SHIELD: Securing Healthcare IoT with Efficient Machine Learning Techniques for Anomaly Detection

The integration of IoT devices in healthcare introduces significant security and reliability challenges, increasing susceptibility to cyber threats and operational anomalies. This study proposes a machine learning-driven framework for (1) detecting malicious cyberattacks and (2) identifying faulty device anomalies, leveraging a dataset of 200,000 records. Eight machine learning models are evaluated across three learning approaches: supervised learning (XGBoost, K-Nearest Neighbors (K- NN)), semi-supervised learning (Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Variational Autoencoders (VAE)), and unsupervised learning (One-Class Support Vector Machine (SVM), Isolation Forest, Graph Neural Networks (GNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Autoencoders). The comprehensive evaluation was conducted across multiple metrics like F1-score, precision, recall, accuracy, ROC-AUC, computational efficiency. XGBoost achieved 99\% accuracy with minimal computational overhead (0.04s) for anomaly detection, while Isolation Forest balanced precision and recall effectively. LSTM Autoencoders underperformed with lower accuracy and higher latency. For attack detection, KNN achieved near-perfect precision, recall, and F1-score with the lowest computational cost (0.05s), followed by VAE at 97% accuracy. GAN showed the highest computational cost with lowest accuracy and ROC-AUC. These findings enhance IoT-enabled healthcare security through effective anomaly detection strategies. By improving early detection of cyber threats and device failures, this framework has the potential to prevent data breaches, minimize system downtime, and ensure the continuous and safe operation of medical devices, ultimately safeguarding patient health and trust in IoT-driven healthcare solutions.

New Money: A Systematic Review of Synthetic Data Generation for Finance

Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising approach to address the challenges of using sensitive financial data in machine learning applications. By leveraging generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it is possible to create artificial datasets that preserve the statistical properties of real financial records while mitigating privacy risks and regulatory constraints. Despite the rapid growth of this field, a comprehensive synthesis of the current research landscape has been lacking. This systematic review consolidates and analyses 72 studies published since 2018 that focus on synthetic financial data generation. We categorise the types of financial information synthesised, the generative methods employed, and the evaluation strategies used to assess data utility and privacy. The findings indicate that GAN-based approaches dominate the literature, particularly for generating time-series market data and tabular credit data. While several innovative techniques demonstrate potential for improved realism and privacy preservation, there remains a notable lack of rigorous evaluation of privacy safeguards across studies. By providing an integrated overview of generative techniques, applications, and evaluation methods, this review highlights critical research gaps and offers guidance for future work aimed at developing robust, privacy-preserving synthetic data solutions for the financial domain.

Unsupervised Deep Generative Models for Anomaly Detection in Neuroimaging: A Systematic Scoping Review

Unsupervised deep generative models are emerging as a promising alternative to supervised methods for detecting and segmenting anomalies in brain imaging. Unlike fully supervised approaches, which require large voxel-level annotated datasets and are limited to well-characterised pathologies, these models can be trained exclusively on healthy data and identify anomalies as deviations from learned normative brain structures. This PRISMA-guided scoping review synthesises recent work on unsupervised deep generative models for anomaly detection in neuroimaging, including autoencoders, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and denoising diffusion models. A total of 49 studies published between 2018 - 2025 were identified, covering applications to brain MRI and, less frequently, CT across diverse pathologies such as tumours, stroke, multiple sclerosis, and small vessel disease. Reported performance metrics are compared alongside architectural design choices. Across the included studies, generative models achieved encouraging performance for large focal lesions and demonstrated progress in addressing more subtle abnormalities. A key strength of generative models is their ability to produce interpretable pseudo-healthy (also referred to as counterfactual) reconstructions, which is particularly valuable when annotated data are scarce, as in rare or heterogeneous diseases. Looking ahead, these models offer a compelling direction for anomaly detection, enabling semi-supervised learning, supporting the discovery of novel imaging biomarkers, and facilitating within- and cross-disease deviation mapping in unified end-to-end frameworks. To realise clinical impact, future work should prioritise anatomy-aware modelling, development of foundation models, task-appropriate evaluation metrics, and rigorous clinical validation.

Unconditional Human Motion and Shape Generation via Balanced Score-Based Diffusion

Recent work has explored a range of model families for human motion generation, including Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and diffusion-based models. Despite their differences, many methods rely on over-parameterized input features and auxiliary losses to improve empirical results. These strategies should not be strictly necessary for diffusion models to match the human motion distribution. We show that on par with state-of-the-art results in unconditional human motion generation are achievable with a score-based diffusion model using only careful feature-space normalization and analytically derived weightings for the standard L2 score-matching loss, while generating both motion and shape directly, thereby avoiding slow post hoc shape recovery from joints. We build the method step by step, with a clear theoretical motivation for each component, and provide targeted ablations demonstrating the effectiveness of each proposed addition in isolation.

I-DCCRN-VAE: An Improved Deep Representation Learning Framework for Complex VAE-based Single-channel Speech Enhancement

Recently, a complex variational autoencoder (VAE)-based single-channel speech enhancement system based on the DCCRN architecture has been proposed. In this system, a noise suppression VAE (NSVAE) learns to extract clean speech representations from noisy speech using pretrained clean speech and noise VAEs with skip connections. In this paper, we improve DCCRN-VAE by incorporating three key modifications: 1) removing the skip connections in the pretrained VAEs to encourage more informative speech and noise latent representations; 2) using $\beta$-VAE in pretraining to better balance reconstruction and latent space regularization; and 3) a NSVAE generating both speech and noise latent representations. Experiments show that the proposed system achieves comparable performance as the DCCRN and DCCRN-VAE baselines on the matched DNS3 dataset but outperforms the baselines on mismatched datasets (WSJ0-QUT, Voicebank-DEMEND), demonstrating improved generalization ability. In addition, an ablation study shows that a similar performance can be achieved with classical fine-tuning instead of adversarial training, resulting in a simpler training pipeline.

In-Field Mapping of Grape Yield and Quality with Illumination-Invariant Deep Learning

This paper presents an end-to-end, IoT-enabled robotic system for the non-destructive, real-time, and spatially-resolved mapping of grape yield and quality (Brix, Acidity) in vineyards. The system features a comprehensive analytical pipeline that integrates two key modules: a high-performance model for grape bunch detection and weight estimation, and a novel deep learning framework for quality assessment from hyperspectral (HSI) data. A critical barrier to in-field HSI is the ``domain shift" caused by variable illumination. To overcome this, our quality assessment is powered by the Light-Invariant Spectral Autoencoder (LISA), a domain-adversarial framework that learns illumination-invariant features from uncalibrated data. We validated the system's robustness on a purpose-built HSI dataset spanning three distinct illumination domains: controlled artificial lighting (lab), and variable natural sunlight captured in the morning and afternoon. Results show the complete pipeline achieves a recall (0.82) for bunch detection and a $R^2$ (0.76) for weight prediction, while the LISA module improves quality prediction generalization by over 20% compared to the baselines. By combining these robust modules, the system successfully generates high-resolution, georeferenced data of both grape yield and quality, providing actionable, data-driven insights for precision viticulture.

SSDD: Single-Step Diffusion Decoder for Efficient Image Tokenization

Tokenizers are a key component of state-of-the-art generative image models, extracting the most important features from the signal while reducing data dimension and redundancy. Most current tokenizers are based on KL-regularized variational autoencoders (KL-VAE), trained with reconstruction, perceptual and adversarial losses. Diffusion decoders have been proposed as a more principled alternative to model the distribution over images conditioned on the latent. However, matching the performance of KL-VAE still requires adversarial losses, as well as a higher decoding time due to iterative sampling. To address these limitations, we introduce a new pixel diffusion decoder architecture for improved scaling and training stability, benefiting from transformer components and GAN-free training. We use distillation to replicate the performance of the diffusion decoder in an efficient single-step decoder. This makes SSDD the first diffusion decoder optimized for single-step reconstruction trained without adversarial losses, reaching higher reconstruction quality and faster sampling than KL-VAE. In particular, SSDD improves reconstruction FID from $0.87$ to $0.50$ with $1.4\times$ higher throughput and preserve generation quality of DiTs with $3.8\times$ faster sampling. As such, SSDD can be used as a drop-in replacement for KL-VAE, and for building higher-quality and faster generative models.

Fine-Tuning Flow Matching via Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Reconstructions

Flow Matching (FM) algorithm achieves remarkable results in generative tasks especially in robotic manipulation. Building upon the foundations of diffusion models, the simulation-free paradigm of FM enables simple and efficient training, but inherently introduces a train-inference gap. Specifically, we cannot assess the model's output during the training phase. In contrast, other generative models including Variational Autoencoder (VAE), Normalizing Flow and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) directly optimize on the reconstruction loss. Such a gap is particularly evident in scenarios that demand high precision, such as robotic manipulation. Moreover, we show that FM's over-pursuit of straight predefined paths may introduce some serious problems such as stiffness into the system. These motivate us to fine-tune FM via Maximum Likelihood Estimation of reconstructions - an approach made feasible by FM's underlying smooth ODE formulation, in contrast to the stochastic differential equations (SDEs) used in diffusion models. This paper first theoretically analyzes the relation between training loss and inference error in FM. Then we propose a method of fine-tuning FM via Maximum Likelihood Estimation of reconstructions, which includes both straightforward fine-tuning and residual-based fine-tuning approaches. Furthermore, through specifically designed architectures, the residual-based fine-tuning can incorporate the contraction property into the model, which is crucial for the model's robustness and interpretability. Experimental results in image generation and robotic manipulation verify that our method reliably improves the inference performance of FM.

Quantum Generative Adversarial Autoencoders: Learning latent representations for quantum data generation

In this work, we introduce the Quantum Generative Adversarial Autoencoder (QGAA), a quantum model for generation of quantum data. The QGAA consists of two components: (a) Quantum Autoencoder (QAE) to compress quantum states, and (b) Quantum Generative Adversarial Network (QGAN) to learn the latent space of the trained QAE. This approach imparts the QAE with generative capabilities. The utility of QGAA is demonstrated in two representative scenarios: (a) generation of pure entangled states, and (b) generation of parameterized molecular ground states for H$_2$ and LiH. The average errors in the energies estimated by the trained QGAA are 0.02 Ha for H$_2$ and 0.06 Ha for LiH in simulations upto 6 qubits. These results illustrate the potential of QGAA for quantum state generation, quantum chemistry, and near-term quantum machine learning applications.

Generative AI Meets Wireless Sensing: Towards Wireless Foundation Model

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has made significant advancements in fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating its capability to synthesize high-fidelity data and improve generalization. Recently, there has been growing interest in integrating GenAI into wireless sensing systems. By leveraging generative techniques such as data augmentation, domain adaptation, and denoising, wireless sensing applications, including device localization, human activity recognition, and environmental monitoring, can be significantly improved. This survey investigates the convergence of GenAI and wireless sensing from two complementary perspectives. First, we explore how GenAI can be integrated into wireless sensing pipelines, focusing on two modes of integration: as a plugin to augment task-specific models and as a solver to directly address sensing tasks. Second, we analyze the characteristics of mainstream generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and diffusion models, and discuss their applicability and unique advantages across various wireless sensing tasks. We further identify key challenges in applying GenAI to wireless sensing and outline a future direction toward a wireless foundation model: a unified, pre-trained design capable of scalable, adaptable, and efficient signal understanding across diverse sensing tasks.