With the growth of digital financial systems, robust security and privacy have become a concern for financial institutions. Even though traditional machine learning models have shown to be effective in fraud detections, they often compromise user data by requiring centralized access to sensitive information. In IoT-enabled financial endpoints such as ATMs and POS Systems that regularly produce sensitive data that is sent over the network. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving, decentralized model training across institutions without sharing raw data. FL enables cross-silo collaboration among banks while also using cross-device learning on IoT endpoints. This survey explores the role of FL in enhancing financial security and introduces a novel classification of its applications based on regulatory and compliance exposure levels ranging from low-exposure tasks such as collaborative portfolio optimization to high-exposure tasks like real-time fraud detection. Unlike prior surveys, this work reviews FL's practical use within financial systems, discussing its regulatory compliance and recent successes in fraud prevention and blockchain-integrated frameworks. However, FL deployment in finance is not without challenges. Data heterogeneity, adversarial attacks, and regulatory compliance make implementation far from easy. This survey reviews current defense mechanisms and discusses future directions, including blockchain integration, differential privacy, secure multi-party computation, and quantum-secure frameworks. Ultimately, this work aims to be a resource for researchers exploring FL's potential to advance secure, privacy-compliant financial systems.

When working on digital devices, people often face distractions that can lead to a decline in productivity and efficiency, as well as negative psychological and emotional impacts. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that elicits a user's intention, assesses whether ongoing activities are in line with that intention, and provides gentle nudges when deviations occur. The system leverages a large language model to analyze screenshots, application titles, and URLs, issuing notifications when behavior diverges from the stated goal. Its detection accuracy is refined through initial clarification dialogues and continuous user feedback. In a three-week, within-subjects field deployment with 22 participants, we compared our assistant to both a rule-based intent reminder system and a passive baseline that only logged activity. Results indicate that our AI assistant effectively supports users in maintaining focus and aligning their digital behavior with their intentions. Our source code is publicly available at https://intentassistant.github.io

Prompt injection attacks deceive a large language model into completing an attacker-specified task instead of its intended task by contaminating its input data with an injected prompt, which consists of injected instruction(s) and data. Localizing the injected prompt within contaminated data is crucial for post-attack forensic analysis and data recovery. Despite its growing importance, prompt injection localization remains largely unexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing PromptLocate, the first method for localizing injected prompts. PromptLocate comprises three steps: (1) splitting the contaminated data into semantically coherent segments, (2) identifying segments contaminated by injected instructions, and (3) pinpointing segments contaminated by injected data. We show PromptLocate accurately localizes injected prompts across eight existing and eight adaptive attacks.

Abstract--In mixed-traffic environments, where autonomous vehicles (A Vs) must interact with diverse human-driven vehicles (HVs), the unpredictability of human intentions and heterogeneous driving behaviors poses significant challenges to safe and efficient lane change maneuvers. Existing methods often oversimplify these interactions by assuming uniform or fixed behavioral patterns. T o address this limitation, we propose an intention-driven lane change framework that integrates driving-style recognition with cooperation-aware decision-making and motion-planning. First, a deep learning-based classifier is developed to identify distinct human driving styles from the NGSIM dataset in real time. Second, we introduce a cooperation score composed of intrinsic and interactive components, which estimates surrounding drivers' intentions and quantifies their willingness to cooperate with the ego vehicle's lane change. Third, a decision-making module is designed by combining behavior cloning (BC) with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to determine whether a lane change should be initiated under current conditions. Finally, a coordinated motion-planning architecture is established, integrating IRL-based intention inference with model predictive control (MPC) to generate collision-free and socially compliant trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed intention-driven BC-IRL model achieves superior performance, reaching 94.2% accuracy and 94.3% F1-score, and outperforming multiple rule-based and learning-based baselines. In particular, it improves lane change recognition by 4-15% in F1-score, highlighting the benefit of modeling inter-driver heterogeneity via intrinsic and interactive cooperation scores.

This paper introduces a novel methodology for constructing multiclass ROC curves using the multidimensional Gini index. The proposed methodology leverages the established relationship between the Gini coefficient and the ROC Curve and extends it to multiclass settings through the multidimensional Gini index. The framework is validated by means of two comprehensive case studies in health care and finance. The paper provides a theoretically grounded solution to multiclass performance evaluation, particularly valuable for imbalanced datasets, for which a prudential assessment should take precedence over class frequency considerations.

Kernel ridge regression (KRR) is a foundational tool in machine learning, with recent work emphasizing its connections to neural networks. However, existing theory primarily addresses the i.i.d. setting, while real-world data often exhibits structured dependencies - particularly in applications like denoising score learning where multiple noisy observations derive from shared underlying signals. We present the first systematic study of KRR generalization for non-i.i.d. data with signal-noise causal structure, where observations represent different noisy views of common signals. By developing a novel blockwise decomposition method that enables precise concentration analysis for dependent data, we derive excess risk bounds for KRR that explicitly depend on: (1) the kernel spectrum, (2) causal structure parameters, and (3) sampling mechanisms (including relative sample sizes for signals and noises). We further apply our results to denoising score learning, establishing generalization guarantees and providing principled guidance for sampling noisy data points. This work advances KRR theory while providing practical tools for analyzing dependent data in modern machine learning applications.

Semantic segmentation labels each pixel in an image with its corresponding class, and is typically evaluated using the Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice metrics to quantify the overlap between predicted and ground-truth segmentation masks. In the literature, most existing methods estimate pixel-wise class probabilities, then apply argmax or thresholding to obtain the final prediction. These methods have been shown to generally lead to inconsistent or suboptimal results, as they do not directly maximize segmentation metrics. To address this issue, a novel consistent segmentation framework, RankSEG, has been proposed, which includes RankDice and RankIoU specifically designed to optimize the Dice and IoU metrics, respectively. Although RankSEG almost guarantees improved performance, it suffers from two major drawbacks. First, it is its computational expense-RankDice has a complexity of O(d log d) with a substantial constant factor (where d represents the number of pixels), while RankIoU exhibits even higher complexity O(d^2), thus limiting its practical application. For instance, in LiTS, prediction with RankSEG takes 16.33 seconds compared to just 0.01 seconds with the argmax rule. Second, RankSEG is only applicable to overlapping segmentation settings, where multiple classes can occupy the same pixel, which contrasts with standard benchmarks that typically assume non-overlapping segmentation. In this paper, we overcome these two drawbacks via a reciprocal moment approximation (RMA) of RankSEG with the following contributions: (i) we improve RankSEG using RMA, namely RankSEG-RMA, reduces the complexity of both algorithms to O(d) while maintaining comparable performance; (ii) inspired by RMA, we develop a pixel-wise score function that allows efficient implementation for non-overlapping segmentation settings.

Two-photon lithography (TPL) is a sophisticated additive manufacturing technology for creating three-dimensional (3D) micro- and nano-structures. Maintaining the health of TPL systems is critical for ensuring consistent fabrication quality. Current maintenance practices often rely on experience rather than informed monitoring of machine health, resulting in either untimely maintenance that causes machine downtime and poor-quality fabrication, or unnecessary maintenance that leads to inefficiencies and avoidable downtime. To address this gap, this paper presents three methods for accurate and timely monitoring of TPL machine health. Through integrating physics-informed data-driven predictive models for structure dimensions with statistical approaches, the proposed methods are able to handle increasingly complex scenarios featuring different levels of generalizability. A comprehensive experimental dataset that encompasses six process parameter combinations and six structure dimensions under two machine health conditions was collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Across all test scenarios, the approaches are shown to achieve high accuracies, demonstrating excellent effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability. These results represent a significant step toward condition-based maintenance for TPL systems.

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its summary measure, the Area Under the Curve (AUC), are well-established tools for evaluating the efficacy of biomarkers in biomedical studies. Compared to the traditional ROC curve, the covariate-adjusted ROC curve allows for individual evaluation of the biomarker. However, the use of machine learning models has rarely been explored in this context, despite their potential to develop more powerful and sophisticated approaches for biomarker evaluation. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework for neural network-based covariate-adjusted ROC modeling that allows flexible and nonlinear evaluation of the effectiveness of a biomarker to discriminate between two reference populations. The finite-sample performance of our method is investigated through extensive simulation tests under varying dependency structures between biomarkers, covariates, and referenced populations. The methodology is further illustrated in a clinically case study that assesses daily physical activity - measured as total activity time (TAC), a proxy for daily step count-as a biomarker to predict mortality at three, five and eight years. Analyzes stratified by sex and adjusted for age and BMI reveal distinct covariate effects on mortality outcomes. These results underscore the importance of covariate-adjusted modeling in biomarker evaluation and highlight TAC's potential as a functional capacity biomarker based on specific individual characteristics.

Consider two sets of entities and their members' mutual affinity values, say drug-target affinities (DTA). Drugs and targets are said to interact in their effects on DTAs if drug's effect on it depends on the target. Presence of interaction implies that assigning a drug to a target and another drug to another target does not provide the same aggregate DTA as the reversed assignment would provide. Accordingly, correctly capturing interactions enables better decision-making, for example, in allocation of limited numbers of drug doses to their best matching targets. Learning to predict DTAs is popularly done from either solely from known DTAs or together with side information on the entities, such as chemical structures of drugs and targets. In this paper, we introduce interaction directions' prediction performance estimator we call interaction concordance index (IC-index), for both fixed predictors and machine learning algorithms aimed for inferring them. IC-index complements the popularly used DTA prediction performance estimators by evaluating the ratio of correctly predicted directions of interaction effects in data. First, we show the invariance of IC-index on predictors unable to capture interactions. Secondly, we show that learning algorithm's permutation equivariance regarding drug and target identities implies its inability to capture interactions when either drug, target or both are unseen during training. In practical applications, this equivariance is remedied via incorporation of appropriate side information on drugs and targets. We make a comprehensive empirical evaluation over several biomedical interaction data sets with various state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. The experiments demonstrate how different types of affinity strength prediction methods perform in terms of IC-index complementing existing prediction performance estimators.