The growing complexity of cyber incidents presents significant challenges for digital forensic investigators, especially in evidence collection and analysis. Public resources are still limited because of ethical, legal, and privacy concerns, even though realistic datasets are necessary to support research and tool developments. To address this gap, we introduce ForensicsData, an extensive Question-Context-Answer (Q-C-A) dataset sourced from actual malware analysis reports. It consists of more than 5,000 Q-C-A triplets. A unique workflow was used to create the dataset, which extracts structured data, uses large language models (LLMs) to transform it into Q-C-A format, and then uses a specialized evaluation process to confirm its quality. Among the models evaluated, Gemini 2 Flash demonstrated the best performance in aligning generated content with forensic terminology. ForensicsData aims to advance digital forensics by enabling reproducible experiments and fostering collaboration within the research community.

Automatic emotion recognition has become increasingly important with the rise of AI, especially in fields like healthcare, education, and automotive systems. However, there is a lack of multimodal datasets, particularly involving body motion and physiological signals, which limits progress in the field. To address this, the MVRS dataset is introduced, featuring synchronized recordings from 13 participants aged 12 to 60 exposed to VR based emotional stimuli (relaxation, fear, stress, sadness, joy). Data were collected using eye tracking (via webcam in a VR headset), body motion (Kinect v2), and EMG and GSR signals (Arduino UNO), all timestamp aligned. Participants followed a unified protocol with consent and questionnaires. Features from each modality were extracted, fused using early and late fusion techniques, and evaluated with classifiers to confirm the datasets quality and emotion separability, making MVRS a valuable contribution to multimodal affective computing.

Randomly Wired Neural Networks (RWNNs) serve as a valuable testbed for investigating the impact of network topology in deep learning by capturing how different connectivity patterns impact both learning efficiency and model performance. At the same time, they provide a natural framework for exploring edge-centric network measures as tools for pruning and optimization. In this study, we investigate three edge-centric network measures: Forman-Ricci curvature (FRC), Ollivier-Ricci curvature (ORC), and edge betweenness centrality (EBC), to compress RWNNs by selectively retaining important synapses (or edges) while pruning the rest. As a baseline, RWNNs are trained for COVID-19 chest x-ray image classification, aiming to reduce network complexity while preserving performance in terms of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity. We extend prior work on pruning RWNN using ORC by incorporating two additional edge-centric measures, FRC and EBC, across three network generators: Erdös-Rényi (ER) model, Watts-Strogatz (WS) model, and Barabási-Albert (BA) model. We provide a comparative analysis of the pruning performance of the three measures in terms of compression ratio and theoretical speedup. A central focus of our study is to evaluate whether FRC, which is computationally more efficient than ORC, can achieve comparable pruning effectiveness. Along with performance evaluation, we further investigate the structural properties of the pruned networks through modularity and global efficiency, offering insights into the trade-off between modular segregation and network efficiency in compressed RWNNs. Our results provide initial evidence that FRC-based pruning can effectively simplify RWNNs, offering significant computational advantages while maintaining performance comparable to ORC.

The use of unvetted third-party and internet data renders pre-trained models susceptible to backdoor attacks. Detecting backdoor samples is critical to prevent backdoor activation during inference or injection during training. However, existing detection methods often require the defender to have access to the poisoned models, extra clean samples, or significant computational resources to detect backdoor samples, limiting their practicality. To address this limitation, we propose a backdoor sample detection method based on perturbatio\textbf{N} discr\textbf{E}pancy consis\textbf{T}ency \textbf{E}valuation (\NETE). This is a novel detection method that can be used both pre-training and post-training phases. In the detection process, it only requires an off-the-shelf pre-trained model to compute the log probability of samples and an automated function based on a mask-filling strategy to generate perturbations. Our method is based on the interesting phenomenon that the change in perturbation discrepancy for backdoor samples is smaller than that for clean samples. Based on this phenomenon, we use curvature to measure the discrepancy in log probabilities between different perturbed samples and input samples, thereby evaluating the consistency of the perturbation discrepancy to determine whether the input sample is a backdoor sample. Experiments conducted on four typical backdoor attacks and five types of large language model backdoor attacks demonstrate that our detection strategy outperforms existing zero-shot black-box detection methods.

The advancement of Object Detection (OD) using Deep Learning (DL) is often hindered by the significant challenge of acquiring large, accurately labeled datasets, a process that is time-consuming and expensive. While techniques like Active Learning (AL) can reduce annotation effort by intelligently querying informative samples, they often lack transparency, limit the strategic insight of human experts, and may overlook informative samples not aligned with an employed query strategy. To mitigate these issues, Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) approaches integrating human intelligence and intuition throughout the machine learning life-cycle have gained traction. Leveraging Visual Analytics (VA), effective interfaces can be created to facilitate this human-AI collaboration. This thesis explores the intersection of these fields by developing and investigating "VILOD: A Visual Interactive Labeling tool for Object Detection". VILOD utilizes components such as a t-SNE projection of image features, together with uncertainty heatmaps and model state views. Enabling users to explore data, interpret model states, AL suggestions, and implement diverse sample selection strategies within an iterative HITL workflow for OD. An empirical investigation using comparative use cases demonstrated how VILOD, through its interactive visualizations, facilitates the implementation of distinct labeling strategies by making the model's state and dataset characteristics more interpretable (RQ1). The study showed that different visually-guided labeling strategies employed within VILOD result in competitive OD performance trajectories compared to an automated uncertainty sampling AL baseline (RQ2). This work contributes a novel tool and empirical insight into making the HITL-AL workflow for OD annotation more transparent, manageable, and potentially more effective.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has pushed their boundaries to many applications in various domains. Recently, the research community has started to evaluate their potential adoption in autonomous vehicles and especially as complementary modules in the perception and planning software stacks. However, their evaluation is limited in synthetic datasets or manually driving datasets without the ground truth knowledge and more precisely, how the current perception and planning algorithms would perform in the cases under evaluation. F or this reason, this work evaluates LLMs on real-world edge cases where current autonomous vehicles have been proven to fail. The proposed architecture consists of an open vocabulary object detector coupled with prompt engineering and large language model contextual reasoning. W e evaluate several state-of-the-art models against real edge cases and provide qualitative comparison results along with a discussion on the findings for the potential application of LLMs as anomaly detectors in autonomous vehicles.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential for autonomous decision-making in the cybersecurity domain, enabling agents to learn through direct environment interaction. However, RL agents in Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) typically learn from scratch, requiring them to execute undesirable actions to learn their consequences. In this study, we integrate external knowledge in the form of a Large Language Model (LLM) pretrained on cybersecurity data that our RL agent can directly leverage to make informed decisions. By guiding initial training with an LLM, we improve baseline performance and reduce the need for exploratory actions with obviously negative outcomes. We evaluate our LLM-integrated approach in a simulated cybersecurity environment, and demonstrate that our guided agent achieves over 2x higher rewards during early training and converges to a favorable policy approximately 4,500 episodes faster than the baseline.

Brain morphology is shaped by genetic and mechanical factors and is linked to biological development and diseases. Its fractal-like features, regional anisotropy, and complex curvature distributions hinder quantitative insights in medical inspections. Recognizing that the underlying elastic instability and bifurcation share the same physics as simple geometries such as spheres and ellipses, we developed a physics-transfer learning framework to address the geometrical complexity. To overcome the challenge of data scarcity, we constructed a digital library of high-fidelity continuum mechanics modeling that both describes and predicts the developmental processes of brain growth and disease. The physics of nonlinear elasticity from simple geometries is embedded into a neural network and applied to brain models. This physics-transfer approach demonstrates remarkable performance in feature characterization and morphogenesis prediction, highlighting the pivotal role of localized deformation in dominating over the background geometry. The data-driven framework also provides a library of reduced-dimensional evolutionary representations that capture the essential physics of the highly folded cerebral cortex. Validation through medical images and domain expertise underscores the deployment of digital-twin technology in comprehending the morphological complexity of the brain.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is fundamental to modern cloud computing, enabling teams to define and manage infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files. However, different cloud service providers utilize diverse IaC formats. The lack of a standardized format requires cloud architects to be proficient in multiple IaC languages, adding complexity to cloud deployment. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in automating IaC creation and maintenance, progress has been limited by the lack of comprehensive benchmarks across multiple IaC formats. We present Multi-IaC-Bench, a novel benchmark dataset for evaluating LLM-based IaC generation and mutation across AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and Cloud Development Kit (CDK) formats. The dataset consists of triplets containing initial IaC templates, natural language modification requests, and corresponding updated templates, created through a synthetic data generation pipeline with rigorous validation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on Multi-IaC-Bench, demonstrating that while modern LLMs can achieve high success rates (>95%) in generating syntactically valid IaC across formats, significant challenges remain in semantic alignment and handling complex infrastructure patterns. Our ablation studies highlight the importance of prompt engineering and retry mechanisms in successful IaC generation. We release Multi-IaC-Bench to facilitate further research in AI-assisted infrastructure management and establish standardized evaluation metrics for this crucial domain.

Molecular docking is a cornerstone of drug discovery, relying on high-resolution ligand-bound structures to achieve accurate predictions. However, obtaining these structures is often costly and time-intensive, limiting their availability. In contrast, ligand-free structures are more accessible but suffer from reduced docking performance due to pocket geometries being less suited for ligand accommodation in apo structures. Traditional methods for artificially inducing these conformations, such as molecular dynamics simulations, are computationally expensive. In this work, we introduce Sesame, a generative model designed to predict this conformational change efficiently. By generating geometries better suited for ligand accommodation at a fraction of the computational cost, Sesame aims to provide a scalable solution for improving virtual screening workflows.