OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Maintaining Journalistic Integrity in the Digital Age: A Comprehensive NLP Framework for Evaluating Online News Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid growth of online news platforms has led to an increased need for reliable methods to evaluate the quality and credibility of news articles. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework to analyze online news texts using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, particularly a language model specifically trained for this purpose, alongside other well-established NLP methods. The framework incorporates ten journalism standards-objectivity, balance and fairness, readability and clarity, sensationalism and clickbait, ethical considerations, public interest and value, source credibility, relevance and timeliness, factual accuracy, and attribution and transparency-to assess the quality of news articles. By establishing these standards, researchers, media organizations, and readers can better evaluate and understand the content they consume and produce. The proposed method has some limitations, such as potential difficulty in detecting subtle biases and the need for continuous updating of the language model to keep pace with evolving language patterns.
Robots and Social Sustainability
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Sustainability is no longer a matter of choice but is invariably linked to the survival of the entire ecosystem of our planet Earth. As robotics technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is crucial to examine its implications for sustainability. Our focus is on social sustainability, specifically analyzing the role of robotics technology in this domain by identifying six distinct ways robots influence social sustainability.
Ensemble Defense System: A Hybrid IDS Approach for Effective Cyber Threat Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Sophisticated cyber attacks present significant challenges for organizations in detecting and preventing such threats. To address this critical need for advanced defense mechanisms, we propose an Ensemble Defense System (EDS). An EDS is a cybersecurity framework aggregating multiple security tools designed to monitor and alert an organization during cyber attacks. The proposed EDS leverages a comprehensive range of Intrusion Detection System (IDS) capabilities by introducing a hybrid of signature-based IDS and anomaly-based IDS tools. It also incorporates Elasticsearch, an open-source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tool, to facilitate data analysis and interactive visualization of alerts generated from IDSs. The effectiveness of the EDS is evaluated through a payload from a bash script that executes various attacks, including port scanning, privilege escalation, and Denial-of-Service (DoS). The evaluation demonstrates the EDS's ability to detect diverse cyber attacks.
ROIC-DM: Robust Text Inference and Classification via Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While language models have made many milestones in text inference and classification tasks, they remain susceptible to adversarial attacks that can lead to unforeseen outcomes. Existing works alleviate this problem by equipping language models with defense patches. However, these defense strategies often rely on impractical assumptions or entail substantial sacrifices in model performance. Consequently, enhancing the resilience of the target model using such defense mechanisms is a formidable challenge. This paper introduces an innovative model for robust text inference and classification, built upon diffusion models (ROIC-DM). Benefiting from its training involving denoising stages, ROIC-DM inherently exhibits greater robustness compared to conventional language models. Moreover, ROIC-DM can attain comparable, and in some cases, superior performance to language models, by effectively incorporating them as advisory components. Extensive experiments conducted with several strong textual adversarial attacks on three datasets demonstrate that (1) ROIC-DM outperforms traditional language models in robustness, even when the latter are fortified with advanced defense mechanisms; (2) ROIC-DM can achieve comparable and even better performance than traditional language models by using them as advisors.
NovelGym: A Flexible Ecosystem for Hybrid Planning and Learning Agents Designed for Open Worlds
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As AI agents leave the lab and venture into the real world as autonomous vehicles, delivery robots, and cooking robots, it is increasingly necessary to design and comprehensively evaluate algorithms that tackle the ``open-world''. To this end, we introduce NovelGym, a flexible and adaptable ecosystem designed to simulate gridworld environments, serving as a robust platform for benchmarking reinforcement learning (RL) and hybrid planning and learning agents in open-world contexts. The modular architecture of NovelGym facilitates rapid creation and modification of task environments, including multi-agent scenarios, with multiple environment transformations, thus providing a dynamic testbed for researchers to develop open-world AI agents.
Overview of Dialogue Robot Competition 2023
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We have held dialogue robot competitions in 2020 and 2022 to compare the performances of interactive robots using an android that closely resembles a human. In 2023, the third competition DRC2023 was held. The task of DRC2023 was designed to be more challenging than the previous travel agent dialogue tasks. Since anyone can now develop a dialogue system using LLMs, the participating teams are required to develop a system that effectively uses information about the situation on the spot (real-time information), which is not handled by ChatGPT and other systems. DRC2023 has two rounds, a preliminary round and the final round as well as the previous competitions. The preliminary round has held on Oct.27 -- Nov.20, 2023 at real travel agency stores. The final round will be held on December 23, 2023. This paper provides an overview of the task settings and evaluation method of DRC2023 and the preliminary round results.
Privacy-Preserving in Blockchain-based Federated Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) has recently arisen as a revolutionary approach to collaborative training Machine Learning models. According to this novel framework, multiple participants train a global model collaboratively, coordinating with a central aggregator without sharing their local data. As FL gains popularity in diverse domains, security, and privacy concerns arise due to the distributed nature of this solution. Therefore, integrating this strategy with Blockchain technology has been consolidated as a preferred choice to ensure the privacy and security of participants. This paper explores the research efforts carried out by the scientific community to define privacy solutions in scenarios adopting Blockchain-Enabled FL. It comprehensively summarizes the background related to FL and Blockchain, evaluates existing architectures for their integration, and the primary attacks and possible countermeasures to guarantee privacy in this setting. Finally, it reviews the main application scenarios where Blockchain-Enabled FL approaches have been proficiently applied. This survey can help academia and industry practitioners understand which theories and techniques exist to improve the performance of FL through Blockchain to preserve privacy and which are the main challenges and future directions in this novel and still under-explored context. We believe this work provides a novel contribution respect to the previous surveys and is a valuable tool to explore the current landscape, understand perspectives, and pave the way for advancements or improvements in this amalgamation of Blockchain and Federated Learning.
A Note on Dynamic Bidirected Dyck-Reachability with Cycles
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, Li et al. [2022] presented a dynamic Dyck-reachability algorithm for bidirected graphs. The basic idea is based on updating edge weights in a data structure called the merged graph $G_m$. As noted in Krishna et al. [2023], the edge deletion procedure described in the algorithm of Li et al. [2022] cannot properly update the weights in the presence of cycles in $G_m$. This note discusses the cycle case and the time complexity.
Bridging the Skills Gap: Evaluating an AI-Assisted Provider Platform to Support Care Providers with Empathetic Delivery of Protocolized Therapy
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the high prevalence and burden of mental health conditions, there is a global shortage of mental health providers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been proposed as a way to address this shortage, by supporting providers with less extensive training as they deliver care. To this end, we developed the AI-Assisted Provider Platform (A2P2), a text-based virtual therapy interface that includes a response suggestion feature, which supports providers in delivering protocolized therapies empathetically. We studied providers with and without expertise in mental health treatment delivering a therapy session using the platform with (intervention) and without (control) AI-assistance features. Upon evaluation, the AI-assisted system significantly decreased response times by 29.34% (p=0.002), tripled empathic response accuracy (p=0.0001), and increased goal recommendation accuracy by 66.67% (p=0.001) across both user groups compared to the control. Both groups rated the system as having excellent usability.
Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning via Graph Message Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph contrastive learning is usually performed by first conducting Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) and then employing a contrastive learning pipeline to train GNNs. As we know that GDA is an important issue for graph contrastive learning. Various GDAs have been developed recently which mainly involve dropping or perturbing edges, nodes, node attributes and edge attributes. However, to our knowledge, it still lacks a universal and effective augmentor that is suitable for different types of graph data. To address this issue, in this paper, we first introduce the graph message representation of graph data. Based on it, we then propose a novel Graph Message Augmentation (GMA), a universal scheme for reformulating many existing GDAs. The proposed unified GMA not only gives a new perspective to understand many existing GDAs but also provides a universal and more effective graph data augmentation for graph self-supervised learning tasks. Moreover, GMA introduces an easy way to implement the mixup augmentor which is natural for images but usually challengeable for graphs. Based on the proposed GMA, we then propose a unified graph contrastive learning, termed Graph Message Contrastive Learning (GMCL), that employs attribution-guided universal GMA for graph contrastive learning. Experiments on many graph learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed GMA and GMCL approaches.
Language Models Encode the Value of Numbers Linearly
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive competence in various tasks, but their internal mechanisms on mathematical problems are still under-explored. In this paper, we study a fundamental question: how language models encode the value of numbers, a basic element in math. To study the question, we construct a synthetic dataset comprising addition problems and utilize linear probes to read out input numbers from the hidden states. Experimental results support the existence of encoded number values in LLMs on different layers, and these values can be extracted via linear probes. Further experiments show that LLMs store their calculation results in a similar manner, and we can intervene the output via simple vector additions, proving the causal connection between encoded numbers and language model outputs. Our research provides evidence that LLMs encode the value of numbers linearly, offering insights for better exploring, designing, and utilizing numeric information in LLMs.
Analysis of Blockchain Integration in the e-Healthcare Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

No one can dispute the disruptive impact of blockchain technology, which has long been considered one of the major revolutions of contemporary times. Its integration into the healthcare ecosystem has helped overcome numerous difficulties and constraints faced by healthcare systems. This has been notably demonstrated in the meticulous management of electronic health records (EHR) and their access rights, as well as in its capabilities in terms of security, scalability, flexibility, and interoperability with other systems. This article undertakes the study and analysis of the most commonly adopted approaches in healthcare data management systems using blockchain technology. An evaluation is then conducted based on a set of observed common characteristics, distinguishing one approach from the others. The results of this analysis highlight the advantages and limitations of each approach, thus facilitating the choice of the method best suited to the readers' specific case study. Furthermore, for effective implementation in the context of e-health, we emphasize the existence of crucial challenges, such as the incomplete representation of major stakeholders in the blockchain network, the lack of regulatory flexibility to ensure legal interoperability by country, and the insufficient integration of an official regulatory authority ensuring compliance with ethical and legal standards. To address these challenges, it is necessary to establish close collaboration between regulators, technology developers, and healthcare stakeholders.
Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Sub-optimal Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of interest, however, it is possible to observe the behavior of multiple experts with different degree of optimality (e.g., racing drivers whose skills ranges from amateurs to professionals). For this reason, in this work, we extend the IRL formulation to problems where, in addition to demonstrations from the optimal agent, we can observe the behavior of multiple sub-optimal experts. Given this problem, we first study the theoretical properties of the class of reward functions that are compatible with a given set of experts, i.e., the feasible reward set. Our results show that the presence of multiple sub-optimal experts can significantly shrink the set of compatible rewards. Furthermore, we study the statistical complexity of estimating the feasible reward set with a generative model. To this end, we analyze a uniform sampling algorithm that results in being minimax optimal whenever the sub-optimal experts' performance level is sufficiently close to the one of the optimal agent.
Survey and Analysis of DNS Filtering Components
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The Domain Name System (DNS) comprises name servers translating domain names into, commonly, IP addresses. Authoritative name servers hosts the resource records (RR) for certain zones, and resolver name servers are responsible for querying and answering DNS queries on behalf of their clients. Unfortunately, cybercriminals often use DNS for malicious purposes, such as phishing, malware distribution, and botnet communication. To combat these threats, filtering resolvers have become increasingly popular, employing various techniques to identify and block malicious requests. In this paper, we survey several techniques to implement and enhance the capabilities of filtering resolvers including response policy zones, threat intelligence feeds, and detection of algorithmically generated domains. We identify the current trends of each area and find missing intersections in the literature, which could be used to improve the effectiveness of filtering resolvers. In addition, we propose future work designing a framework for filtering resolvers using state-of-the-art approaches identified in this study.
Metaheuristics for (Variable-Size) Mixed Optimization Problems: A Unified Taxonomy and Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Many real world optimization problems are formulated as mixed-variable optimization problems (MVOPs) which involve both continuous and discrete variables. MVOPs including dimensional variables are characterized by a variable-size search space. Depending on the values of dimensional variables, the number and type of the variables of the problem can vary dynamically. MVOPs and variable-size MVOPs (VMVOPs) are difficult to solve and raise a number of scientific challenges in the design of metaheuristics. Standard metaheuristics have been first designed to address continuous or discrete optimization problems, and are not able to tackle (V)MVOPs in an efficient way. The development of metaheuristics for solving such problems has attracted the attention of many researchers and is increasingly popular. However, to our knowledge there is no well established taxonomy and comprehensive survey for handling this important family of optimization problems. This paper presents a unified taxonomy for metaheuristic solutions for solving (V)MVOPs in an attempt to provide a common terminology and classification mechanisms. It provides a general mathematical formulation and concepts of (V)MVOPs, and identifies the various solving methodologies than can be applied in metaheuristics. The advantages, the weaknesses and the limitations of the presented methodologies are discussed. The proposed taxonomy also allows to identify some open research issues which needs further in-depth investigations.
The Impact of Differential Privacy on Recommendation Accuracy and Popularity Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Collaborative filtering-based recommender systems leverage vast amounts of behavioral user data, which poses severe privacy risks. Thus, often, random noise is added to the data to ensure Differential Privacy (DP). However, to date, it is not well understood, in which ways this impacts personalized recommendations. In this work, we study how DP impacts recommendation accuracy and popularity bias, when applied to the training data of state-of-the-art recommendation models. Our findings are three-fold: First, we find that nearly all users' recommendations change when DP is applied. Second, recommendation accuracy drops substantially while recommended item popularity experiences a sharp increase, suggesting that popularity bias worsens. Third, we find that DP exacerbates popularity bias more severely for users who prefer unpopular items than for users that prefer popular items.
A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models -- Part I: Continuity With Classic Debates
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable proficiency in a broad spectrum of language-based tasks, some of which are traditionally associated with hallmarks of human intelligence. This has prompted ongoing disagreements about the extent to which we can meaningfully ascribe any kind of linguistic or cognitive competence to language models. Such questions have deep philosophical roots, echoing longstanding debates about the status of artificial neural networks as cognitive models. This article -- the first part of two companion papers -- serves both as a primer on language models for philosophers, and as an opinionated survey of their significance in relation to classic debates in the philosophy cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. We cover topics such as compositionality, language acquisition, semantic competence, grounding, world models, and the transmission of cultural knowledge. We argue that the success of language models challenges several long-held assumptions about artificial neural networks. However, we also highlight the need for further empirical investigation to better understand their internal mechanisms. This sets the stage for the companion paper (Part II), which turns to novel empirical methods for probing the inner workings of language models, and new philosophical questions prompted by their latest developments.
Generative adversarial wavelet neural operator: Application to fault detection and isolation of multivariate time series data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Fault detection and isolation in complex systems are critical to ensure reliable and efficient operation. However, traditional fault detection methods often struggle with issues such as nonlinearity and multivariate characteristics of the time series variables. This article proposes a generative adversarial wavelet neural operator (GAWNO) as a novel unsupervised deep learning approach for fault detection and isolation of multivariate time series processes.The GAWNO combines the strengths of wavelet neural operators and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to effectively capture both the temporal distributions and the spatial dependencies among different variables of an underlying system. The approach of fault detection and isolation using GAWNO consists of two main stages. In the first stage, the GAWNO is trained on a dataset of normal operating conditions to learn the underlying data distribution. In the second stage, a reconstruction error-based threshold approach using the trained GAWNO is employed to detect and isolate faults based on the discrepancy values. We validate the proposed approach using the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) dataset and Avedore wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and N2O emissions named as WWTPN2O datasets. Overall, we showcase that the idea of harnessing the power of wavelet analysis, neural operators, and generative models in a single framework to detect and isolate faults has shown promising results compared to various well-established baselines in the literature.
Learning-to-Rank with Nested Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Many platforms on the web present ranked lists of content to users, typically optimized for engagement-, satisfaction- or retention- driven metrics. Advances in the Learning-to-Rank (LTR) research literature have enabled rapid growth in this application area. Several popular interfaces now include nested lists, where users can enter a 2nd-level feed via any given 1st-level item. Naturally, this has implications for evaluation metrics, objective functions, and the ranking policies we wish to learn. We propose a theoretically grounded method to incorporate 2nd-level feedback into any 1st-level ranking model. Online experiments on a large-scale recommendation system confirm our theoretical findings.
Convex SGD: Generalization Without Early Stopping
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the generalization error associated with stochastic gradient descent on a smooth convex function over a compact set. We show the first bound on the generalization error that vanishes when the number of iterations $T$ and the dataset size $n$ go to zero at arbitrary rates; our bound scales as $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T} + 1/\sqrt{n})$ with step-size $α_t = 1/\sqrt{t}$. In particular, strong convexity is not needed for stochastic gradient descent to generalize well.