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Nuno Moniz

Nuno Moniz appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

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Artificial IntelligenceCryptography and SecurityInformation RetrievalMachine Learning

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

From Controlled to the Wild: Evaluation of Pentesting Agents for the Real-World

AI pentesting agents are increasingly credible as offensive security systems, but current benchmarks still provide limited guidance on which will perform best in real-world targets. Existing evaluation protocols assess and optimize for predefined goals such as capture-the-flag, remote code execution, exploit reproduction, or trajectory similarity, in simplified or narrow settings. These tools are valuable for measuring bounded capabilities, yet they do not adequately capture the complexity, open-ended exploration, and strategic decision-making required in realistic pentesting. In this paper, we present a practical evaluation protocol that shifts assessment from task completion to validated vulnerability discovery, allowing evaluation in sufficiently complex targets spanning multiple attack surfaces and vulnerability classes. The protocol combines structured ground-truth with LLM-based semantic matching to identify vulnerabilities, bipartite resolution to score findings under realistic ambiguity, continuous ground-truth maintenance, repeated and cumulative evaluation of stochastic agents, efficiency metrics, and reduced-suite selection for sustainable experimentation. This protocol extends the state of the art by enabling a more realistic, operationally informative comparison of AI pentesting agents. To enable reproducibility, we also release expert-annotated ground truth and code for the proposed evaluation protocol: https://github.com/jd0965199-oss/ethibench.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Model Optimization in Imbalanced Regression

Imbalanced domain learning aims to produce accurate models in predicting instances that, though underrepresented, are of utmost importance for the domain. Research in this field has been mainly focused on classification tasks. Comparatively, the number of studies carried out in the context of regression tasks is negligible. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of loss functions capable of focusing on minimizing the errors of extreme (rare) values. Recently, an evaluation metric was introduced: Squared Error Relevance Area (SERA). This metric posits a bigger emphasis on the errors committed at extreme values while also accounting for the performance in the overall target variable domain, thus preventing severe bias. However, its effectiveness as an optimization metric is unknown. In this paper, our goal is to study the impacts of using SERA as an optimization criterion in imbalanced regression tasks. Using gradient boosting algorithms as proof of concept, we perform an experimental study with 36 data sets of different domains and sizes. Results show that models that used SERA as an objective function are practically better than the models produced by their respective standard boosting algorithms at the prediction of extreme values. This confirms that SERA can be embedded as a loss function into optimization-based learning algorithms for imbalanced regression scenarios.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Survey on Privacy-Preserving Techniques for Data Publishing

The exponential growth of collected, processed, and shared microdata has given rise to concerns about individuals' privacy. As a result, laws and regulations have emerged to control what organisations do with microdata and how they protect it. Statistical Disclosure Control seeks to reduce the risk of confidential information disclosure by de-identifying them. Such de-identification is guaranteed through privacy-preserving techniques. However, de-identified data usually results in loss of information, with a possible impact on data analysis precision and model predictive performance. The main goal is to protect the individuals' privacy while maintaining the interpretability of the data, i.e. its usefulness. Statistical Disclosure Control is an area that is expanding and needs to be explored since there is still no solution that guarantees optimal privacy and utility. This survey focuses on all steps of the de-identification process. We present existing privacy-preserving techniques used in microdata de-identification, privacy measures suitable for several disclosure types and, information loss and predictive performance measures. In this survey, we discuss the main challenges raised by privacy constraints, describe the main approaches to handle these obstacles, review taxonomies of privacy-preserving techniques, provide a theoretical analysis of existing comparative studies, and raise multiple open issues.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Towards a Data Privacy-Predictive Performance Trade-off

Machine learning is increasingly used in the most diverse applications and domains, whether in healthcare, to predict pathologies, or in the financial sector to detect fraud. One of the linchpins for efficiency and accuracy in machine learning is data utility. However, when it contains personal information, full access may be restricted due to laws and regulations aiming to protect individuals' privacy. Therefore, data owners must ensure that any data shared guarantees such privacy. Removal or transformation of private information (de-identification) are among the most common techniques. Intuitively, one can anticipate that reducing detail or distorting information would result in losses for model predictive performance. However, previous work concerning classification tasks using de-identified data generally demonstrates that predictive performance can be preserved in specific applications. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the existence of a trade-off between data privacy and predictive performance in classification tasks. We leverage a large set of privacy-preserving techniques and learning algorithms to provide an assessment of re-identification ability and the impact of transformed variants on predictive performance. Unlike previous literature, we confirm that the higher the level of privacy (lower re-identification risk), the higher the impact on predictive performance, pointing towards clear evidence of a trade-off.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Data-Driven Relevance Judgments for Ranking Evaluation

Ranking evaluation metrics are a fundamental element of design and improvement efforts in information retrieval. We observe that most popular metrics disregard information portrayed in the scores used to derive rankings, when available. This may pose a numerical scaling problem, causing an under- or over-estimation of the evaluation depending on the degree of divergence between the scores of ranked items. The purpose of this work is to propose a principled way of quantifying multi-graded relevance judgments of items and enable a more accurate penalization of ordering errors in rankings. We propose a data-driven generation of relevance functions based on the degree of the divergence amongst a set of items' scores and its application in the evaluation metric Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). We use synthetic data to demonstrate the interest of our proposal and a combination of data on news items from Google News and their respective popularity in Twitter to show its performance in comparison to the standard nDCG. Results show that our proposal is capable of providing a more fine-grained evaluation of rankings when compared to the standard nDCG, and that the latter frequently under- or over-estimates its evaluation scores in light of the divergence of items' scores.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Socially Driven News Recommendation

The participatory Web has enabled the ubiquitous and pervasive access of information, accompanied by an increase of speed and reach in information sharing. Data dissemination services such as news aggregators are expected to provide up-to-date, real-time information to the end users. News aggregators are in essence recommendation systems that filter and rank news stories in order to select the few that will appear on the users front screen at any time. One of the main challenges in such systems is to address the recency and latency problems, that is, to identify as soon as possible how important a news story is. In this work we propose an integrated framework that aims at predicting the importance of news items upon their publication with a focus on recent and highly popular news, employing resampling strategies, and at translating the result into concrete news rankings. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation using real-life datasets of the proposed framework as both a stand-alone system and when applied to news recommendations from Google News. Additionally, we propose and evaluate a combinatorial solution to the augmentation of official media recommendations with social information. Results show that the proposed approach complements and enhances the news rankings generated by state-of-the-art systems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access