Fairness is a growing area of machine learning (ML) that focuses on ensuring models do not produce systematically biased outcomes for specific groups, particularly those defined by protected attributes such as race, gender, or age. Evaluating fairness is a critical aspect of ML model development, as biased models can perpetuate structural inequalities. The {fairmetrics} R package offers a user-friendly framework for rigorously evaluating numerous group-based fairness criteria, including metrics based on independence (e.g., statistical parity), separation (e.g., equalized odds), and sufficiency (e.g., predictive parity). Group-based fairness criteria assess whether a model is equally accurate or well-calibrated across a set of predefined groups so that appropriate bias mitigation strategies can be implemented. {fairmetrics} provides both point and interval estimates for multiple metrics through a convenient wrapper function and includes an example dataset derived from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care, version II (MIMIC-II) database (Goldberger et al., 2000; Raffa, 2016).

The difficulty of extracting deep features from EEG data and effectively integrating information from multiple views presents significant challenges for developing a generalizable pretraining framework for EEG representation learning. However, most existing pre-training methods rely solely on the contextual semantics of a single view, failing to capture the complex and synergistic interactions among different perspectives, limiting the expressiveness and generalization of learned representations. To address these issues, this paper proposes CRIA, an adaptive framework that utilizes variable-length and variable-channel coding to achieve a unified representation of EEG data across different datasets. In this work, we define cross-view information as the integrated representation that emerges from the interaction among temporal, spectral, and spatial views of EEG signals. The model employs a cross-attention mechanism to fuse temporal, spectral, and spatial features effectively, and combines an attention matrix masking strategy based on the information bottleneck principle with a novel viewpoint masking pre-training scheme. Experimental results on the Temple University EEG corpus and the CHB-MIT dataset show that CRIA outperforms existing methods with the same pre-training conditions, achieving a balanced accuracy of 57.02% for multi-class event classification and 80.03% for anomaly detection, highlighting its strong generalization ability.

Digital watermarking is a promising solution for mitigating some of the risks arising from the misuse of automatically generated text. These approaches either embed non-specific watermarks to allow for the detection of any text generated by a particular sampler, or embed specific keys that allow the identification of the LLM user. However, simultaneously using the same embedding for both detection and user identification leads to a false detection problem, whereby, as user capacity grows, unwatermarked text is increasingly likely to be falsely detected as watermarked. Through theoretical analysis, we identify the underlying causes of this phenomenon. Building on these insights, we propose Dual Watermarking which jointly encodes detection and identification watermarks into generated text, significantly reducing false positives while maintaining high detection accuracy. Our experimental results validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Accurate fault detection in lithium-ion batteries is essential for the safe and reliable operation of electric vehicles and energy storage systems. However, existing methods often struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies and cannot fully leverage abundant unlabeled data. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong representation capabilities, their architectures are not directly suited to the numerical time-series data common in industrial settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that adapts BERT-style pretraining for battery fault detection by extending the standard BERT architecture with a customized time-series-to-token representation module and a point-level Masked Signal Modeling (point-MSM) pretraining task tailored to battery applications. This approach enables self-supervised learning on sequential current, voltage, and other charge-discharge cycle data, yielding distributionally robust, context-aware temporal embeddings. We then concatenate these embeddings with battery metadata and feed them into a downstream classifier for accurate fault classification. Experimental results on a large-scale real-world dataset show that models initialized with our pretrained parameters significantly improve both representation quality and classification accuracy, achieving an AUROC of 0.945 and substantially outperforming existing approaches. These findings validate the effectiveness of BERT-style pretraining for time-series fault detection.

The field of neuroscience has been revolutionized by the advent of brain imaging technologies, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging in the resting state (rest fMRI) (Khalilullah et al, 2023; Vasilkovska et al, 2023; Liu et al, 2024). This powerful tool allows the measurement of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals in predefined Regions of Interest (ROIs) within the brain, offering an unprecedented avenue for revealing information about potential diseases such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (Philiastides et al, 2021; Kocak, 2021). Various brain atlases, including Harvard-Oxford (Makris et al, 2006) and Craddock 200 (Craddock et al, 2012) parcellations, have been used to define these ROIs. Furthermore, ROIs can be interestingly modelled as graph data, where the ROIs themselves represent nodes, and the connections between ROIs represent edges of graphs (Cui et al, 2022b). This graph-based data structure, inheriting the graph theory technique, has been instrumental in revealing meaningful relationships between ROIs in brain networks to diagnose brain diseases more effectively (Alsubaie et al, 2024; Ren and Xia, 2024). With the current popularity of deep learning, recent frameworks have developed graph neural networks (GNNs) (Xia et al, 2021; Febrinanto et al, 2023c) to extend the merits of modelling graph-structured data for detecting brain diseases with brain networks based on fMRI signals as input (Kan et al, 2022b; Li et al, 2021; Kan et al, 2022a; Cui et al, 2022a; ElGazzar et al, 2022; Febrinanto et al, 2023a). These techniques perform more accurately than typical machine learning or deep learning techniques. However, there is still a high consensus on how to construct or define an appropriate graph structure in brain networks in terms of two processes: 1) how do we generate the graphs?

We introduce CLEAR-3K, a dataset of 3,000 assertion-reasoning questions designed to evaluate whether language models can determine if one statement causally explains another. Each question present an assertion-reason pair and challenge language models to distinguish between semantic relatedness and genuine causal explanatory relationships. Through comprehensive evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art language models (ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters), we identify two fundamental findings. First, language models frequently confuse semantic similarity with causality, relying on lexical and semantic overlap instead of inferring actual causal explanatory relationships. Second, as parameter size increases, models tend to shift from being overly skeptical about causal relationships to being excessively permissive in accepting them. Despite this shift, performance measured by the Matthews Correlation Coefficient plateaus at just 0.55, even for the best-performing models.Hence, CLEAR-3K provides a crucial benchmark for developing and evaluating genuine causal reasoning in language models, which is an essential capability for applications that require accurate assessment of causal relationships.

Trust is emerging as an effective tool to ensure the successful completion of collaborative tasks within collaborative systems. However, rapidly and continuously evaluating the trustworthiness of collaborators during task execution is a significant challenge due to distributed devices, complex operational environments, and dynamically changing resources. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a Siamese-enabled rapid and continuous trust evaluation framework (SRCTE) to facilitate effective task collaboration. First, the communication and computing resource attributes of the collaborator in a trusted state, along with historical collaboration data, are collected and represented using an attributed control flow graph (ACFG) that captures trust-related semantic information and serves as a reference for comparison with data collected during task execution. At each time slot of task execution, the collaborator's communication and computing resource attributes, as well as task completion effectiveness, are collected in real time and represented with an ACFG to convey their trust-related semantic information. A Siamese model, consisting of two shared-parameter Structure2vec networks, is then employed to learn the deep semantics of each pair of ACFGs and generate their embeddings. Finally, the similarity between the embeddings of each pair of ACFGs is calculated to determine the collaborator's trust value at each time slot. A real system is built using two Dell EMC 5200 servers and a Google Pixel 8 to test the effectiveness of the proposed SRCTE framework. Experimental results demonstrate that SRCTE converges rapidly with only a small amount of data and achieves a high anomaly trust detection rate compared to the baseline algorithm.

Foundation models have revolutionized music information retrieval, but questions remain about their ability to generalize across diverse musical traditions. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art audio foundation models across six musical corpora spanning Western popular, Greek, Turkish, and Indian classical traditions. We employ three complementary methodologies to investigate these models' cross-cultural capabilities: probing to assess inherent representations, targeted supervised fine-tuning of 1-2 layers, and multi-label few-shot learning for low-resource scenarios. Our analysis shows varying cross-cultural generalization, with larger models typically outperforming on non-Western music, though results decline for culturally distant traditions. Notably, our approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance on five out of six evaluated datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of foundation models for world music understanding. We also find that our targeted fine-tuning approach does not consistently outperform probing across all settings, suggesting foundation models already encode substantial musical knowledge. Our evaluation framework and benchmarking results contribute to understanding how far current models are from achieving universal music representations while establishing metrics for future progress.

The detection and localization of quality-related problems in industrially mass-produced products has historically relied on manual inspection, which is costly and error-prone. Machine learning has the potential to replace manual handling. As such, the desire is to facilitate an unsupervised (or self-supervised) approach, as it is often impossible to specify all conceivable defects ahead of time. A plethora of prior works have demonstrated the aptitude of common reconstruction-, embedding-, and synthesis-based methods in laboratory settings. However, in practice, we observe that most methods do not handle low data quality well or exude low robustness in unfavorable, but typical real-world settings. For practitioners it may be very difficult to identify the actual underlying problem when such methods underperform. Worse, often-reported metrics (e.g., AUROC) are rarely suitable in practice and may give misleading results. In our setting, we attempt to identify subtle anomalies on the surface of blasted forged metal parts, using rather low-quality RGB imagery only, which is a common industrial setting. We specifically evaluate two types of state-of-the-art models that allow us to identify and improve quality issues in production data, without having to obtain new data. Our contribution is to provide guardrails for practitioners that allow them to identify problems related to, e.g., (lack of) robustness or invariance, in either the chosen model or the data reliably in similar scenarios. Furthermore, we exemplify common pitfalls in and shortcomings of likelihood-based approaches and outline a framework for proper empirical risk estimation that is more suitable for real-world scenarios.

We present a method to improve the detection limit for radionuclides using spectroscopic radiation detectors and the arrival time of each detected radiation quantum. We enable this method using a neural network with an attention mechanism. We illustrate the method on the detection of Cesium release from a nuclear facility during an upset, and our method shows $2\times$ improvement over the traditional spectroscopic method. We hypothesize that our method achieves this performance increase by modulating its detection probability by the overall rate of probable detections, specifically by adapting detection thresholds based on temporal event distributions and local spectral features, and show evidence to this effect. We believe this method is applicable broadly and may be more successful for radionuclides with more complicated decay chains than Cesium; we also note that our method can generalize beyond the addition of arrival time and could integrate other data about each detection event, such as pulse quality, location in detector, or even combining the energy and time from detections in different detectors.