OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Attacks on LoRa Device Identification and Rogue Signal Detection with Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, such as LoRa, have gained significant attention for their ability to enable long-range, low-power communication for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the security of LoRa networks remains a major concern, particularly in scenarios where device identification and classification of legitimate and spoofed signals are crucial. This paper studies a deep learning framework to address these challenges, considering LoRa device identification and legitimate vs. rogue LoRa device classification tasks. A deep neural network (DNN), either a convolutional neural network (CNN) or feedforward neural network (FNN), is trained for each task by utilizing real experimental I/Q data for LoRa signals, while rogue signals are generated by using kernel density estimation (KDE) of received signals by rogue devices. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM)-based adversarial attacks are considered for LoRa signal classification tasks using deep learning models. The impact of these attacks is assessed on the performance of two tasks, namely device identification and legitimate vs. rogue device classification, by utilizing separate or common perturbations against these signal classification tasks. Results presented in this paper quantify the level of transferability of adversarial attacks on different LoRa signal classification tasks as a major vulnerability and highlight the need to make IoT applications robust to adversarial attacks.
Landslide Detection and Segmentation Using Remote Sensing Images and Deep Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge about historic landslide event occurrence is important for supporting disaster risk reduction strategies. Building upon findings from 2022 Landslide4Sense Competition, we propose a deep neural network based system for landslide detection and segmentation from multisource remote sensing image input. We use a U-Net trained with Cross Entropy loss as baseline model. We then improve the U-Net baseline model by leveraging a wide range of deep learning techniques. In particular, we conduct feature engineering by generating new band data from the original bands, which helps to enhance the quality of remote sensing image input. Regarding the network architecture, we replace traditional convolutional layers in the U-Net baseline by a residual-convolutional layer. We also propose an attention layer which leverages the multi-head attention scheme. Additionally, we generate multiple output masks with three different resolutions, which creates an ensemble of three outputs in the inference process to enhance the performance. Finally, we propose a combined loss function which leverages Focal loss and IoU loss to train the network. Our experiments on the development set of the Landslide4Sense challenge achieve an F1 score and an mIoU score of 84.07 and 76.07, respectively. Our best model setup outperforms the challenge baseline and the proposed U-Net baseline, improving the F1 score/mIoU score by 6.8/7.4 and 10.5/8.8, respectively.
SuperServe: Fine-Grained Inference Serving for Unpredictable Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing deployment of ML models on the critical path of production applications in both datacenter and the edge requires ML inference serving systems to serve these models under unpredictable and bursty request arrival rates. Serving models under such conditions requires these systems to strike a careful balance between the latency and accuracy requirements of the application and the overall efficiency of utilization of scarce resources. State-of-the-art systems resolve this tension by either choosing a static point in the latency-accuracy tradeoff space to serve all requests or load specific models on the critical path of request serving. In this work, we instead resolve this tension by simultaneously serving the entire-range of models spanning the latency-accuracy tradeoff space. Our novel mechanism, SubNetAct, achieves this by carefully inserting specialized operators in weight-shared SuperNetworks. These operators enable SubNetAct to dynamically route requests through the network to meet a latency and accuracy target. SubNetAct requires upto 2.6x lower memory to serve a vastly-higher number of models than prior state-of-the-art. In addition, SubNetAct's near-instantaneous actuation of models unlocks the design space of fine-grained, reactive scheduling policies. We explore the design of one such extremely effective policy, SlackFit and instantiate both SubNetAct and SlackFit in a real system, SuperServe. SuperServe achieves 4.67% higher accuracy for the same SLO attainment and 2.85x higher SLO attainment for the same accuracy on a trace derived from the real-world Microsoft Azure Functions workload and yields the best trade-offs on a wide range of extremely-bursty synthetic traces automatically.
Catch Me if You Can: Effective Honeypot Placement in Dynamic AD Attack Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We study a Stackelberg game between an attacker and a defender on large Active Directory (AD) attack graphs where the defender employs a set of honeypots to stop the attacker from reaching high-value targets. Contrary to existing works that focus on small and static attack graphs, AD graphs typically contain hundreds of thousands of nodes and edges and constantly change over time. We consider two types of attackers: a simple attacker who cannot observe honeypots and a competent attacker who can. To jointly solve the game, we propose a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation. We observed that the optimal blocking plan for static graphs performs poorly in dynamic graphs. To solve the dynamic graph problem, we re-design the mixed-integer programming formulation by combining m MIP (dyMIP(m)) instances to produce a near-optimal blocking plan. Furthermore, to handle a large number of dynamic graph instances, we use a clustering algorithm to efficiently find the m-most representative graph instances for a constant m (dyMIP(m)). We prove a lower bound on the optimal blocking strategy for dynamic graphs and show that our dyMIP(m) algorithms produce close to optimal results for a range of AD graphs under realistic conditions.
EvPlug: Learn a Plug-and-Play Module for Event and Image Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Event cameras and RGB cameras exhibit complementary characteristics in imaging: the former possesses high dynamic range (HDR) and high temporal resolution, while the latter provides rich texture and color information. This makes the integration of event cameras into middle- and high-level RGB-based vision tasks highly promising. However, challenges arise in multi-modal fusion, data annotation, and model architecture design. In this paper, we propose EvPlug, which learns a plug-and-play event and image fusion module from the supervision of the existing RGB-based model. The learned fusion module integrates event streams with image features in the form of a plug-in, endowing the RGB-based model to be robust to HDR and fast motion scenes while enabling high temporal resolution inference. Our method only requires unlabeled event-image pairs (no pixel-wise alignment required) and does not alter the structure or weights of the RGB-based model. We demonstrate the superiority of EvPlug in several vision tasks such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and 3D hand pose estimation
Attack Tree Analysis for Adversarial Evasion Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, the evolution of deep learning has promoted the application of machine learning (ML) to various systems. However, there are ML systems, such as autonomous vehicles, that cause critical damage when they misclassify. Conversely, there are ML-specific attacks called adversarial attacks based on the characteristics of ML systems. For example, one type of adversarial attack is an evasion attack, which uses minute perturbations called "adversarial examples" to intentionally misclassify classifiers. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the risk of ML-specific attacks in introducing ML base systems. In this study, we propose a quantitative evaluation method for analyzing the risk of evasion attacks using attack trees. The proposed method consists of the extension of the conventional attack tree to analyze evasion attacks and the systematic construction method of the extension. In the extension of the conventional attack tree, we introduce ML and conventional attack nodes to represent various characteristics of evasion attacks. In the systematic construction process, we propose a procedure to construct the attack tree. The procedure consists of three steps: (1) organizing information about attack methods in the literature to a matrix, (2) identifying evasion attack scenarios from methods in the matrix, and (3) constructing the attack tree from the identified scenarios using a pattern. Finally, we conducted experiments on three ML image recognition systems to demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our proposed method.
Multi-Tier Computing-Enabled Digital Twin in 6G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Digital twin (DT) is the recurrent and common feature in discussions about future technologies, bringing together advanced communication, computation, and artificial intelligence, to name a few. In the context of Industry 4.0, industries such as manufacturing, automotive, and healthcare are rapidly adopting DT-based development. The main challenges to date have been the high demands on communication and computing resources, as well as privacy and security concerns, arising from the large volumes of data exchanges. To achieve low latency and high security services in the emerging DT, multi-tier computing has been proposed by combining edge/fog computing and cloud computing. Specifically, low latency data transmission, efficient resource allocation, and validated security strategies of multi-tier computing systems are used to solve the operational problems of the DT system. In this paper, we introduce the architecture and applications of DT using examples from manufacturing, the Internet-of-Vehicles and healthcare. At the same time, the architecture and technology of multi-tier computing systems are studied to support DT. This paper will provide valuable reference and guidance for the theory, algorithms, and applications in collaborative multi-tier computing and DT.
A Generalization of the Sugeno integral to aggregate Interval-valued data: an application to Brain Computer Interface and Social Network Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Intervals are a popular way to represent the uncertainty related to data, in which we express the vagueness of each observation as the width of the interval. However, when using intervals for this purpose, we need to use the appropriate set of mathematical tools to work with. This can be problematic due to the scarcity and complexity of interval-valued functions in comparison with the numerical ones. In this work, we propose to extend a generalization of the Sugeno integral to work with interval-valued data. Then, we use this integral to aggregate interval-valued data in two different settings: first, we study the use of intervals in a brain-computer interface; secondly, we study how to construct interval-valued relationships in a social network, and how to aggregate their information. Our results show that interval-valued data can effectively model some of the uncertainty and coalitions of the data in both cases. For the case of brain-computer interface, we found that our results surpassed the results of other interval-valued functions.
Learning Spatially Collaged Fourier Bases for Implicit Neural Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Existing approaches to Implicit Neural Representation (INR) can be interpreted as a global scene representation via a linear combination of Fourier bases of different frequencies. However, such universal basis functions can limit the representation capability in local regions where a specific component is unnecessary, resulting in unpleasant artifacts. To this end, we introduce a learnable spatial mask that effectively dispatches distinct Fourier bases into respective regions. This translates into collaging Fourier patches, thus enabling an accurate representation of complex signals. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior reconstruction quality of the proposed approach over existing baselines across various INR tasks, including image fitting, video representation, and 3D shape representation. Our method outperforms all other baselines, improving the image fitting PSNR by over 3dB and 3D reconstruction to 98.81 IoU and 0.0011 Chamfer Distance.
Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The explosion of visual content available online underscores the requirement for an accurate machine assessor to robustly evaluate scores across diverse types of visual contents. While recent studies have demonstrated the exceptional potentials of large multi-modality models (LMMs) on a wide range of related fields, in this work, we explore how to teach them for visual rating aligned with human opinions. Observing that human raters only learn and judge discrete text-defined levels in subjective studies, we propose to emulate this subjective process and teach LMMs with text-defined rating levels instead of scores. The proposed Q-Align achieves state-of-the-art performance on image quality assessment (IQA), image aesthetic assessment (IAA), as well as video quality assessment (VQA) tasks under the original LMM structure. With the syllabus, we further unify the three tasks into one model, termed the OneAlign. In our experiments, we demonstrate the advantage of the discrete-level-based syllabus over direct-score-based variants for LMMs. Our code and the pre-trained weights are released at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Align.
The Intelligence College in Europe (ICE): An Effort to Create a European Intelligence Community
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

In fulfilling the European security commitment, the actors of the so-called "Intelligence Community" play a central role. They provide political and military decision-makers with important analyses and information. The Intelligence College in Europe (ICE) is the first entity to offer professional intelligence training as well as postgraduate level academic education in intelligence and security studies at a pan-European level. In developing its postgraduate provision, ICE has benefited from the experience of the German Master of Intelligence and Security Studies (MISS), which is a joint effort of the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the Department of Intelligence at the Federal University of Administrative Sciences in Berlin. As a main contribution of this paper, the module Counterterrorism (adapted from the MISS) is examined in more detail as a case study of how postgraduate modules can be modified to speak to a pan-European audience of intelligence professionals.
Factoring Expertise, Workload, and Turnover into Code Review Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Developer turnover is inevitable on software projects and leads to knowledge loss, a reduction in productivity, and an increase in defects. Mitigation strategies to deal with turnover tend to disrupt and increase workloads for developers. In this work, we suggest that through code review recommendation we can distribute knowledge and mitigate turnover while more evenly distributing review workload. We conduct historical analyses to understand the natural concentration of review workload and the degree of knowledge spreading that is inherent in code review. Even though review workload is highly concentrated, we show that code review natural spreads knowledge thereby reducing the files at risk to turnover. Using simulation, we evaluate existing code review recommenders and develop novel recommenders to understand their impact on the level of expertise during review, the workload of reviewers, and the files at risk to turnover. Our simulations use seeded random replacement of reviewers to allow us to compare the reviewer recommenders without the confounding variation of different reviewers being replaced for each recommender. Combining recommenders, we develop the SofiaWL recommender that suggests experts with low active review workload when none of the files under review are known by only one developer. In contrast, when knowledge is concentrated on one developer, it sends the review to other reviewers to spread knowledge. For the projects we study, we are able to globally increase expertise during reviews, +3%, reduce workload concentration, -12%, and reduce the files at risk, -28%. We make our scripts and data available in our replication package. Developers can optimize for a particular outcome measure based on the needs of their project, or use our GitHub bot to automatically balance the outcomes.
Flying By ML -- CNN Inversion of Affine Transforms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes a machine learning method to automate reading of cockpit gauges, using a CNN to invert affine transformations and deduce aircraft states from instrument images. Validated with synthetic images of a turn-and-bank indicator, this research introduces methods such as generating datasets from a single image, the 'Clean Training Principle' for optimal noise-free training, and CNN interpolation for continuous value predictions from categorical data. It also offers insights into hyperparameter optimization and ML system software engineering.
Transformer-Based Multi-Object Smoothing with Decoupled Data Association and Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the task of estimating the state trajectories of an unknown and time-varying number of objects over a certain time window. Several algorithms have been proposed to tackle the multi-object smoothing task, where object detections can be conditioned on all the measurements in the time window. However, the best-performing methods suffer from intractable computational complexity and require approximations, performing suboptimally in complex settings. Deep learning based algorithms are a possible venue for tackling this issue but have not been applied extensively in settings where accurate multi-object models are available and measurements are low-dimensional. We propose a novel DL architecture specifically tailored for this setting that decouples the data association task from the smoothing task. We compare the performance of the proposed smoother to the state-of-the-art in different tasks of varying difficulty and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison between traditional Bayesian trackers and DL trackers in the smoothing problem setting.
RefineNet: Enhancing Text-to-Image Conversion with High-Resolution and Detail Accuracy through Hierarchical Transformers and Progressive Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this research, we introduce RefineNet, a novel architecture designed to address resolution limitations in text-to-image conversion systems. We explore the challenges of generating high-resolution images from textual descriptions, focusing on the trade-offs between detail accuracy and computational efficiency. RefineNet leverages a hierarchical Transformer combined with progressive and conditional refinement techniques, outperforming existing models in producing detailed and high-quality images. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets, we demonstrate RefineNet's superiority in clarity and resolution, particularly in complex image categories like animals, plants, and human faces. Our work not only advances the field of image-to-text conversion but also opens new avenues for high-fidelity image generation in various applications.
Explainability-Based Adversarial Attack on Graphs Through Edge Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the success of graph neural networks (GNNs) in various domains, they exhibit susceptibility to adversarial attacks. Understanding these vulnerabilities is crucial for developing robust and secure applications. In this paper, we investigate the impact of test time adversarial attacks through edge perturbations which involve both edge insertions and deletions. A novel explainability-based method is proposed to identify important nodes in the graph and perform edge perturbation between these nodes. The proposed method is tested for node classification with three different architectures and datasets. The results suggest that introducing edges between nodes of different classes has higher impact as compared to removing edges among nodes within the same class.
Count What You Want: Exemplar Identification and Few-shot Counting of Human Actions in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper addresses the task of counting human actions of interest using sensor data from wearable devices. We propose a novel exemplar-based framework, allowing users to provide exemplars of the actions they want to count by vocalizing predefined sounds ''one'', ''two'', and ''three''. Our method first localizes temporal positions of these utterances from the audio sequence. These positions serve as the basis for identifying exemplars representing the action class of interest. A similarity map is then computed between the exemplars and the entire sensor data sequence, which is further fed into a density estimation module to generate a sequence of estimated density values. Summing these density values provides the final count. To develop and evaluate our approach, we introduce a diverse and realistic dataset consisting of real-world data from 37 subjects and 50 action categories, encompassing both sensor and audio data. The experiments on this dataset demonstrate the viability of the proposed method in counting instances of actions from new classes and subjects that were not part of the training data. On average, the discrepancy between the predicted count and the ground truth value is 7.47, significantly lower than the errors of the frequency-based and transformer-based methods. Our project, code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/ExRAC.
Unmasking information manipulation: A quantitative approach to detecting Copy-pasta, Rewording, and Translation on Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

This study proposes a comprehensive methodology for identifying three techniques utilized in foreign-operated information manipulation campaigns: Copy-Pasta, Rewording, and Translation. Our approach, dubbed the ``$3Δ$-space duplicate methodology'', quantifies the semantic, grapheme, and language aspects of messages. Computing pairwise distances within these dimensions enables detection of abnormally close messages that are likely part of a coordinated campaign. We validate our approach using a synthetic dataset generated with ChatGPT and DeepL, further applying it to a real-world dataset on Venezuelan actors from Twitter Transparency. Our method successfully identifies all three types of inauthentic duplicates in the synthetic dataset, and is able to uncover inauthentic duplicates across political, commercial, and entertainment contexts in the Twitter dataset. The distinct focus on clustered alterations to messages, rather than individual messages, makes our approach efficient and effective at detecting large-scale instances of textual manipulation, including AI-generated ones. Moreover, our method offers a robust tool for identifying translated content, overlooked in previous research. This research also represents the first comprehensive analysis of copy-pasta detection, providing a reliable technique for tracking duplicate textual content across social networks.