Deep Learning
Adversarial Defense in Cybersecurity: A Systematic Review of GANs for Threat Detection and Mitigation
Ndayipfukamiye, Tharcisse, Ding, Jianguo, Sarwatt, Doreen Sebastian, Philipo, Adamu Gaston, Ning, Huansheng
Digital transformation of modern society has spread the attack surface of critical infrastructures, enterprise networks, and personal devices. Quick propagation of cyber threats, driven by sophisticated adversarial attacks including evasion[8, 82], data poisoning[21], and backdoor insertions[20, 21], weakened traditional security measures across domains including intrusion detection systems (IDS), Internet of Things (IoT) security, and autonomous networks [19, 82, 127, 138]. These attacks exploit machine learning vulnerabilities, vastly expanding attack surfaces amid the proliferation of IoT devices and distributed systems[35, 58, 59]. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), first introduced by Goodfellow et al.[1], have transitioned from synthetic data generation to essential defenses, enabling adversarial scenario simulation, dataset augmentation, and model resilience enhancement[16, 32, 33, 139]. Variants like Conditional GANs (CGANs) and Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) excel in producing realistic samples for anomaly detection and IDS robustness[27, 169, 170], outperforming static signature-based approaches against dynamic threats[60, 169, 173]. Yet, GAN applications in Cybersecurity are fragmented, grappling with training instability, dataset scarcity, edge-device computational constraints, and dual-use risks where GANs facilitate both defenses and advanced attacks[11, 13, 24, 34, 44, 61-63, 79, 80]. Recent advancements, such as GAN-IF models for intrusion detection and AR-GAN for autonomous vehicle defenses, underscore potential in real-time mitigation, but ethical frameworks and unified evaluations remain deficient[78, 81]. This gap necessitates a systematic literature review (SLR) to consolidate GAN architectures, applications, and performance metrics for proactive adversarial defense. 1
Beyond Sharp Minima: Robust LLM Unlearning via Feedback-Guided Multi-Point Optimization
Wu, Wenhan, Liu, Zheyuan, Gao, Chongyang, Wang, Ren, Ding, Kaize
Current LLM unlearning methods face a critical security vulnerability that undermines their fundamental purpose: while they appear to successfully remove sensitive or harmful knowledge, this ``forgotten" information remains precariously recoverable through relearning attacks. We identify that the root cause is that conventional methods optimizing the forgetting loss at individual data points will drive model parameters toward sharp minima in the loss landscape. In these unstable regions, even minimal parameter perturbations can drastically alter the model's behaviors. Consequently, relearning attacks exploit this vulnerability by using just a few fine-tuning samples to navigate the steep gradients surrounding these unstable regions, thereby rapidly recovering knowledge that was supposedly erased. This exposes a critical robustness gap between apparent unlearning and actual knowledge removal. To address this issue, we propose StableUN, a bi-level feedback-guided optimization framework that explicitly seeks more stable parameter regions via neighborhood-aware optimization. It integrates forgetting feedback, which uses adversarial perturbations to probe parameter neighborhoods, with remembering feedback to preserve model utility, aligning the two objectives through gradient projection. Experiments on WMDP and MUSE benchmarks demonstrate that our method is significantly more robust against both relearning and jailbreaking attacks while maintaining competitive utility performance.
U-Mamba2-SSL for Semi-Supervised Tooth and Pulp Segmentation in CBCT
Tan, Zhi Qin, Zhu, Xiatian, Addison, Owen, Li, Yunpeng
Accurate segmentation of teeth and pulp in Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is vital for clinical applications like treatment planning and diagnosis. However, this process requires extensive expertise and is exceptionally time-consuming, highlighting the critical need for automated algorithms that can effectively utilize unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose U-Mamba2-SSL, a novel semi-supervised learning framework that builds on the U-Mamba2 model and employs a multi-stage training strategy. The framework first pre-trains U-Mamba2 in a self-supervised manner using a disruptive autoencoder. It then leverages unlabeled data through consistency regularization, where we introduce input and feature perturbations to ensure stable model outputs. Finally, a pseudo-labeling strategy is implemented with a reduced loss weighting to minimize the impact of potential errors. U-Mamba2-SSL achieved an average score of 0.789 and a DSC of 0.917 on the hidden test set, achieving first place in Task 1 of the STSR 2025 challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/zhiqin1998/UMamba2.
FlowCast-ODE: Continuous Hourly Weather Forecasting with Dynamic Flow Matching and ODE Solver
He, Shuangshuang, Zhang, Yuanting, Liang, Hongli, Meng, Qingye, Yuan, Xingyuan, Wang, Shuo
Data-driven hourly weather forecasting models often face the challenge of error accumulation in long-term predictions. The problem is exacerbated by non-physical temporal discontinuities present in widely-used training datasets such as ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5), which stem from its 12-hour assimilation cycle. Such artifacts lead hourly autoregressive models to learn spurious dynamics and rapidly accumulate errors. To address this, we introduce FlowCast-ODE, a novel framework that treats atmospheric evolution as a continuous flow to ensure temporal coherence. Our method employs dynamic flow matching to learn the instantaneous velocity field from data and an ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver to generate smooth and temporally continuous hourly predictions. By pre-training on 6-hour intervals to sidestep data discontinuities and fine-tuning on hourly data, FlowCast-ODE produces seamless forecasts for up to 120 hours with a single lightweight model. It achieves competitive or superior skill on key meteorological variables compared to baseline models, preserves fine-grained spatial details, and demonstrates strong performance in forecasting extreme events, such as tropical cyclone tracks.
Multi-Robot Task Planning for Multi-Object Retrieval Tasks with Distributed On-Site Knowledge via Large Language Models
Murata, Kento, Hasegawa, Shoichi, Ishikawa, Tomochika, Hagiwara, Yoshinobu, Taniguchi, Akira, Hafi, Lotfi El, Taniguchi, Tadahiro
It is crucial to efficiently execute instructions such as "Find an apple and a banana" or "Get ready for a field trip," which require searching for multiple objects or understanding context-dependent commands. This study addresses the challenging problem of determining which robot should be assigned to which part of a task when each robot possesses different situational on-site knowledge-specifically, spatial concepts learned from the area designated to it by the user. We propose a task planning framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and spatial concepts to decompose natural language instructions into subtasks and allocate them to multiple robots. We designed a novel few-shot prompting strategy that enables LLMs to infer required objects from ambiguous commands and decompose them into appropriate subtasks. In our experiments, the proposed method achieved 47/50 successful assignments, outperforming random (28/50) and commonsense-based assignment (26/50). Furthermore, we conducted qualitative evaluations using two actual mobile manipulators. The results demonstrated that our framework could handle instructions, including those involving ad hoc categories such as "Get ready for a field trip," by successfully performing task decomposition, assignment, sequential planning, and execution.
Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval
Xie, Zequn, Wang, Chuxin, Cai, Sihang, Wang, Yeqiang, Wang, Shulei, Jin, Tao
Text-based person search (TBPS) enables the retrieval of person images from large-scale databases using natural language descriptions, offering critical value in surveillance applications. However, a major challenge lies in the labor-intensive process of obtaining high-quality textual annotations, which limits scalability and practical deployment. To address this, we introduce two complementary modules: Multi-Turn Text Generation (MTG) and Multi-Turn Text Interaction (MTI). MTG generates rich pseudo-labels through simulated dialogues with MLLMs, producing fine-grained and diverse visual descriptions without manual supervision. MTI refines user queries at inference time through dynamic, dialogue-based reasoning, enabling the system to interpret and resolve vague, incomplete, or ambiguous descriptions - characteristics often seen in real-world search scenarios. Together, MTG and MTI form a unified and annotation-free framework that significantly improves retrieval accuracy, robustness, and usability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior results while eliminating the need for manual captions, paving the way for scalable and practical deployment of TBPS systems.
MindVL: Towards Efficient and Effective Training of Multimodal Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs
Chen, Feilong, Liu, Yijiang, Huang, Yi, Wang, Hao, Tian, Miren, Yu, Ya-Qi, Liao, Minghui, Wu, Jihao
We propose MindVL, a multimodal large language model (MLLMs) trained on Ascend NPUs. The training of state-of-the-art MLLMs is often confined to a limited set of hardware platforms and relies heavily on massive, undisclosed data recipes, which hinders reproducibility and open research. To change the common perception that Ascend hardware is unsuitable for efficient full-stage MLLM training, we introduce MindSpeed-MLLM, a highly efficient training framework that supports stable and high-performance training of large-scale Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models on Ascend hardware. Based on this, we provide a systematic and open description of the data production methods and mixing strategies for all training stages. Furthermore, we present MindVL, a data-efficient multimodal large language model trained end-to-end on Ascend NPUs. In addition, we find that averaging weights from checkpoints trained with different sequence lengths is particularly effective and yields further gains when combined with test-time resolution search. Our experiments demonstrate superior data efficiency: MindVL-8B matches the performance of Qwen2.5VL-7B using only 10\% of its training data, while our MoE model, MindVL-671B-A37B, matches Qwen2.5VL-72B using only 3\% of the Qwen2.5VL training data, and achieves comparable performance with other leading multimodal MoE models. Our work provides the community with a valuable hardware alternative, open data recipes, and effective performance-enhancing techniques.
Inducing Uncertainty on Open-Weight Models for Test-Time Privacy in Image Recognition
Ashiq, Muhammad H., Triantafillou, Peter, Tseng, Hung Yun, Chrysos, Grigoris G.
A key concern for AI safety remains understudied in the machine learning (ML) literature: how can we ensure users of ML models do not leverage predictions on incorrect personal data to harm others? This is particularly pertinent given the rise of open-weight models, where simply masking model outputs does not suffice to prevent adversaries from recovering harmful predictions. To address this threat, which we call *test-time privacy*, we induce maximal uncertainty on protected instances while preserving accuracy on all other instances. Our proposed algorithm uses a Pareto optimal objective that explicitly balances test-time privacy against utility. We also provide a certifiable approximation algorithm which achieves $(\varepsilon, ฮด)$ guarantees without convexity assumptions. We then prove a tight bound that characterizes the privacy-utility tradeoff that our algorithms incur. Empirically, our method obtains at least $>3\times$ stronger uncertainty than pretraining with marginal drops in accuracy on various image recognition benchmarks. Altogether, this framework provides a tool to guarantee additional protection to end users.
HealthSLM-Bench: Benchmarking Small Language Models for Mobile and Wearable Healthcare Monitoring
Wang, Xin, Dang, Ting, Zhang, Xinyu, Kostakos, Vassilis, Witbrock, Michael J., Jia, Hong
Mobile and wearable healthcare monitoring play a vital role in facilitating timely interventions, managing chronic health conditions, and ultimately improving individuals' quality of life. Previous studies on large language models (LLMs) have highlighted their impressive generalization abilities and effectiveness in healthcare prediction tasks. However, most LLM-based healthcare solutions are cloud-based, which raises significant privacy concerns and results in increased memory usage and latency. To address these challenges, there is growing interest in compact models, Small Language Models (SLMs), which are lightweight and designed to run locally and efficiently on mobile and wearable devices. Nevertheless, how well these models perform in healthcare prediction remains largely unexplored. We systematically evaluated SLMs on health prediction tasks using zero-shot, few-shot, and instruction fine-tuning approaches, and deployed the best performing fine-tuned SLMs on mobile devices to evaluate their real-world efficiency and predictive performance in practical healthcare scenarios. Our results show that SLMs can achieve performance comparable to LLMs while offering substantial gains in efficiency and privacy. However, challenges remain, particularly in handling class imbalance and few-shot scenarios. These findings highlight SLMs, though imperfect in their current form, as a promising solution for next-generation, privacy-preserving healthcare monitoring.
Ban&Pick: Ehancing Performance and Efficiency of MoE-LLMs via Smarter Routing
Chen, Yuanteng, Wang, Peisong, Shao, Yuantian, Zeng, Nanxin, Xu, Chang, Cheng, Jian
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a key architecture for scaling large language models (LLMs) efficiently. Recent fine-grained MoE designs introduce hundreds of experts per layer, with multiple experts activated per token, enabling stronger specialization. However, during pre-training, routers are optimized mainly for stability and robustness: they converge prematurely and enforce balanced usage, limiting the full potential of model performance and efficiency at inference. In this work, we uncover two overlooked issues: (i) a few highly influential experts are underutilized due to premature and balanced routing decisions; and (ii) enforcing a fixed number of active experts per token introduces substantial redundancy. Instead of retraining models or redesigning MoE architectures, we introduce Ban&Pick, a post-training, plug-and-play strategy for smarter routing. Pick discovers and reinforces key experts-a small group with outsized impact on performance-leading to notable accuracy gains across domains. Ban further dynamically prunes redundant experts based on layer and token sensitivity, delivering faster inference with minimal accuracy loss. Experiments on fine-grained MoE-LLMs (DeepSeek, Qwen3) across math, code, and general reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Ban\&Pick delivers free performance gains and inference acceleration without retraining or architectural changes. For instance, on Qwen3-30B-A3B, it improves accuracy from 80.67 to 84.66 on AIME2024 and from 65.66 to 68.18 on GPQA-Diamond, while accelerating inference by 1.25x under the vLLM.