OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Tell, don't show: Declarative facts influence how LLMs generalize
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We examine how large language models (LLMs) generalize from abstract declarative statements in their training data. As an illustration, consider an LLM that is prompted to generate weather reports for London in 2050. One possibility is that the temperatures in the reports match the mean and variance of reports from 2023 (i.e. matching the statistics of pretraining). Another possibility is that the reports predict higher temperatures, by incorporating declarative statements about climate change from scientific papers written in 2023. An example of such a declarative statement is "global temperatures will increase by $1^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$ by 2050". To test the influence of abstract declarative statements, we construct tasks in which LLMs are finetuned on both declarative and procedural information. We find that declarative statements influence model predictions, even when they conflict with procedural information. In particular, finetuning on a declarative statement $S$ increases the model likelihood for logical consequences of $S$. The effect of declarative statements is consistent across three domains: aligning an AI assistant, predicting weather, and predicting demographic features. Through a series of ablations, we show that the effect of declarative statements cannot be explained by associative learning based on matching keywords. Nevertheless, the effect of declarative statements on model likelihoods is small in absolute terms and increases surprisingly little with model size (i.e. from 330 million to 175 billion parameters). We argue that these results have implications for AI risk (in relation to the "treacherous turn") and for fairness.
Impact of Computer-Based Assessments on the Science's Ranks of Secondary Students
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This study reports the impact of examining either with digital or paper-based tests in science subjects taught across the second-ary level. With our method, we compare the percentile ranking scores of two cohorts earned in computer- and paper-based teacher-made assessments to find signals of a testing mode effect. It was found that overall, at cohort and gender levels, pupils were rank-ordered equivalently in both testing modes. Furthermore, females and top-achieving pupils were the two subgroups where the differences between modes were smaller. The practical implications of these findings are discussed from the lens of a case study and the doubt about whether regular schools could afford to deliver high-stakes computer-based tests.
Characteristic Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In many real-world scenarios, it is crucial to be able to reliably and efficiently reason under uncertainty while capturing complex relationships in data. Probabilistic circuits (PCs), a prominent family of tractable probabilistic models, offer a remedy to this challenge by composing simple, tractable distributions into a high-dimensional probability distribution. However, learning PCs on heterogeneous data is challenging and densities of some parametric distributions are not available in closed form, limiting their potential use. We introduce characteristic circuits (CCs), a family of tractable probabilistic models providing a unified formalization of distributions over heterogeneous data in the spectral domain. The one-to-one relationship between characteristic functions and probability measures enables us to learn high-dimensional distributions on heterogeneous data domains and facilitates efficient probabilistic inference even when no closed-form density function is available. We show that the structure and parameters of CCs can be learned efficiently from the data and find that CCs outperform state-of-the-art density estimators for heterogeneous data domains on common benchmark data sets.
Approximate Fully Dynamic Directed Densest Subgraph
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We give a fully dynamic algorithm maintaining a $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximate directed densest subgraph in $\tilde{O}(\log^3(n)/\varepsilon^6)$ amortized time or $\tilde{O}(\log^4(n)/\varepsilon^7)$ worst-case time per edge update (where $\tilde{O}$ hides $\log\log$ factors), based on earlier work by Chekuri and Quanrud [arXiv:2210.02611, arXiv:2310.18146]. This result improves on earlier work done by Sawlani and Wang [arXiv:1907.03037], which guarantees $O(\log^5(n)/\varepsilon^7)$ worst case time for edge insertions and deletions.
Conflict Transformation and Management. From Cognitive Maps to Value Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Conflict transformation and management are complex decision processes with extremely high stakes at hand and could greatly benefit from formal approaches to decision support. For this purpose we develop a general framework about how to use problem structuring methods for such purposes. More precisely we show how to transform cognitive maps to value trees in order to promote a more design-oriented approach to decision support aiming at constructing innovative solutions for conflict management purposes. We show that our findings have a much wider validity since they allow to move from a descriptive representation of a problem situation to a more prescriptive one using formal procedures and models.
Data-Dependent Higher-Order Clique Selection for Artery-Vein Segmentation by Energy Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel segmentation method based on energy minimization of higher-order potentials. We introduce higher-order terms into the energy to incorporate prior knowledge on the shape of the segments. The terms encourage certain sets of pixels to be entirely in one segment or the other. The sets can for instance be smooth curves in order to help delineate pulmonary vessels, which are known to run in almost straight lines. The higher-order terms can be converted to submodular first-order terms by adding auxiliary variables, which can then be globally minimized using graph cuts. We also determine the weight of these terms, or the degree of the aforementioned encouragement, in a principled way by learning from training data with the ground truth. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a real-world application in fully-automatic pulmonary artery-vein segmentation in CT images.
RAT: Reinforcement-Learning-Driven and Adaptive Testing for Vulnerability Discovery in Web Application Firewalls
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the increasing sophistication of web attacks, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have to be tested and updated regularly to resist the relentless flow of web attacks. In practice, using a brute-force attack to discover vulnerabilities is infeasible due to the wide variety of attack patterns. Thus, various black-box testing techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, these techniques suffer from low efficiency. This paper presents Reinforcement-Learning-Driven and Adaptive Testing (RAT), an automated black-box testing strategy to discover injection vulnerabilities in WAFs. In particular, we focus on SQL injection and Cross-site Scripting, which have been among the top ten vulnerabilities over the past decade. More specifically, RAT clusters similar attack samples together. It then utilizes a reinforcement learning technique combined with a novel adaptive search algorithm to discover almost all bypassing attack patterns efficiently. We compare RAT with three state-of-the-art methods considering their objectives. The experiments show that RAT performs 33.53% and 63.16% on average better than its counterparts in discovering the most possible bypassing payloads and reducing the number of attempts before finding the first bypassing payload when testing well-configured WAFs, respectively.
Ensuring End-to-End Security with Fine-grained Access Control for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As advanced V2X applications emerge in the connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV), the data communications between in-vehicle end-devices and outside nodes increase, which make the end-to-end (E2E) security to in-vehicle end-devices as the urgent issue to be handled. However, the E2E security with fine-grained access control still remains as a challenging issue for resource-constrained end-devices since the existing security solutions require complicated key management and high resource consumption. Therefore, we propose a practical and secure vehicular communication protocol for the E2E security based on a new attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme. In our scheme, the outsourced computation is provided for encryption, and the computation cost for decryption constantly remains small, regardless of the number of attributes. The policy privacy can be ensured by the proposed ABE to support privacy-sensitive V2X applications, and the existing identity-based signature for outsourced signing is newly reconstructed. Our scheme achieves the confidentiality, message authentication, identity anonymity, unlinkability, traceability, and reconfigurable outsourced computation, and we also show the practical feasibility of our protocol via the performance evaluation.
Artificial Intelligence Studies in Cartography: A Review and Synthesis of Methods, Applications, and Ethics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) primarily due to the ground-breaking achievements in deep learning and machine learning. A growing number of scholars from cartography have demonstrated successfully that GeoAI can accelerate previously complex cartographic design tasks and even enable cartographic creativity in new ways. Despite the promise of GeoAI, researchers and practitioners have growing concerns about the ethical issues of GeoAI for cartography. In this paper, we conducted a systematic content analysis and narrative synthesis of research studies integrating GeoAI and cartography to summarize current research and development trends regarding the usage of GeoAI for cartographic design. Based on this review and synthesis, we first identify dimensions of GeoAI methods for cartography such as data sources, data formats, map evaluations, and six contemporary GeoAI models, each of which serves a variety of cartographic tasks. These models include decision trees, knowledge graph and semantic web technologies, deep convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks, graph neural networks, and reinforcement learning. Further, we summarize seven cartographic design applications where GeoAI have been effectively employed: generalization, symbolization, typography, map reading, map interpretation, map analysis, and map production. We also raise five potential ethical challenges that need to be addressed in the integration of GeoAI for cartography: commodification, responsibility, privacy, bias, and (together) transparency, explainability, and provenance. We conclude by identifying four potential research directions for future cartographic research with GeoAI: GeoAI-enabled active cartographic symbolism, human-in-the-loop GeoAI for cartography, GeoAI-based mapping-as-a-service, and generative GeoAI for cartography.
Coordinated Intra- and Inter-system Interference Management in Integrated Satellite Terrestrial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Leveraging the advantage of satellite and terrestrial networks, the integrated satellite terrestrial networks (ISTNs) can help to achieve seamless global access and eliminate the digital divide. However, the dense deployment and frequent handover of satellites aggravate intra- and inter-system interference, resulting in a decrease in downlink sum rate. To address this issue, we propose a coordinated intra- and inter-system interference management algorithm for ISTN. This algorithm coordinates multidimensional interference through a joint design of inter-satellite handover and resource allocation method. On the one hand, we take inter-system interference between low earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites as a constraint, and reduce interference to GEO satellite ground stations (GEO-GS) while ensuring system capacity through inter-satellite handover. On the other hand, satellite and terrestrial resource allocation schemes are designed based on the matching idea, and channel gain and interference to other channels are considered during the matching process to coordinate co-channel interference. In order to avoid too many unnecessary handovers, we consider handover scenarios related to service capabilities and service time to determine the optimal handover target satellite. Numerical results show that the gap between the results on the system sum rate obtained by the proposed method and the upper bound is reduced as the user density increases, and the handover frequency can be significantly reduced.
Zero-Knowledge Proof of Traffic: A Deterministic and Privacy-Preserving Cross Verification Mechanism for Cooperative Perception Data
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Cooperative perception is crucial for connected automated vehicles in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs); however, ensuring the authenticity of perception data remains a challenge as the vehicles cannot verify events that they do not witness independently. Various studies have been conducted on establishing the authenticity of data, such as trust-based statistical methods and plausibility-based methods. However, these methods are limited as they require prior knowledge such as previous sender behaviors or predefined rules to evaluate the authenticity. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel approach called zero-knowledge Proof of Traffic (zk-PoT), which involves generating cryptographic proofs to the traffic observations. Multiple independent proofs regarding the same vehicle can be deterministically cross-verified by any receivers without relying on ground truth, probabilistic, or plausibility evaluations. Additionally, no private information is compromised during the entire procedure. A full on-board unit software stack that reflects the behavior of zk-PoT is implemented within a specifically designed simulator called Flowsim. A comprehensive experimental analysis is then conducted using synthesized city-scale simulations, which demonstrates that zk-PoT's cross-verification ratio ranges between 80 % to 96 %, and 80 % of the verification is achieved in 2 s, with a protocol overhead of approximately 25 %. Furthermore, the analyses of various attacks indicate that most of the attacks could be prevented, and some, such as collusion attacks, can be mitigated. The proposed approach can be incorporated into existing works, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ITS standards, without disrupting the backward compatibility.
Semantic-aware Data Augmentation for Text-to-image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Data augmentation has been recently leveraged as an effective regularizer in various vision-language deep neural networks. However, in text-to-image synthesis (T2Isyn), current augmentation wisdom still suffers from the semantic mismatch between augmented paired data. Even worse, semantic collapse may occur when generated images are less semantically constrained. In this paper, we develop a novel Semantic-aware Data Augmentation (SADA) framework dedicated to T2Isyn. In particular, we propose to augment texts in the semantic space via an Implicit Textual Semantic Preserving Augmentation ($ITA$), in conjunction with a specifically designed Image Semantic Regularization Loss ($L_r$) as Generated Image Semantic Conservation, to cope well with semantic mismatch and collapse. As one major contribution, we theoretically show that $ITA$ can certify better text-image consistency while $L_r$ regularizing the semantics of generated images would avoid semantic collapse and enhance image quality. Extensive experiments validate that SADA enhances text-image consistency and improves image quality significantly in T2Isyn models across various backbones. Especially, incorporating SADA during the tuning process of Stable Diffusion models also yields performance improvements.
Enhancing Robotic Navigation: An Evaluation of Single and Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This study presents a comparative analysis between single-objective and multi-objective reinforcement learning methods for training a robot to navigate effectively to an end goal while efficiently avoiding obstacles. Traditional reinforcement learning techniques, namely Deep Q-Network (DQN), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), and Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3), have been evaluated using the Gazebo simulation framework in a variety of environments with parameters such as random goal and robot starting locations. These methods provide a numerical reward to the robot, offering an indication of action quality in relation to the goal. However, their limitations become apparent in complex settings where multiple, potentially conflicting, objectives are present. To address these limitations, we propose an approach employing Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL). By modifying the reward function to return a vector of rewards, each pertaining to a distinct objective, the robot learns a policy that effectively balances the different goals, aiming to achieve a Pareto optimal solution. This comparative study highlights the potential for MORL in complex, dynamic robotic navigation tasks, setting the stage for future investigations into more adaptable and robust robotic behaviors.
Topology-Dependent Privacy Bound For Decentralized Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Decentralized Federated Learning (FL) has attracted significant attention due to its enhanced robustness and scalability compared to its centralized counterpart. It pivots on peer-to-peer communication rather than depending on a central server for model aggregation. While prior research has delved into various factors of decentralized FL such as aggregation methods and privacy-preserving techniques, one crucial aspect affecting privacy is relatively unexplored: the underlying graph topology. In this paper, we fill the gap by deriving a stringent privacy bound for decentralized FL under the condition that the accuracy is not compromised, highlighting the pivotal role of graph topology. Specifically, we demonstrate that the minimum privacy loss at each model aggregation step is dependent on the size of what we term as 'honest components', the maximally connected subgraphs once all untrustworthy participants are excluded from the networks, which is closely tied to network robustness. Our analysis suggests that attack-resilient networks will provide a superior privacy guarantee. We further validate this by studying both Poisson and power law networks, showing that the latter, being less robust against attacks, indeed reveals more privacy. In addition to a theoretical analysis, we consolidate our findings by examining two distinct privacy attacks: membership inference and gradient inversion.
A multi-sourced data and agent-based approach for complementing Time Use Surveys in the context of residential human activity and load curve simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

To address the major issues associated with using Time-Use Survey (TUS) for simulating residential load curves, we present the SMACH approach, which combines qualitative and quantitative data with agent-based simulation. Our model consists of autonomous agents assigned with daily tasks. The agents try to accomplish their assigned tasks to the best of their abilities. Quantitative data are used to generate tasks assignments. Qualitative studies allow us to define how agents select, based on plausible cognitive principles, the tasks to accomplish depending on the context. Our results show a better representation of weekdays and weekends, a more flexible association of tasks with appliances, and an improved simulation of load curves compared to real data. Highlights $\bullet$ Discussion about Time-Use Surveys (TUS) limits and the use of TUS in activity and energy simulation $\bullet$ Presentation of complementary data both qualitative and quantitative used to complement TUS data $\bullet$ Proposition of an agent-based approach that balances these limitations
Generalized Deepfakes Detection with Reconstructed-Blended Images and Multi-scale Feature Reconstruction Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The growing diversity of digital face manipulation techniques has led to an urgent need for a universal and robust detection technology to mitigate the risks posed by malicious forgeries. We present a blended-based detection approach that has robust applicability to unseen datasets. It combines a method for generating synthetic training samples, i.e., reconstructed blended images, that incorporate potential deepfake generator artifacts and a detection model, a multi-scale feature reconstruction network, for capturing the generic boundary artifacts and noise distribution anomalies brought about by digital face manipulations. Experiments demonstrated that this approach results in better performance in both cross-manipulation detection and cross-dataset detection on unseen data.
Provable Security for the Onion Routing and Mix Network Packet Format Sphinx
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Onion routing and mix networks are fundamental concepts to provide users with anonymous access to the Internet. Various corresponding solutions rely on the efficient Sphinx packet format. However, flaws in Sphinx's underlying proof strategy were found recently. It is thus currently unclear which guarantees Sphinx actually provides, and, even worse, there is no suitable proof strategy available. In this paper, we restore the security foundation for all these works by building a theoretical framework for Sphinx. We discover that the previously-used DDH assumption is insufficient for a security proof and show that the Gap Diffie-Hellman (GDH) assumption is required instead. We apply it to prove that a slightly adapted version of the Sphinx packet format is secure under the GDH assumption. Ours is the first work to provide a detailed, in-depth security proof for Sphinx in this manner. Our adaptations to Sphinx are necessary, as we demonstrate with an attack on sender privacy that would be possible otherwise.
Trust and Acceptance of Multi-Robot Systems "in the Wild". A Roadmap exemplified within the EU-Project BugWright2
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper outlines a roadmap to effectively leverage shared mental models in multi-robot, multi-stakeholder scenarios, drawing on experiences from the BugWright2 project. The discussion centers on an autonomous multi-robot systems designed for ship inspection and maintenance. A significant challenge in the development and implementation of this system is the calibration of trust. To address this, the paper proposes that trust calibration can be managed and optimized through the creation and continual updating of shared and accurate mental models of the robots. Strategies to promote these mental models, including cross-training, briefings, debriefings, and task-specific elaboration and visualization, are examined. Additionally, the crucial role of an adaptable, distributed, and well-structured user interface (UI) is discussed.