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Privacy and data sharing are often in tension. Many organizations use synthetic data to reduce privacy risk and still share useful data. For tabular data, auditing privacy remains hard. In many cases, even humans cannot easily tell if a table is real or synthetic. In this paper, we propose a method based on LLM discrimination. We ask an LLM to classify each table sample as REAL or SYNTHETIC. We test two settings: C1 with table only, and C2 with table plus distributional metadata. We use LLaMA as an open model and Gemini as a reference model. In our experiments, we run three synthesis models, CTGAN, TVAE, and Gaussian Copula, on two public datasets, UCI Adult and ACS Census. We collect 451 valid trials. Our results show clear differences between models. On Adult, LLaMA reaches DRS=0% in reported cells, while Gemini reaches DRS=100% for CTGAN and TVAE. On Census, LLaMA predicts SYNTHETIC for most samples, while Gemini stays high in C1 but drops for CTGAN and TVAE in C2. We also compare with a classifier two-sample test (C2ST) and record linkage as distributional baselines, and with a human pilot of 2 annotators and 240 trials. Our results show that LLM discrimination is a practical privacy audit signal when model choice, per provider reporting, and data encoding are handled with care. For reproducibility, code and experiment scripts are available at https://github.com/SlokomManel/LLM-as-a-Discriminator.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential for monitoring network traffic and identifying malicious activities in modern cyber-physical, Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise, and distributed network environments. However, developing reliable IDS models remains challenging because attack behaviors evolve over time, realistic datasets are difficult to obtain, traffic records may be incomplete, attack classes are often imbalanced, and privacy constraints limit centralized data collection. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) provide new opportunities to address these limitations. Generative models can support anomaly detection, synthetic traffic generation, data augmentation, data imputation, adversarial traffic generation, and IDS alert explanation. FL enables distributed IDS training without directly sharing local network traffic, making it suitable for privacy-sensitive and geographically distributed environments. This survey provides a structured review of generative AI and FL techniques for IDS. We first summarize representative IDS research directions, including adversarial machine learning, anomaly-based detection, IoT-oriented IDS, explainable IDS, and benchmark datasets. We then categorize generative AI applications in IDS according to model families and task objectives, covering autoencoder-based models, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). Finally, we review emerging studies that integrate generative AI with FL-based IDS and discuss open challenges, including synthetic data quality, realistic traffic generation, dual-use adversarial risks, non-IID client distributions, communication-efficient model sharing, federated IDS benchmarking, and domain-specific LLMs for network security.

Despite growing interest, most evaluations of large language models' (LLMs') personalization abilities have relied on synthetic data. It remains unclear how well current personalization systems work for real users. In this paper, we study the gap in LLM personalization performance when using synthetic versus human data. We collect human conversations (550 conversations) and judgments across three stages of personalization: extracting user attributes from conversations (5,949 judgments), pairing relevant attributes with new prompts (11,919), and incorporating relevant attributes into a personalized response (1,101). Incorporating human data reveals system limitations at each stage. Models struggle to extract attributes from human conversations, disagree with human judgments on relevant attributes, and generate personalized responses that humans judge no better than generic responses (though that LLM judges widely rate as better). We introduce two lightweight training-based interventions that shift automated personalization evaluation closer to human data in our first two stages. However, in our third stage we find that learned reward models achieve only modest correlation with human ratings, suggesting that human-aligned personalization quality judgments are difficult to model directly. Our collected data provides a foundation for studying how models should extract, select, and incorporate user information in ways that humans find useful.

Real-world deployment of AI vision models is both fueled and limited by the data available for training and testing. Real datasets are sparse and uneven: long-tailed or unbalanced distributions hinder generalization, and the low number of samples in low density regions makes it hard to run evaluations. Synthetic data can fill these gaps, providing us with a way to sample the input space more continuously and improve data coverage for benchmarks. Focusing on the autonomous driving safety-critical case of pedestrian detection in the dark, we show how synthetic low-light samples can be used to better characterize the performance of a state-of-the-art object detection model as a function of the scene illumination. We use a synthetic RAW image augmentation technique to generate low-light samples that match the noise model of the camera sensor. Performance metrics on real and synthetic low-light data are similar, indicating that the AI model finds it hard to distinguish between them.

Semantic segmentation provides pixel-level scene understanding essential for autonomous driving and fine-grained perception tasks. However, training segmentation models requires costly, labor-intensive annotations on real-world datasets. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses this by training models on labeled synthetic data and adapting them to unlabeled real images. While conceptually simple, adaptation is challenging due to the domain gap, i.e., differences in visual appearance and scene structure between synthetic and real data. Prior approaches bridge this gap through pixel-level mixing or feature-level contrastive learning. Yet, these techniques suffer from two major limitations: (1) reliance on high-confidence pseudo-labels restricts learning to a subset of the target domain, and (2) prototype-based contrastive methods initialize class prototypes from source-trained models, yielding biased and unstable anchors during adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a dual-foundation UDA framework that leverages two complementary foundation models. First, we employ the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with superpixel-guided prompting to enable learning from a broader range of target pixels beyond high-confidence predictions. Second, we incorporate DINOv3 to construct stable, domain-invariant class prototypes through its robust representation learning. Our method achieves consistent improvements of +1.3% and +1.4% mIoU over strong UDA baselines on GTA-to-Cityscapes and SYNTHIA-to-Cityscapes, respectively.

Synthetic medical image data can unlock the potential of deep learning (DL)-based clinical decision support (CDS) systems through the creation of large scale, privacy-preserving, training sets. Despite the significant progress in this field, there is still a largely unanswered research question: "How can we quantitatively assess the similarity of a synthetically generated set of images with a set of real images in a given application domain?". Today, answers to this question are mainly provided via user evaluation studies, inception-based measures, and the classification performance achieved on synthetic images. This paper proposes a novel measure to assess the similarity between synthetically generated and real sets of images, in terms of their utility for the development of DL-based CDS systems. Inspired by generalized neural additive models, and unlike inception-based measures, the proposed measure is interpretable (Interpretable Utility Similarity, IUS), explaining why a synthetic dataset could be more useful than another one in the context of a CDS system based on clinically relevant image features. The experimental results on publicly available benchmark datasets from various color medical imaging modalities including endoscopic, dermoscopic and fundus imaging, indicate that selecting synthetic images of high utility similarity using IUS can result in relative improvements of up to 54.6% in terms of classification performance. The generality of IUS for synthetic data assessment is demonstrated also for grayscale X-ray and ultrasound imaging modalities. IUS implementation is available at https://github.com/innoisys/ius.

Synthetic images are increasingly used to augment scarce real data for object detection. However, not all synthetic sets help equally, and the only way to know a set's value is to train a detector on it, which is slow and demands dense annotation. We ask whether a training-free metric can instead rank candidate synthetic training sets by their downstream utility. Existing image-set metrics such as FID, KID, and MMD compare two feature distributions with a single global statistic, which we show is mis-specified for detection-data selection in two ways: it is blind to per-image composition (object count, box scale, class mix), and even at fixed composition its global averaging washes out the appearance differences that separate high-mAP pools from low-mAP ones. We propose Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which converts any feature-space distance into a composition-stratified comparison, matching candidate and target within metadata-defined strata without training a detector. On COCO and VisDrone-DET, the best CCDM variant ranks 19 candidate training sets in strong agreement with YOLOv8 mAP (Spearman \r{ho} = 0.97 and 0.96), outperforming FID, KID, and MMD. Furthermore, CCDM holds when reference metadata comes from detector pseudo-labels rather than ground-truth boxes.

Hardware assurance relies on scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to verify nanoscale structures, but assembling the large, high-quality datasets required for automated analysis is impeded by time-intensive acquisition and strict intellectual property (IP) constraints on proprietary designs. We propose a privacy-preserving pipeline that secures IP by heavily distorting the functional design while generating a visually realistic synthetic dataset from a small set of initial examples. A StyleGAN first learns the distribution of hardware layout masks to generate novel, macroscopically varied structures. Subsequently, a conditional GAN (Pix2PixHD) translates these masks into realistic SEM images that preserve authentic textures and noise. The primary finding of this work is that a segmentation model trained exclusively on this synthetic data not only demonstrates a successful "sim-to-real" transfer to real images but also outperforms a baseline model trained on the limited real dataset. Because the underlying synthetic layouts are demonstrably novel and reproduce none of the specific proprietary routing of the original design, deploying the final segmentation model mitigates the risk of exposing sensitive IP to attacks like gradient inversion and membership inference, providing a highly secure, high-performance solution for hardware assurance.

Recent generative models can produce high-quality synthetic images, offering scalable training training data for data-hungry models. Existing approaches to exploiting this potential typically involve 1) training or fine-tuning generators, or 2) using lightweight post-hoc adaptation like prompt engineering or inference-time guidance, making them generator-specific and expertise-intensive. We study a complementary question: given a fixed pool of generated images, can downstream utility be improved purely by selecting an informative subset? The answer is yes. We show that effective selection must counter a structural bias of modern generators: they tend to over-produce canonical modes of each class while underrepresenting intra-class variation. Building on this insight, we split each real class into a canonical Homogeneous (HO) subset and a non-redundant Heterogeneous (HE) subset, then score synthetic images by a fidelity-diversity criterion that rewards semantic alignment while penalizing canonical redundancy. The method is generator-agnostic and requires no retraining. Across multiple benchmarks, it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines and matches the real-data performance with up to 40% fewer synthetic samples. The same criterion remains effective when applied on top of stronger task-tuned generators, with gains on both classification and segmentation tasks. Post-generation selection is therefore not a substitute for better generators, but a complementary mechanism for improving the utility of synthetic data.

Synthetic post-training pipelines commonly filter generated samples with reward models or holistic LLM judges, yet two practices remain rarely examined together: whether the filtering signal is grounded in the source evidence that induced each generation, and whether rejected samples can be systematically recovered rather than permanently discarded. We present a controlled study of both questions across gate configurations, recovery strategies, and generator scales, using adversarially injected corpora to provide ground-truth failure labels. We find that exact source provenance improves faithfulness gating for stronger judges, that hallucination and reward gates reject largely disjoint sample populations making both necessary, and that an adaptive recovery pipeline combining failure diagnosis with targeted regeneration achieves higher yield, recovery rate, and injection recall than naive resampling. Downstream fine-tuning quality is driven primarily by generator scale, with filtration and recovery conditions contributing meaningfully but secondarily.

Autonomous driving systems are commonly trained and evaluated within limited geographic regions, which hinders their scalability when deployed in new cities. However, significant domain shifts in appearance, road topology, and traffic patterns often cause severe performance degradation under cross-city deployment. Existing approaches based on domain adaptation, data augmentation, or synthetic data generation typically rely on labeled target data, city-specific annotations, or task-specific designs, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for holistic evaluation. In this paper, we introduce CityTransfer-Bench, a geographically disjoint benchmark for evaluating cross-city generalization across perception, segmentation, and planning, and propose CityGen, a diffusion-based generative framework that performs zero-label city adaptation via HD-map-conditioned synthesis guided by city-level visual prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CityGen consistently improves cross-city robustness across multiple tasks, establishing a scalable and label-efficient foundation for generalizable autonomous driving.

Mapping large origin-destination (OD) datasets remains challenging because flow maps become cluttered, meaningful patterns occur at multiple spatial scales, and existing flow-mapping approaches frequently rely on predefined aggregation units or manual generalization. This paper presents XFlowMap, a framework for the cross-scale generalization and mapping of massive OD data. Specifically, the framework integrates cross-scale flow pattern (cluster) detection, automated flow map generalization, and a new cartographic representation for analyzing and visualizing complex origin-destination flow structures. The approach detects salient flow patterns at their appropriate origin and destination scales, extracts high-level structures, and generates a new flow map representation that supports holistic interpretation of complex origin-destination flow patterns. A scan-statistic-based procedure is developed to evaluate and generalize cross-scale flow clusters. The detected clusters are then visualized using a novel flow symbol that integrates location, direction, strength, and OD scales in a single representation. The framework supports both area-based and point-based OD data, is robust to sparse and noisy datasets, and enables comparative mapping of stratified flow data. Experiments with synthetic data and U.S. migration data demonstrate that the method effectively extracts meaningful cross-scale flow patterns and produces clear, information-rich flow maps for large mobility datasets, supporting both static presentation and interactive exploration.

Cross-domain shifts challenge Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) on ID Cards, given the restricted data available due to privacy concerns. This work proposes a compact multimodal model, based on new generative and discriminative blocks, which combines visual and textual data for PAD on genuine and synthetic ID images. While multimodal models exhibit strong generalisation after supervised fine-tuning, they fail in zero-shot settings. Our findings underscore that model capacity and real-world data are essential for reliable PAD, while existing synthetic datasets may not reflect real-world challenges. We argue for a re-evaluation of synthetic data as a benchmark and emphasise the need for more realistic, diverse datasets to advance PAD research.

Research regarding the sign language recognition mostly relies on RGB images, whileas sign language datasets that provide depth images are limited. Point clouds obtained from depth images can be used for sign language recognition with neural networks like PointNet. In recent years, various neural networks are used for generating realistic depth images from monocular RGB images. In this work, synthetic depth images were created from RGB images using Depth Anything V2 network. For this purpose, three sign language datasets (Real-time ASL Fingerspelling, KArSL, AUTSL) which contain both RGB and depth images were used. Classification accuracies of the point cloud data created from both original and synthetic depth images using various PointNet architectures were measured for sign language recognition. From the original and synthetic point clouds, frame based, Point Gesture Map and Long Short Term Memory data models were used for classification and their performances were compared. In the results, both original and synthetic based data achieved acceptable performance in most models. In general, original depth based point cloud models performed better than synthetic ones, however in some models synthetic depth based models performed better than the originals.

In high-stakes domains such as healthcare, privacy concerns severely limit the use of real-world training data. Differentially private (DP) synthetic data offers a promising alternative with formal privacy guarantees, but achieving strong utility remains challenging for clinical note generation due to domain specificity and long-form text complexity. We present Term2Note, a method for synthesising full-length clinical notes under DP constraints. By structurally separating content and form, Term2Note generates section-wise note content conditioned on medical terms, with terms and notes privatised under separate DP constraints, and applies a DP quality maximiser to improve outputs. Experiments demonstrate that Term2Note produces synthetic notes with statistical properties closely aligned with real clinical notes, and that downstream models trained on these notes achieve performance comparable to those trained on real clinical data. Compared to existing DP text generation baselines, Term2Note substantially improves both fidelity and utility, without relying on label distribution assumptions, highlighting its effectiveness as a practical privacy-preserving alternative to real clinical notes.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to learn a target-domain classifier from labeled source data and unlabeled target data under distribution shift. Recent diffusion-based UDA methods approach this problem by synthesizing labeled target-style images and training on the resulting synthetic data. However, their performance depends heavily on the conditioning design: class prompts provide only coarse guidance, while domain adaptation modules mainly control appearance, which may leave target-style synthesis insufficiently specified. We propose VT-DUDA, a visual-token conditioning framework for diffusion-guided UDA. Instead of relying only on text prompts, VT-DUDA uses source images to provide additional instance-level visual context for target-style synthesis. Specifically, VT-DUDA maps each source image to a compact sequence of visual tokens and forms a hybrid conditioning context by concatenating these tokens with the corresponding text embeddings along the cross-attention context dimension of a latent diffusion model. This provides instance-dependent conditioning beyond text alone, while synthesis is performed with the target-domain adapter branch. Because guidance is represented explicitly as a token sequence, the same interface also permits inference-time manipulation of the conditioning signal through token selection and token-strength adjustment. The proposed method preserves the standard diffusion objective and can be integrated into existing adapter-based diffusion frameworks without modifying the backbone. Across Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA-2017, VT-DUDA improves average target-domain accuracy over strong discriminative and diffusion-based UDA baselines. The results suggest that, in generation-based UDA, a stronger conditioning interface can improve the downstream usefulness of synthetic target-style data.

Scribble-guided image editing allows users to combine simple scribble annotations with text prompts to specify both where and how an image should be edited, enabling flexible interaction with precise spatial control. However, existing models still exhibit unstable performance under this paradigm, especially in multi-task scenarios. To improve performance, we conduct empirical studies using an open-source editing model and reveal an asymmetry in generalization: instruction-level generalization, including across editing tasks and from single-task to multi-task settings, is more challenging than image-domain generalization, such as from synthetic to real-world images or from mosaicked to regular images. This suggests that the primary bottleneck lies in insufficient learning for diverse editing instructions rather than in the image domain gap. Motivated by this insight, we propose three strategies: (a) a Coverage-then-Realism Curriculum, a two-stage pipeline that first builds large-scale synthetic, instruction-rich data for broad task supervision, then curates a small set of real-world data to refine generation realism; (b) Multi-Task Mosaicking, which constructs multi-task training samples by concatenating single-task examples at nearly zero cost while enabling the learned capability to generalize to non-mosaicked images; and (c) an Edit-Focused Loss, which leverages the changed regions between input and output images in synthetic data to focus training on edited regions, improving both learning efficiency and editing accuracy. With these strategies, we substantially improve both single-task and multi-task scribble-guided editing on the VIBE benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art results. We will publicly release our dataset and model.

Object detection in adverse weather is critical for the safety of autonomous vehicles; however, the scarcity of labelled, real-world foggy data remains a significant bottleneck. In this paper, we propose Clear2Fog (C2F), an end-to-end, physics-based pipeline that simulates fog on clear-weather datasets while ensuring cross-modal consistency across camera and LiDAR. C2F combines monocular depth estimation with a novel atmospheric light estimation method to improve the physical consistency of synthetic fog generation while reducing structural artifacts and chromatic biases observed in existing frameworks. Utilising a training set of 270,000 images from the Waymo Open Dataset, we conduct an extensive data efficiency study to investigate whether environmental diversity can reduce dataset scale requirements and improve model generalisation under varying fog conditions. Our findings reveal that models trained on mixed-density fog datasets at 75% scale achieve comparable detection performance to those trained on fixed-density datasets at 100% scale, reducing synthetic training data requirements by 25%. We observe that this efficiency trend is consistent across two representative detector architectures. Furthermore, we investigate the sim-to-real transfer by using C2F-generated data as a pre-training foundation before fine-tuning on real-world fog data. We demonstrate that, within the evaluated settings, a relative 10x increase in the default fine-tuning learning rate reduces the negative transfer caused by standard fine-tuning, achieving up to a 1.17 mAP point improvement beyond the real-only baseline. Overall, this work demonstrates the value of diverse synthetic fog as a pre-training tool for real-world adaptation.

Epidemiological models often rely on survey data to represent how individuals make health-related decisions, such as whether to vaccinate or adopt protective behaviors. However, repeated large-scale surveys are costly, time-consuming, and limited in the range of scenarios they can capture. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can generate synthetic survey responses that reproduce patterns observed in real populations. Using longitudinal data from the FluPaths surveys, we first identify groups associated with broadly positive or negative attitudes toward vaccination through clustering analysis. We then evaluate several LLMs using a cluster-informed prompting approach to generate synthetic survey responses across multiple epidemic waves. Across models, the synthetic data generally reproduce the distributions of demographic characteristics, vaccination-related beliefs, risk perceptions, and health behaviors observed in the survey data. However, they are less successful at capturing how these factors vary together within respondents. Some models reproduce group-level vaccination trends more reliably than others, although performance varies across waves. We also trained a classifier to distinguish real from synthetic records and found that the generated responses remained identifiable as synthetic. Overall, our findings suggest that LLM-generated survey data may provide a useful tool for exploratory data augmentation and we hope that it could support agent-based epidemic modeling approaches. However, the generated data should not be treated as a substitute for human survey data without further methodological improvements and validation.

Survival analysis models time-to-event data, but in clinical settings training data are costly and scarce: events accrue over years of follow-up, cohorts are small, and privacy regulations restrict sharing across institutions. Tabular generative models promise augmentation and privacy-preserving cohort sharing, yet are themselves data-hungry -- on the small cohorts typical of survival analysis, a single generator rarely characterizes the population well enough for downstream models trained on its output to match real-data performance. FoGS (Filtered Mixture-of-Generators for Survival analysis) reframes synthetic-data construction as sample selection rather than generation. A candidate pool is drawn from four architecturally distinct tabular generators, and each sample is scored by an ensemble of seven survival models trained on real data, using proper scoring rules as a per-sample plausibility proxy. A two-level pipeline optimizes, in its outer loop, a selection policy -- generator quotas, scorer weights, a random complement, and stratified balancing on event time and censoring -- against held-out downstream performance, while an inner loop tunes the downstream model (XGBoost-Cox). On 16 public datasets under train-on-synthetic, test-on-real (C-index and IBS, $0$--$100$ scale), FoGS yields mean improvements of $+2.17$ in C-index and $+0.67$ in IBS, improving both metrics on 9 of 16 datasets and at least one on 13 (one-sided Wilcoxon $p=0.039$ and $p=0.035$). It matches or exceeds real-data training on most cohorts, with no significant change in nearest-neighbour privacy margin relative to unfiltered sampling. Sample filtering over a heterogeneous generator pool is thus a viable substitute for real-data training in privacy-restricted clinical settings.

Synthetic augmentation is increasingly used to mitigate data scarcity in financial machine learning, yet its statistical role remains poorly understood. We formalize synthetic augmentation as a modification of the effective training distribution and show that it induces a structural bias--variance trade-off: while additional samples may reduce estimation error, they may also shift the population objective whenever the synthetic distribution deviates from regions relevant under evaluation. To isolate informational gains from mechanical sample-size effects, we introduce a size-matched null augmentation and a finite-sample, non-parametric block permutation test that remains valid under weak temporal dependence. We evaluate this framework in both controlled Markov-switching environments and real financial datasets, including high-frequency option trade data and a daily equity panel. Across generators spanning bootstrap, copula-based models, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, and TimeGAN, we vary augmentation ratio, model capacity, task type, regime rarity, and signal-to-noise. We show that synthetic augmentation is beneficial only in variance-dominant regimes, such as persistent volatility forecasting-while it deteriorates performance in bias-dominant settings, including near-efficient directional prediction. Rare-regime targeting can improve domain-specific metrics but may conflict with unconditional permutation inference. Our results provide a structural perspective on when synthetic data improves financial learning performance and when it induces persistent distributional distortion.

This work presents the development of hybrid models that integrate spiking neural networks (SNNs) with components of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn from simulated event-based camera data (Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) generated from conventional smartphone videos. Aimed primarily at human fall detection, the approach leverages the energy efficiency and spatio-temporal processing capabilities of SNNs by converting video frames into event-based data. The proposed models are evaluated through simulations on multiple datasets, comparing their performance to that of traditional machine learning models. Results demonstrate significant gains in efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring the potential of combining SNNs and DVS technology for complex tasks in real-world environments.

Generative models of limit orderbook (LOB) data have advanced rapidly, but their evaluation often focuses on stylised facts and selected market statistics. These measures provide useful diagnostics but may not capture the joint temporal and cross-level structure of order-book trajectories. We introduce LOB-ID, an embedding-based framework that adapts the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Monge Inception Distance (MIND) to LOB data. To obtain domain-specific embeddings, we train the DeepLOB architecture on four months of Level-2 order-book data for five equities. We show that LOB-ID is stable across time, instruments, and embedding checkpoints, and rises monotonically under controlled distortions. We then construct a moment-matching attack against FID and a deep-book perturbation that evades statistic-based evaluation. MIND remains substantially more sensitive to both distortions. Finally, we score five generative LOB models, spanning stochastic baselines and deep learning approaches, and find that LOB-ID ranks them in line with the joint temporal and cross-level structure each captures by construction.

Recent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) models rely on electromagnetic articulography (EMA) data, which are costly and limited in scale. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{ArtBoost}, a novel data augmentation strategy that leverages large-scale speech--mesh datasets originally developed for speech-driven 3D facial animation to improve AAI under limited EMA supervision. \textit{ArtBoost} extracts pseudo articulatory trajectories from visible facial anchors and uses them for pre-training before fine-tuning on real EMA data. Experiments show consistent improvements in PCC and RMSE. Trajectory analyses confirm that the pseudo articulatory signals reflect physically meaningful visible articulatory dynamics. Additional evaluations across different AAI architectures demonstrate stable performance gains, indicating that \textit{ArtBoost} can be integrated into diverse AAI models. These results suggest that speech--mesh data provide an effective and scalable source of articulatory supervision for AAI. Project page: https://cau-irislab.github.io/Interspeech26-ArtBoost/

Spherical harmonic encoded acoustic sound-fields capture directional characteristics of room impulse responses that are useful for accurate spatial audio reproduction. However, high costs of multi-microphone measurements and numerical simulations motivate alternative data-set augmentation and synthetic data generation methods that supplement small collections. This paper introduces time-varying exponentiated convolution methods that transform both Gaussian noise and impulse responses into reverberation and modified spectral-decay fields respectively. We derive two recursive and fast convolution algorithms that extend into the spherical harmonic domain, model smooth reverberation time distributions with non-stationary Gaussian processes, and realize an optimal filter design. Experiments evaluate computational performance, and validate out-of-distribution generated impulse responses.

Billions of scientific papers lead to the need to identify essential parts from the massive text. Scientific research is an activity from putting forward problems to using methods. To learn the main idea from scientific papers, we focus on extracting problem and method sentences. Annotating sentences within scientific papers is labor-intensive, resulting in small-scale datasets that limit the amount of information models can learn. This limited information leads models to rely heavily on specific forms, which in turn reduces their generalization capabilities. This paper addresses the problems caused by small-scale datasets from three perspectives: increasing dataset scale, reducing dependence on specific forms, and enriching the information within sentences. To implement the first two ideas, we introduce the concept of formulaic expression (FE) desensitization and propose FE desensitization-based data augmenters to generate synthetic data and reduce models' reliance on FEs. For the third idea, we propose a context-enhanced transformer that utilizes context to measure the importance of words in target sentences and to reduce noise in the context. Furthermore, this paper conducts experiments using large language model (LLM) based in-context learning (ICL) methods. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed models achieve a higher macro F1 score compared to the baseline models on two scientific paper datasets, with improvements of 3.71% and 2.67%, respectively. The LLM based ICL methods are found to be not suitable for the task of problem and method extraction.

Maritime distress communications transmitted over very high frequency (VHF) radio are safety-critical voice messages used to report emergencies at sea. Under the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS), such messages follow standardized procedures and are expected to convey essential details, including vessel identity, position, nature of the distress, and required assistance. In practice, however, automatic analysis remains difficult because distress messages are often brief, noisy, and produced under stress, may deviate from the prescribed format, and are further degraded by automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors caused by channel noise and speaker stress. This paper presents SeaAlert, a controlled experimental framework for evaluating robust analysis of maritime distress communications using transformer-based severity classification and LLM-based structured extraction. To address the scarcity of labeled real-world data, we develop a synthetic data generation pipeline in which an LLM produces diverse maritime messages, including challenging variants in which standard distress codewords are omitted or replaced with less explicit expressions. The generated utterances are synthesized into speech, degraded with simulated VHF noise, and transcribed by an ASR system to obtain controlled noise-degraded transcripts. The resulting evaluation shows that transformer-based classification degrades more gracefully than lexical baselines under ASR noise and codeword masking, while LLM-based extraction is more effective than Regex-based extraction for noisy structured fields.

As scaling laws push the training of frontier large language models (LLMs) toward ever-growing data requirements, training pipelines are approaching a regime where much of the publicly available online text may be consumed. At the same time, widespread LLM usage increases the volume of machine-generated content on the web; together, these trends raise the likelihood of generated text re-entering future training corpora, increasing the associated risk of performance degradation often called model collapse. In practice, model developers address this concern through data cleaning, watermarking, synthetic-data policies, or, in some cases, blissful ignorance. However, the problem of model collapse in generative models has not been examined from a learning-theoretic perspective: we study it through the theoretical lens of the language generation in the limit framework, introducing a replay adversary that augments the example stream with the generator's own past outputs. Our main contribution is a fine-grained learning-theoretic characterization of when replay fundamentally limits generation: while replay is benign for the strongest notion of uniform generation, it provably creates separations for the weaker notions of non-uniform generation and generation in the limit. Interestingly, our positive results mirror heuristics widely used in practice, such as data cleaning, watermarking, and output filtering, while our separations show when these ideas can fail.

Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of graph-driven applications by identifying abnormal graphs that deviate from the majority. Considering the privacy concerns in distributed scenarios, federated graph-level anomaly detection (FedGLAD) has emerged as a promising solution to enable collaborative detection without sharing raw data. However, existing methods suffer from poor generalization due to the reliance on unrealistic synthetic anomalies and insufficient personalization capabilities under data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Federated graph-level anomaly detection approach with Cluster-adaptIve GAted Reconstruction (FedCIGAR). Specifically, we design a reconstruction-based paradigm trained on normal graphs to avoid synthetic data. Furthermore, we introduce a client-side node contribution gating mechanism and a server-side sliding window-based clustering strategy to tackle data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedCIGAR achieves superior performance and robustness in contrast to state-of-the-art methods.

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has given rise to an interactive learning environment, where model parameters are continuously updated using not only data generated by natural processes, but also synthetic outputs produced by other models. This paradigm introduces two major challenges: (1) training data are no longer drawn exclusively from the target population, undermining a core assumption of classical statistical learning, and (2) model training processes become inherently correlated, as models interact with one another through repeated exposure to each other's synthetic outputs in a potentially complex manner. Establishing reliable statistical inference in such structured interactive learning environments therefore remains an important open problem. In particular, there is growing concern about model collapse, a phenomenon in which the performance of generative models progressively degrades as they are trained on synthetic data produced by earlier model generations. Prior work on model collapse primarily focuses on a single model trained on its own output, failing to capture model performance in multi-model interactive settings. In this work, we fill this gap by investigating the performance of generative models in an interactive learning environment with general interaction patterns. In particular, we formalize model interactions using directed graphs and show that the occurrence of model collapse depends critically on the topology of the interaction graph. We further derive an explicit necessary and sufficient condition characterizing when model collapse occurs, and establish finite-sample results for linear regression and asymptotic guarantees for general M-estimators. We support our theoretical findings through extensive numerical experiments.