The article discusses the transformative impact of Generative AI (GenAI) to the field of vulnerability assessment (VA) and risk management (RM) right from the beginning of their life cycle to the end in cybersecurity (CS). Through a systematic review of over 100 publications (2021-2025), we develop a comprehensive taxonomy classifying GenAI’s dual offensive and defensive applications in VA/RM. The survey spells out the dominant techniques of GenAI and also points towards challenging aspects, which include security, explainability, and trustworthiness. The resultant findings reinforce the belief that GenAI could help resolve many traditional VA/RM challenges, thus providing fertile ground for research and practice in this area.

Explainable AI has received significant attention in recent years. Machine learning models often operate as black boxes, lacking explainability and transparency while supporting decision-making processes. Local post-hoc explainability queries attempt to answer why individual inputs are classified in a certain way by a given model. While there has been important work on counterfactual explanations, less attention has been devoted to semifactual ones. In this paper, we focus on local post-hoc explainability queries within the semifactual `even-if' thinking and their computational complexity among different classes of models, and show that both linear and tree-based models are strictly more interpretable than neural networks. After this, we introduce a preference-based framework enabling users to personalize explanations based on their preferences, both in the case of semifactuals and counterfactuals, enhancing interpretability and user-centricity. Finally, we explore the complexity of several interpretability problems in the proposed preference-based framework and provide algorithms for polynomial cases.

Early suicidal ideation detection has long been regarded as an important task that can benefit both society and individuals. In this regard, it has been shown that, very frequently, the first symptoms of this problem can be identified by analyzing the contents shared on social media. Machine learning classification models have proven promising in capturing behavioral and textual features from posts shared on social media. This study proposes a novel machine-learning model to detect the risk of suicide from social media posts, employing both natural language processing and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. We propose an ensemble LSTM-TCN model that benefits from a self-attention mechanism to detect suicidal ideation among users of two well-known social networks, Twitter (X) and Reddit. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive analysis of the data, examining the suicidal posts both statistically and semantically, which can provide rich knowledge about suicidal ideation. Our proposed model (AL-BTCN) outperforms the compared state-of-the-art models, resulting in over 94% accuracy, recall, and F1-score. Researchers, mental health specialists, and social media service providers can all benefit from the findings of this study.

Fingerprint-based localization methods provide high accuracy location estimation, which use machine learning algorithms to recognize the statistical patterns of collected data. In these methods, the users’ locations can be estimated based on the received signal strength vectors from some transmitters. However, the data collection is a labor-intensive phase, and the collected data should be updated periodically. Many researchers have contributed to reducing this cost. The easiest way to remove the data collection cost is to use fingerprints generated by the model-based approaches, in which the trained machine learning algorithm can be updated based on the environment changes. Probabilistic-based localization algorithms, in addition to the user location, can estimate a region of interest called 2σ confidence interval in which the probability of user presence is 95%. Gaussian process regression (GPR) is a probabilistic method that can be used to achieve this goal. However, conventional GPR (CGPR) cannot accurately estimate the confidence interval when noise-free fingerprints generated by the model-based approaches are used in the training phase. In this paper, we propose a novel GPR-based localization algorithm, named enhanced GPR (EGPR), which improves the accuracy level of confidence interval estimation compared to the existing methods while fixing the level of computational complexity in the online phase. We also theoretically prove that GPR-based algorithms are minimum variance unbiased and efficient estimators. Experiments under line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over counterparts in terms of accuracy as well as applicability in real-time localization systems.

Despite the recency of their conception, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) constitute an extensively-researched machine learning sub-field for the creation of synthetic data through deep generative modeling. GANs have consequently been applied in a number of domains, most notably computer vision, in which they are typically used to generate or transform synthetic images. Given their relative ease of use, it is therefore natural that researchers in the field of networking (which has seen extensive application of deep learning methods) should take an interest in GAN-based approaches. The need for a comprehensive survey of such activity is therefore urgent. In this paper, we demonstrate how this branch of machine learning can benefit multiple aspects of computer and communication networks, including mobile networks, network analysis, internet of things, physical layer, and cybersecurity. In doing so, we shall provide a novel evaluation framework for comparing the performance of different models in non-image applications, applying this to a number of reference network datasets.

Localization in wireless sensor networks means determination of sensor nodes coordination, and this can be done using the known positions of some other nodes (called anchors) and given distance measurements. Practically, these distance measurements may be corrupted by noise and this may cause errors in estimating the nodes' locations. In addition, when some connections do not have line-of-sight (LOS) links, localization accuracy degrades significantly. Furthermore, in some cases, there is an uncertainty in anchor position and this degrades the accuracy of the localization. In this paper, we propose a new class of convex relaxations for wireless sensor network localization based on the principle of maximum entropy for both LOS and non-LOS environments. Moreover, unlike maximum likelihood (ML) formulation, this class is independent from noise probability density function. In this paper, we propose a localization method in the presence of anchor position uncertainty which is independent from knowing the covariance of uncertainty in anchor positions, while in the ML-based approaches, knowing the covariance matrix is necessary. Simulation results confirm that the proposed convex relaxations can provide more accuracy in comparison with ML-based semidefinite programming methods.