automotive system engineers

Abstract: This paper studies interactions between clean-label poisoning attack and defense in vehicular networks using federated learning (FL). Basic Safety Message (BSM) classification for anomaly detection is modeled as a distributed learning problem over a vehicular network with dynamic topology. As a critical threat to FL, a feature-space clean-label attack is introduced, wherein benign samples are perturbed toward malicious feature extremes, degrading class separability while preserving labels. To counter this, a feature-consistency relabeling defense is proposed to detect and relabel suspicious samples. A game-theoretic framework is developed to capture attack-defense interactions and characterize equilibrium strategies based on attack effectiveness and cost parameters. Results show that the attack scales effectively with compromised nodes, while the proposed defense keeps attack success low without degrading clean accuracy and shifts equilibrium regions toward attack-averse regimes.

Abstract: Production lane keeping assist (LKA) systems tell the driver whether they detect the lane markings, but whether this displayed status reflects what the system perceives, and what happens when it does not, has not been examined in real-world driving. This study introduces CANDID-LKA, a CAN-based Diagnosis of the Indicated Detection status in LKA. It evaluates a proprietary driver-facing status using three signals: the displayed status and the steering torque of the driver, both recorded from the controller area network (CAN) bus of the vehicle, and the lane perception confidence of a third-party vision system observing the same road. The framework examines how the status responds to driving conditions and estimates how completely it reports degraded lane perception by comparing it with the other two signals in a latent-class model. We apply it to 39,800 seconds of real-world driving from 13 vehicle models of three manufacturers. The results show that the status does not respond consistently to the conditions that make markings harder to see, and that the three makes differ widely in how often they report not detected. The latent-class model shows that the displayed status is incomplete: it reports only 47% of degraded seconds as not detected, compared with 80% for the third-party low perception confidence, and in half of the low-confidence episodes it never reports not detected. In the silent seconds in which the status reads detected while the perception confidence is low and the driver is not in control, the standard deviation of lateral position over the next 3 s is about 60% larger than when the status and the perception confidence agree. A detected status thus does not guarantee reliable lane perception, and silence with the driver not in control is the case that most needs attention.

Abstract: Lane departure and traffic-sign negligence are leading contributors to road accidents, particularly in regions with non-standardized signage and limited annotated data. Existing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) solutions are often developed as disjointed submodules, are rarely validated for real-time operation, and struggle to balance accuracy with low-latency inference for embedded deployment. We address these gaps with a unified, edge-deployable ADAS framework that simultaneously performs lane-departure warning (LDW) and traffic-sign detection and recognition (TSD/TSR), and validate the proposed system on automotive-class devices. Our framework combines a lightweight, lane-segmentation-driven LDW, which includes a drivable-area fallback for degraded markings, with a two-stage TSD/TSR pipeline consisting of efficient sign localization followed by fine-grained classification, designed to preserve accuracy at embedded latency. To support region-specific deployment under data scarcity, we curate a 35-class local traffic-sign dataset and introduce a generalized augmentation and balancing profile, expanding the corpus from 359 images to 8,750 samples. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, the integrated system sustains 15 FPS end to end (32 FPS for LDW and 18 FPS for TSD/TSR). The TSD/TSR branch achieves 97.4 mAP for detection and 95.6% validation accuracy (93.1% on a local real-world set) while maintaining an approximately 13.9 M parameter footprint. Relative to recent methods that target a single task or report results only on desktop-class GPUs, our approach delivers both LDW and TSD/TSR with real-time performance on edge hardware, providing a practical pathway to low-cost, field-ready ADAS in resource-constrained settings.

Abstract: Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) are embedded in agents for smart homes, vehicles, wearables, and embodied systems, where acoustic inputs can propagate from perception into persistent state and consequential execution. This setting extends security analysis beyond model behavior to the system conditions that determine how acoustic inputs can influence agent behavior and external actions. Existing surveys examine acoustic security, LLM-based agents, and edge deployment in isolation, leaving their security interactions in deployed Audio LLM-based agents insufficiently characterized. This survey introduces an Acoustic Sensing-to-Action (S2A) system model that traces these security implications along the path from acoustic sensing to external execution, while accounting for edge-cloud runtime and lifecycle transformation. We use the model to synthesize attacks, defenses, and evaluation methods across the acoustic, agent, and edge-system literature. The synthesis shows that security gaps can emerge within components and at the transitions between stages, where protections developed for one stage do not necessarily provide end-to-end assurance in the deployed system. These findings motivate security evaluation that follows acoustic influence from sensing to action across persistent state, system boundaries, and changing deployment conditions in real-world agents.

Abstract: Recent work on large audio-language models (LALMs) explores adaptive reasoning to balance accuracy and efficiency. However, existing approaches often rely on coarse-grained difficulty estimation, overlooking the diverse factors that determine reasoning effort. We address this limitation by deriving five-dimensional difficulty scores and compressed reasoning traces from complementary offline assessments. Based on this characterization, we propose SWEAR, a difficulty-aware reasoning framework that learns difficulty signals during supervised fine-tuning and uses reinforcement learning to adapt reasoning allocation across reasoning stages. Experiments on MMAU-test-mini and MMAR show that SWEAR improves accuracy while substantially reducing generated tokens, shortening reasoning for easy instances without sacrificing performance on difficult ones.

Abstract: Cooperative and connected automated vehicles (CAVs) rely on Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) messages to cross signalized intersections; a denial-of-service (DoS) flood that blocks SPaT forces CAVs into a fail-safe mode. Because human-driven vehicles share the intersection, the safety consequence depends not only on the attack and the CAV fail-safe policy, but on how the surrounding human drivers behave. We investigate this human-factors dimension with a coupled OMNeT++/INET (5G NR-V2X) and SUMO microsimulation of a signalized corridor, sweeping CAV market penetration (10-90%), four calibrated driver temperaments (cautious to aggressive) and two standards-based fail-safe policies, a minimal-risk maneuver (MRM) and an adaptive cruise control (ACC) keep-driving fallback, with each attack arm differenced against its policy-matched no-attack baseline. Temperament's effect on the attack is specific and modest rather than a blanket amplification. Aggressive surroundings worsen one metric, the hard-braking a keep-driving fail-safe forces on nearby drivers (p = 0.03), rising from near zero to +8 episodes/1000 veh-s. They appear to dampen rear-end conflicts, but only because the flood clears the queues aggressive drivers build, so the gain is in flow, not safety. On the attack's primary signatures, CAV red-light running and crossing conflicts, temperament has no detectable effect. It instead dominates baseline risk, producing a 13- to 18-fold cautious-to-aggressive gradient far larger than the attack itself, which acts through a channel already congested by CAV adoption. Human driver populations determine how dangerous the intersection is but do not systematically amplify this attack, so fail-safe design cannot assume a cautious test population bounds the risk.

Abstract: Full-duplex speech models listen and speak at once, promising always-on assistants. Yet they must also decide when they should speak. Human listeners speak when addressed or when the speaker stops, but also self-select to correct a false claim, supply a missing word, or warn of danger. We ask whether full-duplex models do the same. To separate the reason to speak from the opportunity, we construct context-matched English monologues in which only the trigger utterance varies within a topic, define 10 conditions from turn-allocation rules, and compress inter-word pauses to limit opportunities created by silence. Across five model families, being addressed and silence are far more reliable triggers than false facts or hazards. Frame-level text-token probabilities in Moshi and PersonaPlex are lower for false facts than for Neutral when averaged over the first 2\,s after trigger end. Pauses or permission to interrupt do not close this gap either. Given the floor, Moshi and PersonaPlex answer most direct questions, yet the proportion of non-empty false-fact replies that challenge the claim is only .14--.15, and the proportion of hazard replies that warn of danger is .04--.07. This paper thus identifies a gap in both speech initiation and response content. Closing it requires genuine content understanding and intervention decisions grounded in it.