Conversion and conversion rate (CVR) prediction play a critical role in efficient advertising decision-making. In past decades, although researchers have developed plenty of models for CVR prediction, the methodological evolution and relationships between different techniques have been precluded. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on CVR prediction in online advertising, and classify state-of-the-art CVR prediction models into six categories with respect to the underlying techniques and elaborate on connections between these techniques. For each category of models, we present the framework of underlying techniques, their advantages and disadvantages, and discuss how they are utilized for CVR prediction. Moreover, we summarize the performance of various CVR prediction models on public and proprietary datasets. Finally, we identify research trends, major challenges, and promising future directions. We observe that results of performance evaluation reported in prior studies are not unanimous; semantics-enriched, attribution-enhanced, debiased CVR prediction and jointly modeling CTR and CVR prediction would be promising directions to explore in the future. This review is expected to provide valuable references and insights for future researchers and practitioners in this area.

Predictive maintenance in manufacturing environments presents a challenging optimization problem characterized by extreme cost asymmetry, where missed failures incur costs roughly fifty times higher than false alarms. Conventional machine learning approaches typically optimize statistical accuracy metrics that do not reflect this operational reality and cannot reliably distinguish causal relationships from spurious correlations. This study evaluates eight predictive models, ranging from baseline statistical approaches to formal causal inference methods, on a dataset of 10,000 CNC machines with a 3.3 percent failure prevalence. The formal causal inference model (L5) achieved estimated annual cost savings of 1.16 million USD (a 70.2 percent reduction), outperforming the best correlation-based decision tree model (L3) by approximately 80,000 USD per year. The causal model matched the highest observed recall (87.9 percent) while reducing false alarms by 97 percent (from 165 to 5) and attained a precision of 92.1 percent, with a train-test performance gap of only 2.6 percentage points. These results indicate that causal AI methods, when combined with domain knowledge, can yield superior financial outcomes and more interpretable predictions compared to correlation-based approaches in predictive maintenance applications.

Indirect prompt injection attacks (IPIAs), where large language models (LLMs) follow malicious instructions hidden in input data, pose a critical threat to LLMpowered agents. In this paper, we present IntentGuard, a general defense framework based on instruction-following intent analysis. The key insight of Intent-Guard is that the decisive factor in IPIAs is not the presence of malicious text, but whether the LLM intends to follow instructions from untrusted data. Building on this insight, IntentGuard leverages an instruction-following intent analyzer (IIA) to identify which parts of the input prompt the model recognizes as actionable instructions, and then flag or neutralize any overlaps with untrusted data segments. To instantiate the framework, we develop an IIA that uses three "thinking intervention" strategies to elicit a structured list of intended instructions from reasoning-enabled LLMs. These techniques include start-of-thinking prefilling, end-of-thinking refinement, and adversarial in-context demonstration. We evaluate IntentGuard on two agentic benchmarks (AgentDojo and Mind2Web) using two reasoning-enabled LLMs (Qwen-3-32B and gpt-oss-20B). Results demonstrate that IntentGuard achieves (1) no utility degradation in all but one setting and (2) strong robustness against adaptive prompt injection attacks (e.g., reducing attack success rates from 100% to 8.5% in a Mind2Web scenario). Indirect prompt injection attacks (IPIAs) (Greshake et al., 2023), where large language models (LLMs) follow malicious instructions hidden in the input data, have emerged as a top security concern for LLM-powered agents. Although many defenses have been proposed, each faces fundamental limitations. Finetuning-based defenses (Chen et al., 2024; 2025b) are costly and lack interpretability; auxiliary classifiers for IPIA detection Shi et al. (2025); Hung et al. (2024) often fail to generalize and are vulnerable to adaptive attacks; system-level rule enforcement Debenedetti et al. (2025) can impact agent utility while offering little robustness against attacks that do not alter control and data flows (e.g., injecting misinformation or phishing links into an email summary). In this paper, we approach the prompt injection problem from a new perspective: instruction-following intent analysis. For an LLM to effectively follow instructions, it must have an internal mechanism to decide which parts of a prompt it recognizes as actionable instructions.

Transformer models have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), demonstrating strong performance in English. However, their effectiveness in Arabic, particularly for Named Entity Recognition (NER), remains limited, even with larger pre-trained models. This performance gap stems from multiple factors, including tokenisation, dataset quality, and annotation inconsistencies. Existing studies often analyze these issues in isolation, failing to capture their joint effect on system behaviour and performance. We introduce DeformAr (Debugging and Evaluation Framework for Transformer-based NER Systems), a novel framework designed to investigate and explain the performance discrepancy between Arabic and English NER systems. DeformAr integrates a data extraction library and an interactive dashboard, supporting two modes of evaluation: cross-component analysis and behavioural analysis. The framework divides each language into dataset and model components to examine their interactions. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, cross-component analysis provides systematic diagnostic measures across data and model subcomponents, addressing the "what," "how," and "why" behind observed discrepancies. The second stage applies behavioural analysis by combining interpretability techniques with token-level metrics, interactive visualisations, and representation space analysis. These stages enable a component-aware diagnostic process that detects model behaviours and explains them by linking them to underlying representational patterns and data factors. DeformAr is the first Arabic-specific, component-based interpretability tool, offering a crucial resource for advancing model analysis in under-resourced languages.

Watermarking acts as a critical safeguard in text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). By embedding identifiable signals into model outputs, watermarking enables reliable attribution and enhances the security of machine-generated content. Existing approaches typically embed signals by manipulating token generation probabilities. Despite their effectiveness, these methods inherently face a trade-off between detectability and text quality: the signal strength and randomness required for robust watermarking tend to degrade the performance of downstream tasks. In this paper, we design a novel embedding scheme that controls seed pools to facilitate diverse parallel generation of watermarked text. Based on that scheme, we propose WaterSearch, a sentence-level, search-based watermarking framework adaptable to a wide range of existing methods. WaterSearch enhances text quality by jointly optimizing two key aspects: 1) distribution fidelity and 2) watermark signal characteristics. Furthermore, WaterSearch is complemented by a sentence-level detection method with strong attack robustness. We evaluate our method on three popular LLMs across ten diverse tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an average performance improvement of 51.01\% over state-of-the-art baselines at a watermark detectability strength of 95\%. In challenging scenarios such as short text generation and low-entropy output generation, our method yields performance gains of 47.78\% and 36.47\%, respectively. Moreover, under different attack senarios including insertion, synonym substitution and paraphrase attasks, WaterSearch maintains high detectability, further validating its robust anti-attack capabilities. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/WaterSearch}{https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/WaterSearch}.

The rapid evolution of end-to-end AI music generation poses an escalating threat to artistic authenticity and copyright, demanding detection methods that can keep pace. While foundational, existing models like SpecTTTra falter when faced with the diverse and rapidly advancing ecosystem of new generators, exhibiting significant performance drops on out-of-distribution (OOD) content. This generalization failure highlights a critical gap: the need for more challenging benchmarks and more robust detection architectures. To address this, we first introduce Melody or Machine (MoM), a new large-scale benchmark of over 130,000 songs (6,665 hours). MoM is the most diverse dataset to date, built with a mix of open and closed-source models and a curated OOD test set designed specifically to foster the development of truly generalizable detectors. Alongside this benchmark, we introduce CLAM, a novel dual-stream detection architecture. We hypothesize that subtle, machine-induced inconsistencies between vocal and instrumental elements, often imperceptible in a mixed signal, offer a powerful tell-tale sign of synthesis. CLAM is designed to test this hypothesis by employing two distinct pre-trained audio encoders (MERT and Wave2Vec2) to create parallel representations of the audio. These representations are fused by a learnable cross-aggregation module that models their inter-dependencies. The model is trained with a dual-loss objective: a standard binary cross-entropy loss for classification, complemented by a contrastive triplet loss which trains the model to distinguish between coherent and artificially mismatched stream pairings, enhancing its sensitivity to synthetic artifacts without presuming a simple feature alignment. CLAM establishes a new state-of-the-art in synthetic music forensics. It achieves an F1 score of 0.925 on our challenging MoM benchmark.

This work presents the development and evaluation of an NLP-enabled probabilistic classifier designed to estimate the probability of technical and regulatory success (pTRS) for clinical trials in the field of neuroscience. While pharmaceutical R&D is plagued by high attrition rates and enormous costs, particularly within neuroscience, where success rates are below 10%, timely identification of promising programs can streamline resource allocation and reduce financial risk. Leveraging data from the ClinicalTrials.gov database and success labels from the recently developed Clinical Trial Outcome dataset, the classifier extracts text-based clinical trial features using statistical NLP techniques. These features were integrated into several non-LLM frameworks (logistic regression, gradient boosting, and random forest) to generate calibrated probability scores. Model performance was assessed on a retrospective dataset of 101,145 completed clinical trials spanning 1976-2024, achieving an overall ROC-AUC of 0.64. An LLM-based predictive model was then built using BioBERT, a domain-specific language representation encoder. The BioBERT-based model achieved an overall ROC-AUC of 0.74 and a Brier Score of 0.185, indicating its predictions had, on average, 40% less squared error than would be observed using industry benchmarks. The BioBERT-based model also made trial outcome predictions that were superior to benchmark values 70% of the time overall. By integrating NLP-driven insights into drug development decision-making, this work aims to enhance strategic planning and optimize investment allocation in neuroscience programs.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on Motor Execution (ME) and Motor Imagery (MI) electroencephalogram (EEG) signals offer a direct pathway for human-machine interaction. However, developing robust decoding models remains challenging due to the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of EEG, its low signal-to-noise ratio, and the limited generalizability of many existing approaches across subjects and paradigms. To address these issues, this paper proposes Graph-guided Clustering Mixture-of-Experts CNN-GRU (GCMCG), a novel unified framework for MI-ME EEG decoding. Our approach integrates a robust preprocessing stage using Independent Component Analysis and Wavelet Transform (ICA-WT) for effective denoising. We further introduce a pre-trainable graph tokenization module that dynamically models electrode relationships via a Graph Attention Network (GAT), followed by unsupervised spectral clustering to decompose signals into interpretable functional brain regions. Each region is processed by a dedicated CNN-GRU expert network, and a gated fusion mechanism with L1 regularization adaptively combines these local features with a global expert. This Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design enables deep spatio-temporal fusion and enhances representational capacity. A three-stage training strategy incorporating focal loss and progressive sampling is employed to improve cross-subject generalization and handle class imbalance. Evaluated on three public datasets of varying complexity (EEGmmidb-BCI2000, BCI-IV 2a, and M3CV), GCMCG achieves overall accuracies of 86.60%, 98.57%, and 99.61%, respectively, which demonstrates its superior effectiveness and strong generalization capability for practical BCI applications.

Abstract--The widespread adoption of complex machine learning models in high-stakes domains has brought the "black-box" problem to the forefront of responsible AI research. This paper aims at addressing this issue by improving the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), a state-of-the-art glassbox model that delivers both high accuracy and complete transparency. The paper outlines three distinct enhancement methodologies: targeted hyperparameter optimization with Bayesian methods, the implementation of a custom multi-objective function for fairness for hyperparameter optimization, and a novel self-supervised pre-training pipeline for cold-start scenarios. All three methodologies are evaluated across standard benchmark datasets, including the Adult Income, Credit Card Fraud Detection, and UCI Heart Disease datasets. The analysis indicates that while the tuning process yielded marginal improvements in the primary ROC AUC metric, it led to a subtle but important shift in the model's decision-making behavior, demonstrating the value of a multi-faceted evaluation beyond a single performance score. This work is positioned as a critical step toward developing machine learning systems that are not only accurate but also robust, equitable, and transparent, meeting the growing demands of regulatory and ethical compliance. A. The Black-Box Problem in High-Stakes Domains The remarkable surge in the performance of machine learning models has led to their pervasive adoption across a multitude of domains, from retail and finance to medicine and judicial systems. Complex, high-performing models, such as deep neural networks and ensemble methods like Random Forest and XGBoost, have become the de facto standard for many tasks.

Fairness in machine learning has been extensively studied in single-task settings, while fair multi-task learning (MTL), especially with heterogeneous tasks (classification, detection, regression) and partially missing labels, remains largely unexplored. Existing fairness methods are predominantly classification-oriented and fail to extend to continuous outputs, making a unified fairness objective difficult to formulate. Further, existing MTL optimization is structurally misaligned with fairness: constraining only the shared representation, allowing task heads to absorb bias and leading to uncontrolled task-specific disparities. Finally, most work treats fairness as a zero-sum trade-off with utility, enforcing symmetric constraints that achieve parity by degrading well-served groups. We introduce FairMT, a unified fairness-aware MTL framework that accommodates all three task types under incomplete supervision. At its core is an Asymmetric Heterogeneous Fairness Constraint Aggregation mechanism, which consolidates task-dependent asymmetric violations into a unified fairness constraint. Utility and fairness are jointly optimized via a primal--dual formulation, while a head-aware multi-objective optimization proxy provides a tractable descent geometry that explicitly accounts for head-induced anisotropy. Across three homogeneous and heterogeneous MTL benchmarks encompassing diverse modalities and supervision regimes, FairMT consistently achieves substantial fairness gains while maintaining superior task utility. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.