The performance of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) is critically dependent on the relevance and quality of the datasets used for training and evaluation. However, current AI model evaluation practices for developing IDS/IPS focus predominantly on accuracy metrics, often overlooking whether datasets represent industry-specific threats. To address this gap, we introduce a novel multi-dimensional framework that integrates the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base for threat intelligence and employs five complementary metrics that together provide a comprehensive assessment of dataset suitability. Methodologically, this framework combines threat intelligence, natural language processing, and quantitative analysis to assess the suitability of datasets for specific industry contexts. Applying this framework to nine publicly available IDS/IPS datasets reveals significant gaps in threat coverage, particularly in the healthcare, energy, and financial sectors. In particular, recent datasets (e.g., CIC-IoMT, CIC-UNSW-NB15) align better with sector-specific threats, whereas others, like CICIoV-24, underperform despite their recency. Our findings provide a standardized, interpretable approach for selecting datasets aligned with sector-specific operational requirements, ultimately enhancing the real-world effectiveness of AI-driven IDS/IPS deployments. The efficiency and practicality of the framework are validated through deployment in a real-world case study, underscoring its capacity to inform dataset selection and enhance the effectiveness of AI-driven IDS/IPS in operational environments.

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to accomplish various user goals through natural language communication, which often involve complexity and require multiple dialogue turns to complete [1-3]. For instance, when assisting users in booking air tickets, a task-oriented dialogue system engages in a conversation to gather information such as the departure place, destination, and departure time. Once sufficient information is obtained, the system automatically handles the booking process. The convenience offered by this natural language interaction has led to a growing interest in task-oriented dialogue systems in recent years [4-6]. Traditionally, task-oriented dialogue systems are generally modeled as intelligent agents that have access to back-end APIs to acquire knowledge in a database [7-9], thereby using this knowledge to help users complete various tasks. These agents follow a pipeline process in the dialogue with users: predict the user's intention, extract slot values in the user's utterance, call API to access the database and response to the user [10-15]. For example, as shown in Figure 1, when a user desires to book a restaurant, the agent engages in a dialogue where, in the first 4 turns, the user seeks a restaurant meeting specific requirements, prompting the agent to call the "find_restaurant" API. In the last 2 turns, the user provides detailed reservation information, leading to the agent calling the "book_restaurant" API. However, in real-world scenarios, the availability of customized APIs for building practical task-oriented dialogue systems is limited, primarily due to two reasons.

Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable text generation capabilities, often hallucinate and generate text that is factually incorrect and not grounded in real-world knowledge. This poses serious risks in domains like healthcare, finance, and customer support. A typical way to use LLMs is via the APIs provided by LLM vendors where there is no access to model weights or options to fine-tune the model. Existing methods to detect hallucinations in such settings where the model access is restricted or constrained by resources typically require making multiple LLM API calls, increasing latency and API cost. We introduce CONFACTCHECK, an efficient hallucination detection approach that does not leverage any external knowledge base and works on the simple intuition that responses to factual probes within the generated text should be consistent within a single LLM and across different LLMs. Rigorous empirical evaluation on multiple datasets that cover both the generation of factual texts and the open generation shows that CONFACTCHECK can detect hallucinated facts efficiently using fewer resources and achieves higher accuracy scores compared to existing baselines that operate under similar conditions. Our code is available here.

Road safety is a critical global concern, with manual enforcement of helmet laws and vehicle safety standards (e.g., rear-view mirror presence) being resource-intensive and inconsistent. This paper presents an AI-powered system to automate traffic violation detection, significantly enhancing enforcement efficiency and road safety. The system leverages YOLOv8 for robust object detection and EasyOCR for license plate recognition. Trained on a custom dataset of annotated images (augmented for diversity), it identifies helmet non-compliance, the absence of rear-view mirrors on motorcycles, an innovative contribution to automated checks, and extracts vehicle registration numbers. A Streamlit-based interface facilitates real-time monitoring and violation logging. Advanced image preprocessing enhances license plate recognition, particularly under challenging conditions. Based on evaluation results, the model achieves an overall precision of 0.9147, a recall of 0.886, and a mean Average Precision (mAP@50) of 0.843. The mAP@50 95 of 0.503 further indicates strong detection capability under stricter IoU thresholds. This work demonstrates a practical and effective solution for automated traffic rule enforcement, with considerations for real-world deployment discussed.

Steganography and steganalysis are strongly related subjects of information security. Over the past decade, many powerful and efficient artificial intelligence (AI) - driven techniques have been designed and presented during research into steganography as well as steganalysis. This study presents a scientometric analysis of AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques using a thematic modelling approach. A total of 654 articles within the time span of 2017 to 2023 have been considered. Experimental evaluation of the study reveals that 69% of published articles are from Asian countries. The China is on top (TP:312), followed by India (TP-114). The study mainly identifies seven thematic clusters: steganographic image data hiding, deep image steganalysis, neural watermark robustness, linguistic steganography models, speech steganalysis algorithms, covert communication networks, and video steganography techniques. The proposed study also assesses the scope of AI-steganography under the purview of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to present the interdisciplinary reciprocity between them. It has been observed that only 18 of the 654 articles are aligned with one of the SDGs, which shows that limited studies conducted in alignment with SDG goals. SDG9 which is Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure is leading among 18 SDGs mapped articles. To the top of our insight, this study is the unique one to present a scientometric study on AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques. In the context of descriptive statistics, the study breaks down the underlying causes of observed trends, including the influence of DL developments, trends in East Asia and maturity of foundational methods. The work also stresses upon the critical gaps in societal alignment, particularly the SDGs, ultimately working on unveiling the field's global impact on AI security challenges.

Smart cities and pervasive IoT deployments have generated interest in IoT data analysis across transportation and urban planning. At the same time, Large Language Models offer a new interface for exploring IoT data - particularly through natural language. Users today face two key challenges when working with IoT data using LLMs: (1) data collection infrastructure is expensive, producing terabytes of low-level sensor readings that are too granular for direct use, and (2) data analysis is slow, requiring iterative effort and technical expertise. Directly feeding all IoT telemetry to LLMs is impractical due to finite context windows, prohibitive token costs at scale, and non-interactive latencies. What is missing is a system that first parses a user's query to identify the analytical task, then selects the relevant data slices, and finally chooses the right representation before invoking an LLM. We present Flash-Fusion, an end-to-end edge-cloud system that reduces the IoT data collection and analysis burden on users. Two principles guide its design: (1) edge-based statistical summarization (achieving 73.5% data reduction) to address data volume, and (2) cloud-based query planning that clusters behavioral data and assembles context-rich prompts to address data interpretation. We deploy Flash-Fusion on a university bus fleet and evaluate it against a baseline that feeds raw data to a state-of-the-art LLM. Flash-Fusion achieves a 95% latency reduction and 98% decrease in token usage and cost while maintaining high-quality responses. It enables personas across disciplines - safety officers, urban planners, fleet managers, and data scientists - to efficiently iterate over IoT data without the burden of manual query authoring or preprocessing.

We consider a discrete-time formulation for a class of high-dimensional stochastic joint replenishment problems. First, we approximate the problem by a continuous-time impulse control problem. Exploiting connections among the impulse control problem, backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) with jumps, and the stochastic target problem, we develop a novel, simulation-based computational method that relies on deep neural networks to solve the impulse control problem. Based on that solution, we propose an implementable inventory control policy for the original (discrete-time) stochastic joint replenishment problem, and test it against the best available benchmarks in a series of test problems. For the problems studied thus far, our method matches or beats the best benchmark we could find, and it is computationally feasible up to at least 50 dimensions -- that is, 50 stock-keeping units (SKUs).

This position paper envisions a next-generation elderly monitoring system that moves beyond fall detection toward the broader goal of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) recognition. Our ultimate aim is to design privacy-preserving, edge-deployed, and federated AI systems that can robustly detect and understand daily routines, supporting independence and dignity in aging societies. At present, ADL-specific datasets are still under collection. As a preliminary step, we demonstrate feasibility through experiments using the SISFall dataset and its GAN-augmented variants, treating fall detection as a proxy task. We report initial results on federated learning with non-IID conditions, and embedded deployment on Jetson Orin Nano devices. We then outline open challenges such as domain shift, data scarcity, and privacy risks, and propose directions toward full ADL monitoring in smart-room environments. This work highlights the transition from single-task detection to comprehensive daily activity recognition, providing both early evidence and a roadmap for sustainable and human-centered elderly care AI.

Split computing distributes deep neural network inference between resource-constrained edge devices and cloud servers but faces significant communication bottlenecks when transmitting intermediate features. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight compression framework that leverages Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems (rANS) encoding with asymmetric integer quantization and sparse tensor representation to reduce transmission overhead dramatically. Specifically, our approach combines asymmetric integer quantization with a sparse representation technique, eliminating the need for complex probability modeling or network modifications. The key contributions include: (1) a distribution-agnostic compression pipeline that exploits inherent tensor sparsity to achieve bandwidth reduction with minimal computational overhead; (2) an approximate theoretical model that optimizes tensor reshaping dimensions to maximize compression efficiency; and (3) a GPU-accelerated implementation with sub-millisecond encoding/decoding latency. Extensive evaluations across diverse neural architectures (ResNet, VGG16, MobileNetV2, SwinT, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0) demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently maintains near-baseline accuracy across CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks. Moreover, we validated the framework's effectiveness on advanced natural language processing tasks by employing Llama2 7B and 13B on standard benchmarks such as MMLU, HellaSwag, ARC, PIQA, Winogrande, BoolQ, and OpenBookQA, demonstrating its broad applicability beyond computer vision. Furthermore, this method addresses a fundamental bottleneck in deploying sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in bandwidth-constrained environments without compromising model performance.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has rapidly emerged as a transformative approach for integrating large language models into clinical and biomedical workflows. However, privacy risks, such as protected health information (PHI) exposure, remain inconsistently mitigated. This review provides a thorough analysis of the current landscape of RAG applications in healthcare, including (i) sensitive data type across clinical scenarios, (ii) the associated privacy risks, (iii) current and emerging data-privacy protection mechanisms and (iv) future direction for patient data privacy protection. We synthesize 23 articles on RAG applications in healthcare and systematically analyze privacy challenges through a pipeline-structured framework encompassing data storage, transmission, retrieval and generation stages, delineating potential failure modes, their underlying causes in threat models and system mechanisms, and their practical implications. Building on this analysis, we critically review 17 articles on privacy-preserving strategies for RAG systems. Our evaluation reveals critical gaps, including insufficient clinical validation, absence of standardized evaluation frameworks, and lack of automated assessment tools. We propose actionable directions based on these limitations and conclude with a call to action. This review provides researchers and practitioners with a structured framework for understanding privacy vulnerabilities in healthcare RAG and offers a roadmap toward developing systems that achieve both clinical effectiveness and robust privacy preservation.