Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) pose a major cybersecurity challenge due to their stealth, persistence, and adaptability. Traditional machine learning detectors struggle with class imbalance, high dimensional features, and scarce real world traces. They often lack transferability-performing well in the training domain but degrading in novel attack scenarios. We propose a hybrid transfer framework that integrates Transfer Learning, Explainable AI (XAI), contrastive learning, and Siamese networks to improve cross-domain generalization. An attention-based autoencoder supports knowledge transfer across domains, while Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) select stable, informative features to reduce dimensionality and computational cost. A Siamese encoder trained with a contrastive objective aligns source and target representations, increasing anomaly separability and mitigating feature drift. We evaluate on real-world traces from the DARPA Transparent Computing (TC) program and augment with synthetic attack scenarios to test robustness. Across source to target transfers, the approach delivers improved detection scores with classical and deep baselines, demonstrating a scalable, explainable, and transferable solution for APT detection.

To address the scarcity and privacy concerns of network traffic data, various generative models have been developed to produce synthetic traffic. However, synthetic traffic is not inherently privacy-preserving, and the extent to which it leaks sensitive information, and how to measure such leakage, remain largely unexplored. This challenge is further compounded by the diversity of model architectures, which shape how traffic is represented and synthesized. We introduce a comprehensive set of privacy metrics for synthetic network traffic, combining standard approaches like membership inference attacks (MIA) and data extraction attacks with network-specific identifiers and attributes. Using these metrics, we systematically evaluate the vulnerability of different representative generative models and examine the factors that influence attack success. Our results reveal substantial variability in privacy risks across models and datasets. MIA success ranges from 0% to 88%, and up to 100% of network identifiers can be recovered from generated traffic, highlighting serious privacy vulnerabilities. We further identify key factors that significantly affect attack outcomes, including training data diversity and how well the generative model fits the training data. These findings provide actionable guidance for designing and deploying generative models that minimize privacy leakage, establishing a foundation for safer synthetic network traffic generation.

Real-world AI/ML workflows often apply inference computations to feature vectors joined from multiple datasets. To avoid the redundant AI/ML computations caused by repeated data records in the join's output, factorized ML has been proposed to decompose ML computations into sub-computations to be executed on each normalized dataset. However, there is insufficient discussion on how factorized ML could impact AI/ML inference over multi-way joins. To address the limitations, we propose a novel declarative InferF system, focusing on the factorization of arbitrary inference workflows represented as analyzable expressions over the multi-way joins. We formalize our problem to flexibly push down partial factorized computations to qualified nodes in the join tree to minimize the overall inference computation and join costs and propose two algorithms to resolve the problem: (1) a greedy algorithm based on a per-node cost function that estimates the influence on overall latency if a subset of factorized computations is pushed to a node, and (2) a genetic algorithm for iteratively enumerating and evaluating promising factorization plans. We implement InferF on Velox, an open-sourced database engine from Meta, evaluate it on real-world datasets, observed up to 11.3x speedups, and systematically summarized the factors that determine when factorized ML can benefit AI/ML inference workflows.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a significant challenge in cybersecurity due to their stealthy and long-term nature. Modern supervised learning methods require extensive labeled data, which is often scarce in real-world cybersecurity environments. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach that leverages AutoEncoders for unsupervised anomaly detection, augmented by active learning to iteratively improve the detection of APT anomalies. By selectively querying an oracle for labels on uncertain or ambiguous samples, we minimize labeling costs while improving detection rates, enabling the model to improve its detection accuracy with minimal data while reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. We provide a detailed formulation of the proposed Attention Adversarial Dual AutoEncoder-based anomaly detection framework and show how the active learning loop iteratively enhances the model. The framework is evaluated on real-world imbalanced provenance trace databases produced by the DARPA Transparent Computing program, where APT-like attacks constitute as little as 0.004\% of the data. The datasets span multiple operating systems, including Android, Linux, BSD, and Windows, and cover two attack scenarios. The results have shown significant improvements in detection rates during active learning and better performance compared to other existing approaches.

We introduce Nemotron-Parse-1.1, a lightweight document parsing and OCR model that advances the capabilities of its predecessor, Nemoretriever-Parse-1.0. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 delivers improved capabilities across general OCR, markdown formatting, structured table parsing, and text extraction from pictures, charts, and diagrams. It also supports a longer output sequence length for visually dense documents. As with its predecessor, it extracts bounding boxes of text segments, as well as corresponding semantic classes. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 follows an encoder-decoder architecture with 885M parameters, including a compact 256M-parameter language decoder. It achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks making it a strong lightweight OCR solution. We release the model weights publicly on Huggingface, as well as an optimized NIM container, along with a subset of the training data as part of the broader Nemotron-VLM-v2 dataset. Additionally, we release Nemotron-Parse-1.1-TC which operates on a reduced vision token length, offering a 20% speed improvement with minimal quality degradation.

Developing comprehensive assistive technologies requires the seamless integration of visual and auditory perception. This research evaluates the feasibility of a modular architecture inspired by core functionalities of perceptive systems like 'Smart Eye.' We propose and benchmark three independent sensing modules: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for eye state detection (drowsiness/attention), a deep CNN for facial expression recognition, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for voice-based speaker identification. Utilizing the Eyes Image, FER2013, and customized audio datasets, our models achieved accuracies of 93.0%, 97.8%, and 96.89%, respectively. This study demonstrates that lightweight, domain-specific models can achieve high fidelity on discrete tasks, establishing a validated foundation for future real-time, multimodal integration in resource-constrained assistive devices.

Extracting individual elements from music mixtures is a valuable tool for music production and practice. While neural networks optimized to mask or transform mixture spectrograms into the individual source(s) have been the leading approach, the source overlap and correlation in music signals poses an inherent challenge. Also, accessing all sources in the mixture is crucial to train these systems, while complicated. Attempts to address these challenges in a generative fashion exist, however, the separation performance and inference efficiency remain limited. In this work, we study the potential of diffusion models to advance toward bridging this gap, focusing on generative singing voice separation relying only on corresponding pairs of isolated vocals and mixtures for training. To align with creative workflows, we leverage latent diffusion: the system generates samples encoded in a compact latent space, and subsequently decodes these into audio. This enables efficient optimization and faster inference. Our system is trained using only open data. We outperform existing generative separation systems, and level the compared non-generative systems on a list of signal quality measures and on interference removal. We provide a noise robustness study on the latent encoder, providing insights on its potential for the task. We release a modular toolkit for further research on the topic.

This paper presents pNav, a novel power-management system that significantly enhances the power/energy-efficiency of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) by jointly optimizing their physical/mechanical and cyber subsystems. By profiling AMRs' power consumption, we identify three challenges in achieving CPS (cyber-physical system) power-efficiency that involve both cyber (C) and physical (P) subsystems: (1) variabilities of system power consumption breakdown, (2) environment-aware navigation locality, and (3) coordination of C and P subsystems. pNav takes a multi-faceted approach to achieve power-efficiency of AMRs. First, it integrates millisecond-level power consumption prediction for both C and P subsystems. Second, it includes novel real-time modeling and monitoring of spatial and temporal navigation localities for AMRs. Third, it supports dynamic coordination of AMR software (navigation, detection) and hardware (motors, DVFS driver) configurations. pNav is prototyped using the Robot Operating System (ROS) Navigation Stack, 2D LiDAR, and camera. Our in-depth evaluation with a real robot and Gazebo environments demonstrates a >96% accuracy in predicting power consumption and a 38.1% reduction in power consumption without compromising navigation accuracy and safety.

Abstract--Recent advances in large language models have created new opportunities for stylometry, the study of writing styles and authorship. Two challenges, however, remain central: training generative models when no paired data exist, and evaluating stylistic text without relying only on human judgment. In this work, we present a framework for both generating and evaluating sentences in the style of 19th-century novelists. Large language models are fine-tuned with minimal, single-token prompts to produce text in the voices of authors such as Dickens, Austen, Twain, Alcott, and Melville. T o assess these generative models, we employ a transformer-based detector trained on authentic sentences, using it both as a classifier and as a tool for stylistic explanation. We complement this with syntactic comparisons and explainable AI methods, including attention-based and gradient-based analyses, to identify the linguistic cues that drive stylistic imitation. Our findings show that the generated text reflects the authors' distinctive patterns and that AI-based evaluation offers a reliable alternative to human assessment. All artifacts of this work are published online. The ability to recognize and reproduce an author's writing style has long fascinated both literary scholars and computer scientists. Stylometry, the quantitative study of writing style, rests on the idea that every author leaves behind unconscious patterns in vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm [2, 3]. These patterns have been analyzed for centuries in questions of disputed authorship, the study of literary traditions, and more recently in applications such as security and forensics [4].

Machine learning has become integral to Channel State Information (CSI)-based human sensing systems and is expected to power applications such as device-free activity recognition and identity detection in future cellular and Wi-Fi generations. However, these systems rely on models whose decisions can be subtly perturbed, raising concerns for security and reliability in ubiquitous sensing. Quantifying and understanding the robustness of such models, defined as their ability to maintain accurate predictions under adversarial perturbations, is therefore critical before wireless sensing can be safely deployed in real-world environments. This work presents a systematic evaluation of the robustness of CSI deep learning models under diverse threat models (white-box, black-box/transfer, and universal perturbations) and varying degrees of attack realism. We establish a framework to compare compact temporal autoencoder models with larger deep architectures across three public datasets, quantifying how model scale, training regime, and physical constraints influence robustness. Our experiments show that smaller models, while efficient and equally performant on clean data, are markedly less robust. We further confirm that physically realizable signal-space perturbations, designed to be feasible in real wireless channels, significantly reduce attack success compared to unconstrained feature-space attacks. Adversarial training mitigates these vulnerabilities, improving mean robust accuracy with only moderate degradation in clean performance across both model classes. As wireless sensing advances towards reliable, cross-domain operation, these findings provide quantitative baselines for robustness estimation and inform design principles for secure and trustworthy human-centered sensing systems.