SEED: Towards More Accurate Semantic Evaluation for Visual Brain Decoding

We present SEED (\textbf{Se}mantic \textbf{E}valuation for Visual Brain \textbf{D}ecoding), a novel metric for evaluating the semantic decoding performance of visual brain decoding models. It integrates three complementary metrics, each capturing a different aspect of semantic similarity between images. Using carefully crowd-sourced human judgment data, we demonstrate that SEED achieves the highest alignment with human evaluations, outperforming other widely used metrics. Through the evaluation of existing visual brain decoding models, we further reveal that crucial information is often lost in translation, even in state-of-the-art models that achieve near-perfect scores on existing metrics. To facilitate further research, we open-source the human judgment data, encouraging the development of more advanced evaluation methods for brain decoding models. Additionally, we propose a novel loss function designed to enhance semantic decoding performance by leveraging the order of pairwise cosine similarity in CLIP image embeddings. This loss function is compatible with various existing methods and has been shown to consistently improve their semantic decoding performances when used for training, with respect to both existing metrics and SEED.

GST-UNet: Spatiotemporal Causal Inference with Time-Varying Confounders

Estimating causal effects from spatiotemporal data is a key challenge in fields such as public health, social policy, and environmental science, where controlled experiments are often infeasible. However, existing causal inference methods relying on observational data face significant limitations: they depend on strong structural assumptions to address spatiotemporal challenges $\unicode{x2013}$ such as interference, spatial confounding, and temporal carryover effects $\unicode{x2013}$ or fail to account for $\textit{time-varying confounders}$. These confounders, influenced by past treatments and outcomes, can themselves shape future treatments and outcomes, creating feedback loops that complicate traditional adjustment strategies. To address these challenges, we introduce the $\textbf{GST-UNet}$ ($\textbf{G}$-computation $\textbf{S}$patio-$\textbf{T}$emporal $\textbf{UNet}$), a novel end-to-end neural network framework designed to estimate treatment effects in complex spatial and temporal settings. The GST-UNet leverages regression-based iterative G-computation to explicitly adjust for time-varying confounders, providing valid estimates of potential outcomes and treatment effects. To the best of our knowledge, the GST-UNet is the first neural model to account for complex, non-linear dynamics and time-varying confounders in spatiotemporal interventions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the GST-UNet through extensive simulation studies and showcase its practical utility with a real-world analysis of the impact of wildfire smoke on respiratory hospitalizations during the 2018 California Camp Fire. Our results highlight the potential of GST-UNet to advance spatiotemporal causal inference across a wide range of policy-driven and scientific applications.

Learning to Measure Quantum Neural Networks

The rapid progress in quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML) has attracted growing attention, prompting extensive research into quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms to solve diverse and complex problems. Designing high-performance QML models demands expert-level proficiency, which remains a significant obstacle to the broader adoption of QML. A few major hurdles include crafting effective data encoding techniques and parameterized quantum circuits, both of which are crucial to the performance of QML models. Additionally, the measurement phase is frequently overlooked-most current QML models rely on pre-defined measurement protocols that often fail to account for the specific problem being addressed. We introduce a novel approach that makes the observable of the quantum system-specifically, the Hermitian matrix-learnable. Our method features an end-to-end differentiable learning framework, where the parameterized observable is trained alongside the ordinary quantum circuit parameters simultaneously. Using numerical simulations, we show that the proposed method can identify observables for variational quantum circuits that lead to improved outcomes, such as higher classification accuracy, thereby boosting the overall performance of QML models.

Transfer Learning Analysis of Variational Quantum Circuits

This work analyzes transfer learning of the Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC). Our framework begins with a pretrained VQC configured in one domain and calculates the transition of 1-parameter unitary subgroups required for a new domain. A formalism is established to investigate the adaptability and capability of a VQC under the analysis of loss bounds. Our theory observes knowledge transfer in VQCs and provides a heuristic interpretation for the mechanism. An analytical fine-tuning method is derived to attain the optimal transition for adaptations of similar domains.

Evidential Deep Learning for Probabilistic Modelling of Extreme Storm Events

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods play an important role in reducing errors in weather forecasting. Conventional approaches in UQ for weather forecasting rely on generating an ensemble of forecasts from physics-based simulations to estimate the uncertainty. However, it is computationally expensive to generate many forecasts to predict real-time extreme weather events. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) is an uncertainty-aware deep learning approach designed to provide confidence about its predictions using only one forecast. It treats learning as an evidence acquisition process where more evidence is interpreted as increased predictive confidence. We apply EDL to storm forecasting using real-world weather datasets and compare its performance with traditional methods. Our findings indicate that EDL not only reduces computational overhead but also enhances predictive uncertainty. This method opens up novel opportunities in research areas such as climate risk assessment, where quantifying the uncertainty about future climate is crucial.

Macro2Micro: Cross-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Synthesis Leveraging Multi-scale Brain Structures

Spanning multiple scales-from macroscopic anatomy down to intricate microscopic architecture-the human brain exemplifies a complex system that demands integrated approaches to fully understand its complexity. Yet, mapping nonlinear relationships between these scales remains challenging due to technical limitations and the high cost of multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) acquisition. Here, we introduce Macro2Micro, a deep learning framework that predicts brain microstructure from macrostructure using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Grounded in the scale-free, self-similar nature of brain organization-where microscale information can be inferred from macroscale patterns-Macro2Micro explicitly encodes multiscale brain representations into distinct processing branches. To further enhance image fidelity and suppress artifacts, we propose a simple yet effective auxiliary discriminator and learning objective. Our results show that Macro2Micro faithfully translates T1-weighted MRIs into corresponding Fractional Anisotropy (FA) images, achieving a 6.8% improvement in the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) compared to previous methods, while preserving the individual neurobiological characteristics.

A Training-Free Approach for Music Style Transfer with Latent Diffusion Models

Music style transfer, while offering exciting possibilities for personalized music generation, often requires extensive training or detailed textual descriptions. This paper introduces a novel training-free approach leveraging pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). By manipulating the self-attention features of the LDM, we effectively transfer the style of reference music onto content music without additional training. Our method achieves superior style transfer and melody preservation compared to existing methods. This work opens new creative avenues for personalized music generation.

Problem-dependent convergence bounds for randomized linear gradient compression

In distributed optimization, the communication of model updates can be a performance bottleneck. Consequently, gradient compression has been proposed as a means of increasing optimization throughput. In general, due to information loss, compression introduces a penalty on the number of iterations needed to reach a solution. In this work, we investigate how the iteration penalty depends on the interaction between compression and problem structure, in the context of non-convex stochastic optimization. We focus on linear compression schemes, where compression and decompression can be modeled as multiplication with a random matrix. We consider several distributions of matrices, among them random orthogonal matrices and matrices with random Gaussian entries. We find that in each case, the impact of compression on convergence can be quantified in terms of the norm of the Hessian of the objective, using a norm defined by the compression scheme. The analysis reveals that in certain cases, compression performance is related to low-rank structure or other spectral properties of the problem. In these cases, our bounds predict that the penalty introduced by compression is significantly reduced compared to worst-case bounds that only consider the compression level, ignoring problem data. We verify the theoretical findings on several optimization problems, including fine-tuning an image classification model.

Variable Rate Neural Compression for Sparse Detector Data

High-energy large-scale particle colliders generate data at extraordinary rates. Developing real-time high-throughput data compression algorithms to reduce data volume and meet the bandwidth requirement for storage has become increasingly critical. Deep learning is a promising technology that can address this challenging topic. At the newly constructed sPHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) serves as the main tracking detector, which records three-dimensional particle trajectories in a volume of a gas-filled cylinder. In terms of occupancy, the resulting data flow can be very sparse reaching $10^{-3}$ for proton-proton collisions. Such sparsity presents a challenge to conventional learning-free lossy compression algorithms, such as SZ, ZFP, and MGARD. In contrast, emerging deep learning-based models, particularly those utilizing convolutional neural networks for compression, have outperformed these conventional methods in terms of compression ratios and reconstruction accuracy. However, research on the efficacy of these deep learning models in handling sparse datasets, like those produced in particle colliders, remains limited. Furthermore, most deep learning models do not adapt their processing speeds to data sparsity, which affects efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach for TPC data compression via key-point identification facilitated by sparse convolution. Our proposed algorithm, BCAE-VS, achieves a $75\%$ improvement in reconstruction accuracy with a $10\%$ increase in compression ratio over the previous state-of-the-art model. Additionally, BCAE-VS manages to achieve these results with a model size over two orders of magnitude smaller. Lastly, we have experimentally verified that as sparsity increases, so does the model's throughput.

Quantum Gradient Class Activation Map for Model Interpretability

Quantum machine learning (QML) has recently made significant advancements in various topics. Despite the successes, the safety and interpretability of QML applications have not been thoroughly investigated. This work proposes using Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) for activation mapping to enhance model transparency, introducing the Quantum Gradient Class Activation Map (QGrad-CAM). This hybrid quantum-classical computing framework leverages both quantum and classical strengths and gives access to the derivation of an explicit formula of feature map importance. Experimental results demonstrate significant, fine-grained, class-discriminative visual explanations generated across both image and speech datasets.