-- This study examines machine learning techniques like Decision Trees, Support V ector Machines, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, and ensemble methods to detect Android malware. The study evaluates these models on a dataset of Android applications and analyzes their accuracy, efficiency, and real-world applicability. Key findings show that ensemble methods demonstrate superior performance, but there are trade-offs between model interpretability, efficiency, and accuracy. Given its increasing threat, the insights guide future research and practical use of ML to combat Android malware. I. INTRODUCTION Smartphones have brought in a new era of connectivity, convenience, and innovation, with Android being the most widely used mobile operating system [1], [2]. However, this ubiquity has come with challenges. The background of Android's ecosystem makes clear that the characteristics that make Android popular also leave it vulnerable to malicious activities. Specifically, Android's open-source nature, vast user base, and easy application distribution and installation have created an environment where cybercriminals can thrive. Thus, it is essential to understand the Android ecosystem's unique landscape to address the severe threat of Android malware. The following section sets the stage for exploring advanced malware detection techniques for Android devices in later sections. A. Background The extensive adoption of Android operating systems, with their open-source nature and customization capabilities, has led to them becoming a primary target for cybercriminals. Android's vast and diverse application ecosystem presents significant security challenges, as malicious applications can masquerade as legitimate ones, exploiting vulnerabilities and employing social engineering tactics [1]-[3]. These malicious activities include stealing sensitive information, sending premium-rate SMS messages, and installing additional payloads [4]-[5].

Step-by-step reasoning has become a standard approach for large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks. While this paradigm has proven effective, it raises a fundamental question: How can we verify that an LLM's reasoning is accurately grounded in knowledge? To address this question, we introduce a novel evaluation suite that systematically assesses the knowledge grounding of intermediate reasoning. Our framework comprises three key components. (1) Principal Knowledge Collection, a large-scale repository of atomic knowledge essential for reasoning. Based on the collection, we propose (2) knowledge-grounded evaluation metrics designed to measure how well models recall and apply prerequisite knowledge in reasoning. These metrics are computed by our (3) evaluator LLM, a lightweight model optimized for cost-effective and reliable metric computation. Our evaluation suite demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in identifying missing or misapplied knowledge elements, providing crucial insights for uncovering fundamental reasoning deficiencies in LLMs. Beyond evaluation, we demonstrate how these metrics can be integrated into preference optimization, showcasing further applications of knowledge-grounded evaluation.

The presence of social biases in large language models (LLMs) has become a significant concern in AI research. These biases, often embedded in training data, can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and distort decision-making processes. When LLMs are integrated into ranking systems, they can propagate these biases, leading to unfair outcomes in critical applications such as search engines and recommendation systems. Backpack Language Models, unlike traditional transformer-based models that treat text sequences as monolithic structures, generate outputs as weighted combinations of non-contextual, learned word aspects, also known as senses. Leveraging this architecture, we propose a framework for debiasing ranking tasks. Our experimental results show that this framework effectively mitigates gender bias in text retrieval and ranking with minimal degradation in performance.

LLM training is resource-intensive. Quantized training improves computational and memory efficiency but introduces quantization noise, which can hinder convergence and degrade model accuracy. Stochastic Rounding (SR) has emerged as a theoretically attractive alternative to deterministic rounding, offering unbiased gradient estimates. However, its interaction with other training factors -- especially batch size -- remains under explored. In this paper, we present a theoretical and empirical study of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with SR, showing that increased batch sizes can compensate for reduced precision during back-propagation. Furthermore, we show that quantizing weights and activations impacts gradient variance in distinct ways. Our experiments validate these theoretical insights.

Large Language Model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by the growing size of the key-value (KV) cache, which scales with both context length and generation length. Prior work shows that attention is dominated by a small subset of critical tokens, yet existing systems struggle to exploit this efficiently without degrading accuracy, especially in long generation. We make a key observation: the temporal stability of these critical tokens varies significantly across KV heads: some heads consistently focus on the same tokens, while others shift frequently. Building on this insight, we introduce FlexiCache, a hierarchical KV-cache management system that leverages the temporal stability of KV heads to reduce GPU memory usage and computation overhead, while preserving model accuracy. FlexiCache classifies KV heads as stable or unstable: it retains all KV-cache pages from unstable heads in GPU memory, whereas for stable heads, it keeps only the top-K pages on the GPU and offloads the rest to host memory. By exploiting temporal stability, FlexiCache performs periodic reranking for stable heads to fetch newly promoted top pages. Implemented atop vLLM, FlexiCache reduces GPU memory footprint for long-context requests by up to 70%, improves offline serving throughput by 1.38-1.55x, and lowers online token latency by 1.6-2.1x, all while maintaining accuracy in long-context, long-generation scenarios.

Abstract--Predicting pedestrian crossing intentions is crucial for the navigation of mobile robots and intelligent vehicles. Although recent deep learning-based models have shown significant success in forecasting intentions, few consider incomplete observation under occlusion scenarios. T o tackle this challenge, we propose an Occlusion-A ware Diffusion Model (ODM) that reconstructs occluded motion patterns and leverages them to guide future intention prediction. During the denoising stage, we introduce an occlusion-aware diffusion transformer architecture to estimate noise features associated with occluded patterns, thereby enhancing the model's ability to capture contextual relationships in occluded semantic scenarios. Furthermore, an occlusion mask-guided reverse process is introduced to effectively utilize observation information, reducing the accumulation of prediction errors and enhancing the accuracy of reconstructed motion features. The performance of the proposed method under various occlusion scenarios is comprehensively evaluated and compared with existing methods on popular benchmarks, namely PIE and JAAD. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more robust performance than existing methods in the literature. ITH the rapid advancement of intelligent sensing and computing technologies, much progress has been made in recent years in developing autonomous vehicles to enhance traffic efficiency and road safety. To prevent collisions, path planning of autonomous vehicles [1], [2] is essential, requiring an understanding of interactions between road users and the ability to forecast their potential actions [3]-[5]. This manuscript has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems as a regular paper. Y u Liu is also with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. Y ou-Fu Li is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. The typical scenario of visual occlusion is illustrated here. Solid green lines represent the parts of the observation that are within the field of view and visible, while dashed red lines indicate positional features that are undetectable due to occlusion.

The increasing utilization of large language models raises significant concerns about the propagation of social biases, which may result in harmful and unfair outcomes. However, existing debiasing methods treat the biased and unbiased samples independently, thus ignoring their mutual relationship. This oversight enables a hidden negative-positive coupling, where improvements for one group inadvertently compromise the other, allowing residual social bias to persist. In this paper, we introduce TriCon-Fair, a contrastive learning framework that employs a decoupled loss that combines triplet and language modeling terms to eliminate positive-negative coupling. Our TriCon-Fair assigns each anchor an explicitly biased negative and an unbiased positive, decoupling the push-pull dynamics and avoiding positive-negative coupling, and jointly optimizes a language modeling (LM) objective to preserve general capability. Experimental results demonstrate that TriCon-Fair reduces discriminatory output beyond existing debiasing baselines while maintaining strong downstream performance. This suggests that our proposed TriCon-Fair offers a practical and ethical solution for sensitive NLP applications.

Spoken Dialogue Models (SDMs) have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to sustain genuinely interactive multi-turn conversations remains underexplored, as most benchmarks focus on single-turn exchanges. We introduce Multi-Bench, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate SDMs in multi-turn interactive dialogue with an emphasis on emotional intelligence. Multi-Bench employs a hierarchical structure with a basic track for emotion understanding and reasoning and an advanced track for emotion support and application. It comprises five carefully designed tasks and about 3.2K samples, ranging from emotion recognition to complex reasoning and interactive dialogue, supported by a reproducible evaluation framework. We evaluate six representative SDMs on eight subsets of Multi-Bench. Results show that while current SDMs achieve good performance on basic understanding tasks, they still have room for improvement in advanced multi-turn interactive dialogue and reasoning-related tasks, particularly in emotion awareness and application.

Current benchmarks for coding evaluate language models (LMs) on concrete, well-specified tasks such as fixing specific bugs or writing targeted tests. However, human programmers do not spend all day incessantly addressing isolated tasks. Instead, real-world software development is grounded in the pursuit of high-level goals, like improving user retention or reducing costs. Evaluating whether LMs can also iteratively develop code to better accomplish open-ended objectives without any explicit guidance remains an open challenge. To address this, we introduce CodeClash, a benchmark where LMs compete in multi-round tournaments to build the best codebase for achieving a competitive objective. Each round proceeds in two phases: agents edit their code, then their codebases compete head-to-head in a code arena that determines winners based on objectives like score maximization, resource acquisition, or survival. Whether it's writing notes, scrutinizing documentation, analyzing competition logs, or creating test suites, models must decide for themselves how to improve their codebases both absolutely and against their opponents. We run 1680 tournaments (25,200 rounds total) to evaluate 8 LMs across 6 arenas. Our results reveal that while models exhibit diverse development styles, they share fundamental limitations in strategic reasoning. Models also struggle with long-term codebase maintenance, as repositories become progressively messy and redundant. These limitations are stark: top models lose every round against expert human programmers. We open-source CodeClash to advance the study of autonomous, goal-oriented code development.

Though deep neural networks exhibit superior performance on various tasks, they are still plagued by adversarial examples. Adversarial training has been demonstrated to be the most effective method to defend against adversarial attacks. However, existing adversarial training methods show that the model robustness has apparent oscillations and overfitting issues in the training process, degrading the defense efficacy. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Parameter Interpolation Adversarial Training (PIAT). PIAT tunes the model parameters between each epoch by interpolating the parameters of the previous and current epochs. It makes the decision boundary of model change more moderate and alleviates the overfitting issue, helping the model converge better and achieving higher model robustness. In addition, we suggest using the Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) to further improve the robustness by aligning the relative magnitude of logits between clean and adversarial examples rather than the absolute magnitude. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework could prominently improve the robustness of both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs).