Misclassifications in spam and phishing detection are very harmful, as false negatives expose users to attacks while false positives degrade trust. Existing uncertainty-based detectors can flag potential errors, but may be deceived and offer limited interpretability. This paper presents X-MAP, an eXplainable Misclassification Analysis and Profilling framework that reveals topic-level semantic patterns behind model failures. X-MAP combines SHAP-based feature attributions with non-negative matrix factorization to build interpretable topic profiles for reliably classified spam/phishing and legitimate messages, and measures each message’s deviation from these profiles using Jensen–Shannon divergence. Experiments on SMS and phishing datasets show that misclassified messages exhibit at least twice the divergence of correctly classified ones. As a detector, X-MAP achieves up to 0.98 AUROC and lowers the false-rejection rate at 95

Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

The Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) problem involves multiple entities competing for influence in online social networks (OSNs). While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown promise, existing methods often assume users' opinions are binary and ignore their behavior and prior knowledge. We propose DRIM, a multi-dimensional uncertainty-aware DRL-based CIM framework that leverages Subjective Logic (SL) to model uncertainty in user opinions, preferences, and DRL decision-making. DRIM introduces an Uncertainty-based Opinion Model (UOM) for a more realistic representation of user uncertainty and optimizes seed selection for propagating true information while countering false information. In addition, it quantifies uncertainty in balancing exploration and exploitation. Results show that UOM significantly enhances true information spread and maintains influence against advanced false information strategies. DRIM-based CIM schemes outperform state-of-the-art methods by up to 57% and 88% in influence while being up to 48% and 77% faster. Sensitivity analysis indicates that higher network observability and greater information propagation boost performance, while high network activity mitigates the effect of users' initial biases.

This paper proposes U-FARE, an uncertainty-aware fair federated learning (FL) framework aimed at improving disease prediction in healthcare, with a specific focus on Alzheimer's disease detection. U-FARE incorporates evidential neural networks (ENN) to quantify uncertainty, enhancing both model fairness and accuracy. The framework ensures group-level fairness, providing consistent model performance across diverse healthcare environments despite data heterogeneity. We evaluate U-FARE on three real-world healthcare datasets-NACC, OASIS, and ADNI-comparing its performance to several state-of-the-art fairness-aware FL methods. Experimental results demonstrate that U-FARE outperforms baseline methods in both prediction accuracy and fairness, effectively balancing these two crucial aspects. The results also reveal the trade-off between fairness and accuracy, where higher fairness levels may compromise prediction accuracy. U-FARE achieves the highest accuracy (0.928) on the NACC dataset, consistently outperforms the competitive baseline q-FedAvg by 46%, particularly when higher fairness constraints are applied, and outperforms methods like Ditto and q-FFL with minimal accuracy variance and loss disparity. This is the first approach to simultaneously optimize fairness and accuracy in FL for Alzheimer's disease detection, providing a novel solution to the challenge of fair and effective AI in healthcare. The framework demonstrates the potential to address data heterogeneity while ensuring privacy and fairness in real-world applications.

Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising approach for collaborative model training in healthcare while preserving data privacy. However, existing FL methods often fall short in addressing two critical challenges: client-level fairness and compounded uncertainty from data heterogeneity and privacy-preserving mechanisms. We propose fair-LDP, a fairness-aware Local Differential Privacy framework that promotes fairness and privacy via uncertainty-guided aggregation in federated healthcare AI. fair-LDP leverages evidential neural networks (ENNs) to quantify predictive uncertainty and introduces a novel strategy that uses uncertainty-driven local differential privacy to guide fairness-aware updates while preserving data privacy. This ensures equitable performance across clients with varying data quality while mitigating the influence of unreliable or outlier updates. fair-LDP incorporates an adaptive mechanism that adjusts each client's privacy budget based on model performance, balancing fairness, privacy, and accuracy. We evaluate fair-LDP on real-world healthcare datasets under both IID and non-IID settings. Our experimental results show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art fairness-aware and privacy-preserving FL baselines, with no added computational overhead, while maintaining privacy guarantees comparable to homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty computation. By integrating uncertainty modeling, fairness-aware aggregation, and adaptive local differential privacy, fair-LDP provides a practical and principled solution for responsible, equitable, and privacy-preserving federated learning in healthcare.

The Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) problem involves entities competing to maximize influence in online social networks (OSNs). While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have shown promise, most assume binary user opinions and overlook behavioral factors. We introduce DRIM, a novel DRL-based CIM framework using Subjective Logic (SL) to incorporate user preferences and uncertainty, optimizing seed selection to spread true information while countering false information. DRIM’s Uncertainty-based Opinion Model (UOM) provides a realistic representation of user opinions. Results demonstrate that UOM maintains over 80% true influence against advanced misinformation, and DRIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 45% in influence and 77% in speed. DRIM also excels in limited-resource scenarios, networks with 10% invisibility, and when users are inclined to doubt true information.

An in-depth understanding of uncertainty is the first step to making effective decisions under uncertainty. Machine/deep learning (ML/DL) has been hugely leveraged to solve complex problems involved with processing high-dimensional data. However, reasoning and quantifying different uncertainties to achieve effective decision-making have been much less explored in ML/DL than in other Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. In particular, belief/evidence theories have been studied in Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) since the 1960s to reason and measure uncertainties to enhance decision-making effectiveness. Based on our in-depth literature review, only a few studies have leveraged mature uncertainty research in belief/evidence theories in ML/DL to tackle complex problems under different types of uncertainty. Our present survey paper discusses major belief theories and their core ideas dealing with uncertainty causes and types and quantifying them, along with the discussions of their applicability in ML/DL. Particularly, we discuss three main approaches leveraging belief theories in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Evidential DNNs, Fuzzy DNNs, and Rough DNNs, in terms of their uncertainty causes, types, and quantification methods along with their applicability in diverse problem domains. Through an in-depth understanding of the extensive survey on this topic, we discuss insights, lessons learned, limitations of the current state-of-the-art bridging belief theories and ML/DL, and future research directions. This paper conducts an extensive survey by bridging belief theories and deep learning in reasoning and quantifying uncertainty to help researchers initiate uncertainty and decision-making research.

Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) involves entities competing to maximize influence in online social networks (OSNs). Current Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods in CIM rely on simplistic binary opinion models (i.e., an opinion is represented by either 0 or 1) and often overlook the complexity of user behaviors and prior knowledge. We propose a novel DRL-based framework that enhances CIM analysis by integrating Subjective Logic (SL) to accommodate uncertain opinions, user behaviors, and preferences. This approach targets the mitigation of false information by effectively propagating true information. By modeling two competitive agents, one spreading true information and the other spreading false information, we capture the strategic interplay essential to CIM. Our framework utilizes an uncertainty-based opinion model (UOM) to assess the impact on information quality in OSNs, emphasizing the importance of user behavior alongside network topology in selecting influential seed nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving faster and more influential results (i.e., outperforming over 20 method shows robust performance in partially observable networks, effectively doubling the performance when users are predisposed to disbelieve true information.

As machine intelligence evolves, the need to test and compare the problem-solving abilities of different AI models grows. However, current benchmarks are often simplistic, allowing models to perform uniformly well and making it difficult to distinguish their capabilities. Additionally, benchmarks typically rely on static question-answer pairs that the models might memorize or guess. To address these limitations, we introduce Dynamic Intelligence Assessment (DIA), a novel methodology for testing AI models using dynamic question templates and improved metrics across multiple disciplines such as mathematics, cryptography, cybersecurity, and computer science. The accompanying dataset, DIA-Bench, contains a diverse collection of challenge templates with mutable parameters presented in various formats, including text, PDFs, compiled binaries, visual puzzles, and CTF-style cybersecurity challenges. Our framework introduces four new metrics to assess a model’s reliability and confidence across multiple attempts. These metrics revealed that even simple questions are frequently answered incorrectly when posed in varying forms, highlighting significant gaps in models’ reliability. Notably, API models like GPT-4o often overestimated their mathematical capabilities, while ChatGPT-4o demonstrated better performance due to effective tool usage. In self-assessment OpenAI’s o1-mini proved to have the best judgement on what tasks it should attempt to solve. We evaluated 25 state-of-the-art LLMs using DIA-Bench, showing that current models struggle with complex tasks and often display unexpectedly low confidence, even with simpler questions. The DIA framework sets a new standard for assessing not only problem-solving, but also a model’s adaptive intelligence and ability to assess its limitations. The dataset is publicly available on the project’s page: https://github.com/DIA-Bench.

Cyber threat hunting offers a proactive threat analysis method which, discover previously unseen threat events and threat detection. However, threat hunting faces challenges with data overload, the constantly evolving threat landscape, and establishing context to particular security events. By leveraging semantic reasoning technologies and contextual analysis of interconnected security events, the study presents an enhanced method for threat hunting. Adversarial behaviours are modelled as Indicators of Behaviour - a series of low level to high level abstractions for reasoning over individually captured security events. The findings demonstrate a semantic gap between the representation of adversarial procedures and behaviours, and how to detect them. We also enhance limitations in the MITRE ATT &CK framework for detection logic. In utilising our method we find that adversarial procedures and behaviours can be represented both as a prose text description, a collection of abstractions, and inferred security events through the use of semantic reasoning.