Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly text-based, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues. To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources—distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins—for comprehensive toxic speech analysis. Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions. Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.

Voice communication is convenient while also poses risks of privacy leakage, due to potential interception or eavesdropping during voice transmission. Current protections of voice privacy are almost entirely controlled by communication service providers (CSPs), which operate as a black-box to users thus hard to fully trust. To take back the control of user privacy, in this paper, we introduce SecHeadset, an end-to-end solution for secure voice communication based on voice obfuscation, which is plug-and-play and compatible with various CSPs. Our solution involves two parts. First, we design a voice-like noise masking scheme for voice obfuscation. The noise, mimicking voice characteristics, could effectively obscure users' voices while demonstrating resilience against noise reduction methods. Second, we develop a protocol that enables efficient channel state estimation and secure information exchange between two communication entities. Based on this information, we propose a lightweight algorithm for voice retrieval during communication. We develop a prototype of SecHeadset and evaluate its performance with 8 widely-used applications, including Telegram and Skype. It reduces the voice recognition accuracy of various adversaries to below 15% while maintaining communication quality. We also integrate SecHeadset with off-the-shelf portable devices and verify its real-world effectiveness.

Invisible Image Watermarking is crucial for ensuring content provenance and accountability in generative AI. While Gen-AI providers are increasingly integrating invisible watermarking systems, the robustness of these schemes against forgery attacks remains poorly characterized. This is critical, as forging traceable watermarks onto illicit content leads to false attribution, potentially harming the reputation and legal standing of Gen-AI service providers who are not responsible for the content. In this work, we propose WMCopier, an effective watermark forgery attack that operates without requiring any prior knowledge of or access to the target watermarking algorithm. Our approach first models the target watermark distribution using an unconditional diffusion model, and then seamlessly embeds the target watermark into a non-watermarked image via a shallow inversion process. We also incorporate an iterative optimization procedure that refines the reconstructed image to further trade off the fidelity and forgery efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that WMCopier effectively deceives both open-source and closed-source watermark systems (e.g., Amazon’s system), achieving a significantly higher success rate than existing methods. Additionally, we evaluate the robustness of forged samples and discuss the potential defense against our attack. Code is available at: https://github.com/holdrain/WMCopier.

Log-based AIOps is a widely researched topic aiming at reducing the developer burden in system maintenance. Since industrial developers prefer lightweight supervised solutions for log-based AIOps, the strong dependence of these solutions on labeled data creates significant challenges for teams new to building log-based AIOps capabilities, such as high labeling costs, inconsistent annotations, and manual management issues. Log-labeling faces challenges in integrating existing artifacts to reduce labeling costs and manage labels effectively. To the best of our knowledge, no prior research addresses of assisting log-labeling problem. In this article, we propose a new approach called LogLabeler to assist developers in annotating and managing log labels. LogLabeler leverages existing artifacts for initial-label-acquisition, minimizes labeling costs by automatically generating all log labels, and shields developers from manual label management through a human-in-the-loop refinement approach. Evaluations on real-world datasets from Alibaba and open-source datasets show that LogLabeler can effectively supplement log labels, achieving comparable accuracy to existing baselines while operating more efficiently. Furthermore, we demonstrate LogLabeler's practical effectiveness at Alibaba through a case study, highlighting its benefits to developers.

The performance testing and optimization of cloud applications is challenging, because manual tuning of cloud computing stacks is tedious and automated tuning tools are rare used for cloud services. To address this issue, we introduce KeenTune, an automated tuning tool designed to optimize application performance and facilitate performance testing. KeenTune is a lightweight and flexible tool that can be deployed with to-be-tuned applications with negligible impact on their performance. Specifically, KeenTune uses a surrogate model that can be implemented with machine learning models to filter out less relevant parameters for efficient tuning. Our empirical evaluation shows that KeenTune significantly enhances the throughput performance of Nginx web servers, resulting in performance improvements of up to 90.43% and 117.23% in certain cases. This study highlights the benefits of using KeenTune for achieving efficient and effective performance testing of cloud applications. The video and source code for KeenTune are provided as supplementary materials.

Auto-tuning attracts increasing attention in industry practice to optimize the performance of a system with many configurable parameters. It is particularly useful for cloud applications and services since they have complex system hierarchies and intricate knob correlations. However, existing tools and algorithms rarely consider practical problems such as workload pressure control, the support for distributed deployment, and expensive time costs, etc., which are utterly important for enterprise cloud applications and services. In this work, we significantly extend an open source tuning tool – KeenTune to optimize several typical enterprise cloud applications and services. Our practice is in collaboration with enterprise users and tuning tool developers to address the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we highlight five key challenges from our experiences and provide a set of solutions accordingly. Through applying the improved tuning tool to different application scenarios, we achieve 2%-14% improvements for the performance of MySQL, OceanBase, nginx, ingress-nginx, and 5%-70% improvements for the performance of ACK cloud container service.

Data samples collected for training machine learning models are typically assumed to be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). Recent research has demonstrated that this assumption can be problematic as it simplifies the manifold of structured data. This has motivated different research areas such as data poisoning, model improvement, and explanation of machine learning models. In this work, we study the influence of a sample on determining the intrinsic topological features of its underlying manifold. We propose the Shapley homology framework, which provides a quantitative metric for the influence of a sample of the homology of a simplicial complex. Our proposed framework consists of two main parts: homology analysis, where we compute the Betti number of the target topological space, and Shapley value calculation, where we decompose the topological features of a complex built from data points to individual points. By interpreting the influence as a probability measure, we further define an entropy that reflects the complexity of the data manifold. Furthermore, we provide a preliminary discussion of the connection of the Shapley homology to the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension. Empirical studies show that when the zero-dimensional Shapley homology is used on neighboring graphs, samples with higher influence scores have a greater impact on the accuracy of neural networks that determine graph connectivity and on several regular grammars whose higher entropy values imply greater difficulty in being learned.

The rapid growth of Internet services and mobile devices provides an excellent opportunity to satisfy the strong demand for the personalized item or product recommendation. However, with the tremendous increase of users and items, personalized recommender systems still face several challenging problems: (1) the hardness of exploiting sparse implicit feedback; (2) the difficulty of combining heterogeneous data. To cope with these challenges, we propose a gated attentive-autoencoder (GATE) model, which is capable of learning fused hidden representations of items' contents and binary ratings, through a neural gating structure. Based on the fused representations, our model exploits neighboring relations between items to help infer users' preferences. In particular, a word-level and a neighbor-level attention module are integrated with the autoencoder. The word-level attention learns the item hidden representations from items' word sequences, while favoring informative words by assigning larger attention weights. The neighbor-level attention learns the hidden representation of an item's neighborhood by considering its neighbors in a weighted manner. We extensively evaluate our model with several state-of-the-art methods and different validation metrics on four real-world datasets. The experimental results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on top-N recommendation but also provide interpretable results attributed to the attention modules.

The rapid growth of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) provides a great opportunity to satisfy the strong demand for personalized Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation services. However, with the tremendous increase of users and POIs, POI recommender systems still face several challenging problems: (1) the hardness of modeling complex user-POI interactions from sparse implicit feedback; (2) the difficulty of incorporating the geographical context information. To cope with these challenges, we propose a novel autoencoder-based model to learn the complex user-POI relations, namely SAE-NAD, which consists of a self-attentive encoder (SAE) and a neighbor-aware decoder (NAD). In particular, unlike previous works equally treat users' checked-in POIs, our self-attentive encoder adaptively differentiates the user preference degrees in multiple aspects, by adopting a multi-dimensional attention mechanism. To incorporate the geographical context information, we propose a neighbor-aware decoder to make users' reachability higher on the similar and nearby neighbors of checked-in POIs, which is achieved by the inner product of POI embeddings together with the radial basis function (RBF) kernel. To evaluate the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with many state-of-the-art methods and evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

It has been recently shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to a particular type of attack that exploits a fundamental flaw in their design. This attack consists of generating particular synthetic examples referred to as adversarial samples. These samples are constructed by slightly manipulating real data-points that change "fool" the original DNN model, forcing it to misclassify previously correctly classified samples with high confidence. Many believe addressing this flaw is essential for DNNs to be used in critical applications such as cyber security. Previous work has shown that learning algorithms that enhance the robustness of DNN models all use the tactic of "security through obscurity". This means that security can be guaranteed only if one can obscure the learning algorithms from adversaries. Once the learning technique is disclosed, DNNs protected by these defense mechanisms are still susceptible to adversarial samples. In this work, we investigate by examining how previous research dealt with this and propose a generic approach to enhance a DNN's resistance to adversarial samples. More specifically, our approach integrates a data transformation module with a DNN, making it robust even if we reveal the underlying learning algorithm. To demonstrate the generality of our proposed approach and its potential for handling cyber security applications, we evaluate our method and several other existing solutions on datasets publicly available, such as a large scale malware dataset and MNIST and IMDB datasets. Our results indicate that our approach typically provides superior classification performance and robustness to attacks compared with state-of-art solutions.

Rule extraction from black box models is critical in domains that require model validation before implementation, as can be the case in credit scoring and medical diagnosis. Though already a challenging problem in statistical learning in general, the difficulty is even greater when highly nonlinear, recursive models, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), are fit to data. Here, we study the extraction of rules from second-order RNNs trained to recognize the Tomita grammars. We show that production rules can be stably extracted from trained RNNs and that in certain cases, the rules outperform the trained RNNs.

Outside the highly publicized victories in the game of Go, there have been numerous successful applications of deep learning in the fields of information retrieval, computer vision, and speech recognition. In cybersecurity, an increasing number of companies have begun exploring the use of deep learning (DL) in a variety of security tasks with malware detection among the more popular. These companies claim that deep neural networks (DNNs) could help turn the tide in the war against malware infection. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial samples, a shortcoming that plagues most, if not all, statistical and machine learning models. Recent research has demonstrated that those with malicious intent can easily circumvent deep learning-powered malware detection by exploiting this weakness.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are experiencing a major increase in popularity in both consumer and industrial markets as prices fall and the technology matures. No longer are drones limited to military purposes as manufacturers begin to mass produce civilian models, ushering in a new era of transportation technology. While consumer drones are still in their infancy stage, there is little in the way of rules and regulations regarding privacy issues of these new devices. In this paper, we design an energy efficient off-the-shelf hardware system capable of detecting and selectively disabling video feeds of WiFi based consumer drones if they enter a defended area.