OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VulMCI : Code Splicing-based Pixel-row Oversampling for More Continuous Vulnerability Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning technology has brought new prospects to the field of vulnerability detection. Many vulnerability detection methods involve converting source code into images for detection, yet they often overlook the quality of the generated images. Due to the fact that vulnerability images lack clear and continuous contours, unlike images used in object detection, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) tend to lose semantic information during the convolution and pooling processes. Therefore, this paper proposes a pixel row oversampling method based on code line concatenation to generate more continuous code features, addressing the issue of discontinuity in code image coloration.Building upon these contributions, we propose the vulnerability detection system VulMCI and conduct tests on the SARD and NVD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that VulMCI outperforms seven state-of-the-art vulnerability detectors (namely Checkmarx, FlawFinder, RATS, VulDeePecker, SySeVR, VulCNN, and Devign). Compared to other image-based methods, VulMCI shows improvements in various metrics, including a 2.877\% increase in True Positive Rate (TPR), a 5.446\% increase in True Negative Rate (TNR), and a 5.91\% increase in Accuracy (ACC). On the NVD real-world dataset, VulMCI achieves an average accuracy of 5.162\%, confirming its value in practical vulnerability detection applications.
Prospect Personalized Recommendation on Large Language Model-based Agent Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The new kind of Agent-oriented information system, exemplified by GPTs, urges us to inspect the information system infrastructure to support Agent-level information processing and to adapt to the characteristics of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Agents, such as interactivity. In this work, we envisage the prospect of the recommender system on LLM-based Agent platforms and introduce a novel recommendation paradigm called Rec4Agentverse, comprised of Agent Items and Agent Recommender. Rec4Agentverse emphasizes the collaboration between Agent Items and Agent Recommender, thereby promoting personalized information services and enhancing the exchange of information beyond the traditional user-recommender feedback loop. Additionally, we prospect the evolution of Rec4Agentverse and conceptualize it into three stages based on the enhancement of the interaction and information exchange among Agent Items, Agent Recommender, and the user. A preliminary study involving several cases of Rec4Agentverse validates its significant potential for application. Lastly, we discuss potential issues and promising directions for future research.
How open are hybrid journals included in transformative agreements?
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

The ongoing controversy surrounding transformative agreements, which aim to transition subscription-based journal publishing to full open access, highlights the need for large-scale studies assessing the impact of these agreements on hybrid open access. By combining multiple open data sources, including cOAlition S Journal Checker, Crossref, and OpenAlex, this study presents a novel approach that analyses over 700 agreements. Results suggest a strong growth in open access, from 4.3% in 2018 to 15% in 2022. Over five years, 11,189 hybrid journals provided open access to 742,369 out of 8,146,958 articles (9.1%). Authors who could make use of transformative agreements contributed 328,957 open access articles (44%) during this period, reaching a peak in 2022 with 143,615 out of 249,511 open access articles (58%). While this trend was predominantly driven by the three commercial publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, open access uptake varied substantially across journals, publishers, disciplines, and countries. Particularly, the OECD and BRICS areas revealed different publication trends. In conclusion, this study suggests that current levels of implementation of transformative agreements is insufficient to bring about a large-scale transition to full open access.
Efficiently Computable Safety Bounds for Gaussian Processes in Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Active learning of physical systems must commonly respect practical safety constraints, which restricts the exploration of the design space. Gaussian Processes (GPs) and their calibrated uncertainty estimations are widely used for this purpose. In many technical applications the design space is explored via continuous trajectories, along which the safety needs to be assessed. This is particularly challenging for strict safety requirements in GP methods, as it employs computationally expensive Monte-Carlo sampling of high quantiles. We address these challenges by providing provable safety bounds based on the adaptively sampled median of the supremum of the posterior GP. Our method significantly reduces the number of samples required for estimating high safety probabilities, resulting in faster evaluation without sacrificing accuracy and exploration speed. The effectiveness of our safe active learning approach is demonstrated through extensive simulations and validated using a real-world engine example.
WIKIGENBENCH: Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

It presents significant challenges to generate comprehensive and accurate Wikipedia articles for newly emerging events under a real-world scenario. Existing attempts fall short either by focusing only on short snippets or by using metrics that are insufficient to evaluate real-world scenarios. In this paper, we construct WIKIGENBENCH, a new benchmark consisting of 1,320 entries, designed to align with real-world scenarios in both generation and evaluation. For generation, we explore a real-world scenario where structured, full-length Wikipedia articles with citations are generated for new events using input documents from web sources. For evaluation, we integrate systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess the verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-world scenarios. Based on this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments using various models within three commonly used frameworks: direct RAG, hierarchical structure-based RAG, and RAG with a fine-tuned generation model. Experimental results show that hierarchical-based methods can generate more comprehensive content, while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability. However, even the best methods still show a significant gap compared to existing Wikipedia content, indicating that further research is necessary.
EAN-MapNet: Efficient Vectorized HD Map Construction with Anchor Neighborhoods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

High-definition (HD) map is crucial for autonomous driving systems. Most existing works design map elements detection heads based on the DETR decoder. However, the initial queries lack explicit incorporation of physical positional information, and vanilla self-attention entails high computational complexity. Therefore, we propose EAN-MapNet for Efficiently constructing HD map using Anchor Neighborhoods. Firstly, we design query units based on the anchor neighborhoods, allowing non-neighborhood central anchors to effectively assist in fitting the neighborhood central anchors to the target points representing map elements. Then, we propose grouped local self-attention (GL-SA) by leveraging the relative instance relationship among the queries. This facilitates direct feature interaction among queries of the same instances, while innovatively employing local queries as intermediaries for interaction among queries from different instances. Consequently, GL-SA significantly reduces the computational complexity of self-attention while ensuring ample feature interaction among queries. On the nuScenes dataset, EAN-MapNet achieves a state-of-the-art performance with 63.0 mAP after training for 24 epochs, surpassing MapTR by 12.7 mAP. Furthermore, it considerably reduces memory consumption by 8198M compared to MapTRv2.
Play like a Vertex: A Stackelberg Game Approach for Streaming Graph Partitioning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In the realm of distributed systems tasked with managing and processing large-scale graph-structured data, optimizing graph partitioning stands as a pivotal challenge. The primary goal is to minimize communication overhead and runtime cost. However, alongside the computational complexity associated with optimal graph partitioning, a critical factor to consider is memory overhead. Real-world graphs often reach colossal sizes, making it impractical and economically unviable to load the entire graph into memory for partitioning. This is also a fundamental premise in distributed graph processing, where accommodating a graph with non-distributed systems is unattainable. Currently, existing streaming partitioning algorithms exhibit a skew-oblivious nature, yielding satisfactory partitioning results exclusively for specific graph types. In this paper, we propose a novel streaming partitioning algorithm, the Skewness-aware Vertex-cut Partitioner S5P, designed to leverage the skewness characteristics of real graphs for achieving high-quality partitioning. S5P offers high partitioning quality by segregating the graph's edge set into two subsets, head and tail sets. Following processing by a skewness-aware clustering algorithm, these two subsets subsequently undergo a Stackelberg graph game. Our extensive evaluations conducted on substantial real-world and synthetic graphs demonstrate that, in all instances, the partitioning quality of S5P surpasses that of existing streaming partitioning algorithms, operating within the same load balance constraints. For example, S5P can bring up to a 51% improvement in partitioning quality compared to the top partitioner among the baselines. Lastly, we showcase that the implementation of S5P results in up to an 81% reduction in communication cost and a 130% increase in runtime efficiency for distributed graph processing tasks on PowerGraph.
Location-guided Head Pose Estimation for Fisheye Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Camera with a fisheye or ultra-wide lens covers a wide field of view that cannot be modeled by the perspective projection. Serious fisheye lens distortion in the peripheral region of the image leads to degraded performance of the existing head pose estimation models trained on undistorted images. This paper presents a new approach for head pose estimation that uses the knowledge of head location in the image to reduce the negative effect of fisheye distortion. We develop an end-to-end convolutional neural network to estimate the head pose with the multi-task learning of head pose and head location. Our proposed network estimates the head pose directly from the fisheye image without the operation of rectification or calibration. We also created a fisheye-distorted version of the three popular head pose estimation datasets, BIWI, 300W-LP, and AFLW2000 for our experiments. Experiments results show that our network remarkably improves the accuracy of head pose estimation compared with other state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage methods.
Privacy Policies and Consent Management Platforms: Growth and Users' Interactions over Time
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

In response to growing concerns about user privacy, legislators have introduced new regulations and laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that force websites to obtain user consent before activating personal data collection, fundamental to providing targeted advertising. The cornerstone of this consent-seeking process involves the use of Privacy Banners, the technical mechanism to collect users' approval for data collection practices. Consent management platforms (CMPs) have emerged as practical solutions to make it easier for website administrators to properly manage consent, allowing them to outsource the complexities of managing user consent and activating advertising features. This paper presents a detailed and longitudinal analysis of the evolution of CMPs spanning nine years. We take a twofold perspective: Firstly, thanks to the HTTP Archive dataset, we provide insights into the growth, market share, and geographical spread of CMPs. Noteworthy observations include the substantial impact of GDPR on the proliferation of CMPs in Europe. Secondly, we analyse millions of user interactions with a medium-sized CMP present in thousands of websites worldwide. We observe how even small changes in the design of Privacy Banners have a critical impact on the user's giving or denying their consent to data collection. For instance, over 60% of users do not consent when offered a simple "one-click reject-all" option. Conversely, when opting out requires more than one click, about 90% of users prefer to simply give their consent. The main objective is in fact to eliminate the annoying privacy banner rather the make an informed decision. Curiously, we observe iOS users exhibit a higher tendency to accept cookies compared to Android users, possibly indicating greater confidence in the privacy offered by Apple devices.
Robotising Psychometrics: Validating Wellbeing Assessment Tools in Child-Robot Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The interdisciplinary nature of Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) fosters incorporating measures and methodologies from many established domains. However, when employing CRI approaches to sensitive avenues of health and wellbeing, caution is critical in adapting metrics to retain their safety standards and ensure accurate utilisation. In this work, we conducted a secondary analysis to previous empirical work, investigating the reliability and construct validity of established psychological questionnaires such as the Short Moods and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ) and three subscales (generalised anxiety, panic and low mood) of the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) within a CRI setting for the assessment of mental wellbeing. Through confirmatory principal component analysis, we have observed that these measures are reliable and valid in the context of CRI. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that scales communicated by a robot demonstrated a better fit than when self-reported, underscoring the efficiency and effectiveness of robot-mediated psychological assessments in these settings. Nevertheless, we have also observed variations in item contributions to the main factor, suggesting potential areas of examination and revision (e.g., relating to physiological changes, inactivity and cognitive demands) when used in CRI. Findings from this work highlight the importance of verifying the reliability and validity of standardised metrics and assessment tools when employed in CRI settings, thus, aiming to avoid any misinterpretations and misrepresentations.
FineDiffusion: Scaling up Diffusion Models for Fine-grained Image Generation with 10,000 Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The class-conditional image generation based on diffusion models is renowned for generating high-quality and diverse images. However, most prior efforts focus on generating images for general categories, e.g., 1000 classes in ImageNet-1k. A more challenging task, large-scale fine-grained image generation, remains the boundary to explore. In this work, we present a parameter-efficient strategy, called FineDiffusion, to fine-tune large pre-trained diffusion models scaling to large-scale fine-grained image generation with 10,000 categories. FineDiffusion significantly accelerates training and reduces storage overhead by only fine-tuning tiered class embedder, bias terms, and normalization layers' parameters. To further improve the image generation quality of fine-grained categories, we propose a novel sampling method for fine-grained image generation, which utilizes superclass-conditioned guidance, specifically tailored for fine-grained categories, to replace the conventional classifier-free guidance sampling. Compared to full fine-tuning, FineDiffusion achieves a remarkable 1.56x training speed-up and requires storing merely 1.77% of the total model parameters, while achieving state-of-the-art FID of 9.776 on image generation of 10,000 classes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. The code and more generated results are available at our project website: https://finediffusion.github.io/.
LatentSwap: An Efficient Latent Code Mapping Framework for Face Swapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose LatentSwap, a simple face swapping framework generating a face swap latent code of a given generator. Utilizing randomly sampled latent codes, our framework is light and does not require datasets besides employing the pre-trained models, with the training procedure also being fast and straightforward. The loss objective consists of only three terms, and can effectively control the face swap results between source and target images. By attaching a pre-trained GAN inversion model independent to the model and using the StyleGAN2 generator, our model produces photorealistic and high-resolution images comparable to other competitive face swap models. We show that our framework is applicable to other generators such as StyleNeRF, paving a way to 3D-aware face swapping and is also compatible with other downstream StyleGAN2 generator tasks. The source code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/usingcolor/LatentSwap}.
Polynomial-time approximation schemes for induced subgraph problems on fractionally tree-independence-number-fragile graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate a relaxation of the notion of fractional treewidth-fragility, namely fractional tree-independence-number-fragility. In particular, we obtain polynomial-time approximation schemes for meta-problems such as finding a maximum-weight sparse induced subgraph satisfying a given $\mathsf{CMSO}_2$ formula on fractionally tree-independence-number-fragile graph classes. Our approach unifies and extends several known polynomial-time approximation schemes on seemingly unrelated graph classes, such as classes of intersection graphs of fat objects in a fixed dimension or proper minor-closed classes. We also study the related notion of layered tree-independence number, a relaxation of layered treewidth, and its applications to exact subexponential-time algorithms.
Similarity-based analogical proportions
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The author has recently introduced abstract algebraic frameworks of analogical proportions and similarity within the general setting of universal algebra. The purpose of this paper is to build a bridge from similarity to analogical proportions by formulating the latter in terms of the former. The benefit of this similarity-based approach is that the connection between proportions and similarity is built into the framework and therefore evident which is appealing since proportions and similarity are both at the center of analogy; moreover, future results on similarity can directly be applied to analogical proportions.
Large Language Models As Evolution Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large Transformer models are capable of implementing a plethora of so-called in-context learning algorithms. These include gradient descent, classification, sequence completion, transformation, and improvement. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs), which never explicitly encountered the task of black-box optimization, are in principle capable of implementing evolutionary optimization algorithms. While previous works have solely focused on language-based task specification, we move forward and focus on the zero-shot application of LLMs to black-box optimization. We introduce a novel prompting strategy, consisting of least-to-most sorting of discretized population members and querying the LLM to propose an improvement to the mean statistic, i.e. perform a type of black-box recombination operation. Empirically, we find that our setup allows the user to obtain an LLM-based evolution strategy, which we call `EvoLLM', that robustly outperforms baseline algorithms such as random search and Gaussian Hill Climbing on synthetic BBOB functions as well as small neuroevolution tasks. Hence, LLMs can act as `plug-in' in-context recombination operators. We provide several comparative studies of the LLM's model size, prompt strategy, and context construction. Finally, we show that one can flexibly improve EvoLLM's performance by providing teacher algorithm information via instruction fine-tuning on previously collected teacher optimization trajectories.
TrustRate: A Decentralized Platform for Hijack-Resistant Anonymous Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Reviews and ratings by users form a central component in several widely used products today (e.g., product reviews, ratings of online content, etc.), but today's platforms for managing such reviews are ad-hoc and vulnerable to various forms of tampering and hijack by fake reviews either by bots or motivated paid workers. We define a new metric called 'hijack-resistance' for such review platforms, and then present TrustRate, an end-to-end decentralized, hijack-resistant platform for authentic, anonymous, tamper-proof reviews. With a prototype implementation and evaluation at the scale of thousands of nodes, we demonstrate the efficacy and performance of our platform, towards a new paradigm for building products based on trusted reviews by end users without having to trust a single organization that manages the reviews.
Leveraging Diverse Modeling Contexts with Collaborating Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models are two types of generative models for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). AR models predict tokens in a word-by-word manner and can effectively capture the distribution of real translations. NAR models predict tokens by extracting bidirectional contextual information which can improve the inference speed but they suffer from performance degradation. Previous works utilized AR models to enhance NAR models by reducing the training data's complexity or incorporating the global information into AR models by virtue of NAR models. However, those investigated methods only take advantage of the contextual information of a single type of model while neglecting the diversity in the contextual information that can be provided by different types of models. In this paper, we propose a novel generic collaborative learning method, DCMCL, where AR and NAR models are treated as collaborators instead of teachers and students. To hierarchically leverage the bilateral contextual information, token-level mutual learning and sequence-level contrastive learning are adopted between AR and NAR models. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmarks show that the proposed DCMCL method can simultaneously improve both AR and NAR models with up to 1.38 and 2.98 BLEU scores respectively, and can also outperform the current best-unified model with up to 0.97 BLEU scores for both AR and NAR decoding.