arXiv subjects

Pulei Xiong

Publications and source records attributed to Pulei Xiong.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Improving Methodologies for Agentic Evaluations Across Domains: Leakage of Sensitive Information, Fraud and Cybersecurity Threats

The rapid rise of autonomous AI systems and advancements in agent capabilities are introducing new risks due to reduced oversight of real-world interactions. Yet agent testing remains nascent and is still a developing science. As AI agents begin to be deployed globally, it is important that they handle different languages and cultures accurately and securely. To address this, participants from The International Network for Advanced AI Measurement, Evaluation and Science, including representatives from Singapore, Japan, Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Kenya, South Korea, and the United Kingdom have come together to align approaches to agentic evaluations. This is the third exercise, building on insights from two earlier joint testing exercises conducted by the Network in November 2024 and February 2025. The objective is to further refine best practices for testing advanced AI systems. The exercise was split into two strands: (1) common risks, including leakage of sensitive information and fraud, led by Singapore AISI; and (2) cybersecurity, led by UK AISI. A mix of open and closed-weight models were evaluated against tasks from various public agentic benchmarks. Given the nascency of agentic testing, our primary focus was on understanding methodological issues in conducting such tests, rather than examining test results or model capabilities. This collaboration marks an important step forward as participants work together to advance the science of agentic evaluations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A Benchmark for Evaluating Outcome-Driven Constraint Violations in Autonomous AI Agents

As autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring their safety and alignment with human values is becoming a practical deployment concern. Current benchmarks for AI agents primarily evaluate refusal of explicitly harmful instructions or completion of complex multi-step tasks. However, there is a lack of benchmarks designed to capture emergent outcome-driven constraint violations, which arise when agents pursue goal optimization under strong performance incentives while deprioritizing ethical, legal, or safety constraints. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark of 40 scenarios in production-inspired sandbox environments. Each scenario requires multi-step actions, and the agent's performance is tied to a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Each scenario features Mandated (direct KPI-outcome mandate) and Incentivized (KPI-pressure-driven) variations to distinguish failures under direct outcome mandates from self-directed constraint violations. Across 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations ranging from 0.0% to 62.8%, with most evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates at or above 25%. Furthermore, through a cross-generational analysis comparing current models with their predecessors within the same product families, we find that safety does not reliably improve across generations: misalignment rates rose in four families and fell in five. To improve evaluation robustness, we score trajectories with a four-model judge panel aggregated by median, finding high agreement on the primary misalignment threshold. We also observe substantial deliberative misalignment: cases where models later judge their own trajectories as unethical despite having executed them under KPI pressure.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Privacy-Preserving Explainable AIoT Application via SHAP Entropy Regularization

The widespread integration of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) in smart home environments has amplified the demand for transparent and interpretable machine learning models. To foster user trust and comply with emerging regulatory frameworks, the Explainable AI (XAI) methods, particularly post-hoc techniques such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), are widely employed to elucidate model behavior. However, recent studies have shown that these explanation methods can inadvertently expose sensitive user attributes and behavioral patterns, thereby introducing new privacy risks. To address these concerns, we propose a novel privacy-preserving approach based on SHAP entropy regularization to mitigate privacy leakage in explainable AIoT applications. Our method incorporates an entropy-based regularization objective that penalizes low-entropy SHAP attribution distributions during training, promoting a more uniform spread of feature contributions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a suite of SHAP-based privacy attacks that strategically leverage model explanation outputs to infer sensitive information. We validate our method through comparative evaluations using these attacks alongside utility metrics on benchmark smart home energy consumption datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SHAP entropy regularization substantially reduces privacy leakage compared to baseline models, while maintaining high predictive accuracy and faithful explanation fidelity. This work contributes to the development of privacy-preserving explainable AI techniques for secure and trustworthy AIoT applications.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of IoT Intrusion Detection via SHAP-Based Attribution Fingerprinting

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has transformed numerous industries by enabling seamless connectivity and data-driven automation. However, this expansion has also exposed IoT networks to increasingly sophisticated security threats, including adversarial attacks targeting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) to deliberately evade detection, induce misclassification, and systematically undermine the reliability and integrity of security defenses. To address these challenges, we propose a novel adversarial detection model that enhances the robustness of IoT IDS against adversarial attacks through SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)-based fingerprinting. Using SHAP's DeepExplainer, we extract attribution fingerprints from network traffic features, enabling the IDS to reliably distinguish between clean and adversarially perturbed inputs. By capturing subtle attribution patterns, the model becomes more resilient to evasion attempts and adversarial manipulations. We evaluated the model on a standard IoT benchmark dataset, where it significantly outperformed a state-of-the-art method in detecting adversarial attacks. In addition to enhanced robustness, this approach improves model transparency and interpretability, thereby increasing trust in the IDS through explainable AI.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

NegRefine: Refining Negative Label-Based Zero-Shot OOD Detection

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models like CLIP have enabled zero-shot OOD detection by leveraging both image and textual label information. Among these, negative label-based methods such as NegLabel and CSP have shown promising results by utilizing a lexicon of words to define negative labels for distinguishing OOD samples. However, these methods suffer from detecting in-distribution samples as OOD due to negative labels that are subcategories of in-distribution labels or proper nouns. They also face limitations in handling images that match multiple in-distribution and negative labels. We propose NegRefine, a novel negative label refinement framework for zero-shot OOD detection. By introducing a filtering mechanism to exclude subcategory labels and proper nouns from the negative label set and incorporating a multi-matching-aware scoring function that dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple labels matching an image, NegRefine ensures a more robust separation between in-distribution and OOD samples. We evaluate NegRefine on large-scale benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K. The code is available at https://github.com/ah-ansari/NegRefine.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Towards integration of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a crucial pathway in mitigating the risk of non-transparency in the decision-making process of black-box Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. However, despite the benefits, XAI methods are found to leak the privacy of individuals whose data is used in training or querying the models. Researchers have demonstrated privacy attacks that exploit explanations to infer sensitive personal information of individuals. Currently there is a lack of defenses against known privacy attacks targeting explanations when vulnerable XAI are used in production and machine learning as a service system. To address this gap, in this article, we explore Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) as a defense mechanism against attribute inference on explanations provided by feature-based XAI methods. We empirically evaluate 3 types of PETs, namely synthetic training data, differentially private training and noise addition, on two categories of feature-based XAI. Our evaluation determines different responses from the mitigation methods and side-effects of PETs on other system properties such as utility and performance. In the best case, PETs integration in explanations reduced the risk of the attack by 49.47%, while maintaining model utility and explanation quality. Through our evaluation, we identify strategies for using PETs in XAI for maximizing benefits and minimizing the success of this privacy attack on sensitive personal information.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Towards a Robust and Trustworthy Machine Learning System Development: An Engineering Perspective

While Machine Learning (ML) technologies are widely adopted in many mission critical fields to support intelligent decision-making, concerns remain about system resilience against ML-specific security attacks and privacy breaches as well as the trust that users have in these systems. In this article, we present our recent systematic and comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art ML robustness and trustworthiness from a security engineering perspective, focusing on the problems in system threat analysis, design and evaluation faced in developing practical machine learning applications, in terms of robustness and user trust. Accordingly, we organize the presentation of this survey intended to facilitate the convey of the body of knowledge from this angle. We then describe a metamodel we created that represents the body of knowledge in a standard and visualized way. We further illustrate how to leverage the metamodel to guide a systematic threat analysis and security design process which extends and scales up the classic process. Finally, we propose the future research directions motivated by our findings. Our work differs itself from the existing surveys by (i) exploring the fundamental principles and best practices to support robust and trustworthy ML system development, and (ii) studying the interplay of robustness and user trust in the context of ML systems. We expect this survey provides a big picture for machine learning security practitioners.

cs.LG↗