Federated Recommender Systems (FedRecs) leverage federated learning to protect user privacy by retaining data locally. However, user embeddings in FedRecs often encode sensitive attribute information, rendering them vulnerable to attribute inference attacks. Attribute unlearning has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate this issue. In this paper, we focus on user-level FedRecs, which is a more practical yet challenging setting compared to group-level FedRecs. Adversarial training emerges as the most feasible approach within this context. We identify two key challenges in implementing adversarial training-based attribute unlearning for user-level FedRecs: i) mitigating training instability caused by user data heterogeneity, and ii) preventing attribute information leakage through gradients. To address these challenges, we propose FedAU2, an attribute unlearning method for user-level FedRecs. For CH1, we propose a adaptive adversarial training strategy, where the training dynamics are adjusted in response to local optimization behavior. For CH2, we propose a dual-stochastic variational autoencoder to perturb the adversarial model, effectively preventing gradient-based information leakage. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed FedAU2 achieves superior performance in unlearning effectiveness and recommendation performance compared to existing baselines.

Accurately localizing and segmenting obscured objects from faint light patterns beyond the field of view is highly challenging due to multiple scattering and medium-induced perturbations. Most existing methods, based on real-valued modeling or local convolutional operations, are inadequate for capturing the underlying physics of coherent light propagation. Moreover, under low signal-to-noise conditions, these methods often converge to non-physical solutions, severely compromising the stability and reliability of the observation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel physics-driven Wavefront Propagating Compensation Network (WavePCNet) to simulate wavefront propagation and enhance the perception of obscured objects. This WavePCNet integrates the Tri-Phase Wavefront Complex-Propagation Reprojection (TriWCP) to incorporate complex amplitude transfer operators to precisely constrain coherent propagation behavior, along with a momentum memory mechanism to effectively suppress the accumulation of perturbations. Additionally, a High-frequency Cross-layer Compensation Enhancement is introduced to construct frequency-selective pathways with multi-scale receptive fields and dynamically models structural consistency across layers, further boosting the model’s robustness and interpretability under complex environmental conditions. Extensive experiments conducted on four physically collected datasets demonstrate that WavePCNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both accuracy and robustness.

In the context of Internet of Things (IoT) networks, this work investigates an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system and establishes an integrated analytical frame-work that rigorously characterizes both the inherent double-fading effect of RIS-assisted propagation and the power-gain coupling introduced by the active RIS. A weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem is then formulated under the constraints of access point (AP) power budgets, the RIS power consumption limitations, and the receiver energy harvesting requirements. To manage the resulting highly non-convex structure, the original problem is equivalently reformulated as a weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE) minimization problem, which enables the development of an efficient alternating optimization algorithm. At each iteration, the MMSE decoding vectors are firstly updated in closed form, while the energy signal covariance matrices, the AP information beamformers, and the active RIS reflection coefficients are subsequently optimized via semi-definite programming, successive convex approximation, and augmented Lagrangian method, respectively. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the adoption of an active RIS effectively mitigates the double-fading effect and achieves performance comparable to that of passive RIS with significantly fewer reflecting elements, while the proposed joint optimization strategy yields substantial WSR gains and further enlarges the performance gap between the optimized active and passive RIS schemes.

Ophthalmic diseases such significantly impair the vision of numerous individuals globally. Accurate and real-time 3D reconstruction of macular edema and retinal tears is crucial for improving surgical efficiency and success rates. However, lesion areas often exhibit considerable noise and high heterogeneity, and the imaging devices employed may introduce electronic noise and artifacts. Current 2D medical image segmentation techniques fail to achieve optimal outcomes. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Tri-Path Fourier-Temporal Modulation Network (TriFTM-Net). TriFTM-Net synergistically integrates spatial, frequency, and spatiotemporal features. This design effectively augments both feature representation and extraction. TriFTM-Net comprises three critical modules: the Tri-Path Spectral Hierarchical Encoder (TPSHE), which amplifies feature representation by integrating tri-path features; the Feature Re-Modulation (FRM), which reduces noise interference and enhances feature extraction; and the Hierarchical Feature Reconstruction Module (HFRM), which improves detail preservation in upsampled images. Comparative analysis with thirteen baseline methods demonstrates that our approach achieves the highest Dice scores, IoU, and Kappa coefficient on the OIMHS dataset.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/IMOP-lab/TriFTM-Net.

In cross-modal retrieval, comprehensive image understanding is vital while the scene text in images can provide fine-grained information to understand visual semantics. Current methods fail to make full use of scene text. They suffer from the semantic ambiguity of independent scene text and overlook the heterogeneous concepts in image-caption pairs. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous prompt-guided entity inferring and distilling (HOPID) network to explore the nature connection of scene text in images and captions and learn a property-centric scene text representation. Specifically, we propose to align scene text in images and captions via heterogeneous prompt, which consists of visual and text prompt. For text prompt, we introduce the discriminative entity inferring module to reason key scene text words from captions, while visual prompt highlights the corresponding scene text in images. Furthermore, to secure a robust scene text representation, we design a perceptive entity distilling module that distills the beneficial information of scene text at a fine-grained level. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches on two public cross-modal retrieval benchmarks.

Information retrieved from three dimensions is treated uniformly in CNN-based volumetric segmentation methods. However, such neglect of axial disparities fails to capture true spatio-temporal variations. This paper introduces the volumetric axial disentanglement to address the disparities in spatial information along different axial dimensions. Building on this concept, we propose the Post-Axial Refiner (PaR) module to refine segmentation masks by implementing axial disentanglement on the specific axis of the volumetric medical sequences. As a plug-and-play enhancement to existing volumetric segmentation architecture, PaR further utilizes specialized attention approaches to learn disentangled post-decoding features, enhancing spatial representation and structural detail. Validation on various datasets demonstrates PaR's consistent elevation of segmentation precision and boundary clarity across 11 baselines and different imaging modalities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Experimental tests demonstrate the ability of volumetric axial disentanglement to refine the segmentation of volumetric medical images. Code is released at https://github.com/IMOP-lab/PaR-Pytorch.

The early detection of ocular disorders, including Graves’ disease, myasthenia gravis, conjunctival hyperemia, conjunctivitis, and keratitis, which critically impair the vision of millions worldwide, necessitates large-scale screening predicated on ocular appearance measurements as a crucial diagnostic component. The emerging Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) introduces new avenues for local clinics to embrace portable and extensive diagnostics. However, the inherent heterogeneity and blurriness of ocular images, compounded by environmental noise, and the computational resource constraint hinder the high-precision diagnostics on IoMT devices. In response to these challenges, a linguistic-guided generative large vision model (LiGu-LVM) has been formulated to assist and enhance the diagnostic capability of IoMT-enabled ocular scanners, integrating a dynamically allocated high-speed quantization system (DAHSQS), a linguistic-guided generative local-isolation module (LiGu), an oculo visio transformatrix segmentum-analytica modulorum (OVT-SAM), and a multiscale recursive attention segmentation engine (MuRASE). DAHSQS enables the flexible aggregation and transmission of patient imagery to shift heavy diagnostic tasks from IoMT-enabled mobile ocular scanners to computational clusters, facilitating rapid facial measurements and preliminary screening via dynamic task allocation and scalable server clusters. The LiGu module employs natural language guidance to generate key image locations, using extensive prior knowledge embedded within linguistic models for precise semantic isolation. OVT-SAM synthesizes multilevel features from the large vision model, extracting intermediate characteristic information and addressing global features alongside deep semantic understanding in natural images collected from IoMT-enabled ocular scanners. MuRASE achieves high-fidelity segmentation of ocular images by incorporating contextual recursive attention mechanisms and skip connections with layer-wise reverse connectivity. Extensive experiments show proposed method surpassing 80% Intersection Over Union (IoU) in ocular semantic segmentation on the CelebA-HQ dataset, achieving an IoU of 82.9%, thus exceeding the performance of existing models by 4.9%.

In the present study, we introduce an innovative structure for 3D medical image segmentation that effectively integrates 2D U-Net-derived skip connections into the architecture of 3D convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs). Conventional 3D segmentation techniques predominantly depend on isotropic 3D convolutions for the extraction of volumetric features, which frequently engenders inefficiencies due to the varying information density across the three orthogonal axes in medical imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This disparity leads to a decline in axial-slice plane feature extraction efficiency, with slice plane features being comparatively underutilized relative to features in the time-axial. To address this issue, we introduce the U-shaped Connection (uC), utilizing simplified 2D U-Net in place of standard skip connections to augment the extraction of the axial-slice plane features while concurrently preserving the volumetric context afforded by 3D convolutions. Based on uC, we further present uC 3DU-Net, an enhanced 3D U-Net backbone that integrates the uC approach to facilitate optimal axial-slice plane feature utilization. Through rigorous experimental validation on five publicly accessible datasets—FLARE2021, OIMHS, FeTA2021, AbdomenCT-1K, and BTCV, the proposed method surpasses contemporary state-of-the-art models. Notably, this performance is achieved while reducing the number of parameters and computational complexity. This investigation underscores the efficacy of incorporating 2D convolutions within the framework of 3D CNNs to overcome the intrinsic limitations of volumetric segmentation, thereby potentially expanding the frontiers of medical image analysis. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/IMOP-lab/U-Shaped-Connection.

With the accumulation of check-in data from location-based services, next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendations are gaining increasing attention. It is well known that the spatio-temporal contextual information of user check-in behavior plays a crucial role in handling vital and inherent challenges in next POI recommendation, including capture of user dynamic preferences and the sparsity problem of check-in data. However, many studies either ignore or simply stack the context features with the embedding of POIs while relying only on POI recommendation loss to optimize the entire model, therefore failing to take full advantage of the potential information in contexts. Additionally, users’ interests are usually unstable and evolve over time, and accordingly recent studies have proposed various approaches to predict users’ next POIs by incorporating contextual information and modeling both their long- and short-term preferences, respectively. Yet many studies overemphasize the final POI recommendation performance, and the association between POI sequences and contextual information is not well embodied in data representations. In this article, we focus on the preceding problems and propose a unified attention framework for next POI recommendation by modeling users’ Long- and Short-term Preferences via Self-supervised Learning (LSPSL). Specifically, based on the self-attention network and two self-supervised optimization objectives, LSPSL first deeply exploits the intrinsic correlations between POI sequences and contextual information through pre-training, which strengthens data representations. Then, supported by pre-trained contextualized embeddings, LSPSL models and fuses users’ complex long- and short-term preferences in a unified way. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.