OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exposing Privacy Risks in Anonymizing Clinical Data: Combinatorial Refinement Attacks on k-Anonymity Without Auxiliary Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Despite longstanding criticism from the privacy community, k-anonymity remains a widely used standard for data anonymization, mainly due to its simplicity, regulatory alignment, and preservation of data utility. However, non-experts often defend k-anonymity on the grounds that, in the absence of auxiliary information, no known attacks can compromise its protections. In this work, we refute this claim by introducing Combinatorial Refinement Attacks (CRA), a new class of privacy attacks targeting k-anonymized datasets produced using local recoding. This is the first method that does not rely on external auxiliary information or assumptions about the underlying data distribution. CRA leverages the utility-optimizing behavior of local recoding anonymization of ARX, which is a widely used open-source software for anonymizing data in clinical settings, to formulate a linear program that significantly reduces the space of plausible sensitive values. To validate our findings, we partnered with a network of free community health clinics, an environment where (1) auxiliary information is indeed hard to find due to the population they serve and (2) open-source k-anonymity solutions are attractive due to regulatory obligations and limited resources. Our results on real-world clinical microdata reveal that even in the absence of external information, established anonymization frameworks do not deliver the promised level of privacy, raising critical privacy concerns.
Tuning Block Size for Workload Optimization in Consortium Blockchain Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Determining the optimal block size is crucial for achieving high throughput in blockchain systems. Many studies have focused on tuning various components, such as databases, network bandwidth, and consensus mechanisms. However, the impact of block size on system performance remains a topic of debate, often resulting in divergent views and even leading to new forks in blockchain networks. This research proposes a mathematical model to maximize performance by determining the ideal block size for Hyperledger Fabric, a prominent consortium blockchain. By leveraging machine learning and solving the model with a genetic algorithm, the proposed approach assesses how factors such as block size, transaction size, and network capacity influence the block processing time. The integration of an optimization solver enables precise adjustments to block size configuration before deployment, ensuring improved performance from the outset. This systematic approach aims to balance block processing efficiency, network latency, and system throughput, offering a robust solution to improve blockchain performance across diverse business contexts.
Cluster and then Embed: A Modular Approach for Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Dimensionality reduction methods such as t-SNE and UMAP are popular methods for visualizing data with a potential (latent) clustered structure. They are known to group data points at the same time as they embed them, resulting in visualizations with well-separated clusters that preserve local information well. However, t-SNE and UMAP also tend to distort the global geometry of the underlying data. We propose a more transparent, modular approach consisting of first clustering the data, then embedding each cluster, and finally aligning the clusters to obtain a global embedding. We demonstrate this approach on several synthetic and real-world datasets and show that it is competitive with existing methods, while being much more transparent.
Transformer-Guided Content-Adaptive Graph Learning for Hyperspectral Unmixing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) targets to decompose each mixed pixel in remote sensing images into a set of endmembers and their corresponding abundances. Despite significant progress in this field using deep learning, most methods fail to simultaneously characterize global dependencies and local consistency, making it difficult to preserve both long-range interactions and boundary details. This letter proposes a novel transformer-guided content-adaptive graph unmixing framework (T-CAGU), which overcomes these challenges by employing a transformer to capture global dependencies and introducing a content-adaptive graph neural network to enhance local relationships. Unlike previous work, T-CAGU integrates multiple propagation orders to dynamically learn the graph structure, ensuring robustness against noise. Furthermore, T-CAGU leverages a graph residual mechanism to preserve global information and stabilize training. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/T-CAGU.
ANNIE: Be Careful of Your Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

The integration of vision-language-action (VLA) models into embodied AI (EAI) robots is rapidly advancing their ability to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in humancentric environments. However, EAI systems introduce critical security risks: a compromised VLA model can directly translate adversarial perturbations on sensory input into unsafe physical actions. Traditional safety definitions and methodologies from the machine learning community are no longer sufficient. EAI systems raise new questions, such as what constitutes safety, how to measure it, and how to design effective attack and defense mechanisms in physically grounded, interactive settings. In this work, we present the first systematic study of adversarial safety attacks on embodied AI systems, grounded in ISO standards for human-robot interactions. We (1) formalize a principled taxonomy of safety violations (critical, dangerous, risky) based on physical constraints such as separation distance, velocity, and collision boundaries; (2) introduce ANNIEBench, a benchmark of nine safety-critical scenarios with 2,400 video-action sequences for evaluating embodied safety; and (3) ANNIE-Attack, a task-aware adversarial framework with an attack leader model that decomposes long-horizon goals into frame-level perturbations. Our evaluation across representative EAI models shows attack success rates exceeding 50% across all safety categories. We further demonstrate sparse and adaptive attack strategies and validate the real-world impact through physical robot experiments. These results expose a previously underexplored but highly consequential attack surface in embodied AI systems, highlighting the urgent need for security-driven defenses in the physical AI era. Code is available at https://github.com/RLCLab/Annie.
Beyond Correctness: Harmonizing Process and Outcome Rewards through RL Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged to be a predominant paradigm for mathematical reasoning tasks, offering stable improvements in reasoning ability. However, Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) in RLVR are too coarse-grained to distinguish flawed reasoning within correct answers or valid reasoning within incorrect answers. This lack of granularity introduces noisy and misleading gradients significantly and hinders further progress in reasoning process quality. While Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer fine-grained guidance for intermediate steps, they frequently suffer from inaccuracies and are susceptible to reward hacking. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce PRocess cOnsistency Filter (PROF), an effective data process curation method that harmonizes noisy, fine-grained process rewards with accurate, coarse-grained outcome rewards. Rather than naively blending PRM and ORM in the objective function (arXiv:archive/2506.18896), PROF leverages their complementary strengths through consistency-driven sample selection. Our approach retains correct responses with higher averaged process values and incorrect responses with lower averaged process values, while maintaining positive/negative training sample balance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only consistently improves the final accuracy over $4\%$ compared to the blending approaches, but also strengthens the quality of intermediate reasoning steps. Codes and training recipes are available at https://github.com/Chenluye99/PROF.
Scalable and Loosely-Coupled Multimodal Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Subtyping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Healthcare applications are inherently multimodal, benefiting greatly from the integration of diverse data sources. However, the modalities available in clinical settings can vary across different locations and patients. A key area that stands to gain from multimodal integration is breast cancer molecular subtyping, an important clinical task that can facilitate personalized treatment and improve patient prognosis. In this work, we propose a scalable and loosely-coupled multimodal framework that seamlessly integrates data from various modalities, including copy number variation (CNV), clinical records, and histopathology images, to enhance breast cancer subtyping. While our primary focus is on breast cancer, our framework is designed to easily accommodate additional modalities, offering the flexibility to scale up or down with minimal overhead without requiring re-training of existing modalities, making it applicable to other types of cancers as well. We introduce a dual-based representation for whole slide images (WSIs), combining traditional image-based and graph-based WSI representations. This novel dual approach results in significant performance improvements. Moreover, we present a new multimodal fusion strategy, demonstrating its ability to enhance performance across a range of multimodal conditions. Our comprehensive results show that integrating our dual-based WSI representation with CNV and clinical health records, along with our pipeline and fusion strategy, outperforms state-of-the-art methods in breast cancer subtyping.
Decoding Visual Neural Representations by Multimodal with Dynamic Balancing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we propose an innovative framework that integrates EEG, image, and text data, aiming to decode visual neural representations from low signal-to-noise ratio EEG signals. Specifically, we introduce text modality to enhance the semantic correspondence between EEG signals and visual content. With the explicit semantic labels provided by text, image and EEG features of the same category can be more closely aligned with the corresponding text representations in a shared multimodal space. To fully utilize pre-trained visual and textual representations, we propose an adapter module that alleviates the instability of high-dimensional representation while facilitating the alignment and fusion of cross-modal features. Additionally, to alleviate the imbalance in multimodal feature contributions introduced by the textual representations, we propose a Modal Consistency Dynamic Balance (MCDB) strategy that dynamically adjusts the contribution weights of each modality. We further propose a stochastic perturbation regularization (SPR) term to enhance the generalization ability of semantic perturbation-based models by introducing dynamic Gaussian noise in the modality optimization process. The evaluation results on the ThingsEEG dataset show that our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in both Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy metrics, improving by 2.0\% and 4.7\% respectively.
Feature-Oriented IoT Malware Analysis: Extraction, Classification, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

As IoT devices continue to proliferate, their reliability is increasingly constrained by security concerns. In response, researchers have developed diverse malware analysis techniques to detect and classify IoT malware. These techniques typically rely on extracting features at different levels from IoT applications, giving rise to a wide range of feature extraction methods. However, current approaches still face significant challenges when applied in practice. This survey provides a comprehensive review of feature extraction techniques for IoT malware analysis from multiple perspectives. We first examine static and dynamic feature extraction methods, followed by hybrid approaches. We then explore feature representation strategies based on graph learning. Finally, we compare the strengths and limitations of existing techniques, highlight open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research.
DPQuant: Efficient and Differentially-Private Model Training via Dynamic Quantization Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Differentially-Private SGD (DP-SGD) is a powerful technique to protect user privacy when using sensitive data to train neural networks. During training, converting model weights and activations into low-precision formats, i.e., quantization, can drastically reduce training times, energy consumption, and cost, and is thus a widely used technique. In this work, we demonstrate that quantization causes significantly higher accuracy degradation in DP-SGD compared to regular SGD. We observe that this is caused by noise injection in DP-SGD, which amplifies quantization variance, leading to disproportionately large accuracy degradation. To address this challenge, we present QPQuant, a dynamic quantization framework that adaptively selects a changing subset of layers to quantize at each epoch. Our method combines two key ideas that effectively reduce quantization variance: (i) probabilistic sampling of the layers that rotates which layers are quantized every epoch, and (ii) loss-aware layer prioritization, which uses a differentially private loss sensitivity estimator to identify layers that can be quantized with minimal impact on model quality. This estimator consumes a negligible fraction of the overall privacy budget, preserving DP guarantees. Empirical evaluations on ResNet18, ResNet50, and DenseNet121 across a range of datasets demonstrate that DPQuant consistently outperforms static quantization baselines, achieving near Pareto-optimal accuracy-compute trade-offs and up to 2.21x theoretical throughput improvements on low-precision hardware, with less than 2% drop in validation accuracy.
SafeProtein: Red-Teaming Framework and Benchmark for Protein Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Proteins play crucial roles in almost all biological processes. The advancement of deep learning has greatly accelerated the development of protein foundation models, leading to significant successes in protein understanding and design. However, the lack of systematic red-teaming for these models has raised serious concerns about their potential misuse, such as generating proteins with biological safety risks. This paper introduces SafeProtein, the first red-teaming framework designed for protein foundation models to the best of our knowledge. SafeProtein combines multimodal prompt engineering and heuristic beam search to systematically design red-teaming methods and conduct tests on protein foundation models. We also curated SafeProtein-Bench, which includes a manually constructed red-teaming benchmark dataset and a comprehensive evaluation protocol. SafeProtein achieved continuous jailbreaks on state-of-the-art protein foundation models (up to 70% attack success rate for ESM3), revealing potential biological safety risks in current protein foundation models and providing insights for the development of robust security protection technologies for frontier models. The codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/jigang-fan/SafeProtein.
A comprehensive Persian offline handwritten database for investigating the effects of heritability and family relationships on handwriting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a comprehensive database for research and investigation on the effects of inheritance on handwriting. A database has been created that can be used to answer questions such as: Is there a genetic component to handwriting? Is handwriting inherited? Do family relationships affect handwriting? Varieties of samples of handwritten components such as: digits, letters, shapes and free paragraphs of 210 families including (grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces) have been collected using specially designed forms, and family relationships of all writers are captured. To the best of our knowledge, no such database is presently available. Based on comparisons and investigation of features of handwritings of family members, similarities among their features and writing styles are detected. Our database is freely available to the pattern recognition community and hope it will pave the way for investigations on the effects of inheritance and family relationships on handwritings.
Improving Factuality in LLMs via Inference-Time Knowledge Graph Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with producing factually consistent answers due to limitations in their parametric memory. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigms mitigate this issue by incorporating external knowledge at inference time. However, such methods typically handle knowledge as unstructured text, which reduces retrieval accuracy, hinders compositional reasoning, and amplifies the influence of irrelevant information on the factual consistency of LLM outputs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that dynamically constructs and expands knowledge graphs (KGs) during inference, integrating both internal knowledge extracted from LLMs and external knowledge retrieved from external sources. Our method begins by extracting a seed KG from the question via prompting, followed by iterative expansion using the LLM's internal knowledge. The KG is then selectively refined through external retrieval, enhancing factual coverage and correcting inaccuracies. We evaluate our approach on three diverse Factual QA benchmarks, demonstrating consistent gains in factual accuracy over baselines. Our findings reveal that inference-time KG construction is a promising direction for enhancing LLM factuality in a structured, interpretable, and scalable manner.
Self-Organizing Aerial Swarm Robotics for Resilient Load Transportation : A Table-Mechanics-Inspired Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

In comparison with existing approaches, which struggle with scalability, communication dependency, and robustness against dynamic failures, cooperative aerial transportation via robot swarms holds transformative potential for logistics and disaster response. Here, we present a physics-inspired cooperative transportation approach for flying robot swarms that imitates the dissipative mechanics of table-leg load distribution. By developing a decentralized dissipative force model, our approach enables autonomous formation stabilization and adaptive load allocation without the requirement of explicit communication. Based on local neighbor robots and the suspended payload, each robot dynamically adjusts its position. This is similar to energy-dissipating table leg reactions. The stability of the resultant control system is rigorously proved. Simulations demonstrate that the tracking errors of the proposed approach are 20%, 68%, 55.5%, and 21.9% of existing approaches under the cases of capability variation, cable uncertainty, limited vision, and payload variation, respectively. In real-world experiments with six flying robots, the cooperative aerial transportation system achieved a 94% success rate under single-robot failure, disconnection events, 25% payload variation, and 40% cable length uncertainty, demonstrating strong robustness under outdoor winds up to Beaufort scale 4. Overall, this physics-inspired approach bridges swarm intelligence and mechanical stability principles, offering a scalable framework for heterogeneous aerial systems to collectively handle complex transportation tasks in communication-constrained environments.
Nonnegative matrix factorization and the principle of the common cause
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a known unsupervised data-reduction method. The principle of the common cause (PCC) is a basic methodological approach in probabilistic causality, which seeks an independent mixture model for the joint probability of two dependent random variables. It turns out that these two concepts are closely related. This relationship is explored reciprocally for several datasets of gray-scale images, which are conveniently mapped into probability models. On one hand, PCC provides a predictability tool that leads to a robust estimation of the effective rank of NMF. Unlike other estimates (e.g., those based on the Bayesian Information Criteria), our estimate of the rank is stable against weak noise. We show that NMF implemented around this rank produces features (basis images) that are also stable against noise and against seeds of local optimization, thereby effectively resolving the NMF nonidentifiability problem. On the other hand, NMF provides an interesting possibility of implementing PCC in an approximate way, where larger and positively correlated joint probabilities tend to be explained better via the independent mixture model. We work out a clustering method, where data points with the same common cause are grouped into the same cluster. We also show how NMF can be employed for data denoising.
Semantic Analysis of SNOMED CT Concept Co-occurrences in Clinical Documentation using MIMIC-IV
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Clinical notes contain rich clinical narratives but their unstructured format poses challenges for large-scale analysis. Standardized terminologies such as SNOMED CT improve interoperability, yet understanding how concepts relate through co-occurrence and semantic similarity remains underexplored. In this study, we leverage the MIMIC-IV database to investigate the relationship between SNOMED CT concept co-occurrence patterns and embedding-based semantic similarity. Using Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) and pretrained embeddings (e.g., ClinicalBERT, BioBERT), we examine whether frequently co-occurring concepts are also semantically close, whether embeddings can suggest missing concepts, and how these relationships evolve temporally and across specialties. Our analyses reveal that while co-occurrence and semantic similarity are weakly correlated, embeddings capture clinically meaningful associations not always reflected in documentation frequency. Embedding-based suggestions frequently matched concepts later documented, supporting their utility for augmenting clinical annotations. Clustering of concept embeddings yielded coherent clinical themes (symptoms, labs, diagnoses, cardiovascular conditions) that map to patient phenotypes and care patterns. Finally, co-occurrence patterns linked to outcomes such as mortality and readmission demonstrate the practical utility of this approach. Collectively, our findings highlight the complementary value of co-occurrence statistics and semantic embeddings in improving documentation completeness, uncovering latent clinical relationships, and informing decision support and phenotyping applications.
lifeXplore at the Lifelog Search Challenge 2021
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Since its first iteration in 2018, the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) continues to rise in popularity as an interactive lifelog data retrieval competition, co-located at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR). The goal of this annual live event is to search a large corpus of lifelogging data for specifically announced memories using a purposefully developed tool within a limited amount of time. As long-standing participants, we present our improved lifeXplore - a retrieval system combining chronologic day summary browsing with interactive combinable concept filtering. Compared to previous versions, the tool is improved by incorporating temporal queries, advanced day summary features as well as usability improvements.