Cross-Modal Corroboration for Annotation-Free Wildlife Monitoring

Scaling wildlife monitoring for real-world conservation deployments requires automated analysis of smart sensors that operate under severe annotation scarcity. We propose leveraging expert knowledge of species activity patterns as an annotation-free validation signal for multimodal monitoring pipelines. We operationalize agreement as the alignment of independently derived hourly activity curves both with each other and with published behavioral priors-a three-way convergence that rules out shared-data confounds and dataset-internal correlation as alternative explanations. Our vision pipeline combines zero-shot species detection via BioCLIP 2, sliced inference to handle deployment-constrained camera positioning, and geometry-based geographic localization from camera trap imagery. Our acoustic pipeline detects species vocalizations via a fine-tuned classifier. We validate the pipeline on a breeding herd of Milu deer and demonstrate that both modalities independently recover activity patterns consistent with known deer behavioral ecology with minimal manual annotation. The framework applies to species detectable in both visual and acoustic modalities for which behavioral priors are documented in the literature, suggesting a practical path toward self-validating wildlife-monitoring pipelines at conservation scale.

Side-Channel Attacks Survive Noise Cancellation in 3D Printers

Active Motor Noise Cancellation (AMNC) is a noise-reduction feature shipped in commercial fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers. Because it suppresses the acoustic emissions that side-channel attacks exploit, it has security-relevant side effects, though we find no evidence it was designed as a security control. We present a duration-controlled evaluation of side-channel leakage on AMNC-equipped hardware, using a public dataset of 144 synchronized acoustic and vibration recordings from two Bambu Lab printers across 12 object classes. Spectral analysis confirms suppression is measurably active: the motor-resonance band rises only 4.92 dB above its background-relative baseline during printing. Leakage nonetheless survives it. Acoustic classification is at chance for 30-second windows (11.11%, permutation p = 0.188) but reaches 27.08% on a duration-clean 60-second window and 40.28% under distributed sampling, against an 8.33% baseline: the channel is suppressed within short windows, not eliminated. The dominant discriminator, however, is print duration itself, which classifies at 63.89% (95% CI [55.78, 71.28]) from recording length alone and is validated against sliced G-code print time at r = 0.907. Vibration carries genuine geometry information independent of duration: with the observation window equalized by truncation, classification reaches 45.83% against a 25% baseline (permutation p = 0.023). It nonetheless adds no measurable information beyond duration in paired comparison. The leak is architecture-specific, present on the core-XY device (36.11%) and indistinguishable from chance on the bed-slinger (13.89%), and a consumer handset recovers as much as a mounted accelerometer (25.00% vs 26.39%). Noise cancellation raises the observation time an acoustic attacker requires without eliminating the channel, and leaves print duration entirely untouched.