Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is widely employed, and its usage is growing exponentially because it facilitates remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data-driven decision making, especially in the healthcare and industrial sectors. However, IoT devices remain vulnerable due to their resource constraints and difficulty in applying security patches. Consequently, various cybersecurity attacks are reported daily, such as Denial of Service, particularly in IoT-driven solutions. Most attack detection methodologies are based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques, which can detect attack patterns. However, the focus is more on identification rather than considering the impact of ML algorithms on computational resources. This paper proposes a green methodology to identify IoT malware networking attacks based on flow privacy-preserving statistical features. In particular, the hyperparameters of three tree-based models -- Decision Trees, Random Forest and Extra-Trees -- are optimized based on energy consumption and test-time performance in terms of Matthew's Correlation Coefficient. Our results show that models maintain high performance and detection accuracy while consistently reducing power usage in terms of watt-hours (Wh). This suggests that on-premise ML-based Intrusion Detection Systems are suitable for IoT and other resource-constrained devices.

We present GaRAGe, a large RAG benchmark with human-curated long-form answers and annotations of each grounding passage, allowing a fine-grained evaluation of whether LLMs can identify relevant grounding when generating RAG answers. Our benchmark contains 2366 questions of diverse complexity, dynamism, and topics, and includes over 35K annotated passages retrieved from both private document sets and the Web, to reflect real-world RAG use cases. This makes it an ideal test bed to evaluate an LLM's ability to identify only the relevant information necessary to compose a response, or provide a deflective response when there is insufficient information. Evaluations of multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on GaRAGe show that the models tend to over-summarise rather than (a) ground their answers strictly on the annotated relevant passages (reaching at most a Relevance-Aware Factuality Score of 60%), or (b) deflect when no relevant grounding is available (reaching at most 31% true positive rate in deflections). The F1 in attribution to relevant sources is at most 58.9%, and we show that performance is particularly reduced when answering time-sensitive questions and when having to draw knowledge from sparser private grounding sources.

We present DeRAGEC, a method for improving Named Entity (NE) correction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. By extending the Retrieval-Augmented Generative Error Correction (RAGEC) framework, DeRAGEC employs synthetic denoising rationales to filter out noisy NE candidates before correction. By leveraging phonetic similarity and augmented definitions, it refines noisy retrieved NEs using in-context learning, requiring no additional training. Experimental results on CommonVoice and STOP datasets show significant improvements in Word Error Rate (WER) and NE hit ratio, outperforming baseline ASR and RAGEC methods. Specifically, we achieved a 28% relative reduction in WER compared to ASR without postprocessing. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/solee0022/deragec

Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhance large vision-language models by integrating cross-modal knowledge, enabling their increasing adoption across real-world multimodal tasks. These knowledge databases may contain sensitive information that requires privacy protection. However, multimodal RAG systems inherently grant external users indirect access to such data, making them potentially vulnerable to privacy attacks, particularly membership inference attacks (MIAs). % Existing MIA methods targeting RAG systems predominantly focus on the textual modality, while the visual modality remains relatively underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose MrM, the first black-box MIA framework targeted at multimodal RAG systems. It utilizes a multi-object data perturbation framework constrained by counterfactual attacks, which can concurrently induce the RAG systems to retrieve the target data and generate information that leaks the membership information. Our method first employs an object-aware data perturbation method to constrain the perturbation to key semantics and ensure successful retrieval. Building on this, we design a counterfact-informed mask selection strategy to prioritize the most informative masked regions, aiming to eliminate the interference of model self-knowledge and amplify attack efficacy. Finally, we perform statistical membership inference by modeling query trials to extract features that reflect the reconstruction of masked semantics from response patterns. Experiments on two visual datasets and eight mainstream commercial visual-language models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2) demonstrate that MrM achieves consistently strong performance across both sample-level and set-level evaluations, and remains robust under adaptive defenses.

Design rule checking (DRC) is of great significance for cost reduction and design efficiency improvement in integrated circuit (IC) designs. Machine-learning-based DRC has become an important approach in computer-aided design (CAD). In this paper, we propose MAGNet, a hybrid deep learning model that integrates an improved U-Net with a graph neural network for DRC violation prediction. The U-Net backbone is enhanced with a Dynamic Attention Module (DAM) and a Multi-Scale Convolution Module (MSCM) to strengthen its capability in extracting fine-grained and multi-scale spatial features. In parallel, we construct a pixel-aligned graph structure based on chip layout tiles, and apply a specialized GNN to model the topological relationships among pins. During graph construction, a graph-to-grid mapping is generated to align GNN features with the layout image. In addition, a label amplification strategy is adopted during training to enhance the model's sensitivity to sparse violation patterns. Overall, MAGNet effectively combines spatial, semantic, and structural information, achieving improved prediction accuracy and reduced false positive rates in DRC hotspot detection. Subsequently, through incremental training, we achieve a more sensitive discrimination ability for hotspots. The results demonstrate that, in comparison with ibUnet, RouteNet, and J-Net, MAGnet significantly outperforms these models, achieving substantial improvements in overall performance.

This article proposes a robust brain-inspired audio feature extractor (RBA-FE) model for depression diagnosis, using an improved hierarchical network architecture. Most deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance for image-based diagnostic tasks, ignoring the counterpart audio features. In order to tailor the noise challenge, RBA-FE leverages six acoustic features extracted from the raw audio, capturing both spatial characteristics and temporal dependencies. This hybrid attribute helps alleviate the precision limitation in audio feature extraction within other learning models like deep residual shrinkage networks. To deal with the noise issues, our model incorporates an improved spiking neuron model, called adaptive rate smooth leaky integrate-and-fire (ARSLIF). The ARSLIF model emulates the mechanism of ``retuning of cellular signal selectivity" in the brain attention systems, which enhances the model robustness against environmental noises in audio data. Experimental results demonstrate that RBA-FE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the MODMA dataset, respectively with 0.8750, 0.8974, 0.8750 and 0.8750 in precision, accuracy, recall and F1 score. Extensive experiments on the AVEC2014 and DAIC-WOZ datasets both show enhancements in noise robustness. It is further indicated by comparison that the ARSLIF neuron model suggest the abnormal firing pattern within the feature extraction on depressive audio data, offering brain-inspired interpretability.

Patient similarity computation (PSC) is a fundamental problem in healthcare informatics. The aim of the patient similarity computation is to measure the similarity among patients according to their historical clinical records, which helps to improve clinical decision support. This paper presents a novel distributed patient similarity computation (DPSC) technique based on data transformation (DT) methods, utilizing an effective combination of time series and static data. Time series data are sensor-collected patients' information, including metrics like heart rate, blood pressure, Oxygen saturation, respiration, etc. The static data are mainly patient background and demographic data, including age, weight, height, gender, etc. Static data has been used for clustering the patients. Before feeding the static data to the machine learning model adaptive Weight-of-Evidence (aWOE) and Z-score data transformation (DT) methods have been performed, which improve the prediction performances. In aWOE-based patient similarity models, sensitive patient information has been processed using aWOE which preserves the data privacy of the trained models. We used the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) approach, which is robust and very popular, for time series similarity. However, DTW is not suitable for big data due to the significant computational run-time. To overcome this problem, distributed DTW computation is used in this study. For Coronary Artery Disease, our DT based approach boosts prediction performance by as much as 11.4%, 10.20%, and 12.6% in terms of AUC, accuracy, and F-measure, respectively. In the case of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), our proposed method achieves performance enhancement up to 15.9%, 10.5%, and 21.9% for the same measures, respectively. The proposed method reduces the computation time by as high as 40%.

Understanding how events in a scenario causally connect with each other is important for effectively modeling and reasoning about events. But event reasoning remains a difficult challenge, and despite recent advances, Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to accurately identify causal connections between events. This struggle leads to poor performance on deeper reasoning tasks like event forecasting and timeline understanding. To address this challenge, we investigate the generation of causal event graphs (e.g., A enables B) as a parallel mechanism to help LLMs explicitly represent causality during inference. This paper evaluates both how to generate correct graphs as well as how graphs can assist reasoning. We propose a collaborative approach to causal graph generation where we use LLMs to simulate experts that focus on specific semantic relations. The experts engage in multiple rounds of discussions which are then consolidated by a final expert. Then, to demonstrate the utility of causal graphs, we use them on multiple downstream applications, and also introduce a new explainable event prediction task that requires a causal chain of events in the explanation. These explanations are more informative and coherent than baseline generations. Finally, our overall approach not finetuned on any downstream task, achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art models on both forecasting and next event prediction tasks.

In the era of large language models (LLMs), the Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) task has seen various LLM methods developed, yet their performance remains unsatisfactory. In contrast, fine-tuned BERT-based models, relying on high-quality in-domain data, show excellent performance but suffer from edit pattern overfitting. This paper proposes a novel dynamic mixture approach that effectively combines the probability distributions of small models and LLMs during the beam search decoding phase, achieving a balanced enhancement of precise corrections from small models and the fluency of LLMs. This approach also eliminates the need for fine-tuning LLMs, saving significant time and resources, and facilitating domain adaptation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our mixture approach significantly boosts error correction capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhqiao-nlp/MSLLM.

Mitigating human-wildlife conflict seeks to resolve unwanted encounters between these parties. Computer Vision provides a solution to identifying individuals that might escalate into conflict, such as members of the Big Five African animals. However, environments often contain several varied species. The current state-of-the-art animal classification models are trained under a closed-world assumption. They almost always remain overconfident in their predictions even when presented with unknown classes. This study investigates out-of-distribution (OOD) detection of wildlife, specifically the Big Five. To this end, we select a parametric Nearest Class Mean (NCM) and a non-parametric contrastive learning approach as baselines to take advantage of pretrained and projected features from popular classification encoders. Moreover, we compare our baselines to various common OOD methods in the literature. The results show feature-based methods reflect stronger generalisation capability across varying classification thresholds. Specifically, NCM with ImageNet pre-trained features achieves a 2%, 4% and 22% improvement on AUPR-IN, AUPR-OUT and AUTC over the best OOD methods, respectively. The code can be found here https://github.com/pxpana/BIG5OOD