pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Chaos: A Spectral Stochastic Neural Operator
Authors: Bahador Bahmani, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis, Michael D. Shields
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Building surrogate models with uncertainty quantification capabilities is essential for many engineering applications where randomness, such as variability in material properties, is unavoidable. Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) is widely recognized as a to-go method for constructing stochastic solutions in both intrusive and non-intrusive ways. Its application becomes challenging, however, with complex or high-dimensional processes, as achieving accuracy requires higher-order polynomials, which can increase computational demands and or the risk of overfitting. Furthermore, PCE requires specialized treatments to manage random variables that are not independent, and these treatments may be problem-dependent or may fail with increasing complexity. In this work, we adopt the spectral expansion formalism used in PCE; however, we replace the classical polynomial basis functions with neural network (NN) basis functions to leverage their expressivity. To achieve this, we propose an algorithm that identifies NN-parameterized basis functions in a purely data-driven manner, without any prior assumptions about the joint distribution of the random variables involved, whether independent or dependent. The proposed algorithm identifies each NN-parameterized basis function sequentially, ensuring they are orthogonal with respect to the data distribution. The basis functions are constructed directly on the joint stochastic variables without requiring a tensor product structure. This approach may offer greater flexibility for complex stochastic models, while simplifying implementation compared to the tensor product structures typically used in PCE to handle random vectors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through several numerical examples of varying complexity and provide comparisons with classical PCE.
FLAG-Trader: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading
Authors: Guojun Xiong, Zhiyang Deng, Keyi Wang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xueqing Peng, Mingquan Lin, Kaleb E Smith, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on multimodal financial data have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in various financial tasks. However, they often struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets, such as trading, where complex agentic approaches are required to improve decision-making. To address this, we propose \textsc{FLAG-Trader}, a unified architecture integrating linguistic processing (via LLMs) with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization, in which a partially fine-tuned LLM acts as the policy network, leveraging pre-trained knowledge while adapting to the financial domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Through policy gradient optimization driven by trading rewards, our framework not only enhances LLM performance in trading but also improves results on other financial-domain tasks. We present extensive empirical evidence to validate these enhancements.
Gradient GA: Gradient Genetic Algorithm for Drug Molecular Design
Authors: Chris Zhuang, Debadyuti Mukherjee, Yingzhou Lu, Tianfan Fu, Ruqi Zhang
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00

Molecular discovery has brought great benefits to the chemical industry. Various molecule design techniques are developed to identify molecules with desirable properties. Traditional optimization methods, such as genetic algorithms, continue to achieve state-of-the-art results across multiple molecular design benchmarks. However, these techniques rely solely on random walk exploration, which hinders both the quality of the final solution and the convergence speed. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called Gradient Genetic Algorithm (Gradient GA), which incorporates gradient information from the objective function into genetic algorithms. Instead of random exploration, each proposed sample iteratively progresses toward an optimal solution by following the gradient direction. We achieve this by designing a differentiable objective function parameterized by a neural network and utilizing the Discrete Langevin Proposal to enable gradient guidance in discrete molecular spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves both convergence speed and solution quality, outperforming cutting-edge techniques. For example, it achieves up to a 25% improvement in the top-10 score over the vanilla genetic algorithm. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/debadyuti23/GradientGA.
Machine Learning-Driven Convergence Analysis in Multijurisdictional Compliance Using BERT and K-Means Clustering
Authors: Raj Sonani, Lohalekar Prayas
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

Digital data continues to grow, there has been a shift towards using effective regulatory mechanisms to safeguard personal information. The CCPA of California and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union are two of the most important privacy laws. The regulation is intended to safeguard consumer privacy, but it varies greatly in scope, definitions, and methods of enforcement. This paper presents a fresh approach to adaptive compliance, using machine learning and emphasizing natural language processing (NLP) as the primary focus of comparison between the GDPR and CCPA. Using NLP, this study compares various regulations to identify areas where they overlap or diverge. This includes the "right to be forgotten" provision in the GDPR and the "opt-out of sale" provision under CCPA. International companies can learn valuable lessons from this report, as it outlines strategies for better enforcement of laws across different nations. Additionally, the paper discusses the challenges of utilizing NLP in legal literature and proposes methods to enhance the model-ability of machine learning models for studying regulations. The study's objective is to "bridge the gap between legal knowledge and technical expertise" by developing regulatory compliance strategies that are more efficient in operation and more effective in data protection.
Classification of Temporal Graphs using Persistent Homology
Authors: Siddharth Pritam, Rohit Roy, Madhav Cherupilil Sajeev
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Graph Classification

Temporal graphs effectively model dynamic systems by representing interactions as timestamped edges. However, analytical tools for temporal graphs are limited compared to static graphs. We propose a novel method for analyzing temporal graphs using Persistent Homology. Our approach leverages $\delta$-temporal motifs (recurrent subgraphs) to capture temporal dynamics %without aggregation . By evolving these motifs, we define the \textit{average filtration} and compute PH on the associated clique complex. This method captures both local and global temporal structures and is stable with respect to reference models. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to the temporal graph classification task. Experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach, achieving over 92\% accuracy, with some cases reaching 100\%. Unlike existing methods that require node classes, our approach is node class free, offering flexibility for a wide range of temporal graph analysis.
Enhanced Anomaly Detection in IoMT Networks using Ensemble AI Models on the CICIoMT2024 Dataset
Authors: Prathamesh Chandekar, Mansi Mehta, Swet Chandan
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices in healthcare has introduced unique cybersecurity challenges, primarily due to the diverse communication protocols and critical nature of these devices This research aims to develop an advanced, real-time anomaly detection framework tailored for IoMT network traffic, leveraging AI/ML models and the CICIoMT2024 dataset By integrating multi-protocol (MQTT, WiFi), attack-specific (DoS, DDoS), time-series (active/idle states), and device-specific (Bluetooth) data, our study captures a comprehensive range of IoMT interactions As part of our data analysis, various machine learning techniques are employed which include an ensemble model using XGBoost for improved performance against specific attack types, sequential models comprised of LSTM and CNN-LSTM that leverage time dependencies, and unsupervised models such as Autoencoders and Isolation Forest that are good in general anomaly detection The results of the experiment prove with an ensemble model lowers false positive rates and reduced detections.
BaxBench: Can LLMs Generate Correct and Secure Backends?
Authors: Mark Vero, Niels Mündler, Victor Chibotaru, Veselin Raychev, Maximilian Baader, Nikola Jovanović, Jingxuan He, Martin Vechev
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

Automatic program generation has long been a fundamental challenge in computer science. Recent benchmarks have shown that large language models (LLMs) can effectively generate code at the function level, make code edits, and solve algorithmic coding tasks. However, to achieve full automation, LLMs should be able to generate production-quality, self-contained application modules. To evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in solving this challenge, we introduce BaxBench, a novel evaluation benchmark consisting of 392 tasks for the generation of backend applications. We focus on backends for three critical reasons: (i) they are practically relevant, building the core components of most modern web and cloud software, (ii) they are difficult to get right, requiring multiple functions and files to achieve the desired functionality, and (iii) they are security-critical, as they are exposed to untrusted third-parties, making secure solutions that prevent deployment-time attacks an imperative. BaxBench validates the functionality of the generated applications with comprehensive test cases, and assesses their security exposure by executing end-to-end exploits. Our experiments reveal key limitations of current LLMs in both functionality and security: (i) even the best model, OpenAI o1, achieves a mere 62% on code correctness; (ii) on average, we could successfully execute security exploits on around half of the correct programs generated by each LLM; and (iii) in less popular backend frameworks, models further struggle to generate correct and secure applications. Progress on BaxBench signifies important steps towards autonomous and secure software development with LLMs.
ReVeil: Unconstrained Concealed Backdoor Attack on Deep Neural Networks using Machine Unlearning
Authors: Manaar Alam, Hithem Lamri, Michail Maniatakos
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Machine Unlearning

Backdoor attacks embed hidden functionalities in deep neural networks (DNN), triggering malicious behavior with specific inputs. Advanced defenses monitor anomalous DNN inferences to detect such attacks. However, concealed backdoors evade detection by maintaining a low pre-deployment attack success rate (ASR) and restoring high ASR post-deployment via machine unlearning. Existing concealed backdoors are often constrained by requiring white-box or black-box access or auxiliary data, limiting their practicality when such access or data is unavailable. This paper introduces ReVeil, a concealed backdoor attack targeting the data collection phase of the DNN training pipeline, requiring no model access or auxiliary data. ReVeil maintains low pre-deployment ASR across four datasets and four trigger patterns, successfully evades three popular backdoor detection methods, and restores high ASR post-deployment through machine unlearning.
"I'm not for sale" -- Perceptions and limited awareness of privacy risks by digital natives about location data
Authors: Antoine Boutet, Victor Morel
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

Although mobile devices benefit users in their daily lives in numerous ways, they also raise several privacy concerns. For instance, they can reveal sensitive information that can be inferred from location data. This location data is shared through service providers as well as mobile applications. Understanding how and with whom users share their location data -- as well as users' perception of the underlying privacy risks --, are important notions to grasp in order to design usable privacy-enhancing technologies. In this work, we perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of smartphone users' awareness, perception and self-reported behavior towards location data-sharing through a survey of n=99 young adult participants (i.e., digital natives). We compare stated practices with actual behaviors to better understand their mental models, and survey participants' understanding of privacy risks before and after the inspection of location traces and the information that can be inferred therefrom. Our empirical results show that participants have risky privacy practices: about 54% of participants underestimate the number of mobile applications to which they have granted access to their data, and 33% forget or do not think of revoking access to their data. Also, by using a demonstrator to perform inferences from location data, we observe that slightly more than half of participants (57%) are surprised by the extent of potentially inferred information, and that 47% intend to reduce access to their data via permissions as a result of using the demonstrator. Last, a majority of participants have little knowledge of the tools to better protect themselves, but are nonetheless willing to follow suggestions to improve privacy (51%). Educating people, including digital natives, about privacy risks through transparency tools seems a promising approach.
DELMAN: Dynamic Defense Against Large Language Model Jailbreaking with Model Editing
Authors: Yi Wang, Fenghua Weng, Sibei Yang, Zhan Qin, Minlie Huang, Wenjie Wang
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model, Model Editing, Safety Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in decision making, but their deployment is threatened by jailbreak attacks, where adversarial users manipulate model behavior to bypass safety measures. Existing defense mechanisms, such as safety fine-tuning and model editing, either require extensive parameter modifications or lack precision, leading to performance degradation on general tasks, which is unsuitable to post-deployment safety alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DELMAN (Dynamic Editing for LLMs JAilbreak DefeNse), a novel approach leveraging direct model editing for precise, dynamic protection against jailbreak attacks. DELMAN directly updates a minimal set of relevant parameters to neutralize harmful behaviors while preserving the model's utility. To avoid triggering a safe response in benign context, we incorporate KL-divergence regularization to ensure the updated model remains consistent with the original model when processing benign queries. Experimental results demonstrate that DELMAN outperforms baseline methods in mitigating jailbreak attacks while preserving the model's utility, and adapts seamlessly to new attack instances, providing a practical and efficient solution for post-deployment model protection.
Data and Decision Traceability for SDA TAP Lab's Prototype Battle Management System
Authors: Latha Pratti, Samya Bagchi, Yasir Latif
Date: 2025-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Space Protocol is applying the principles derived from MITRE and NIST's Supply Chain Traceability: Manufacturing Meta-Framework (NIST IR 8536) to a complex multi party system to achieve introspection, auditing, and replay of data and decisions that ultimately lead to a end decision. The core goal of decision traceability is to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity within the WA system. This is accomplished by providing a clear, auditable path from the system's inputs all the way to the final decision. This traceability enables the system to track the various algorithms and data flows that have influenced a particular outcome.
DeFiScope: Detecting Various DeFi Price Manipulations with LLM Reasoning
Authors: Juantao Zhong, Daoyuan Wu, Ye Liu, Maoyi Xie, Yang Liu, Yi Li, Ning Liu
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is one of the most important applications of today's cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. It manages hundreds of billions in Total Value Locked (TVL) on-chain, yet it remains susceptible to common DeFi price manipulation attacks. Despite state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems like DeFiRanger and DeFort, we found that they are less effective to non-standard price models in custom DeFi protocols, which account for 44.2% of the 95 DeFi price manipulation attacks reported over the past three years. In this paper, we introduce the first LLM-based approach, DeFiScope, for detecting DeFi price manipulation attacks in both standard and custom price models. Our insight is that large language models (LLMs) have certain intelligence to abstract price calculation from code and infer the trend of token price changes based on the extracted price models. To further strengthen LLMs in this aspect, we leverage Foundry to synthesize on-chain data and use it to fine-tune a DeFi price-specific LLM. Together with the high-level DeFi operations recovered from low-level transaction data, DeFiScope detects various DeFi price manipulations according to systematically mined patterns. Experimental results show that DeFiScope achieves a high precision of 96% and a recall rate of 80%, significantly outperforming SOTA approaches. Moreover, we evaluate DeFiScope's cost-effectiveness and demonstrate its practicality by helping our industry partner confirm 147 real-world price manipulation attacks, including discovering 81 previously unknown historical incidents.
Optimized detection of cyber-attacks on IoT networks via hybrid deep learning models
Authors: Ahmed Bensaoud, Jugal Kalita
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased the risk of cyber-attacks, making effective detection essential for securing IoT networks. This work introduces a novel approach combining Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), and Autoencoders to detect known and previously unseen attack patterns. A comprehensive evaluation using simulated and real-world traffic data is conducted, with models optimized via Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The system achieves an accuracy of up to 99.99% and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) values exceeding 99.50%. Experiments on NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and CICIoT2023 confirm the model's strong performance across diverse attack types. These findings suggest that the proposed method enhances IoT security by identifying emerging threats and adapting to evolving attack strategies.
CCJA: Context-Coherent Jailbreak Attack for Aligned Large Language Models
Authors: Guanghao Zhou, Panjia Qiu, Mingyuan Fan, Cen Chen, Mingyuan Chu, Xin Zhang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Despite explicit alignment efforts for large language models (LLMs), they can still be exploited to trigger unintended behaviors, a phenomenon known as "jailbreaking." Current jailbreak attack methods mainly focus on discrete prompt manipulations targeting closed-source LLMs, relying on manually crafted prompt templates and persuasion rules. However, as the capabilities of open-source LLMs improve, ensuring their safety becomes increasingly crucial. In such an environment, the accessibility of model parameters and gradient information by potential attackers exacerbates the severity of jailbreak threats. To address this research gap, we propose a novel \underline{C}ontext-\underline{C}oherent \underline{J}ailbreak \underline{A}ttack (CCJA). We define jailbreak attacks as an optimization problem within the embedding space of masked language models. Through combinatorial optimization, we effectively balance the jailbreak attack success rate with semantic coherence. Extensive evaluations show that our method not only maintains semantic consistency but also surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in attack effectiveness. Additionally, by integrating semantically coherent jailbreak prompts generated by our method into widely used black-box methodologies, we observe a notable enhancement in their success rates when targeting closed-source commercial LLMs. This highlights the security threat posed by open-source LLMs to commercial counterparts. We will open-source our code if the paper is accepted.
Mimicking the Familiar: Dynamic Command Generation for Information Theft Attacks in LLM Tool-Learning System
Authors: Ziyou Jiang, Mingyang Li, Guowei Yang, Junjie Wang, Yuekai Huang, Zhiyuan Chang, Qing Wang
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Comment Generation, Large Language Model

Information theft attacks pose a significant risk to Large Language Model (LLM) tool-learning systems. Adversaries can inject malicious commands through compromised tools, manipulating LLMs to send sensitive information to these tools, which leads to potential privacy breaches. However, existing attack approaches are black-box oriented and rely on static commands that cannot adapt flexibly to the changes in user queries and the invocation chain of tools. It makes malicious commands more likely to be detected by LLM and leads to attack failure. In this paper, we propose AutoCMD, a dynamic attack comment generation approach for information theft attacks in LLM tool-learning systems. Inspired by the concept of mimicking the familiar, AutoCMD is capable of inferring the information utilized by upstream tools in the toolchain through learning on open-source systems and reinforcement with target system examples, thereby generating more targeted commands for information theft. The evaluation results show that AutoCMD outperforms the baselines with +13.2% $ASR_{Theft}$, and can be generalized to new tool-learning systems to expose their information leakage risks. We also design four defense methods to effectively protect tool-learning systems from the attack.
Nuclear Deployed: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents
Authors: Rongwu Xu, Xiaojian Li, Shuo Chen, Wei Xu
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes scenarios, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) domains. Based on the insight that such risks can originate from trade-offs between the agent's Helpful, Harmlessness and Honest (HHH) goals, we build a novel three-stage evaluation framework, which is carefully constructed to effectively and naturally expose such risks. We conduct 14,400 agentic simulations across 12 advanced LLMs, with extensive experiments and analysis. Results reveal that LLM agents can autonomously engage in catastrophic behaviors and deception, without being deliberately induced. Furthermore, stronger reasoning abilities often increase, rather than mitigate, these risks. We also show that these agents can violate instructions and superior commands. On the whole, we empirically prove the existence of catastrophic risks in autonomous LLM agents. We release our code to foster further research.