Anantaa Kotal

Aritran Piplai, Anantaa Kotal, Seyedreza Mohseni et al.

Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging and quickly advancing field that combines the subsymbolic strengths of (deep) neural networks and explicit, symbolic knowledge contained in knowledge graphs to enhance explainability and safety in AI systems. This approach addresses a key criticism of current generation systems, namely their inability to generate human-understandable explanations for their outcomes and ensure safe behaviors, especially in scenarios with \textit{unknown unknowns} (e.g. cybersecurity, privacy). The integration of neural networks, which excel at exploring complex data spaces, and symbolic knowledge graphs, which represent domain knowledge, allows AI systems to reason, learn, and generalize in a manner understandable to experts. This article describes how applications in cybersecurity and privacy, two most demanding domains in terms of the need for AI to be explainable while being highly accurate in complex environments, can benefit from Neuro-Symbolic AI.

David Sanchez, Holly Lopez, Michelle Buraczyk et al.

As machine learning systems move from theory to practice, they are increasingly tasked with decisions that affect healthcare access, financial opportunities, hiring, and public services. In these contexts, accuracy is only one piece of the puzzle - models must also be fair to different groups, protect individual privacy, and remain accountable to stakeholders. Achieving all three is difficult: differential privacy can unintentionally worsen disparities, fairness interventions often rely on sensitive data that privacy restricts, and automated pipelines ignore that fairness is ultimately a human and contextual judgment. We introduce FAIRPLAI (Fair and Private Learning with Active Human Influence), a practical framework that integrates human oversight into the design and deployment of machine learning systems. FAIRPLAI works in three ways: (1) it constructs privacy-fairness frontiers that make trade-offs between accuracy, privacy guarantees, and group outcomes transparent; (2) it enables interactive stakeholder input, allowing decision-makers to select fairness criteria and operating points that reflect their domain needs; and (3) it embeds a differentially private auditing loop, giving humans the ability to review explanations and edge cases without compromising individual data security. Applied to benchmark datasets, FAIRPLAI consistently preserves strong privacy protections while reducing fairness disparities relative to automated baselines. More importantly, it provides a straightforward, interpretable process for practitioners to manage competing demands of accuracy, privacy, and fairness in socially impactful applications. By embedding human judgment where it matters most, FAIRPLAI offers a pathway to machine learning systems that are effective, responsible, and trustworthy in practice. GitHub: https://github.com/Li1Davey/Fairplai

Anantaa Kotal, Lavanya Elluri, Deepti Gupta et al.

Big Data empowers the farming community with the information needed to optimize resource usage, increase productivity, and enhance the sustainability of agricultural practices. The use of Big Data in farming requires the collection and analysis of data from various sources such as sensors, satellites, and farmer surveys. While Big Data can provide the farming community with valuable insights and improve efficiency, there is significant concern regarding the security of this data as well as the privacy of the participants. Privacy regulations, such as the EU GDPR, the EU Code of Conduct on agricultural data sharing by contractual agreement, and the proposed EU AI law, have been created to address the issue of data privacy and provide specific guidelines on when and how data can be shared between organizations. To make confidential agricultural data widely available for Big Data analysis without violating the privacy of the data subjects, we consider privacy-preserving methods of data sharing in agriculture. Deep learning-based synthetic data generation has been proposed for privacy-preserving data sharing. However, there is a lack of compliance with documented data privacy policies in such privacy-preserving efforts. In this study, we propose a novel framework for enforcing privacy policy rules in privacy-preserving data generation algorithms. We explore several available agricultural codes of conduct, extract knowledge related to the privacy constraints in data, and use the extracted knowledge to define privacy bounds in a privacy-preserving generative model. We use our framework to generate synthetic agricultural data and present experimental results that demonstrate the utility of the synthetic dataset in downstream tasks. We also show that our framework can evade potential threats and secure data based on applicable regulatory policy rules.

Nilanjana Das, Anantaa Kotal, Daniel Roseberry et al.

A key challenge faced by small and medium-sized business entities is securely managing software updates and changes. Specifically, with rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats, changes/updates/patches to software systems are necessary to stay ahead of emerging threats and are often mandated by regulators or statutory authorities to counter these. However, security patches/updates require stress testing before they can be released in the production system. Stress testing in production environments is risky and poses security threats. Large businesses usually have a non-production environment where such changes can be made and tested before being released into production. Smaller businesses do not have such facilities. In this work, we show how "digital twins", especially for a mix of IT and IoT environments, can be created on the cloud. These digital twins act as a non-production environment where changes can be applied, and the system can be securely tested before patch release. Additionally, the non-production digital twin can be used to collect system data and run stress tests on the environment, both manually and automatically. In this paper, we show how using a small sample of real data/interactions, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can be used to generate testing scenarios to check for points of failure.

Anantaa Kotal, Anupam Joshi

The integration of privacy measures, including differential privacy techniques, ensures a provable privacy guarantee for the synthetic data. However, challenges arise for Generative Deep Learning models when tasked with generating realistic data, especially in critical domains such as Cybersecurity and Healthcare. Generative Models optimized for continuous data struggle to model discrete and non-Gaussian features that have domain constraints. Challenges increase when the training datasets are limited and not diverse. In such cases, generative models create synthetic data that repeats sensitive features, which is a privacy risk. Moreover, generative models face difficulties comprehending attribute constraints in specialized domains. This leads to the generation of unrealistic data that impacts downstream accuracy. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel model, KIPPS, that infuses Domain and Regulatory Knowledge from Knowledge Graphs into Generative Deep Learning models for enhanced Privacy Preserving Synthetic data generation. The novel framework augments the training of generative models with supplementary context about attribute values and enforces domain constraints during training. This added guidance enhances the model's capacity to generate realistic and domain-compliant synthetic data. The proposed model is evaluated on real-world datasets, specifically in the domains of Cybersecurity and Healthcare, where domain constraints and rules add to the complexity of the data. Our experiments evaluate the privacy resilience and downstream accuracy of the model against benchmark methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the balance between privacy preservation and data accuracy in complex domains.

Anantaa Kotal, Anupam Joshi

The widespread use of big data across sectors has raised major privacy concerns, especially when sensitive information is shared or analyzed. Regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA impose strict controls on data handling, making it difficult to balance the need for insights with privacy requirements. Synthetic data offers a promising solution by creating artificial datasets that reflect real patterns without exposing sensitive information. However, traditional synthetic data methods often fail to capture complex, implicit rules that link different elements of the data and are essential in domains like healthcare. They may reproduce explicit patterns but overlook domain-specific constraints that are not directly stated yet crucial for realism and utility. For example, prescription guidelines that restrict certain medications for specific conditions or prevent harmful drug interactions may not appear explicitly in the original data. Synthetic data generated without these implicit rules can lead to medically inappropriate or unrealistic profiles. To address this gap, we propose ContextGAN, a Context-Aware Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Network that integrates domain-specific rules through a constraint matrix encoding both explicit and implicit knowledge. The constraint-aware discriminator evaluates synthetic data against these rules to ensure adherence to domain constraints, while differential privacy protects sensitive details from the original data. We validate ContextGAN across healthcare, security, and finance, showing that it produces high-quality synthetic data that respects domain rules and preserves privacy. Our results demonstrate that ContextGAN improves realism and utility by enforcing domain constraints, making it suitable for applications that require compliance with both explicit patterns and implicit rules under strict privacy guarantees.

Emre Umucu, Guillermina Solis, Leon Garza et al.

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative and reasoning capabilities but remain limited in healthcare and caregiving applications due to two key deficiencies: factual unreliability and a lack of empathetic communication. These shortcomings pose significant risks in sensitive contexts where users, particularly non-professionals and caregivers, seek medically relevant guidance or emotional reassurance. To address these challenges, we introduce a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-based alignment framework designed to improve factual correctness, semantic coherence, and human-centric qualities such as empathy, politeness, and simplicity in caregiver-patient dialogues. Our approach fine-tunes domain-adapted LLMs using pairwise preference data, where preferred responses reflect supportive and accessible communication styles while rejected ones represent prescriptive or overly technical tones. This direct optimization method aligns model outputs with human preferences more efficiently than traditional reinforcement-learning-based alignment. Empirical evaluations across multiple open and proprietary LLMs show that our DPO-tuned models achieve higher semantic alignment, improved factual accuracy, and stronger human-centric evaluation scores compared to baseline and commercial alternatives such as Google medical dialogue systems. These improvements demonstrate that preference-based alignment offers a scalable and transparent pathway toward developing trustworthy, empathetic, and clinically informed AI assistants for caregiver and healthcare communication. Our open-source code is available at: https://github.com/LeonG19/Empathy-by-Design

Zalish Mahmud, Anantaa Kotal, Aritran Piplai

Incomplete data are common in real-world applications. Sensors fail, records are inconsistent, and datasets collected from different sources often differ in scale, sampling rate, and quality. These differences create missing values that make it difficult to combine data and build reliable models. Standard imputation methods such as regression models, expectation-maximization, and multiple imputation rely on strong assumptions about linearity and independence. These assumptions rarely hold for complex or heterogeneous data, which can lead to biased or over-smoothed estimates. We propose Impugan, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for imputing missing values and integrating heterogeneous datasets. The model is trained on complete samples to learn how missing variables depend on observed ones. During inference, the generator reconstructs missing entries from available features, and the discriminator enforces realism by distinguishing true from imputed data. This adversarial process allows Impugan to capture nonlinear and multimodal relationships that conventional methods cannot represent. In experiments on benchmark datasets and a multi-source integration task, Impugan achieves up to 82\% lower Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and 70\% lower mutual-information deviation (MI) compared to leading baselines. These results show that adversarially trained generative models provide a scalable and principled approach for imputing and merging incomplete, heterogeneous data. Our model is available at: github.com/zalishmahmud/impuganBigData2025

Leon Garza, Lavanya Elluri, Anantaa Kotal et al.

Data protection and privacy is becoming increasingly crucial in the digital era. Numerous companies depend on third-party vendors and service providers to carry out critical functions within their operations, encompassing tasks such as data handling and storage. However, this reliance introduces potential vulnerabilities, as these vendors' security measures and practices may not always align with the standards expected by regulatory bodies. Businesses are required, often under the penalty of law, to ensure compliance with the evolving regulatory rules. Interpreting and implementing these regulations pose challenges due to their complexity. Regulatory documents are extensive, demanding significant effort for interpretation, while vendor-drafted privacy policies often lack the detail required for full legal compliance, leading to ambiguity. To ensure a concise interpretation of the regulatory requirements and compliance of organizational privacy policy with said regulations, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) and Semantic Web based approach for privacy compliance. In this paper, we develop the novel Privacy Policy Compliance Verification Knowledge Graph, PrivComp-KG. It is designed to efficiently store and retrieve comprehensive information concerning privacy policies, regulatory frameworks, and domain-specific knowledge pertaining to the legal landscape of privacy. Using Retrieval Augmented Generation, we identify the relevant sections in a privacy policy with corresponding regulatory rules. This information about individual privacy policies is populated into the PrivComp-KG. Combining this with the domain context and rules, the PrivComp-KG can be queried to check for compliance with privacy policies by each vendor against relevant policy regulations. We demonstrate the relevance of the PrivComp-KG, by verifying compliance of privacy policy documents for various organizations.

Leon Garza, Anantaa Kotal, Michael A. Grasso et al.

The increasing complexity of clinical decision-making, alongside the rapid expansion of electronic health records (EHR), presents both opportunities and challenges for delivering data-informed care. This paper proposes a clinical decision support system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist prescribing clinicians. The system generates therapeutic suggestions by analyzing historical EHR data, including patient demographics, presenting complaints, clinical symptoms, diagnostic information, and treatment histories. The framework integrates natural language processing with structured clinical inputs to produce contextually relevant recommendations. Rather than replacing clinician judgment, it is designed to augment decision-making by retrieving and synthesizing precedent cases with comparable characteristics, drawing on local datasets or federated sources where applicable. At its core, the system employs a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that harmonizes unstructured narratives and codified data to support LLM-based inference. We outline the system's technical components, including representation representation alignment and generation strategies. Preliminary evaluations, conducted with de-identified and synthetic clinical datasets, examine the clinical plausibility and consistency of the model's outputs. Early findings suggest that LLM-based tools may provide valuable decision support in prescribing workflows when appropriately constrained and rigorously validated. This work represents an initial step toward integration of generative AI into real-world clinical decision-making with an emphasis on transparency, safety, and alignment with established practices.

S. M. Mustaqim, Anantaa Kotal, Paul H. Yi

Generative models are increasingly used to produce privacy-preserving synthetic data as a safe alternative to sharing sensitive training datasets. However, we demonstrate that such synthetic releases can still leak information about the underlying training samples through structural overlap in the data manifold. We propose a black-box membership inference attack that exploits this vulnerability without requiring access to model internals or real data. The attacker repeatedly queries the generative model to obtain large numbers of synthetic samples, performs unsupervised clustering to identify dense regions of the synthetic distribution, and then analyzes cluster medoids and neighborhoods that correspond to high-density regions in the original training data. These neighborhoods act as proxies for training samples, enabling the adversary to infer membership or reconstruct approximate records. Our experiments across healthcare, finance, and other sensitive domains show that cluster overlap between real and synthetic data leads to measurable membership leakage-even when the generator is trained with differential privacy or other noise mechanisms. The results highlight an under-explored attack surface in synthetic data generation pipelines and call for stronger privacy guarantees that account for distributional neighborhood inference rather than sample-level memorization alone, underscoring its role in privacy-preserving data publishing. Implementation and evaluation code are publicly available at:github.com/Cluster-Medoid-Leakage-Attack.