Performance Analysis
RePPL: Recalibrating Perplexity by Uncertainty in Semantic Propagation and Language Generation for Explainable QA Hallucination Detection
Huang, Yiming, Zhang, Junyan, Wang, Zihao, Bie, Biquan, Qiu, Yunzhong, Fung, Yi R., He, Xinlei
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become powerful, but hallucinations remain a vital obstacle to their trustworthy use. While previous works improved the capability of hallucination detection by measuring uncertainty, they all lack the ability to explain the provenance behind why hallucinations occur, i.e., which part of the inputs tends to trigger hallucinations. Recent works on the prompt attack indicate that uncertainty exists in semantic propagation, where attention mechanisms gradually fuse local token information into high-level semantics across layers. Meanwhile, uncertainty also emerges in language generation, due to its probability-based selection of high-level semantics for sampled generations. Based on that, we propose RePPL to recalibrate uncertainty measurement by these two aspects, which dispatches explainable uncertainty scores to each token and aggregates in Perplexity-style Log-Average form as total score. Experiments show that our method achieves the best comprehensive detection performance across various QA datasets on advanced models (average AUC of 0.833), and our method is capable of producing token-level uncertainty scores as explanations for the hallucination. Leveraging these scores, we preliminarily find the chaotic pattern of hallucination and showcase its promising usage.
Attackers Strike Back? Not Anymore -- An Ensemble of RL Defenders Awakens for APT Detection
Benabderrahmane, Sidahmed, Rahwan, Talal
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent a growing menace to modern digital infrastructure. Unlike traditional cyberattacks, APTs are stealthy, adaptive, and long-lasting, often bypassing signature-based detection systems. This paper introduces a novel framework for APT detection that unites deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL), and active learning into a cohesive, adaptive defense system. Our system combines auto-encoders for latent behavioral encoding with a multi-agent ensemble of RL-based defenders, each trained to distinguish between benign and malicious process behaviors. We identify a critical challenge in existing detection systems: their static nature and inability to adapt to evolving attack strategies. To this end, our architecture includes multiple RL agents (Q-Learning, PPO, DQN, adversarial defenders), each analyzing latent vectors generated by an auto-encoder. When any agent is uncertain about its decision, the system triggers an active learning loop to simulate expert feedback, thus refining decision boundaries. An ensemble voting mechanism, weighted by each agent's performance, ensures robust final predictions.
Estimating Conditional Covariance between labels for Multilabel Data
Park, Laurence A. F., Read, Jesse
Multilabel data should be analysed for label dependence before applying multilabel models. Independence between multilabel data labels cannot be measured directly from the label values due to their dependence on the set of covariates $\vec{x}$, but can be measured by examining the conditional label covariance using a multivariate Probit model. Unfortunately, the multivariate Probit model provides an estimate of its copula covariance, and so might not be reliable in estimating constant covariance and dependent covariance. In this article, we compare three models (Multivariate Probit, Multivariate Bernoulli and Staged Logit) for estimating the constant and dependent multilabel conditional label covariance. We provide an experiment that allows us to observe each model's measurement of conditional covariance. We found that all models measure constant and dependent covariance equally well, depending on the strength of the covariance, but the models all falsely detect that dependent covariance is present for data where constant covariance is present. Of the three models, the Multivariate Probit model had the lowest error rate.
Auditing Approximate Machine Unlearning for Differentially Private Models
Gu, Yuechun, He, Jiajie, Chen, Keke
Approximate machine unlearning aims to remove the effect of specific data from trained models to ensure individuals' privacy. Existing methods focus on the removed records and assume the retained ones are unaffected. However, recent studies on the \emph{privacy onion effect} indicate this assumption might be incorrect. Especially when the model is differentially private, no study has explored whether the retained ones still meet the differential privacy (DP) criterion under existing machine unlearning methods. This paper takes a holistic approach to auditing both unlearned and retained samples' privacy risks after applying approximate unlearning algorithms. We propose the privacy criteria for unlearned and retained samples, respectively, based on the perspectives of DP and membership inference attacks (MIAs). To make the auditing process more practical, we also develop an efficient MIA, A-LiRA, utilizing data augmentation to reduce the cost of shadow model training. Our experimental findings indicate that existing approximate machine unlearning algorithms may inadvertently compromise the privacy of retained samples for differentially private models, and we need differentially private unlearning algorithms. For reproducibility, we have pubished our code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Auditing-machine-unlearning-CB10/README.md
Biologically Disentangled Multi-Omic Modeling Reveals Mechanistic Insights into Pan-Cancer Immunotherapy Resistance
Tariq, Ifrah, Fraenkel, Ernest
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer treatment, yet patient responses remain highly variable, and the biological mechanisms underlying resistance are poorly understood. While machine learning models hold promise for predicting responses to ICIs, most existing methods lack interpretability and do not effectively leverage the biological structure inherent to multi-omics data. Here, we introduce the Biologically Disentangled Variational Autoencoder (BDVAE), a deep generative model that integrates transcriptomic and genomic data through modality- and pathway-specific encoders. Unlike existing rigid, pathway-informed models, BDVAE employs a modular encoder architecture combined with variational inference to learn biologically meaningful latent features associated with immune, genomic, and metabolic processes. Applied to a pan-cancer cohort of 366 patients across four cancer types treated with ICIs, BDVAE accurately predicts treatment response (AUC-ROC = 0.94 on unseen test data) and uncovers critical resistance mechanisms, including immune suppression, metabolic shifts, and neuronal signaling. Importantly, BDVAE reveals that resistance spans a continuous biological spectrum rather than strictly binary states, reflecting gradations of tumor dysfunction. Several latent features correlate with survival outcomes and known clinical subtypes, demonstrating BDVAE's capability to generate interpretable, clinically relevant insights. These findings underscore the value of biologically structured machine learning in elucidating complex resistance patterns and guiding precision immunotherapy strategies.
BTW: A Non-Parametric Variance Stabilization Framework for Multimodal Model Integration
Hou, Jun, Wang, Le, Wang, Xuan
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become increasingly powerful in multimodal learning by enabling modular specialization across modalities. However, their effectiveness remains unclear when additional modalities introduce more noise than complementary information. Existing approaches, such as the Partial Information Decomposition, struggle to scale beyond two modalities and lack the resolution needed for instance-level control. We propose Beyond Two-modality Weighting (BTW), a bi-level, non-parametric weighting framework that combines instance-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and modality-level mutual information (MI) to dynamically adjust modality importance during training. Our method does not require additional parameters and can be applied to an arbitrary number of modalities. Specifically, BTW computes per-example KL weights by measuring the divergence between each unimodal and the current multimodal prediction, and modality-wide MI weights by estimating global alignment between unimodal and multimodal outputs. Extensive experiments on sentiment regression and clinical classification demonstrate that our method significantly improves regression performance and multiclass classification accuracy.
An Analytical Approach to Privacy and Performance Trade-Offs in Healthcare Data Sharing
Wei, Yusi, Benson, Hande Y., Capan, Muge
The secondary use of healthcare data is vital for research and clinical innovation, but it raises concerns about patient privacy. This study investigates how to balance privacy preservation and data utility in healthcare data sharing, considering the perspectives of both data providers and data users. Using a dataset of adult patients hospitalized between 2013 and 2015, we predict whether sepsis was present at admission or developed during the hospital stay. We identify sub-populations, such as older adults, frequently hospitalized patients, and racial minorities, that are especially vulnerable to privacy attacks due to their unique combinations of demographic and healthcare utilization attributes. These groups are also critical for machine learning (ML) model performance. We evaluate three anonymization methods-$k$-anonymity, the technique by Zheng et al., and the MO-OBAM model-based on their ability to reduce re-identification risk while maintaining ML utility. Results show that $k$-anonymity offers limited protection. The methods of Zheng et al. and MO-OBAM provide stronger privacy safeguards, with MO-OBAM yielding the best utility outcomes: only a 2% change in precision and recall compared to the original dataset. This work provides actionable insights for healthcare organizations on how to share data responsibly. It highlights the need for anonymization methods that protect vulnerable populations without sacrificing the performance of data-driven models.
Backprompting: Leveraging Synthetic Production Data for Health Advice Guardrails
Cheng, Kellen Tan, Gentile, Anna Lisa, DeLuca, Chad, Ren, Guang-Jie
The pervasiveness of large language models (LLMs) in enterprise settings has also brought forth a significant amount of risks associated with their usage. Guardrails technologies aim to mitigate this risk by filtering LLMs' input/output text through various detectors. However, developing and maintaining robust detectors faces many challenges, one of which is the difficulty in acquiring production-quality labeled data on real LLM outputs prior to deployment. In this work, we propose backprompting, a simple yet intuitive solution to generate production-like labeled data for health advice guardrails development. Furthermore, we pair our backprompting method with a sparse human-in-the-loop clustering technique to label the generated data. Our aim is to construct a parallel corpus roughly representative of the original dataset yet resembling real LLM output. We then infuse existing datasets with our synthetic examples to produce robust training data for our detector. We test our technique in one of the most difficult and nuanced guardrails: the identification of health advice in LLM output, and demonstrate improvement versus other solutions. Our detector is able to outperform GPT-4o by up to 3.73%, despite having 400x less parameters.
ProtoEHR: Hierarchical Prototype Learning for EHR-based Healthcare Predictions
Cai, Zi, Liu, Yu, Luo, Zhiyao, Zhu, Tingting
Digital healthcare systems have enabled the collection of mass healthcare data in electronic healthcare records (EHRs), allowing artificial intelligence solutions for various healthcare prediction tasks. However, existing studies often focus on isolated components of EHR data, limiting their predictive performance and interpretability. To address this gap, we propose ProtoEHR, an interpretable hierarchical prototype learning framework that fully exploits the rich, multi-level structure of EHR data to enhance healthcare predictions. More specifically, ProtoEHR models relationships within and across three hierarchical levels of EHRs: medical codes, hospital visits, and patients. We first leverage large language models to extract semantic relationships among medical codes and construct a medical knowledge graph as the knowledge source. Building on this, we design a hierarchical representation learning framework that captures contextualized representations across three levels, while incorporating prototype information within each level to capture intrinsic similarities and improve generalization. To perform a comprehensive assessment, we evaluate ProtoEHR in two public datasets on five clinically significant tasks, including prediction of mortality, prediction of readmission, prediction of length of stay, drug recommendation, and prediction of phenotype. The results demonstrate the ability of ProtoEHR to make accurate, robust, and interpretable predictions compared to baselines in the literature. Furthermore, ProtoEHR offers interpretable insights on code, visit, and patient levels to aid in healthcare prediction.
MobileDenseAttn:A Dual-Stream Architecture for Accurate and Interpretable Brain Tumor Detection
Banik, Shudipta, Das, Muna, Banik, Trapa, Haque, Md. Ehsanul
The detection of brain tumor in MRI is an important aspect of ensuring timely diagnostics and treatment; however, manual analysis is commonly long and error-prone. Current approaches are not universal because they have limited generalization to heterogeneous tumors, are computationally inefficient, are not interpretable, and lack transparency, thus limiting trustworthiness. To overcome these issues, we introduce MobileDenseAttn, a fusion model of dual streams of MobileNetV2 and DenseNet201 that can help gradually improve the feature representation scale, computing efficiency, and visual explanations via GradCAM. Our model uses feature level fusion and is trained on an augmented dataset of 6,020 MRI scans representing glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumors, and normal samples. Measured under strict 5-fold cross-validation protocols, MobileDenseAttn provides a training accuracy of 99.75%, a testing accuracy of 98.35%, and a stable F1 score of 0.9835 (95% CI: 0.9743 to 0.9920). The extensive validation shows the stability of the model, and the comparative analysis proves that it is a great advancement over the baseline models (VGG19, DenseNet201, MobileNetV2) with a +3.67% accuracy increase and a 39.3% decrease in training time compared to VGG19. The GradCAM heatmaps clearly show tumor-affected areas, offering clinically significant localization and improving interpretability. These findings position MobileDenseAttn as an efficient, high performance, interpretable model with a high probability of becoming a clinically practical tool in identifying brain tumors in the real world.