This position paper presents A VEC (Adaptive Verifiable Edge Control), a framework for bootstrapping privacy for local language models by enforcing privacy at the edge with explicit verifiability for delegated queries. A VEC introduces an adaptive budgeting algorithm that allocates per-query differential privacy parameters based on sensitivity, local confidence, and historical usage, and uses verifiable transformation with on-device integrity checks. We formalize guarantees using R enyi differential privacy with odometer-based accounting, and establish utility ceilings, delegation-leakage bounds, and impossibility results for deterministic gating and hash-only certification. Our evaluation is simulation-based by design to study mechanism behavior and accounting; we do not claim deployment readiness or task-level utility with live LLMs. The contribution is a conceptual architecture and theoretical foundation that chart a pathway for empirical follow-up on privately bootstrapping local LLMs.

Video-based assessment of motor symptoms in conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD) offers a scalable alternative to in-clinic evaluations, but home-recorded videos introduce significant challenges, including visual degradation, inconsistent task execution, annotation noise, and domain shifts. We present HiLWS, a cascaded human-in-the-loop weak supervision framework for curating and annotating hand motor task videos from both clinical and home settings. Unlike conventional single-stage weak supervision methods, HiLWS employs a novel cascaded approach, first applies weak supervision to aggregate expert-provided annotations into probabilistic labels, which are then used to train machine learning models. Model predictions, combined with expert input, are subsequently refined through a second stage of weak supervision. The complete pipeline includes quality filtering, optimized pose estimation, and task-specific segment extraction, complemented by context-sensitive evaluation metrics that assess both visual fidelity and clinical relevance by prioritizing ambiguous cases for expert review. Our findings reveal key failure modes in home recorded data and emphasize the importance of context-sensitive curation strategies for robust medical video analysis.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks remain a serious threat to online infrastructure, often bypassing detection by altering traffic in subtle ways. We present a method using hive-plot sequences of network data and a 3D convolutional neural network (3D CNN) to classify DDoS traffic with high accuracy. Our system relies on three main ideas: (1) using spatio-temporal hive-plot encodings to set a pattern-recognition baseline, (2) applying adversarial training with FGSM and PGD alongside spatial noise and image shifts, and (3) analyzing frame-wise predictions to find early signals. On a benchmark dataset, our method lifts adversarial accuracy from 50-55% to over 93% while maintaining clean-sample performance. Frames 3-4 offer strong predictive signals, showing early-stage classification is possible.

The physical and chemical characteristics of cathodes used in batteries are derived from the lithium-ion phosphate cathodes crystalline arrangement, which is pivotal to the overall battery performance. Therefore, the correct prediction of the crystal system is essential to estimate the properties of cathodes. This study applies machine learning classification algorithms for predicting the crystal systems, namely monoclinic, orthorhombic, and triclinic, related to Li P (Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, V) O based Phosphate cathodes. The data used in this work is extracted from the Materials Project. Feature evaluation showed that cathode properties depend on the crystal structure, and optimized classification strategies lead to better predictability. Ensemble machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest, Extremely Randomized Trees, and Gradient Boosting Machines have demonstrated the best predictive capabilities for crystal systems in the Monte Carlo cross-validation test. Additionally, sequential forward selection (SFS) is performed to identify the most critical features influencing the prediction accuracy for different machine learning models, with Volume, Band gap, and Sites as input features ensemble machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest (80.69%), Extremely Randomized Tree (78.96%), and Gradient Boosting Machine (80.40%) approaches lead to the maximum accuracy towards crystallographic classification with stability and the predicted materials can be the potential cathode materials for lithium ion batteries.

Forecasting product demand in retail supply chains presents a complex challenge due to noisy, heterogeneous features and rapidly shifting consumer behavior. While traditional gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) offer strong predictive performance on structured data, they often lack adaptive mechanisms to identify and emphasize the most relevant features under changing conditions. In this work, we propose AttnBoost, an interpretable learning framework that integrates feature-level attention into the boosting process to enhance both predictive accuracy and explainability. Specifically, the model dynamically adjusts feature importance during each boosting round via a lightweight attention mechanism, allowing it to focus on high-impact variables such as promotions, pricing, and seasonal trends. We evaluate AttnBoost on a large-scale retail sales dataset and demonstrate that it outperforms standard machine learning and deep tabular models, while also providing actionable insights for supply chain managers. An ablation study confirms the utility of the attention module in mitigating overfitting and improving interpretability. Our results suggest that attention-guided boosting represents a promising direction for interpretable and scalable AI in real-world forecasting applications.

Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking embeds detectable signals into generated text for copyright protection, misuse prevention, and content detection. While prior studies evaluate robustness using watermark removal attacks, these methods are often suboptimal, creating the misconception that effective removal requires large perturbations or powerful adversaries. To bridge the gap, we first formalize the system model for LLM watermark, and characterize two realistic threat models constrained on limited access to the watermark detector. We then analyze how different types of perturbation vary in their attack range, i.e., the number of tokens they can affect with a single edit. We observe that character-level perturbations (e.g., typos, swaps, deletions, homoglyphs) can influence multiple tokens simultaneously by disrupting the tokenization process. We demonstrate that character-level perturbations are significantly more effective for watermark removal under the most restrictive threat model. We further propose guided removal attacks based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) that uses a reference detector for optimization. Under a practical threat model with limited black-box queries to the watermark detector, our method demonstrates strong removal performance. Experiments confirm the superiority of character-level perturbations and the effectiveness of the GA in removing watermarks under realistic constraints. Additionally, we argue there is an adversarial dilemma when considering potential defenses: any fixed defense can be bypassed by a suitable perturbation strategy. Motivated by this principle, we propose an adaptive compound character-level attack. Experimental results show that this approach can effectively defeat the defenses. Our findings highlight significant vulnerabilities in existing LLM watermark schemes and underline the urgency for the development of new robust mechanisms.

Automatic sleep staging typically relies on gold-standard EEG setups, which are accurate but obtrusive and impractical for everyday use outside sleep laboratories. This limits applicability in real-world settings, such as home environments, where continuous, long-term monitoring is needed. Detecting sleep onset is particularly relevant, enabling consumer applications (e.g. automatically pausing media playback when the user falls asleep). Recent research has shown correlations between in-ear EEG and full-scalp EEG for various phenomena, suggesting wearable, in-ear devices could allow unobtrusive sleep monitoring. We investigated the feasibility of using single-channel in-ear electrophysiological (ExG) signals for automatic sleep staging in a wearable device by conducting a sleep study with 11 participants (mean age: 24), using a custom earpiece with a dry eartip electrode (Dätwyler SoftPulse) as a measurement electrode in one ear and a reference in the other. Ground truth sleep stages were obtained from an Apple Watch Ultra, validated for sleep staging. Our system achieved 90.5% accuracy for binary sleep detection (Awake vs. Asleep) and 65.1% accuracy for four-class staging (Awake, REM, Core, Deep) using leave-one-subject-out validation. These findings demonstrate the potential of in-ear electrodes as a low-effort, comfortable approach to sleep monitoring, with applications such as stopping podcasts when users fall asleep.

Photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) are commonly recorded in intesive care unit (ICU) and operating room (OR). However, the high incidence of poor, incomplete, and inconsistent signal quality, can lead to false alarms or diagnostic inaccuracies. The methods explored so far suffer from limited generalizability, reliance on extensive labeled data, and poor cross-task transferability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce QualityFM, a novel multimodal foundation model for these physiological signals, designed to acquire a general-purpose understanding of signal quality. Our model is pre-trained on an large-scale dataset comprising over 21 million 30-second waveforms and 179,757 hours of data. Our approach involves a dual-track architecture that processes paired physiological signals of differing quality, leveraging a self-distillation strategy where an encoder for high-quality signals is used to guide the training of an encoder for low-quality signals. To efficiently handle long sequential signals and capture essential local quasi-periodic patterns, we integrate a windowed sparse attention mechanism within our Transformer-based model. Furthermore, a composite loss function, which combines direct distillation loss on encoder outputs with indirect reconstruction loss based on power and phase spectra, ensures the preservation of frequency-domain characteristics of the signals. We pre-train three models with varying parameter counts (9.6 M to 319 M) and demonstrate their efficacy and practical value through transfer learning on three distinct clinical tasks: false alarm of ventricular tachycardia detection, the identification of atrial fibrillation and the estimation of arterial blood pressure (ABP) from PPG and ECG signals.

Recent face anti-spoofing (FAS) methods have shown remarkable cross-domain performance by employing vision-language models like CLIP. However, existing CLIP-based FAS models do not fully exploit CLIP's patch embedding tokens, failing to detect critical spoofing clues. Moreover, these models rely on a single text prompt per class (e.g., 'live' or 'fake'), which limits generalization. To address these issues, we propose MVP-FAS, a novel framework incorporating two key modules: Multi-View Slot attention (MVS) and Multi-Text Patch Alignment (MTPA). Both modules utilize multiple paraphrased texts to generate generalized features and reduce dependence on domain-specific text. MVS extracts local detailed spatial features and global context from patch embeddings by leveraging diverse texts with multiple perspectives. MTPA aligns patches with multiple text representations to improve semantic robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVP-FAS achieves superior generalization performance, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods on cross-domain datasets. Code: https://github.com/Elune001/MVP-FAS.

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback under misspecification. Sometimes human feedback is systematically wrong on certain types of inputs, like a broken compass that points the wrong way in specific regions. We prove that when feedback is biased on a fraction alpha of contexts with bias strength epsilon, any learning algorithm needs exponentially many samples exp(n*alpha*epsilon^2) to distinguish between two possible "true" reward functions that differ only on these problematic contexts. However, if you can identify where feedback is unreliable (a "calibration oracle"), you can focus your limited questions there and overcome the exponential barrier with just O(1/(alpha*epsilon^2)) queries. This quantifies why alignment is hard: rare edge cases with subtly biased feedback create an exponentially hard learning problem unless you know where to look. The gap between what we optimize (proxy from human feedback) and what we want (true objective) is fundamentally limited by how common the problematic contexts are (alpha), how wrong the feedback is there (epsilon), and how much the true objectives disagree there (gamma). Murphy's Law for AI alignment: the gap always wins unless you actively route around misspecification.