OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Robustness of Malware Detectors to Adversarial Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Adversarial examples add imperceptible alterations to inputs with the objective to induce misclassification in machine learning models. They have been demonstrated to pose significant challenges in domains like image classification, with results showing that an adversarially perturbed image to evade detection against one classifier is most likely transferable to other classifiers. Adversarial examples have also been studied in malware analysis. Unlike images, program binaries cannot be arbitrarily perturbed without rendering them non-functional. Due to the difficulty of crafting adversarial program binaries, there is no consensus on the transferability of adversarially perturbed programs to different detectors. In this work, we explore the robustness of malware detectors against adversarially perturbed malware. We investigate the transferability of adversarial attacks developed against one detector, against other machine learning-based malware detectors, and code similarity techniques, specifically, locality sensitive hashing-based detectors. Our analysis reveals that adversarial program binaries crafted for one detector are generally less effective against others. We also evaluate an ensemble of detectors and show that they can potentially mitigate the impact of adversarial program binaries. Finally, we demonstrate that substantial program changes made to evade detection may result in the transformation technique being identified, implying that the adversary must make minimal changes to the program binary.
PTM4Tag+: Tag Recommendation of Stack Overflow Posts with Pre-trained Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Stack Overflow is one of the most influential Software Question & Answer (SQA) websites, hosting millions of programming-related questions and answers. Tags play a critical role in efficiently organizing the contents in Stack Overflow and are vital to support a range of site operations, e.g., querying relevant content. Poorly selected tags often raise problems like tag ambiguity and tag explosion. Thus, a precise and accurate automated tag recommendation technique is demanded. Inspired by the recent success of pre-trained models (PTMs) in natural language processing (NLP), we present PTM4Tag+, a tag recommendation framework for Stack Overflow posts that utilizes PTMs in language modeling. PTM4Tag+ is implemented with a triplet architecture, which considers three key components of a post, i.e., Title, Description, and Code, with independent PTMs. We utilize a number of popular pre-trained models, including the BERT-based models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, CodeBERT, BERTOverflow, and ALBERT), and encoder-decoder models (e.g., PLBART, CoTexT, and CodeT5). Our results show that leveraging CodeT5 under the PTM4Tag+ framework achieves the best performance among the eight considered PTMs and outperforms the state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network-based approach by a substantial margin in terms of average P recision@k, Recall@k, and F1-score@k (k ranges from 1 to 5). Specifically, CodeT5 improves the performance of F1-score@1-5 by 8.8%, 12.4%, 15.3%, 16.4%, and 16.6%. Moreover, to address the concern with inference latency, we experiment PTM4Tag+ with smaller PTM models (i.e., DistilBERT, DistilRoBERTa, CodeBERT-small, and CodeT5-small). We find that although smaller PTMs cannot outperform larger PTMs, they still maintain over 93.96% of the performance on average, meanwhile shortening the mean inference time by more than 47.2%
Optimization of Iterative Blind Detection based on Expectation Maximization and Belief Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We study iterative blind symbol detection for block-fading linear inter-symbol interference channels. Based on the factor graph framework, we design a joint channel estimation and detection scheme that combines the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and the ubiquitous belief propagation (BP) algorithm. Interweaving the iterations of both schemes significantly reduces the EM algorithm's computational burden while retaining its excellent performance. To this end, we apply simple yet effective model-based learning methods to find a suitable parameter update schedule by introducing momentum in both the EM parameter updates as well as in the BP message passing. Numerical simulations verify that the proposed method can learn efficient schedules that generalize well and even outperform coherent BP detection in high signal-to-noise scenarios.
XDC Network Assessment: Decentralization, Scalability and Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

XinFin, in 2019, unveiled the XDC network, an enterprise-ready hybrid blockchain platform that is open-source and specializes in tokenization for real-world decentralized finance. Overseeing the XDC network is currently the XDC Foundation, a non-profit organization established to encourage the growth, enhancement, and adoption of the XDC Network through community-driven projects such as GitHub. This whitepaper discusses the real-time assessment of the XDC network's decentralization, scalability, and security aspects as well as the Nakamoto coefficient estimation that follows, which is a measure of a decentralized system's decentralization nature that quantifies the minimal number of nodes or entities needed to compromise the system. A high coefficient denotes greater decentralization, while a low number denotes increased disruption risk. The XDC network's real-time computation of the high Nakamoto coefficient demonstrates its highly decentralized character. The article also addresses the diversity of consensus and execution clients, the host distribution, the geo-distribution, and some of the outstanding issues and business considerations.
From Generalist to Specialist: Exploring CWE-Specific Vulnerability Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Vulnerability Detection (VD) using machine learning faces a significant challenge: the vast diversity of vulnerability types. Each Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) represents a unique category of vulnerabilities with distinct characteristics, code semantics, and patterns. Treating all vulnerabilities as a single label with a binary classification approach may oversimplify the problem, as it fails to capture the nuances and context-specific to each CWE. As a result, a single binary classifier might merely rely on superficial text patterns rather than understanding the intricacies of each vulnerability type. Recent reports showed that even the state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM) with hundreds of billions of parameters struggles to generalize well to detect vulnerabilities. Our work investigates a different approach that leverages CWE-specific classifiers to address the heterogeneity of vulnerability types. We hypothesize that training separate classifiers for each CWE will enable the models to capture the unique characteristics and code semantics associated with each vulnerability category. To confirm this, we conduct an ablation study by training individual classifiers for each CWE and evaluating their performance independently. Our results demonstrate that CWE-specific classifiers outperform a single binary classifier trained on all vulnerabilities. Building upon this, we explore strategies to combine them into a unified vulnerability detection system using a multiclass approach. Even if the lack of large and high-quality datasets for vulnerability detection is still a major obstacle, our results show that multiclass detection can be a better path toward practical vulnerability detection in the future. All our models and code to produce our results are open-sourced.
Developing PUGG for Polish: A Modern Approach to KBQA, MRC, and IR Dataset Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Advancements in AI and natural language processing have revolutionized machine-human language interactions, with question answering (QA) systems playing a pivotal role. The knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task, utilizing structured knowledge graphs (KG), allows for handling extensive knowledge-intensive questions. However, a significant gap exists in KBQA datasets, especially for low-resource languages. Many existing construction pipelines for these datasets are outdated and inefficient in human labor, and modern assisting tools like Large Language Models (LLM) are not utilized to reduce the workload. To address this, we have designed and implemented a modern, semi-automated approach for creating datasets, encompassing tasks such as KBQA, Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), and Information Retrieval (IR), tailored explicitly for low-resource environments. We executed this pipeline and introduced the PUGG dataset, the first Polish KBQA dataset, and novel datasets for MRC and IR. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive implementation, insightful findings, detailed statistics, and evaluation of baseline models.
Machine Learning Applications in Medical Prognostics: A Comprehensive Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) has revolutionized medical prognostics by integrating advanced algorithms with clinical data to enhance disease prediction, risk assessment, and patient outcome forecasting. This comprehensive review critically examines the application of various ML techniques in medical prognostics, focusing on their efficacy, challenges, and future directions. The methodologies discussed include Random Forest (RF) for sepsis prediction, logistic regression for cardiovascular risk assessment, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for cancer detection, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for predicting clinical deterioration. RF models demonstrate robust performance in handling high-dimensional data and capturing non-linear relationships, making them particularly effective for sepsis prediction. Logistic regression remains valuable for its interpretability and ease of use in cardiovascular risk assessment. CNNs have shown exceptional accuracy in cancer detection, leveraging their ability to learn complex visual patterns from medical imaging. LSTM networks excel in analyzing temporal data, providing accurate predictions of clinical deterioration. The review highlights the strengths and limitations of each technique, the importance of model interpretability, and the challenges of data quality and privacy. Future research directions include the integration of multi-modal data sources, the application of transfer learning, and the development of continuous learning systems. These advancements aim to enhance the predictive power and clinical applicability of ML models, ultimately improving patient outcomes in healthcare settings.
Operationalizing Contextual Integrity in Privacy-Conscious Assistants
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Advanced AI assistants combine frontier LLMs and tool access to autonomously perform complex tasks on behalf of users. While the helpfulness of such assistants can increase dramatically with access to user information including emails and documents, this raises privacy concerns about assistants sharing inappropriate information with third parties without user supervision. To steer information-sharing assistants to behave in accordance with privacy expectations, we propose to operationalize contextual integrity (CI), a framework that equates privacy with the appropriate flow of information in a given context. In particular, we design and evaluate a number of strategies to steer assistants' information-sharing actions to be CI compliant. Our evaluation is based on a novel form filling benchmark composed of human annotations of common webform applications, and it reveals that prompting frontier LLMs to perform CI-based reasoning yields strong results.
A Few-Shot Approach for Relation Extraction Domain Adaptation using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been successfully applied to the analysis of complex scientific and technological domains, with automatic KG generation methods typically building upon relation extraction models capturing fine-grained relations between domain entities in text. While these relations are fully applicable across scientific areas, existing models are trained on few domain-specific datasets such as SciERC and do not perform well on new target domains. In this paper, we experiment with leveraging in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models to perform schema-constrained data annotation, collecting in-domain training instances for a Transformer-based relation extraction model deployed on titles and abstracts of research papers in the Architecture, Construction, Engineering and Operations (AECO) domain. By assessing the performance gain with respect to a baseline Deep Learning architecture trained on off-domain data, we show that by using a few-shot learning strategy with structured prompts and only minimal expert annotation the presented approach can potentially support domain adaptation of a science KG generation model.
Strategic Federated Learning: Application to Smart Meter Data Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) involves several clients that share with a fusion center (FC), the model each client has trained with its own data. Conventional FL, which can be interpreted as an estimation or distortion-based approach, ignores the final use of model information (MI) by the FC and the other clients. In this paper, we introduce a novel FL framework in which the FC uses an aggregate version of the MI to make decisions that affect the client's utility functions. Clients cannot choose the decisions and can only use the MI reported to the FC to maximize their utility. Depending on the alignment between the client and FC utilities, the client may have an individual interest in adding strategic noise to the model. This general framework is stated and specialized to the case of clustering, in which noisy cluster representative information is reported. This is applied to the problem of power consumption scheduling. In this context, utility non-alignment occurs, for instance, when the client wants to consume when the price of electricity is low, whereas the FC wants the consumption to occur when the total power is the lowest. This is illustrated with aggregated real data from Ausgrid \cite{ausgrid}. Our numerical analysis clearly shows that the client can increase his utility by adding noise to the model reported to the FC. Corresponding results and source codes can be downloaded from \cite{source-code}.
Online Fair Allocation with Best-of-Many-Worlds Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate the online fair allocation problem with sequentially arriving items under various input models, with the goal of balancing fairness and efficiency. We propose the unconstrained PACE (Pacing According to Current Estimated utility) algorithm, a parameter-free allocation dynamic that requires no prior knowledge of the input while using only integral allocations. PACE attains near-optimal convergence or approximation guarantees under stationary, stochastic-but-nonstationary, and adversarial input types, thereby achieving the first best-of-many-worlds guarantee in online fair allocation. Beyond theoretical bounds, PACE is highly simple, efficient, and decentralized, and is thus likely to perform well on a broad range of real-world inputs. Numerical results support the conclusion that PACE works well under a variety of input models. We find that PACE performs very well on two real-world datasets even under the true temporal arrivals in the data, which are highly nonstationary.
Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-view geo-localization in GNSS-denied environments aims to determine an unknown location by matching drone-view images with the correct geo-tagged satellite-view images from a large gallery. Recent research shows that learning discriminative image representations under specific weather conditions can significantly enhance performance. However, the frequent occurrence of unseen extreme weather conditions hinders progress. This paper introduces MCGF, a Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Framework designed to dynamically adapt to unseen weather conditions. MCGF establishes a joint optimization between image restoration and geo-localization using denoising diffusion models. For image restoration, MCGF incorporates a shared encoder and a lightweight restoration module to help the backbone eliminate weather-specific information. For geo-localization, MCGF uses EVA-02 as a backbone for feature extraction, with cross-entropy loss for training and cosine distance for testing. Extensive experiments on University160k-WX demonstrate that MCGF achieves competitive results for geo-localization in varying weather conditions.
PENDRAM: Enabling High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks through a Generalized DRAM Data Mapping Policy
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a prominent type of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for solving machine learning tasks. To improve the performance and energy efficiency of CNN inference, the employment of specialized hardware accelerators is prevalent. However, CNN accelerators still face performance- and energy-efficiency challenges due to high off-chip memory (DRAM) access latency and energy, which are especially crucial for latency- and energy-constrained embedded applications. Moreover, different DRAM architectures have different profiles of access latency and energy, thus making it challenging to optimize them for high performance and energy-efficient CNN accelerators. To address this, we present PENDRAM, a novel design space exploration methodology that enables high-performance and energy-efficient CNN acceleration through a generalized DRAM data mapping policy. Specifically, it explores the impact of different DRAM data mapping policies and DRAM architectures across different CNN partitioning and scheduling schemes on the DRAM access latency and energy, then identifies the pareto-optimal design choices. The experimental results show that our DRAM data mapping policy improves the energy-delay-product of DRAM accesses in the CNN accelerator over other mapping policies by up to 96%. In this manner, our PENDRAM methodology offers high-performance and energy-efficient CNN acceleration under any given DRAM architectures for diverse embedded AI applications.
Infusing Emotions into Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Understanding, Management, and Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Emotions are indispensable in human communication, but are often overlooked in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) modelling, where the task success is the primary focus. While existing works have explored user emotions or similar concepts in some ToD tasks, none has so far included emotion modelling into a fully-fledged ToD system nor conducted interaction with human or simulated users. In this work, we incorporate emotion into the complete ToD processing loop, involving understanding, management, and generation. To this end, we extend the EmoWOZ dataset (Feng et al., 2022) with system affective behaviour labels. Through interactive experimentation involving both simulated and human users, we demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly enhances the user's emotional experience as well as the task success.
Demystifying Spatial Dependence: Interactive Visualizations for Interpreting Local Spatial Autocorrelation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

The Local Moran's I statistic is a valuable tool for identifying localized patterns of spatial autocorrelation. Understanding these patterns is crucial in spatial analysis, but interpreting the statistic can be difficult. To simplify this process, we introduce three novel visualizations that enhance the interpretation of Local Moran's I results. These visualizations can be interactively linked to one another, and to established visualizations, to offer a more holistic exploration of the results. We provide a JavaScript library with implementations of these new visual elements, along with a web dashboard that demonstrates their integrated use.
FE-Adapter: Adapting Image-based Emotion Classifiers to Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Utilizing large pre-trained models for specific tasks has yielded impressive results. However, fully fine-tuning these increasingly large models is becoming prohibitively resource-intensive. This has led to a focus on more parameter-efficient transfer learning, primarily within the same modality. But this approach has limitations, particularly in video understanding where suitable pre-trained models are less common. Addressing this, our study introduces a novel cross-modality transfer learning approach from images to videos, which we call parameter-efficient image-to-video transfer learning. We present the Facial-Emotion Adapter (FE-Adapter), designed for efficient fine-tuning in video tasks. This adapter allows pre-trained image models, which traditionally lack temporal processing capabilities, to analyze dynamic video content efficiently. Notably, it uses about 15 times fewer parameters than previous methods, while improving accuracy. Our experiments in video emotion recognition demonstrate that the FE-Adapter can match or even surpass existing fine-tuning and video emotion models in both performance and efficiency. This breakthrough highlights the potential for cross-modality approaches in enhancing the capabilities of AI models, particularly in fields like video emotion analysis where the demand for efficiency and accuracy is constantly rising.
RIs-Calib: An Open-Source Spatiotemporal Calibrator for Multiple 3D Radars and IMUs Based on Continuous-Time Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Aided inertial navigation system (INS), typically consisting of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and an exteroceptive sensor, has been widely accepted as a feasible solution for navigation. Compared with vision-aided and LiDAR-aided INS, radar-aided INS could achieve better performance in adverse weather conditions since the radar utilizes low-frequency measuring signals with less attenuation effect in atmospheric gases and rain. For such a radar-aided INS, accurate spatiotemporal transformation is a fundamental prerequisite to achieving optimal information fusion. In this work, we present RIs-Calib: a spatiotemporal calibrator for multiple 3D radars and IMUs based on continuous-time estimation, which enables accurate spatiotemporal calibration and does not require any additional artificial infrastructure or prior knowledge. Our approach starts with a rigorous and robust procedure for state initialization, followed by batch optimizations, where all parameters can be refined to global optimal states steadily. We validate and evaluate RIs-Calib on both simulated and real-world experiments, and the results demonstrate that RIs-Calib is capable of accurate and consistent calibration. We open-source our implementations at (https://github.com/Unsigned-Long/RIs-Calib) to benefit the research community.