Deep Learning Model Security: Threats and Defenses

Deep learning has transformed AI applications but faces critical security challenges, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, model theft, and privacy leakage. This survey examines these vulnerabilities, detailing their mechanisms and impact on model integrity and confidentiality. Practical implementations, including adversarial examples, label flipping, and backdoor attacks, are explored alongside defenses such as adversarial training, differential privacy, and federated learning, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Advanced methods like contrastive and self-supervised learning are presented for enhancing robustness. The survey concludes with future directions, emphasizing automated defenses, zero-trust architectures, and the security challenges of large AI models. A balanced approach to performance and security is essential for developing reliable deep learning systems.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Advancing Big Data Analytics and Management

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

A Comprehensive Guide to Explainable AI: From Classical Models to LLMs

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) addresses the growing need for transparency and interpretability in AI systems, enabling trust and accountability in decision-making processes. This book offers a comprehensive guide to XAI, bridging foundational concepts with advanced methodologies. It explores interpretability in traditional models such as Decision Trees, Linear Regression, and Support Vector Machines, alongside the challenges of explaining deep learning architectures like CNNs, RNNs, and Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, GPT, and T5. The book presents practical techniques such as SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, counterfactual explanations, and causal inference, supported by Python code examples for real-world applications. Case studies illustrate XAI's role in healthcare, finance, and policymaking, demonstrating its impact on fairness and decision support. The book also covers evaluation metrics for explanation quality, an overview of cutting-edge XAI tools and frameworks, and emerging research directions, such as interpretability in federated learning and ethical AI considerations. Designed for a broad audience, this resource equips readers with the theoretical insights and practical skills needed to master XAI. Hands-on examples and additional resources are available at the companion GitHub repository: https://github.com/Echoslayer/XAI_From_Classical_Models_to_LLMs.

FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality

In this paper, we present \textbf{\textit{FasterCache}}, a novel training-free strategy designed to accelerate the inference of video diffusion models with high-quality generation. By analyzing existing cache-based methods, we observe that \textit{directly reusing adjacent-step features degrades video quality due to the loss of subtle variations}. We further perform a pioneering investigation of the acceleration potential of classifier-free guidance (CFG) and reveal significant redundancy between conditional and unconditional features within the same timestep. Capitalizing on these observations, we introduce FasterCache to substantially accelerate diffusion-based video generation. Our key contributions include a dynamic feature reuse strategy that preserves both feature distinction and temporal continuity, and CFG-Cache which optimizes the reuse of conditional and unconditional outputs to further enhance inference speed without compromising video quality. We empirically evaluate FasterCache on recent video diffusion models. Experimental results show that FasterCache can significantly accelerate video generation (\eg 1.67$\times$ speedup on Vchitect-2.0) while keeping video quality comparable to the baseline, and consistently outperform existing methods in both inference speed and video quality.

Navigating Public Sentiment in the Circular Economy through Topic Modelling and Hyperparameter Optimisation

To advance the circular economy (CE), it is crucial to gain insights into the evolution of public sentiments, cognitive pathways of the masses concerning circular products and digital technology, and recognise the primary concerns. To achieve this, we collected data related to the CE from diverse platforms including Twitter, Reddit, and The Guardian. This comprehensive data collection spanned across three distinct strata of the public: the general public, professionals, and official sources. Subsequently, we utilised three topic models on the collected data. Topic modelling represents a type of data-driven and machine learning approach for text mining, capable of automatically categorising a large number of documents into distinct semantic groups. Simultaneously, these groups are described by topics, and these topics can aid in understanding the semantic content of documents at a high level. However, the performance of topic modelling may vary depending on different hyperparameter values. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a framework for topic modelling with hyperparameter optimisation for CE and conducted a series of systematic experiments to ensure that topic models are set with appropriate hyperparameters and to gain insights into the correlations between the CE and public opinion based on well-established models. The results of this study indicate that concerns about sustainability and economic impact persist across all three datasets. Official sources demonstrate a higher level of engagement with the application and regulation of CE. To the best of our knowledge, this study is pioneering in investigating various levels of public opinions concerning CE through topic modelling with the exploration of hyperparameter optimisation.

SAIS: A Novel Bio-Inspired Artificial Immune System Based on Symbiotic Paradigm

We propose a novel type of Artificial Immune System (AIS): Symbiotic Artificial Immune Systems (SAIS), drawing inspiration from symbiotic relationships in biology. SAIS parallels the three key stages (i.e., mutualism, commensalism and parasitism) of population updating from the Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) algorithm. This parallel approach effectively addresses the challenges of large population size and enhances population diversity in AIS, which traditional AIS and SOS struggle to resolve efficiently. We conducted a series of experiments, which demonstrated that our SAIS achieved comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approach SOS and outperformed other popular AIS approaches and evolutionary algorithms across 26 benchmark problems. Furthermore, we investigated the problem of parameter selection and found that SAIS performs better in handling larger population sizes while requiring fewer generations. Finally, we believe SAIS, as a novel bio-inspired and immune-inspired algorithm, paves the way for innovation in bio-inspired computing with the symbiotic paradigm.