Human cancers present a significant public health challenge and require the discovery of novel drugs through translational research. Transcriptomics profiling data that describes molecular activities in tumors and cancer cell lines are widely utilized for predicting anti-cancer drug responses. However, existing AI models face challenges due to noise in transcriptomics data and lack of biological interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VETE (Variational and Explanatory Transcriptomics Encoder), a novel neural network framework that incorporates a variational component to mitigate noise effects and integrates traceable gene ontology into the neural network architecture for encoding cancer transcriptomics data. Key innovations include a local interpretability-guided method for identifying ontology paths, a visualization tool to elucidate biological mechanisms of drug responses, and the application of centralized large scale hyperparameter optimization. VETE demonstrated robust accuracy in cancer cell line classification and drug response prediction. Additionally, it provided traceable biological explanations for both tasks and offers insights into the mechanisms underlying its predictions. VETE bridges the gap between AI-driven predictions and biologically meaningful insights in cancer research, which represents a promising advancement in the field.

The proliferation of malicious URLs has become a significant threat to internet security, encompassing SPAM, phishing, malware, and defacement attacks. Traditional detection methods struggle to keep pace with the evolving nature of these threats. Detecting malicious URLs in real-time requires advanced techniques capable of handling large datasets and identifying novel attack patterns. The challenge lies in developing a robust model that combines efficient feature extraction with accurate classification. We propose a hybrid machine learning approach combining Self-Organizing Map based Radial Movement Optimization (SOM-RMO) for feature extraction and Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) based Tabu Search for classification. SOM-RMO effectively reduces dimensionality and highlights significant features, while RBFN, optimized with Tabu Search, classifies URLs with high precision. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance in detecting various malicious URL attacks. On a benchmark dataset, our approach achieved an accuracy of 96.5%, precision of 95.2%, recall of 94.8%, and an F1-score of 95.0%, outperforming traditional methods significantly.

Tabular synthesis models remain ineffective at capturing complex dependencies, and the quality of synthetic data is still insufficient for comprehensive downstream tasks, such as prediction under distribution shifts, automated decision-making, and cross-table understanding. A major challenge is the lack of prior knowledge about underlying structures and high-order relationships in tabular data. We argue that a systematic evaluation on high-order structural information for tabular data synthesis is the first step towards solving the problem. In this paper, we introduce high-order structural causal information as natural prior knowledge and provide a benchmark framework for the evaluation of tabular synthesis models. The framework allows us to generate benchmark datasets with a flexible range of data generation processes and to train tabular synthesis models using these datasets for further evaluation. We propose multiple benchmark tasks, high-order metrics, and causal inference tasks as downstream tasks for evaluating the quality of synthetic data generated by the trained models. Our experiments demonstrate to leverage the benchmark framework for evaluating the model capability of capturing high-order structural causal information. Furthermore, our benchmarking results provide an initial assessment of state-of-the-art tabular synthesis models. They have clearly revealed significant gaps between ideal and actual performance and how baseline methods differ. Our benchmark framework is available at URL https://github.com/TURuibo/CauTabBench.

Recommender systems are essential for content-sharing platforms by curating personalized content. To evaluate updates to recommender systems targeting content creators, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized experiments. The treatment effect measures the change in outcomes when a new algorithm is implemented compared to the status quo. We show that the standard difference-in-means estimator can lead to biased estimates due to recommender interference that arises when treated and control creators compete for exposure. We propose a "recommender choice model" that describes which item gets exposed from a pool containing both treated and control items. By combining a structural choice model with neural networks, this framework directly models the interference pathway while accounting for rich viewer-content heterogeneity. We construct a debiased estimator of the treatment effect and prove it is $\sqrt n$-consistent and asymptotically normal with potentially correlated samples. We validate our estimator's empirical performance with a field experiment on Weixin short-video platform. In addition to the standard creator-side experiment, we conduct a costly double-sided randomization design to obtain a benchmark estimate free from interference bias. We show that the proposed estimator yields results comparable to the benchmark, whereas the standard difference-in-means estimator can exhibit significant bias and even produce reversed signs.

Protecting intellectual property (IP) of text such as articles and code is increasingly important, especially as sophisticated attacks become possible, such as paraphrasing by large language models (LLMs) or even unauthorized training of LLMs on copyrighted text to infringe such IP. However, existing text watermarking methods are not robust enough against such attacks nor scalable to millions of users for practical implementation. In this paper, we propose Waterfall, the first training-free framework for robust and scalable text watermarking applicable across multiple text types (e.g., articles, code) and languages supportable by LLMs, for general text and LLM data provenance. Waterfall comprises several key innovations, such as being the first to use LLM as paraphrasers for watermarking along with a novel combination of techniques that are surprisingly effective in achieving robust verifiability and scalability. We empirically demonstrate that Waterfall achieves significantly better scalability, robust verifiability, and computational efficiency compared to SOTA article-text watermarking methods, and also showed how it could be directly applied to the watermarking of code.

This paper presents a novel anomaly and outlier detection algorithm from the SPINEX (Similarity-based Predictions with Explainable Neighbors Exploration) family. This algorithm leverages the concept of similarity and higher-order interactions across multiple subspaces to identify outliers. A comprehensive set of experiments was conducted to evaluate the performance of SPINEX. This algorithm was examined against 21 commonly used anomaly detection algorithms, namely, namely, Angle-Based Outlier Detection (ABOD), Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor (COF), Copula-Based Outlier Detection (COPOD), ECOD, Elliptic Envelope (EE), Feature Bagging with KNN, Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), Histogram-based Outlier Score (HBOS), Isolation Forest (IF), Isolation Neural Network Ensemble (INNE), Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Lightweight Online Detector of Anomalies (LODA), Linear Model Deviation-based Detector (LMDD), Local Outlier Factor (LOF), Minimum Covariance Determinant (MCD), One-Class SVM (OCSVM), Quadratic MCD (QMCD), Robust Covariance (RC), Stochastic Outlier Selection (SOS), and Subspace Outlier Detection (SOD), and across 39 synthetic and real datasets from various domains and of a variety of dimensions and complexities. Furthermore, a complexity analysis was carried out to examine the complexity of the proposed algorithm. Our results demonstrate that SPINEX achieves superior performance, outperforms commonly used anomaly detection algorithms, and has moderate complexity (e.g., O(n log n d)). More specifically, SPINEX was found to rank at the top of algorithms on the synthetic datasets and the 7th on the real datasets. Finally, a demonstration of the explainability capabilities of SPINEX, along with future research needs, is presented.

Explainability in classification results are dependent upon the features used for classification. Data dependency graph features representing data movement are directly correlated with operational semantics, and subject to fine grained analysis. This study obtains accurate classification from the use of features tied to structure and semantics. By training an accurate model using labeled data, this feature representation of semantics is shown to be correlated with ground truth labels. This was performed using non-parametric learning with a novel feature representation on a large scale dataset, the Kaggle 2015 Malware dataset. The features used enable fine grained analysis, increase in resolution, and explainable inferences. This allows for the body of the term frequency distribution to be further analyzed and to provide an increase in feature resolution over term frequency features. This method obtains high accuracy from analysis of a single instruction, a method that can be repeated for additional instructions to obtain further increases in accuracy. This study evaluates the hypothesis that the semantic representation and analysis of structure are able to make accurate predications and are also correlated to ground truth labels. Additionally, similarity in the metric space can be calculated directly without prior training. Our results provide evidence that data dependency graphs accurately capture both semantic and structural information for increased explainability in classification results.

Text-based person search (TBPS) is a problem that gained significant interest within the research community. The task is that of retrieving one or more images of a specific individual based on a textual description. The multi-modal nature of the task requires learning representations that bridge text and image data within a shared latent space. Existing TBPS systems face two major challenges. One is defined as inter-identity noise that is due to the inherent vagueness and imprecision of text descriptions and it indicates how descriptions of visual attributes can be generally associated to different people; the other is the intra-identity variations, which are all those nuisances e.g. pose, illumination, that can alter the visual appearance of the same textual attributes for a given subject. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel TBPS architecture named MARS (Mae-Attribute-Relation-Sensitive), which enhances current state-of-the-art models by introducing two key components: a Visual Reconstruction Loss and an Attribute Loss. The former employs a Masked AutoEncoder trained to reconstruct randomly masked image patches with the aid of the textual description. In doing so the model is encouraged to learn more expressive representations and textual-visual relations in the latent space. The Attribute Loss, instead, balances the contribution of different types of attributes, defined as adjective-noun chunks of text. This loss ensures that every attribute is taken into consideration in the person retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid, report performance improvements, with significant gains in the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric w.r.t. the current state of the art.

We present a practical method to audit the differential privacy (DP) guarantees of a machine learning model using a small hold-out dataset that is not exposed to the model during the training. Having a score function such as the loss function employed during the training, our method estimates the total variation (TV) distance between scores obtained with a subset of the training data and the hold-out dataset. With some meta information about the underlying DP training algorithm, these TV distance values can be converted to $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-guarantees for any $\delta$. We show that these score distributions asymptotically give lower bounds for the DP guarantees of the underlying training algorithm, however, we perform a one-shot estimation for practicality reasons. We specify conditions that lead to lower bounds for the DP guarantees with high probability. To estimate the TV distance between the score distributions, we use a simple density estimation method based on histograms. We show that the TV distance gives a very close to optimally robust estimator and has an error rate $\mathcal{O}(k^{-1/3})$, where $k$ is the total number of samples. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our approach and show improvements over baseline methods for black-box auditing.

Random feature (RF) has been widely used for node consistency in decentralized kernel ridge regression (KRR). Currently, the consistency is guaranteed by imposing constraints on coefficients of features, necessitating that the random features on different nodes are identical. However, in many applications, data on different nodes varies significantly on the number or distribution, which calls for adaptive and data-dependent methods that generate different RFs. To tackle the essential difficulty, we propose a new decentralized KRR algorithm that pursues consensus on decision functions, which allows great flexibility and well adapts data on nodes. The convergence is rigorously given and the effectiveness is numerically verified: by capturing the characteristics of the data on each node, while maintaining the same communication costs as other methods, we achieved an average regression accuracy improvement of 25.5\% across six real-world data sets.