Industry
Exploiting Latent Space Discontinuities for Building Universal LLM Jailbreaks and Data Extraction Attacks
Paim, Kayua Oleques, Mansilha, Rodrigo Brandao, Kreutz, Diego, Franco, Muriel Figueredo, Cordeiro, Weverton
The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised significant concerns about their security against adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to crafting universal jailbreaks and data extraction attacks by exploiting latent space discontinuities, an architectural vulnerability related to the sparsity of training data. Initial results indicate that when these discontinuities are exploited, they can consistently and profoundly compromise model behavior, even in the presence of layered defenses. The findings suggest that this strategy has substantial potential as a systemic attack vector. Disclaimer: This paper contains examples of harmful and offensive language. Additional supporting materials may be provided upon formal request and are subject to the signing of a liability and ethical use agreement. Large Language Models (LLMs) are enabling novel applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and transforming human activities through conversational models (e.g., ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Llama, and Claude). LLMs allow for natural human-AI interaction and specialized applications across multiple domains, including image generation (e.g., Adobe Firefly and Pixlr), code automation (e.g., GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer), and retrieval-augmented generation systems (e.g., Perplexity AI and IBM watsonx). The interactions may happen using different interfaces, such as via direct interaction with the user using a Web interface or indirectly via APIs.
OSMGen: Highly Controllable Satellite Image Synthesis using OpenStreetMap Data
Ziashahabi, Amir, Ghasemi, Narges, Shahabi, Sajjad, Krumm, John, Avestimehr, Salman, Shahabi, Cyrus
Accurate and up-to-date geospatial data are essential for urban planning, infrastructure monitoring, and environmental management. Yet, automating urban monitoring remains difficult because curated datasets of specific urban features and their changes are scarce. We introduce OSMGen, a generative framework that creates realistic satellite imagery directly from raw OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Unlike prior work that relies on raster tiles, OSMGen uses the full richness of OSM JSON, including vector geometries, semantic tags, location, and time, giving fine-grained control over how scenes are generated. A central feature of the framework is the ability to produce consistent before-after image pairs: user edits to OSM inputs translate into targeted visual changes, while the rest of the scene is preserved. This makes it possible to generate training data that addresses scarcity and class imbalance, and to give planners a simple way to preview proposed interventions by editing map data. More broadly, OSMGen produces paired (JSON, image) data for both static and changed states, paving the way toward a closed-loop system where satellite imagery can automatically drive structured OSM updates. Source code is available at https://github.com/amir-zsh/OSMGen.
Split Learning-Enabled Framework for Secure and Light-weight Internet of Medical Things Systems
Sai, Siva, Prasad, Manish, Bhargava, Animesh, Chamola, Vinay, Buyya, Rajkumar
Abstract--The rapid growth of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices has resulted in significant security risks, particularly the risk of malware attacks on resource-constrained devices. Conventional deep learning methods are impractical due to resource limitations, while Federated Learning (FL) suffers from high communication overhead and vulnerability to non-IID (heterogeneous) data. In this paper, we propose a split learning (SL) based framework for IoT malware detection through image-based classification. By dividing the neural network training between the clients and an edge server, the framework reduces computational burden on resource-constrained clients while ensuring data privacy. We formulate a joint optimization problem that balances computation cost and communication efficiency by using a game-theoretic approach for attaining better training performance. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed framework outperforms popular FL methods in terms of accuracy (+6.35%), These results establish the potential of SL as a scalable and secure paradigm for next-generation IoT security. Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a popular paradigm for connecting vast networks of computing devices, sensors, software, and many more, with enhanced communicative capabilities, automation, and efficiency, thus revolutionizing both industrial and commercial use cases.
Sherlock: Reliable and Efficient Agentic Workflow Execution
Ro, Yeonju, Qiu, Haoran, Goiri, รรฑigo, Fonseca, Rodrigo, Bianchini, Ricardo, Akella, Aditya, Wang, Zhangyang, Erez, Mattan, Choukse, Esha
With the increasing adoption of large language models (LLM), agentic workflows, which compose multiple LLM calls with tools, retrieval, and reasoning steps, are increasingly replacing traditional applications. However, such workflows are inherently error-prone: incorrect or partially correct output at one step can propagate or even amplify through subsequent stages, compounding the impact on the final output. Recent work proposes integrating verifiers that validate LLM output or actions, such as self-reflection, debate, or LLM-as-a-judge mechanisms. Yet, verifying every step introduces significant latency and cost overheads. In this work, we seek to answer three key questions: which nodes in a workflow are most error-prone and thus deserve costly verification, how to select the most appropriate verifier for each node, and how to use verification with minimal impact to latency? Our solution, Sherlock, addresses these using counterfactual analysis on agentic workflows to identify error-prone nodes and selectively attaching cost-optimal verifiers only where necessary. At runtime, Sherlock speculatively executes downstream tasks to reduce latency overhead, while verification runs in the background. If verification fails, execution is rolled back to the last verified output. Compared to the non-verifying baseline, Sherlock delivers an 18.3% accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. Sherlock reduces workflow execution time by up to 48.7% over non-speculative execution and lowers verification cost by 26.0% compared to the Monte Carlo search-based method, demonstrating that principled, fault-aware verification effectively balances efficiency and reliability in agentic workflows.
Scalable Processing-Near-Memory for 1M-Token LLM Inference: CXL-Enabled KV-Cache Management Beyond GPU Limits
Kim, Dowon, Lee, MinJae, Kim, Janghyeon, Kwon, HyuckSung, Jeong, Hyeonggyu, Park, Sang-Soo, Yoon, Minyong, Roh, Si-Dong, Kwon, Yongsuk, So, Jinin, Choi, Jungwook
The expansion of context windows in large language models (LLMs) to multi-million tokens introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks, particularly in managing the growing Key-Value (KV) cache. While Compute Express Link (CXL) enables non-eviction frameworks that offload the full KV-cache to scalable external memory, these frameworks still suffer from costly data transfers when recalling non-resident KV tokens to limited GPU memory as context lengths increase. This work proposes scalable Processing-Near-Memory (PNM) for 1M-Token LLM Inference, a CXL-enabled KV-cache management system that coordinates memory and computation beyond GPU limits. Our design offloads token page selection to a PNM accelerator within CXL memory, eliminating costly recalls and enabling larger GPU batch sizes. We further introduce a hybrid parallelization strategy and a steady-token selection mechanism to enhance compute efficiency and scalability. Implemented atop a state-of-the-art CXL-PNM system, our solution delivers consistent performance gains for LLMs with up to 405B parameters and 1M-token contexts. Our PNM-only offloading scheme (PNM-KV) and GPU-PNM hybrid with steady-token execution (PnG-KV) achieve up to 21.9x throughput improvement, up to 60x lower energy per token, and up to 7.3x better total cost efficiency than the baseline, demonstrating that CXL-enabled multi-PNM architectures can serve as a scalable backbone for future long-context LLM inference.
A systematic evaluation of uncertainty quantification techniques in deep learning: a case study in photoplethysmography signal analysis
Bench, Ciaran, Pfeffer, Oskar, Desai, Vivek, Moulaeifard, Mohammad, Coquelin, Loรฏc, Charlton, Peter H., Strodthoff, Nils, Hegemann, Nando, Aston, Philip J., Thompson, Andrew
In principle, deep learning models trained on medical time-series, including wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor data, can provide a means to continuously monitor physiological parameters outside of clinical settings. However, there is considerable risk of poor performance when deployed in practical measurement scenarios leading to negative patient outcomes. Reliable uncertainties accompanying predictions can provide guidance to clinicians in their interpretation of the trustworthiness of model outputs. It is therefore of interest to compare the effectiveness of different approaches. Here we implement an unprecedented set of eight uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques to models trained on two clinically relevant prediction tasks: Atrial Fibrillation (AF) detection (classification), and two variants of blood pressure regression. We formulate a comprehensive evaluation procedure to enable a rigorous comparison of these approaches. We observe a complex picture of uncertainty reliability across the different techniques, where the most optimal for a given task depends on the chosen expression of uncertainty, evaluation metric, and scale of reliability assessed. We find that assessing local calibration and adaptivity provides practically relevant insights about model behaviour that otherwise cannot be acquired using more commonly implemented global reliability metrics. We emphasise that criteria for evaluating UQ techniques should cater to the model's practical use case, where the use of a small number of measurements per patient places a premium on achieving small-scale reliability for the chosen expression of uncertainty, while preserving as much predictive performance as possible.
POSESTITCH-SLT: Linguistically Inspired Pose-Stitching for End-to-End Sign Language Translation
Joshi, Abhinav, Sharma, Vaibhav, Singh, Sanjeet, Modi, Ashutosh
Sign language translation remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, sentence-aligned datasets. Prior arts have focused on various feature extraction and architectural changes to support neural machine translation for sign languages. We propose POSESTITCH-SLT, a novel pre-training scheme that is inspired by linguistic-templates-based sentence generation technique. With translation comparison on two sign language datasets, How2Sign and iSign, we show that a simple transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture outperforms the prior art when considering template-generated sentence pairs in training. We achieve BLEU-4 score improvements from 1.97 to 4.56 on How2Sign and from 0.55 to 3.43 on iSign, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods for pose-based gloss-free translation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of template-driven synthetic supervision in low-resource sign language settings.
FedReplay: A Feature Replay Assisted Federated Transfer Learning Framework for Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Smart Agriculture
Li, Long, Li, Jiajia, Chen, Dong, Pu, Lina, Yao, Haibo, Huang, Yanbo
Accurate classification plays a pivotal role in smart agriculture, enabling applications such as crop monitoring, fruit recognition, and pest detection. However, conventional centralized training often requires large-scale data collection, which raises privacy concerns, while standard federated learning struggles with non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and incurs high communication costs. To address these challenges, we propose a federated learning framework that integrates a frozen Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) vision transformer (ViT) with a lightweight transformer classifier. By leveraging the strong feature extraction capability of the pre-trained CLIP ViT, the framework avoids training large-scale models from scratch and restricts federated updates to a compact classifier, thereby reducing transmission overhead significantly. Furthermore, to mitigate performance degradation caused by non-IID data distribution, a small subset (1%) of CLIP-extracted feature representations from all classes is shared across clients. These shared features are non-reversible to raw images, ensuring privacy preservation while aligning class representation across participants. Experimental results on agricultural classification tasks show that the proposed method achieve 86.6% accuracy, which is more than 4 times higher compared to baseline federated learning approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of combining vision-language model features with federated learning for privacy-preserving and scalable agricultural intelligence.
IL-PCSR: Legal Corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval
Paul, Shounak, Ghumare, Dhananjay, Goyal, Pawan, Ghosh, Saptarshi, Modi, Ashutosh
Identifying/retrieving relevant statutes and prior cases/precedents for a given legal situation are common tasks exercised by law practitioners. Researchers to date have addressed the two tasks independently, thus developing completely different datasets and models for each task; however, both retrieval tasks are inherently related, e.g., similar cases tend to cite similar statutes (due to similar factual situation). In this paper, we address this gap. We propose IL-PCR (Indian Legal corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval), which is a unique corpus that provides a common testbed for developing models for both the tasks (Statute Retrieval and Precedent Retrieval) that can exploit the dependence between the two. We experiment extensively with several baseline models on the tasks, including lexical models, semantic models and ensemble based on GNNs. Further, to exploit the dependence between the two tasks, we develop an LLM-based re-ranking approach that gives the best performance.
Advancing AI Challenges for the United States Department of the Air Force
Prothmann, Christian, Gadepally, Vijay, Kepner, Jeremy, Borchard, Koley, Carlone, Luca, Folcik, Zachary, Grith, J. Daniel, Houle, Michael, How, Jonathan P., Hughes, Nathan, Igbinedion, Ifueko, Jananthan, Hayden, Jayashankar, Tejas, Jones, Michael, Karaman, Sertac, Kurien, Binoy G., Lancho, Alejandro, Lavezzi, Giovanni, Lee, Gary C. F., Leiserson, Charles E., Linares, Richard, McEvoy, Lindsey, Michaleas, Peter, Milner, Chasen, Pentland, Alex, Polyanskiy, Yury, Popovich, Jovan, Price, Jeffrey, Reid, Tim W., Riley, Stephanie, Samsi, Siddharth, Saunders, Peter, Simek, Olga, Veillette, Mark S., Weiss, Amir, Wornell, Gregory W., Rus, Daniela, Ruppel, Scott T.
The DAF-MIT AI Accelerator is a collaboration between the United States Department of the Air Force (DAF) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This program pioneers fundamental advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to expand the competitive advantage of the United States in the defense and civilian sectors. In recent years, AI Accelerator projects have developed and launched public challenge problems aimed at advancing AI research in priority areas. Hallmarks of AI Accelerator challenges include large, publicly available, and AI-ready datasets to stimulate open-source solutions and engage the wider academic and private sector AI ecosystem. This article supplements our previous publication, which introduced AI Accelerator challenges. We provide an update on how ongoing and new challenges have successfully contributed to AI research and applications of AI technologies.