“No, not at all!” Mr. Polland practically jumped out of his seat, barely able to contain his excitement. “This is incredible! I can’t believe one of my students wrote this! Emmy, I have to show your thesis to Dominic—he’ll be blown away by your framework!”
Dominic. The giant of the AI world.
At the sound of his name, Emmy’s eyes lost their shine. She didn’t say a word.
Just then, a clear, amused female voice interrupted the buzz in the room.
“Emmy’s paper really is impressive. Since you built this framework yourself, you must know every single line of data inside and out,” the woman said with a small, knowing smile.
“I just have one question. In the third stage of your adversarial attack simulation, why does the ‘phantom noise’ injection threshold suddenly drop to such an unusually low value? That data spike doesn’t fit any known theory.”
Evelina narrowed her eyes, her tone turning sharper. “Or are you saying that core data wasn’t even generated by you?”
The room fell silent. The energy shifted in an instant, excitement replaced by shock.
Mr. Polland’s face went from thrilled to stunned in the blink of an eye. The other professors exchanged worried looks.
This wasn’t just a technical question anymore—she was questioning whether Emmy’s entire thesis was even real.
After a tense moment, Emmy finally spoke, her voice steady and clear.
“That data point isn’t an anomaly. It’s actually a decoy I designed to counter ‘shadow attacks.’”
“When the system detects adversarial samples above a certain threshold, it drops the noise injection to a fake safe value. That tricks the attacker into thinking they’ve succeeded, while actually revealing their attack path and data source. You can think of it as a reverse honeypot.”
She explained it all smoothly, not missing a beat.
The professors stared, stunned for a second. Then their eyes lit up, even brighter than before.
Evelina looked genuinely surprised. She smiled, then started clapping—slow at first, but soon the others joined in.
“That’s a clever idea. Emmy, you’re really talented,” Evelina said. “But I have to ask—someone with your skills could have gone anywhere. Why did you pick this university?”
She paused, then added, “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this school—if I thought that, I wouldn’t be here as a judge.”
“What I mean is, with your ability, you could have easily graduated from MIT.”
VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Dumped My Cheating Ex. Now I'm Sleeping Next to a Billionaire CEO