Causal reasoning and discovery, two fundamental tasks of causal analysis, often face challenges in applications due to the complexity, noisiness, and high-dimensionality of real-world data. Despite recent progress in identifying latent causal structures using causal representation learning (CRL), what makes learned representations useful for causal downstream tasks and how to evaluate them are still not well understood. In this paper, we reinterpret CRL using a measurement model framework, where the learned representations are viewed as proxy measurements of the latent causal variables. Our approach clarifies the conditions under which learned representations support downstream causal reasoning and provides a principled basis for quantitatively assessing the quality of representations using a new Test-based Measurement EXclusivity (T-MEX) score. We validate T-MEX across diverse causal inference scenarios, including numerical simulations and real-world ecological video analysis, demonstrating that the proposed framework and corresponding score effectively assess the identification of learned representations and their usefulness for causal downstream tasks.

Generating thorough natural language explanations for threat detections remains an open problem in cybersecurity research, despite significant advances in automated malware detection systems. In this work, we present AutoMalDesc, an automated static analysis summarization framework that, following initial training on a small set of expert-curated examples, operates independently at scale. This approach leverages an iterative self-paced learning pipeline to progressively enhance output quality through synthetic data generation and validation cycles, eliminating the need for extensive manual data annotation. Evaluation across 3,600 diverse samples in five scripting languages demonstrates statistically significant improvements between iterations, showing consistent gains in both summary quality and classification accuracy. Our comprehensive validation approach combines quantitative metrics based on established malware labels with qualitative assessment from both human experts and LLM-based judges, confirming both technical precision and linguistic coherence of generated summaries. To facilitate reproducibility and advance research in this domain, we publish our complete dataset of more than 100K script samples, including annotated seed (0.9K) and test (3.6K)

Biomarker discovery from high-throughput transcriptomic data is crucial for advancing precision medicine. However, existing methods often neglect gene-gene regulatory relationships and lack stability across datasets, leading to conflation of spurious correlations with genuine causal effects. To address these issues, we develop a causal graph neural network (Causal-GNN) method that integrates causal inference with multi-layer graph neural networks (GNNs). The key innovation is the incorporation of causal effect estimation for identifying stable biomarkers, coupled with a GNN-based propensity scoring mechanism that leverages cross-gene regulatory networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves consistently high predictive accuracy across four distinct datasets and four independent classifiers. Moreover, it enables the identification of more stable biomarkers compared to traditional methods. Our work provides a robust, efficient, and biologically interpretable tool for biomarker discovery, demonstrating strong potential for broad application across medical disciplines.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is now integral to digital interaction, driving applications from virtual assistants to automated subtitles on platforms like YouTube ( Dykes et al. 2023). Despite its wide adoption and significant advancements, ASR performance remains imperfect, particularly in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (L VCSR) and under real-world conditions like background noise or diverse accents ( Errattahi et al. 2018; Romana et al. 2024). This often results in a significant Word Error Rate (WER). A major, persistent source of error stems from speech disfluencies, which are interruptions in the smooth flow of speech, including filled pauses, hesitations, self-corrections, and most relevantly, repetitions ( Romana et al. 2024). Disfluencies are natural and frequent; one study found a 50% probability of a disfluency in a 10-13 word sentence ( Jamshid Lou and Johnson 2020b). Their presence creates noisy transcripts that are difficult to read and detrimental to downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as machine translation or information extraction ( Romana et al. 2024; Jamshid Lou and Johnson 2020a).

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding - the task of mapping natural language instructions to screen coordinates - is essential for autonomous agents and accessibility technologies. Existing systems rely on monolithic models or one-shot pipelines that lack modularity and fail under visual clutter and ambiguous instructions. We introduce MEGA-GUI, a multi-stage framework that separates grounding into coarse Region-of-Interest (ROI) selection and fine-grained element grounding, orchestrated by specialized vision-language agents. MEGA-GUI features a bidirectional ROI zoom algorithm that mitigates spatial dilution and a context-aware rewriting agent that reduces semantic ambiguity. Our analysis reveals complementary strengths and weaknesses across vision-language models at different visual scales, and we show that leveraging this modular structure achieves consistently higher accuracy than monolithic approaches. On the visually dense ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, MEGA-GUI attains 73.18% accuracy, and on the semantically complex OSWorld-G benchmark it reaches 68.63%, surpassing previously reported results. Code and the Grounding Benchmark Toolkit (GBT) are available at https://github.com/samsungsds-research-papers/mega-gui.

Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) operate in high-pressure environments, making rapid, life-critical decisions under heavy cognitive and operational loads. We present EMSGlass, a smart-glasses system powered by EMSNet, the first multimodal multitask model for Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and EMSServe, a low-latency multimodal serving framework tailored to EMS scenarios. EMSNet integrates text, vital signs, and scene images to construct a unified real-time understanding of EMS incidents. Trained on real-world multimodal EMS datasets, EMSNet simultaneously supports up to five critical EMS tasks with superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art unimodal baselines. Built on top of PyTorch, EMSServe introduces a modality-aware model splitter and a feature caching mechanism, achieving adaptive and efficient inference across heterogeneous hardware while addressing the challenge of asynchronous modality arrival in the field. By optimizing multimodal inference execution in EMS scenarios, EMSServe achieves 1.9x -- 11.7x speedup over direct PyTorch multimodal inference. A user study evaluation with six professional EMTs demonstrates that EMSGlass enhances real-time situational awareness, decision-making speed, and operational efficiency through intuitive on-glass interaction. In addition, qualitative insights from the user study provide actionable directions for extending EMSGlass toward next-generation AI-enabled EMS systems, bridging multimodal intelligence with real-world emergency response workflows.

Abstract--Decentralized finance (DeFi) is experiencing rapid expansion. However, prevalent code reuse and limited open-source contributions have introduced significant challenges to the blockchain ecosystem, including plagiarism and the propagation of vulnerable code. Consequently, an effective and accurate similarity detection method for EVM bytecode is urgently needed to identify similar contracts. Traditional binary similarity detection methods are typically based on instruction stream or control flow graph (CFG), which have limitations on EVM bytecode due to specific features like low-level EVM bytecode and heavily-reused basic blocks. Moreover, the highly-diverse Solidity Compiler (Solc) versions further complicate accurate similarity detection. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel EVM bytecode representation called Stable-Semantic Graph (SSG), which captures relationships between "stable instructions" (special instructions identified by our study). Moreover, we implement a prototype, Esim, which embeds SSG into matrices for similarity detection using a heterogeneous graph neural network. Esim demonstrates high accuracy in SSG construction, achieving F1-scores of 100% for control flow and 95.16% for data flow, and its similarity detection performance reaches 96.3% AUC, surpassing traditional approaches. Our large-scale study, analyzing 2,675,573 smart contracts on six EVM-compatible chains over a one-year period, also demonstrates that Esim outperforms the SOT A tool Etherscan in vulnerability search. With the rapid expansion of decentralized finance (DeFi) in the blockchain ecosystem, DeFi projects, which are built on smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), have attracted substantial investment in recent years, with over $88.8 billion Total V alue Locked (TVL) in 2024 [1]. As a representative case, the Compound v2 protocol [3], one of the top lending protocols, has been widely adopted and forked by numerous DeFi projects. This protocol has a known precision loss issue that can be exploited when the corresponding market lacks liquidity. Since 2022, a series of attacks (e.g., Hundred Finance Attack [4], Onyx Protocol Attack [5], Radiant Attack [6]) have been observed due to the code abuse of Compound v2 protocol, resulting in millions of dollars in losses. Consequently, there is an urgent need for an efficient method to detect code reuse in EVM bytecode (binaries), a process also known as EVM bytecode similarity detection. More than 99% of the Ethereum contracts are not open source [2] In general, binary similarity detection studies in traditional languages (e.g., C++ [7], [8], [9] and Java [10]) can be divided into two categories, i.e., instruction stream based and control flow graph (CFG) based.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated high performance in image classification tasks by effectively utilizing both labeled and unlabeled data. However, existing SSL methods often suffer from poor calibration, with models yielding overconfident predictions that misrepresent actual prediction likelihoods. Recently, neural networks trained with {\tt mixup} that linearly interpolates random examples from the training set have shown better calibration in supervised settings. However, calibration of neural models remains under-explored in semi-supervised settings. Although effective in supervised model calibration, random mixup of pseudolabels in SSL presents challenges due to the overconfidence and unreliability of pseudolabels. In this work, we introduce CalibrateMix, a targeted mixup-based approach that aims to improve the calibration of SSL models while maintaining or even improving their classification accuracy. Our method leverages training dynamics of labeled and unlabeled samples to identify ``easy-to-learn'' and ``hard-to-learn'' samples, which in turn are utilized in a targeted mixup of easy and hard samples. Experimental results across several benchmark image datasets show that our method achieves lower expected calibration error (ECE) and superior accuracy compared to existing SSL approaches.

The performance of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) is critically dependent on the relevance and quality of the datasets used for training and evaluation. However, current AI model evaluation practices for developing IDS/IPS focus predominantly on accuracy metrics, often overlooking whether datasets represent industry-specific threats. To address this gap, we introduce a novel multi-dimensional framework that integrates the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base for threat intelligence and employs five complementary metrics that together provide a comprehensive assessment of dataset suitability. Methodologically, this framework combines threat intelligence, natural language processing, and quantitative analysis to assess the suitability of datasets for specific industry contexts. Applying this framework to nine publicly available IDS/IPS datasets reveals significant gaps in threat coverage, particularly in the healthcare, energy, and financial sectors. In particular, recent datasets (e.g., CIC-IoMT, CIC-UNSW-NB15) align better with sector-specific threats, whereas others, like CICIoV-24, underperform despite their recency. Our findings provide a standardized, interpretable approach for selecting datasets aligned with sector-specific operational requirements, ultimately enhancing the real-world effectiveness of AI-driven IDS/IPS deployments. The efficiency and practicality of the framework are validated through deployment in a real-world case study, underscoring its capacity to inform dataset selection and enhance the effectiveness of AI-driven IDS/IPS in operational environments.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve superhuman performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet often fail on much simpler problems, raising concerns about their reliability and interpretability. We investigate this paradox through a focused study with two key design features: simplicity, to expose basic failure modes, and scale, to enable comprehensive controlled experiments. We focus on set membership queries -- among the most fundamental forms of reasoning -- using tasks like ``Is apple an element of the set \{pear, plum, apple, raspberry\}?''. We conduct a systematic empirical evaluation across prompt phrasing, semantic structure, element ordering, and model choice. Our large-scale analysis reveals that LLM performance on this elementary task is consistently brittle, and unpredictable across all dimensions, suggesting that the models' ``understanding'' of the set concept is fragmented and convoluted at best. Our work demonstrates that the large-scale experiments enabled by the simplicity of the problem allow us to map and analyze the failure modes comprehensively, making this approach a valuable methodology for LLM evaluation in general.