Performance Analysis
Enhancing Obsolescence Forecasting with Deep Generative Data Augmentation: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Low-Data Industrial Applications
Saad, Elie, Besbes, Mariem, Zolghadri, Marc, Czmil, Victor, Baron, Claude, Bourgeois, Vincent
The challenge of electronic component obsolescence is particularly critical in systems with long life cycles. Various obsolescence management methods are employed to mitigate its impact, with obsolescence forecasting being a highly sought-after and prominent approach. As a result, numerous machine learning-based forecasting methods have been proposed. However, machine learning models require a substantial amount of relevant data to achieve high precision, which is lacking in the current obsolescence landscape in some situations. This work introduces a novel framework for obsolescence forecasting based on deep learning. The proposed framework solves the lack of available data through deep generative modeling, where new obsolescence cases are generated and used to augment the training dataset. The augmented dataset is then used to train a classical machine learning-based obsolescence forecasting model. To train classical forecasting models using augmented datasets, existing classical supervised-learning classifiers are adapted for semi-supervised learning within this framework. The proposed framework demonstrates state-of-the-art results on benchmarking datasets.
A Rusty Link in the AI Supply Chain: Detecting Evil Configurations in Model Repositories
Ding, Ziqi, Fu, Qian, Ding, Junchen, Deng, Gelei, Liu, Yi, Li, Yuekang
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred the development of diverse AI applications from code generation and video editing to text generation; however, AI supply chains such as Hugging Face, which host pretrained models and their associated configuration files contributed by the public, face significant security challenges; in particular, configuration files originally intended to set up models by specifying parameters and initial settings can be exploited to execute unauthorized code, yet research has largely overlooked their security compared to that of the models themselves; in this work, we present the first comprehensive study of malicious configurations on Hugging Face, identifying three attack scenarios (file, website, and repository operations) that expose inherent risks; to address these threats, we introduce CONFIGSCAN, an LLM-based tool that analyzes configuration files in the context of their associated runtime code and critical libraries, effectively detecting suspicious elements with low false positive rates and high accuracy; our extensive evaluation uncovers thousands of suspicious repositories and configuration files, underscoring the urgent need for enhanced security validation in AI model hosting platforms.
Addressing Noise and Stochasticity in Fraud Detection for Service Networks
Zhang, Wenxin, Xu, Ding, Xuan, Xi, Jiang, Lei, Yao, Guangzhen, Han, Renda, Lang, Xiangxiang, Luo, Cuicui
--Fraud detection is crucial in social service networks to maintain user trust and improve service network security. Existing spectral graph-based methods address this challenge by leveraging different graph filters to capture signals with different frequencies in service networks. However, most graph filter-based methods struggle with deriving clean and discriminative graph signals. On the one hand, they overlook the noise in the information propagation process, resulting in degradation of filtering ability. On the other hand, they fail to discriminate the frequency-specific characteristics of graph signals, leading to distortion of signals fusion. T o address these issues, we develop a novel spectral graph network based on information bottleneck theory (SGNN-IB) for fraud detection in service networks. SGNN-IB splits the original graph into homophilic and heterophilic subgraphs to better capture the signals at different frequencies. For the first limitation, SGNN-IB applies information bottleneck theory to extract key characteristics of encoded representations. For the second limitation, SGNN-IB introduces prototype learning to implement signal fusion, preserving the frequency-specific characteristics of signals. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SGNN-IB outperforms state-of-the-art fraud detection methods. The rapid growth of digital service networks has transformed how services are delivered across industries, enabling seamless interactions across platforms, from financial services to e-commerce. However, this transformation has introduced new risks, particularly from sophisticated fraud schemes that undermine service quality, erode customer trust, and threaten operational stability.
Explanations as Bias Detectors: A Critical Study of Local Post-hoc XAI Methods for Fairness Exploration
Papanikou, Vasiliki, Karidi, Danae Pla, Pitoura, Evaggelia, Panagiotou, Emmanouil, Ntoutsi, Eirini
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in areas that significantly impact human lives, concerns about fairness and transparency have grown, especially regarding their impact on protected groups. Recently, the intersection of explainability and fairness has emerged as an important area to promote responsible AI systems. This paper explores how explainability methods can be leveraged to detect and interpret unfairness. We propose a pipeline that integrates local post-hoc explanation methods to derive fairness-related insights. During the pipeline design, we identify and address critical questions arising from the use of explanations as bias detectors such as the relationship between distributive and procedural fairness, the effect of removing the protected attribute, the consistency and quality of results across different explanation methods, the impact of various aggregation strategies of local explanations on group fairness evaluations, and the overall trustworthiness of explanations as bias detectors. Our results show the potential of explanation methods used for fairness while highlighting the need to carefully consider the aforementioned critical aspects.
Responsive DNN Adaptation for Video Analytics against Environment Shift via Hierarchical Mobile-Cloud Collaborations
Zhao, Maozhe, Liu, Shengzhong, Wu, Fan, Chen, Guihai
Mobile video analysis systems often encounter various deploying environments, where environment shifts present greater demands for responsiveness in adaptations of deployed "expert DNN models". Existing model adaptation frameworks primarily operate in a cloud-centric way, exhibiting degraded performance during adaptation and delayed reactions to environment shifts. Instead, this paper proposes MOCHA, a novel framework optimizing the responsiveness of continuous model adaptation through hierarchical collaborations between mobile and cloud resources. Specifically, MOCHA (1) reduces adaptation response delays by performing on-device model reuse and fast fine-tuning before requesting cloud model retrieval and end-to-end retraining; (2) accelerates history expert model retrieval by organizing them into a structured taxonomy utilizing domain semantics analyzed by a cloud foundation model as indices; (3) enables efficient local model reuse by maintaining onboard expert model caches for frequent scenes, which proactively prefetch model weights from the cloud model database. Extensive evaluations with real-world videos on three DNN tasks show MOCHA improves the model accuracy during adaptation by up to 6.8% while saving the response delay and retraining time by up to 35.5x and 3.0x respectively.
Bayes-Optimal Fair Classification with Multiple Sensitive Features
Yang, Yi, Huang, Yinghui, Chang, Xiangyu
Existing theoretical work on Bayes-optimal fair classifiers usually considers a single (binary) sensitive feature. In practice, individuals are often defined by multiple sensitive features. In this paper, we characterize the Bayes-optimal fair classifier for multiple sensitive features under general approximate fairness measures, including mean difference and mean ratio. We show that these approximate measures for existing group fairness notions, including Demographic Parity, Equal Opportunity, Predictive Equality, and Accuracy Parity, are linear transformations of selection rates for specific groups defined by both labels and sensitive features. We then characterize that Bayes-optimal fair classifiers for multiple sensitive features become instance-dependent thresholding rules that rely on a weighted sum of these group membership probabilities. Our framework applies to both attribute-aware and attribute-blind settings and can accommodate composite fairness notions like Equalized Odds. Building on this, we propose two practical algorithms for Bayes-optimal fair classification via in-processing and post-processing. We show empirically that our methods compare favorably to existing methods.
CICADA: Cross-Domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation in Multivariate Time Series
Lan, Tian, Gao, Yifei, Lu, Yimeng, Zhang, Chen
Unsupervised Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in applications across industries. However, existing methods face significant challenges due to data distributional shifts across different domains, which are exacerbated by the non-stationarity of time series over time. Existing models fail to generalize under multiple heterogeneous source domains and emerging unseen new target domains. To fill the research gap, we introduce CICADA (Cross-domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation), with four key innovations: (1) a mixture of experts (MOE) framework that captures domain-agnostic anomaly features with high flexibility and interpretability; (2) a novel selective meta-learning mechanism to prevent negative transfer between dissimilar domains, (3) an adaptive expansion algorithm for emerging heterogeneous domain expansion, and (4) a hierarchical attention structure that quantifies expert contributions during fusion to enhance interpretability further.Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that CICADA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both cross-domain detection performance and interpretability.
Enhancing Security and Strengthening Defenses in Automated Short-Answer Grading Systems
Yarmohammadtoosky, Sahar, Zhou, Yiyun, Yaneva, Victoria, Baldwin, Peter, Rezayi, Saed, Clauser, Brian, Harikeo, Polina
This study examines vulnerabilities in transformer-based automated short-answer grading systems used in medical education, with a focus on how these systems can be manipulated through adversarial gaming strategies. Our research identifies three main types of gaming strategies that exploit the system's weaknesses, potentially leading to false positives. To counteract these vulnerabilities, we implement several adversarial training methods designed to enhance the systems' robustness. Our results indicate that these methods significantly reduce the susceptibility of grading systems to such manipulations, especially when combined with ensemble techniques like majority voting and ridge regression, which further improve the system's defense against sophisticated adversarial inputs. Additionally, employing large language models such as GPT-4 with varied prompting techniques has shown promise in recognizing and scoring gaming strategies effectively. The findings underscore the importance of continuous improvements in AI-driven educational tools to ensure their reliability and fairness in high-stakes settings.
Can a Quantum Support Vector Machine algorithm be utilized to identify Key Biomarkers from Multi-Omics data of COVID19 patients?
Choi, Junggu, Yu, Chansu, Jung, Kyle L., Foo, Suan-Sin, Chen, Weiqiang, Comhair, Suzy AA, Erzurum, Serpil C., Jehi, Lara, Jung, Jae U.
The unprecedented global COVID - 19 pandemic has prompted researchers to investigate both the biochemical changes associated with acute infection and the long - term effects of COVID - 19, with the goal of elucidating underlying mechanisms [ 1 4 ]. Among the diverse biochemical alterations observed in COVID - 19, change s in metabolomic and proteomic profiles have drawn particular attention due to their roles in fundamental biological processes, including protein expression and metabolic pathways [5, 6]. Early in the pandemic, several studies highlighted the significance of certain biomarkers for diagnosing COVID - 19 and assessing disease severity [7, 8]. These initial finding s reveal ed that specific biomarkers are involved in COVID - 19 pathogenesis and correlate with disease severity. S ubsequent research into post - acute sequelae of COVID - 19 (PASC, or long COVID) has further shown that variations in these biomarkers are associated with neurological and respiratory complications [9, 10]. Collectively, these studie s highlight the importance of identifying key biomarkers to support both acute COVID - 19 detection and the understanding of long COVID.
Manifold-Constrained Sentence Embeddings via Triplet Loss: Projecting Semantics onto Spheres, Tori, and Möbius Strips
Recent advances in representation learning have emphasized the role of embedding geometry in capturing semantic structure. Traditional sentence embeddings typically reside in unconstrained Euclidean spaces, which may limit their ability to reflect complex relationships in language. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that constrains sentence embeddings to lie on continuous manifolds -- specifically the unit sphere, torus, and Möbius strip -- using triplet loss as the core training objective. By enforcing differential geometric constraints on the output space, our approach encourages the learning of embeddings that are both discriminative and topologically structured. We evaluate our method on benchmark datasets (AG News and MBTI) and compare it to classical baselines including TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and unconstrained Keras-derived embeddings. Our results demonstrate that manifold-constrained embeddings, particularly those projected onto spheres and Möbius strips, significantly outperform traditional approaches in both clustering quality (Silhouette Score) and classification performance (Accuracy). These findings highlight the value of embedding in manifold space -- where topological structure complements semantic separation -- offering a new and mathematically grounded direction for geometric representation learning in NLP.