Automatic Extraction of Rules for Generating Synthetic Patient Data From Real-World Population Data Using Glioblastoma as an Example

The generation of synthetic data is a promising technology to make medical data available for secondary use in a privacy-compliant manner. A popular method for creating realistic patient data is the rule-based Synthea data generator. Synthea generates data based on rules describing the lifetime of a synthetic patient. These rules typically express the probability of a condition occurring, such as a disease, depending on factors like age. Since they only contain statistical information, rules usually have no specific data protection requirements. However, creating meaningful rules can be a very complex process that requires expert knowledge and realistic sample data. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate an approach to automatically generate Synthea rules based on statistics from tabular data, which we extracted from cancer reports. As an example use case, we created a Synthea module for glioblastoma from a real-world dataset and used it to generate a synthetic dataset. Compared to the original dataset, the synthetic data reproduced known disease courses and mostly retained the statistical properties. Overall, synthetic patient data holds great potential for privacy-preserving research. The data can be used to formulate hypotheses and to develop prototypes, but medical interpretation should consider the specific limitations as with any currently available approach.

Exploring LLMs for Scientific Information Extraction Using The SciEx Framework

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly touted as powerful tools for automating scientific information extraction. However, existing methods and tools often struggle with the realities of scientific literature: long-context documents, multi-modal content, and reconciling varied and inconsistent fine-grained information across multiple publications into standardized formats. These challenges are further compounded when the desired data schema or extraction ontology changes rapidly, making it difficult to re-architect or fine-tune existing systems. We present SciEx, a modular and composable framework that decouples key components including PDF parsing, multi-modal retrieval, extraction, and aggregation. This design streamlines on-demand data extraction while enabling extensibility and flexible integration of new models, prompting strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. We evaluate SciEx on datasets spanning three scientific topics for its ability to extract fine-grained information accurately and consistently. Our findings provide practical insights into both the strengths and limitations of current LLM-based pipelines.

CTIGuardian: A Few-Shot Framework for Mitigating Privacy Leakage in Fine-Tuned LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to adapt their general-purpose knowledge to specific tasks and domains such as cyber threat intelligence (CTI). Fine-tuning is mostly done through proprietary datasets that may contain sensitive information. Owners expect their fine-tuned model to not inadvertently leak this information to potentially adversarial end users. Using CTI as a use case, we demonstrate that data-extraction attacks can recover sensitive information from fine-tuned models on CTI reports, underscoring the need for mitigation. Retraining the full model to eliminate this leakage is computationally expensive and impractical. We propose an alternative approach, which we call privacy alignment, inspired by safety alignment in LLMs. Just like safety alignment teaches the model to abide by safety constraints through a few examples, we enforce privacy alignment through few-shot supervision, integrating a privacy classifier and a privacy redactor, both handled by the same underlying LLM. We evaluate our system, called CTIGuardian, using GPT-4o mini and Mistral-7B Instruct models, benchmarking against Presidio, a named entity recognition (NER) baseline. Results show that CTIGuardian provides a better privacy-utility trade-off than NER based models. While we demonstrate its effectiveness on a CTI use case, the framework is generic enough to be applicable to other sensitive domains.

Isolated Sign Language Recognition with Segmentation and Pose Estimation

The recent surge in large language models has automated translations of spoken and written languages. However, these advances remain largely inaccessible to American Sign Language (ASL) users, whose language relies on complex visual cues. Isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) - the task of classifying videos of individual signs - can help bridge this gap but is currently limited by scarce per-sign data, high signer variability, and substantial computational costs. We propose a model for ISLR that reduces computational requirements while maintaining robustness to signer variation. Our approach integrates (i) a pose estimation pipeline to extract hand and face joint coordinates, (ii) a segmentation module that isolates relevant information, and (iii) a ResNet-Transformer backbone to jointly model spatial and temporal dependencies.

ERIENet: An Efficient RAW Image Enhancement Network under Low-Light Environment

RAW images have shown superior performance than sRGB images in many image processing tasks, especially for low-light image enhancement. However, most existing methods for RAW-based low-light enhancement usually sequentially process multi-scale information, which makes it difficult to achieve lightweight models and high processing speeds. Besides, they usually ignore the green channel superiority of RAW images, and fail to achieve better reconstruction performance with good use of green channel information. In this work, we propose an efficient RAW Image Enhancement Network (ERIENet), which parallelly processes multi-scale information with efficient convolution modules, and takes advantage of rich information in green channels to guide the reconstruction of images. Firstly, we introduce an efficient multi-scale fully-parallel architecture with a novel channel-aware residual dense block to extract feature maps, which reduces computational costs and achieves real-time processing speed. Secondly, we introduce a green channel guidance branch to exploit the rich information within the green channels of the input RAW image. It increases the quality of reconstruction results with few parameters and computations. Experiments on commonly used low-light image enhancement datasets show that ERIENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enhancing low-light RAW images with higher effiency. It also achieves an optimal speed of over 146 frame-per-second (FPS) for 4K-resolution images on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with 24G memory.

Tracking spatial temporal details in ultrasound long video via wavelet analysis and memory bank

Medical ultrasound videos are widely used for medical inspections, disease diagnosis and surgical planning. High-fidelity lesion area and target organ segmentation constitutes a key component of the computer-assisted surgery workflow. The low contrast levels and noisy backgrounds of ultrasound videos cause missegmentation of organ boundary, which may lead to small object losses and increase boundary segmentation errors. Object tracking in long videos also remains a significant research challenge. To overcome these challenges, we propose a memory bank-based wavelet filtering and fusion network, which adopts an encoder-decoder structure to effectively extract fine-grained detailed spatial features and integrate high-frequency (HF) information. Specifically, memory-based wavelet convolution is presented to simultaneously capture category, detailed information and utilize adjacent information in the encoder. Cascaded wavelet compression is used to fuse multiscale frequency-domain features and expand the receptive field within each convolutional layer. A long short-term memory bank using cross-attention and memory compression mechanisms is designed to track objects in long video. To fully utilize the boundary-sensitive HF details of feature maps, an HF-aware feature fusion module is designed via adaptive wavelet filters in the decoder. In extensive benchmark tests conducted on four ultrasound video datasets (two thyroid nodule, the thyroid gland, the heart datasets) compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method demonstrates marked improvements in segmentation metrics. In particular, our method can more accurately segment small thyroid nodules, demonstrating its effectiveness for cases involving small ultrasound objects in long video. The code is available at https://github.com/XiAooZ/MWNet.

Replace, Don't Expand: Mitigating Context Dilution in Multi-Hop RAG via Fixed-Budget Evidence Assembly

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often fail on multi-hop queries when the initial retrieval misses a bridge fact. Prior corrective approaches, such as Self-RAG, CRAG, and Adaptive-$k$, typically address this by \textit{adding} more context or pruning existing lists. However, simply expanding the context window often leads to \textbf{context dilution}, where distractors crowd out relevant information. We propose \textbf{SEAL-RAG}, a training-free controller that adopts a \textbf{``replace, don't expand''} strategy to fight context dilution under a fixed retrieval depth $k$. SEAL executes a (\textbf{S}earch $\rightarrow$ \textbf{E}xtract $\rightarrow$ \textbf{A}ssess $\rightarrow$ \textbf{L}oop) cycle: it performs on-the-fly, entity-anchored extraction to build a live \textit{gap specification} (missing entities/relations), triggers targeted micro-queries, and uses \textit{entity-first ranking} to actively swap out distractors for gap-closing evidence. We evaluate SEAL-RAG against faithful re-implementations of Basic RAG, CRAG, Self-RAG, and Adaptive-$k$ in a shared environment on \textbf{HotpotQA} and \textbf{2WikiMultiHopQA}. On HotpotQA ($k=3$), SEAL improves answer correctness by \textbf{+3--13 pp} and evidence precision by \textbf{+12--18 pp} over Self-RAG. On 2WikiMultiHopQA ($k=5$), it outperforms Adaptive-$k$ by \textbf{+8.0 pp} in accuracy and maintains \textbf{96\%} evidence precision compared to 22\% for CRAG. These gains are statistically significant ($p<0.001$). By enforcing fixed-$k$ replacement, SEAL yields a predictable cost profile while ensuring the top-$k$ slots are optimized for precision rather than mere breadth. We release our code and data at https://github.com/mosherino/SEAL-RAG.

UniFi: Combining Irregularly Sampled CSI from Diverse Communication Packets and Frequency Bands for Wi-Fi Sensing

Existing Wi-Fi sensing systems rely on injecting high-rate probing packets to extract channel state information (CSI), leading to communication degradation and poor deployability. Although Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is a promising direction, existing solutions still rely on auxiliary packet injection because they exploit only CSI from data frames. We present UniFi, the first Wi-Fi-based ISAC framework that fully eliminates intrusive packet injection by directly exploiting irregularly sampled CSI from diverse communication packets across multiple frequency bands. UniFi integrates a CSI sanitization pipeline to harmonize heterogeneous packets and remove burst-induced redundancy, together with a time-aware attention model that learns directly from non-uniform CSI sequences without resampling. We further introduce CommCSI-HAR, the first dataset with irregularly sampled CSI from real-world dual-band communication traffic. Extensive evaluations on this dataset and four public benchmarks show that UniFi achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with a compact model size, while fully preserving communication throughput.

FusAD: Time-Frequency Fusion with Adaptive Denoising for General Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis plays a vital role in fields such as finance, healthcare, industry, and meteorology, underpinning key tasks including classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection. Although deep learning models have achieved remarkable progress in these areas in recent years, constructing an efficient, multi-task compatible, and generalizable unified framework for time series analysis remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches are often tailored to single tasks or specific data types, making it difficult to simultaneously handle multi-task modeling and effectively integrate information across diverse time series types. Moreover, real-world data are often affected by noise, complex frequency components, and multi-scale dynamic patterns, which further complicate robust feature extraction and analysis. To ameliorate these challenges, we propose FusAD, a unified analysis framework designed for diverse time series tasks. FusAD features an adaptive time-frequency fusion mechanism, integrating both Fourier and Wavelet transforms to efficiently capture global-local and multi-scale dynamic features. With an adaptive denoising mechanism, FusAD automatically senses and filters various types of noise, highlighting crucial sequence variations and enabling robust feature extraction in complex environments. In addition, the framework integrates a general information fusion and decoding structure, combined with masked pre-training, to promote efficient learning and transfer of multi-granularity representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FusAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on mainstream time series benchmarks for classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection tasks, while maintaining high efficiency and scalability. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangda1018/FusAD.

Yuan-TecSwin: A text conditioned Diffusion model with Swin-transformer blocks

Diffusion models have shown remarkable capacity in image synthesis based on their U-shaped architecture and convolutional neural networks (CNN) as basic blocks. The locality of the convolution operation in CNN may limit the model's ability to understand long-range semantic information. To address this issue, we propose Yuan-TecSwin, a text-conditioned diffusion model with Swin-transformer in this work. The Swin-transformer blocks take the place of CNN blocks in the encoder and decoder, to improve the non-local modeling ability in feature extraction and image restoration. The text-image alignment is improved with a well-chosen text encoder, effective utilization of text embedding, and careful design in the incorporation of text condition. Using an adapted time step to search in different diffusion stages, inference performance is further improved by 10%. Yuan-TecSwin achieves the state-of-the-art FID score of 1.37 on ImageNet generation benchmark, without any additional models at different denoising stages. In a side-by-side comparison, we find it difficult for human interviewees to tell the model-generated images from the human-painted ones.