Industry
DeFi TrustBoost: Blockchain and AI for Trustworthy Decentralized Financial Decisions
Sachan, Swati, Fickett, Dale S.
This research introduces the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) TrustBoost Framework, which combines blockchain technology and Explainable AI to address challenges faced by lenders underwriting small business loan applications from low-wealth households. The framework is designed with a strong emphasis on fulfilling four crucial requirements of blockchain and AI systems: confidentiality, compliance with data protection laws, resistance to adversarial attacks, and compliance with regulatory audits. It presents a technique for tamper-proof auditing of automated AI decisions and a strategy for on-chain (inside-blockchain) and off-chain data storage to facilitate collaboration within and across financial organizations.
Asm2SrcEval: Evaluating Large Language Models for Assembly-to-Source Code Translation
Hamedi, Parisa, Jelodar, Hamed, Bai, Samita, Meymani, Mohammad, Razavi-Far, Roozbeh, Ghorbani, Ali A.
Assembly-to-source code translation is a critical task in reverse engineering, cybersecurity, and software maintenance, yet systematic benchmarks for evaluating large language models on this problem remain scarce. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art large language models on assembly-to-source translation. We assess model performance using a diverse set of metrics capturing lexical similarity (BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR), semantic alignment (BERTScore), fluency (Perplexity), and efficiency (time prediction). Our results reveal clear trade-offs: while certain models excel in text similarity metrics, others demonstrate lower perplexity or faster inference times. We further provide qualitative analyses of typical model successes and failure cases, highlighting challenges such as control flow recovery and identifier reconstruction. Taken together, our benchmark offers actionable insights into the strengths and limitations of current large language models for program translation, establishing a foundation for future research in combining accuracy with efficiency for real-world applications.
Analysis of Incursive Breast Cancer in Mammograms Using YOLO, Explainability, and Domain Adaptation
Adhikari, Jayan, Joshi, Prativa, Baral, Susish
Abstract--Deep learning models for breast cancer detection from mammographic images have significant reliability problems when presented with Out-of-Distribution (OOD) inputs such as other imaging modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray) or equipment variations, leading to unreliable detection and misdiagnosis. Our strategy establishes an in-domain gallery via cosine similarity to rigidly reject non-mammographic inputs prior to processing, ensuring that only domain-associated images supply the detection pipeline. The OOD detection component achieves 99.77% general accuracy with immaculate 100% accuracy on OOD test sets, effectively eliminating irrelevant imaging modalities. ResNet50 was selected as the optimum backbone after 12 CNN architecture searches. The joint framework unites OOD robustness with high detection performance (mAP@0.5: Experimental validation establishes that OOD filtering significantly improves system reliability by preventing false alarms on out-of-distribution inputs while maintaining higher detection accuracy on mammographic data. The present study offers a fundamental foundation for the deployment of reliable AI-based breast cancer detection systems in diverse clinical environments with inherent data heterogeneity. A global health concern, breast cancer is the second-highest cause of cancer related to mortality in women. It has been recorded as the most diagnosed disease in the world in 2020 [1]. According to the World Health Organization, all types of cancer account for 626700 global deaths of women, out of which the breast is the predominant and second leading cause [2]. If diagnosed in its early development stage, the survival rate are likely to be high and the treatment cost will get reduced [3]. Studies has found that 30% breast cancer are diagnosed when the size of the mass is 30mm.
RadDiff: Retrieval-Augmented Denoising Diffusion for Protein Inverse Folding
Han, Jin, Fu, Tianfan, Li, Wu-Jun
Protein inverse folding, the design of an amino acid sequence based on a target 3D structure, is a fundamental problem of computational protein engineering. Existing methods either generate sequences without leveraging external knowledge or relying on protein language models (PLMs). The former omits the evolutionary information stored in protein databases, while the latter is parameter-inefficient and inflexible to adapt to ever-growing protein data. To overcome the above drawbacks, in this paper we propose a novel method, called r etrieval-a ugmented d enoising diff usion (RadDiff), for protein inverse folding. Given the target protein backbone, RadDiff uses a hierarchical search strategy to efficiently retrieve structurally similar proteins from large protein databases. The retrieved structures are then aligned residue-by-residue to the target to construct a position-specific amino acid profile, which serves as an evolutionary-informed prior that conditions the denoising process. A lightweight integration module is further designed to incorporate this prior effectively. Experimental results on the CA TH, PDB, and TS50 datasets show that RadDiff consistently outperforms existing methods, improving sequence recovery rate by up to 19%. Experimental results also demonstrate that RadDiff generates highly foldable sequences and scales effectively with database size. Proteins are the molecular machines of life, executing a vast array of biological functions dictated by their three-dimensional (3D) structures (Koehler Leman et al., 2023).
Hybrid Synthetic Data Generation with Domain Randomization Enables Zero-Shot Vision-Based Part Inspection Under Extreme Class Imbalance
Mei, Ruo-Syuan, Jia, Sixian, Li, Guangze, Lee, Soo Yeon, Musser, Brian, Keller, William, Zakula, Sreten, Arinez, Jorge, Shao, Chenhui
Machine learning, particularly deep learning, is transforming industrial quality inspection. Yet, training robust machine learning models typically requires large volumes of high-quality labeled data, which are expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive to obtain in manufacturing. Moreover, defective samples are intrinsically rare, leading to severe class imbalance that degrades model performance. These data constraints hinder the widespread adoption of machine learning-based quality inspection methods in real production environments. Synthetic data generation (SDG) offers a promising solution by enabling the creation of large, balanced, and fully annotated datasets in an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable manner. This paper presents a hybrid SDG framework that integrates simulation-based rendering, domain randomization, and real background compositing to enable zero-shot learning for computer vision-based industrial part inspection without manual annotation. The SDG pipeline generates 12,960 labeled images in one hour by varying part geometry, lighting, and surface properties, and then compositing synthetic parts onto real image backgrounds. A two-stage architecture utilizing a YOLOv8n backbone for object detection and MobileNetV3-small for quality classification is trained exclusively on synthetic data and evaluated on 300 real industrial parts. The proposed approach achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.995 for detection, 96% classification accuracy, and 90.1% balanced accuracy. Comparative evaluation against few-shot real-data baseline approaches demonstrates significant improvement. The proposed SDG-based approach achieves 90-91% balanced accuracy under severe class imbalance, while the baselines reach only 50% accuracy. These results demonstrate that the proposed method enables annotation-free, scalable, and robust quality inspection for real-world manufacturing applications.
Art2Music: Generating Music for Art Images with Multi-modal Feeling Alignment
Hong, Jiaying, Zhu, Ting, Markchom, Thanet, Liang, Huizhi
With the rise of AI-generated content (AIGC), generating perceptually natural and feeling-aligned music from multimodal inputs has become a central challenge. Existing approaches often rely on explicit emotion labels that require costly annotation, underscoring the need for more flexible feeling-aligned methods. To support multimodal music generation, we construct ArtiCaps, a pseudo feeling-aligned image-music-text dataset created by semantically matching descriptions from ArtEmis and MusicCaps. We further propose Art2Music, a lightweight cross-modal framework that synthesizes music from artistic images and user comments. In the first stage, images and text are encoded with OpenCLIP and fused using a gated residual module; the fused representation is decoded by a bidirectional LSTM into Mel-spectrograms with a frequency-weighted L1 loss to enhance high-frequency fidelity. In the second stage, a fine-tuned HiFi-GAN vocoder reconstructs high-quality audio waveforms. Experiments on ArtiCaps show clear improvements in Mel-Cepstral Distortion, Frechet Audio Distance, Log-Spectral Distance, and cosine similarity. A small LLM-based rating study further verifies consistent cross-modal feeling alignment and offers interpretable explanations of matches and mismatches across modalities. These results demonstrate improved perceptual naturalness, spectral fidelity, and semantic consistency. Art2Music also maintains robust performance with only 50k training samples, providing a scalable solution for feeling-aligned creative audio generation in interactive art, personalized soundscapes, and digital art exhibitions.
NetDeTox: Adversarial and Efficient Evasion of Hardware-Security GNNs via RL-LLM Orchestration
Wang, Zeng, Shao, Minghao, Saha, Akashdeep, Karri, Ramesh, Knechtel, Johann, Shafique, Muhammad, Sinanoglu, Ozgur
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise in hardware security by learning structural motifs from netlist graphs. However, this reliance on motifs makes GNNs vulnerable to adversarial netlist rewrites; even small-scale edits can mislead GNN predictions. Existing adversarial approaches, ranging from synthesis-recipe perturbations to gate transformations, come with high design overheads. We present NetDeTox, an automated end-to-end framework that orchestrates large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) in a systematic manner, enabling focused local rewriting. The RL agent identifies netlist components critical for GNN-based reasoning, while the LLM devises rewriting plans to diversify motifs that preserve functionality. Iterative feedback between the RL and LLM stages refines adversarial rewritings to limit overheads. Compared to the SOTA work AttackGNN, NetDeTox successfully degrades the effectiveness of all security schemes with fewer rewrites and substantially lower area overheads (reductions of 54.50% for GNN-RE, 25.44% for GNN4IP, and 41.04% for OMLA, respectively). For GNN4IP, ours can even optimize/reduce the original benchmarks' area, in particular for larger circuits, demonstrating the practicality and scalability of NetDeTox.
From RISC-V Cores to Neuromorphic Arrays: A Tutorial on Building Scalable Digital Neuromorphic Processors
Digital neuromorphic processors are emerging as a promising computing substrate for low-power, always-on EdgeAI applications. In this tutorial paper, we outline the main architectural design principles behind fully digital neuromorphic processors and illustrate them using the SENECA platform as a running example. Starting from a flexible array of tiny RISC-V processing cores connected by a simple Network-on-Chip (NoC), we show how to progressively evolve the architecture: from a baseline event-driven implementation of fully connected networks, to versions with dedicated Neural Processing Elements (NPEs) and a loop controller that offloads fine-grained control from the general-purpose cores. Along the way, we discuss software and mapping techniques such as spike grouping, event-driven depth-first convolution for convolutional networks, and hard-attention style processing for high-resolution event-based vision. The focus is on architectural trade-offs, performance and energy bottlenecks, and on leveraging flexibility to incrementally add domain-specific acceleration. This paper assumes familiarity with basic neuromorphic concepts (spikes, event-driven computation, sparse activation) and deep neural network workloads. It does not present new experimental results; instead, it synthesizes and contextualizes findings previously reported in our SENECA publications to provide a coherent, step-by-step architectural perspective for students and practitioners who wish to design their own digital neuromorphic processors.
Comparative Analysis of Vision Transformer, Convolutional, and Hybrid Architectures for Mental Health Classification Using Actigraphy-Derived Images
This work examines how three different image-based methods, VGG16, ViT-B/16, and CoAtNet-Tiny, perform in identifying depression, schizophrenia, and healthy controls using daily actigraphy records. Wrist-worn activity signals from the Psykose and Depresjon datasets were converted into 30 48 images and evaluated through a three-fold subject-wise split. Although all methods fitted the training data well, their behaviour on unseen data differed. VGG16 improved steadily but often settled at lower accuracy. ViT-B/16 reached strong results in some runs, but its performance shifted noticeably from fold to fold. CoAtNet-Tiny stood out as the most reliable, recording the highest average accuracy and the most stable curves across folds. It also produced the strongest precision, recall, and F1-scores, particularly for the underrepresented depression and schizophrenia classes. Overall, the findings indicate that CoAtNet-Tiny performed most consistently on the actigraphy images, while VGG16 and ViT-B/16 yielded mixed results. These observations suggest that certain hybrid designs may be especially suited for mental-health work that relies on actigraphy-derived images. I. Introduction Mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia constitute a significant and growing global health challenge, with profound impacts on individuals, families, and healthcare systems worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, depression affects over 280 million people.
Predicting COVID-19 Prevalence Using Wastewater RNA Surveillance: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach with Temporal Feature Trust
As COVID-19 transitions into an endemic disease that remains constantly present in the population at a stable level, monitoring its prevalence without invasive measures becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we present a deep neural network estimator for the COVID-19 daily case count based on wastewater surveillance data and other confounding factors. This work builds upon the study by Jiang, Kolozsvary, and Li (2024), which connects the COVID-19 case counts with testing data collected early in the pandemic. Using the COVID-19 testing data and the wastewater surveillance data during the period when both data were highly reliable, one can train an artificial neural network that learns the nonlinear relation between the COVID-19 daily case count and the wastewater viral RNA concentration. From a machine learning perspective, the main challenge lies in addressing temporal feature reliability, as the training data has different reliability over different time periods.