Neural Architecture Search Algorithms for Quantum Autoencoders

The design of quantum circuits is currently driven by the specific objectives of the quantum algorithm in question. This approach thus relies on a significant manual effort by the quantum algorithm designer to design an appropriate circuit for the task. However this approach cannot scale to more complex quantum algorithms in the future without exponentially increasing the circuit design effort and introducing unwanted inductive biases. Motivated by this observation, we propose to automate the process of cicuit design by drawing inspiration from Neural Architecture Search (NAS). In this work, we propose two Quantum-NAS algorithms that aim to find efficient circuits given a particular quantum task. We choose quantum data compression as our driver quantum task and demonstrate the performance of our algorithms by finding efficient autoencoder designs that outperform baselines on three different tasks - quantum data denoising, classical data compression and pure quantum data compression. Our results indicate that quantum NAS algorithms can significantly alleviate the manual effort while delivering performant quantum circuits for any given task.

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.

VRAE: Vertical Residual Autoencoder for License Plate Denoising and Deblurring

In real-world traffic surveillance, vehicle images captured under adverse weather, poor lighting, or high-speed motion often suffer from severe noise and blur. Such degradations significantly reduce the accuracy of license plate recognition systems, especially when the plate occupies only a small region within the full vehicle image. Restoring these degraded images a fast realtime manner is thus a crucial pre-processing step to enhance recognition performance. In this work, we propose a Vertical Residual Autoencoder (VRAE) architecture designed for the image enhancement task in traffic surveillance. The method incorporates an enhancement strategy that employs an auxiliary block, which injects input-aware features at each encoding stage to guide the representation learning process, enabling better general information preservation throughout the network compared to conventional autoencoders. Experiments on a vehicle image dataset with visible license plates demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms Autoencoder (AE), Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and Flow-Based (FB) approaches. Compared with AE at the same depth, it improves PSNR by about 20%, reduces NMSE by around 50%, and enhances SSIM by 1%, while requiring only a marginal increase of roughly 1% in parameters.

Autoencoder-Based Denoising of Muscle Artifacts in ECG to Preserve Skin Nerve Activity (SKNA) for Cognitive Stress Detection

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) plays a central role in regulating the body's responses to stress and maintaining physiological stability. Its dysregulation is associated with a wide range of conditions, from cardiovascular disease to anxiety disorders. Skin nerve activity (SKNA) extracted from high-frequency electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings provides a noninvasive window into SNS dynamics, but its measurement is highly susceptible to electromyographic (EMG) contamination. Traditional preprocessing based on bandpass filtering within a fixed range (e.g., 500--1000 Hz) is susceptible to overlapping EMG and SKNA spectral components, especially during sustained muscle activity. We present a denoising approach using a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional autoencoder with a long short-term memory (LSTM) bottleneck to reconstruct clean SKNA from EMG-contaminated recordings. Using clean ECG-derived SKNA data from cognitive stress experiments and EMG noise from chaotic muscle stimulation recordings, we simulated contamination at realistic noise levels (--4 dB, --8 dB signal-to-noise ratio) and trained the model in the leave-one-subject-out cross-validation framework. The method improved signal-to-noise ratio by up to 9.65 dB, increased cross correlation with clean SKNA from 0.40 to 0.72, and restored burst-based SKNA features to near-clean discriminability (AUROC $\geq$ 0.96). Classification of baseline versus sympathetic stimulation (cognitive stress) conditions reached accuracies of 91--98\% across severe noise levels, comparable to clean data. These results demonstrate that deep learning--based reconstruction can preserve physiologically relevant sympathetic bursts during substantial EMG interference, enabling more robust SKNA monitoring in naturalistic, movement-rich environments.

OCTANE -- Optimal Control for Tensor-based Autoencoder Network Emergence: Explicit Case

This paper presents a novel, mathematically rigorous framework for autoencoder-type deep neural networks that combines optimal control theory and low-rank tensor methods to yield memory-efficient training and automated architecture discovery. The learning task is formulated as an optimization problem constrained by differential equations representing the encoder and decoder components of the network and the corresponding optimality conditions are derived via a Lagrangian approach. Efficient memory compression is enabled by approximating differential equation solutions on low-rank tensor manifolds using an adaptive explicit integration scheme. These concepts are combined to form OCTANE (Optimal Control for Tensor-based Autoencoder Network Emergence) -- a unified training framework that yields compact autoencoder architectures, reduces memory usage, and enables effective learning, even with limited training data. The framework's utility is illustrated with application to image denoising and deblurring tasks and recommendations regarding governing hyperparameters are provided.

Synthetic Survival Data Generation for Heart Failure Prognosis Using Deep Generative Models

Background: Heart failure (HF) research is constrained by limited access to large, shareable datasets due to privacy regulations and institutional barriers. Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution to overcome these challenges while preserving patient confidentiality. Methods: We generated synthetic HF datasets from institutional data comprising 12,552 unique patients using five deep learning models: tabular variational autoencoder (TVAE), normalizing flow, ADSGAN, SurvivalGAN, and tabular denoising diffusion probabilistic models (TabDDPM). We comprehensively evaluated synthetic data utility through statistical similarity metrics, survival prediction using machine learning and privacy assessments. Results: SurvivalGAN and TabDDPM demonstrated high fidelity to the original dataset, exhibiting similar variable distributions and survival curves after applying histogram equalization. SurvivalGAN (C-indices: 0.71-0.76) and TVAE (C-indices: 0.73-0.76) achieved the strongest performance in survival prediction evaluation, closely matched real data performance (C-indices: 0.73-0.76). Privacy evaluation confirmed protection against re-identification attacks. Conclusions: Deep learning-based synthetic data generation can produce high-fidelity, privacy-preserving HF datasets suitable for research applications. This publicly available synthetic dataset addresses critical data sharing barriers and provides a valuable resource for advancing HF research and predictive modeling.

MIDAS: Multimodal Interactive Digital-humAn Synthesis via Real-time Autoregressive Video Generation

Recently, interactive digital human video generation has attracted widespread attention and achieved remarkable progress. However, building such a practical system that can interact with diverse input signals in real time remains challenging to existing methods, which often struggle with heavy computational cost and limited controllability. In this work, we introduce an autoregressive video generation framework that enables interactive multimodal control and low-latency extrapolation in a streaming manner. With minimal modifications to a standard large language model (LLM), our framework accepts multimodal condition encodings including audio, pose, and text, and outputs spatially and semantically coherent representations to guide the denoising process of a diffusion head. To support this, we construct a large-scale dialogue dataset of approximately 20,000 hours from multiple sources, providing rich conversational scenarios for training. We further introduce a deep compression autoencoder with up to 64$\times$ reduction ratio, which effectively alleviates the long-horizon inference burden of the autoregressive model. Extensive experiments on duplex conversation, multilingual human synthesis, and interactive world model highlight the advantages of our approach in low latency, high efficiency, and fine-grained multimodal controllability.

Diffusion-Scheduled Denoising Autoencoders for Anomaly Detection in Tabular Data

Anomaly detection in tabular data remains challenging due to complex feature interactions and the scarcity of anomalous examples. Denoising autoencoders rely on fixed-magnitude noise, limiting adaptability to diverse data distributions. Diffusion models introduce scheduled noise and iterative denoising, but lack explicit reconstruction mappings. We propose the Diffusion-Scheduled Denoising Autoencoder (DDAE), a framework that integrates diffusion-based noise scheduling and contrastive learning into the encoding process to improve anomaly detection. We evaluated DDAE on 57 datasets from ADBench. Our method outperforms in semi-supervised settings and achieves competitive results in unsupervised settings, improving PR-AUC by up to 65% (9%) and ROC-AUC by 16% (6%) over state-of-the-art autoencoder (diffusion) model baselines. We observed that higher noise levels benefit unsupervised training, while lower noise with linear scheduling is optimal in semi-supervised settings. These findings underscore the importance of principled noise strategies in tabular anomaly detection.

Towards Spatially Consistent Image Generation: On Incorporating Intrinsic Scene Properties into Diffusion Models

Image generation models trained on large datasets can synthesize high-quality images but often produce spatially inconsistent and distorted images due to limited information about the underlying structures and spatial layouts. In this work, we leverage intrinsic scene properties (e.g., depth, segmentation maps) that provide rich information about the underlying scene, unlike prior approaches that solely rely on image-text pairs or use intrinsics as conditional inputs. Our approach aims to co-generate both images and their corresponding intrinsics, enabling the model to implicitly capture the underlying scene structure and generate more spatially consistent and realistic images. Specifically, we first extract rich intrinsic scene properties from a large image dataset with pre-trained estimators, eliminating the need for additional scene information or explicit 3D representations. We then aggregate various intrinsic scene properties into a single latent variable using an autoencoder. Building upon pre-trained large-scale Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), our method simultaneously denoises the image and intrinsic domains by carefully sharing mutual information so that the image and intrinsic reflect each other without degrading image quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method corrects spatial inconsistencies and produces a more natural layout of scenes while maintaining the fidelity and textual alignment of the base model (e.g., Stable Diffusion).

Deep Learning for Gradient and BCG Artifacts Removal in EEG During Simultaneous fMRI

Simultaneous EEG-fMRI recording combines high temporal and spatial resolution for tracking neural activity. However, its usefulness is greatly limited by artifacts from magnetic resonance (MR), especially gradient artifacts (GA) and ballistocardiogram (BCG) artifacts, which interfere with the EEG signal. To address this issue, we used a denoising autoencoder (DAR), a deep learning framework designed to reduce MR-related artifacts in EEG recordings. Using paired data that includes both artifact-contaminated and MR-corrected EEG from the CWL EEG-fMRI dataset, DAR uses a 1D convolutional autoencoder to learn a direct mapping from noisy to clear signal segments. Compared to traditional artifact removal methods like principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), average artifact subtraction (AAS), and wavelet thresholding, DAR shows better performance. It achieves a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.0218 $\pm$ 0.0152, a structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.8885 $\pm$ 0.0913, and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of 14.63 dB. Statistical analysis with paired t-tests confirms that these improvements are significant (p<0.001; Cohen's d>1.2). A leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation protocol shows that the model generalizes well, yielding an average RMSE of 0.0635 $\pm$ 0.0110 and an SSIM of 0.6658 $\pm$ 0.0880 across unseen subjects. Additionally, saliency-based visualizations demonstrate that DAR highlights areas with dense artifacts, which makes its decisions easier to interpret. Overall, these results position DAR as a potential and understandable solution for real-time EEG artifact removal in simultaneous EEG-fMRI applications.