The recent coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has become a pandemic and has affected the entire globe. During the pandemic, we have observed a spike in cases related to mental health, such as anxiety, stress, and depression. Depression significantly influences most diseases worldwide, making it difficult to detect mental health conditions in people due to unawareness and unwillingness to consult a doctor. However, nowadays, people extensively use online social media platforms to express their emotions and thoughts. Hence, social media platforms are now becoming a large data source that can be utilized for detecting depression and mental illness. However, existing approaches often overlook data sparsity in tweets and the multimodal aspects of social media. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal framework that combines textual, user-specific, and image analysis to detect depression among social media users. To provide enough context about the user's emotional state, we propose (i) an extrinsic feature by harnessing the URLs present in tweets and (ii) extracting textual content present in images posted in tweets. We also extract five sets of features belonging to different modalities to describe a user. Additionally, we introduce a Deep Learning model, the Visual Neural Network (VNN), to generate embeddings of user-posted images, which are used to create the visual feature vector for prediction. We contribute a curated Covid-19 dataset of depressed and non-depressed users for research purposes and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in detecting depression during the Covid-19 outbreak. Our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods over a benchmark dataset by 2%-8% and produces promising results on the Covid-19 dataset. Our analysis highlights the impact of each modality and provides valuable insights into users' mental and emotional states.

Large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise in medical applications, but their ability to detect and correct errors in clinical texts -- a prerequisite for safe deployment -- remains under-evaluated, particularly beyond English. We introduce MedRECT, a cross-lingual benchmark (Japanese/English) that formulates medical error handling as three subtasks: error detection, error localization (sentence extraction), and error correction. MedRECT is built with a scalable, automated pipeline from the Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations (JMLE) and a curated English counterpart, yielding MedRECT-ja (663 texts) and MedRECT-en (458 texts) with comparable error/no-error balance. We evaluate 9 contemporary LLMs spanning proprietary, open-weight, and reasoning families. Key findings: (i) reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, with up to 13.5% relative improvement in error detection and 51.0% in sentence extraction; (ii) cross-lingual evaluation reveals 5-10% performance gaps from English to Japanese, with smaller disparities for reasoning models; (iii) targeted LoRA fine-tuning yields asymmetric improvements in error correction performance (Japanese: +0.078, English: +0.168) while preserving reasoning capabilities; and (iv) our fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance on structured medical error correction tasks. To our knowledge, MedRECT is the first comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark for medical error correction, providing a reproducible framework and resources for developing safer medical LLMs across languages.

While AI-generated text (AIGT) detectors achieve over 90\% accuracy on direct LLM outputs, they fail catastrophically against iteratively-paraphrased content. We investigate why iteratively-paraphrased text -- itself AI-generated -- evades detection systems designed for AIGT identification. Through intrinsic mechanism analysis, we reveal that iterative paraphrasing creates an intermediate laundering region characterized by semantic displacement with preserved generation patterns, which brings up two attack categories: paraphrasing human-authored text (authorship obfuscation) and paraphrasing LLM-generated text (plagiarism evasion). To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce PADBen, the first benchmark systematically evaluating detector robustness against both paraphrase attack scenarios. PADBen comprises a five-type text taxonomy capturing the full trajectory from original content to deeply laundered text, and five progressive detection tasks across sentence-pair and single-sentence challenges. We evaluate 11 state-of-the-art detectors, revealing critical asymmetry: detectors successfully identify the plagiarism evasion problem but fail for the case of authorship obfuscation. Our findings demonstrate that current detection approaches cannot effectively handle the intermediate laundering region, necessitating fundamental advances in detection architectures beyond existing semantic and stylistic discrimination methods. For detailed code implementation, please see https://github.com/JonathanZha47/PadBen-Paraphrase-Attack-Benchmark.

Abstract--Emotion recognition from speech plays a vital role in the development of empathetic human-computer interaction systems. This paper presents a comparative analysis of lightweight transformer-based models, DistilHuBERT and PaSST, by classifying six core emotions from the CREMA-D dataset. DistilHuBERT demonstrates superior accuracy (70.64%) and F1 score (70.36%) while maintaining an exceptionally small model size (0.02 MB), outperforming both PaSST and the baseline. Furthermore, we conducted an ablation study on three variants of the PaSST, Linear, MLP, and Attentive Pooling heads, to understand the effect of classification head architecture on model performance. Our results indicate that PaSST with an MLP head yields the best performance among its variants but still falls short of DistilHuBERT . Among the emotion classes, angry is consistently the most accurately detected, while disgust remains the most challenging. These findings suggest that lightweight transformers like DistilHuBERT offer a compelling solution for real-time speech emotion recognition on edge devices.

Abstract--Driven by the unceasing development of maritime services, tasks of unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V)-assisted maritime data collection (MDC) are becoming increasingly diverse, complex and personalized. As a result, effective task allocation for MDC is becoming increasingly critical. In this work, integrating the concept of spatial crowdsourcing (SC), we develop an SCbased MDC network model and investigate the task allocation problem for UA V-assisted MDC. In variable maritime service scenarios, tasks are allocated to UA Vs based on the spatial and temporal requirements of the tasks, as well as the mobility of the UA Vs. T o address this problem, we design an SCbased task allocation algorithm for the MDC (SC-MDC-T A). The quality estimation is utilized to assess and regulate task execution quality by evaluating signal to interference plus noise ratio and the UA V energy consumption. The reverse auction is employed to potentially reduce the task waiting time as much as possible while ensuring timely completion. Additionally, we establish typical task allocation scenarios based on maritime service requirements indicated by electronic navigational charts. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SC-MDC-T A algorithm effectively allocates tasks for various MDC scenarios. Furthermore, compared to the benchmark, the SC-MDC-T A algorithm can also reduce the task completion time and lower the UA V energy consumption. RIVEN by the continuous development of maritime services such as marine resources exploration, reconnaissance and surveillance, anti-submarine, marine tourism, marine transportation and emergency collection, tasks of unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V)-assisted maritime data collection (MDC) are becoming increasingly diverse, complex and personalized [1]-[3]. Personal use of this material is permitted.

Organizations are increasingly adopting and adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) hosted on public repositories such as HuggingFace. Although these adaptations often improve performance on specialized downstream tasks, recent evidence indicates that they can also degrade a model's safety or fairness. Since different fine-tuning techniques may exert distinct effects on these critical dimensions, this study undertakes a systematic assessment of their trade-offs. Four widely used Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods, LoRA, IA3, Prompt-Tuning, and P-Tuning, are applied to four instruction-tuned model families (Meta-Llama-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-7B). In total, 235 fine-tuned variants are evaluated across eleven safety hazard categories and nine demographic fairness dimensions. The results show that adapter-based approaches (LoRA, IA3) tend to improve safety scores and are the least disruptive to fairness, retaining higher accuracy and lower bias scores. In contrast, prompt-based methods (Prompt-Tuning and P-Tuning) generally reduce safety and cause larger fairness regressions, with decreased accuracy and increased bias. Alignment shifts are strongly moderated by base model type: LLaMA remains stable, Qwen records modest gains, Gemma experiences the steepest safety decline, and Mistral, which is released without an internal moderation layer, displays the greatest variance. Improvements in safety do not necessarily translate into improvements in fairness, and no single configuration optimizes all fairness metrics simultaneously, indicating an inherent trade-off between these objectives. These findings suggest a practical guideline for safety-critical deployments: begin with a well-aligned base model, favour adapter-based PEFT, and conduct category-specific audits of both safety and fairness.

Achieving both accurate and interpretable classification of motor imagery EEG remains a key challenge in brain computer interface (BCI) research. This paper compares a transparent fuzzy reasoning approach (ANFIS-FBCSP-PSO) with a deep learning benchmark (EEGNet) using the BCI Competition IV-2a dataset. The ANFIS pipeline combines filter bank common spatial pattern feature extraction with fuzzy IF-THEN rules optimized via particle swarm optimization, while EEGNet learns hierarchical spatial temporal representations directly from raw EEG data. In within-subject experiments, the fuzzy neural model performed better (68.58 percent +/- 13.76 percent accuracy, kappa = 58.04 percent +/- 18.43), while in cross-subject (LOSO) tests, the deep model exhibited stronger generalization (68.20 percent +/- 12.13 percent accuracy, kappa = 57.33 percent +/- 16.22). The study provides practical guidance for selecting MI-BCI systems according to design goals: interpretability or robustness across users. Future investigations into transformer based and hybrid neuro symbolic frameworks are expected to advance transparent EEG decoding.

High-quality data scarcity hinders malware detection, limiting ML performance. We introduce MalDataGen, an open-source modular framework for generating high-fidelity synthetic tabular data using modular deep learning models (e.g., WGAN-GP, VQ-V AE). Evaluated via dual validation (TR-TS/TS-TR), seven classifiers, and utility metrics, MalDataGen outperforms benchmarks like SDV while preserving data utility. Its flexible design enables seamless integration into detection pipelines, offering a practical solution for cybersecurity applications. I. Introduction Modern machine learning algorithms, particularly deep learning architectures, depend on large-scale datasets with reliable annotations to achieve optimal performance.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) developed using publicly available datasets predominantly focus on enterprise environments, raising concerns about their effectiveness for converged Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) in energy infrastructures. This study evaluates the representativeness of five widely used datasets: CIC-IDS2017, SWaT, WADI, Sherlock, and CIC-Modbus2023 against network-detectable MITRE ATT&CK techniques extracted from documented energy sector incidents. Using a structured five-step analytical approach, this article successfully developed and performed a gap analysis that identified 94 network observable techniques from an initial pool of 274 ATT&CK techniques. Sherlock dataset exhibited the highest mean coverage (0.56), followed closely by CIC-IDS2017 (0.55), while SWaT and WADI recorded the lowest scores (0.38). Combining CIC-IDS2017, Sherlock, and CIC-Modbus2023 achieved an aggregate coverage of 92%, highlighting their complementary strengths. The analysis identifies critical gaps, particularly in lateral movement and industrial protocol manipulation, providing a clear pathway for dataset enhancement and more robust NIDS evaluation in hybrid IT/OT energy environments.

The rapid rise of generative diffusion models has made distinguishing authentic visual content from synthetic imagery increasingly challenging. Traditional deepfake detection methods, which rely on frequency or pixel-level artifacts, fail against modern text-to-image systems such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that produce photorealistic and artifact-free results. This paper introduces a diffusion-based forensic framework that leverages multi-strength image reconstruction dynamics, termed diffusion snap-back, to identify AI-generated images. By analysing how reconstruction metrics (LPIPS, SSIM, and PSNR) evolve across varying noise strengths, we extract interpretable manifold-based features that differentiate real and synthetic images. Evaluated on a balanced dataset of 4,000 images, our approach achieves 0.993 AUROC under cross-validation and remains robust to common distortions such as compression and noise. Despite using limited data and a single diffusion backbone (Stable Diffusion v1.5), the proposed method demonstrates strong generalization and interpretability, offering a foundation for scalable, model-agnostic synthetic media forensics.