OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
It's more than just money: The real-world harms from ransomware attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As cyber-attacks continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, organisations must be better prepared to face the reality of an incident. Any organisational plan that intends to be successful at managing security risks must clearly understand the harm (i.e., negative impact) and the various parties affected in the aftermath of an attack. To this end, this article conducts a novel exploration into the multitude of real-world harms that can arise from cyber-attacks, with a particular focus on ransomware incidents given their current prominence. This exploration also leads to the proposal of a new, robust methodology for modelling harms from such incidents. We draw on publicly-available case data on high-profile ransomware incidents to examine the types of harm that emerge at various stages after a ransomware attack and how harms (e.g., an offline enterprise server) may trigger other negative, potentially more substantial impacts for stakeholders (e.g., the inability for a customer to access their social welfare benefits or bank account). Prominent findings from our analysis include the identification of a notable set of social/human harms beyond the business itself (and beyond the financial payment of a ransom) and a complex web of harms that emerge after attacks regardless of the industry sector. We also observed that deciphering the full extent and sequence of harms can be a challenging undertaking because of the lack of complete data available. This paper consequently argues for more transparency on ransomware harms, as it would lead to a better understanding of the realities of these incidents to the benefit of organisations and society more generally.
Probabilistic and Semantic Descriptions of Image Manifolds and Their Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper begins with a description of methods for estimating image probability density functions that reflects the observation that such data is usually constrained to lie in restricted regions of the high-dimensional image space-not every pattern of pixels is an image. It is common to say that images lie on a lower-dimensional manifold in the high-dimensional space. However, it is not the case that all points on the manifold have an equal probability of being images. Images are unevenly distributed on the manifold, and our task is to devise ways to model this distribution as a probability distribution. We therefore consider popular generative models. For our purposes, generative/probabilistic models should have the properties of 1) sample generation: the possibility to sample from this distribution with the modelled density function, and 2) probability computation: given a previously unseen sample from the dataset of interest, one should be able to compute its probability, at least up to a normalising constant. To this end, we investigate the use of methods such as normalising flow and diffusion models. We then show how semantic interpretations are used to describe points on the manifold. To achieve this, we consider an emergent language framework that uses variational encoders for a disentangled representation of points that reside on a given manifold. Trajectories between points on a manifold can then be described as evolving semantic descriptions. We also show that such probabilistic descriptions (bounded) can be used to improve semantic consistency by constructing defences against adversarial attacks. We evaluate our methods with improved semantic robustness and OoD detection capability, explainable and editable semantic interpolation, and improved classification accuracy under patch attacks. We also discuss the limitation in diffusion models.
Sample-Efficient Learning of POMDPs with Multiple Observations In Hindsight
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies the sample-efficiency of learning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), a challenging problem in reinforcement learning that is known to be exponentially hard in the worst-case. Motivated by real-world settings such as loading in game playing, we propose an enhanced feedback model called ``multiple observations in hindsight'', where after each episode of interaction with the POMDP, the learner may collect multiple additional observations emitted from the encountered latent states, but may not observe the latent states themselves. We show that sample-efficient learning under this feedback model is possible for two new subclasses of POMDPs: \emph{multi-observation revealing POMDPs} and \emph{distinguishable POMDPs}. Both subclasses generalize and substantially relax \emph{revealing POMDPs} -- a widely studied subclass for which sample-efficient learning is possible under standard trajectory feedback. Notably, distinguishable POMDPs only require the emission distributions from different latent states to be \emph{different} instead of \emph{linearly independent} as required in revealing POMDPs.
Transfer Learning for the Efficient Detection of COVID-19 from Smartphone Audio Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Disease detection from smartphone data represents an open research challenge in mobile health (m-health) systems. COVID-19 and its respiratory symptoms are an important case study in this area and their early detection is a potential real instrument to counteract the pandemic situation. The efficacy of this solution mainly depends on the performances of AI algorithms applied to the collected data and their possible implementation directly on the users' mobile devices. Considering these issues, and the limited amount of available data, in this paper we present the experimental evaluation of 3 different deep learning models, compared also with hand-crafted features, and of two main approaches of transfer learning in the considered scenario: both feature extraction and fine-tuning. Specifically, we considered VGGish, YAMNET, and L\textsuperscript{3}-Net (including 12 different configurations) evaluated through user-independent experiments on 4 different datasets (13,447 samples in total). Results clearly show the advantages of L\textsuperscript{3}-Net in all the experimental settings as it overcomes the other solutions by 12.3\% in terms of Precision-Recall AUC as features extractor, and by 10\% when the model is fine-tuned. Moreover, we note that to fine-tune only the fully-connected layers of the pre-trained models generally leads to worse performances, with an average drop of 6.6\% with respect to feature extraction. %highlighting the need for further investigations. Finally, we evaluate the memory footprints of the different models for their possible applications on commercial mobile devices.
Context-Aware Configuration and Management of WiFi Direct Groups for Real Opportunistic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Wi-Fi Direct is a promising technology for the support of device-to-device communications (D2D) on commercial mobile devices. However, the standard as-it-is is not sufficient to support the real deployment of networking solutions entirely based on D2D such as opportunistic networks. In fact, WiFi Direct presents some characteristics that could limit the autonomous creation of D2D connections among users' personal devices. Specifically, the standard explicitly requires the user's authorization to establish a connection between two or more devices, and it provides a limited support for inter-group communication. In some cases, this might lead to the creation of isolated groups of nodes which cannot communicate among each other. In this paper, we propose a novel middleware-layer protocol for the efficient configuration and management of WiFi Direct groups (WiFi Direct Group Manager, WFD-GM) to enable autonomous connections and inter-group communication. This enables opportunistic networks in real conditions (e.g., variable mobility and network size). WFD-GM defines a context function that takes into account heterogeneous parameters for the creation of the best group configuration in a specific time window, including an index of nodes' stability and power levels. We evaluate the protocol performances by simulating three reference scenarios including different mobility models, geographical areas and number of nodes. Simulations are also supported by experimental results related to the evaluation in a real testbed of the involved context parameters. We compare WFD-GM with the state-of-the-art solutions and we show that it performs significantly better than a Baseline approach in scenarios with medium/low mobility, and it is comparable with it in case of high mobility, without introducing additional overhead.
Benchmarking Test-Time Adaptation against Distribution Shifts in Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a technique aimed at enhancing the generalization performance of models by leveraging unlabeled samples solely during prediction. Given the need for robustness in neural network systems when faced with distribution shifts, numerous TTA methods have recently been proposed. However, evaluating these methods is often done under different settings, such as varying distribution shifts, backbones, and designing scenarios, leading to a lack of consistent and fair benchmarks to validate their effectiveness. To address this issue, we present a benchmark that systematically evaluates 13 prominent TTA methods and their variants on five widely used image classification datasets: CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, ImageNet-C, DomainNet, and Office-Home. These methods encompass a wide range of adaptation scenarios (e.g. online adaptation v.s. offline adaptation, instance adaptation v.s. batch adaptation v.s. domain adaptation). Furthermore, we explore the compatibility of different TTA methods with diverse network backbones. To implement this benchmark, we have developed a unified framework in PyTorch, which allows for consistent evaluation and comparison of the TTA methods across the different datasets and network architectures. By establishing this benchmark, we aim to provide researchers and practitioners with a reliable means of assessing and comparing the effectiveness of TTA methods in improving model robustness and generalization performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyongcan/Benchmark-TTA.
MultiVENT: Multilingual Videos of Events with Aligned Natural Text
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Everyday news coverage has shifted from traditional broadcasts towards a wide range of presentation formats such as first-hand, unedited video footage. Datasets that reflect the diverse array of multimodal, multilingual news sources available online could be used to teach models to benefit from this shift, but existing news video datasets focus on traditional news broadcasts produced for English-speaking audiences. We address this limitation by constructing MultiVENT, a dataset of multilingual, event-centric videos grounded in text documents across five target languages. MultiVENT includes both news broadcast videos and non-professional event footage, which we use to analyze the state of online news videos and how they can be leveraged to build robust, factually accurate models. Finally, we provide a model for complex, multilingual video retrieval to serve as a baseline for information retrieval using MultiVENT.
Cryptoart: Ethical Challenges of the NFT Revolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The digital transformation of the art world has become a revolution for the sector. Cryptoart, based on non-fungible tokens (NFT), is attracting the attention of artists, collectors and enthusiasts for its ability to tokenise any element that can be sold as art in the digital market. That means it is able to become a scarce resource and an economic asset by encapsulating the market value of a piece of digital art, which may or may not have a reference in the real world. This study will delve into the ethical aspects underlying what is known as the NFT Revolution, particularly impacts related to the abuse or destruction of cultural heritage, speculation and the generation of economic bubbles and environmental unsustainability.
ChatGPT is not a pocket calculator -- Problems of AI-chatbots for teaching Geography
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The recent success of large language models and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT in various knowledge domains has a severe impact on teaching and learning Geography and GIScience. The underlying revolution is often compared to the introduction of pocket calculators, suggesting analogous adaptations that prioritize higher-level skills over other learning content. However, using ChatGPT can be fraudulent because it threatens the validity of assessments. The success of such a strategy therefore rests on the assumption that lower-level learning goals are substitutable by AI, and supervision and assessments can be refocused on higher-level goals. Based on a preliminary survey on ChatGPT's quality in answering questions in Geography and GIScience, we demonstrate that this assumption might be fairly naive, and effective control in assessments and supervision is required.
Transcribing Educational Videos Using Whisper: A preliminary study on using AI for transcribing educational videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Videos are increasingly being used for e-learning, and transcripts are vital to enhance the learning experience. The costs and delays of generating transcripts can be alleviated by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this article, we quantify the transcripts generated by whisper for 25 educational videos and identify some open avenues of research when leveraging ASR for transcribing educational videos.
Analyzing the Performance Portability of Tensor Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

We employ pressure point analysis and roofline modeling to identify performance bottlenecks and determine an upper bound on the performance of the Canonical Polyadic Alternating Poisson Regression Multiplicative Update (CP-APR MU) algorithm in the SparTen software library. Our analyses reveal that a particular matrix computation, $Φ^{(n)}$, is the critical performance bottleneck in the SparTen CP-APR MU implementation. Moreover, we find that atomic operations are not a critical bottleneck while higher cache reuse can provide a non-trivial performance improvement. We also utilize grid search on the Kokkos library parallel policy parameters to achieve 2.25x average speedup over the SparTen default for $Φ^{(n)}$ computation on CPU and 1.70x on GPU. We conclude our investigations by comparing Kokkos implementations of the STREAM benchmark and the matricized tensor times Khatri-Rao product (MTTKRP) benchmark from the Parallel Sparse Tensor Algorithm (PASTA) benchmark suite to implementations using vendor libraries. We show that with a single implementation Kokkos achieves performance comparable to hand-tuned code for fundamental operations that make up tensor decomposition kernels on a wide range of CPU and GPU systems. Overall, we conclude that Kokkos demonstrates good performance portability for simple data-intensive operations but requires tuning for algorithms with more complex dependencies and data access patterns.
When Fair Classification Meets Noisy Protected Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The operationalization of algorithmic fairness comes with several practical challenges, not the least of which is the availability or reliability of protected attributes in datasets. In real-world contexts, practical and legal impediments may prevent the collection and use of demographic data, making it difficult to ensure algorithmic fairness. While initial fairness algorithms did not consider these limitations, recent proposals aim to achieve algorithmic fairness in classification by incorporating noisiness in protected attributes or not using protected attributes at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first head-to-head study of fair classification algorithms to compare attribute-reliant, noise-tolerant and attribute-blind algorithms along the dual axes of predictivity and fairness. We evaluated these algorithms via case studies on four real-world datasets and synthetic perturbations. Our study reveals that attribute-blind and noise-tolerant fair classifiers can potentially achieve similar level of performance as attribute-reliant algorithms, even when protected attributes are noisy. However, implementing them in practice requires careful nuance. Our study provides insights into the practical implications of using fair classification algorithms in scenarios where protected attributes are noisy or partially available.
InfoSync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Information Synchronization of semi-structured data across languages is challenging. For instance, Wikipedia tables in one language should be synchronized across languages. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset InfoSyncC and a two-step method for tabular synchronization. InfoSync contains 100K entity-centric tables (Wikipedia Infoboxes) across 14 languages, of which a subset (3.5K pairs) are manually annotated. The proposed method includes 1) Information Alignment to map rows and 2) Information Update for updating missing/outdated information for aligned tables across multilingual tables. When evaluated on InfoSync, information alignment achieves an F1 score of 87.91 (en <-> non-en). To evaluate information updation, we perform human-assisted Wikipedia edits on Infoboxes for 603 table pairs. Our approach obtains an acceptance rate of 77.28% on Wikipedia, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.
BiPhone: Modeling Inter Language Phonetic Influences in Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A large number of people are forced to use the Web in a language they have low literacy in due to technology asymmetries. Written text in the second language (L2) from such users often contains a large number of errors that are influenced by their native language (L1). We propose a method to mine phoneme confusions (sounds in L2 that an L1 speaker is likely to conflate) for pairs of L1 and L2. These confusions are then plugged into a generative model (Bi-Phone) for synthetically producing corrupted L2 text. Through human evaluations, we show that Bi-Phone generates plausible corruptions that differ across L1s and also have widespread coverage on the Web. We also corrupt the popular language understanding benchmark SuperGLUE with our technique (FunGLUE for Phonetically Noised GLUE) and show that SoTA language understating models perform poorly. We also introduce a new phoneme prediction pre-training task which helps byte models to recover performance close to SuperGLUE. Finally, we also release the FunGLUE benchmark to promote further research in phonetically robust language models. To the best of our knowledge, FunGLUE is the first benchmark to introduce L1-L2 interactions in text.
Evaluating Biased Attitude Associations of Language Models in an Intersectional Context
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Language models are trained on large-scale corpora that embed implicit biases documented in psychology. Valence associations (pleasantness/unpleasantness) of social groups determine the biased attitudes towards groups and concepts in social cognition. Building on this established literature, we quantify how social groups are valenced in English language models using a sentence template that provides an intersectional context. We study biases related to age, education, gender, height, intelligence, literacy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, social class, and weight. We present a concept projection approach to capture the valence subspace through contextualized word embeddings of language models. Adapting the projection-based approach to embedding association tests that quantify bias, we find that language models exhibit the most biased attitudes against gender identity, social class, and sexual orientation signals in language. We find that the largest and better-performing model that we study is also more biased as it effectively captures bias embedded in sociocultural data. We validate the bias evaluation method by overperforming on an intrinsic valence evaluation task. The approach enables us to measure complex intersectional biases as they are known to manifest in the outputs and applications of language models that perpetuate historical biases. Moreover, our approach contributes to design justice as it studies the associations of groups underrepresented in language such as transgender and homosexual individuals.
A Side-by-side Comparison of Transformers for English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.
Teaching Arithmetic to Small Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token prediction objective. This study investigates how small transformers, trained from random initialization, can efficiently learn arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, and elementary functions like square root, using the next-token prediction objective. We first demonstrate that conventional training data is not the most effective for arithmetic learning, and simple formatting changes can significantly improve accuracy. This leads to sharp phase transitions as a function of training data scale, which, in some cases, can be explained through connections to low-rank matrix completion. Building on prior work, we then train on chain-of-thought style data that includes intermediate step results. Even in the complete absence of pretraining, this approach significantly and simultaneously improves accuracy, sample complexity, and convergence speed. We also study the interplay between arithmetic and text data during training and examine the effects of few-shot prompting, pretraining, and model scale. Additionally, we discuss length generalization challenges. Our work highlights the importance of high-quality, instructive data that considers the particular characteristics of the next-word prediction objective for rapidly eliciting arithmetic capabilities.