OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RLTrace: Synthesizing High-Quality System Call Traces for OS Fuzz Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Securing operating system (OS) kernel is one central challenge in today's cyber security landscape. The cutting-edge testing technique of OS kernel is software fuzz testing. By mutating the program inputs with random variations for iterations, fuzz testing aims to trigger program crashes and hangs caused by potential bugs that can be abused by the inputs. To achieve high OS code coverage, the de facto OS fuzzer typically composes system call traces as the input seed to mutate and to interact with OS kernels. Hence, quality and diversity of the employed system call traces become the prominent factor to decide the effectiveness of OS fuzzing. However, these system call traces to date are generated with hand-coded rules, or by analyzing system call logs of OS utility programs. Our observation shows that such system call traces can only subsume common usage scenarios of OS system calls, and likely omit hidden bugs. In this research, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based solution, called RLTrace, to synthesize diverse and comprehensive system call traces as the seed to fuzz OS kernels. During model training, the deep learning model interacts with OS kernels and infers optimal system call traces w.r.t. our learning goal -- maximizing kernel code coverage. Our evaluation shows that RLTrace outperforms other seed generators by producing more comprehensive system call traces, subsuming system call corner usage cases and subtle dependencies. By feeding the de facto OS fuzzer, SYZKALLER, with system call traces synthesized by RLTrace, we show that SYZKALLER can achieve higher code coverage for testing Linux kernels. Furthermore, RLTrace found one vulnerability in the Linux kernel (version 5.5-rc6), which is publicly unknown to the best of our knowledge by the time of writing.
Curve Trajectory Model for Human Preferred Path Planning of Automated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Automated driving systems are often used for lane keeping tasks. By these systems, a local path is planned ahead of the vehicle. However, these paths are often found unnatural by human drivers. We propose a linear driver model, which can calculate node points that reflect the preferences of human drivers and based on these node points a human driver preferred motion path can be designed for autonomous driving. The model input is the road curvature. We apply this model to a self-developed Euler-curve-based curve fitting algorithm. Through a case study, we show that the model based planned path can reproduce the average behavior of human curve path selection. We analyze the performance of the proposed model through statistical analysis that shows the validity of the captured relations.
Extracting Rules from Event Data for Study Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we examine how event data from campus management systems can be used to analyze the study paths of higher education students. The main goal is to offer valuable guidance for their study planning. We employ process and data mining techniques to explore the impact of sequences of taken courses on academic success. Through the use of decision tree models, we generate data-driven recommendations in the form of rules for study planning and compare them to the recommended study plan. The evaluation focuses on RWTH Aachen University computer science bachelor program students and demonstrates that the proposed course sequence features effectively explain academic performance measures. Furthermore, the findings suggest avenues for developing more adaptable study plans.
Comparative Analysis of Imbalanced Malware Byteplot Image Classification using Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Cybersecurity is a major concern due to the increasing reliance on technology and interconnected systems. Malware detectors help mitigate cyber-attacks by comparing malware signatures. Machine learning can improve these detectors by automating feature extraction, identifying patterns, and enhancing dynamic analysis. In this paper, the performance of six multiclass classification models is compared on the Malimg dataset, Blended dataset, and Malevis dataset to gain insights into the effect of class imbalance on model performance and convergence. It is observed that the more the class imbalance less the number of epochs required for convergence and a high variance across the performance of different models. Moreover, it is also observed that for malware detectors ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, and DenseNet169 can handle imbalanced and balanced data well. A maximum precision of 97% is obtained for the imbalanced dataset, a maximum precision of 95% is obtained on the intermediate imbalance dataset, and a maximum precision of 95% is obtained for the perfectly balanced dataset.
Everest: GPU-Accelerated System For Mining Temporal Motifs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal motif mining is the task of finding the occurrences of subgraph patterns within a large input temporal graph that obey the specified structural and temporal constraints. Despite its utility in several critical application domains that demand high performance (e.g., detecting fraud in financial transaction graphs), the performance of existing software is limited on commercial hardware platforms, in that it runs for tens of hours. This paper presents Everest - a system that efficiently maps the workload of mining (supports both enumeration and counting) temporal motifs to the highly parallel GPU architecture. In particular, using an input temporal graph and a more expressive user-defined temporal motif query definition compared to prior works, Everest generates an execution plan and runtime primitives that optimize the workload execution by exploiting the high compute throughput of a GPU. Everest generates motif-specific mining code to reduce long-latency memory accesses and frequent thread divergence operations. Everest incorporates novel low-cost runtime mechanisms to enable load balancing to improve GPU hardware utilization. To support large graphs that do not fit on GPU memory, Everest also supports multi-GPU execution by intelligently partitioning the edge list that prevents inter-GPU communication. Everest hides the implementation complexity of presented optimizations away from the targeted system user for better usability. Our evaluation shows that, using proposed optimizations, Everest improves the performance of a baseline GPU implementation by 19x, on average.
Multi-Domain Causal Representation Learning via Weak Distributional Invariances
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Causal representation learning has emerged as the center of action in causal machine learning research. In particular, multi-domain datasets present a natural opportunity for showcasing the advantages of causal representation learning over standard unsupervised representation learning. While recent works have taken crucial steps towards learning causal representations, they often lack applicability to multi-domain datasets due to over-simplifying assumptions about the data; e.g. each domain comes from a different single-node perfect intervention. In this work, we relax these assumptions and capitalize on the following observation: there often exists a subset of latents whose certain distributional properties (e.g., support, variance) remain stable across domains; this property holds when, for example, each domain comes from a multi-node imperfect intervention. Leveraging this observation, we show that autoencoders that incorporate such invariances can provably identify the stable set of latents from the rest across different settings.
Recent Methodological Advances in Federated Learning for Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

For healthcare datasets, it is often not possible to combine data samples from multiple sites due to ethical, privacy or logistical concerns. Federated learning allows for the utilisation of powerful machine learning algorithms without requiring the pooling of data. Healthcare data has many simultaneous challenges which require new methodologies to address, such as highly-siloed data, class imbalance, missing data, distribution shifts and non-standardised variables. Federated learning adds significant methodological complexity to conventional centralised machine learning, requiring distributed optimisation, communication between nodes, aggregation of models and redistribution of models. In this systematic review, we consider all papers on Scopus that were published between January 2015 and February 2023 and which describe new federated learning methodologies for addressing challenges with healthcare data. We performed a detailed review of the 89 papers which fulfilled these criteria. Significant systemic issues were identified throughout the literature which compromise the methodologies in many of the papers reviewed. We give detailed recommendations to help improve the quality of the methodology development for federated learning in healthcare.
Something for (almost) nothing: Improving deep ensemble calibration using unlabeled data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present a method to improve the calibration of deep ensembles in the small training data regime in the presence of unlabeled data. Our approach is extremely simple to implement: given an unlabeled set, for each unlabeled data point, we simply fit a different randomly selected label with each ensemble member. We provide a theoretical analysis based on a PAC-Bayes bound which guarantees that if we fit such a labeling on unlabeled data, and the true labels on the training data, we obtain low negative log-likelihood and high ensemble diversity on testing samples. Empirically, through detailed experiments, we find that for low to moderately-sized training sets, our ensembles are more diverse and provide better calibration than standard ensembles, sometimes significantly.
Whole-body MPC for highly redundant legged manipulators: experimental evaluation with a 37 DoF dual-arm quadruped
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Recent progress in legged locomotion has rendered quadruped manipulators a promising solution for performing tasks that require both mobility and manipulation (loco-manipulation). In the real world, task specifications and/or environment constraints may require the quadruped manipulator to be equipped with high redundancy as well as whole-body motion coordination capabilities. This work presents an experimental evaluation of a whole-body Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework achieving real-time performance on a dual-arm quadruped platform consisting of 37 actuated joints. To the best of our knowledge this is the legged manipulator with the highest number of joints to be controlled with real-time whole-body MPC so far. The computational efficiency of the MPC while considering the full robot kinematics and the centroidal dynamics model builds upon an open-source DDP-variant solver and a state-of-the-art optimal control problem formulation. Differently from previous works on quadruped manipulators, the MPC is directly interfaced with the low-level joint impedance controllers without the need of designing an instantaneous whole-body controller. The feasibility on the real hardware is showcased using the CENTAURO platform for the challenging task of picking a heavy object from the ground. Dynamic stepping (trotting) is also showcased for first time with this robot. The results highlight the potential of replanning with whole-body information in a predictive control loop.
Enhancing Ayurvedic Diagnosis using Multinomial Naive Bayes and K-modes Clustering: An Investigation into Prakriti Types and Dosha Overlapping
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The identification of Prakriti types for the human body is a long-lost medical practice in finding the harmony between the nature of human beings and their behaviour. There are 3 fundamental Prakriti types of individuals. A person can belong to any Dosha. In the existing models, researchers have made use of SVM, KNN, PCA, Decision Tree, and various other algorithms. The output of these algorithms was quite decent, but it can be enhanced with the help of Multinomial Naive Bayes and K-modes clustering. Most of the researchers have confined themselves to 3 basic classes. This might not be accurate in the real-world scenario, where overlapping might occur. Considering these, we have classified the Doshas into 7 categories, which includes overlapping of Doshas. These are namely, VATT-Dosha, PITT-Dosha, KAPH-Dosha, VATT-PITT-Dosha, PITT-KAPH-Dosha, KAPH-VATT-Dosha, and VATT-PITT-KAPH-Dosha. The data used contains a balanced set of all individual entries on which preprocessing steps of machine learning have been performed. Chi-Square test for handling categorical data is being used for feature selection. For model fitting, the method used in this approach is K-modes clustering. The empirical results demonstrate a better result while using the MNB classifier. All key findings of this work have achieved 0.90 accuracy, 0.81 precision, 0.91 F-score, and 0.90 recall. The discussion suggests a provident analysis of the seven clusters and predicts their occurrence. The results have been consolidated to improve the Ayurvedic advancements with machine learning.
LibriSpeech-PC: Benchmark for Evaluation of Punctuation and Capitalization Capabilities of end-to-end ASR Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) models output lower-cased words without punctuation marks, which reduces readability and necessitates a subsequent text processing model to convert ASR transcripts into a proper format. Simultaneously, the development of end-to-end ASR models capable of predicting punctuation and capitalization presents several challenges, primarily due to limited data availability and shortcomings in the existing evaluation methods, such as inadequate assessment of punctuation prediction. In this paper, we introduce a LibriSpeech-PC benchmark designed to assess the punctuation and capitalization prediction capabilities of end-to-end ASR models. The benchmark includes a LibriSpeech-PC dataset with restored punctuation and capitalization, a novel evaluation metric called Punctuation Error Rate (PER) that focuses on punctuation marks, and initial baseline models. All code, data, and models are publicly available.
Credit card score prediction using machine learning models: A new dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The use of credit cards has recently increased, creating an essential need for credit card assessment methods to minimize potential risks. This study investigates the utilization of machine learning (ML) models for credit card default prediction system. The main goal here is to investigate the best-performing ML model for new proposed credit card scoring dataset. This new dataset includes credit card transaction histories and customer profiles, is proposed and tested using a variety of machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, XGBoost, and LightGBM. To prepare the data for machine learning models, we perform data pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection, and data balancing techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that MLP outperforms logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, LightGBM, and XGBoost in terms of predictive performance in true positive rate, achieving an impressive area under the curve (AUC) of 86.7% and an accuracy rate of 91.6%, with a recall rate exceeding 80%. These results indicate the superiority of MLP in predicting the default customers and assessing the potential risks. Furthermore, they help banks and other financial institutions in predicting loan defaults at an earlier stage.
Exploring API Capabilities with Fieldwire
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Fieldwire, a cloud-based construction management software, has become a pivotal tool in the construction industry. It offers a comprehensive suite of features encompassing project management, task tracking, document management, and collaboration. With the rise of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in the software industry, Fieldwire has harnessed this trend to further empower construction professionals. APIs act as bridges between different software systems, and in Fieldwire's context, they hold the potential to integrate with specialized construction tools, eliminating data silos, manual data entry, and real-time information-sharing issues. This integration promises a streamlined and efficient construction management process, saving both time and resources. The research outlined in these abstract focuses on understanding Fieldwire's API capabilities, exploring integration possibilities with various construction tools, evaluating the impact of integration on efficiency and error reduction, establishing best practices, and offering recommendations to construction professionals. Python programming scripts are employed to visualize the benefits of API integration. Empirical findings indicate that Fieldwire's API significantly improves data accuracy, reduces project completion times by an average of 20%, and garners high user satisfaction. Such results are paramount in an industry reliant on precise data and efficient communication. This research underscores the transformative potential of Fieldwire's API and its relevance in modern construction management. It encourages construction professionals to embrace API integration for enhanced project outcomes and serves as an inspiration for software developers to innovate further in construction technology. As the construction industry evolves, API integration remains crucial for staying competitive and efficient.
No Forking Way: Detecting Cloning Attacks on Intel SGX Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Forking attacks against TEEs like Intel SGX can be carried out either by rolling back the application to a previous state, or by cloning the application and by partitioning its inputs across the cloned instances. Current solutions to forking attacks require Trusted Third Parties (TTP) that are hard to find in real-world deployments. In the absence of a TTP, many TEE applications rely on monotonic counters to mitigate forking attacks based on rollbacks; however, they have no protection mechanism against forking attack based on cloning. In this paper, we analyze 72 SGX applications and show that approximately 20% of those are vulnerable to forking attacks based on cloning - including those that rely on monotonic counters. To address this problem, we present CloneBuster, the first practical clone-detection mechanism for Intel SGX that does not rely on a TTP and, as such, can be used directly to protect existing applications. CloneBuster allows enclaves to (self-) detect whether another enclave with the same binary is running on the same platform. To do so, CloneBuster relies on a cache-based covert channel for enclaves to signal their presence to (and detect the presence of) clones on the same machine. We show that CloneBuster is robust despite a malicious OS, only incurs a marginal impact on the application performance, and adds approximately 800 LoC to the TCB. When used in conjunction with monotonic counters, CloneBuster allows applications to benefit from a comprehensive protection against forking attacks.
Benchmarking Local Robustness of High-Accuracy Binary Neural Networks for Enhanced Traffic Sign Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Traffic signs play a critical role in road safety and traffic management for autonomous driving systems. Accurate traffic sign classification is essential but challenging due to real-world complexities like adversarial examples and occlusions. To address these issues, binary neural networks offer promise in constructing classifiers suitable for resource-constrained devices. In our previous work, we proposed high-accuracy BNN models for traffic sign recognition, focusing on compact size for limited computation and energy resources. To evaluate their local robustness, this paper introduces a set of benchmark problems featuring layers that challenge state-of-the-art verification tools. These layers include binarized convolutions, max pooling, batch normalization, fully connected. The difficulty of the verification problem is given by the high number of network parameters (905k - 1.7 M), of the input dimension (2.7k-12k), and of the number of regions (43) as well by the fact that the neural networks are not sparse. The proposed BNN models and local robustness properties can be checked at https://github.com/ChristopherBrix/vnncomp2023_benchmarks/tree/main/benchmarks/traffic_signs_recognition. The results of the 4th International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP'23) revealed the fact that 4, out of 7, solvers can handle many of our benchmarks randomly selected (minimum is 6, maximum is 36, out of 45). Surprisingly, tools output also wrong results or missing counterexample (ranging from 1 to 4). Currently, our focus lies in exploring the possibility of achieving a greater count of solved instances by extending the allotted time (previously set at 8 minutes). Furthermore, we are intrigued by the reasons behind the erroneous outcomes provided by the tools for certain benchmarks.
EcoAssistant: Using LLM Assistant More Affordably and Accurately
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Today, users ask Large language models (LLMs) as assistants to answer queries that require external knowledge; they ask about the weather in a specific city, about stock prices, and even about where specific locations are within their neighborhood. These queries require the LLM to produce code that invokes external APIs to answer the user's question, yet LLMs rarely produce correct code on the first try, requiring iterative code refinement upon execution results. In addition, using LLM assistants to support high query volumes can be expensive. In this work, we contribute a framework, EcoAssistant, that enables LLMs to answer code-driven queries more affordably and accurately. EcoAssistant contains three components. First, it allows the LLM assistants to converse with an automatic code executor to iteratively refine code or to produce answers based on the execution results. Second, we use a hierarchy of LLM assistants, which attempts to answer the query with weaker, cheaper LLMs before backing off to stronger, expensive ones. Third, we retrieve solutions from past successful queries as in-context demonstrations to help subsequent queries. Empirically, we show that EcoAssistant offers distinct advantages for affordability and accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 by 10 points of success rate with less than 50% of GPT-4's cost.