Overview
A Survey on Trustworthy LLM Agents: Threats and Countermeasures
Yu, Miao, Meng, Fanci, Zhou, Xinyun, Wang, Shilong, Mao, Junyuan, Pang, Linsey, Chen, Tianlong, Wang, Kun, Li, Xinfeng, Zhang, Yongfeng, An, Bo, Wen, Qingsong
With the rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents and Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have significantly expanded the capabilities of LLM ecosystems. This evolution stems from empowering LLMs with additional modules such as memory, tools, environment, and even other agents. However, this advancement has also introduced more complex issues of trustworthiness, which previous research focused solely on LLMs could not cover. In this survey, we propose the TrustAgent framework, a comprehensive study on the trustworthiness of agents, characterized by modular taxonomy, multi-dimensional connotations, and technical implementation. By thoroughly investigating and summarizing newly emerged attacks, defenses, and evaluation methods for agents and MAS, we extend the concept of Trustworthy LLM to the emerging paradigm of Trustworthy Agent. In TrustAgent, we begin by deconstructing and introducing various components of the Agent and MAS. Then, we categorize their trustworthiness into intrinsic (brain, memory, and tool) and extrinsic (user, agent, and environment) aspects. Subsequently, we delineate the multifaceted meanings of trustworthiness and elaborate on the implementation techniques of existing research related to these internal and external modules. Finally, we present our insights and outlook on this domain, aiming to provide guidance for future endeavors.
Towards Graph Foundation Models: A Transferability Perspective
Wang, Yuxiang, Fan, Wenqi, Wang, Suhang, Ma, Yao
In recent years, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have gained significant attention for their potential to generalize across diverse graph domains and tasks. Some works focus on Domain-Specific GFMs, which are designed to address a variety of tasks within a specific domain, while others aim to create General-Purpose GFMs that extend the capabilities of domain-specific models to multiple domains. Regardless of the type, transferability is crucial for applying GFMs across different domains and tasks. However, achieving strong transferability is a major challenge due to the structural, feature, and distributional variations in graph data. To date, there has been no systematic research examining and analyzing GFMs from the perspective of transferability. To bridge the gap, we present the first comprehensive taxonomy that categorizes and analyzes existing GFMs through the lens of transferability, structuring GFMs around their application scope (domain-specific vs. general-purpose) and their approaches to knowledge acquisition and transfer. We provide a structured perspective on current progress and identify potential pathways for advancing GFM generalization across diverse graph datasets and tasks. We aims to shed light on the current landscape of GFMs and inspire future research directions in GFM development.
Investigating User Perspectives on Differentially Private Text Privatization
Meisenbacher, Stephen, Klymenko, Alexandra, Karpp, Alexander, Matthes, Florian
Recent literature has seen a considerable uptick in $\textit{Differentially Private Natural Language Processing}$ (DP NLP). This includes DP text privatization, where potentially sensitive input texts are transformed under DP to achieve privatized output texts that ideally mask sensitive information $\textit{and}$ maintain original semantics. Despite continued work to address the open challenges in DP text privatization, there remains a scarcity of work addressing user perceptions of this technology, a crucial aspect which serves as the final barrier to practical adoption. In this work, we conduct a survey study with 721 laypersons around the globe, investigating how the factors of $\textit{scenario}$, $\textit{data sensitivity}$, $\textit{mechanism type}$, and $\textit{reason for data collection}$ impact user preferences for text privatization. We learn that while all these factors play a role in influencing privacy decisions, users are highly sensitive to the utility and coherence of the private output texts. Our findings highlight the socio-technical factors that must be considered in the study of DP NLP, opening the door to further user-based investigations going forward.
A Survey on Enhancing Causal Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models
Li, Xin, Cai, Zhuo, Wang, Shoujin, Yu, Kun, Chen, Fang
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable performance in language tasks and beyond. However, due to their limited inherent causal reasoning ability, LLMs still face challenges in handling tasks that require robust causal reasoning ability, such as healthcare and economical analysis. As a result, a growing body of research has focused on enhancing the causal reasoning ability of LLMs. Despite the booming research, there lacks of a survey to well review the challenges, progress and future directions in this area. To bridge this significant gap, we systematically review literature on how to strengthen LLMs' causal reasoning ability in this paper. We start from the introduction of background and motivations of this topic, followed by the summarization of key challenges in this area. Thereafter, we propose a novel taxonomy to systematically categorize existing methods, together with detailed comparisons within and between classes of methods. Furthermore, we summarize existing benchmarks and evaluation metrics for assessing LLMs' causal reasoning ability. Finally, we outline future research directions for this emerging field, offering insights and inspiration to researchers and practitioners in the area.
Time-EAPCR: A Deep Learning-Based Novel Approach for Anomaly Detection Applied to the Environmental Field
Liu, Lei, Lu, Yuchao, An, Ling, Liang, Huajie, Zhou, Chichun, Zhang, Zhenyu
As human activities intensify, environmental systems such as aquatic ecosystems and water treatment systems face increasingly complex pressures, impacting ecological balance, public health, and sustainable development, making intelligent anomaly monitoring essential. However, traditional monitoring methods suffer from delayed responses, insufficient data processing capabilities, and weak generalisation, making them unsuitable for complex environmental monitoring needs.In recent years, machine learning has been widely applied to anomaly detection, but the multi-dimensional features and spatiotemporal dynamics of environmental ecological data, especially the long-term dependencies and strong variability in the time dimension, limit the effectiveness of traditional methods.Deep learning, with its ability to automatically learn features, captures complex nonlinear relationships, improving detection performance. However, its application in environmental monitoring is still in its early stages and requires further exploration.This paper introduces a new deep learning method, Time-EAPCR (Time-Embedding-Attention-Permutated CNN-Residual), and applies it to environmental science. The method uncovers feature correlations, captures temporal evolution patterns, and enables precise anomaly detection in environmental systems.We validated Time-EAPCR's high accuracy and robustness across four publicly available environmental datasets. Experimental results show that the method efficiently handles multi-source data, improves detection accuracy, and excels across various scenarios with strong adaptability and generalisation. Additionally, a real-world river monitoring dataset confirmed the feasibility of its deployment, providing reliable technical support for environmental monitoring.
A primer on optimal transport for causal inference with observational data
The theory of optimal transportation has developed into a powerful and elegant framework for comparing probability distributions, with wide-ranging applications in all areas of science. The fundamental idea of analyzing probabilities by comparing their underlying state space naturally aligns with the core idea of causal inference, where understanding and quantifying counterfactual states is paramount. Despite this intuitive connection, explicit research at the intersection of optimal transport and causal inference is only beginning to develop. Yet, many foundational models in causal inference have implicitly relied on optimal transport principles for decades, without recognizing the underlying connection. Therefore, the goal of this review is to offer an introduction to the surprisingly deep existing connections between optimal transport and the identification of causal effects with observational data -- where optimal transport is not just a set of potential tools, but actually builds the foundation of model assumptions. As a result, this review is intended to unify the language and notation between different areas of statistics, mathematics, and econometrics, by pointing out these existing connections, and to explore novel problems and directions for future work in both areas derived from this realization.
Technical Insights and Legal Considerations for Advancing Federated Learning in Bioinformatics
Malpetti, Daniele, Scutari, Marco, Gualdi, Francesco, van Setten, Jessica, van der Laan, Sander, Haitjema, Saskia, Lee, Aaron Mark, Hering, Isabelle, Mangili, Francesca
Federated learning leverages data across institutions to improve clinical discovery while complying with data-sharing restrictions and protecting patient privacy. As the evolution of biobanks in genetics and systems biology has proved, accessing more extensive and varied data pools leads to a faster and more robust exploration and translation of results. More widespread use of federated learning may have the same impact in bioinformatics, allowing access to many combinations of genotypic, phenotypic and environmental information that are undercovered or not included in existing biobanks. This paper reviews the methodological, infrastructural and legal issues that academic and clinical institutions must address before implementing it. Finally, we provide recommendations for the reliable use of federated learning and its effective translation into clinical practice.
A Novel Approach for Intrinsic Dimension Estimation
Özçoban, Kadir, Manguoğlu, Murat, Yetkin, Emrullah Fatih
Dimensionality reduction approaches are crucial in various applications of machine learning tasks such as computer vision, robotics, natural language processing, medical diagnosis, recommendation systems or industrial IoT applications such as predictive maintenance which need to generate and process large amounts of data and variables. In general, dimensionality reduction improves the performance of machine learning tasks' by removing redundant features. In this regard, both linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction methods, specifically the manifold learning techniques are particularly efficient since they are based on the preservation of the geometric structure of the original feature space. In this manner, there are several approaches already available and studied extensively in the literature such as principal component analysis (PCA), Multidimensional scaling (MDS), Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE) and other. We refer the reader to (Lee and Verleysen, 2007) for a comprehensive survey of the available methods.
LLM-Pack: Intuitive Grocery Handling for Logistics Applications
Blei, Yannik, Krawez, Michael, Jülg, Tobias, Krack, Pierre, Walter, Florian, Burgard, Wolfram
LLM-Pack: Intuitive Grocery Handling for Logistics Applications Y annik Blei 1, Michael Krawez 1, Tobias Jülg 1, Pierre Krack 1, Florian Walter 1 and Wolfram Burgard 1 Abstract -- Robotics and automation are increasingly influential in logistics but remain largely confined to traditional warehouses. In grocery retail, advancements such as cashier-less supermarkets exist, yet customers still manually pick and pack groceries. While there has been a substantial focus in robotics on the bin picking problem, the task of packing objects and groceries has remained largely untouched. However, packing grocery items in the right order is crucial for preventing product damage, e.g., heavy objects should not be placed on top of fragile ones. However, the exact criteria for the right packing order are hard to define, in particular given the huge variety of objects typically found in stores. In this paper, we introduce LLM-Pack, a novel approach for grocery packing. LLM-Pack leverages language and vision foundation models for identifying groceries and generating a packing sequence that mimics human packing strategy. LLM-Pack does not require dedicated training to handle new grocery items and its modularity allows easy upgrades of the underlying foundation models. We extensively evaluate our approach to demonstrate its performance.
A systematic literature review of unsupervised learning algorithms for anomalous traffic detection based on flows
Miguel-Diez, Alberto, Campazas-Vega, Adrián, Álvarez-Aparicio, Claudia, Esteban-Costales, Gonzalo, Guerrero-Higueras, Ángel Manuel
The constant increase of devices connected to the Internet, and therefore of cyber-attacks, makes it necessary to analyze network traffic in order to recognize malicious activity. Traditional packet-based analysis methods are insufficient because in large networks the amount of traffic is so high that it is unfeasible to review all communications. For this reason, flows is a suitable approach for this situation, which in future 5G networks will have to be used, as the number of packets will increase dramatically. If this is also combined with unsupervised learning models, it can detect new threats for which it has not been trained. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on unsupervised learning algorithms for detecting anomalies in network flows, following the PRISMA guideline. A total of 63 scientific articles have been reviewed, analyzing 13 of them in depth. The results obtained show that autoencoder is the most used option, followed by SVM, ALAD, or SOM. On the other hand, all the datasets used for anomaly detection have been collected, including some specialised in IoT or with real data collected from honeypots.