Is Generative AI the Next Tactical Cyber Weapon For Threat Actors? Unforeseen Implications of AI Generated Cyber Attacks

In an era where digital threats are increasingly sophisticated, the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity presents both promising defenses and potent dangers. This paper delves into the escalating threat posed by the misuse of AI, specifically through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs). This study details various techniques like the switch method and character play method, which can be exploited by cybercriminals to generate and automate cyber attacks. Through a series of controlled experiments, the paper demonstrates how these models can be manipulated to bypass ethical and privacy safeguards to effectively generate cyber attacks such as social engineering, malicious code, payload generation, and spyware. By testing these AI generated attacks on live systems, the study assesses their effectiveness and the vulnerabilities they exploit, offering a practical perspective on the risks AI poses to critical infrastructure. We also introduce Occupy AI, a customized, finetuned LLM specifically engineered to automate and execute cyberattacks. This specialized AI driven tool is adept at crafting steps and generating executable code for a variety of cyber threats, including phishing, malware injection, and system exploitation. The results underscore the urgency for ethical AI practices, robust cybersecurity measures, and regulatory oversight to mitigate AI related threats. This paper aims to elevate awareness within the cybersecurity community about the evolving digital threat landscape, advocating for proactive defense strategies and responsible AI development to protect against emerging cyber threats.

Enhancing Retinal Disease Classification from OCTA Images via Active Learning Techniques

Eye diseases are common in older Americans and can lead to decreased vision and blindness. Recent advancements in imaging technologies allow clinicians to capture high-quality images of the retinal blood vessels via Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA), which contain vital information for diagnosing these diseases and expediting preventative measures. OCTA provides detailed vascular imaging as compared to the solely structural information obtained by common OCT imaging. Although there have been considerable studies on OCT imaging, there have been limited to no studies exploring the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches for predictive modeling with OCTA images. In this paper, we explore the use of deep learning to identify eye disease in OCTA images. However, due to the lack of labeled data, the straightforward application of deep learning doesn't necessarily yield good generalization. To this end, we utilize active learning to select the most valuable subset of data to train our model. We demonstrate that active learning subset selection greatly outperforms other strategies, such as inverse frequency class weighting, random undersampling, and oversampling, by up to 49% in F1 evaluation.

TTA-OOD: Test-time Augmentation for Improving Out-of-Distribution Detection in Gastrointestinal Vision

Deep learning has significantly advanced the field of gastrointestinal vision, enhancing disease diagnosis capabilities. One major challenge in automating diagnosis within gastrointestinal settings is the detection of abnormal cases in endoscopic images. Due to the sparsity of data, this process of distinguishing normal from abnormal cases has faced significant challenges, particularly with rare and unseen conditions. To address this issue, we frame abnormality detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem. In this setup, a model trained on In-Distribution (ID) data, which represents a healthy GI tract, can accurately identify healthy cases, while abnormalities are detected as OOD, regardless of their class. We introduce a test-time augmentation segment into the OOD detection pipeline, which enhances the distinction between ID and OOD examples, thereby improving the effectiveness of existing OOD methods with the same model. This augmentation shifts the pixel space, which translates into a more distinct semantic representation for OOD examples compared to ID examples. We evaluated our method against existing state-of-the-art OOD scores, showing improvements with test-time augmentation over the baseline approach.

CAR-MFL: Cross-Modal Augmentation by Retrieval for Multimodal Federated Learning with Missing Modalities

Multimodal AI has demonstrated superior performance over unimodal approaches by leveraging diverse data sources for more comprehensive analysis. However, applying this effectiveness in healthcare is challenging due to the limited availability of public datasets. Federated learning presents an exciting solution, allowing the use of extensive databases from hospitals and health centers without centralizing sensitive data, thus maintaining privacy and security. Yet, research in multimodal federated learning, particularly in scenarios with missing modalities a common issue in healthcare datasets remains scarce, highlighting a critical area for future exploration. Toward this, we propose a novel method for multimodal federated learning with missing modalities. Our contribution lies in a novel cross-modal data augmentation by retrieval, leveraging the small publicly available dataset to fill the missing modalities in the clients. Our method learns the parameters in a federated manner, ensuring privacy protection and improving performance in multiple challenging multimodal benchmarks in the medical domain, surpassing several competitive baselines. Code Available: https://github.com/bhattarailab/CAR-MFL

TE-SSL: Time and Event-aware Self Supervised Learning for Alzheimer's Disease Progression Analysis

Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) represents one of the most pressing challenges in the field of neurodegenerative disorders, with its progression analysis being crucial for understanding disease dynamics and developing targeted interventions. Recent advancements in deep learning and various representation learning strategies, including self-supervised learning (SSL), have shown significant promise in enhancing medical image analysis, providing innovative ways to extract meaningful patterns from complex data. Notably, the computer vision literature has demonstrated that incorporating supervisory signals into SSL can further augment model performance by guiding the learning process with additional relevant information. However, the application of such supervisory signals in the context of disease progression analysis remains largely unexplored. This gap is particularly pronounced given the inherent challenges of incorporating both event and time-to-event information into the learning paradigm. Addressing this, we propose a novel framework, Time and Even-aware SSL (TE-SSL), which integrates time-to-event and event data as supervisory signals to refine the learning process. Our comparative analysis with existing SSL-based methods in the downstream task of survival analysis shows superior performance across standard metrics.

Segmentation of Maya hieroglyphs through fine-tuned foundation models

The study of Maya hieroglyphic writing unlocks the rich history of cultural and societal knowledge embedded within this ancient civilization's visual narrative. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a novel lens through which we can translate these inscriptions, with the potential to allow non-specialists access to reading these texts and to aid in the decipherment of those hieroglyphs which continue to elude comprehensive interpretation. Toward this, we leverage a foundational model to segment Maya hieroglyphs from an open-source digital library dedicated to Maya artifacts. Despite the initial promise of publicly available foundational segmentation models, their effectiveness in accurately segmenting Maya hieroglyphs was initially limited. Addressing this challenge, our study involved the meticulous curation of image and label pairs with the assistance of experts in Maya art and history, enabling the fine-tuning of these foundational models. This process significantly enhanced model performance, illustrating the potential of fine-tuning approaches and the value of our expanding dataset. We plan to open-source this dataset for encouraging future research, and eventually to help make the hieroglyphic texts legible to a broader community, particularly for Maya heritage community members.

Multimodal Federated Learning in Healthcare: a review

Recent advancements in multimodal machine learning have empowered the development of accurate and robust AI systems in the medical domain, especially within centralized database systems. Simultaneously, Federated Learning (FL) has progressed, providing a decentralized mechanism where data need not be consolidated, thereby enhancing the privacy and security of sensitive healthcare data. The integration of these two concepts supports the ongoing progress of multimodal learning in healthcare while ensuring the security and privacy of patient records within local data-holding agencies. This paper offers a concise overview of the significance of FL in healthcare and outlines the current state-of-the-art approaches to Multimodal Federated Learning (MMFL) within the healthcare domain. It comprehensively examines the existing challenges in the field, shedding light on the limitations of present models. Finally, the paper outlines potential directions for future advancements in the field, aiming to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and the imperative need for patient data privacy in healthcare applications.