Overview
Overview and practical recommendations on using Shapley Values for identifying predictive biomarkers via CATE modeling
Svensson, David, Hermansson, Erik, Nikolaou, Nikolaos, Sechidis, Konstantinos, Lipkovich, Ilya
In recent years, two parallel research trends have emerged in machine learning, yet their intersections remain largely unexplored. On one hand, there has been a significant increase in literature focused on Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) modeling, particularly targeting the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) using meta-learner techniques. These approaches often aim to identify causal effects from observational data. On the other hand, the field of Explainable Machine Learning (XML) has gained traction, with various approaches developed to explain complex models and make their predictions more interpretable. A prominent technique in this area is Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), which has become mainstream in data science for analyzing supervised learning models. However, there has been limited exploration of SHAP application in identifying predictive biomarkers through CATE models, a crucial aspect in pharmaceutical precision medicine. We address inherent challenges associated with the SHAP concept in multi-stage CATE strategies and introduce a surrogate estimation approach that is agnostic to the choice of CATE strategy, effectively reducing computational burdens in high-dimensional data. Using this approach, we conduct simulation benchmarking to evaluate the ability to accurately identify biomarkers using SHAP values derived from various CATE meta-learners and Causal Forest.
LLM Security: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, Defenses, and Countermeasures
Aguilera-Martรญnez, Francisco, Berzal, Fernando
As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, it is critical to assess the security threats and vulnerabilities that may arise both during their training phase and after models have been deployed. This survey seeks to define and categorize the various attacks targeting LLMs, distinguishing between those that occur during the training phase and those that affect already trained models. A thorough analysis of these attacks is presented, alongside an exploration of defense mechanisms designed to mitigate such threats. Defenses are classified into two primary categories: prevention-based and detection-based defenses. Furthermore, our survey summarizes possible attacks and their corresponding defense strategies. It also provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of the known defense mechanisms for the different security threats. Our survey aims to offer a structured framework for securing LLMs, while also identifying areas that require further research to improve and strengthen defenses against emerging security challenges.
Low-Precision Training of Large Language Models: Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities
Hao, Zhiwei, Guo, Jianyuan, Shen, Li, Luo, Yong, Hu, Han, Wang, Guoxia, Yu, Dianhai, Wen, Yonggang, Tao, Dacheng
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various domains. However, the substantial hardware resources required for their training present a significant barrier to efficiency and scalability. To mitigate this challenge, low-precision training techniques have been widely adopted, leading to notable advancements in training efficiency. Despite these gains, low-precision training involves several components$\unicode{x2013}$such as weights, activations, and gradients$\unicode{x2013}$each of which can be represented in different numerical formats. The resulting diversity has created a fragmented landscape in low-precision training research, making it difficult for researchers to gain a unified overview of the field. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing low-precision training methods. To systematically organize these approaches, we categorize them into three primary groups based on their underlying numerical formats, which is a key factor influencing hardware compatibility, computational efficiency, and ease of reference for readers. The categories are: (1) fixed-point and integer-based methods, (2) floating-point-based methods, and (3) customized format-based methods. Additionally, we discuss quantization-aware training approaches, which share key similarities with low-precision training during forward propagation. Finally, we highlight several promising research directions to advance this field. A collection of papers discussed in this survey is provided in https://github.com/Hao840/Awesome-Low-Precision-Training.
Attack and defense techniques in large language models: A survey and new perspectives
Liao, Zhiyu, Chen, Kang, Lin, Yuanguo, Li, Kangkang, Liu, Yunxuan, Chen, Hefeng, Huang, Xingwang, Yu, Yuanhui
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become central to numerous natural language processing tasks, but their vulnerabilities present significant security and ethical challenges. This systematic survey explores the evolving landscape of attack and defense techniques in LLMs. We classify attacks into adversarial prompt attack, optimized attacks, model theft, as well as attacks on application of LLMs, detailing their mechanisms and implications. Consequently, we analyze defense strategies, including prevention-based and detection-based defense methods. Although advances have been made, challenges remain to adapt to the dynamic threat landscape, balance usability with robustness, and address resource constraints in defense implementation. We highlight open problems, including the need for adaptive scalable defenses, explainable security techniques, and standardized evaluation frameworks. This survey provides actionable insights and directions for developing secure and resilient LLMs, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and ethical considerations to mitigate risks in real-world applications.
A Mathematical Philosophy of Explanations in Mechanistic Interpretability -- The Strange Science Part I.i
Ayonrinde, Kola, Jaburi, Louis
Mechanistic Interpretability aims to understand neural networks through causal explanations. We argue for the Explanatory View Hypothesis: that Mechanistic Interpretability research is a principled approach to understanding models because neural networks contain implicit explanations which can be extracted and understood. We hence show that Explanatory Faithfulness, an assessment of how well an explanation fits a model, is well-defined. We propose a definition of Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) as the practice of producing Model-level, Ontic, Causal-Mechanistic, and Falsifiable explanations of neural networks, allowing us to distinguish MI from other interpretability paradigms and detail MI's inherent limits. We formulate the Principle of Explanatory Optimism, a conjecture which we argue is a necessary precondition for the success of Mechanistic Interpretability.
Wireless Communication as an Information Sensor for Multi-agent Cooperative Perception: A Survey
Song, Zhiying, Xie, Tenghui, Wen, Fuxi, Li, Jun
Wireless Communication as an Information Sensor for Multi-agent Cooperative Perception: A Survey Zhiying Song, Tenghui Xie, Fuxi Wen, Senior Member, IEEE, Jun Li Abstract --Cooperative perception extends the perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles by enabling multi-agent information sharing via V ehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Unlike traditional onboard sensors, V2X acts as a dynamic "information sensor" characterized by limited communication, heterogeneity, mobility, and scalability. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements from the perspective of information-centric cooperative perception, focusing on three key dimensions: information representation, information fusion, and large-scale deployment. We categorize information representation into data-level, feature-level, and object-level schemes, and highlight emerging methods for reducing data volume and compressing messages under communication constraints. In information fusion, we explore techniques under both ideal and non-ideal conditions, including those addressing heterogeneity, localization errors, latency, and packet loss. Finally, we summarize system-level approaches to support scalability in dense traffic scenarios. Compared with existing surveys, this paper introduces a new perspective by treating V2X communication as an information sensor and emphasizing the challenges of deploying cooperative perception in real-world intelligent transportation systems. I NTRODUCTION Autonomous vehicles rely on perception systems to navigate complex scenarios. These systems typically integrate multiple onboard sensors, such as LiDAR and cameras. However, single-vehicle perception has inherent limitations, such as sensor range constraints and occlusion, which fragment the operational design domain and compromise safety [1].
Voice Cloning: Comprehensive Survey
Azzuni, Hussam, Saddik, Abdulmotaleb El
--V oice Cloning has rapidly advanced in today's digital world, with many researchers and corporations working to improve these algorithms for various applications. This article aims to establish a standardized terminology for voice cloning and explore its different variations. It will cover speaker adaptation as the fundamental concept and then delve deeper into topics such as few-shot, zero-shot, and multilingual TTS within that context. Finally, we will explore the evaluation metrics commonly used in voice cloning research and related datasets. This survey compiles the available voice cloning algorithms to encourage research toward its generation and detection to limit its misuse. OICE Cloning is the ability to replicate a person's voice. Advancing these algorithms relies on enhancing the performance of Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems in various areas, including speech quality, naturalness, prosody, and timbre, ensuring the produced voice closely resembles the target speaker.
A Methodological and Structural Review of Parkinsons Disease Detection Across Diverse Data Modalities
Miah, Abu Saleh Musa, Suzuki, taro, Shin, Jungpil
Parkinsons Disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder that primarily affects motor functions and can lead to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia in its advanced stages. With approximately 10 million people diagnosed globally 1 to 1.8 per 1,000 individuals, according to reports by the Japan Times and the Parkinson Foundation early and accurate diagnosis of PD is crucial for improving patient outcomes. While numerous studies have utilized machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques for PD recognition, existing surveys are limited in scope, often focusing on single data modalities and failing to capture the potential of multimodal approaches. To address these gaps, this study presents a comprehensive review of PD recognition systems across diverse data modalities, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), gait-based pose analysis, gait sensory data, handwriting analysis, speech test data, Electroencephalography (EEG), and multimodal fusion techniques. Based on over 347 articles from leading scientific databases, this review examines key aspects such as data collection methods, settings, feature representations, and system performance, with a focus on recognition accuracy and robustness. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers, providing actionable guidance for the development of next generation PD recognition systems. By leveraging diverse data modalities and cutting-edge machine learning paradigms, this work contributes to advancing the state of PD diagnostics and improving patient care through innovative, multimodal approaches.
Efficient Neural Video Representation with Temporally Coherent Modulation
Shin, Seungjun, Kim, Suji, Oh, Dokwan
Implicit neural representations (INR) has found successful applications across diverse domains. To employ INR in real-life, it is important to speed up training. In the field of INR for video applications, the state-of-the-art approach employs grid-type parametric encoding and successfully achieves a faster encoding speed in comparison to its predecessors. However, the grid usage, which does not consider the video's dynamic nature, leads to redundant use of trainable parameters. As a result, it has significantly lower parameter efficiency and higher bitrate compared to NeRV-style methods that do not use a parametric encoding. To address the problem, we propose Neural Video representation with Temporally coherent Modulation (NVTM), a novel framework that can capture dynamic characteristics of video. By decomposing the spatio-temporal 3D video data into a set of 2D grids with flow information, NVTM enables learning video representation rapidly and uses parameter efficiently. Our framework enables to process temporally corresponding pixels at once, resulting in the fastest encoding speed for a reasonable video quality, especially when compared to the NeRV-style method, with a speed increase of over 3 times. Also, it remarks an average of 1.54dB/0.019 improvements in PSNR/LPIPS on UVG (Dynamic) (even with 10% fewer parameters) and an average of 1.84dB/0.013 improvements in PSNR/LPIPS on MCL-JCV (Dynamic), compared to previous grid-type works. By expanding this to compression tasks, we demonstrate comparable performance to video compression standards (H.264, HEVC) and recent INR approaches for video compression. Additionally, we perform extensive experiments demonstrating the superior performance of our algorithm across diverse tasks, encompassing super resolution, frame interpolation and video inpainting. Project page is https://sujiikim.github.io/NVTM/.
Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applications
Dong, Wenhan, Zhao, Yuemeng, Sun, Zhen, Liu, Yule, Peng, Zifan, Zheng, Jingyi, Zhang, Zongmin, Zhang, Ziyi, Wu, Jun, Wang, Ruiming, Xu, Shengmin, Huang, Xinyi, He, Xinlei
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in human-centered tasks, assessing their psychological traits is crucial for understanding their social impact and ensuring trustworthy AI alignment. While existing reviews have covered some aspects of related research, several important areas have not been systematically discussed, including detailed discussions of diverse psychological tests, LLM-specific psychological datasets, and the applications of LLMs with psychological traits. To address this gap, we systematically review six key dimensions of applying psychological theories to LLMs: (1) assessment tools; (2) LLM-specific datasets; (3) evaluation metrics (consistency and stability); (4) empirical findings; (5) personality simulation methods; and (6) LLM-based behavior simulation. Our analysis highlights both the strengths and limitations of current methods. While some LLMs exhibit reproducible personality patterns under specific prompting schemes, significant variability remains across tasks and settings. Recognizing methodological challenges such as mismatches between psychological tools and LLMs' capabilities, as well as inconsistencies in evaluation practices, this study aims to propose future directions for developing more interpretable, robust, and generalizable psychological assessment frameworks for LLMs.