G-MSGINet: A Grouped Multi-Scale Graph-Involution Network for Contactless Fingerprint Recognition

This paper presents G-MSGINet, a unified and efficient framework for robust contactless fingerprint recognition that jointly performs minutiae localization and identity embedding directly from raw input images. Existing approaches rely on multi-branch architectures, orientation labels, or complex preprocessing steps, which limit scalability and generalization across real-world acquisition scenarios. In contrast, the proposed architecture introduces the GMSGI layer, a novel computational module that integrates grouped pixel-level involution, dynamic multi-scale kernel generation, and graph-based relational modelling into a single processing unit. Stacked GMSGI layers progressively refine both local minutiae-sensitive features and global topological representations through end-to-end optimization. The architecture eliminates explicit orientation supervision and adapts graph connectivity directly from learned kernel descriptors, thereby capturing meaningful structural relationships among fingerprint regions without fixed heuristics. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, namely PolyU, CFPose, and Benchmark 2D/3D, demonstrate that G-MSGINet consistently achieves minutiae F1-scores in the range of $0.83\pm0.02$ and Rank-1 identification accuracies between 97.0% and 99.1%, while maintaining an Equal Error Rate (EER) as low as 0.5%. These results correspond to improvements of up to 4.8% in F1-score and 1.4% in Rank-1 accuracy when compared to prior methods, using only 0.38 million parameters and 6.63 giga floating-point operations, which represents up to ten times fewer parameters than competitive baselines. This highlights the scalability and effectiveness of G-MSGINet in real-world contactless biometric recognition scenarios.

MUST: Multi-Scale Structural-Temporal Link Prediction Model for UAV Ad Hoc Networks

Link prediction in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ad hoc networks (UANETs) aims to predict the potential formation of future links between UAVs. In adversarial environments where the route information of UAVs is unavailable, predicting future links must rely solely on the observed historical topological information of UANETs. However, the highly dynamic and sparse nature of UANET topologies presents substantial challenges in effectively capturing meaningful structural and temporal patterns for accurate link prediction. Most existing link prediction methods focus on temporal dynamics at a single structural scale while neglecting the effects of sparsity, resulting in insufficient information capture and limited applicability to UANETs. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale structural-temporal link prediction model (MUST) for UANETs. Specifically, we first employ graph attention networks (GATs) to capture structural features at multiple levels, including the individual UAV level, the UAV community level, and the overall network level. Then, we use long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to learn the temporal dynamics of these multi-scale structural features. Additionally, we address the impact of sparsity by introducing a sophisticated loss function during model optimization. We validate the performance of MUST using several UANET datasets generated through simulations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MUST achieves state-of-the-art link prediction performance in highly dynamic and sparse UANETs.

Land-Coverage Aware Path-Planning for Multi-UAV Swarms in Search and Rescue Scenarios

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become vital in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions, with autonomous mission planning improving response times and coverage efficiency. Early approaches primarily used path planning techniques such as A*, potential-fields, or Dijkstra's algorithm, while recent approaches have incorporated meta-heuristic frameworks like genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization to balance competing objectives such as network connectivity, energy efficiency, and strategic placement of charging stations. However, terrain-aware path planning remains under-explored, despite its critical role in optimizing UAV SAR deployments. To address this gap, we present a computer-vision based terrain-aware mission planner that autonomously extracts and analyzes terrain topology to enhance SAR pre-flight planning. Our framework uses a deep segmentation network fine-tuned on our own collection of landcover datasets to transform satellite imagery into a structured, grid-based representation of the operational area. This classification enables terrain-specific UAV-task allocation, improving deployment strategies in complex environments. We address the challenge of irregular terrain partitions, by introducing a two-stage partitioning scheme that first evaluates terrain monotonicity along coordinate axes before applying a cost-based recursive partitioning process, minimizing unnecessary splits and optimizing path efficiency. Empirical validation in a high-fidelity simulation environment demonstrates that our approach improves search and dispatch time over multiple meta-heuristic techniques and against a competing state-of-the-art method. These results highlight its potential for large-scale SAR operations, where rapid response and efficient UAV coordination are critical.

STG: Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network with Fusion and Spatiotemporal Decoupling Learning for Prognostic Prediction of Colorectal Cancer Liver Metastasis

We propose a multimodal spatiotemporal graph neural network (STG) framework to predict colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CRLM) progression. Current clinical models do not effectively integrate the tumor's spatial heterogeneity, dynamic evolution, and complex multimodal data relationships, limiting their predictive accuracy. Our STG framework combines preoperative CT imaging and clinical data into a heterogeneous graph structure, enabling joint modeling of tumor distribution and temporal evolution through spatial topology and cross-modal edges. The framework uses GraphSAGE to aggregate spatiotemporal neighborhood information and leverages supervised and contrastive learning strategies to enhance the model's ability to capture temporal features and improve robustness. A lightweight version of the model reduces parameter count by 78.55%, maintaining near-state-of-the-art performance. The model jointly optimizes recurrence risk regression and survival analysis tasks, with contrastive loss improving feature representational discriminability and cross-modal consistency. Experimental results on the MSKCC CRLM dataset show a time-adjacent accuracy of 85% and a mean absolute error of 1.1005, significantly outperforming existing methods. The innovative heterogeneous graph construction and spatiotemporal decoupling mechanism effectively uncover the associations between dynamic tumor microenvironment changes and prognosis, providing reliable quantitative support for personalized treatment decisions.

Advanced Clustering Framework for Semiconductor Image Analytics Integrating Deep TDA with Self-Supervised and Transfer Learning Techniques

Semiconductor manufacturing generates vast amounts of image data, crucial for defect identification and yield optimization, yet often exceeds manual inspection capabilities. Traditional clustering techniques struggle with high-dimensional, unlabeled data, limiting their effectiveness in capturing nuanced patterns. This paper introduces an advanced clustering framework that integrates deep Topological Data Analysis (TDA) with self-supervised and transfer learning techniques, offering a novel approach to unsupervised image clustering. TDA captures intrinsic topological features, while self-supervised learning extracts meaningful representations from unlabeled data, reducing reliance on labeled datasets. Transfer learning enhances the framework's adaptability and scalability, allowing fine-tuning to new datasets without retraining from scratch. Validated on synthetic and open-source semiconductor image datasets, the framework successfully identifies clusters aligned with defect patterns and process variations. This study highlights the transformative potential of combining TDA, self-supervised learning, and transfer learning, providing a scalable solution for proactive process monitoring and quality control in semiconductor manufacturing and other domains with large-scale image datasets.

Topology-Aware CLIP Few-Shot Learning

Efficiently adapting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP for few-shot learning poses challenges in balancing pre-trained knowledge retention and task-specific adaptation. Existing methods often overlook valuable structural information within the VLM's latent space. We introduce a topology-aware tuning approach integrating Representation Topology Divergence (RTD) into the Task Residual (TR) framework. By explicitly aligning the topological structures of visual and text representations using a combined RTD and Cross-Entropy loss, while freezing base VLM encoders, our method enhances few-shot performance. We optimize only lightweight Task Residual parameters, effectively leveraging topological information. Across 6 diverse benchmark datasets, our approach demonstrates significant gains, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 1-2\% over relevant baseline methods in few-shot settings. This work presents an effective strategy to boost VLM few-shot capabilities by incorporating topological alignment.

FreCT: Frequency-augmented Convolutional Transformer for Robust Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is critical for system monitoring and risk identification, across various domains, such as finance and healthcare. However, for most reconstruction-based approaches, detecting anomalies remains a challenge due to the complexity of sequential patterns in time series data. On the one hand, reconstruction-based techniques are susceptible to computational deviation stemming from anomalies, which can lead to impure representations of normal sequence patterns. On the other hand, they often focus on the time-domain dependencies of time series, while ignoring the alignment of frequency information beyond the time domain. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Frequency-augmented Convolutional Transformer (FreCT). FreCT utilizes patch operations to generate contrastive views and employs an improved Transformer architecture integrated with a convolution module to capture long-term dependencies while preserving local topology information. The introduced frequency analysis based on Fourier transformation could enhance the model's ability to capture crucial characteristics beyond the time domain. To protect the training quality from anomalies and improve the robustness, FreCT deploys stop-gradient Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and absolute error to optimize consistency information in both time and frequency domains. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that FreCT outperforms existing methods in identifying anomalies.

Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance with Nonlinear Projection

Tree-Sliced methods have recently emerged as an alternative to the traditional Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, replacing one-dimensional lines with tree-based metric spaces and incorporating a splitting mechanism for projecting measures. This approach enhances the ability to capture the topological structures of integration domains in Sliced Optimal Transport while maintaining low computational costs. Building on this foundation, we propose a novel nonlinear projectional framework for the Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (TSW) distance, substituting the linear projections in earlier versions with general projections, while ensuring the injectivity of the associated Radon Transform and preserving the well-definedness of the resulting metric. By designing appropriate projections, we construct efficient metrics for measures on both Euclidean spaces and spheres. Finally, we validate our proposed metric through extensive numerical experiments for Euclidean and spherical datasets. Applications include gradient flows, self-supervised learning, and generative models, where our methods demonstrate significant improvements over recent SW and TSW variants.

Pixel3DMM: Versatile Screen-Space Priors for Single-Image 3D Face Reconstruction

We address the 3D reconstruction of human faces from a single RGB image. To this end, we propose Pixel3DMM, a set of highly-generalized vision transformers which predict per-pixel geometric cues in order to constrain the optimization of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM). We exploit the latent features of the DINO foundation model, and introduce a tailored surface normal and uv-coordinate prediction head. We train our model by registering three high-quality 3D face datasets against the FLAME mesh topology, which results in a total of over 1,000 identities and 976K images. For 3D face reconstruction, we propose a FLAME fitting opitmization that solves for the 3DMM parameters from the uv-coordinate and normal estimates. To evaluate our method, we introduce a new benchmark for single-image face reconstruction, which features high diversity facial expressions, viewing angles, and ethnicities. Crucially, our benchmark is the first to evaluate both posed and neutral facial geometry. Ultimately, our method outperforms the most competitive baselines by over 15% in terms of geometric accuracy for posed facial expressions.

Toward Data-centric Directed Graph Learning: An Entropy-driven Approach

The directed graph (digraph), as a generalization of undirected graphs, exhibits superior representation capability in modeling complex topology systems and has garnered considerable attention in recent years. Despite the notable efforts made by existing DiGraph Neural Networks (DiGNNs) to leverage directed edges, they still fail to comprehensively delve into the abundant data knowledge concealed in the digraphs. This data-level limitation results in model-level sub-optimal predictive performance and underscores the necessity of further exploring the potential correlations between the directed edges (topology) and node profiles (feature and labels) from a data-centric perspective, thereby empowering model-centric neural networks with stronger encoding capabilities. In this paper, we propose \textbf{E}ntropy-driven \textbf{D}igraph knowl\textbf{E}dge distillatio\textbf{N} (EDEN), which can serve as a data-centric digraph learning paradigm or a model-agnostic hot-and-plug data-centric Knowledge Distillation (KD) module. The core idea is to achieve data-centric ML, guided by our proposed hierarchical encoding theory for structured data. Specifically, EDEN first utilizes directed structural measurements from a topology perspective to construct a coarse-grained Hierarchical Knowledge Tree (HKT). Subsequently, EDEN quantifies the mutual information of node profiles to refine knowledge flow in the HKT, enabling data-centric KD supervision within model training. As a general framework, EDEN can also naturally extend to undirected scenarios and demonstrate satisfactory performance. In our experiments, EDEN has been widely evaluated on 14 (di)graph datasets (homophily and heterophily) and across 4 downstream tasks. The results demonstrate that EDEN attains SOTA performance and exhibits strong improvement for prevalent (Di)GNNs.