--The advent of convenient and efficient fully unmanned stores equipped with artificial intelligence-based automated checkout systems marks a new era in retail. However, these systems have inherent artificial intelligence security vulnerabilities, which are exploited via adversarial patch attacks, particularly in physical environments. This study demonstrated that adversarial patches can severely disrupt object detection models used in unmanned stores, leading to issues such as theft, inventory discrepancies, and interference. We investigated three types of adversarial patch attacks--Hiding, Creating, and Altering attacks--and highlighted their effectiveness. We also introduce the novel color histogram similarity loss function by leveraging attacker knowledge of the color information of a target class object. Besides the traditional confusion-matrix-based attack success rate, we introduce a new bounding-boxes-based metric to analyze the practical impact of these attacks. Starting with attacks on object detection models trained on snack and fruit datasets in a digital environment, we evaluated the effectiveness of adversarial patches in a physical testbed that mimicked a real unmanned store with RGB cameras and realistic conditions. Furthermore, we assessed the robustness of these attacks in black-box scenarios, demonstrating that shadow attacks can enhance success rates of attacks even without direct access to model parameters. Our study underscores the necessity for robust defense strategies to protect unmanned stores from adversarial threats. Highlighting the limitations of the current defense mechanisms in real-time detection systems and discussing various proactive measures, we provide insights into improving the robustness of object detection models and fortifying unmanned retail environments against these attacks. NMANNED stores operate without sellers or employees, utilizing artificial intelligence-(AI-)based automation technologies. These stores provide consumers with a convenient shopping experience and effectively reduce operational costs, thus playing a crucial role in shaping the future of automated retail[1], [2]. This work was partially supported by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) grant through the Korean Government [Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT)] (Robust AI and Distributed Attack Detection for Edge AI Security) under Grant 2021-0-00511 and by the IITP grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. H. Na, W . Lee, S. Roh and S. Park are with Department of Software Convergence, Soongsil University, Seoul 07027, South Korea, Email: rn-rud7932@soongsil.ac.kr. D. Choi is with Department of Software, Soongsil University, Seoul 07027, South Korea, Email: sunchoi@ssu.ac.kr. Enhanced detection capabilities are achieved using RGB and depth cameras, supplemented by sensors like RFID, LiDAR, and weight sensors [3], [4].

Despite decades of research and practice in automated software testing, several fundamental concepts remain ill-defined and under-explored, yet offer enormous potential real-world impact. We show that these concepts raise exciting new challenges in the context of Large Language Models for software test generation. More specifically, we formally define and investigate the properties of hardening and catching tests. A hardening test is one that seeks to protect against future regressions, while a catching test is one that catches such a regression or a fault in new functionality introduced by a code change. Hardening tests can be generated at any time and may become catching tests when a future regression is caught. We also define and motivate the Catching 'Just-in-Time' (JiTTest) Challenge, in which tests are generated 'just-in-time' to catch new faults before they land into production. We show that any solution to Catching JiTTest generation can also be repurposed to catch latent faults in legacy code. We enumerate possible outcomes for hardening and catching tests and JiTTests, and discuss open research problems, deployment options, and initial results from our work on automated LLM-based hardening at Meta. This paper was written to accompany the keynote by the authors at the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2025. Author order is alphabetical. The corresponding author is Mark Harman.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that have the ability to address competitive resource allocation problems together with detection and mitigation of anomalous behavior. In this paper, we investigate their use in next-generation (NextG) communications within the context of cognitive networks to address i) spectrum sharing, ii) detecting anomalies, and iii) mitigating security attacks. GANs have the following advantages. First, they can learn and synthesize field data, which can be costly, time consuming, and nonrepeatable. Second, they enable pre-training classifiers by using semi-supervised data. Third, they facilitate increased resolution. Fourth, they enable the recovery of corrupted bits in the spectrum. The paper provides the basics of GANs, a comparative discussion on different kinds of GANs, performance measures for GANs in computer vision and image processing as well as wireless applications, a number of datasets for wireless applications, performance measures for general classifiers, a survey of the literature on GANs for i)-iii) above, and future research directions. As a use case of GAN for NextG communications, we show that a GAN can be effectively applied for anomaly detection in signal classification (e.g., user authentication) outperforming another state-of-the-art ML technique such as an autoencoder.

Ensuring fairness is critical when applying artificial intelligence to high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where predictive models trained on imbalanced and demographically skewed data risk exacerbating existing disparities. Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaboration across institutions, but remains vulnerable to both algorithmic bias and subgroup imbalance - particularly when multiple sensitive attributes intersect. We propose FedIDA (Fed erated Learning for Imbalance and D isparity A wareness), a framework-agnostic method that combines fairness-aware regularization with group-conditional oversampling. FedIDA supports multiple sensitive attributes and heterogeneous data distributions without altering the convergence behavior of the underlying FL algorithm. We provide theoretical analysis establishing fairness improvement bounds using Lipschitz continuity and concentration inequalities, and show that FedIDA reduces the variance of fairness metrics across test sets. Empirical results on both benchmark and real-world clinical datasets confirm that FedIDA consistently improves fairness while maintaining competitive predictive performance, demonstrating its effectiveness for equitable and privacy-preserving modeling in healthcare. The source code is available on GitHub.

Even though thermodynamic energy-based crystal structure prediction (CSP) has revolutionized materials discovery, the energy-driven CSP approaches often struggle to identify experimentally realizable metastable materials synthesized through kinetically controlled pathways, creating a critical gap between theoretical predictions and experimental synthesis. Here, we propose a synthesizability-driven CSP framework that integrates symmetry-guided structure derivation with a Wyckoff encode-based machine-learning model, allowing for the efficient localization of subspaces likely to yield highly synthesizable structures. Within the identified promising subspaces, a structure-based synthesizability evaluation model, fine-tuned using recently synthesized structures to enhance predictive accuracy, is employed in conjunction with ab initio calculations to systematically identify synthesizable candidates. The framework successfully reproduces 13 experimentally known XSe (X = Sc, Ti, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn) structures, demonstrating its effectiveness in predicting synthesizable structures. Notably, 92,310 structures are filtered from the 554,054 candidates predicted by GNoME, exhibiting great potential for promising synthesizability. Additionally, eight thermodynamically favorable Hf-X-O (X = Ti, V, and Mn) structures have been identified, among which three HfV$_2$O$_7$ candidates exhibit high synthesizability, presenting viable candidates for experimental realization and potentially associated with experimentally observed temperature-induced phase transitions. This work establishes a data-driven paradigm for machine-learning-assisted inorganic materials synthesis, highlighting its potential to bridge the gap between computational predictions and experimental realization while unlocking new opportunities for the targeted discovery of novel functional materials.

The rapid advancement of large language models has raised significant concerns regarding their potential misuse by malicious actors. As a result, developing effective detectors to mitigate these risks has become a critical priority. However, most existing detection methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, often neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). This paper addresses this issue by leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP), which effectively constrains the upper bound of FPRs. While directly applying CP constrains FPRs, it also leads to a significant reduction in detection performance. To overcome this trade-off, this paper proposes a Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (MCP), which both enforces the FPR constraint and improves detection performance. This paper also introduces RealDet, a high-quality dataset that spans a wide range of domains, ensuring realistic calibration and enabling superior detection performance when combined with MCP. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MCP effectively constrains FPRs, significantly enhances detection performance, and increases robustness against adversarial attacks across multiple detectors and datasets.

Topic modeling in Italian legal research is hindered by the lack of public datasets, limiting the analysis of legal themes in Supreme Court judgments. To address this, we developed a document processing pipeline that produces an anonymized dataset optimized for topic modeling. The pipeline integrates document layout analysis (YOLOv8x), optical character recognition, and text anonymization. The DLA module achieved a mAP@50 of 0.964 and a mAP@50-95 of 0.800. The OCR detector reached a mAP@50-95 of 0.9022, and the text recognizer (TrOCR) obtained a character error rate of 0.0047 and a word error rate of 0.0248. Compared to OCR-only methods, our dataset improved topic modeling with a diversity score of 0.6198 and a coherence score of 0.6638. We applied BERTopic to extract topics and used large language models to generate labels and summaries. Outputs were evaluated against domain expert interpretations. Claude Sonnet 3.7 achieved a BERTScore F1 of 0.8119 for labeling and 0.9130 for summarization.

Classroom discourse is an essential vehicle through which teaching and learning take place. Assessing different characteristics of discursive practices and linking them to student learning achievement enhances the understanding of teaching quality. Traditional assessments rely on manual coding of classroom observation protocols, which is time-consuming and costly. Despite many studies utilizing AI techniques to analyze classroom discourse at the utterance level, investigations into the evaluation of discursive practices throughout an entire lesson segment remain limited. To address this gap, our study proposes a novel text-centered multimodal fusion architecture to assess the quality of three discourse components grounded in the Global Teaching InSights (GTI) observation protocol: Nature of Discourse, Questioning, and Explanations. First, we employ attention mechanisms to capture inter- and intra-modal interactions from transcript, audio, and video streams. Second, a multi-task learning approach is adopted to jointly predict the quality scores of the three components. Third, we formulate the task as an ordinal classification problem to account for rating level order. The effectiveness of these designed elements is demonstrated through an ablation study on the GTI Germany dataset containing 92 videotaped math lessons. Our results highlight the dominant role of text modality in approaching this task. Integrating acoustic features enhances the model's consistency with human ratings, achieving an overall Quadratic Weighted Kappa score of 0.384, comparable to human inter-rater reliability (0.326). Our study lays the groundwork for the future development of automated discourse quality assessment to support teacher professional development through timely feedback on multidimensional discourse practices.

As machine learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, trustworthy uncertainty quantification (UQ) is critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of these models. Traditional UQ methods rely on specifying a true generative model and are not robust to misspecification. On the other hand, conformal inference allows for arbitrary ML models but does not consider model selection, which leads to large interval sizes. We tackle these drawbacks by proposing a UQ method based on the predictability, computability, and stability (PCS) framework for veridical data science proposed by Yu and Kumbier. Specifically, PCS-UQ addresses model selection by using a prediction check to screen out unsuitable models. PCS-UQ then fits these screened algorithms across multiple bootstraps to assess inter-sample variability and algorithmic instability, enabling more reliable uncertainty estimates. Further, we propose a novel calibration scheme that improves local adaptivity of our prediction sets. Experiments across $17$ regression and $6$ classification datasets show that PCS-UQ achieves the desired coverage and reduces width over conformal approaches by $\approx 20\%$. Further, our local analysis shows PCS-UQ often achieves target coverage across subgroups while conformal methods fail to do so. For large deep-learning models, we propose computationally efficient approximation schemes that avoid the expensive multiple bootstrap trainings of PCS-UQ. Across three computer vision benchmarks, PCS-UQ reduces prediction set size over conformal methods by $20\%$. Theoretically, we show a modified PCS-UQ algorithm is a form of split conformal inference and achieves the desired coverage with exchangeable data.

Conformal prediction is a popular method to construct prediction intervals for black-box machine learning models with marginal coverage guarantees. In applications with potentially high-impact events, such as flooding or financial crises, regulators often require very high confidence for such intervals. However, if the desired level of confidence is too large relative to the amount of data used for calibration, then classical conformal methods provide infinitely wide, thus, uninformative prediction intervals. In this paper, we propose a new method to overcome this limitation. We bridge extreme value statistics and conformal prediction to provide reliable and informative prediction intervals with high-confidence coverage, which can be constructed using any black-box extreme quantile regression method. The advantages of this extreme conformal prediction method are illustrated in a simulation study and in an application to flood risk forecasting.