OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IDRetracor: Towards Visual Forensics Against Malicious Face Swapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The face swapping technique based on deepfake methods poses significant social risks to personal identity security. While numerous deepfake detection methods have been proposed as countermeasures against malicious face swapping, they can only output binary labels (Fake/Real) for distinguishing fake content without reliable and traceable evidence. To achieve visual forensics and target face attribution, we propose a novel task named face retracing, which considers retracing the original target face from the given fake one via inverse mapping. Toward this goal, we propose an IDRetracor that can retrace arbitrary original target identities from fake faces generated by multiple face swapping methods. Specifically, we first adopt a mapping resolver to perceive the possible solution space of the original target face for the inverse mappings. Then, we propose mapping-aware convolutions to retrace the original target face from the fake one. Such convolutions contain multiple kernels that can be combined under the control of the mapping resolver to tackle different face swapping mappings dynamically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the IDRetracor exhibits promising retracing performance from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
Faster Lattice Basis Computation via a Natural Generalization of the Euclidean Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The Euclidean algorithm is the oldest algorithms known to mankind. Given two integral numbers $a_1$ and $a_2$, it computes the greatest common divisor (gcd) of $a_1$ and $a_2$ in a very elegant way. From a lattice perspective, it computes a basis of the sum of two one-dimensional lattices $a_1 \mathbb{Z}$ and $a_2 \mathbb{Z}$ as $\gcd(a_1,a_2) \mathbb{Z} = a_1 \mathbb{Z} + a_2 \mathbb{Z}$. In this paper, we show that the classical Euclidean algorithm can be adapted in a very natural way to compute a basis of a general lattice $L(A_1, \ldots , A_n)$ given vectors $A_1, \ldots , A_n \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ with $n> \mathrm{rank}(a_1, \ldots ,a_d)$. Similar to the Euclidean algorithm, our algorithm is very easy to describe and implement and can be written within 12 lines of pseudocode. As our main result, we obtain an algorithm to compute a lattice basis for given vectors $A_1, \ldots , A_n \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ in time (counting bit operations) $LS + \tilde{O}((n-d)d^2 \cdot \log(||A||)$, where $LS$ is the time required to obtain the exact fractional solution of a certain system of linear equalities. The analysis of the running time of our algorithms relies on fundamental statements on the fractionality of solutions of linear systems of equations. So far, the fastest algorithm for lattice basis computation was due to Storjohann and Labhan [SL96] having a running time of $\tilde{O}(nd^ω\log ||A||)$. For current upper bounds of $LS$, our algorithm has a running time improvement of a factor of at least $d^{0.12}$ over [SL96]. Our algorithm is therefore the first general algorithmic improvement to this classical problem in nearly 30 years. At last, we present a postprocessing procedure which yields an improved size bound of $\sqrt{d} ||A||$ for vectors of the resulting basis matrix.
Sustaining Maintenance Labor for Healthy Open Source Software Projects through Human Infrastructure: A Maintainer Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) fuels our global digital infrastructure but is commonly maintained by small groups of people whose time and labor represent a depletable resource. For the OSS projects to stay sustainable, i.e., viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, maintenance labor requires an underlying infrastructure to be supported and secured. Aims: Using the construct of human infrastructure, our study aims to investigate how maintenance labor can be supported and secured to enable the creation and maintenance of sustainable OSS projects, viewed from the maintainers' perspective. Method: In our exploration, we interviewed ten maintainers from nine well-adopted OSS projects. We coded the data in two steps using investigator-triangulation. Results: We constructed a framework of infrastructure design that provide insight for OSS projects in the design of their human infrastructure. The framework specifically highlight the importance of human factors, e.g., securing a work-life balance and proactively managing social pressure, toxicity, and diversity. We also note both differences and overlaps in how the infrastructure needs to support and secure maintenance labor from maintainers and the wider OSS community, respectively. Funding is specifically highlighted as an important enabler for both types of resources. Conclusions: The study contributes to the qualitative understanding of the importance, sensitivity, and risk for depletion of the maintenance labor required to build and maintain healthy OSS projects. Human infrastructure is pivotal in ensuring that maintenance labor is sustainable, and by extension the OSS projects on which we all depend.
Adaptive Data Quality Scoring Operations Framework using Drift-Aware Mechanism for Industrial Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Within data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) systems for industrial applications, ensuring the reliability of the incoming data streams is an integral part of trustworthy decision-making. An approach to assess data validity is data quality scoring, which assigns a score to each data point or stream based on various quality dimensions. However, certain dimensions exhibit dynamic qualities, which require adaptation on the basis of the system's current conditions. Existing methods often overlook this aspect, making them inefficient in dynamic production environments. In this paper, we introduce the Adaptive Data Quality Scoring Operations Framework, a novel framework developed to address the challenges posed by dynamic quality dimensions in industrial data streams. The framework introduces an innovative approach by integrating a dynamic change detector mechanism that actively monitors and adapts to changes in data quality, ensuring the relevance of quality scores. We evaluate the proposed framework performance in a real-world industrial use case. The experimental results reveal high predictive performance and efficient processing time, highlighting its effectiveness in practical quality-driven AI applications.
Grasping by Hanging: a Learning-Free Grasping Detection Method for Previously Unseen Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a novel learning-free three-stage method that predicts grasping poses, enabling robots to pick up and transfer previously unseen objects. Our method first identifies potential structures that can afford the action of hanging by analyzing the hanging mechanics and geometric properties. Then 6D poses are detected for a parallel gripper retrofitted with an extending bar, which when closed forms loops to hook each hangable structure. Finally, an evaluation policy qualities and rank grasp candidates for execution attempts. Compared to the traditional physical model-based and deep learning-based methods, our approach is closer to the human natural action of grasping unknown objects. And it also eliminates the need for a vast amount of training data. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments with a real robot. Experimental results indicate that the grasping accuracy and stability are significantly higher than the state-of-the-art learning-based method, especially for thin and flat objects.
Evaluating Research Quality with Large Language Models: An Analysis of ChatGPT's Effectiveness with Different Settings and Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Evaluating the quality of academic journal articles is a time consuming but critical task for national research evaluation exercises, appointments and promotion. It is therefore important to investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can play a role in this process. This article assesses which ChatGPT inputs (full text without tables, figures and references; title and abstract; title only) produce better quality score estimates, and the extent to which scores are affected by ChatGPT models and system prompts. The results show that the optimal input is the article title and abstract, with average ChatGPT scores based on these (30 iterations on a dataset of 51 papers) correlating at 0.67 with human scores, the highest ever reported. ChatGPT 4o is slightly better than 3.5-turbo (0.66), and 4o-mini (0.66). The results suggest that article full texts might confuse LLM research quality evaluations, even though complex system instructions for the task are more effective than simple ones. Thus, whilst abstracts contain insufficient information for a thorough assessment of rigour, they may contain strong pointers about originality and significance. Finally, linear regression can be used to convert the model scores into the human scale scores, which is 31% more accurate than guessing.
Visual Neural Decoding via Improved Visual-EEG Semantic Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual neural decoding refers to the process of extracting and interpreting original visual experiences from human brain activity. Recent advances in metric learning-based EEG visual decoding methods have delivered promising results and demonstrated the feasibility of decoding novel visual categories from brain activity. However, methods that directly map EEG features to the CLIP embedding space may introduce mapping bias and cause semantic inconsistency among features, thereby degrading alignment and impairing decoding performance. To further explore the semantic consistency between visual and neural signals. In this work, we construct a joint semantic space and propose a Visual-EEG Semantic Decouple Framework that explicitly extracts the semantic-related features of these two modalities to facilitate optimal alignment. Specifically, a cross-modal information decoupling module is introduced to guide the extraction of semantic-related information from modalities. Then, by quantifying the mutual information between visual image and EEG features, we observe a strong positive correlation between the decoding performance and the magnitude of mutual information. Furthermore, inspired by the mechanisms of visual object understanding from neuroscience, we propose an intra-class geometric consistency approach during the alignment process. This strategy maps visual samples within the same class to consistent neural patterns, which further enhances the robustness and the performance of EEG visual decoding. Experiments on a large Image-EEG dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot neural decoding tasks.
HLSPilot: LLM-based High-Level Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed an upsurge in automatic code generation, garnering significant attention for register transfer level (RTL) code generation. Despite the potential of RTL code generation with natural language, it remains error-prone and limited to relatively small modules because of the substantial semantic gap between natural language expressions and hardware design intent. In response to the limitations, we propose a methodology that reduces the semantic gaps by utilizing C/C++ for generating hardware designs via High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools. Basically, we build a set of C-to-HLS optimization strategies catering to various code patterns, such as nested loops and local arrays. Then, we apply these strategies to sequential C/C++ code through in-context learning, which provides the LLMs with exemplary C/C++ to HLS prompts. With this approach, HLS designs can be generated effectively. Since LLMs still face problems in determining the optimized pragma parameters precisely, we have a design space exploration (DSE) tool integrated for pragma parameter tuning. Furthermore, we also employ profiling tools to pinpoint the performance bottlenecks within a program and selectively convert bottleneck components to HLS code for hardware acceleration. By combining the LLM-based profiling, C/C++ to HLS translation, and DSE, we have established HLSPilot, the first LLM-enabled high-level synthesis framework, which can fully automate the high-level application acceleration on hybrid CPU-FPGA architectures. According to our experiments on real-world application benchmarks, HLSPilot achieve comparable performance in general and can even outperform manually crafted counterparts, thereby underscoring the substantial promise of LLM-assisted hardware designs.
Enhancing Multiview Synergy: Robust Learning by Exploiting the Wave Loss Function with Consensus and Complementarity Principles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multiview learning (MvL) is an advancing domain in machine learning, leveraging multiple data perspectives to enhance model performance through view-consistency and view-discrepancy. Despite numerous successful multiview-based SVM models, existing frameworks predominantly focus on the consensus principle, often overlooking the complementarity principle. Furthermore, they exhibit limited robustness against noisy, error-prone, and view-inconsistent samples, prevalent in multiview datasets. To tackle the aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces Wave-MvSVM, a novel multiview support vector machine framework leveraging the wave loss (W-loss) function, specifically designed to harness both consensus and complementarity principles. Unlike traditional approaches that often overlook the complementary information among different views, the proposed Wave-MvSVM ensures a more comprehensive and resilient learning process by integrating both principles effectively. The W-loss function, characterized by its smoothness, asymmetry, and bounded nature, is particularly effective in mitigating the adverse effects of noisy and outlier data, thereby enhancing model stability. Theoretically, the W-loss function also exhibits a crucial classification-calibrated property, further boosting its effectiveness. Wave-MvSVM employs a between-view co-regularization term to enforce view consistency and utilizes an adaptive combination weight strategy to maximize the discriminative power of each view. The optimization problem is efficiently solved using a combination of GD and the ADMM, ensuring reliable convergence to optimal solutions. Theoretical analyses, grounded in Rademacher complexity, validate the generalization capabilities of the Wave-MvSVM model. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse datasets demonstrate the superior performance of Wave-MvSVM in comparison to existing benchmark models.
Stateful protocol fuzzing with statemap-based reverse state selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Stateful Coverage-Based Greybox Fuzzing (SCGF) is considered the state-of-the-art method for network protocol greybox fuzzing. During the protocol fuzzing process, SCGF constructs the state machine of the target protocol by identifying protocol states. Optimal states are selected for fuzzing using heuristic methods, along with corresponding seeds and mutation regions, to effectively conduct fuzz testing. Nevertheless, existing SCGF methodologies prioritise the selection of protocol states without considering the correspondence between program basic block coverage information and protocol states. To address this gap, this paper proposes a statemap-based reverse state selection method for SCGF. This approach prioritises the coverage information of fuzzy test seeds, and delves deeper into the correspondence between the basic block coverage information of the programme and the protocol state, with the objective of improving the bitmap coverage. The state map is employed to simplify the state machine representation method. Furthermore, the design of different types of states has enabled the optimisation of the method of constructing message sequences, the reduction in the length of message sequences further improve the efficiency of test case execution. By optimising the SCGF, we developed SMGFuzz and conducted experiments utilising Profuzzbench in order to assess the testing efficiency of SMGFuzz.The results indicate that compared to AFLNet, SMGFuzz achieved an average increase of 12.48% in edges coverage, a 50.1% increase in unique crashes and a 40.2% increase in test case execution speed over a period of 24 hours.
Generative AI Tools in Academic Research: Applications and Implications for Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methodologies
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This study examines the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on academic research, focusing on its application to qualitative and quantitative data analysis. As GenAI tools evolve rapidly, they offer new possibilities for enhancing research productivity and democratising complex analytical processes. However, their integration into academic practice raises significant questions regarding research integrity and security, authorship, and the changing nature of scholarly work. Through an examination of current capabilities and potential future applications, this study provides insights into how researchers may utilise GenAI tools responsibly and ethically. We present case studies that demonstrate the application of GenAI in various research methodologies, discuss the challenges of replicability and consistency in AI-assisted research, and consider the ethical implications of increased AI integration in academia. This study explores both qualitative and quantitative applications of GenAI, highlighting tools for transcription, coding, thematic analysis, visual analytics, and statistical analysis. By addressing these issues, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the role of AI in shaping the future of academic research and provide guidance for researchers exploring the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-assisted research tools and research.
Margin of Victory for Weighted Tournament Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Determining how close a winner of an election is to becoming a loser, or distinguishing between different possible winners of an election, are major problems in computational social choice. We tackle these problems for so-called weighted tournament solutions by generalizing the notion of margin of victory (MoV) for tournament solutions by Brill et. al to weighted tournament solutions. For these, the MoV of a winner (resp. loser) is the total weight that needs to be changed in the tournament to make them a loser (resp. winner). We study three weighted tournament solutions: Borda's rule, the weighted Uncovered Set, and Split Cycle. For all three rules, we determine whether the MoV for winners and non-winners is tractable and give upper and lower bounds on the possible values of the MoV. Further, we axiomatically study and generalize properties from the unweighted tournament setting to weighted tournaments.
An Information Geometry Interpretation for Approximate Message Passing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose an information geometry (IG) framework to solve the standard linear regression problem. The proposed framework is an extension of the one for computing the mean of complex multivariate Gaussian distribution. By applying the proposed framework, the information geometry approach (IGA) and the approximate information geometry approach (AIGA) for basis pursuit de-noising (BPDN) in standard linear regression are derived. The framework can also be applied to other standard linear regression problems. With the transformations of natural and expectation parameters of Gaussian distributions, we then show the relationship between the IGA and the message passing (MP) algorithm. Finally, we prove that the AIGA is equivalent to the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm. These intrinsic results offer a new perspective for the AMP algorithm, and clues for understanding and improving stochastic reasoning methods.
Temporal Variability and Multi-Viewed Self-Supervised Representations to Tackle the ASVspoof5 Deepfake Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

ASVspoof5, the fifth edition of the ASVspoof series, is one of the largest global audio security challenges. It aims to advance the development of countermeasure (CM) to discriminate bonafide and spoofed speech utterances. In this paper, we focus on addressing the problem of open-domain audio deepfake detection, which corresponds directly to the ASVspoof5 Track1 open condition. At first, we comprehensively investigate various CM on ASVspoof5, including data expansion, data augmentation, and self-supervised learning (SSL) features. Due to the high-frequency gaps characteristic of the ASVspoof5 dataset, we introduce Frequency Mask, a data augmentation method that masks specific frequency bands to improve CM robustness. Combining various scale of temporal information with multiple SSL features, our experiments achieved a minDCF of 0.0158 and an EER of 0.55% on the ASVspoof 5 Track 1 evaluation progress set.
Heavy-Ball Momentum Accelerated Actor-Critic With Function Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

By using an parametric value function to replace the Monte-Carlo rollouts for value estimation, the actor-critic (AC) algorithms can reduce the variance of stochastic policy gradient so that to improve the convergence rate. While existing works mainly focus on analyzing convergence rate of AC algorithms under Markovian noise, the impacts of momentum on AC algorithms remain largely unexplored. In this work, we first propose a heavy-ball momentum based advantage actor-critic (\mbox{HB-A2C}) algorithm by integrating the heavy-ball momentum into the critic recursion that is parameterized by a linear function. When the sample trajectory follows a Markov decision process, we quantitatively certify the acceleration capability of the proposed HB-A2C algorithm. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the proposed HB-A2C finds an $ε$-approximate stationary point with $\oo{ε^{-2}}$ iterations for reinforcement learning tasks with Markovian noise. Moreover, we also reveal the dependence of learning rates on the length of the sample trajectory. By carefully selecting the momentum factor of the critic recursion, the proposed HB-A2C can balance the errors introduced by the initialization and the stoschastic approximation.
PayOff: A Regulated Central Bank Digital Currency with Private Offline Payments
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The European Central Bank is preparing for the potential issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), called the digital euro. A recent regulatory proposal by the European Commission defines several requirements for the digital euro, such as support for both online and offline payments. Offline payments are expected to enable cash-like privacy, local payment settlement, and the enforcement of holding limits. While other central banks have expressed similar desired functionality, achieving such offline payments poses a novel technical challenge. We observe that none of the existing research solutions, including offline E-cash schemes, are fully compliant. Proposed solutions based on secure elements offer no guarantees in case of compromise and can therefore lead to significant payment fraud. The main contribution of this paper is PayOff, a novel CBDC design motivated by the digital euro regulation, which focuses on offline payments. We analyze the security implications of local payment settlement and identify new security objectives. PayOff protects user privacy, supports complex regulations such as holding limits, and implements safeguards to increase robustness against secure element failure. Our analysis shows that PayOff provides strong privacy and identifies residual leakages that may arise in real-world deployments. Our evaluation shows that offline payments can be fast and that the central bank can handle high payment loads with moderate computing resources. However, the main limitation of PayOff is that offline payment messages and storage requirements grow in the number of payments that the sender makes or receives without going online in between.