Does Privacy Always Harm Fairness? Data-Dependent Trade-offs via Chernoff Information Neural Estimation

Fairness and privacy are two vital pillars of trustworthy machine learning. Despite extensive research on these individual topics, the relationship between fairness and privacy has received significantly less attention. In this paper, we utilize the information-theoretic measure Chernoff Information to highlight the data-dependent nature of the relationship among the triad of fairness, privacy, and accuracy. We first define Noisy Chernoff Difference, a tool that allows us to analyze the relationship among the triad simultaneously. We then show that for synthetic data, this value behaves in 3 distinct ways (depending on the distribution of the data). We highlight the data distributions involved in these cases and explore their fairness and privacy implications. Additionally, we show that Noisy Chernoff Difference acts as a proxy for the steepness of the fairness-accuracy curves. Finally, we propose a method for estimating Chernoff Information on data from unknown distributions and utilize this framework to examine the triad dynamic on real datasets. This work builds towards a unified understanding of the fairness-privacy-accuracy relationship and highlights its data-dependent nature.

Diffusion Large Language Models for Black-Box Optimization

Offline black-box optimization (BBO) aims to find optimal designs based solely on an offline dataset of designs and their labels. Such scenarios frequently arise in domains like DNA sequence design and robotics, where only a few labeled data points are available. Traditional methods typically rely on task-specific proxy or generative models, overlooking the in-context learning capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Recent efforts have adapted autoregressive LLMs to BBO by framing task descriptions and offline datasets as natural language prompts, enabling direct design generation. However, these designs often contain bidirectional dependencies, which left-to-right models struggle to capture. In this paper, we explore diffusion LLMs for BBO, leveraging their bidirectional modeling and iterative refinement capabilities. This motivates our in-context denoising module: we condition the diffusion LLM on the task description and the offline dataset, both formatted in natural language, and prompt it to denoise masked designs into improved candidates. To guide the generation toward high-performing designs, we introduce masked diffusion tree search, which casts the denoising process as a step-wise Monte Carlo Tree Search that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation. Each node represents a partially masked design, each denoising step is an action, and candidates are evaluated via expected improvement under a Gaussian Process trained on the offline dataset. Our method, dLLM, achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot settings on design-bench.

Seeing Beyond the Image: ECG and Anatomical Knowledge-Guided Myocardial Scar Segmentation from Late Gadolinium-Enhanced Images

Accurate segmentation of myocardial scar from late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac MRI is essential for evaluating tissue viability, yet remains challenging due to variable contrast and imaging artifacts. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals provide complementary physiological information, as conduction abnormalities can help localize or suggest scarred myocardial regions. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal framework that integrates ECG-derived electrophysiological information with anatomical priors from the AHA-17 atlas for physiologically consistent LGE-based scar segmentation. As ECGs and LGE-MRIs are not acquired simultaneously, we introduce a Temporal Aware Feature Fusion (TAFF) mechanism that dynamically weights and fuses features based on their acquisition time difference. Our method was evaluated on a clinical dataset and achieved substantial gains over the state-of-the-art image-only baseline (nnU-Net), increasing the average Dice score for scars from 0.6149 to 0.8463 and achieving high performance in both precision (0.9115) and sensitivity (0.9043). These results show that integrating physiological and anatomical knowledge allows the model to "see beyond the image", setting a new direction for robust and physiologically grounded cardiac scar segmentation.

ORCA: Agentic Reasoning For Hallucination and Adversarial Robustness in Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucinations from intrinsic errors and adversarial attacks from external exploitations, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. We present ORCA, an agentic reasoning framework that improves the factual accuracy and adversarial robustness of pretrained LVLMs through test-time structured inference reasoning with a suite of small vision models (less than 3B parameters). ORCA operates via an Observe--Reason--Critique--Act loop, querying multiple visual tools with evidential questions, validating cross-model inconsistencies, and refining predictions iteratively without access to model internals or retraining. ORCA also stores intermediate reasoning traces, which supports auditable decision-making. Though designed primarily to mitigate object-level hallucinations, ORCA also exhibits emergent adversarial robustness without requiring adversarial training or defense mechanisms. We evaluate ORCA across three settings: (1) clean images on hallucination benchmarks, (2) adversarially perturbed images without defense, and (3) adversarially perturbed images with defense applied. On the POPE hallucination benchmark, ORCA improves standalone LVLM performance by +3.64\% to +40.67\% across different subsets. Under adversarial perturbations on POPE, ORCA achieves an average accuracy gain of +20.11\% across LVLMs. When combined with defense techniques on adversarially perturbed AMBER images, ORCA further improves standalone LVLM performance, with gains ranging from +1.20\% to +48.00\% across evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate that ORCA offers a promising path toward building more reliable and robust multimodal systems.

CLAIM: Clinically-Guided LGE Augmentation for Realistic and Diverse Myocardial Scar Synthesis and Segmentation

Deep learning-based myocardial scar segmentation from late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MRI has shown great potential for accurate and timely diagnosis and treatment planning for structural cardiac diseases. However, the limited availability and variability of LGE images with high-quality scar labels restrict the development of robust segmentation models. To address this, we introduce CLAIM: \textbf{C}linically-Guided \textbf{L}GE \textbf{A}ugmentation for Real\textbf{i}stic and Diverse \textbf{M}yocardial Scar Synthesis and Segmentation framework, a framework for anatomically grounded scar generation and segmentation. At its core is the SMILE module (Scar Mask generation guided by cLinical knowledgE), which conditions a diffusion-based generator on the clinically adopted AHA 17-segment model to synthesize images with anatomically consistent and spatially diverse scar patterns. In addition, CLAIM employs a joint training strategy in which the scar segmentation network is optimized alongside the generator, aiming to enhance both the realism of synthesized scars and the accuracy of the scar segmentation performance. Experimental results show that CLAIM produces anatomically coherent scar patterns and achieves higher Dice similarity with real scar distributions compared to baseline models. Our approach enables controllable and realistic myocardial scar synthesis and has demonstrated utility for downstream medical imaging task.

PASS: Private Attributes Protection with Stochastic Data Substitution

The growing Machine Learning (ML) services require extensive collections of user data, which may inadvertently include people's private information irrelevant to the services. Various studies have been proposed to protect private attributes by removing them from the data while maintaining the utilities of the data for downstream tasks. Nevertheless, as we theoretically and empirically show in the paper, these methods reveal severe vulnerability because of a common weakness rooted in their adversarial training based strategies. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach, PASS, designed to stochastically substitute the original sample with another one according to certain probabilities, which is trained with a novel loss function soundly derived from information-theoretic objective defined for utility-preserving private attributes protection. The comprehensive evaluation of PASS on various datasets of different modalities, including facial images, human activity sensory signals, and voice recording datasets, substantiates PASS's effectiveness and generalizability.

MAPLE: A Mobile Assistant with Persistent Finite State Machines for Recovery Reasoning

Mobile GUI agents aim to autonomously complete user-instructed tasks across mobile apps. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable these agents to interpret UI screens, identify actionable elements, and perform interactions such as tapping or typing. However, existing agents remain reactive: they reason only over the current screen and lack a structured model of app navigation flow, limiting their ability to understand context, detect unexpected outcomes, and recover from errors. We present MAPLE, a state-aware multi-agent framework that abstracts app interactions as a Finite State Machine (FSM). We computationally model each UI screen as a discrete state and user actions as transitions, allowing the FSM to provide a structured representation of the app execution. MAPLE consists of specialized agents responsible for four phases of task execution: planning, execution, verification, error recovery, and knowledge retention. These agents collaborate to dynamically construct FSMs in real time based on perception data extracted from the UI screen, allowing the GUI agents to track navigation progress and flow, validate action outcomes through pre- and post-conditions of the states, and recover from errors by rolling back to previously stable states. Our evaluation results on two challenging cross-app benchmarks, Mobile-Eval-E and SPA-Bench, show that MAPLE outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline, improving task success rate by up to 12%, recovery success by 13.8%, and action accuracy by 6.5%. Our results highlight the importance of structured state modeling in guiding mobile GUI agents during task execution. Moreover, our FSM representation can be integrated into future GUI agent architectures as a lightweight, model-agnostic memory layer to support structured planning, execution verification, and error recovery.

Hydra: An Agentic Reasoning Approach for Enhancing Adversarial Robustness and Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models

To develop trustworthy Vision-Language Models (VLMs), it is essential to address adversarial robustness and hallucination mitigation, both of which impact factual accuracy in high-stakes applications such as defense and healthcare. Existing methods primarily focus on either adversarial defense or hallucination post-hoc correction, leaving a gap in unified robustness strategies. We introduce \textbf{Hydra}, an adaptive agentic framework that enhances plug-in VLMs through iterative reasoning, structured critiques, and cross-model verification, improving both resilience to adversarial perturbations and intrinsic model errors. Hydra employs an Action-Critique Loop, where it retrieves and critiques visual information, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and In-Context Learning (ICL) techniques to refine outputs dynamically. Unlike static post-hoc correction methods, Hydra adapts to both adversarial manipulations and intrinsic model errors, making it robust to malicious perturbations and hallucination-related inaccuracies. We evaluate Hydra on four VLMs, three hallucination benchmarks, two adversarial attack strategies, and two adversarial defense methods, assessing performance on both clean and adversarial inputs. Results show that Hydra surpasses plug-in VLMs and state-of-the-art (SOTA) dehallucination methods, even without explicit adversarial defenses, demonstrating enhanced robustness and factual consistency. By bridging adversarial resistance and hallucination mitigation, Hydra provides a scalable, training-free solution for improving the reliability of VLMs in real-world applications.

RobuNFR: Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models on Non-Functional Requirements Aware Code Generation

When using LLMs to address Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), developers may behave differently (e.g., expressing the same NFR in different words). Robust LLMs should output consistent results across these variations; however, this aspect remains underexplored. We propose RobuNFR for evaluating the robustness of LLMs in NFR-aware code generation across four NFR dimensions: design, readability, reliability, and performance, using three methodologies: prompt variation, regression testing, and diverse workflows. Our experiments show that RobuNFR reveals robustness issues in the tested LLMs when considering NFRs in code generation. Specifically, under prompt variation, including NFRs leads to a decrease in Pass@1 by up to 39 percent and an increase in the standard deviation from 0.48 to 2.48 compared to the baseline without NFRs (i.e., Function-Only). While incorporating NFRs generally improves overall NFR metrics, it also results in higher prompt sensitivity. In regression settings, some LLMs exhibit differences across versions, with improvements in one aspect (e.g., reduced code smells) often accompanied by regressions in another (e.g., decreased correctness), revealing inconsistencies that challenge their robustness. When varying workflows, the tested LLMs show significantly different NFR-aware code generation capabilities between two workflows: (1) integrating NFRs and functional requirements into the initial prompt and (2) enhancing Function-Only-generated code with the same NFR.

Exploring Code Language Models for Automated HLS-based Hardware Generation: Benchmark, Infrastructure and Analysis

Recent advances in code generation have illuminated the potential of employing large language models (LLMs) for general-purpose programming languages such as Python and C++, opening new opportunities for automating software development and enhancing programmer productivity. The potential of LLMs in software programming has sparked significant interest in exploring automated hardware generation and automation. Although preliminary endeavors have been made to adopt LLMs in generating hardware description languages (HDLs), several challenges persist in this direction. First, the volume of available HDL training data is substantially smaller compared to that for software programming languages. Second, the pre-trained LLMs, mainly tailored for software code, tend to produce HDL designs that are more error-prone. Third, the generation of HDL requires a significantly higher number of tokens compared to software programming, leading to inefficiencies in cost and energy consumption. To tackle these challenges, this paper explores leveraging LLMs to generate High-Level Synthesis (HLS)-based hardware design. Although code generation for domain-specific programming languages is not new in the literature, we aim to provide experimental results, insights, benchmarks, and evaluation infrastructure to investigate the suitability of HLS over low-level HDLs for LLM-assisted hardware design generation. To achieve this, we first finetune pre-trained models for HLS-based hardware generation, using a collected dataset with text prompts and corresponding reference HLS designs. An LLM-assisted framework is then proposed to automate end-to-end hardware code generation, which also investigates the impact of chain-of-thought and feedback loops promoting techniques on HLS-design generation. Limited by the timeframe of this research, we plan to evaluate more advanced reasoning models in the future.