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 Performance Analysis


On the Privacy Risks of Spiking Neural Networks: A Membership Inference Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are increasingly explored for their energy efficiency and robustness in real-world applications, yet their privacy risks remain largely unexamined. In this work, we investigate the susceptibility of SNNs to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) -- a major privacy threat where an adversary attempts to determine whether a given sample was part of the training dataset. While prior work suggests that SNNs may offer inherent robustness due to their discrete, event-driven nature, we find that its resilience diminishes as latency (T) increases. Furthermore, we introduce an input dropout strategy under black box setting, that significantly enhances membership inference in SNNs. Our findings challenge the assumption that SNNs are inherently more secure, and even though they are expected to be better, our results reveal that SNNs exhibit privacy vulnerabilities that are equally comparable to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIA_SNN-3610.


Cohort-attention Evaluation Metric against Tied Data: Studying Performance of Classification Models in Cancer Detection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly improved medical screening accuracy, particularly in cancer detection and risk assessment. However, traditional classification metrics often fail to account for imbalanced data, varying performance across cohorts, and patient-level inconsistencies, leading to biased evaluations. We propose the Cohort-Attention Evaluation Metrics (CAT) framework to address these challenges. CAT introduces patient-level assessment, entropy-based distribution weighting, and cohort-weighted sensitivity and specificity. Key metrics like CATSensitivity (CATSen), CATSpecificity (CATSpe), and CATMean ensure balanced and fair evaluation across diverse populations. This approach enhances predictive reliability, fairness, and interpretability, providing a robust evaluation method for AI-driven medical screening models.


DeepGrav: Anomalous Gravitational-Wave Detection Through Deep Latent Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work introduces a novel deep learning-based approach for gravitational wave anomaly detection, aiming to overcome the limitations of traditional matched filtering techniques in identifying unknown waveform gravitational wave signals. We introduce a modified convolutional neural network architecture inspired by ResNet that leverages residual blocks to extract high-dimensional features, effectively capturing subtle differences between background noise and gravitational wave signals. This network architecture learns a high-dimensional projection while preserving discrepancies with the original input, facilitating precise identification of gravitational wave signals. In our experiments, we implement an innovative data augmentation strategy that generates new data by computing the arithmetic mean of multiple signal samples while retaining the key features of the original signals. In the NSF HDR A3D3: Detecting Anomalous Gravitational Wave Signals competition, it is honorable for us (group name: easonyan123) to get to the first place at the end with our model achieving a true negative rate (TNR) of 0.9708 during development/validation phase and 0.9832 on an unseen challenge dataset during final/testing phase, the highest among all competitors. These results demonstrate that our method not only achieves excellent generalization performance but also maintains robust adaptability in addressing the complex uncertainties inherent in gravitational wave anomaly detection.


Winning the MIDST Challenge: New Membership Inference Attacks on Diffusion Models for Tabular Data Synthesis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabular data synthesis using diffusion models has gained significant attention for its potential to balance data utility and privacy. However, existing privacy evaluations often rely on heuristic metrics or weak membership inference attacks (MIA), leaving privacy risks inadequately assessed. In this work, we conduct a rigorous MIA study on diffusion-based tabular synthesis, revealing that state-of-the-art attacks designed for image models fail in this setting. We identify noise initialization as a key factor influencing attack efficacy and propose a machine-learning-driven approach that leverages loss features across different noises and time steps. Our method, implemented with a lightweight MLP, effectively learns membership signals, eliminating the need for manual optimization. Experimental results from the MIDST Challenge @ SaTML 2025 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, securing first place across all tracks. Code is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/Tartan_Federer_MIDST.


A Novel Double Pruning method for Imbalanced Data using Information Entropy and Roulette Wheel Selection for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate illness diagnosis is vital for effective treatment and patient safety. Machine learning models are widely used for cancer diagnosis based on historical medical data. However, data imbalance remains a major challenge, leading to hindering classifier performance and reliability. The SMOTEBoost method addresses this issue by generating synthetic data to balance the dataset, but it may overlook crucial overlapping regions near the decision boundary and can produce noisy samples. This paper proposes RE-SMOTEBoost, an enhanced version of SMOTEBoost, designed to overcome these limitations. Firstly, RE-SMOTEBoost focuses on generating synthetic samples in overlapping regions to better capture the decision boundary using roulette wheel selection. Secondly, it incorporates a filtering mechanism based on information entropy to reduce noise, and borderline cases and improve the quality of generated data. Thirdly, we introduce a double regularization penalty to control the synthetic samples proximity to the decision boundary and avoid class overlap. These enhancements enable higher-quality oversampling of the minority class, resulting in a more balanced and effective training dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques when evaluated on imbalanced datasets. Compared to the top-performing sampling algorithms, RE-SMOTEBoost demonstrates a notable improvement of 3.22\% in accuracy and a variance reduction of 88.8\%. These results indicate that the proposed model offers a solid solution for medical settings, effectively overcoming data scarcity and severe imbalance caused by limited samples, data collection difficulties, and privacy constraints.


General Scales Unlock AI Evaluation with Explanatory and Predictive Power

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring safe and effective use of AI requires understanding and anticipating its performance on novel tasks, from advanced scientific challenges to transformed workplace activities. So far, benchmarking has guided progress in AI, but it has offered limited explanatory and predictive power for general-purpose AI systems, given the low transferability across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce general scales for AI evaluation that can explain what common AI benchmarks really measure, extract ability profiles of AI systems, and predict their performance for new task instances, in- and out-of-distribution. Our fully-automated methodology builds on 18 newly-crafted rubrics that place instance demands on general scales that do not saturate. Illustrated for 15 large language models and 63 tasks, high explanatory power is unleashed from inspecting the demand and ability profiles, bringing insights on the sensitivity and specificity exhibited by different benchmarks, and how knowledge, metacognition and reasoning are affected by model size, chain-of-thought and distillation. Surprisingly, high predictive power at the instance level becomes possible using these demand levels, providing superior estimates over black-box baseline predictors based on embeddings or finetuning, especially in out-of-distribution settings (new tasks and new benchmarks). The scales, rubrics, battery, techniques and results presented here represent a major step for AI evaluation, underpinning the reliable deployment of AI in the years ahead. (Collaborative platform: https://kinds-of-intelligence-cfi.github.io/ADELE.)


Hyperbolic Safety-Aware Vision-Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Addressing the retrieval of unsafe content from vision-language models such as CLIP is an important step towards real-world integration. Current efforts have relied on unlearning techniques that try to erase the model's knowledge of unsafe concepts. While effective in reducing unwanted outputs, unlearning limits the model's capacity to discern between safe and unsafe content. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that shifts from unlearning to an awareness paradigm by leveraging the inherent hierarchical properties of the hyperbolic space. We propose to encode safe and unsafe content as an entailment hierarchy, where both are placed in different regions of hyperbolic space. Our HySAC, Hyperbolic Safety-Aware CLIP, employs entailment loss functions to model the hierarchical and asymmetrical relations between safe and unsafe image-text pairs. This modelling, ineffective in standard vision-language models due to their reliance on Euclidean embeddings, endows the model with awareness of unsafe content, enabling it to serve as both a multimodal unsafe classifier and a flexible content retriever, with the option to dynamically redirect unsafe queries toward safer alternatives or retain the original output. Extensive experiments show that our approach not only enhances safety recognition but also establishes a more adaptable and interpretable framework for content moderation in vision-language models. Our source code is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/HySAC.


Spatio-Temporal Graph Structure Learning for Earthquake Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Earthquake detection is essential for earthquake early warning (EEW) systems. Traditional methods struggle with low signal-to-noise ratios and single-station reliance, limiting their effectiveness. We propose a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) using Spectral Structure Learning Convolution (Spectral SLC) to model static and dynamic relationships across seismic stations. Our approach processes multi-station waveform data and generates station-specific detection probabilities. Experiments show superior performance over a conventional GCN baseline in terms of true positive rate (TPR) and false positive rate (FPR), highlighting its potential for robust multi-station earthquake detection. The code repository for this study is available at https://github.com/SuchanunP/eq_detector.


Alzheimer's Disease Classification Using Retinal OCT: TransnetOCT and Swin Transformer Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images are the biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases, which are rising in prevalence. Early detection of Alzheimer's disease using retinal OCT is a primary challenging task. This work utilizes advanced deep learning techniques to classify retinal OCT images of subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls (CO). The goal is to enhance diagnostic capabilities through efficient image analysis. In the proposed model, Raw OCT images have been preprocessed with ImageJ and given to various deep-learning models to evaluate the accuracy. The best classification architecture is TransNetOCT, which has an average accuracy of 98.18% for input OCT images and 98.91% for segmented OCT images for five-fold cross-validation compared to other models, and the Swin Transformer model has achieved an accuracy of 93.54%. The evaluation accuracy metric demonstrated TransNetOCT and Swin transformer models capability to classify AD and CO subjects reliably, contributing to the potential for improved diagnostic processes in clinical settings.


Identifying Likely-Reputable Blockchain Projects on Ethereum

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This raises the fundamental question of whether it is possible to systematically differentiate reputable projects from those that may not be. While existing research has primarily focused on detecting fraudulent activities--such as scams, Ponzi schemes, and network anomalies--these efforts remain centered on identifying and flagging illicit behavior rather than providing a holistic assessment of a project's overall reputability. Several studies have explored the detection of illicit activities on the Ethereum blockchain [8], the identification of Ponzi schemes [17], for anti-money laundering [15] and anomaly detection within the network [13]. While these contributions enhance our understanding of fraudulent behavior, they do not directly address the broader issue of evaluating whether a project itself is reputable. Given the growing number of Ethereum-based initiatives, the need for a systematic approach to assessing project reputability becomes increasingly evident. Distinguishing between legitimate and potentially deceptive ventures requires a dedicated methodology that extends beyond merely detecting illicit activity. By establishing such an approach, stakeholders, including investors, developers, and regulators can make more informed decisions, mitigate risks associated with unreliable projects, and foster a more secure and transparent investment landscape within the Ethereum ecosystem. This research aims to identify projects that are likely to be reputable by comparing them against a model comprised of data associated with a list of reputable projects from a source deemed to be trust-worthy. We therefore, define the following project aim to: develop a comprehensive methodology for identifying likely-reputable Ethereum Blockchain based projects using transactional data and machine learning techniques.