pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Simplified and Secure MCP Gateways for Enterprise AI Integration
Authors: Ivo Brett
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

The increased adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI Agents necessitates robust security for Enterprise integrations. This paper introduces the MCP Gateway to simplify self-hosted MCP server integration. The proposed architecture integrates security principles, authentication, intrusion detection, and secure tunneling, enabling secure self-hosting without exposing infrastructure. Key contributions include a reference architecture, threat model mapping, simplified integration strategies, and open-source implementation recommendations. This work focuses on the unique challenges of enterprise-centric, self-hosted AI integrations, unlike existing public MCP server solutions.
Securing GenAI Multi-Agent Systems Against Tool Squatting: A Zero Trust Registry-Based Approach
Authors: Vineeth Sai Narajala, Ken Huang, Idan Habler
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) multi-agent systems (MAS) necessitates standardized protocols enabling agents to discover and interact with external tools. However, these protocols introduce new security challenges, particularly; tool squatting; the deceptive registration or representation of tools. This paper analyzes tool squatting threats within the context of emerging interoperability standards, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) or seamless communication between agents protocols. It introduces a comprehensive Tool Registry system designed to mitigate these risks. We propose a security-focused architecture featuring admin-controlled registration, centralized tool discovery, fine grained access policies enforced via dedicated Agent and Tool Registry services, a dynamic trust scoring mechanism based on tool versioning and known vulnerabilities, and just in time credential provisioning. Based on its design principles, the proposed registry framework aims to effectively prevent common tool squatting vectors while preserving the flexibility and power of multi-agent systems. This work addresses a critical security gap in the rapidly evolving GenAI ecosystem and provides a foundation for secure tool integration in production environments.
Automated Hybrid Reward Scheduling via Large Language Models for Robotic Skill Learning
Authors: Changxin Huang, Junyang Liang, Yanbin Chang, Jingzhao Xu, Jianqiang Li
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Enabling a high-degree-of-freedom robot to learn specific skills is a challenging task due to the complexity of robotic dynamics. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising solution; however, addressing such problems requires the design of multiple reward functions to account for various constraints in robotic motion. Existing approaches typically sum all reward components indiscriminately to optimize the RL value function and policy. We argue that this uniform inclusion of all reward components in policy optimization is inefficient and limits the robot's learning performance. To address this, we propose an Automated Hybrid Reward Scheduling (AHRS) framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). This paradigm dynamically adjusts the learning intensity of each reward component throughout the policy optimization process, enabling robots to acquire skills in a gradual and structured manner. Specifically, we design a multi-branch value network, where each branch corresponds to a distinct reward component. During policy optimization, each branch is assigned a weight that reflects its importance, and these weights are automatically computed based on rules designed by LLMs. The LLM generates a rule set in advance, derived from the task description, and during training, it selects a weight calculation rule from the library based on language prompts that evaluate the performance of each branch. Experimental results demonstrate that the AHRS method achieves an average 6.48% performance improvement across multiple high-degree-of-freedom robotic tasks.
Leveraging LLM to Strengthen ML-Based Cross-Site Scripting Detection
Authors: Dennis Miczek, Divyesh Gabbireddy, Suman Saha
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

According to the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a critical security vulnerability. Despite decades of research, XSS remains among the top 10 security vulnerabilities. Researchers have proposed various techniques to protect systems from XSS attacks, with machine learning (ML) being one of the most widely used methods. An ML model is trained on a dataset to identify potential XSS threats, making its effectiveness highly dependent on the size and diversity of the training data. A variation of XSS is obfuscated XSS, where attackers apply obfuscation techniques to alter the code's structure, making it challenging for security systems to detect its malicious intent. Our study's random forest model was trained on traditional (non-obfuscated) XSS data achieved 99.8% accuracy. However, when tested against obfuscated XSS samples, accuracy dropped to 81.9%, underscoring the importance of training ML models with obfuscated data to improve their effectiveness in detecting XSS attacks. A significant challenge is to generate highly complex obfuscated code despite the availability of several public tools. These tools can only produce obfuscation up to certain levels of complexity. In our proposed system, we fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate complex obfuscated XSS payloads automatically. By transforming original XSS samples into diverse obfuscated variants, we create challenging training data for ML model evaluation. Our approach achieved a 99.5% accuracy rate with the obfuscated dataset. We also found that the obfuscated samples generated by the LLMs were 28.1% more complex than those created by other tools, significantly improving the model's ability to handle advanced XSS attacks and making it more effective for real-world application security.
Timing Is Everything: Finding the Optimal Fusion Points in Multimodal Medical Imaging
Authors: Valerio Guarrasi, Klara Mogensen, Sara Tassinari, Sara Qvarlander, Paolo Soda
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Multimodal Deep Learning, Specificity

Multimodal deep learning harnesses diverse imaging modalities, such as MRI sequences, to enhance diagnostic accuracy in medical imaging. A key challenge is determining the optimal timing for integrating these modalities-specifically, identifying the network layers where fusion modules should be inserted. Current approaches often rely on manual tuning or exhaustive search, which are computationally expensive without any guarantee of converging to optimal results. We propose a sequential forward search algorithm that incrementally activates and evaluates candidate fusion modules at different layers of a multimodal network. At each step, the algorithm retrains from previously learned weights and compares validation loss to identify the best-performing configuration. This process systematically reduces the search space, enabling efficient identification of the optimal fusion timing without exhaustively testing all possible module placements. The approach is validated on two multimodal MRI datasets, each addressing different classification tasks. Our algorithm consistently identified configurations that outperformed unimodal baselines, late fusion, and a brute-force ensemble of all potential fusion placements. These architectures demonstrated superior accuracy, F-score, and specificity while maintaining competitive or improved AUC values. Furthermore, the sequential nature of the search significantly reduced computational overhead, making the optimization process more practical. By systematically determining the optimal timing to fuse imaging modalities, our method advances multimodal deep learning for medical imaging. It provides an efficient and robust framework for fusion optimization, paving the way for improved clinical decision-making and more adaptable, scalable architectures in medical AI applications.
DeeCLIP: A Robust and Generalizable Transformer-Based Framework for Detecting AI-Generated Images
Authors: Mamadou Keita, Wassim Hamidouche, Hessen Bougueffa Eutamene, Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed, Abdenour Hadid
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Triplet, Zero-Shot Learning

This paper introduces DeeCLIP, a novel framework for detecting AI-generated images using CLIP-ViT and fusion learning. Despite significant advancements in generative models capable of creating highly photorealistic images, existing detection methods often struggle to generalize across different models and are highly sensitive to minor perturbations. To address these challenges, DeeCLIP incorporates DeeFuser, a fusion module that combines high-level and low-level features, improving robustness against degradations such as compression and blurring. Additionally, we apply triplet loss to refine the embedding space, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish between real and synthetic content. To further enable lightweight adaptation while preserving pre-trained knowledge, we adopt parameter-efficient fine-tuning using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) within the CLIP-ViT backbone. This approach supports effective zero-shot learning without sacrificing generalization. Trained exclusively on 4-class ProGAN data, DeeCLIP achieves an average accuracy of 89.00% on 19 test subsets composed of generative adversarial network (GAN) and diffusion models. Despite having fewer trainable parameters, DeeCLIP outperforms existing methods, demonstrating superior robustness against various generative models and real-world distortions. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mamadou-Keita/DeeCLIP for research purposes.
AGATE: Stealthy Black-box Watermarking for Multimodal Model Copyright Protection
Authors: Jianbo Gao, Keke Gai, Jing Yu, Liehuang Zhu, Qi Wu
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Anomaly Detection, image-classification, Image Classification, Image-text Retrieval, Malicious Detection, Text Retrieval

Recent advancement in large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) models offering multimodal services have become foundational in AI systems, making them prime targets for model theft. Existing methods select Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data as backdoor watermarks and retrain the original model for copyright protection. However, existing methods are susceptible to malicious detection and forgery by adversaries, resulting in watermark evasion. In this work, we propose Model-\underline{ag}nostic Black-box Backdoor W\underline{ate}rmarking Framework (AGATE) to address stealthiness and robustness challenges in multimodal model copyright protection. Specifically, we propose an adversarial trigger generation method to generate stealthy adversarial triggers from ordinary dataset, providing visual fidelity while inducing semantic shifts. To alleviate the issue of anomaly detection among model outputs, we propose a post-transform module to correct the model output by narrowing the distance between adversarial trigger image embedding and text embedding. Subsequently, a two-phase watermark verification is proposed to judge whether the current model infringes by comparing the two results with and without the transform module. Consequently, we consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods across five datasets in the downstream tasks of multimodal image-text retrieval and image classification. Additionally, we validated the robustness of AGATE under two adversarial attack scenarios.
Incentivizing Inclusive Contributions in Model Sharing Markets
Authors: Enpei Zhang, Jingyi Chai, Rui Ye, Yanfeng Wang, Siheng Chen
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Instruction Following, model, Personalized Federated Learning

While data plays a crucial role in training contemporary AI models, it is acknowledged that valuable public data will be exhausted in a few years, directing the world's attention towards the massive decentralized private data. However, the privacy-sensitive nature of raw data and lack of incentive mechanism prevent these valuable data from being fully exploited. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes inclusive and incentivized personalized federated learning (iPFL), which incentivizes data holders with diverse purposes to collaboratively train personalized models without revealing raw data. iPFL constructs a model-sharing market by solving a graph-based training optimization and incorporates an incentive mechanism based on game theory principles. Theoretical analysis shows that iPFL adheres to two key incentive properties: individual rationality and truthfulness. Empirical studies on eleven AI tasks (e.g., large language models' instruction-following tasks) demonstrate that iPFL consistently achieves the highest economic utility, and better or comparable model performance compared to baseline methods. We anticipate that our iPFL can serve as a valuable technique for boosting future AI models on decentralized private data while making everyone satisfied.
CodeBC: A More Secure Large Language Model for Smart Contract Code Generation in Blockchain
Authors: LingXiang Wang, Hainan Zhang, Qinnan Zhang, Ziwei Wang, Hongwei Zheng, Jin Dong, Zhiming Zheng
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating code from natural language instructions, yet they often lack an understanding of security vulnerabilities. This limitation makes it difficult for LLMs to avoid security risks in generated code, particularly in high-security programming tasks such as smart contract development for blockchain. Researchers have attempted to enhance the vulnerability awareness of these models by training them to differentiate between vulnerable and fixed code snippets. However, this approach relies heavily on manually labeled vulnerability data, which is only available for popular languages like Python and C++. For low-resource languages like Solidity, used in smart contracts, large-scale annotated datasets are scarce and difficult to obtain. To address this challenge, we introduce CodeBC, a code generation model specifically designed for generating secure smart contracts in blockchain. CodeBC employs a three-stage fine-tuning approach based on CodeLlama, distinguishing itself from previous methods by not relying on pairwise vulnerability location annotations. Instead, it leverages vulnerability and security tags to teach the model the differences between vulnerable and secure code. During the inference phase, the model leverages security tags to generate secure and robust code. Experimental results demonstrate that CodeBC outperforms baseline models in terms of BLEU, CodeBLEU, and compilation pass rates, while significantly reducing vulnerability rates. These findings validate the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of our three-stage fine-tuning strategy, making CodeBC a promising solution for generating secure smart contract code.
Investigating the Impact of Personalized AI Tutors on Language Learning Performance
Authors: Simon Suh
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00

Driven by the global shift towards online learning prompted by the COVID 19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a pivotal player in the field of education. Intelligent Tutoring Systems offer a new method of personalized teaching, replacing the limitations of traditional teaching methods. However, concerns arise about the ability of AI tutors to address skill development and engagement during the learning process. In this paper, I will conduct a quasi experiment with paired sample t test on 34 students pre and post use of AI tutors in language learning platforms like Santa and Duolingo to examine the relationship between students engagement, academic performance, and students satisfaction during a personalized language learning experience.
MSFNet-CPD: Multi-Scale Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Crop Pest Detection
Authors: JiaQi Zhang, Zhuodong Liu, Kejian Yu
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Super-Resolution

Accurate identification of agricultural pests is essential for crop protection but remains challenging due to the large intra-class variance and fine-grained differences among pest species. While deep learning has advanced pest detection, most existing approaches rely solely on low-level visual features and lack effective multi-modal integration, leading to limited accuracy and poor interpretability. Moreover, the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal agricultural datasets further restricts progress in this field. To address these issues, we construct two novel multi-modal benchmarks-CTIP102 and STIP102-based on the widely-used IP102 dataset, and introduce a Multi-scale Cross-Modal Fusion Network (MSFNet-CPD) for robust pest detection. Our approach enhances visual quality via a super-resolution reconstruction module, and feeds both the original and reconstructed images into the network to improve clarity and detection performance. To better exploit semantic cues, we propose an Image-Text Fusion (ITF) module for joint modeling of visual and textual features, and an Image-Text Converter (ITC) that reconstructs fine-grained details across multiple scales to handle challenging backgrounds. Furthermore, we introduce an Arbitrary Combination Image Enhancement (ACIE) strategy to generate a more complex and diverse pest detection dataset, MTIP102, improving the model's generalization to real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSFNet-CPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple pest detection benchmarks. All code and datasets will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Healer-ML/MSFNet-CPD.
ReeM: Ensemble Building Thermodynamics Model for Efficient HVAC Control via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yang Deng, Yaohui Liu, Rui Liang, Dafang Zhao, Donghua Xie, Ittetsu Taniguchi, Dan Wang
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Model Selection

The building thermodynamics model, which predicts real-time indoor temperature changes under potential HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) control operations, is crucial for optimizing HVAC control in buildings. While pioneering studies have attempted to develop such models for various building environments, these models often require extensive data collection periods and rely heavily on expert knowledge, making the modeling process inefficient and limiting the reusability of the models. This paper explores a model ensemble perspective that utilizes existing developed models as base models to serve a target building environment, thereby providing accurate predictions while reducing the associated efforts. Given that building data streams are non-stationary and the number of base models may increase, we propose a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approach to dynamically select and weight the base models. Our approach employs a two-tiered decision-making process: the high-level focuses on model selection, while the low-level determines the weights of the selected models. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed approach through offline experiments and an on-site case study, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
What's Pulling the Strings? Evaluating Integrity and Attribution in AI Training and Inference through Concept Shift
Authors: Jiamin Chang, Haoyang Li, Hammond Pearce, Ruoxi Sun, Bo Li, Minhui Xue
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Data Poisoning, Safety Alignment

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has amplified concerns about trustworthiness, including integrity, privacy, robustness, and bias. To assess and attribute these threats, we propose ConceptLens, a generic framework that leverages pre-trained multimodal models to identify the root causes of integrity threats by analyzing Concept Shift in probing samples. ConceptLens demonstrates strong detection performance for vanilla data poisoning attacks and uncovers vulnerabilities to bias injection, such as the generation of covert advertisements through malicious concept shifts. It identifies privacy risks in unaltered but high-risk samples, filters them before training, and provides insights into model weaknesses arising from incomplete or imbalanced training data. Additionally, at the model level, it attributes concepts that the target model is overly dependent on, identifies misleading concepts, and explains how disrupting key concepts negatively impacts the model. Furthermore, it uncovers sociological biases in generative content, revealing disparities across sociological contexts. Strikingly, ConceptLens reveals how safe training and inference data can be unintentionally and easily exploited, potentially undermining safety alignment. Our study informs actionable insights to breed trust in AI systems, thereby speeding adoption and driving greater innovation.
A New Approach to Backtracking Counterfactual Explanations: A Causal Framework for Efficient Model Interpretability
Authors: Pouria Fatemi, Ehsan Sharifian, Mohammad Hossein Yassaee
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Counterfactual explanations enhance interpretability by identifying alternative inputs that produce different outputs, offering localized insights into model decisions. However, traditional methods often neglect causal relationships, leading to unrealistic examples. While newer approaches integrate causality, they are computationally expensive. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient method based on backtracking counterfactuals that incorporates causal reasoning to generate actionable explanations. We first examine the limitations of existing methods and then introduce our novel approach and its features. We also explore the relationship between our method and previous techniques, demonstrating that it generalizes them in specific scenarios. Finally, experiments show that our method provides deeper insights into model outputs.
Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-Base-8B Technical Report
Authors: Paul Kassianik, Baturay Saglam, Alexander Chen, Blaine Nelson, Anu Vellore, Massimo Aufiero, Fraser Burch, Dhruv Kedia, Avi Zohary, Sajana Weerawardhena, Aman Priyanshu, Adam Swanda, Amy Chang, Hyrum Anderson, Kojin Oshiba, Omar Santos, Yaron Singer, Amin Karbasi
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

As transformer-based large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate society, they have revolutionized domains such as software engineering, creative writing, and digital arts. However, their adoption in cybersecurity remains limited due to challenges like scarcity of specialized training data and complexity of representing cybersecurity-specific knowledge. To address these gaps, we present Foundation-Sec-8B, a cybersecurity-focused LLM built on the Llama 3.1 architecture and enhanced through continued pretraining on a carefully curated cybersecurity corpus. We evaluate Foundation-Sec-8B across both established and new cybersecurity benchmarks, showing that it matches Llama 3.1-70B and GPT-4o-mini in certain cybersecurity-specific tasks. By releasing our model to the public, we aim to accelerate progress and adoption of AI-driven tools in both public and private cybersecurity contexts.