Generative foundation models can remove visual artifacts through realistic image inpainting, but their impact on medical AI performance remains uncertain. Pediatric hand radiographs often contain non-anatomical markers, and it is unclear whether inpainting these regions preserves features needed for bone age and gender prediction. To evaluate the clinical reliability of generative model-based inpainting for artifact removal, we used the RSNA Bone Age Challenge dataset, selecting 200 original radiographs and generating 600 inpainted versions with gpt-image-1 using natural language prompts to target non-anatomical artifacts. Downstream performance was assessed with deep learning ensembles for bone age estimation and gender classification, using mean absolute error (MAE) and area under the ROC curve (AUC) as metrics, and pixel intensity distributions to detect structural alterations. Inpainting markedly degraded model performance: bone age MAE increased from 6.26 to 30.11 months, and gender classification AUC decreased from 0.955 to 0.704. Inpainted images displayed pixel-intensity shifts and inconsistencies, indicating structural modifications not corrected by simple calibration. These findings show that, although visually realistic, foundation model-based inpainting can obscure subtle but clinically relevant features and introduce latent bias even when edits are confined to non-diagnostic regions, underscoring the need for rigorous, task-specific validation before integrating such generative tools into clinical AI workflows.

Standard Occupational Classifiers (SOC) are systems used to categorize and classify different types of jobs and occupations based on their similarities in terms of job duties, skills, and qualifications. Integrating these facets with Big Data from job advertisement offers the prospect to investigate labour demand that is specific to various occupations. This project investigates the use of recent developments in natural language processing to construct a classifier capable of assigning an occupation code to a given job advertisement. We develop various classifiers for both UK ONS SOC and US O*NET SOC, using different Language Models. We find that an ensemble model, which combines Google BERT and a Neural Network classifier while considering job title, description, and skills, achieved the highest prediction accuracy. Specifically, the ensemble model exhibited a classification accuracy of up to 61% for the lower (or fourth) tier of SOC, and 72% for the third tier of SOC. This model could provide up to date, accurate information on the evolution of the labour market using job advertisements.

Explaining online time series monitoring models is crucial across sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance, where temporal and contextual prediction dynamics underpin critical decisions. While recent XAI methods have improved the explainability of time series models, they mostly analyze each time step independently, overlooking temporal dependencies. This results in further challenges: explaining prediction changes is non-trivial, methods fail to leverage online dynamics, and evaluation remains difficult. To address these challenges, we propose Delta-XAI, which adapts 14 existing XAI methods through a wrapper function and introduces a principled evaluation suite for the online setting, assessing diverse aspects, such as faithfulness, sufficiency, and coherence. Experiments reveal that classical gradient-based methods, such as Integrated Gradients (IG), can outperform recent approaches when adapted for temporal analysis. Building on this, we propose Shifted Window Integrated Gradients (SWING), which incorporates past observations in the integration path to systematically capture temporal dependencies and mitigate out-of-distribution effects. Extensive experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of SWING across diverse settings with respect to diverse metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Delta-XAI.

Learning transferable latent actions from large-scale object manipulation videos can significantly enhance generalization in downstream robotics tasks, as such representations are agnostic to different robot embodiments. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual reconstruction objectives while neglecting physical priors, leading to sub-optimal performance in learning universal representations. T o address these challenges, we propose a Universal Latent Action Learning framework that takes task instructions and multiple frames as inputs, and optimizes both future frame reconstruction and action sequence prediction. Unlike prior works, incorporating action predictions (e.g., gripper or hand trajectories and orientations) allows the model to capture richer physical priors such as real-world distances and orientations, thereby enabling seamless transferability to downstream tasks. W e further decompose the latent actions into learnable motion and scene tokens to distinguish the robot's active movements from environmental changes, thus filtering out irrelevant dynamics. By distilling the learned latent actions into the latest VLA models, we achieve strong performance across both simulated (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and real-world robot settings. Notably, with only 10 real-world trajectories per task collected on a Franka robot, our approach successfully completes all five challenging tasks, demonstrating strong few-shot transferability in robotic manipulation.

Every day we share our personal information through digital systems which are constantly exposed to threats. For this reason, security-oriented disciplines of signal processing have received increasing attention in the last decades: multimedia forensics, digital watermarking, biometrics, network monitoring, steganography and steganalysis are just a few examples. Even though each of these fields has its own peculiarities, they all have to deal with a common problem: the presence of one or more adversaries aiming at making the system fail. Adversarial Signal Processing lays the basis of a general theory that takes into account the impact that the presence of an adversary has on the design of effective signal processing tools. By focusing on the application side of Adversarial Signal Processing, namely adversarial information fusion in distributed sensor networks, and adopting a game-theoretic approach, this thesis contributes to the above mission by addressing four issues. First, we address decision fusion in distributed sensor networks by developing a novel soft isolation defense scheme that protect the network from adversaries, specifically, Byzantines. Second, we develop an optimum decision fusion strategy in the presence of Byzantines. In the next step, we propose a technique to reduce the complexity of the optimum fusion by relying on a novel near-optimum message passing algorithm based on factor graphs. Finally, we introduce a defense mechanism to protect decentralized networks running consensus algorithm against data falsification attacks.

Reliable positioning in GNSS-challenged environments remains a critical challenge for navigation systems. Tightly coupled GNSS/IMU fusion improves robustness but remains vulnerable to non-Gaussian noise and outliers. We present a robust and adaptive factor graph-based fusion framework that directly integrates GNSS pseudorange measurements with IMU preintegration factors and incorporates the Barron loss, a general robust loss function that unifies several m-estimators through a single tunable parameter. By adaptively down weighting unreliable GNSS measurements, our approach improves resilience positioning. The method is implemented in an extended GTSAM framework and evaluated on the UrbanNav dataset. The proposed solution reduces positioning errors by up to 41% relative to standard FGO, and achieves even larger improvements over extended Kalman filter (EKF) baselines in urban canyon environments. These results highlight the benefits of Barron loss in enhancing the resilience of GNSS/IMU-based navigation in urban and signal-compromised environments.

Software Requirement Document (RD) typically contain tens of thousands of individual requirements, and ensuring consistency among these requirements is critical for the success of software engineering projects. Automated detection methods can significantly enhance efficiency and reduce costs; however, existing approaches still face several challenges, including low detection accuracy on imbalanced data, limited semantic extraction due to the use of a single encoder, and suboptimal performance in cross-domain transfer learning. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Transferable Software Requirement Conflict Detection Framework based on SBERT and SimCSE, termed TSRCDF-SS. First, the framework employs two independent encoders, Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and Simple Contrastive Sentence Embedding (SimCSE), to generate sentence embeddings for requirement pairs, followed by a six-element concatenation strategy. Furthermore, the classifier is enhanced by a two-layer fully connected feedforward neural network (FFNN) with a hybrid loss optimization strategy that integrates a variant of Focal Loss, domain-specific constraints, and a confidence-based penalty term. Finally, the framework synergistically integrates sequential and cross-domain transfer learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a 10.4% improvement in both macro-F1 and weighted-F1 scores in in-domain settings, and an 11.4% increase in macro-F1 in cross-domain scenarios.

Abstract-- We study automated intrusion prediction in an IT system using statistical learning methods. The focus is on developing online attack predictors that detect attacks in real time and identify the current stage of the attack. While such predictors have been proposed in the recent literature, these works typically rely on constructing a monolithic predictor tailored to a specific attack type and scenario. Given that hundreds of attack types are cataloged in the MITRE framework, training a separate monolithic predictor for each of them is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a modular framework for rapidly assembling online attack predictors from reusable components. Using public datasets for training and evaluation, we provide many examples of modular predictors and show how an effective predictor can be dynamically assembled during training from a network of modular components. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS), such as Snort [1] or Suricata [2], rely on rule-based configurations that are manually crafted and maintained by domain experts. The growing complexity and rapid evolution of IT systems make the maintenance of these rules increasingly challenging and time-consuming. As a response, research efforts into automated cyberdefence have started, based on the idea that attack patterns can be dynamically learned. The rules are no longer defined by humans, but automatically inferred from observing systems under attack. Over the last decade, various approaches have been proposed for automated cyberdefence, most of them based on statistical learning, e.g., [3], [4], [5], [6]. We follow this direction in the paper. We are specifically interested in predicting the stage of an ongoing attack in real time, based on current and earlier observations of an IT system.

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved considerable performance in RGB scene reconstruction. However, multi-modal rendering that incorporates thermal infrared imagery remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches tend to neglect distinctive thermal characteristics, such as heat conduction and the Lambertian property. In this study, we introduce MrGS, a multi-modal radiance field based on 3DGS that simultaneously reconstructs both RGB and thermal 3D scenes. Specifically, MrGS derives RGB- and thermal-related information from a single appearance feature through orthogonal feature extraction and employs view-dependent or view-independent embedding strategies depending on the degree of Lambertian reflectance exhibited by each modality. Furthermore, we leverage two physics-based principles to effectively model thermal-domain phenomena. First, we integrate Fourier's law of heat conduction prior to alpha blending to model intensity interpolation caused by thermal conduction between neighboring Gaussians. Second, we apply the Stefan-Boltzmann law and the inverse-square law to formulate a depth-aware thermal radiation map that imposes additional geometric constraints on thermal rendering. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MrGS achieves high-fidelity RGB-T scene reconstruction while reducing the number of Gaussians.

Deep learning models can excel on medical tasks, yet often experience spurious correlations, known as shortcut learning, leading to poor generalization in new environments. Particularly in medical imaging, where multiple spurious correlations can coexist, misclassifications can have severe consequences. We propose MIMM-X, a framework that disentangles causal features from multiple spurious correlations by minimizing their mutual information. It enables predictions based on true underlying causal relationships rather than dataset-specific shortcuts. We evaluate MIMM-X on three datasets (UK Biobank, NAKO, CheXpert) across two imaging modalities (MRI and X-ray). Results demonstrate that MIMM-X effectively mitigates shortcut learning of multiple spurious correlations.