Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure faces escalating cybersecurity threats that can severely compromise operational efficiency and grid stability. Existing forecasting techniques are limited by the lack of combined robust anomaly mitigation solutions and data privacy preservation. Therefore, this paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel anomaly-resilient federated learning framework that simultaneously preserves data privacy, detects cyber-attacks, and maintains trustworthy demand prediction accuracy under adversarial conditions. The proposed framework integrates three key innovations: LSTM autoencoder-based distributed anomaly detection deployed at each federated client, interpolation-based anomalous data mitigation to preserve temporal continuity, and federated Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks that enable collaborative learning without centralized data aggregation. The framework is validated on real-world EV charging infrastructure datasets combined with real-world DDoS attack datasets, providing robust validation of the proposed approach under realistic threat scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the federated approach achieves superior performance compared to centralized models, with 15.2% improvement in R2 accuracy while maintaining data locality. The integrated cyber-attack detection and mitigation system produces trustworthy datasets that enhance prediction reliability, recovering 47.9% of attack-induced performance degradation while maintaining exceptional precision (91.3%) and minimal false positive rates (1.21%). The proposed architecture enables enhanced EV infrastructure planning, privacy-preserving collaborative forecasting, cybersecurity resilience, and rapid recovery from malicious threats across distributed charging networks.

State-space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have become powerful architectures for sequence modeling, yet their internal dynamics remain poorly understood compared to attention-based models. We introduce and validate the Influence Score, a controllability-based metric derived from the discretized state-space parameters of Mamba and computed through a backward recurrence analogous to system observability. The score quantifies how strongly a token at position k affects all later states and outputs. We evaluate this measure across three Mamba variants: mamba-130m, mamba-2.8b, and mamba-2.8b-slimpj, using six experiments that test its sensitivity to temperature, prompt complexity, token type, layer depth, token position, and input perturbations. The results show three main insights: (1) the Influence Score increases with model size and training data, reflecting model capacity; (2) Mamba exhibits consistent architectural patterns, including recency bias and concentrated influence in mid-to-late layers; and (3) emergent behaviors appear only at scale, with mamba-2.8b-slimpj uniquely prioritizing content words and reducing internal influence in the presence of noise. These findings establish the Influence Score as a practical diagnostic tool for interpreting and comparing SSM-based language models.

Developing a robust visual quality assessment (VQualA) large multi-modal model (LMM) requires achieving versatility, powerfulness, and transferability. However, existing VQualA LMMs typically focus on a single task and rely on full-parameter fine-tuning, which makes them prone to overfitting on specific modalities or task types, thereby limiting their generalization capacity and transferability. To address this, we propose a vision-encoder-centered generative pre-training pipeline and develop the VITAL-Series LMMs. (1) We adopt a machine-executed annotation-scrutiny paradigm, constructing over 4.5M vision-language (VL) pairs-the largest VQualA training dataset to date. (2) We employ a multi-task training workflow that simultaneously enhances the model's quantitative scoring precision and strengthens its capability for quality interpretation across both image and video modalities. (3) Building upon the vision encoder, we realize an efficient model zoo extension: the model zoo exhibits strong zero-shot performance, and each paired decoder requires only a swift warm-up using less than 1/1000 of the pre-training data to achieve performance comparable to the fully trained counterpart. Overall, our work lays a cornerstone for advancing toward the foundation LMM for VQualA.

As AI agents attempt to autonomously act on users' behalf, they raise transparency and control issues. We argue that permission-based access control is indispensable in providing meaningful control to the users, but conventional permission models are inadequate for the automated agentic execution paradigm. We therefore propose automated permission management for AI agents. Our key idea is to conduct a user study to identify the factors influencing users' permission decisions and to encode these factors into an ML-based permission management assistant capable of predicting users' future decisions. We find that participants' permission decisions are influenced by communication context but importantly individual preferences tend to remain consistent within contexts, and align with those of other participants. Leveraging these insights, we develop a permission prediction model achieving 85.1% accuracy overall and 94.4% for high-confidence predictions. We find that even without using permission history, our model achieves an accuracy of 66.9%, and a slight increase of training samples (i.e., 1-4) can substantially increase the accuracy by 10.8%.

With the rapid rise of short-form videos, TikTok has become one of the most influential platforms among children and teenagers, but also a source of harmful content that can affect their perception and behavior. Such content, often subtle or deceptive, challenges traditional moderation methods due to the massive volume and real-time nature of uploads. This paper presents MTikGuard, a real-time multimodal harmful content detection system for TikTok, with three key contributions: (1) an extended TikHarm dataset expanded to 4,723 labeled videos by adding diverse real-world samples, (2) a multimodal classification framework integrating visual, audio, and textual features to achieve state-of-the-art performance with 89.37% accuracy and 89.45% F1-score, and (3) a scalable streaming architecture built on Apache Kafka and Apache Spark for real-time deployment. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining dataset expansion, advanced multimodal fusion, and robust deployment for practical large-scale social media content moderation. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ntdat-8324/MTikGuard-System.git.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in automating clinical diagnosis, yet their non-transparent decision-making and limited alignment with diagnostic standards hinder trust and clinical adoption. We address this challenge by proposing a two-stage diagnostic framework that enhances transparency, trustworthiness, and reliability. First, we introduce Evidence-Guided Diagnostic Reasoning (EGDR), which guides LLMs to generate structured diagnostic hypotheses by interleaving evidence extraction with logical reasoning grounded in DSM-5 criteria. Second, we propose a Diagnosis Confidence Scoring (DCS) module that evaluates the factual accuracy and logical consistency of generated diagnoses through two interpretable metrics: the Knowledge Attribution Score (KAS) and the Logic Consistency Score (LCS). Evaluated on the D4 dataset with pseudo-labels, EGDR outperforms direct in-context prompting and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) across five LLMs. For instance, on OpenBioLLM, EGDR improves accuracy from 0.31 (Direct) to 0.76 and increases DCS from 0.50 to 0.67. On MedLlama, DCS rises from 0.58 (CoT) to 0.77. Overall, EGDR yields up to +45% accuracy and +36% DCS gains over baseline methods, offering a clinically grounded, interpretable foundation for trustworthy AI-assisted diagnosis.

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) excel at chain-of-thought reasoning but face distribution shift at test-time and a lack of verifiable supervision. Recent test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) methods derive label-free pseudo-rewards from self-consistency voting over sampled trajectories, yet they often collapse: the majority-vote reward prevails, responses shorten, and Pass@1 declines. W e trace this to uniform sequence updates in which most tokens are low-entropy followers, while a small high-entropy subset determines the reasoning branches. Thus we propose SPINE, a token-selective test-time reinforcement learning framework that (i) updates only forking tokens, the high-entropy branch points identified from forward-pass statistics, and (ii) applies an entropy-band regularizer at those tokens to sustain exploration when entropy is too low and to suppress noisy supervision when it is too high. SPINE plugs into GRPO-style objectives, optionally with a KL anchor, and requires no labels or reward models. Across ten benchmarks spanning multimodal VQA, general and expert QA, mathematical reasoning, and medical QA, SPINE consistently improves Pass@1 over TTRL while avoiding response-length collapse and yielding more stable training dynamics on both LLM and MLLM backbones. These results indicate that aligning updates with chain-of-thought branch points is a simple and label-free mechanism for stable and effective test-time adaptation in reasoning models.

Alignment faking is a form of strategic deception in AI in which models selectively comply with training objectives when they infer that they are in training, while preserving different behavior outside training. The phenomenon was first documented for Claude 3 Opus and later examined across additional large language models. In these setups, the word "training" refers to simulated training via prompts without parameter updates, so the observed effects are context conditioned shifts in behavior rather than preference learning. We study the phenomenon using an evaluation framework that compares preference optimization methods (BCO, DPO, KTO, and GRPO) across 15 models from four model families, measured along three axes: safety, harmlessness, and helpfulness. Our goal is to identify what causes alignment faking and when it occurs.

Abstract--T emporal Action Detection (T AD) aims to identify and localize actions by determining their starting and ending frames within untrimmed videos. Recent Structured State-Space Models such as Mamba have demonstrated potential in T AD due to their long-range modeling capability and linear computational complexity. On the other hand, structured state-space models often face two key challenges in T AD, namely, decay of temporal context due to recursive processing and self-element conflict during global visual context modeling, which become more severe while handling long-span action instances. This paper presents MambaT AD, a new state-space T AD model that introduces long-range modeling and global feature detection capabilities for accurate temporal action detection. MambaT AD comprises two novel designs that complement each other with superior T AD performance. First, it introduces a Diagonal-Masked Bidirectional State-Space (DMBSS) module which effectively facilitates global feature fusion and temporal action detection. Second, it introduces a global feature fusion head that refines the detection progressively with multi-granularity features and global awareness. In addition, MambaT AD tackles T AD in an end-to-end one-stage manner using a new state-space temporal adapter(SST A) which reduces network parameters and computation cost with linear complexity. Extensive experiments show that MambaT AD achieves superior T AD performance consistently across multiple public benchmarks. Emporal action detection (T AD) aims to detect specific action categories and extract corresponding temporal spans in untrimmed videos. It is a long-standing and challenging problem in video understanding with extensive real-world applications such as sports analysis, surveillance and security. The development of deep neural networks such as CNNs [1], [2] and Transformers [3], [4] has led to continuous advancements in T AD performance over the past few years. However, CNNs have limited capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies, while Transformers face challenges with computational complexity and feature discrimination [1]. Hui Lu and Yi Y u are with the Rapid-Rich Object Search Lab, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, (e-mail: {hui007, yuyi0010}@e.ntu.edu.sg).

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as re-rankers is shifting recommender systems towards a user-centric paradigm. However, a significant gap remains: current re-rankers often lack mechanisms for fine-grained user control. They struggle to balance inherent user preferences with multiple attribute-based constraints, often resorting to simplistic hard filtering that can excessively narrow the recommendation pool and yield suboptimal results. This limitation leaves users as passive recipients rather than active collaborators in the recommendation process. To bridge this gap, we propose COREC, a novel token-augmented re-ranking framework that incorporates specific user requirements in co-creating the recommendation outcome. COREC empowers users to steer re-ranking results with precise and flexible control via explicit, attribute-based signals. The framework learns to balance these commands against latent preferences, yielding rankings that adhere to user instructions without sacrificing personalization. Experiments show that COREC: (1) exceeds state-of-the-art baselines on standard recommendation effectiveness and (2) demonstrates superior adherence to specific attribute requirements, proving that COREC enables fine-grained and predictable manipulation of the rankings.