As large AI models become increasingly valuable assets, the risk of model weight exfiltration from inference servers grows accordingly. An attacker controlling an inference server may exfiltrate model weights by hiding them within ordinary model outputs, a strategy known as steganography. This work investigates how to verify model responses to defend against such attacks and, more broadly, to detect anomalous or buggy behavior during inference. We formalize model exfiltration as a security game, propose a verification framework that can provably mitigate steganographic exfiltration, and specify the trust assumptions associated with our scheme. To enable verification, we characterize valid sources of non-determinism in large language model inference and introduce two practical estimators for them. We evaluate our detection framework on several open-weight models ranging from 3B to 30B parameters. On MOE-Qwen-30B, our detector reduces exfiltratable information to <0.5% with false-positive rate of 0.01%, corresponding to a >200x slowdown for adversaries. Overall, this work further establishes a foundation for defending against model weight exfiltration and demonstrates that strong protection can be achieved with minimal additional cost to inference providers.

The Weibull distribution is a commonly adopted choice for modeling the survival of systems subject to maintenance over time. When only proxy indicators and censored observations are available, it becomes necessary to express the distribution's parameters as functions of time-dependent covariates. Deep neural networks provide the flexibility needed to learn complex relationships between these covariates and operational lifetime, thereby extending the capabilities of traditional regression-based models. Motivated by the analysis of a fleet of military vehicles operating in highly variable and demanding environments, as well as by the limitations observed in existing methodologies, this paper introduces WTNN, a new neural network-based modeling framework specifically designed for Weibull survival studies. The proposed architecture is specifically designed to incorporate qualitative prior knowledge regarding the most influential covariates, in a manner consistent with the shape and structure of the Weibull distribution. Through numerical experiments, we show that this approach can be reliably trained on proxy and right-censored data, and is capable of producing robust and interpretable survival predictions that can improve existing approaches.

The interpretation of Chest X-ray is an important diagnostic issue in clinical practice and especially in the resource-limited setting where the shortage of radiologists plays a role in delayed diagnosis and poor patient outcomes. Although the original CheXNet architecture has shown potential in automated analysis of chest radiographs, DenseNet-121 backbone is computationally inefficient and poorly single-label classifier. To eliminate such shortcomings, we suggest a better classification framework of chest disease that relies on EfficientNetV2-M and incorporates superior training approaches such as Automatic Mixed Precision training, AdamW, Cosine Annealing learning rate scheduling, and Exponential Moving Average regularization. We prepared a dataset of 18,080 chest X-ray images of three source materials of high authority and representing five key clinically significant disease categories which included Cardiomegaly, COVID-19, Normal, Pneumonia, and Tuberculosis. To achieve statistical reliability and reproducibility, nine independent experimental runs were run. The suggested architecture showed significant gains with mean test accuracy of 96.45 percent compared to 95.30 percent at baseline (p less than 0.001) and macro-averaged F1-score increased to 91.08 percent (p less than 0.001). Critical infectious diseases showed near-perfect classification performance with COVID-19 detection having 99.95 percent accuracy and Tuberculosis detection having 99.97 percent accuracy. Although 6.8 times more parameters are included, the training time was reduced by 11.4 percent and performance stability was increased by 22.7 percent. This framework presents itself as a decision-support tool that can be used to respond to a pandemic, screen tuberculosis, and assess thoracic disease regularly in various healthcare facilities.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for computer vision sometimes struggle with understanding images in a global context, as they mainly focus on local patterns. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs), inspired by models originally created for language processing, use self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to understand relationships across the entire image. In this paper, we compare different types of ViTs (pure, hierarchical, and hybrid) against traditional CNN models across various tasks, including object recognition, detection, and medical image classification. We conduct thorough tests on standard datasets like ImageNet for image classification and COCO for object detection. Additionally, we apply these models to medical imaging using the ChestX-ray14 dataset. We find that hybrid and hierarchical transformers, especially Swin and CvT, offer a strong balance between accuracy and computational resources. Furthermore, by experimenting with data augmentation techniques on medical images, we discover significant performance improvements, particularly with the Swin Transformer model. Overall, our results indicate that Vision Transformers are competitive and, in many cases, outperform traditional CNNs, especially in scenarios requiring the understanding of global visual contexts like medical imaging.

We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of ~8,000 hosts across 12 subnets. ARTEMIS is a multi-agent framework featuring dynamic prompt generation, arbitrary sub-agents, and automatic vulnerability triaging. In our comparative study, ARTEMIS placed second overall, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate and outperforming 9 of 10 human participants. While existing scaffolds such as Codex and CyAgent underperformed relative to most human participants, ARTEMIS demonstrated technical sophistication and submission quality comparable to the strongest participants. We observe that AI agents offer advantages in systematic enumeration, parallel exploitation, and cost -- certain ARTEMIS variants cost $18/hour versus $60/hour for professional penetration testers. We also identify key capability gaps: AI agents exhibit higher false-positive rates and struggle with GUI-based tasks.

We address the problem of fair classification in settings where data is scarce and unbalanced across demographic groups. Such low-data regimes are common in domains like medical imaging, where false negatives can have fatal consequences. We propose a novel approach \emph{OxEnsemble} for efficiently training ensembles and enforcing fairness in these low-data regimes. Unlike other approaches, we aggregate predictions across ensemble members, each trained to satisfy fairness constraints. By construction, \emph{OxEnsemble} is both data-efficient, carefully reusing held-out data to enforce fairness reliably, and compute-efficient, requiring little more compute than used to fine-tune or evaluate an existing model. We validate this approach with new theoretical guarantees. Experimentally, our approach yields more consistent outcomes and stronger fairness-accuracy trade-offs than existing methods across multiple challenging medical imaging classification datasets.

Hate speech spreads widely online, harming individuals and communities, making automatic detection essential for large-scale moderation, yet detecting it remains difficult. Part of the challenge lies in subjectivity: what one person flags as hate speech, another may see as benign. Traditional annotation agreement metrics, such as Cohen's $κ$, oversimplify this disagreement, treating it as an error rather than meaningful diversity. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) promise scalable annotation, but prior studies demonstrate that they cannot fully replace human judgement, especially in subjective tasks. In this work, we reexamine LLM reliability using a subjectivity-aware framework, cross-Rater Reliability (xRR), revealing that even under fairer lens, LLMs still diverge from humans. Yet this limitation opens an opportunity: we find that LLM-generated annotations can reliably reflect performance trends across classification models, correlating with human evaluations. We test this by examining whether LLM-generated annotations preserve the relative ordering of model performance derived from human evaluation (i.e. whether models ranked as more reliable by human annotators preserve the same order when evaluated with LLM-generated labels). Our results show that, although LLMs differ from humans at the instance level, they reproduce similar ranking and classification patterns, suggesting their potential as proxy evaluators. While not a substitute for human annotators, they might serve as a scalable proxy for evaluation in subjective NLP tasks.

Generative audio models, based on diffusion and autoregressive architectures, have advanced rapidly in both quality and expressiveness. This progress, however, raises pressing copyright concerns, as such models are often trained on vast corpora of artistic and commercial works. A central question is whether one can reliably verify if an artist's material was included in training, thereby providing a means for copyright holders to protect their content. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of such verification through membership inference attacks (MIA) on open-source generative audio models, which attempt to determine whether a specific audio sample was part of the training set. Our empirical results show that membership inference alone is of limited effectiveness at scale, as the per-sample membership signal is weak for models trained on large and diverse datasets. However, artists and media owners typically hold collections of works rather than isolated samples. Building on prior work in text and vision domains, in this work we focus on dataset inference (DI), which aggregates diverse membership evidence across multiple samples. We find that DI is successful in the audio domain, offering a more practical mechanism for assessing whether an artist's works contributed to model training. Our results suggest DI as a promising direction for copyright protection and dataset accountability in the era of large audio generative models.

This study presents QuanvNeXt, an end-to-end fully quanvolutional model for EEG-based depression diagnosis. QuanvNeXt incorporates a novel Cross Residual block, which reduces feature homogeneity and strengthens cross-feature relationships while retaining parameter efficiency. We evaluated QuanvNeXt on two open-source datasets, where it achieved an average accuracy of 93.1% and an average AUC-ROC of 97.2%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines such as InceptionTime (91.7% accuracy, 95.9% AUC-ROC). An uncertainty analysis across Gaussian noise levels demonstrated well-calibrated predictions, with ECE scores remaining low (0.0436, Dataset 1) to moderate (0.1159, Dataset 2) even at the highest perturbation (ε = 0.1). Additionally, a post-hoc explainable AI analysis confirmed that QuanvNeXt effectively identifies and learns spectrotemporal patterns that distinguish between healthy controls and major depressive disorder. Overall, QuanvNeXt establishes an efficient and reliable approach for EEG-based depression diagnosis.

Group fairness in machine learning is often enforced by adding a regularizer that reduces the dependence between model predictions and sensitive attributes. However, existing regularizers are built on heterogeneous distance measures and design choices, which makes their behavior hard to reason about and their performance inconsistent across tasks. This raises a basic question: what properties make a good fairness regularizer? We address this question by first organizing existing in-process methods into three families: (i) matching prediction statistics across sensitive groups, (ii) aligning latent representations, and (iii) directly minimizing dependence between predictions and sensitive attributes. Through this lens, we identify desirable properties of the underlying distance measure, including tight generalization bounds, robustness to scale differences, and the ability to handle arbitrary prediction distributions. Motivated by these properties, we propose a Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) fairness regularizer that penalizes the empirical CS divergence between prediction distributions conditioned on sensitive groups. Under a Gaussian comparison, we show that CS divergence yields a tighter bound than Kullback-Leibler divergence, Maximum Mean Discrepancy, and the mean disparity used in Demographic Parity, and we discuss how these advantages translate to a distribution-free, kernel-based estimator that naturally extends to multiple sensitive attributes. Extensive experiments on four tabular benchmarks and one image dataset demonstrate that the proposed CS regularizer consistently improves Demographic Parity and Equal Opportunity metrics while maintaining competitive accuracy, and achieves a more stable utility-fairness trade-off across hyperparameter settings compared to prior regularizers.