-
T1-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Scenario Agents in Real-World Domains
Authors:
Genta Indra Winata,
Amartya Chakraborty,
Yuzhen Lin,
Swasthi P Rao,
Shikhhar Siingh,
Houhan Lu,
Nadia Bathaee,
Sriharsha Hatwar,
Paresh Dashore,
Anmol Jain,
Kshitij Tayal,
Xiuzhu Lin,
Anirban Das,
Sambit Sahu,
Shi-Xiong Zhang
Abstract:
Recent advances in reasoning and tool-calling capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable agentic systems. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in task complexity, realism, and domain diversity, and often fail to capture interactions that span multiple domains, limiting their ability to evaluate agents in realistic multi-step settings that require sustaine…
▽ More
Recent advances in reasoning and tool-calling capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable agentic systems. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in task complexity, realism, and domain diversity, and often fail to capture interactions that span multiple domains, limiting their ability to evaluate agents in realistic multi-step settings that require sustained reasoning and coordination. To address these limitations, we introduce T1-Bench, a high-fidelity, comprehensive benchmark for evaluating agentic systems in realistic customer-facing, multi-domain environments, featuring interleaved scenarios that require structured reasoning across multi-turn user-assistant interactions and substantially increasing both compositional complexity and evaluative rigor across 25 domains of varying difficulty. We evaluate T1-Bench using 12 proprietary and open-weight models, providing a reproducible and standardized framework for assessing agent behavior, tool utilization, and conversational quality in complex, multi-step environments. We further complement automatic evaluation with human judgments to strengthen the assessment of qualitative performance. Overall, T1-Bench substantially advances prior benchmarks by increasing task complexity, interaction depth, and domain coverage in simulated multi-domain environments. To facilitate future research on agentic systems, we will publicly release data and evaluation code as open source.
△ Less
Submitted 9 June, 2026;
originally announced June 2026.
-
From See to Shield: ML-Assisted Fine-Grained Access Control for Visual Data
Authors:
Mete Harun Akcay,
Buse Gul Atli,
Siddharth Prakash Rao,
Alexandros Bakas
Abstract:
As the volume of stored data continues to grow, identifying and protecting sensitive information within large repositories becomes increasingly challenging, especially when shared with multiple users with different roles and permissions. This work presents a system architecture for trusted data sharing with policy-driven access control, enabling selective protection of sensitive regions while main…
▽ More
As the volume of stored data continues to grow, identifying and protecting sensitive information within large repositories becomes increasingly challenging, especially when shared with multiple users with different roles and permissions. This work presents a system architecture for trusted data sharing with policy-driven access control, enabling selective protection of sensitive regions while maintaining scalability. The proposed architecture integrates four core modules that combine automated detection of sensitive regions, post-correction, key management, and access control. Sensitive regions are secured using a hybrid scheme that employs symmetric encryption for efficiency and Attribute-Based Encryption for policy enforcement. The system supports efficient key distribution and isolates key storage to strengthen overall security. To demonstrate its applicability, we evaluate the system on visual datasets, where Privacy-Sensitive Objects in images are automatically detected, reassessed, and selectively encrypted prior to sharing in a data repository. Experimental results show that our system provides effective PSO detection, increases macro-averaged F1 score (5%) and mean Average Precision (10%), and maintains an average policy-enforced decryption time of less than 1 second per image. These results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our proposed solution for fine-grained access control.
△ Less
Submitted 9 January, 2026; v1 submitted 22 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.
-
More than Meets the Eye: Understanding the Effect of Individual Objects on Perceived Visual Privacy
Authors:
Mete Harun Akcay,
Siddharth Prakash Rao,
Alexandros Bakas,
Buse Gul Atli
Abstract:
User-generated content, such as photos, comprises the majority of online media content and drives engagement due to the human ability to process visual information quickly. Consequently, many online platforms are designed for sharing visual content, with billions of photos posted daily. However, photos often reveal more than they intended through visible and contextual cues, leading to privacy ris…
▽ More
User-generated content, such as photos, comprises the majority of online media content and drives engagement due to the human ability to process visual information quickly. Consequently, many online platforms are designed for sharing visual content, with billions of photos posted daily. However, photos often reveal more than they intended through visible and contextual cues, leading to privacy risks. Previous studies typically treat privacy as a property of the entire image, overlooking individual objects that may carry varying privacy risks and influence how users perceive it. We address this gap with a mixed-methods study (n = 92) to understand how users evaluate the privacy of images containing multiple sensitive objects. Our results reveal mental models and nuanced patterns that uncover how granular details, such as photo-capturing context and copresence of other objects, affect privacy perceptions. These novel insights could enable personalized, context-aware privacy protection designs on social media and future technologies.
△ Less
Submitted 6 January, 2026; v1 submitted 16 September, 2025;
originally announced September 2025.
-
Photonics for Sustainable Computing
Authors:
Farbin Fayza,
Satyavolu Papa Rao,
Darius Bunandar,
Udit Gupta,
Ajay Joshi
Abstract:
Photonic integrated circuits are finding use in a variety of applications including optical transceivers, LIDAR, bio-sensing, photonic quantum computing, and Machine Learning (ML). In particular, with the exponentially increasing sizes of ML models, photonics-based accelerators are getting special attention as a sustainable solution because they can perform ML inferences with multiple orders of ma…
▽ More
Photonic integrated circuits are finding use in a variety of applications including optical transceivers, LIDAR, bio-sensing, photonic quantum computing, and Machine Learning (ML). In particular, with the exponentially increasing sizes of ML models, photonics-based accelerators are getting special attention as a sustainable solution because they can perform ML inferences with multiple orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency than CMOS-based accelerators. However, recent studies have shown that hardware manufacturing and infrastructure contribute significantly to the carbon footprint of computing devices, even surpassing the emissions generated during their use. For example, the manufacturing process accounts for 74% of the total carbon emissions from Apple in 2019. This prompts us to ask -- if we consider both the embodied (manufacturing) and operational carbon cost of photonics, is it indeed a viable avenue for a sustainable future? So, in this paper, we build a carbon footprint model for photonic chips and investigate the sustainability of photonics-based accelerators by conducting a case study on ADEPT, a photonics-based accelerator for deep neural network inference. Our analysis shows that photonics can reduce both operational and embodied carbon footprints with its high energy efficiency and at least 4$\times$ less fabrication carbon cost per unit area than 28 nm CMOS.
△ Less
Submitted 10 January, 2024;
originally announced January 2024.
-
A cost effective eye movement tracker based wheel chair control algorithm for people with paraplegia
Authors:
Skanda Upadhyaya,
Shravan Bhat,
Siddhanth P. Rao,
V Ashwin,
Krishnan Chemmangat
Abstract:
Spinal cord injuries can often lead to quadriplegia in patients limiting their mobility. Wheelchairs could be a good proposition for patients, but most of them operate either manually or with the help of electric motors operated with a joystick. This, however, requires the use of hands, making it unsuitable for quadriplegic patients. Controlling eye movement, on the other hand, is retained even by…
▽ More
Spinal cord injuries can often lead to quadriplegia in patients limiting their mobility. Wheelchairs could be a good proposition for patients, but most of them operate either manually or with the help of electric motors operated with a joystick. This, however, requires the use of hands, making it unsuitable for quadriplegic patients. Controlling eye movement, on the other hand, is retained even by people who undergo brain injury. Monitoring the movements in the eye can be a helpful tool in generating control signals for the wheelchair. This paper is an approach to converting obtained signals from the eye into meaningful signals by trying to control a bot that imitates a wheelchair. The overall system is cost-effective and uses simple image processing and pattern recognition to control the bot. An android application is developed, which could be used by the patients' aid for more refined control of the wheelchair in the actual scenario.
△ Less
Submitted 21 July, 2022;
originally announced July 2022.
-
Threat modeling framework for mobile communication systems
Authors:
Siddharth Prakash Rao,
Silke Holtmanns,
Tuomas Aura
Abstract:
Due to the complex nature of mobile communication systems, most of the security efforts in its domain are isolated and scattered across underlying technologies. This has resulted in an obscure view of the overall security. In this work, we attempt to fix this problem by proposing a domain-specific threat modeling framework. By gleaning from a diverse and large body of security literature, we syste…
▽ More
Due to the complex nature of mobile communication systems, most of the security efforts in its domain are isolated and scattered across underlying technologies. This has resulted in an obscure view of the overall security. In this work, we attempt to fix this problem by proposing a domain-specific threat modeling framework. By gleaning from a diverse and large body of security literature, we systematically organize the attacks on mobile communications into various tactics and techniques. Our framework is designed to model adversarial behavior in terms of its attack phases and to be used as a common taxonomy matrix. We also provide concrete examples of using the framework for modeling the attacks individually and comparing them with similar ones.
△ Less
Submitted 11 May, 2020;
originally announced May 2020.
-
Client-side Vulnerabilities in Commercial VPNs
Authors:
Thanh Bui,
Siddharth Prakash Rao,
Markku Antikainen,
Tuomas Aura
Abstract:
Internet users increasingly rely on commercial virtual private network (VPN) services to protect their security and privacy. The VPN services route the client's traffic over an encrypted tunnel to a VPN gateway in the cloud. Thus, they hide the client's real IP address from online services, and they also shield the user's connections from perceived threats in the access networks. In this paper, we…
▽ More
Internet users increasingly rely on commercial virtual private network (VPN) services to protect their security and privacy. The VPN services route the client's traffic over an encrypted tunnel to a VPN gateway in the cloud. Thus, they hide the client's real IP address from online services, and they also shield the user's connections from perceived threats in the access networks. In this paper, we study the security of such commercial VPN services. The focus is on how the client applications set up VPN tunnels, and how the service providers instruct users to configure generic client software. We analyze common VPN protocols and implementations on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. We find that the VPN clients have various configuration flaws, which an attacker can exploit to strip off traffic encryption or to bypass authentication of the VPN gateway. In some cases, the attacker can also steal the VPN user's username and password. We suggest ways to mitigate each of the discovered vulnerabilities.
△ Less
Submitted 10 December, 2019;
originally announced December 2019.
-
A New De-blurring Technique for License Plate Images with Robust Length Estimation
Authors:
P. S. Prashanth Rao,
Rajesh Kumar Muthu
Abstract:
Recognizing a license plate clearly while seeing a surveillance camera snapshot is often important in cases where the troublemaker vehicle(s) have to be identified. In many real world situations, these images are blurred due to fast motion of the vehicle and cannot be recognized by the human eye. For this kind of blurring, the kernel involved can be said to be a linear uniform convolution describe…
▽ More
Recognizing a license plate clearly while seeing a surveillance camera snapshot is often important in cases where the troublemaker vehicle(s) have to be identified. In many real world situations, these images are blurred due to fast motion of the vehicle and cannot be recognized by the human eye. For this kind of blurring, the kernel involved can be said to be a linear uniform convolution described by its angle and length. We propose a new de-blurring technique in this paper to parametrically estimate the kernel as accurately as possible with emphasis on the length estimation process. We use a technique which employs Hough transform in estimating the kernel angle. To accurately estimate the kernel length, a novel approach using the cepstral transform is introduced. We compare the de-blurred results obtained using our scheme with those of other recently introduced blind de-blurring techniques. The comparisons corroborate that our scheme can remove a large blur from the image captured by the camera to recover vital semantic information about the license plate.
△ Less
Submitted 17 February, 2018;
originally announced February 2018.
-
Portable Trust: biometric-based authentication and blockchain storage for self-sovereign identity systems
Authors:
J. S. Hammudoglu,
J. Sparreboom,
J. I. Rauhamaa,
J. K. Faber,
L. C. Guerchi,
I. P. Samiotis,
S. P. Rao,
J. A. Pouwelse
Abstract:
We devised a mobile biometric-based authentication system only relying on local processing. Our Android open source solution explores the capability of current smartphones to acquire, process and match fingerprints using only its built-in hardware. Our architecture is specifically designed to run completely locally and autonomously, not requiring any cloud service, server, or permissioned access t…
▽ More
We devised a mobile biometric-based authentication system only relying on local processing. Our Android open source solution explores the capability of current smartphones to acquire, process and match fingerprints using only its built-in hardware. Our architecture is specifically designed to run completely locally and autonomously, not requiring any cloud service, server, or permissioned access to fingerprint reader hardware. It involves three main stages, starting with the fingerprint acquisition using the smartphone camera, followed by a processing pipeline to obtain minutiae features and a final step for matching against other locally stored fingerprints, based on Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptors. We obtained a mean matching accuracy of 55%, with the highest value of 67% for thumb fingers. Our ability to capture and process a finger fingerprint in mere seconds using a smartphone makes this work usable in a wide range of scenarios, for instance, offline remote regions. This work is specifically designed to be a key building block for a self-sovereign identity solution and integrate with our permissionless blockchain for identity and key attestation.
△ Less
Submitted 12 June, 2017;
originally announced June 2017.
-
Studying the Indian mobile Internet networks: Chota recharge and the chota Internet
Authors:
Siddharth Prakash Rao,
Kiran Mohan Kumar
Abstract:
Uniform and affordable Internet is emerging as one of the fundamental civil rights in developing countries. However in India, the connectivity is far from uniform across the regions, where the disparity is evident in the infrastructure, the cost of access and telecommunication services to provide Internet facilities among different economic classes. In spite of having a large mobile user base, the…
▽ More
Uniform and affordable Internet is emerging as one of the fundamental civil rights in developing countries. However in India, the connectivity is far from uniform across the regions, where the disparity is evident in the infrastructure, the cost of access and telecommunication services to provide Internet facilities among different economic classes. In spite of having a large mobile user base, the mobile Internet are still remarkably slower in some of the developing countries. Especially in India, it falls below 50% even in comparison with the performance of its developing counterparts!
This essay presents a study of connectivity and performance trends based on an exploratory analysis of mobile Internet measurement data from India. In order to assess the state of mobile networks and its readiness in adopting the different mobile standards (2G, 3G, and 4G) for commercial use, we discuss the spread, penetration, interoperability and the congestion trends. Based on our analysis, we argue that the network operators have taken negligible measures to scale the mobile Internet. Affordable Internet is definitely for everyone. But, the affordability of the Internet in terms of cost does not necessarily imply the rightful access to Internet services.
Chota recharge is possibly leading us to chota (shrunken) Internet!
△ Less
Submitted 14 October, 2016;
originally announced October 2016.
-
Turning Bitcoins into the Best-coins
Authors:
Siddharth Prakash Rao
Abstract:
In this paper we discuss Bitcoin, the leader among the existing cryptocurrencies, to analyse its trends, success factors, current challenges and probable solutions to make it even better. In the introduction section, we discuss the history and working mechanism of Bitcoin. In the background section, we develop the ideas that evolved in the process of making a stable cryptocurrency. We also analyze…
▽ More
In this paper we discuss Bitcoin, the leader among the existing cryptocurrencies, to analyse its trends, success factors, current challenges and probable solutions to make it even better. In the introduction section, we discuss the history and working mechanism of Bitcoin. In the background section, we develop the ideas that evolved in the process of making a stable cryptocurrency. We also analyze the survey matrices of the present day cryptocurrencies. This survey clearly shows that Bitcoin is the clear winner among its kind. Section 3 is about the success factors of Bitcoin and the proceeding sections are a discussion about current challenges which pose as hurdles in making Bitcoin a better currency in the digital world. We finally discuss the balance between anonymity and reduced trust in the cryptocurrency world, before concluding the survey.
△ Less
Submitted 23 December, 2014;
originally announced December 2014.