On the Privacy of LLMs: An Ablation Study

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive and retrieval-augmented settings, raising significant privacy concerns. While attacks such as Membership Inference (MIA), Attribute Inference (AIA), Data Extraction (DEA), and Backdoor Attacks (BA) have been studied, they are typically analyzed in isolation, leaving a gap in understanding their behavior under common system factors. In this paper, we introduce a unified threat model and notation, reproduce a representative set of privacy attacks, and conduct a structured ablation study to evaluate the impact of key factors such as model architecture, scale, dataset characteristics, and retrieval configuration. Our analysis reveals clear differences across attack types. Membership inference attacks, particularly mask-based variants, exhibit strong and reliable signals, while backdoor attacks achieve consistently high success rates due to their trigger-based nature. In contrast, attribute inference and data extraction attacks remain more challenging, resulting in lower accuracy, yet they pose significant risks as they target sensitive personal information. Overall, these results highlight that privacy risks in LLM systems are highly context-dependent and driven by design choices, emphasizing the need for holistic evaluation and informed deployment practices.

Reduced-Feedback Hybrid Precoding for Wideband mmWave MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this paper, we propose a feedback-efficient hybrid precoding framework for wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. To mitigate the high cost of radio frequency (RF) chains and channel state information (CSI) feedback in large-scale antenna arrays, we first construct frequency-flat analog precoders by extracting dominant angle-of-arrival (AoA) and angle-of-departure (AoD) directions from sparse frequency-domain channels. For digital precoding, we design a quantized codebook using the Lloyd algorithm and develop a binary-search-based hierarchical interpolation algorithm that adaptively assigns codewords according to subcarrier correlation. The proposed method achieves sub-linear feedback scaling by reducing the feedback overhead from O(K) to O(K/M + log M), where K is the number of subcarriers and M is the pilot spacing. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or superior spectral efficiency and bit error rate (BER) performance to existing clustering and interpolation schemes, while significantly reducing computational complexity and exhibiting robustness under imperfect CSI.

Covariance-Aware Goodness for Scalable Forward-Forward Learning

The Forward-Forward algorithm eliminates global gradient flow and full network activations storage. However, in convolutional settings, existing BP-free FF methods significantly under-perform backpropagation on complex benchmarks such as ImageNet-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We identify this gap as a structural bottleneck in goodness extraction: standard sum-of-squares formulation collapses feature volumes into channel-wise activation energies which omits critical second-order dependencies. To address this, we propose a framework centered on three key components. First, Bi-axis Covariance Goodness(BiCovG) explicitly augments the standard goodness function with structured second-order information along two axes: cross-channel projections that model inter-feature covariance, and nested multi-scale aggregation that encodes spatial correlation statistics. This provides a tractable approximation to covariance-aware goodness without the prohibitive O(C^2) complexity of explicit matrix estimation. Second, a lightweight Logistic Fusion module aggregates layer-wise predictions, amplifying the contribution of deeper representations. Third, the Feature Alignment Layer(FAL) introduces a zero-initialized correction at block boundaries to mitigate representation misalignment in deep locally trained networks. By introducing these three components, we effectively double the depth of viable Forward-Forward learning, extending robust layer utilization from shallow baselines to 16 layer architectures like VGG-16. The resulting BP-free model achieves 73.01% on ImageNet-100 and 50.30% on Tiny-ImageNet. As a practical extension, Hybrid Goodness Blocks control the scope of gradient propagation via configurable block sizes, further narrowing the ImageNet-100 gap to 3.6% and matching BP on Tiny-ImageNet, while still reducing peak memory by approximately 50% relative to BP.

TriBench-Ko: Evaluating LLM Risks in Judicial Workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into legal workflows. However, existing benchmarks primarily address proxy tasks, such as bar examination performance or classification, which fail to capture the performance and risks inherent in day-to-day judicial processes. To address this, we publicly release TriBench-Ko, a Korean benchmark designed to evaluate potential deployment risks of LLMs within the context of verified judicial task requirements. It covers four core tasks: jurisprudence summarization, precedent retrieval, legal issue extraction, and evidence analysis. It jointly assesses model behavior across multiple deployment risk categories, including inaccuracy (hallucination, omission, statutory misapplication), biases (demographic, overcompliance), inconsistencies (prompt sensitivity, non-determinism), and adjudicative overreach. Each item is structured to systematically assess both task performance and a specific risk type based on real judicial decisions. Our evaluation of a range of contemporary LLMs reveals that many models frequently manifest significant risks, most notably struggling with precedent retrieval and failing to capture critical legal information. We provide a comprehensive diagnosis of these LLMs and pinpoint critical areas where LLM-generated outputs in judicial contexts necessitate rigorous inspection and caution. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/holi-lab/TriBench-Ko

NoisyCausal: A Benchmark for Evaluating Causal Reasoning Under Structured Noise

Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding in LLMs.

APEX: Large-scale Multi-task Aesthetic-Informed Popularity Prediction for AI-Generated Music

Music popularity prediction has attracted growing research interest, with relevance to artists, platforms, and recommendation systems. However, the explosive rise of AI-generated music platforms has created an entirely new and largely unexplored landscape, where a surge of songs is produced and consumed daily without the traditional markers of artist reputation or label backing. Key, yet unexplored in this pursuit is aesthetic quality. We propose APEX, the first large-scale multi-task learning framework for AI-generated music, trained on over 211k songs (10k hours of audio) from Suno and Udio, that jointly predicts engagement-based popularity signals - streams and likes scores - alongside five perceptual aesthetic quality dimensions from frozen audio embeddings extracted from MERT, a self-supervised music understanding model. Aesthetic quality and popularity capture complementary aspects of music that together prove valuable: in an out-of-distribution evaluation on the Music Arena dataset, comprising pairwise human preference battles across eleven generative music systems unseen during training, including aesthetic features consistently improves preference prediction, demonstrating strong generalisation of the learned representations across generative architectures.

MAGIC: Multi-Step Advantage-Gated Causal Influence for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

A key challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies in designing learning signals that effectively promote coordination among agents. Designing such signals necessitates the ability to quantify the true, long-term causal influence between agents. To address this, we introduce Multi-step Advantage-Gated Interventional Causal MARL (MAGIC), a framework that extracts multi-step causal influences between agents and selectively converts them into intrinsic rewards. MAGIC uses causal intervention with conditional mutual information to quantify long-horizon agent influence, and introduces an advantage-based gating mechanism to ensure exploration is directed toward beneficial, goal-aligned behaviors. Experiments across multiple standard MARL benchmarks and task families, including MPE and SMAC/SMACv2, demonstrate that MAGIC outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin, achieving an improvement of at least 10.1% in the main evaluation metric.

RAFNet: Region-Aware Fusion Network for Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images. Although deep learning has advanced this field, mainstream frequency-based methods relying on standard scaled dot-product attention suffer from quadratic computational complexity and fail to exploit the inherent regional sparsity of remote sensing imagery. Furthermore, existing spatial enhancement strategies typically employ static convolution kernels, which struggle to adapt to the complex frequency and regional variations of PAN and MS images. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a Region-Aware Fusion (RAFNet) Network that synergistically models spatial and frequency information. Specifically, we design a Spatial Adaptive Refinement (SAR) module that leverages the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for directional frequency separation and K-means clustering for regional partitioning, which enables the dynamic construction of region-specific adaptive convolution kernels, achieving spatially and frequency-adaptive feature enhancement. Moreover, we introduce a Clustered Frequency Aggregation (CFA) module based on a sparse attention mechanism guided by the semantic clusters, which executes a region-aware sparse attention strategy that drastically reduces computational redundancy while ensuring high-quality frequency feature extraction. In addition we integrated these modules into a progressive, multi-level spatial-frequency network architecture to facilitate robust interaction and accurate image reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed RAFNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pansharpening methods in both reduced- and full-resolution assessments. The code is available at https://github.com/PatrickNod/RAFNet.

JSSFF: A Joint Structural-Semantic Fusion Framework for Remote Sensing Image Captioning

The encoder-decoder framework has become widely popular nowadays. In this model, the encoder extracts informative visual features from an input image, and the decoder employs a sequence-to-sequence formulation to generate the corresponding textual description from these features. The existing models focus more on the decision part. However, extracting meaningful information from the image can help the decoder generate an accurate caption by providing information about the objects and their relationship. Remote sensing images are highly complex. One major challenge is detecting objects that extend beyond their visible boundaries due to occlusion, overlapping structures, and unclear edges. Hence, there is a need to design an approach that can effectively capture both high-level semantics and low-level spatial details for accurate caption generation. In this work, we have proposed an edge-aware fusion method by incorporating the original image and its edge-aware version into the encoder to enhance feature representation and boundary awareness. We used a comparison-based beam search (CBBS) to generate captions to achieve a balanced trade-off between quantitative metrics and qualitative caption relevance through fairness-based comparison of candidate captions. Experimental results demonstrate our model's superiority over several baseline models in quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

GeoSAE: Geometric Prior-Guided Layer-Wise Sparse Autoencoder Annotation of Brain MRI Foundation Models

Brain MRI foundation models learn rich representations of anatomy, but interpreting what clinical information they encode remains an open problem. Standard sparse autoencoders (SAEs) suffer from severe feature collapse in deep transformer layers, and in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research, aging confounds nearly every clinical variable, making naive annotation unreliable. We propose GeoSAE, a geometry-guided SAE framework that uses the foundation model's learned manifold structure to prevent feature collapse and annotates each surviving feature via age-deconfounded partial correlations. Applied to ~14k T1-weighted MRI scans from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Australian Imaging biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) datasets, GeoSAE identifies a compact, fully interpretable feature set that predicts mild cognitive impairment (MCI)-to-AD conversion (AUC 0.746) using only 2% of the embedding dimensions, while comorbidity-annotated features achieve only chance-level performance. The identified features replicate across cohorts without retraining (r=0.97) and localize to neuroanatomically distinct regions consistent with Braak staging. This shows that geometry-guided SAEs can extract interpretable, biomarkers from frozen brain MRI foundation models.