arXiv:2509.11080v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recommender systems (RecSys) have been widely applied to various applications, including E-commerce, finance, healthcare, social media and have become increasingly influential in shaping user behavior and decision-making, highlighting their growing impact in various domains. However, recent studies have shown that RecSys are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether user interaction record was used to train a target model or not. MIAs on RecSys models can directly lead to a privacy breach. For example, via identifying the fact that a purchase record that has been used to train a RecSys associated with a specific user, an attacker can infer that user's special quirks. In recent years, MIAs have been shown to be effective on other ML tasks, e.g., classification models and natural language processing. However, traditional MIAs are ill-suited for RecSys due to the unseen posterior probability. Although MIAs on RecSys form a newly emerging and rapidly growing research area, there has been no systematic survey on this topic yet. In this article, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on RecSys MIAs. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in RecSys MIAs, exploring the design principles, challenges, attack and defense associated with this emerging field. We provide a unified taxonomy that categorizes different RecSys MIAs based on their characterizations and discuss their pros and cons. Based on the limitations and gaps identified in this survey, we point out several promising future research directions to inspire the researchers who wish to follow this area. This survey not only serves as a reference for the research community but also provides a clear description for researchers outside this research domain.

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 12 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-03199-9

Safety, efficacy and acceptability of human-GenAI single-session exposure-based intervention for academic anxiety: randomized controlled trials

This study developed a multi-layer inducible RNA switch that achieves transient expression of gene-delivery vectors in hepatic and non-hepatic tissues. As an exemplary application, this RNA switch triggers pulsive expression of gene editors that reduces the off-target effects and immunotoxicity of gene editing.

Nature Nanotechnology, Published online: 08 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41565-026-02275-1

Structured light–matter interaction at the single-photon level is demonstrated in a coupled quantum-dot–micropillar system, enabling cavity-enhanced single-photon emission with spin-locked orbital angular momentum and tunable spin–orbit entanglement.

arXiv:2601.04823v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prominent paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs). Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, are widely adopted to adapt pretrained MoE LLMs to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches typically assign identical LoRA ranks to all expert modules, ignoring the heterogeneous specialization of pretrained experts. This uniform allocation leads to a resource mismatch: task-relevant experts are under-provisioned, while less relevant ones receive redundant parameters. To address this, we propose DR-LoRA, a Dynamic Rank LoRA framework for fine-tuning pretrained MoE models. Specifically, DR-LoRA initializes all expert LoRA modules with a small active rank and uses an expert saliency score, which combines routing frequency and gradient-based rank importance, to identify which experts would benefit most from additional capacity. It then periodically expands the active ranks of the task-critical expert LoRA, progressively constructing a heterogeneous rank distribution tailored to the target task. Experiments on three MoE models across six tasks show that DR-LoRA consistently outperforms LoRA and other strong baselines, demonstrating that task-adaptive heterogeneous rank allocation is an effective strategy to improve active capacity utilization in MoE fine-tuning.

arXiv:2602.19271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Second-order optimizers can significantly accelerate large-scale training, yet their naive federated variants are often unstable or even diverge on non-IID data. We show that a key culprit is \emph{preconditioner drift}: client-side second-order training induces heterogeneous \emph{curvature-defined geometries} (i.e., preconditioner coordinate systems), and server-side model averaging updates computed under incompatible metrics, corrupting the global descent direction. To address this geometric mismatch, we propose \texttt{FedPAC}, a \emph{preconditioner alignment and correction} framework for reliable federated second-order optimization. \texttt{FedPAC} explicitly decouples parameter aggregation from geometry synchronization by: (i) \textbf{Alignment} (i.e.,aggregating local preconditioners into a global reference and warm-starting clients via global preconditioner); and (ii) \textbf{Correction} (i.e., steering local preconditioned updates using a global preconditioned direction to suppress long-term drift). We provide drift-coupled non-convex convergence guarantees with linear speedup under partial participation. Empirically, \texttt{FedPAC} consistently improves stability and accuracy across vision and language tasks, achieving up to $5.8\%$ absolute accuracy gain on CIFAR-100 with ViTs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedPAC-8B24.

arXiv:2602.19926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large vision models (LVMs) and large language models (LLMs) under differentially private federated learning (DPFL) is hindered by a fundamental privacy-utility trade-off. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a promising parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, reduces computational and communication costs by introducing two trainable low-rank matrices while freezing pre-trained weights. However, directly applying LoRA in DPFL settings leads to performance degradation, especially in LVMs. Our analysis reveals three previously underexplored challenges: (1) gradient coupling caused by the simultaneous update of two asymmetric low-rank matrices, (2) compounded noise amplification under differential privacy, and (3) sharpness of the global aggregated model in the parameter space. To address these issues, we propose LA-LoRA (\textbf{L}ocal \textbf{A}lternating \textbf{LoRA}), a novel approach that decouples gradient interactions and aligns update directions across clients to enhance robustness under stringent privacy constraints. Theoretically, LA-LoRA strengthens convergence guarantees in noisy federated environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LA-LoRA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Swin Transformer and RoBERTa models, showcasing robustness to DP noise and broad applicability across both LVMs and LLMs. For example, when fine-tuning the Swin-B model on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset under a strict privacy budget ($\epsilon = 1$), LA-LoRA outperforms the best baseline, RoLoRA, by 16.83\% in test accuracy. Code is provided in \repolink.

arXiv:2602.19945v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Balancing convergence efficiency and robustness under Differential Privacy (DP) is a central challenge in Federated Learning (FL). While AdamW accelerates training and fine-tuning in large-scale models, we find that directly applying it to Differentially Private FL (DPFL) suffers from three major issues: (i) data heterogeneity and privacy noise jointly amplify the variance of second-moment estimator, (ii) DP perturbations bias the second-moment estimator, and (iii) DP amplify AdamW sensitivity to local overfitting, worsening client drift. We propose DP-FedAdamW, the first AdamW-based optimizer for DPFL. It restores AdamW under DP by stabilizing second-moment variance, removing DP-induced bias, and aligning local updates to the global descent to curb client drift. Theoretically, we establish an unbiased second-moment estimator and prove a linearly accelerated convergence rate without any heterogeneity assumption, while providing tighter $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP guarantees. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of DP-FedAdamW across language and vision Transformers and ResNet-18. On Tiny-ImageNet (Swin-Base, $\varepsilon=1$), DP-FedAdamW outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 5.83\%. The code is available in Appendix.