The aim of this paper is to formalise the task of continual semi-supervised anomaly detection (CSAD), with the aim of highlighting the importance of such a problem formulation which assumes as close to real-world conditions as possible. After an overview of the relevant definitions of continual semi-supervised learning, its components, anomaly detection extension, and the training protocols; the paper introduces a baseline model of a variational autoencoder (VAE) to work with semi-supervised data along with a continual learning method of deep generative replay with outlier rejection. The results show that such a use of extreme value theory (EVT) applied to anomaly detection can provide promising results even in comparison to an upper baseline of joint training. The results explore the effects of how much labelled and unlabelled data is present, of which class, and where it is located in the data stream. Outlier rejection shows promising initial results where it often surpasses a baseline method of Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). A baseline for CSAD is put forward along with the specific dataset setups used for reproducability and testability for other practitioners. Future research directions include other CSAD settings and further research into efficient continual hyperparameter tuning.

Overfitting has long been stigmatized as detrimental to model performance, especially in the context of anomaly detection. Our work challenges this conventional view by introducing a paradigm shift, recasting overfitting as a controllable and strategic mechanism for enhancing model discrimination capabilities. In this paper, we present Controllable Overfitting-based Anomaly Detection (COAD), a novel framework designed to leverage overfitting for optimized anomaly detection. We propose the Aberrance Retention Quotient (ARQ), a novel metric that systematically quantifies the extent of overfitting, enabling the identification of an optimal "golden overfitting interval." Within this interval, overfitting is leveraged to significantly amplify the model's sensitivity to anomalous patterns, while preserving generalization to normal samples. Additionally, we present the Relative Anomaly Distribution Index (RADI), an innovative metric designed to complement AUROC pixel by providing a more versatile and theoretically robust framework for assessing model performance. RADI leverages ARQ to track and evaluate how overfitting impacts anomaly detection, offering an integrated approach to understanding the relationship between overfitting dynamics and model efficacy. Our theoretical work also rigorously validates the use of Gaussian noise in pseudo anomaly synthesis, providing the foundation for its broader applicability across diverse domains. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our controllable overfitting method not only achieves State of the Art (SOTA) performance in both one-class and multi-class anomaly detection tasks but also redefines overfitting from a modeling challenge into a powerful tool for optimizing anomaly detection.

Sarcasm is hard to interpret as human beings. Being able to interpret sarcasm is often termed as a sign of intelligence, given the complex nature of sarcasm. Hence, this is a field of Natural Language Processing which is still complex for computers to decipher. This Literature Survey delves into different aspects of sarcasm detection, to create an understanding of the underlying problems faced during detection, approaches used to solve this problem, and different forms of available datasets for sarcasm detection.

This paper presents the system description of our entry for the COLING 2025 FMD challenge, focusing on misinformation detection in financial domains. We experimented with a combination of large language models, including Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma-2, and leveraged pre-processing and sequential learning for not only identifying fraudulent financial content but also generating coherent, and concise explanations that clarify the rationale behind the classifications. Our approach achieved competitive results with an F1-score of 0.8283 for classification, and ROUGE-1 of 0.7253 for explanations. This work highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in financial applications, offering insights into their capabilities for combating misinformation and enhancing transparency while identifying areas for future improvement in robustness and domain adaptation.

Scenario-based virtual testing is one of the most significant methods to test and evaluate the safety of automated driving systems (ADSs). However, it is impractical to enumerate all concrete scenarios in a logical scenario space and test them exhaustively. Recently, Black-Box Optimization (BBO) was introduced to accelerate the scenario-based test of ADSs by utilizing the historical test information to generate new test cases. However, a single optimum found by the BBO algorithm is insufficient for the purpose of a comprehensive safety evaluation of ADSs in a logical scenario. In fact, all the subspaces representing danger in the logical scenario space, rather than only the most critical concrete scenario, play a more significant role for the safety evaluation. Covering as many of the critical concrete scenarios in a logical scenario space through a limited number of tests is defined as the Black-Box Coverage (BBC) problem in this paper. We formalized this problem in a sample-based search paradigm and constructed a coverage criterion with Confusion Matrix Analysis. Furthermore, we propose LAMBDA (Latent-Action Monte-Carlo Beam Search with Density Adaption) to solve BBC problems. LAMBDA can quickly focus on critical subspaces by recursively partitioning the logical scenario space into accepted and rejected parts. Compared with its predecessor LaMCTS, LAMBDA introduces sampling density to overcome the sampling bias from optimization and Beam Search to obtain more parallelizability. Experimental results show that LAMBDA achieves state-of-the-art performance among all baselines and can reach at most 33 and 6000 times faster than Random Search to get 95% coverage of the critical areas in 2- and 5-dimensional synthetic functions, respectively. Experiments also demonstrate that LAMBDA has a promising future in the safety evaluation of ADSs in virtual tests.

It is well known that the usefulness of a machine learning model is due to its ability to generalize to unseen data. This study uses three popular cyberbullying datasets to explore the effects of data, how it's collected, and how it's labeled, on the resulting machine learning models. The bias introduced from differing definitions of cyberbullying and from data collection is discussed in detail. An emphasis is made on the impact of dataset expansion methods, which utilize current data points to fetch and label new ones. Furthermore, explicit testing is performed to evaluate the ability of a model to generalize to unseen datasets through cross-dataset evaluation. As hypothesized, the models have a significant drop in the Macro F1 Score, with an average drop of 0.222. As such, this study effectively highlights the importance of dataset curation and cross-dataset testing for creating models with real-world applicability. The experiments and other code can be found at https://github.com/rootdrew27/cyberbullying-ml.

Although generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown significant success in modeling data distributions for image datasets, their application to structured or tabular data, such as well logs, remains relatively underexplored. This study extends the ensemble GANs (EGANs) framework to capture the distribution of well log data and detect anomalies that fall outside of these distributions. The proposed approach compares the performance of traditional methods, such as Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), with EGANs in detecting anomalies outside the expected data distributions. For the gamma ray (GR) dataset, EGANs achieved a precision of 0.62 and F1 score of 0.76, outperforming GMM's precision of 0.38 and F1 score of 0.54. Similarly, for travel time (DT), EGANs achieved a precision of 0.70 and F1 score of 0.79, surpassing GMM 0.56 and 0.71. In the neutron porosity (NPHI) dataset, EGANs recorded a precision of 0.53 and F1 score of 0.68, outshining GMM 0.47 and 0.61. For the bulk density (RHOB) dataset, EGANs achieved a precision of 0.52 and an F1 score of 0.67, slightly outperforming GMM, which yielded a precision of 0.50 and an F1 score of 0.65. This work's novelty lies in applying EGANs for well log data analysis, showcasing their ability to learn data patterns and identify anomalies that deviate from them. This approach offers more reliable anomaly detection compared to traditional methods like GMM. The findings highlight the potential of EGANs in enhancing anomaly detection for well log data, delivering significant implications for optimizing drilling strategies and reservoir management through more accurate, data-driven insights into subsurface characterization.

Fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models is widely used for personalization and adaptation for new domains. In this paper, we identify a critical vulnerability of fine-tuning: safety alignment methods designed to filter harmful content (e.g., nudity) can break down during fine-tuning, allowing previously suppressed content to resurface, even when using benign datasets. While this "fine-tuning jailbreaking" issue is known in large language models, it remains largely unexplored in text-to-image diffusion models. Our investigation reveals that standard fine-tuning can inadvertently undo safety measures, causing models to relearn harmful concepts that were previously removed and even exacerbate harmful behaviors. To address this issue, we present a novel but immediate solution called Modular LoRA, which involves training Safety Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules separately from Fine-Tuning LoRA components and merging them during inference. This method effectively prevents the re-learning of harmful content without compromising the model's performance on new tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that Modular LoRA outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods in maintaining safety alignment, offering a practical approach for enhancing the security of text-to-image diffusion models against potential attacks.

While being very successful in solving many downstream tasks, the application of deep neural networks is limited in real-life scenarios because of their susceptibility to domain shifts such as common corruptions, and adversarial attacks. The existence of adversarial examples and data corruption significantly reduces the performance of deep classification models. Researchers have made strides in developing robust neural architectures to bolster decisions of deep classifiers. However, most of these works rely on effective adversarial training methods, and predominantly focus on overall model robustness, disregarding class-wise differences in robustness, which are critical. Exploiting weakly robust classes is a potential avenue for attackers to fool the image recognition models. Therefore, this study investigates class-to-class biases across adversarially trained robust classification models to understand their latent space structures and analyze their strong and weak class-wise properties. We further assess the robustness of classes against common corruptions and adversarial attacks, recognizing that class vulnerability extends beyond the number of correct classifications for a specific class. We find that the number of false positives of classes as specific target classes significantly impacts their vulnerability to attacks. Through our analysis on the Class False Positive Score, we assess a fair evaluation of how susceptible each class is to misclassification.

This year, the challenge had seven tracks (up from six last year) and covered low-level and high-level tasks, with language and non-language interfaces, across video, audio, and text modalities; the additional track covered hour-long video understanding and introduced a novel video QA benchmark 1h-walk VQA. Overall, the tasks in the different tracks were: object tracking, point tracking, temporal action localisation, temporal sound localisation, multiple-choice video question-answering, grounded video question-answering, and hour-long video question-answering. We summarise in this report the challenge tasks and results, and introduce in detail the novel hour-long video QA benchmark 1h-walk VQA.