Research Papers

Deepfakes represent one of the toughest challenges in the world of Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics, especially considering the high-quality results obtained with recent generative AI-based solutions. Almost all generative models leave unique traces in synthetic data that, if analyzed and identified in detail, can be exploited to improve the generalization limitations of existing deepfake detectors. In this paper we analyzed deepfake images in the frequency domain generated by both GAN and Diffusion Model engines, examining in detail the underlying statistical distribution of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients. Recognizing that not all coefficients contribute equally to image detection, we hypothesize the existence of a unique ``discriminative fingerprint", embedded in specific combinations of coefficients. To identify them, Machine Learning classifiers were trained on various combinations of coefficients. In addition, the Explainable AI (XAI) LIME algorithm was used to search for intrinsic discriminative combinations of coefficients. Finally, we performed a robustness test to analyze the persistence of traces by applying JPEG compression. The experimental results reveal the existence of traces left by the generative models that are more discriminative and persistent at JPEG attacks. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/opontorno/dcts_analysis_deepfakes.

Artificial intelligence-empowred Real-Time Bidding (AIRTB) is regarded as one of the most enabling technologies for online advertising. It has attracted significant research attention from diverse fields such as pattern recognition, game theory and mechanism design. Despite of its remarkable development and deployment, the AIRTB system can sometimes harm the interest of its participants (e.g., depleting the advertisers' budget with various kinds of fraud). As such, building trustworthy AIRTB auctioning systems has emerged as an important direction of research in this field in recent years. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of this field and a lack of a comprehensive survey, it is a challenge for researchers to enter this field and contribute towards building trustworthy AIRTB technologies. This paper bridges this important gap in trustworthy AIRTB literature. We start by analysing the key concerns of various AIRTB stakeholders and identify three main dimensions of trust building in AIRTB, namely security, robustness and fairness. For each of these dimensions, we propose a unique taxonomy of the state of the art, trace the root causes of possible breakdown of trust, and discuss the necessity of the given dimension. This is followed by a comprehensive review of existing strategies for fulfilling the requirements of each trust dimension. In addition, we discuss the promising future directions of research essential towards building trustworthy AIRTB systems to benefit the field of online advertising.

There is still a significant gap between expectations and the successful adoption of AI to innovate and improve businesses. Due to the emergence of deep learning, AI adoption is more complex as it often incorporates big data and the internet of things, affecting data privacy. Existing frameworks have identified the need to focus on human-centered design, combining technical and business/organizational perspectives. However, trust remains a critical issue that needs to be designed from the beginning. The proposed framework expands from the human-centered design approach, emphasizing and maintaining the trust that underpins the process. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for responsible artificial intelligence (AI) implementation. The proposed framework emphasizes a synergistic business technology approach for the agile co-creation process. The aim is to streamline the adoption process of AI to innovate and improve business by involving all stakeholders throughout the project so that the AI technology is designed, developed, and deployed in conjunction with people and not in isolation. The framework presents a fresh viewpoint on responsible AI implementation based on analytical literature review, conceptual framework design, and practitioners' mediating expertise. The framework emphasizes establishing and maintaining trust throughout the human-centered design and agile development of AI. This human-centered approach is aligned with and enabled by the privacy by design principle. The creators of the technology and the end-users are working together to tailor the AI solution specifically for the business requirements and human characteristics. An illustrative case study on adopting AI for assisting planning in a hospital will demonstrate that the proposed framework applies to real-life applications.

This article examines the concept of 'AI fairness' for people with disabilities from the perspective of data protection and equality law. This examination demonstrates that there is a need for a distinctive approach to AI fairness that is fundamentally different to that used for other protected characteristics, due to the different ways in which discrimination and data protection law applies in respect of Disability. We articulate this new agenda for AI fairness for people with disabilities, explaining how combining data protection and equality law creates new opportunities for disabled people's organisations and assistive technology researchers alike to shape the use of AI, as well as to challenge potential harmful uses.

The rapid integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into critical applications is increasingly hindered by persistent safety vulnerabilities. However, existing red-teaming benchmarks are often fragmented, limited to single-turn text interactions, and lack the scalability required for systematic evaluation. To address this, we introduce OpenRT, a unified, modular, and high-throughput red-teaming framework designed for comprehensive MLLM safety evaluation. At its core, OpenRT architects a paradigm shift in automated red-teaming by introducing an adversarial kernel that enables modular separation across five critical dimensions: model integration, dataset management, attack strategies, judging methods, and evaluation metrics. By standardizing attack interfaces, it decouples adversarial logic from a high-throughput asynchronous runtime, enabling systematic scaling across diverse models. Our framework integrates 37 diverse attack methodologies, spanning white-box gradients, multi-modal perturbations, and sophisticated multi-agent evolutionary strategies. Through an extensive empirical study on 20 advanced models (including GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro), we expose critical safety gaps: even frontier models fail to generalize across attack paradigms, with leading models exhibiting average Attack Success Rates as high as 49.14%. Notably, our findings reveal that reasoning models do not inherently possess superior robustness against complex, multi-turn jailbreaks. By open-sourcing OpenRT, we provide a sustainable, extensible, and continuously maintained infrastructure that accelerates the development and standardization of AI safety.

The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities

Yoshua Bengio, Tegan Maharaj, Luke Ong +85

Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to ensure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy, reliable, and secure. Building a trusted ecosystem is therefore essential -- it helps people embrace AI with confidence and gives maximal space for innovation while avoiding backlash. The "2025 Singapore Conference on AI (SCAI): International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety" aimed to support research in this space by bringing together AI scientists across geographies to identify and synthesise research priorities in AI safety. This resulting report builds on the International AI Safety Report chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by 33 governments. By adopting a defence-in-depth model, this report organises AI safety research domains into three types: challenges with creating trustworthy AI systems (Development), challenges with evaluating their risks (Assessment), and challenges with monitoring and intervening after deployment (Control).

As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.

This article examines the ethical and legal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) driven data collection, focusing on developments from 2023 to 2024. It analyzes recent advancements in AI technologies and their impact on data collection practices across various sectors. The study compares regulatory approaches in the European Union, the United States, and China, highlighting the challenges in creating a globally harmonized framework for AI governance. Key ethical issues, including informed consent, algorithmic bias, and privacy protection, are critically assessed in the context of increasingly sophisticated AI systems. The research explores case studies in healthcare, finance, and smart cities to illustrate the practical challenges of AI implementation. It evaluates the effectiveness of current legal frameworks and proposes solutions encompassing legal and policy recommendations, technical safeguards, and ethical frameworks. The article emphasizes the need for adaptive governance and international cooperation to address the global nature of AI development while balancing innovation with the protection of individual rights and societal values.

This article examines the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) regulation in financial services, detailing the legal frameworks and compliance challenges posed by rapid technological adoption. By reviewing current legislation, industry guidelines, and real-world use cases, it highlights how AI-driven processes, from fraud detection to algorithmic trading, offer efficiency gains yet introduce significant risks, including algorithmic bias, data privacy breaches, and lack of transparency in automated decision-making. The study compares regulatory approaches across major jurisdictions such as the European Union, United States, and United Kingdom, identifying both universal concerns, like the need for explainability and robust data protection, and region-specific compliance requirements that impact the implementation of high-risk AI applications. Additionally, it underscores emerging areas of focus, such as liability for AI-driven errors, systemic risks posed by interlinked AI systems, and the ethical considerations of technology-driven financial exclusion. The findings reveal gaps in existing rules and emphasize the necessity for adaptive, technology-neutral policies capable of fostering innovation while safeguarding consumer rights and market integrity. The article concludes by proposing a principled regulatory model that balances flexibility with enforceable standards, advocating closer collaboration between policymakers, financial institutions, and AI developers to ensure a secure, fair, and forward-looking framework for AI in finance.

In the evolving landscape of autonomous vehicles, ensuring robust in-vehicle network (IVN) security is paramount. This paper introduces an advanced intrusion detection system (IDS) called KD-XVAE that uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based knowledge distillation approach to enhance both performance and efficiency. Our model significantly reduces complexity, operating with just 1669 parameters and achieving an inference time of 0.3 ms per batch, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained automotive environments. Evaluations in the HCRL Car-Hacking dataset demonstrate exceptional capabilities, attaining perfect scores (Recall, Precision, F1 Score of 100%, and FNR of 0%) under multiple attack types, including DoS, Fuzzing, Gear Spoofing, and RPM Spoofing. Comparative analysis on the CICIoV2024 dataset further underscores its superiority over traditional machine learning models, achieving perfect detection metrics. We furthermore integrate Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to ensure transparency in the model's decisions. The VAE compresses the original feature space into a latent space, on which the distilled model is trained. SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations) values provide insights into the importance of each latent dimension, mapped back to original features for intuitive understanding. Our paper advances the field by integrating state-of-the-art techniques, addressing critical challenges in the deployment of efficient, trustworthy, and reliable IDSes for autonomous vehicles, ensuring enhanced protection against emerging cyber threats.

Machine Learning (ML) models integrated with in-situ sensing offer transformative solutions for defect detection in Additive Manufacturing (AM), but this integration brings critical challenges in safeguarding sensitive data, such as part designs and material compositions. Differential Privacy (DP), which introduces mathematically controlled noise, provides a balance between data utility and privacy. However, black-box Artificial Intelligence (AI) models often obscure how this noise impacts model accuracy, complicating the optimization of privacy-accuracy trade-offs. This study introduces the Differential Privacy-Hyperdimensional Computing (DP-HD) framework, a novel approach combining Explainable AI (XAI) and vector symbolic paradigms to quantify and predict noise effects on accuracy using a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) metric. DP-HD enables precise tuning of DP noise levels, ensuring an optimal balance between privacy and performance. The framework has been validated using real-world AM data, demonstrating its applicability to industrial environments. Experimental results demonstrate DP-HD's capability to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy (94.43%) with robust privacy protections in anomaly detection for AM, even under significant noise conditions. Beyond AM, DP-HD holds substantial promise for broader applications in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare, financial services, and government data management, where securing sensitive data while maintaining high ML performance is paramount.

Recent advancements in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), integrating Explainable AI (XAI) methodologies, have led to notable improvements in system performance via precise feature selection. However, a thorough understanding of cyber-attacks requires inherently explainable decision-making processes within IDS. In this paper, we present the Interpretable Generalization Mechanism (IG), poised to revolutionize IDS capabilities. IG discerns coherent patterns, making it interpretable in distinguishing between normal and anomalous network traffic. Further, the synthesis of coherent patterns sheds light on intricate intrusion pathways, providing essential insights for cybersecurity forensics. By experiments with real-world datasets NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and UKM-IDS20, IG is accurate even at a low ratio of training-to-test. With 10%-to-90%, IG achieves Precision (PRE)=0.93, Recall (REC)=0.94, and Area Under Curve (AUC)=0.94 in NSL-KDD; PRE=0.98, REC=0.99, and AUC=0.99 in UNSW-NB15; and PRE=0.98, REC=0.98, and AUC=0.99 in UKM-IDS20. Notably, in UNSW-NB15, IG achieves REC=1.0 and at least PRE=0.98 since 40%-to-60%; in UKM-IDS20, IG achieves REC=1.0 and at least PRE=0.88 since 20%-to-80%. Importantly, in UKM-IDS20, IG successfully identifies all three anomalous instances without prior exposure, demonstrating its generalization capabilities. These results and inferences are reproducible. In sum, IG showcases superior generalization by consistently performing well across diverse datasets and training-to-test ratios (from 10%-to-90% to 90%-to-10%), and excels in identifying novel anomalies without prior exposure. Its interpretability is enhanced by coherent evidence that accurately distinguishes both normal and anomalous activities, significantly improving detection accuracy and reducing false alarms, thereby strengthening IDS reliability and trustworthiness.