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Amulet: a Python Library for Assessing Interactions Among ML Defenses and Risks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning (ML) models are susceptible to various risks to security, privacy, and fairness. Most defenses are designed to protect against each risk individually (intended interactions) but can inadvertently affect susceptibility to other unrelated risks (unintended interactions). We introduce Amulet, the first Python library for evaluating both intended and unintended interactions among ML defenses and risks. Amulet is comprehensive by including representative attacks, defenses, and metrics; extensible to new modules due to its modular design; consistent with a user-friendly API template for inputs and outputs; and applicable for evaluating novel interactions. By satisfying all four properties, Amulet offers a unified foundation for studying how defenses interact, enabling the first systematic evaluation of unintended interactions across multiple risks.


AI Agentic Vulnerability Injection And Transformation with Optimized Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--The increasing complexity of software systems and the sophistication of cyber-attacks have underscored the critical need for effective automated vulnerability detection and repair systems. Data-driven approaches using deep learning models show promise but critically depend on the availability of large, accurately labeled datasets. Y et existing datasets either suffer from noisy labels, limited range of vulnerabilities, or fail to reflect vulnerabilities as they occur in real-world software. This also limits large-scale benchmarking of such solutions. Automated vulnerability injection provides a way to directly address these dataset limitations, but existing techniques remain limited in coverage, contextual fidelity, or injection success rates. In this paper, we present A VIA TOR, the first AI-agentic vulnerability injection workflow. It automatically injects realistic, category-specific vulnerabilities for high-fidelity, diverse, large-scale vulnerability dataset generation. Unlike prior monolithic approaches, A VIA TOR orchestrates specialized AI agents, function agents and traditional code analysis tools, that replicate expert reasoning. It combines semantic analysis, injection synthesis enhanced with LoRA-based fine-tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation, as well as post-injection validation via static analysis and LLM-based discriminators. This modular decomposition allows specialized agents to focus on distinct tasks, improving robustness of injection and reducing error propagation across the workflow. Evaluations across three distinct benchmarks demonstrate that A VIA TOR achieves 91%-95% injection success rates, significantly surpassing existing automated dataset generation techniques in both accuracy and scope of software vulnerabilities. The rapid growth in software complexity, coupled with the sophistication of cyber-attacks, poses a significant threat to the global security and stability of digital infrastructures. In 2024 alone, the total number of publicly reported vulnerabilities rose by 25% [1]. Software vulnerabilities refer to weaknesses in system security requirements, design, implementation, or operation, that could be accidentally triggered or intentionally exploited, resulting in a violation of the system's security policy [2].


DRQA: Dynamic Reasoning Quota Allocation for Controlling Overthinking in Reasoning Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reasoning large language models (RLLMs), such as OpenAI-O3 and DeepSeek-R1, have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities by performing structured and multi-step reasoning. However, recent studies reveal that RLLMs often suffer from overthinking, i.e., producing unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains even for simple questions, leading to excessive token consumption and computational inefficiency. Interestingly, we observe that when processing multiple questions in batch mode, RLLMs exhibit more resource-efficient behavior by dynamically compressing reasoning steps for easier problems, due to implicit resource competition. Inspired by this, we propose Dynamic Reasoning Quota Allocation (DRQA), a novel method that transfers the benefits of resource competition from batch processing to single-question inference. Specifically, DRQA leverages batch-generated preference data and reinforcement learning to train the model to allocate reasoning resources adaptively. By encouraging the model to internalize a preference for responses that are both accurate and concise, DRQA enables it to generate concise answers for simple questions while retaining sufficient reasoning depth for more challenging ones. Extensive experiments on a wide range of mathematical and scientific reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DRQA significantly reduces token usage while maintaining, and in many cases improving, answer accuracy. By effectively mitigating the overthinking problem, DRQA offers a promising direction for more efficient and scalable deployment of RLLMs, and we hope it inspires further exploration into fine-grained control of reasoning behaviors.


Boardwalk: Towards a Framework for Creating Board Games with LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Implementing board games in code can be a time-consuming task. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven effective at generating code for domain-specific tasks with simple contextual information. We aim to investigate whether LLMs can implement digital versions of board games from rules described in natural language. This would be a step towards an LLM-assisted framework for quick board game code generation. We expect to determine the main challenges for LLMs to implement the board games, and how different approaches and models compare to one another. We task three state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude, DeepSeek and ChatGPT) with coding a selection of 12 popular and obscure games in free-form and within Boardwalk, our proposed General Game Playing API. We anonymize the games and components to avoid evoking pre-trained LLM knowledge. The implementations are tested for playability and rule compliance. We evaluate success rate and common errors across LLMs and game popularity. Our approach proves viable, with the best performing model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, yielding 55.6\% of games without any errors. While compliance with the API increases error frequency, the severity of errors is more significantly dependent on the LLM. We outline future steps for creating a framework to integrate this process, making the elaboration of board games more accessible.


P-ReMIS: Pragmatic Reasoning in Mental Health and a Social Implication

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although explainability and interpretability have received significant attention in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) for mental health, reasoning has not been examined in the same depth. Addressing this gap is essential to bridge NLP and mental health through interpretable and reasoning-capable AI systems. To this end, we investigate the pragmatic reasoning capability of large-language models (LLMs) in the mental health domain. We introduce PRiMH dataset, and propose pragmatic reasoning tasks in mental health with pragmatic implicature and presupposition phenomena. In particular, we formulate two tasks in implicature and one task in presupposition. To benchmark the dataset and the tasks presented, we consider four models: Llama3.1, Mistral, MentaLLaMa, and Qwen. The results of the experiments suggest that Mistral and Qwen show substantial reasoning abilities in the domain. Subsequently, we study the behavior of MentaLLaMA on the proposed reasoning tasks with the rollout attention mechanism. In addition, we also propose three StiPRompts to study the stigma around mental health with the state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT4o-mini, Deepseek-chat, and Claude-3.5-haiku. Our evaluated findings show that Claude-3.5-haiku deals with stigma more responsibly compared to the other two LLMs.


GAITEX: Human motion dataset of impaired gait and rehabilitation exercises using inertial and optical sensors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) provide a cost-effective approach to assessing human movement in clinical and everyday environments. However, developing the associated classification models for robust assessment of physiotherapeutic exercise and gait analysis requires large, diverse datasets that are costly and time-consuming to collect. We present a multimodal dataset of physiotherapeutic and gait-related exercises, including correct and clinically relevant variants, recorded from 19 healthy subjects using synchronized IMUs and optical marker-based motion capture (MoCap). It contains data from nine IMUs and 68 markers tracking full-body kinematics. Four markers per IMU allow direct comparison between IMU- and MoCap-derived orientations. We additionally provide processed IMU orientations aligned to common segment coordinate systems, subject-specific OpenSim models, inverse kinematics outputs, and visualization tools for IMU-derived orientations. The dataset is fully annotated with movement quality ratings and timestamped segmentations. It supports various machine learning tasks such as exercise evaluation, gait classification, temporal segmentation, and biomechanical parameter estimation. Code for postprocessing, alignment, inverse kinematics, and technical validation is provided to promote reproducibility.


MOTOR: Multimodal Optimal Transport via Grounded Retrieval in Medical Visual Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Medical visual question answering (MedVQA) plays a vital role in clinical decision-making by providing contextually rich answers to image-based queries. Although vision-language models (VLMs) are widely used for this task, they often generate factually incorrect answers. Retrieval-augmented generation addresses this challenge by providing information from external sources, but risks retrieving irrelevant context, which can degrade the reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Re-ranking retrievals, as introduced in existing approaches, enhances retrieval relevance by focusing on query-text alignment. However, these approaches neglect the visual or multimodal context, which is particularly crucial for medical diagnosis. We propose MOTOR, a novel multimodal retrieval and re-ranking approach that leverages grounded captions and optimal transport. It captures the underlying relationships between the query and the retrieved context based on textual and visual information. Consequently, our approach identifies more clinically relevant contexts to augment the VLM input. Empirical analysis and human expert evaluation demonstrate that MOTOR achieves higher accuracy on MedVQA datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by an average of 6.45%. Code is available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MOTOR.


Differentially Private Bilevel Optimization: Efficient Algorithms with Near-Optimal Rates

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Bilevel optimization, in which one optimization problem is nested inside another, underlies many machine learning applications with a hierarchical structure -- such as meta-learning and hyperparameter optimization. Such applications often involve sensitive training data, raising pressing concerns about individual privacy. Motivated by this, we study differentially private bilevel optimization. We first focus on settings where the outer-level objective is convex, and provide novel upper and lower bounds on the excess empirical risk for both pure and approximate differential privacy. These bounds are nearly tight and essentially match the optimal rates for standard single-level differentially private ERM, up to additional terms that capture the intrinsic complexity of the nested bilevel structure. We also provide population loss bounds for bilevel stochastic optimization. The bounds are achieved in polynomial time via efficient implementations of the exponential and regularized exponential mechanisms. A key technical contribution is a new method and analysis of log-concave sampling under inexact function evaluations, which may be of independent interest. In the non-convex setting, we develop novel algorithms with state-of-the-art rates for privately finding approximate stationary points. Notably, our bounds do not depend on the dimension of the inner problem.


Scalable Medication Extraction and Discontinuation Identification from Electronic Health Records Using Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Identifying medication discontinuations in electronic health records (EHRs) is vital for patient safety but is often hindered by information being buried in unstructured notes. This study aims to evaluate the capabilities of advanced open-sourced and proprietary large language models (LLMs) in extracting medications and classifying their medication status from EHR notes, focusing on their scalability on medication information extraction without human annotation. We collected three EHR datasets from diverse sources to build the evaluation benchmark. We evaluated 12 advanced LLMs and explored multiple LLM prompting strategies. Performance on medication extraction, medication status classification, and their joint task (extraction then classification) was systematically compared across all experiments. We found that LLMs showed promising performance on the medication extraction and discontinuation classification from EHR notes. GPT-4o consistently achieved the highest average F1 scores in all tasks under zero-shot setting - 94.0% for medication extraction, 78.1% for discontinuation classification, and 72.7% for the joint task. Open-sourced models followed closely, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct achieved the highest performance in medication status classification on the MIV-Med dataset (68.7%) and in the joint task on both the Re-CASI (76.2%) and MIV-Med (60.2%) datasets. Medical-specific LLMs demonstrated lower performance compared to advanced general-domain LLMs. Few-shot learning generally improved performance, while CoT reasoning showed inconsistent gains. LLMs demonstrate strong potential for medication extraction and discontinuation identification on EHR notes, with open-sourced models offering scalable alternatives to proprietary systems and few-shot can further improve LLMs' capability.


Synapse: Adaptive Arbitration of Complementary Expertise in Time Series Foundational Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Pre-trained Time Series Foundational Models (TSFMs) represent a significant advance, capable of forecasting diverse time series with complex characteristics, including varied seasonalities, trends, and long-range dependencies. Despite their primary goal of universal time series forecasting, their efficacy is far from uniform; divergent training protocols and data sources cause individual TSFMs to exhibit highly variable performance across different forecasting tasks, domains, and horizons. Leveraging this complementary expertise by arbitrating existing TSFM outputs presents a compelling strategy, yet this remains a largely unexplored area of research. In this paper, we conduct a thorough examination of how different TSFMs exhibit specialized performance profiles across various forecasting settings, and how we can effectively leverage this behavior in arbitration between different time series models. We specifically analyze how factors such as model selection and forecast horizon distribution can influence the efficacy of arbitration strategies. Based on this analysis, we propose Synapse, a novel arbitration framework for TSFMs. Synapse is designed to dynamically leverage a pool of TSFMs, assign and adjust predictive weights based on their relative, context-dependent performance, and construct a robust forecast distribution by adaptively sampling from the output quantiles of constituent models. Experimental results demonstrate that Synapse consistently outperforms other popular ensembling techniques as well as individual TSFMs, demonstrating Synapse's efficacy in time series forecasting.