Multimodal personality understanding plays a critical role in human-centered artificial intelligence. Previous work mainly focus on learning rich multimodal representations for video personality understanding. However, they often suffer from potential harm caused by subject bias (e.g., observable age and unobservable mental states), as subjects originate from diverse demographic backgrounds. Learning such spurious associations between multimodal features and traits may lead to unfair personality understanding. In this work, we construct a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to analyze the impact of these biases from a causal perspective, and propose a novel Dual Causal Adjustment Network (DCAN) to mitigate the interference of subject attributes on personality understanding. Specifically, we design a Back-door Adjustment Causal Learning (BACL) module to block spurious correlations from observable demographic factors via a prototype-based confounder dictionary, and subsequently apply a Front-door Adjustment Causal Learning (FACL) module to address latent and unobservable biases through a learned mediator dictionary intervention, thereby achieving causal disentanglement of representations for deconfounded reasoning. Importantly, we construct a Demographic-annotated Multimodal Student Personality (DMSP) dataset to support the analysis and discussion of fairness-related factors. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset CFI-V2 and our DMSP dataset demonstrate that DCAN consistently improves prediction accuracy, reaching 92.11% and 92.90%, respectively. Meanwhile, the improvements in the fairness metrics of equal opportunity and demographic parity are 6.57% and 7.97% on CFI-V2, and 15.38% and 20.06% on the DMSP dataset. Our code and DMSP dataset are available at https://github.com/Sabrina-han/DCAN

Blockchain systems, especially EVM-compatible ones that serially execute transactions, face a significant limitation in throughput. One promising solution is concurrent transaction execution, which accelerates transaction processing and increases the overall throughput. However, existing concurrency control algorithms fail to obtain adequate speedups in high-contention blockchain workloads, primarily due to their transaction-level conflict resolution strategies.

The prosperity of decentralized finance motivates many investors to profit via trading their crypto assets on decentralized applications (DApps for short) of the Ethereum ecosystem. Apart from Ether (the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum), many ERC20 (a widely used token standard on Ethereum) tokens obtain vast market value in the ecosystem. Specifically, the approval mechanism is used to delegate the privilege of spending users’ tokens to DApps. By doing so, the DApps can transfer these tokens to arbitrary receivers on behalf of the users. To increase the usability, unlimited approval is commonly adopted by DApps to reduce the required interaction between them and their users. However, as shown in existing security incidents, this mechanism can be abused to steal users’ tokens.