Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm that leverages similarities among multiple learning tasks, each with insufficient samples to train a standalone model, to solve them simultaneously while minimizing data sharing across users and organizations. MTL typically accomplishes this goal by learning a shared representation that captures common structure among the tasks by embedding data from all tasks into a common feature space. Despite being designed to be the smallest unit of shared information necessary to effectively learn patterns across multiple tasks, these shared representations can inadvertently leak sensitive information about the particular tasks they were trained on. In this work, we investigate what information is revealed by the shared representations through the lens of inference attacks. Towards this, we propose a novel, black-box task-inference threat model where the adversary, given the embedding vectors produced by querying the shared representation on samples from a particular task, aims to determine whether that task was present when training the shared representation. We develop efficient, purely black-box attacks on machine learning models that exploit the dependencies between embeddings from the same task without requiring shadow models or labeled reference data. We evaluate our attacks across vision and language domains for multiple use cases of MTL and demonstrate that even with access only to fresh task samples rather than training data, a black-box adversary can successfully infer a task's inclusion in training. To complement our experiments, we provide theoretical analysis of a simplified learning setting and show a strict separation between adversaries with training samples and fresh samples from the target task's distribution.

This study investigates the integration of signal processing transformations -- Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT), and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) -- within the ResNet50 convolutional neural network (CNN) model for image classification. The primary objective is to assess the trade-offs between computational efficiency, energy consumption, and classification accuracy during training and inference. Using the CIFAR-100 dataset (100 classes, 60,000 images), experiments demonstrated that incorporating WHT significantly reduced energy consumption while improving accuracy. Specifically, a baseline ResNet50 model achieved a testing accuracy of 66%, consuming an average of 25,606 kJ per model. In contrast, a modified ResNet50 incorporating WHT in the early convolutional layers achieved 74% accuracy, and an enhanced version with WHT applied to both early and late layers achieved 79% accuracy, with an average energy consumption of only 39 kJ per model. These results demonstrate the potential of WHT as a highly efficient and effective approach for energy-constrained CNN applications.

Reliable artificial intelligence (AI) models for medical image analysis often depend on large and diverse labeled datasets. Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized and privacy-preserving approach to training but struggles in highly non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings, where institutions with more representative data may experience degraded performance. Moreover, existing large-scale FL studies have been limited to adult datasets, neglecting the unique challenges posed by pediatric data, which introduces additional non-IID variability. To address these limitations, we analyzed n=398,523 adult chest radiographs from diverse institutions across multiple countries and n=9,125 pediatric images, leveraging transfer learning from general-purpose self-supervised image representations to classify pneumonia and cases with no abnormality. Using state-of-the-art vision transformers, we found that FL improved performance only for smaller adult datasets (P<0.001) but degraded performance for larger datasets (P<0.064) and pediatric cases (P=0.242). However, equipping FL with self-supervised weights significantly enhanced outcomes across pediatric cases (P=0.031) and most adult datasets (P<0.008), except the largest dataset (P=0.052). These findings underscore the potential of easily deployable general-purpose self-supervised image representations to address non-IID challenges in clinical FL applications and highlight their promise for enhancing patient outcomes and advancing pediatric healthcare, where data scarcity and variability remain persistent obstacles.

The growth of digital communication platforms has led to increased cyberbullying incidents worldwide, creating a need for automated detection systems to protect users. The rise of code-mixed Hindi-English (Hinglish) communication on digital platforms poses challenges for existing cyberbullying detection systems, which were designed primarily for monolingual text. This paper presents a framework for cyberbullying detection in Hinglish text using the Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MURIL) architecture to address limitations in current approaches. Evaluation across six benchmark datasets -- Bohra \textit{et al.}, BullyExplain, BullySentemo, Kumar \textit{et al.}, HASOC 2021, and Mendeley Indo-HateSpeech -- shows that the MURIL-based approach outperforms existing multilingual models including RoBERTa and IndicBERT, with improvements of 1.36 to 13.07 percentage points and accuracies of 86.97\% on Bohra, 84.62\% on BullyExplain, 86.03\% on BullySentemo, 75.41\% on Kumar datasets, 83.92\% on HASOC 2021, and 94.63\% on Mendeley dataset. The framework includes explainability features through attribution analysis and cross-linguistic pattern recognition. Ablation studies show that selective layer freezing, appropriate classification head design, and specialized preprocessing for code-mixed content improve detection performance, while failure analysis identifies challenges including context-dependent interpretation, cultural understanding, and cross-linguistic sarcasm detection, providing directions for future research in multilingual cyberbullying detection.

-- Stand-alone Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems have little defence against a well-designed adversarial attack, which can lead to disastrous consequences when deployed for robot navigation. We then propose how to close the loop between VPR, an Adversarial Attack Detector (AAD), and active navigation decisions by demonstrating the performance benefit of simulated AADs in a novel experiment paradigm - which we detail for the robotics community to use as a system framework. In the proposed experiment paradigm, we see the addition of AADs across a range of detection accuracies can improve performance over baseline; demonstrating a significant improvement - such as a 50% reduction in the mean along-track localization error - can be achieved with True Positive and False Positive detection rates of only 75% and up to 25% respectively. We examine a variety of metrics including: Along-Track Error, Percentage of Time Attacked, Percentage of Time in an'Unsafe' State, and Longest Continuous Time Under Attack. Expanding further on these results, we provide the first investigation into the efficacy of the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial attack for VPR. The analysis in this work highlights the need for AADs in real-world systems for trustworthy navigation, and informs quantitative requirements for system design. Although the impact of adversity in Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is widely understood, with state-of-the-art models offering increasing levels of robustness [1]-[4], the effects of adversarial attacks remain under-explored. Adversarial attacks generally refer to perturbations made to signals or input data by adversaries, with the goal of forcing the output of a system to be incorrect [5]. There has been a significant amount of work researching their effects on perception tasks such as image classification and object detection [5]-[9], yet they have not been widely investigated in the context of VPR. Adversarial attacks on perception systems vary depending on the level of access and information available to an attacker, including digital, physical-world, subtle, or overt attacks [5].

Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining is a cornerstone of pathological analysis, offering reliable visualization of cellular morphology and tissue architecture for cancer diagnosis, subtyping, and grading. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining provides molecular insights by detecting specific proteins within tissues, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, and improving treatment planning. However, IHC staining is costly, time-consuming, and resource-intensive, requiring specialized expertise. To address these limitations, this study proposes HistoStainAlign, a novel deep learning framework that predicts IHC staining patterns directly from H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) by learning joint representations of morphological and molecular features. The framework integrates paired H&E and IHC embeddings through a contrastive training strategy, capturing complementary features across staining modalities without patch-level annotations or tissue registration. The model was evaluated on gastrointestinal and lung tissue WSIs with three commonly used IHC stains: P53, PD-L1, and Ki-67. HistoStainAlign achieved weighted F1 scores of 0.735 [95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.670-0.799], 0.830 [95% CI: 0.772-0.886], and 0.723 [95% CI: 0.607-0.836], respectively for these three IHC stains. Embedding analyses demonstrated the robustness of the contrastive alignment in capturing meaningful cross-stain relationships. Comparisons with a baseline model further highlight the advantage of incorporating contrastive learning for improved stain pattern prediction. This study demonstrates the potential of computational approaches to serve as a pre-screening tool, helping prioritize cases for IHC staining and improving workflow efficiency.

Social isolation and loneliness, which have been increasing in recent years strongly contribute toward suicide rates. Although social isolation and loneliness are not currently recorded within the US National Violent Death Reporting System's (NVDRS) structured variables, natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be used to identify these constructs in law enforcement and coroner medical examiner narratives. Using topic modeling to generate lexicon development and supervised learning classifiers, we developed high-quality classifiers (average F1: .86, accuracy: .82). Evaluating over 300,000 suicides from 2002 to 2020, we identified 1,198 mentioning chronic social isolation. Decedents had higher odds of chronic social isolation classification if they were men (OR = 1.44; CI: 1.24, 1.69, p<.0001), gay (OR = 3.68; 1.97, 6.33, p<.0001), or were divorced (OR = 3.34; 2.68, 4.19, p<.0001). We found significant predictors for other social isolation topics of recent or impending divorce, child custody loss, eviction or recent move, and break-up. Our methods can improve surveillance and prevention of social isolation and loneliness in the United States.

The increasing use of diffusion models for image generation, especially in sensitive areas like medical imaging, has raised significant privacy concerns. Membership Inference Attack (MIA) has emerged as a potential approach to determine if a specific image was used to train a diffusion model, thus quantifying privacy risks. Existing MIA methods often rely on diffusion reconstruction errors, where member images are expected to have lower reconstruction errors than non-member images. However, applying these methods directly to medical images faces challenges. Reconstruction error is influenced by inherent image difficulty, and diffusion models struggle with high-frequency detail reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a Frequency-Calibrated Reconstruction Error (FCRE) method for MIAs on medical image diffusion models. By focusing on reconstruction errors within a specific mid-frequency range and excluding both high-frequency (difficult to reconstruct) and low-frequency (less informative) regions, our frequency-selective approach mitigates the confounding factor of inherent image difficulty. Specifically, we analyze the reverse diffusion process, obtain the mid-frequency reconstruction error, and compute the structural similarity index score between the reconstructed and original images. Membership is determined by comparing this score to a threshold. Experiments on several medical image datasets demonstrate that our FCRE method outperforms existing MIA methods.

Aiming at the critical role of SSD health state prediction in data reliability assurance, this study proposes a hybrid BiGRU-MHA model that incorporates a multi-head attention mechanism to enhance the accuracy and stability of storage device health classification. The model innovatively integrates temporal feature extraction and key information focusing capabilities. Specifically, it leverages the bidirectional timing modeling advantages of the BiGRU network to capture both forward and backward dependencies of SSD degradation features. Simultaneously, the multi-head attention mechanism dynamically assigns feature weights, improving the model's sensitivity to critical health indicators. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves classification accuracies of 92.70% on the training set and 92.44% on the test set, with a minimal performance gap of only 0.26%, demonstrating excellent generalization ability. Further analysis using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve shows an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.94 on the test set, confirming the model's robust binary classification performance. This work not only presents a new technical approach for SSD health prediction but also addresses the generalization bottleneck of traditional models, offering a verifiable method with practical value for preventive maintenance of industrial-grade storage systems. The results show the model can significantly reduce data loss risks by providing early failure warnings and help optimize maintenance costs, supporting intelligent decision-making in building reliable storage systems for cloud computing data centers and edge storage environments.

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has a critical importance for building trustworthy machine learning system as artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly impact various aspects of society, including healthcare decisions and legal judgments. Moreover, numerous studies demonstrate evidence of unfair outcomes in ML and the need for more robust fairness-aware methods. However, the data we use to train and develop debiasing techniques often contains biased and noisy labels. As a result, the label bias in the training data affects model performance and misrepresents the fairness of classifiers during testing. To tackle this problem, our paper presents Graph-based Fairness-aware Label Correction (GFLC), an efficient method for correcting label noise while preserving demographic parity in datasets. In particular, our approach combines three key components: prediction confidence measure, graph-based regularization through Ricci-flow-optimized graph Laplacians, and explicit demographic parity incentives. Our experimental findings show the effectiveness of our proposed approach and show significant improvements in the trade-off between performance and fairness metrics compared to the baseline.