OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Gaussian Process Surrogate Models for Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Not being able to understand and predict the behavior of deep learning systems makes it hard to decide what architecture and algorithm to use for a given problem. In science and engineering, modeling is a methodology used to understand complex systems whose internal processes are opaque. Modeling replaces a complex system with a simpler, more interpretable surrogate. Drawing inspiration from this, we construct a class of surrogate models for neural networks using Gaussian processes. Rather than deriving kernels for infinite neural networks, we learn kernels empirically from the naturalistic behavior of finite neural networks. We demonstrate our approach captures existing phenomena related to the spectral bias of neural networks, and then show that our surrogate models can be used to solve practical problems such as identifying which points most influence the behavior of specific neural networks and predicting which architectures and algorithms will generalize well for specific datasets.
Testing SOAR Tools in Use
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Modern security operation centers (SOCs) rely on operators and a tapestry of logging and alerting tools with large scale collection and query abilities. SOC investigations are tedious as they rely on manual efforts to query diverse data sources, overlay related logs, and correlate the data into information and then document results in a ticketing system. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools are a new technology that promise to collect, filter, and display needed data; automate common tasks that require SOC analysts' time; facilitate SOC collaboration; and, improve both efficiency and consistency of SOCs. SOAR tools have never been tested in practice to evaluate their effect and understand them in use. In this paper, we design and administer the first hands-on user study of SOAR tools, involving 24 participants and 6 commercial SOAR tools. Our contributions include the experimental design, itemizing six characteristics of SOAR tools and a methodology for testing them. We describe configuration of the test environment in a cyber range, including network, user, and threat emulation; a full SOC tool suite; and creation of artifacts allowing multiple representative investigation scenarios to permit testing. We present the first research results on SOAR tools. We found that SOAR configuration is critical, as it involves creative design for data display and automation. We found that SOAR tools increased efficiency and reduced context switching during investigations, although ticket accuracy and completeness (indicating investigation quality) decreased with SOAR use. Our findings indicated that user preferences are slightly negatively correlated with their performance with the tool; overautomation was a concern of senior analysts, and SOAR tools that balanced automation with assisting a user to make decisions were preferred.
Trustworthy Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Recommender systems (RSs) aim to help users to effectively retrieve items of their interests from a large catalogue. For a quite long period of time, researchers and practitioners have been focusing on developing accurate RSs. Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of threats to RSs, coming from attacks, system and user generated noise, system bias. As a result, it has become clear that a strict focus on RS accuracy is limited and the research must consider other important factors, e.g., trustworthiness. For end users, a trustworthy RS (TRS) should not only be accurate, but also transparent, unbiased and fair as well as robust to noise or attacks. These observations actually led to a paradigm shift of the research on RSs: from accuracy-oriented RSs to TRSs. However, researchers lack a systematic overview and discussion of the literature in this novel and fast developing field of TRSs. To this end, in this paper, we provide an overview of TRSs, including a discussion of the motivation and basic concepts of TRSs, a presentation of the challenges in building TRSs, and a perspective on the future directions in this area. We also provide a novel conceptual framework to support the construction of TRSs.
Towards Code Summarization of APIs Based on Unofficial Documentation Using NLP Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Each programming language comes with official documentation to guide developers with APIs, methods, and classes. However, in some cases, official documentation is not an efficient way to get the needed information. As a result, developers may consult other sources (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub) to learn more about an API, its implementation, usage, and other information that official documentation may not provide. In this research, we propose an automatic approach to generate summaries for APIs and methods by leveraging unofficial documentation using NLP techniques. Our findings demonstrate that the generated summaries are competitive, and can be used as a complementary source for guiding developers in software development and maintenance tasks.
ForecastTKGQuestions: A Benchmark for Temporal Question Answering and Forecasting over Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGQA) has recently found increasing interest. TKGQA requires temporal reasoning techniques to extract the relevant information from temporal knowledge bases. The only existing TKGQA dataset, i.e., CronQuestions, consists of temporal questions based on the facts from a fixed time period, where a temporal knowledge graph (TKG) spanning the same period can be fully used for answer inference, allowing the TKGQA models to use even the future knowledge to answer the questions based on the past facts. In real-world scenarios, however, it is also common that given the knowledge until now, we wish the TKGQA systems to answer the questions asking about the future. As humans constantly seek plans for the future, building TKGQA systems for answering such forecasting questions is important. Nevertheless, this has still been unexplored in previous research. In this paper, we propose a novel task: forecasting question answering over temporal knowledge graphs. We also propose a large-scale TKGQA benchmark dataset, i.e., ForecastTKGQuestions, for this task. It includes three types of questions, i.e., entity prediction, yes-no, and fact reasoning questions. For every forecasting question in our dataset, QA models can only have access to the TKG information before the timestamp annotated in the given question for answer inference. We find that the state-of-the-art TKGQA methods perform poorly on forecasting questions, and they are unable to answer yes-no questions and fact reasoning questions. To this end, we propose ForecastTKGQA, a TKGQA model that employs a TKG forecasting module for future inference, to answer all three types of questions. Experimental results show that ForecastTKGQA outperforms recent TKGQA methods on the entity prediction questions, and it also shows great effectiveness in answering the other two types of questions.
MM-GNN: Mix-Moment Graph Neural Network towards Modeling Neighborhood Feature Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown expressive performance on graph representation learning by aggregating information from neighbors. Recently, some studies have discussed the importance of modeling neighborhood distribution on the graph. However, most existing GNNs aggregate neighbors' features through single statistic (e.g., mean, max, sum), which loses the information related to neighbor's feature distribution and therefore degrades the model performance. In this paper, inspired by the method of moment in statistical theory, we propose to model neighbor's feature distribution with multi-order moments. We design a novel GNN model, namely Mix-Moment Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN), which includes a Multi-order Moment Embedding (MME) module and an Element-wise Attention-based Moment Adaptor module. MM-GNN first calculates the multi-order moments of the neighbors for each node as signatures, and then use an Element-wise Attention-based Moment Adaptor to assign larger weights to important moments for each node and update node representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 15 real-world graphs (including social networks, citation networks and web-page networks etc.) to evaluate our model, and the results demonstrate the superiority of MM-GNN over existing state-of-the-art models.
Smart Contract Synthesis Modulo Hyperproperties
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Smart contracts are small but highly security-critical programs that implement wallets, token systems, auctions, crowd funding systems, elections, and other multi-party transactions on the blockchain. A broad range of methods has been developed to ensure that a smart contract is functionally correct. However, smart contracts often additionally need to satisfy certain hyperproperties, such as symmetry, determinism, or an information flow policy. In this paper, we show how a synthesis method for smart contracts can ensure that the contract satisfies its desired hyperproperties. We build on top of a recently developed synthesis approach from specifications in the temporal logic TSL. We present HyperTSL, an extension of TSL for the specification of hyperproperties of infinite-state software. As a preprocessing step, we show how to detect if a hyperproperty has an equivalent formulation as a (simpler) trace property. Finally, we describe how to refine a synthesized contract to adhere to its HyperTSL specification.
A General Framework for Fair Allocation under Matroid Rank Valuations
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank valuations -- every good provides a marginal value of $0$ or $1$ when added to a bundle and valuations are submodular. We generalize the Yankee Swap algorithm to create a simple framework, called General Yankee Swap, that can efficiently compute allocations that maximize any justice criterion (or fairness objective) satisfying some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a justice criterion, General Yankee Swap is guaranteed to maximize utilitarian social welfare, ensure strategyproofness and use at most a quadratic number of valuation queries. We show how General Yankee Swap can be used to compute allocations for five different well-studied justice criteria: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b) Maximin fairness, (c) Weighted leximin, (d) Max weighted Nash welfare, and (e) Max weighted $p$-mean welfare. In particular, our framework provides the first polynomial time algorithms to compute weighted leximin, max weighted Nash welfare and max weighted $p$-mean welfare allocations for agents with matroid rank valuations.
Three New Validators and a Large-Scale Benchmark Ranking for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Changes to hyperparameters can have a dramatic effect on model accuracy. Thus, the tuning of hyperparameters plays an important role in optimizing machine-learning models. An integral part of the hyperparameter-tuning process is the evaluation of model checkpoints, which is done through the use of "validators". In a supervised setting, these validators evaluate checkpoints by computing accuracy on a validation set that has labels. In contrast, in an unsupervised setting, the validation set has no such labels. Without any labels, it is impossible to compute accuracy, so validators must estimate accuracy instead. But what is the best approach to estimating accuracy? In this paper, we consider this question in the context of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Specifically, we propose three new validators, and we compare and rank them against five other existing validators, on a large dataset of 1,000,000 checkpoints. Extensive experimental results show that two of our proposed validators achieve state-of-the-art performance in various settings. Finally, we find that in many cases, the state-of-the-art is obtained by a simple baseline method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest empirical study of UDA validators to date. Code is available at https://www.github.com/KevinMusgrave/powerful-benchmarker.
American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Cultural areas represent a useful concept that cross-fertilizes diverse fields in social sciences. Knowledge of how humans organize and relate their ideas and behavior within a society helps to understand their actions and attitudes towards different issues. However, the selection of common traits that shape a cultural area is somewhat arbitrary. What is needed is a method that can leverage the massive amounts of data coming online, especially through social media, to identify cultural regions without ad-hoc assumptions, biases or prejudices. This work takes a crucial step in this direction by introducing a method to infer cultural regions based on the automatic analysis of large datasets from microblogging posts. The approach presented here is based on the principle that cultural affiliation can be inferred from the topics that people discuss among themselves. Specifically, regional variations in written discourse are measured in American social media. From the frequency distributions of content words in geotagged Tweets, the regional hotspots of words' usage are found, and from there, principal components of regional variation are derived. Through a hierarchical clustering of the data in this lower-dimensional space, this method yields clear cultural areas and the topics of discussion that define them. It uncovers a manifest North-South separation, which is primarily influenced by the African American culture, and further contiguous (East-West) and non-contiguous divisions that provide a comprehensive picture of today's cultural areas in the US.
Unsupervised domain adaptation semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery with invariant domain-level prototype memory
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Semantic segmentation is a key technique involved in automatic interpretation of high-resolution remote sensing (HRS) imagery and has drawn much attention in the remote sensing community. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been successfully applied to the HRS imagery semantic segmentation task due to their hierarchical representation ability. However, the heavy dependency on a large number of training data with dense annotation and the sensitiveness to the variation of data distribution severely restrict the potential application of DCNNs for the semantic segmentation of HRS imagery. This study proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaptation semantic segmentation network (MemoryAdaptNet) for the semantic segmentation of HRS imagery. MemoryAdaptNet constructs an output space adversarial learning scheme to bridge the domain distribution discrepancy between source domain and target domain and to narrow the influence of domain shift. Specifically, we embed an invariant feature memory module to store invariant domain-level context information because the features obtained from adversarial learning only tend to represent the variant feature of current limited inputs. This module is integrated by a category attention-driven invariant domain-level context aggregation module to current pseudo invariant feature for further augmenting the pixel representations. An entropy-based pseudo label filtering strategy is used to update the memory module with high-confident pseudo invariant feature of current target images. Extensive experiments under three cross-domain tasks indicate that our proposed MemoryAdaptNet is remarkably superior to the state-of-the-art methods.
Direct Sum Theorems From Fortification
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

We revisit the direct sum questions in communication complexity which asks whether the resource needed to solve $n$ communication problems together is (approximately) the sum of resources needed to solve these problems separately. Our work starts with the observation that Dinur and Meir's fortification lemma can be generalized to a general fortification lemma for a sub-additive measure over set. By applying this lemma to the case of cover number, we obtain a dual form of cover number, called "$δ$-fooling set" which is a generalized fooling set. Any rectangle which contains enough number of elements from a $δ$-fooling set can not be monochromatic. With this fact, we are able to reprove the classic direct sum theorem of cover number with a simple double counting argument. Formally, let $S \subseteq (A\times B) \times O$ and $T \subseteq (P\times Q) \times Z$ be two communication problems, $ \log \mathsf{Cov}\left(S\times T\right) \geq \log \mathsf{Cov}\left(S\right) + \log\mathsf{Cov}(T) -\log\log|P||Q|-4.$ where $\mathsf{Cov}$ denotes the cover number. One issue of current deterministic direct sum theorems about communication complexity is that they provide no information when $n$ is small, especially when $n=2$. In this work, we prove a new direct sum theorem about protocol size which imply a better direct sum theorem for two functions in terms of protocol size. Formally, let $\mathsf{L}$ denotes complexity of the protocol size of a communication problem, given a communication problem $F:A \times B \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, $ \log\mathsf{L}\left(F\times F\right)\geq \log \mathsf{L}\left(F\right) +Ω\left(\sqrt{\log\mathsf{L}\left(F\right)}\right)-\log\log|A||B| -4$. All our results are obtained in a similar way using the $δ$-fooling set to construct a hardcore for the direct sum problem.
FOLD-SE: An Efficient Rule-based Machine Learning Algorithm with Scalable Explainability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present FOLD-SE, an efficient, explainable machine learning algorithm for classification tasks given tabular data containing numerical and categorical values. FOLD-SE generates a set of default rules-essentially a stratified normal logic program-as an (explainable) trained model. Explainability provided by FOLD-SE is scalable, meaning that regardless of the size of the dataset, the number of learned rules and learned literals stay quite small while good accuracy in classification is maintained. A model with smaller number of rules and literals is easier to understand for human beings. FOLD-SE is competitive with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms such as XGBoost and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) wrt accuracy of prediction. However, unlike XGBoost and MLP, the FOLD-SE algorithm is explainable. The FOLD-SE algorithm builds upon our earlier work on developing the explainable FOLD-R++ machine learning algorithm for binary classification and inherits all of its positive features. Thus, pre-processing of the dataset, using techniques such as one-hot encoding, is not needed. Like FOLD-R++, FOLD-SE uses prefix sum to speed up computations resulting in FOLD-SE being an order of magnitude faster than XGBoost and MLP in execution speed. The FOLD-SE algorithm outperforms FOLD-R++ as well as other rule-learning algorithms such as RIPPER in efficiency, performance and scalability, especially for large datasets. A major reason for scalable explainability of FOLD-SE is the use of a literal selection heuristics based on Gini Impurity, as opposed to Information Gain used in FOLD-R++. A multi-category classification version of FOLD-SE is also presented.
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Inter-Source Stylization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The goal of Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification (CDFSC) is to accurately classify a target dataset with limited labelled data by exploiting the knowledge of a richly labelled auxiliary dataset, despite the differences between the domains of the two datasets. Some existing approaches require labelled samples from multiple domains for model training. However, these methods fail when the sample labels are scarce. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a solution that makes use of multiple source domains without the need for additional labeling costs. Specifically, one of the source domains is completely tagged, while the others are untagged. An Inter-Source Stylization Network (ISSNet) is then introduced to enhance stylisation across multiple source domains, enriching data distribution and model's generalization capabilities. Experiments on 8 target datasets show that ISSNet leverages unlabelled data from multiple source data and significantly reduces the negative impact of domain gaps on classification performance compared to several baseline methods.
NECE: Narrative Event Chain Extraction Toolkit
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

To understand a narrative, it is essential to comprehend the temporal event flows, especially those associated with main characters; however, this can be challenging with lengthy and unstructured narrative texts. To address this, we introduce NECE, an open-access, document-level toolkit that automatically extracts and aligns narrative events in the temporal order of their occurrence. Through extensive evaluations, we show the high quality of the NECE toolkit and demonstrates its downstream application in analyzing narrative bias regarding gender. We also openly discuss the shortcomings of the current approach, and potential of leveraging generative models in future works. Lastly the NECE toolkit includes both a Python library and a user-friendly web interface, which offer equal access to professionals and layman audience alike, to visualize event chain, obtain narrative flows, or study narrative bias.
Detection and Mitigation of Byzantine Attacks in Distributed Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A plethora of modern machine learning tasks require the utilization of large-scale distributed clusters as a critical component of the training pipeline. However, abnormal Byzantine behavior of the worker nodes can derail the training and compromise the quality of the inference. Such behavior can be attributed to unintentional system malfunctions or orchestrated attacks; as a result, some nodes may return arbitrary results to the parameter server (PS) that coordinates the training. Recent work considers a wide range of attack models and has explored robust aggregation and/or computational redundancy to correct the distorted gradients. In this work, we consider attack models ranging from strong ones: $q$ omniscient adversaries with full knowledge of the defense protocol that can change from iteration to iteration to weak ones: $q$ randomly chosen adversaries with limited collusion abilities which only change every few iterations at a time. Our algorithms rely on redundant task assignments coupled with detection of adversarial behavior. We also show the convergence of our method to the optimal point under common assumptions and settings considered in literature. For strong attacks, we demonstrate a reduction in the fraction of distorted gradients ranging from 16%-99% as compared to the prior state-of-the-art. Our top-1 classification accuracy results on the CIFAR-10 data set demonstrate 25% advantage in accuracy (averaged over strong and weak scenarios) under the most sophisticated attacks compared to state-of-the-art methods.