OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IMBERT: Making BERT Immune to Insertion-based Backdoor Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Backdoor attacks are an insidious security threat against machine learning models. Adversaries can manipulate the predictions of compromised models by inserting triggers into the training phase. Various backdoor attacks have been devised which can achieve nearly perfect attack success without affecting model predictions for clean inputs. Means of mitigating such vulnerabilities are underdeveloped, especially in natural language processing. To fill this gap, we introduce IMBERT, which uses either gradients or self-attention scores derived from victim models to self-defend against backdoor attacks at inference time. Our empirical studies demonstrate that IMBERT can effectively identify up to 98.5% of inserted triggers. Thus, it significantly reduces the attack success rate while attaining competitive accuracy on the clean dataset across widespread insertion-based attacks compared to two baselines. Finally, we show that our approach is model-agnostic, and can be easily ported to several pre-trained transformer models.
Label Agnostic Pre-training for Zero-shot Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Conventional approaches to text classification typically assume the existence of a fixed set of predefined labels to which a given text can be classified. However, in real-world applications, there exists an infinite label space for describing a given text. In addition, depending on the aspect (sentiment, topic, etc.) and domain of the text (finance, legal, etc.), the interpretation of the label can vary greatly. This makes the task of text classification, particularly in the zero-shot scenario, extremely challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of zero-shot text classification with the aim of improving the ability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generalize to both seen and unseen data across varying aspects and domains. To solve this we introduce two new simple yet effective pre-training strategies, Implicit and Explicit pre-training. These methods inject aspect-level understanding into the model at train time with the goal of conditioning the model to build task-level understanding. To evaluate this, we construct and release UTCD, a new benchmark dataset for evaluating text classification in zero-shot settings. Experimental results on UTCD show that our approach achieves improved zero-shot generalization on a suite of challenging datasets across an array of zero-shot formalizations.
Counterfactual Explainer Framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning Models Using Policy Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated promising capability in solving complex control problems. However, DRL applications in safety-critical systems are hindered by the inherent lack of robust verification techniques to assure their performance in such applications. One of the key requirements of the verification process is the development of effective techniques to explain the system functionality, i.e., why the system produces specific results in given circumstances. Recently, interpretation methods based on the Counterfactual (CF) explanation approach have been proposed to address the problem of explanation in DRLs. This paper proposes a novel CF explanation framework to explain the decisions made by a black-box DRL. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed explanation framework, we carried out several experiments in the domains of automated driving systems and Atari Pong game. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework generates plausible and meaningful explanations for various decisions made by deep underlying DRLs. Source codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/Amir-Samadi/Counterfactual-Explanation}
Preliminary studies: Comparing LSTM and BLSTM Deep Neural Networks for Power Consumption Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Electric consumption prediction methods are investigated for many reasons such as decision-making related to energy efficiency as well as for anticipating demand in the energy market dynamics. The objective of the present work is the comparison between two Deep Learning models, namely the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bi-directional LSTM (BLSTM) for univariate electric consumption Time Series (TS) short-term forecast. The Data Sets (DSs) were selected for their different contexts and scales, aiming the assessment of the models' robustness. Four DSs were used, related to the power consumption of: (a) a household in France; (b) a university building in Santarém, Brazil; (c) the Tétouan city zones, in Morocco; and (c) the Singapore aggregated electric demand. The metrics RMSE, MAE, MAPE and R2 were calculated in a TS cross-validation scheme. The Friedman's test was applied to normalized RMSE (NRMSE) results, showing that BLSTM outperforms LSTM with statistically significant difference (p = 0.0455), corroborating the fact that bidirectional weight updating improves significantly the LSTM performance concerning different scales of electric power consumption.
CVB: A Video Dataset of Cattle Visual Behaviors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Existing image/video datasets for cattle behavior recognition are mostly small, lack well-defined labels, or are collected in unrealistic controlled environments. This limits the utility of machine learning (ML) models learned from them. Therefore, we introduce a new dataset, called Cattle Visual Behaviors (CVB), that consists of 502 video clips, each fifteen seconds long, captured in natural lighting conditions, and annotated with eleven visually perceptible behaviors of grazing cattle. We use the Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) to collect our annotations. To make the procedure more efficient, we perform an initial detection and tracking of cattle in the videos using appropriate pre-trained models. The results are corrected by domain experts along with cattle behavior labeling in CVAT. The pre-hoc detection and tracking step significantly reduces the manual annotation time and effort. Moreover, we convert CVB to the atomic visual action (AVA) format and train and evaluate the popular SlowFast action recognition model on it. The associated preliminary results confirm that we can localize the cattle and recognize their frequently occurring behaviors with confidence. By creating and sharing CVB, our aim is to develop improved models capable of recognizing all important behaviors accurately and to assist other researchers and practitioners in developing and evaluating new ML models for cattle behavior classification using video data.
Teamwork Is Not Always Good: An Empirical Study of Classifier Drift in Class-incremental Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to develop a learning system that can continually learn new classes from a data stream without forgetting previously learned classes. When learning classes incrementally, the classifier must be constantly updated to incorporate new classes, and the drift in decision boundary may lead to severe forgetting. This fundamental challenge, however, has not yet been studied extensively, especially in the setting where no samples from old classes are stored for rehearsal. In this paper, we take a closer look at how the drift in the classifier leads to forgetting, and accordingly, design four simple yet (super-) effective solutions to alleviate the classifier drift: an Individual Classifiers with Frozen Feature Extractor (ICE) framework where we individually train a classifier for each learning session, and its three variants ICE-PL, ICE-O, and ICE-PL&O which further take the logits of previously learned classes from old sessions or a constant logit of an Other class as a constraint to the learning of new classifiers. Extensive experiments and analysis on 6 class-incremental information extraction tasks demonstrate that our solutions, especially ICE-O, consistently show significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approaches with up to 44.7% absolute F-score gain, providing a strong baseline and insights for future research on class-incremental learning.
Adversarial Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Metaphor Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Metaphor detection (MD) suffers from limited training data. In this paper, we started with a linguistic rule called Metaphor Identification Procedure and then proposed a novel multi-task learning framework to transfer knowledge in basic sense discrimination (BSD) to MD. BSD is constructed from word sense disambiguation (WSD), which has copious amounts of data. We leverage adversarial training to align the data distributions of MD and BSD in the same feature space, so task-invariant representations can be learned. To capture fine-grained alignment patterns, we utilize the multi-mode structures of MD and BSD. Our method is totally end-to-end and can mitigate the data scarcity problem in MD. Competitive results are reported on four public datasets. Our code and datasets are available.
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Relation extraction (RE) tasks show promising performance in extracting relations from two entities mentioned in sentences, given sufficient annotations available during training. Such annotations would be labor-intensive to obtain in practice. Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences beyond limited annotations. These techniques neither preserve the semantic consistency of the original sentences when rule-based augmentations are adopted, nor preserve the syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. In this work, we propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. We adopt a generative formulation and design a multi-tasking solution to achieve synergies. Furthermore, GDA adopts entity hints as the prior knowledge of the generative model to augment diverse sentences. Experimental results in three datasets under a low-resource setting showed that GDA could bring {\em 2.0\%} F1 improvements compared with no augmentation technique. Source code and data are available.
Attacks on Continuous Chaos Communication and Remedies for Resource Limited Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The Global Wearable market is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate in the next coming years and communication is a fundamental block in any wearable device. In communication, encryption methods are being used with the aid of microcontrollers or software implementations, which are power-consuming and incorporate complex hardware implementation. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are considered as resource-constrained devices that are expected to operate with low computational power and resource utilization criteria. At the same time, recent research has shown that IoT devices are highly vulnerable to emerging security threats, which elevates the need for low-power and small-size hardware-based security countermeasures. Chaotic encryption is a method of data encryption that utilizes chaotic systems and non-linear dynamics to generate secure encryption keys. It aims to provide high-level security by creating encryption keys that are sensitive to initial conditions and difficult to predict, making it challenging for unauthorized parties to intercept and decode encrypted data. Since the discovery of chaotic equations, there have been various encryption applications associated with them. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the physical and encryption attacks on continuous chaotic systems in resource-constrained devices and their potential remedies. To this aim, we introduce different categories of attacks of chaotic encryption. Our experiments focus on chaotic equations implemented using Chua's equation and leverages circuit architectures and provide simulations proof of remedies for different attacks. These remedies are provided to block the attackers from stealing users' information (e.g., a pulse message) with negligible cost to the power and area of the design.
DKAF: KB Arbitration for Learning Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with Dialog-KB Inconsistencies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) agents often ground their responses on external knowledge bases (KBs). These KBs can be dynamic and may be updated frequently. Existing approaches for learning TOD agents assume the KB snapshot contemporary to each individual dialog is available during training. However, in real-world scenarios, only the latest KB snapshot is available during training and as a result, the train dialogs may contain facts conflicting with the latest KB. These dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data may potentially confuse the TOD agent learning algorithm. In this work, we define the novel problem of learning a TOD agent with dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data. We propose a Dialog-KB Arbitration Framework (DKAF) which reduces the dialog-KB inconsistencies by predicting the contemporary KB snapshot for each train dialog. These predicted KB snapshots are then used for training downstream TOD agents. As there are no existing datasets with dialog-KB inconsistencies, we systematically introduce inconsistencies in two publicly available dialog datasets. We show that TOD agents trained with DKAF perform better than existing baselines on both these datasets
Detect Any Shadow: Segment Anything for Video Shadow Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Segment anything model (SAM) has achieved great success in the field of natural image segmentation. Nevertheless, SAM tends to consider shadows as background and therefore does not perform segmentation on them. In this paper, we propose ShadowSAM, a simple yet effective framework for fine-tuning SAM to detect shadows. Besides, by combining it with long short-term attention mechanism, we extend its capability for efficient video shadow detection. Specifically, we first fine-tune SAM on ViSha training dataset by utilizing the bounding boxes obtained from the ground truth shadow mask. Then during the inference stage, we simulate user interaction by providing bounding boxes to detect a specific frame (e.g., the first frame). Subsequently, using the detected shadow mask as a prior, we employ a long short-term network to learn spatial correlations between distant frames and temporal consistency between adjacent frames, thereby achieving precise shadow information propagation across video frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, with notable margin over the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of MAE and IoU metrics. Moreover, our method exhibits accelerated inference speed compared to previous video shadow detection approaches, validating the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. The source code is now publicly available at https://github.com/harrytea/Detect-AnyShadow.
Automating the Analysis of Institutional Design in International Agreements
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores the automatic knowledge extraction of formal institutional design - norms, rules, and actors - from international agreements. The focus was to analyze the relationship between the visibility and centrality of actors in the formal institutional design in regulating critical aspects of cultural heritage relations. The developed tool utilizes techniques such as collecting legal documents, annotating them with Institutional Grammar, and using graph analysis to explore the formal institutional design. The system was tested against the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
GenQ: Automated Question Generation to Support Caregivers While Reading Stories with Children
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

When caregivers ask open--ended questions to motivate dialogue with children, it facilitates the child's reading comprehension skills.Although there is scope for use of technological tools, referred here as "intelligent tutoring systems", to scaffold this process, it is currently unclear whether existing intelligent systems that generate human--language like questions is beneficial. Additionally, training data used in the development of these automated question generation systems is typically sourced without attention to demographics, but people with different cultural backgrounds may ask different questions. As a part of a broader project to design an intelligent reading support app for Latinx children, we crowdsourced questions from Latinx caregivers and noncaregivers as well as caregivers and noncaregivers from other demographics. We examine variations in question--asking within this dataset mediated by individual, cultural, and contextual factors. We then design a system that automatically extracts templates from this data to generate open--ended questions that are representative of those asked by Latinx caregivers.
Selective Mixup Helps with Distribution Shifts, But Not (Only) because of Mixup
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Mixup is a highly successful technique to improve generalization of neural networks by augmenting the training data with combinations of random pairs. Selective mixup is a family of methods that apply mixup to specific pairs, e.g. only combining examples across classes or domains. These methods have claimed remarkable improvements on benchmarks with distribution shifts, but their mechanisms and limitations remain poorly understood. We examine an overlooked aspect of selective mixup that explains its success in a completely new light. We find that the non-random selection of pairs affects the training distribution and improve generalization by means completely unrelated to the mixing. For example in binary classification, mixup across classes implicitly resamples the data for a uniform class distribution - a classical solution to label shift. We show empirically that this implicit resampling explains much of the improvements in prior work. Theoretically, these results rely on a regression toward the mean, an accidental property that we identify in several datasets. We have found a new equivalence between two successful methods: selective mixup and resampling. We identify limits of the former, confirm the effectiveness of the latter, and find better combinations of their respective benefits.
Domain Aligned Prefix Averaging for Domain Generalization in Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Domain generalization is hitherto an underexplored area applied in abstractive summarization. Moreover, most existing works on domain generalization have sophisticated training algorithms. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, weight averaging based, Domain Aligned Prefix Averaging approach to domain generalization for abstractive summarization. Given a number of source domains, our method first trains a prefix for each one of them. These source prefixes generate summaries for a small number of target domain documents. The similarity of the generated summaries to their corresponding documents is used for calculating weights required to average source prefixes. In DAPA, prefix tuning allows for lightweight finetuning, and weight averaging allows for the computationally efficient addition of new source domains. When evaluated on four diverse summarization domains, DAPA shows comparable or better performance against the baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of its prefix averaging scheme.
Location-aware Verification for Autonomous Truck Platooning Based on Blockchain and Zero-knowledge Proof
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Platooning technologies enable trucks to drive cooperatively and automatically, which bring benefits including less fuel consumption, more road capacity and safety. In order to establish trust during dynamic platoon formation, ensure vehicular data integrity, and guard platoons against potential attackers, it is pivotal to verify any given vehicle's identity information before granting it access to join a platoon. To address this concern in dynamic truck platooning, we present a novel location-aware and privacy-preserving verification protocol based on zero-knowledge proof and permissioned blockchain. By performing the verification process within the spatially-local area defined by a given platoon, our system can provide lower latency and communication overhead compared to a location-agnostic blockchain system. We prototype the proposed system and perform benchmark tests on the Hyperledger platform. The experimental results show that our system is suitable for real-world truck platooning.
Robustness of Multi-Source MT to Transcription Errors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic speech translation is sensitive to speech recognition errors, but in a multilingual scenario, the same content may be available in various languages via simultaneous interpreting, dubbing or subtitling. In this paper, we hypothesize that leveraging multiple sources will improve translation quality if the sources complement one another in terms of correct information they contain. To this end, we first show that on a 10-hour ESIC corpus, the ASR errors in the original English speech and its simultaneous interpreting into German and Czech are mutually independent. We then use two sources, English and German, in a multi-source setting for translation into Czech to establish its robustness to ASR errors. Furthermore, we observe this robustness when translating both noisy sources together in a simultaneous translation setting. Our results show that multi-source neural machine translation has the potential to be useful in a real-time simultaneous translation setting, thereby motivating further investigation in this area.
P-CFT: A Privacy-preserving and Crash Fault Tolerant Consensus Algorithm for Permissioned Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Consensus algorithms play a critical role in blockchains and directly impact their performance. During consensus processing, nodes need to validate and order the pending transactions into a new block, which requires verifying the application-specific data encapsulated within a transaction. This exposes the underlying data to the consensus nodes, presenting privacy concerns. Existing consensus algorithms focus on realizing application security and performance goals, but lack privacy-by-design properties or are resource-heavy and intended for securing permissionless blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose P-CFT, a zero-knowledge and crash fault tolerant consensus algorithm for permissioned blockchains. The proposed consensus algorithm provides inherent data privacy directly to the consensus layer, while still providing guarantees of crash fault tolerance. We conduct experiments using the Hyperledger Ursa cryptographic library, and the results show promise for integrating P-CFT into existing permissioned blockchain systems requiring privacy-preserving and crash fault tolerant features.