of 9.12%. Compared to other baseline coreset methods, it reduces power consumption by 96.57% and achieves a 2.2xaverage speedup even on CPU with 1.7GB of memory, underscoring its high performance and energy efficiency.
In recent years, the increasing demand for smaller and more powerful semiconductors highlighted the critical role of lithography--a key stage in semiconductor manufacturing responsible for precise mask design and wafer patterning. To meet these demands, the semiconductor industry has increasingly adopted computational lithography, employing machine learning and deep learning techniques to accelerate advancements in lithographic technology. Despite the various research efforts and successes in computational lithography, there remains a lack of explicit incorporation of physical principles. This gap limits the ability of existing methods to fully capture the complex physical phenomena inherent in lithography behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose OptiCo, a novel convolutional neural network that seamlessly integrates optical diffraction principles into its architecture. At its core, OptiCo employs an optical phase kernel to model phase variations resulting from light propagation, effectively capturing the physical interactions among light, masks, and wafers. We evaluate OptiCo on semiconductor lithography benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance in mask optimization tasks, with its remarkable generalization capabilities in OOD datasets.
Learned image compression (LIC) outperforms traditional codecs but suffers from excessive peak memory usage when handling high-resolution images. Consequently, block-based LIC has been studied to reduce peak memory and peak computational cost, but it often introduces blocking artifacts that degrade visual quality. To mitigate this, the JPEG-AI standard introduced a patch-based scheme in which overlapped blocks are coded independently using empirically determined overlap sizes. However, experimentally searching for optimal overlaps is time-consuming and does not guarantee blocking-free reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an analytic framework that models overlap propagation through convolution and transposed convolution layers to precisely determine the minimal overlaps required for blocking-free reconstruction. Based on the calculated minimum overlaps, we provide a block-based implementation methodology applicable to most CNN-based LIC models. Applied to four CNN-based LIC models on 4K images partitioned into various block sizes (256 x 256, 512 x 512), our method achieves rate-distortion performance identical to full-image coding while reducing average peak memory usage to 13.94% (encoder) and 13.33% (decoder), and average peak computational cost to 2.6% and 1.24%, respectively. Notably, the proposed block-based framework does not require any retraining of the original model. Furthermore, it can also be applied to most CNN-based image-processing neural networks without performance degradation.
Deploying pretrained visual models in real-world environments often suffers from significant performance degradation due to the diversity of testing scenarios. Continuous adaptation of learning models on edge devices via unlabeled data collected from the target domain is highly effective for boosting generalization capability. However, gradient-backpropagation-based optimization of the massive parameters in deep neural networks is vastly more time-consuming than forward inference, rendering online learning infeasible on low-power edge devices. To address this critical challenge, we propose a lightweight gradient-free forward-memorizing framework, namely MemFlow, which leverages a frozen backbone and enables efficient fine-tuning of the mapping between features and predictions. Specifically, MemFlow employs randomly connected neurons to memorize feature-label associations; within the network, spiking signals are propagated, and predictions are generated by associating neuron-stored memories according to their confidence levels. More notably, MemFlow supports reinforced memorization of feature mappings using unlabeled data, thereby enabling rapid adaptation to new domains. Extensive experiments on four real-world cross-domain datasets demonstrate that MemFlow achieves performance improvements of up to 10% while consuming less than 1% of the computational time required by traditional domain adaptation methods.
Non-transferable learning (NTL) aims to enforce usage restrictions by limiting a model's generalization on target-domain data while maintaining its utility on the source domain. Current approaches face three major challenges: (1) low training efficiency due to retraining of the backbone network, (2) low inference efficiency, and (3) a rigid reliance on a shared, non-adaptive backbone network spanning both source and target domains. This shared setup, which aims to maximize source-domain performance and minimize target-domain performance, often introduces optimization conflicts due to overlapping class categories across source and target domains. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient NTL approach using a dynamic Early-Exit Network, named ENL-DEE, which leverages Bayesian theory and dynamic neural networks to address these limitations. Our custom loss function guides source-domain data to exit at later stages of the network, maximizing model utility, while target-domain data exits earlier with non-semantic features, ensuring limited transferability. ENL-DEE offers three key advantages: (1) it enhances training efficiency by optimizing only the parameters of dynamic exit classifiers, bypassing the need to retrain the backbone; (2) it improves inference efficiency as data exits at various exit classifiers in the network; and (3) it resolves optimization conflicts by using distinct parameter sets for source and target domains, achieving higher performance on the source domain and lower performance on the target domain, thereby strengthening NTL. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and model architectures validate the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness of our approach.
Rethinking SNN Online Training and Deployment: Gradient-Coherent Learning via Hybrid-Driven LIF Model
PDF ↗Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are considered to have enormous potential in the future development of Artificial Intelligence due to their brain-inspired and energy-efficient properties. Compared to vanilla Spatial-Temporal Back-propagation (STBP) training methods, online training can effectively avoid the risk of GPU memory explosion. However, current online learning frameworks cannot tackle the gradient discrepancy problem between the forward and backward process, merely aiming to optimize the GPU memory, resulting in no performance advantages compared to the STBP-based models in the inference stage. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose Hybrid-Driven Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (HD-LIF) model family for efficient online learning, which respectively adopt different spiking calculation mechanism in the upper-region and lower-region of the firing threshold. We theoretically point out that our learning framework can effectively separate temporal gradients and address the misalignment problem of surrogate gradients, as well as achieving full-stage optimization towards learning precision, memory footprint and power consumption. Experimental results have demonstrated that our scheme is enable to achieve state-of-the-art performance for multiple evaluation metrics, breaking through the traditional paradigm of SNN online training and deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/HD_LIF.
Efficient Real-Time Raw-to-Raw Denoising for Extreme Low-Light Ultra HD Video on Mobile Devices
PDF ↗Recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly improved visual quality of camera captures under low-light (<10lx) conditions, yet visual quality in extreme low-light (<1lx) remains inadequate. Existing DNN models are computationally intensive and suffer from large processing times, making them impractical for real-time enhancement of high-resolution video. Consequently, Ultra HD (UHD) videos (4K/8K) captured in extreme low-light environments exhibit elevated noise and diminished detail. Developing DNN-based solutions for UHD video enhancement faces challenges including paired dataset creation, temporal consistency, and efficient deployment under strict latency (<33ms) and power constraints (<250mA for 30fps video).We present a comprehensive methodology for developing a real-time raw to raw denoising solution for UHD video in extreme low-light, designed for seamless integration into existing ISP pipelines. Unlike ISP-replacement approaches, our solution enhances commercial camera stacks across sensor platforms. Our framework comprises: (1) Diverse dataset creation methodology; (2) A low-complexity model architecture optimized for mobile compute elements; (3) Efficient training and post-training optimizations (reparameterization, restructuring, quantization) to meet latency constraints while ensuring high-quality output. The result is a power-efficient real-time raw to raw video denoiser that improves extreme low-light video quality while preserving downstream ISP behavior.
Maintaining long-term accuracy of stereo camera calibration parameters is important for autonomous systems' perception. This work proposes Online Tracking of Essential Matrix by Stochastic Optimization (TESO). The core mechanisms of TESO are: 1) a robust loss function based on kernel correlation over tentative correspondences, 2) an adaptive online stochastic optimization on the essential manifold. TESO has low CPU and memory requirements, relies on a few hyperparameters, and eliminates the need for data-driven training, enabling the usage in resource-constrained online perception systems. We evaluated the influence of TESO on geometric precision, rectification quality, and stereo depth consistency. On the large-scale MAN TruckScenes dataset, TESO tracks rotational calibration drift with 0.12 deg precision in the Y-axis-critical for stereo accuracy-while the X- and Z-axes are five times more precise. Tracking applied to sequences with simulated drift shows similar precision with respect to the reference as tracking applied to no-drift sequences, indicating the tracker is unbiased. On the KITTI dataset, TESO revealed systematic inconsistencies in extrinsic parameters across stereo pairs, confirming previous published findings. We verified that intrinsic decalibration affected these errors, as evidenced by the conflicting behavior of the rectification and depth metrics. After correcting the reference calibration, TESO improved its rotation precision around the Y-axis 20 times to 0.025 deg and its depth accuracy 50 times. Despite its lightweight design, direct optimization of the proposed TESO loss function alone achieves accuracy comparable to that of neural network-based single-frame methods.
Stable Spike: Dual Consistency Optimization via Bitwise AND Operations for Spiking Neural Networks
PDF ↗Although the temporal spike dynamics of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enable low-power temporal capture capabilities, they also incur inherent inconsistencies that severely compromise representation. In this paper, we perform dual consistency optimization via Stable Spike to mitigate this problem, thereby improving the recognition performance of SNNs. With the hardware-friendly "AND" bit operation, we efficiently decouple the stable spike skeleton from the multi-timestep spike maps, which captures critical semantics and reduces the inconsistency from variable noise spikes. Enforcing the unstable spike maps to converge to the stable spike skeleton significantly improves the inherent consistency across timesteps. Furthermore, we inject amplitude-aware spike noise into the stable spike skeleton to diversify the representations while preserving consistent semantics. The SNN is encouraged to produce perturbation-consistent predictions, thereby contributing to generalization. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness and versatility of our method. In particular, our method significantly advances neuromorphic object recognition under ultra-low latency, improving accuracy by up to 8.33%. This will help unlock the full power consumption and speed potential of SNNs.
The remarkable success of modern Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be primarily attributed to having access to compute resources and high-quality labeled data, which is often costly and challenging to acquire. Recently, text-to-image Diffusion Models (DMs) have emerged as powerful data generators to augment training datasets. Machine learning practitioners often utilize off-the-shelf third-party DMs for generating synthetic data without domain-specific expertise or adaptation. Such a practice leads to a novel and insidious threat: a diffusion model infected with a backdoor can effectively spread into a large number of downstream models, causing a backdoor pandemic. To achieve this for the first time, we propose Eidolon, designed and optimized to stealthily transfer the backdoor injected into a single diffusion model into virtually an unlimited number of downstream models without any active attacker role in the downstream training tasks. Proposed Eidolon not only makes the attack stealthier and effective, but it also enforces a strict threat model for injecting a backdoor into the downstream model compared to conventional backdoor attacks. We propose four necessary tests that a successful backdoor attack on the diffusion model should pass to cause a backdoor pandemic. Our evaluation across a wide range of benchmark datasets and model architectures exhibits that only our attack successfully passes these tests, causing widespread pandemic across many downstream models. Code is available at https://github.com/ML-Security-Research-LAB/Eidolon