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Yuqi Qiu

Publications and source records attributed to Yuqi Qiu.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Ollama in the Wild: A Longitudinal Measurement of Exposed Ollama LLM Endpoints at Internet Scale

Self-hosted large language model (LLM) serving is emerging as a distinct category of Internet service, but we still know little about how these deployments appear and change on the public Internet. We present a 365-day longitudinal measurement of exposed Ollama endpoints (port 11434) from February 2025 to February 2026, combining daily active probing with GeoIP/ASN enrichment, PTR and port-443 host observations, and survival analysis. Across 362 observation days and approximately 4.8 million IP$\times$day observations, 26.4% of the 152,137 cumulative IPs appear for a single day; across five selected CVEs, only 0.43-2.90% of below-fix IPs upgraded in place; the top five countries/regions account for over 70% of weighted observations; and cloud and hosting providers dominate the top ASNs. These results characterize exposed Ollama as a structural exposure surface: persistent, growing, and heavily concentrated. At the same time, old versions, common model choices, cloud and hosting ASNs, PTR categories, and TLS certificate patterns remain visible across the year, indicating recurring insecure deployment practices in cloud infrastructure and the potential reach of provider-level mitigation.

cs.NI

aCAPTCHA: Verifying That an Entity Is a Capable Agent via Asymmetric Hardness

As autonomous AI agents increasingly populate the Internet, a novel security challenge arises: "Is this entity an AI agent?" It is a new entity-type verification problem with no established solution. We formalize the problem through a three-class entity taxonomy (Human, Script, Agent) based on a verifiable agentic capability vector (action, reasoning, and memory). A timing threshold t exploits the asymmetric hardness between human cognition and AI processing to separate the three classes. We define the Agentic Capability Verification Problem (ACVP) through three necessity primitives, each testing one capability dimension. Building on this foundation, we introduce aCAPTCHA (Agent CAPTCHA), a time-constrained security game for agent admission whose security rests on ACVP hardness under t. We instantiate aCAPTCHA through time-bounded natural-language understanding as a multi-round HTTP verification protocol, and evaluate it with preliminary agent trials that validate the protocol's soundness and completeness. aCAPTCHA provides a composable, infrastructure-free admission gate for any service where entity-type verification is required.

cs.CR

XMap: Fast Internet-wide IPv4 and IPv6 Network Scanner

XMap is an open-source network scanner designed for performing fast Internet-wide IPv4 and IPv6 network research scanning. XMap was initially developed as the research artifact of a paper published at 2021 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '21) and then made available on GitHub. XMap is the first tool to support fast Internet-wide IPv6 network scanning in 2020. During the last five years, XMap has made substantial impact in academia, industry, and government. It has been referenced in 52 research papers (15 published at top-tier security venues and 11 in leading networking societies), received over 450 GitHub stars, featured in multiple news outlets, and deployed or recommended by international companies up to date. Additionally, XMap has contributed to the implementation of RFC documents and the discovery of various vulnerabilities. This paper provides fundamental details about XMap, its architecture, and its impact.

cs.CR

GhostCite: A Large-Scale Analysis of Citation Validity in the Age of Large Language Models

Citations provide the basis for trusting scientific claims; when they are invalid or fabricated, this trust collapses. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), this risk has intensified: LLMs are increasingly used for academic writing, but their tendency to fabricate citations (``ghost citations'') poses a systemic threat to citation validity. To quantify this threat, we develop \citeb, an open-source framework for large-scale citation verification, and conduct a comprehensive study of citation validity in the LLM era through three complementary experiments. First, we benchmark 13 LLMs on citation generation task in various research domains, finding that all models hallucinate citations at rate from 14.23\% to 94.93\%. Second, we analyze 2.2 million citations from 56,381 papers at AI/ML and Security venues (2020--2025), finding that 1.07\% of papers contain invalid citations, with an 80.9\% increase in 2025. Third, we survey 97 researchers, finding that 87.2\% use AI-powered tools in their workflows, 76.7\% of reviewers do not thoroughly check references, and 74.5\% view peer review as ineffective at catching citation errors. Based on these findings, we argue that ghost citations represent a systemic threat to academic integrity, and call for coordinated efforts from community to address this challenge.

cs.CR

Self Balancing Neural Network: A Novel Method to Estimate Average Treatment Effect

In observational studies, confounding variables affect both treatment and outcome. Moreover, instrumental variables also influence the treatment assignment mechanism. This situation sets the study apart from a standard randomized controlled trial, where the treatment assignment is random. Due to this situation, the estimated average treatment effect becomes biased. To address this issue, a standard approach is to incorporate the estimated propensity score when estimating the average treatment effect. However, these methods incur the risk of misspecification in propensity score models. To solve this issue, a novel method called the "Self balancing neural network" (Sbnet), which lets the model itself obtain its pseudo propensity score from the balancing net, is proposed in this study. The proposed method estimates the average treatment effect by using the balancing net as a key part of the feedforward neural network. This formulation resolves the estimation of the average treatment effect in one step. Moreover, the multi-pseudo propensity score framework, which is estimated from the diversified balancing net and used for the estimation of the average treatment effect, is presented. Finally, the proposed methods are compared with state-of-the-art methods on three simulation setups and real-world datasets. It has been shown that the proposed self-balancing neural network shows better performance than state-of-the-art methods.

stat.ML

Optimizing Real-Time Oxytocin Administration to Prevent Postpartum Hemorrhage: A Bayesian Approach to Dynamic Treatment Regimes

Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) remains a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide. Oxytocin, though widely recognized for facilitating labor, is also the primary pharmacological intervention for PPH prevention. However, current dosing protocols lack personalization and fail to account for real-time physiological changes during labor. Moreover, standard dynamic treatment regime (DTR) methods cannot accommodate the continuous monitoring and adjustment. To address this, we propose a semiparametric Bayesian method for estimating an optimal treatment regime in real-time, which allows for the existence of latent individual-level variables. Specifically, random real-time DTRs are defined through interventional parameters, optimized by minimizing posterior predictive loss. We further introduce a "physician-in-the-loop" framework to align optimal strategies with clinical expertise. In an application to Consortium on Safe Labor data, the proposed method achieved consistently lower estimated blood loss than other competing methods. The learned policy recommends earlier initiation, rapid dose escalation, and more frequent titration for parturients with higher BMI, alongside increased adjustments relative to cervical dilation and the interval since the last dose change. Simulation studies demonstrate robust performance and computational efficiency, especially when unmeasured patient factors influence outcomes and covariates. Supplementary materials provides a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

stat.ME

An Efficient Doubly-robust Imputation Framework for Longitudinal Dropout, with an Application to an Alzheimer's Clinical Trial

We develop a novel doubly-robust (DR) imputation framework for longitudinal studies with monotone dropout, motivated by the informative dropout that is common in FDA-regulated trials for Alzheimer's disease. In this approach, the missing data are first imputed using a doubly-robust augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) estimator, then the imputed completed data are substituted into a full-data estimating equation, and the estimate is obtained using standard software. The imputed completed data may be inspected and compared to the observed data, and standard model diagnostics are available. The same imputed completed data can be used for several different estimands, such as subgroup analyses in a clinical trial, allowing for reduced computation and increased consistency across analyses. We present two specific DR imputation estimators, AIPW-I and AIPW-S, study their theoretical properties, and investigate their performance by simulation. AIPW-S has substantially reduced computational burden compared to many other DR estimators, at the cost of some loss of efficiency and the requirement of stronger assumptions. Simulation studies support the theoretical properties and good performance of the DR imputation framework. Importantly, we demonstrate their ability to address time-varying covariates, such as a time by treatment interaction. We illustrate using data from a large randomized Phase III trial investigating the effect of donepezil in Alzheimer's disease, from the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) group.

stat.ME