The below posted today by SarangNoether might be interesting:
Informal discussions with a Purdue researcher at the IEEE workshop yielded great new information about refund transactions under active research by one of his students. Refund transactions are a necessary component of certain payment channel applications. A scheme was proposed to us that involves modifying the structure of outputs and ring signatures to allow for a sender to include two outputs: one is valid prior to a specified block height, and the other is valid afterward. We are working with the researchers on the details and security of this scheme, which could have great applications to Monero transactions.