OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Cutting-Edge Deep Learning Method For Enhancing IoT Security
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

There have been significant issues given the IoT, with heterogeneity of billions of devices and with a large amount of data. This paper proposed an innovative design of the Internet of Things (IoT) Environment Intrusion Detection System (or IDS) using Deep Learning-integrated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our model, based on the CICIDS2017 dataset, achieved an accuracy of 99.52% in classifying network traffic as either benign or malicious. The real-time processing capability, scalability, and low false alarm rate in our model surpass some traditional IDS approaches and, therefore, prove successful for application in today's IoT networks. The development and the performance of the model, with possible applications that may extend to other related fields of adaptive learning techniques and cross-domain applicability, are discussed. The research involving deep learning for IoT cybersecurity offers a potent solution for significantly improving network security.
Multi-Active-IRS-Assisted Cooperative Sensing: Cramér-Rao Bound and Joint Beamforming Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies the multi-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted cooperative sensing, in which multiple active IRSs are deployed in a distributed manner to facilitate multi-view target sensing at the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) area of the base station (BS). Different from prior works employing passive IRSs, we leverage active IRSs with the capability of amplifying the reflected signals to overcome the severe multi-hop-reflection path loss in NLoS sensing. In particular, we consider two sensing setups without and with dedicated sensors equipped at active IRSs. In the first case without dedicated sensors at IRSs, we investigate the cooperative sensing at the BS, where the target's direction-of-arrival (DoA) with respect to each IRS is estimated based on the echo signals received at the BS. In the other case with dedicated sensors at IRSs, we consider that each IRS is able to receive echo signals and estimate the target's DoA with respect to itself. For both sensing setups, we first derive the closed-form Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating target DoA. Then, the (maximum) CRB is minimized by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming at the BS and the reflective beamforming at the multiple IRSs, subject to the constraints on the maximum transmit power at the BS, as well as the maximum amplification power and the maximum power amplification gain constraints at individual active IRSs. To tackle the resulting highly non-convex (max-)CRB minimization problems, we propose two efficient algorithms to obtain high-quality solutions for the two cases with sensing at the BS and at the IRSs, respectively, based on alternating optimization, successive convex approximation, and semi-definite relaxation.
Federated Learning with Limited Node Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Subgraph federated learning (SFL) is a research methodology that has gained significant attention for its potential to handle distributed graph-structured data. In SFL, the local model comprises graph neural networks (GNNs) with a partial graph structure. However, some SFL models have overlooked the significance of missing cross-subgraph edges, which can lead to local GNNs being unable to message-pass global representations to other parties' GNNs. Moreover, existing SFL models require substantial labeled data, which limits their practical applications. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel SFL framework called FedMpa that aims to learn cross-subgraph node representations. FedMpa first trains a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model using a small amount of data and then propagates the federated feature to the local structures. To further improve the embedding representation of nodes with local subgraphs, we introduce the FedMpae method, which reconstructs the local graph structure with an innovation view that applies pooling operation to form super-nodes. Our extensive experiments on six graph datasets demonstrate that FedMpa is highly effective in node classification. Furthermore, our ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of FedMpa.
Who Checks the Checkers? Exploring Source Credibility in Twitter's Community Notes
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has become a significant concern. Initially designed for sharing information and fostering social connections, platforms like Twitter (now rebranded as X) have also unfortunately become conduits for spreading misinformation. To mitigate this, these platforms have implemented various mechanisms, including the recent suggestion to use crowd-sourced non-expert fact-checkers to enhance the scalability and efficiency of content vetting. An example of this is the introduction of Community Notes on Twitter. While previous research has extensively explored various aspects of Twitter tweets, such as information diffusion, sentiment analytics and opinion summarization, there has been a limited focus on the specific feature of Twitter Community Notes, despite its potential role in crowd-sourced fact-checking. Prior research on Twitter Community Notes has involved empirical analysis of the feature's dataset and comparative studies that also include other methods like expert fact-checking. Distinguishing itself from prior works, our study covers a multi-faceted analysis of sources and audience perception within Community Notes. We find that the majority of cited sources are news outlets that are left-leaning and are of high factuality, pointing to a potential bias in the platform's community fact-checking. Left biased and low factuality sources validate tweets more, while Center sources are used more often to refute tweet content. Additionally, source factuality significantly influences public agreement and helpfulness of the notes, highlighting the effectiveness of the Community Notes Ranking algorithm. These findings showcase the impact and biases inherent in community-based fact-checking initiatives.
Adversarial Multi-dueling Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the problem of regret minimization in adversarial multi-dueling bandits. While adversarial preferences have been studied in dueling bandits, they have not been explored in multi-dueling bandits. In this setting, the learner is required to select $m \geq 2$ arms at each round and observes as feedback the identity of the most preferred arm which is based on an arbitrary preference matrix chosen obliviously. We introduce a novel algorithm, MiDEX (Multi Dueling EXP3), to learn from such preference feedback that is assumed to be generated from a pairwise-subset choice model. We prove that the expected cumulative $T$-round regret of MiDEX compared to a Borda-winner from a set of $K$ arms is upper bounded by $O((K \log K)^{1/3} T^{2/3})$. Moreover, we prove a lower bound of $Ω(K^{1/3} T^{2/3})$ for the expected regret in this setting which demonstrates that our proposed algorithm is near-optimal.
Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Purpose: Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires can enhance endovascular surgery safety and efficacy, reducing procedure times and operator radiation exposure. Integrating tele-operated robotics could widen access to time-sensitive emergency procedures like mechanical thrombectomy (MT). Reinforcement learning (RL) shows potential in endovascular navigation, yet its application encounters challenges without a reward signal. This study explores the viability of autonomous navigation in MT vasculature using inverse RL (IRL) to leverage expert demonstrations. Methods: This study established a simulation-based training and evaluation environment for MT navigation. We used IRL to infer reward functions from expert behaviour when navigating a guidewire and catheter. We utilized soft actor-critic to train models with various reward functions and compared their performance in silico. Results: We demonstrated feasibility of navigation using IRL. When evaluating single versus dual device (i.e. guidewire versus catheter and guidewire) tracking, both methods achieved high success rates of 95% and 96%, respectively. Dual-tracking, however, utilized both devices mimicking an expert. A success rate of 100% and procedure time of 22.6 s were obtained when training with a reward function obtained through reward shaping. This outperformed a dense reward function (96%, 24.9 s) and an IRL-derived reward function (48%, 59.2 s). Conclusions: We have contributed to the advancement of autonomous endovascular intervention navigation, particularly MT, by employing IRL. The results underscore the potential of using reward shaping to train models, offering a promising avenue for enhancing the accessibility and precision of MT. We envisage that future research can extend our methodology to diverse anatomical structures to enhance generalizability.
Update Selective Parameters: Federated Machine Unlearning Based on Model Explanation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning is a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for distributed machine learning. In this context, there is sometimes a need for a specialized process called machine unlearning, which is required when the effect of some specific training samples needs to be removed from a learning model due to privacy, security, usability, and/or legislative factors. However, problems arise when current centralized unlearning methods are applied to existing federated learning, in which the server aims to remove all information about a class from the global model. Centralized unlearning usually focuses on simple models or is premised on the ability to access all training data at a central node. However, training data cannot be accessed on the server under the federated learning paradigm, conflicting with the requirements of the centralized unlearning process. Additionally, there are high computation and communication costs associated with accessing clients' data, especially in scenarios involving numerous clients or complex global models. To address these concerns, we propose a more effective and efficient federated unlearning scheme based on the concept of model explanation. Model explanation involves understanding deep networks and individual channel importance, so that this understanding can be used to determine which model channels are critical for classes that need to be unlearned. We select the most influential channels within an already-trained model for the data that need to be unlearned and fine-tune only influential channels to remove the contribution made by those data. In this way, we can simultaneously avoid huge consumption costs and ensure that the unlearned model maintains good performance. Experiments with different training models on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Predicting Award Winning Research Papers at Publication Time
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, many studies have been focusing on predicting the scientific impact of research papers. Most of these predictions are based on citations count or rely on features obtainable only from already published papers. In this study, we predict the likelihood for a research paper of winning an award only relying on information available at publication time. For each paper, we build the citation subgraph induced from its bibliography. We initially consider some features of this subgraph, such as the density and the global clustering coefficient, to make our prediction. Then, we mix this information with textual features, extracted from the abstract and the title, to obtain a more accurate final prediction. We made our experiments considering the ArnetMiner citation graph, while the ground truth on award-winning papers has been obtained from a collection of best paper awards from 32 computer science conferences. In our experiment, we obtained an encouraging F1 score of 0.694. Remarkably, The high recall and the low false negatives rate, show how the model performs very well at identifying papers that will not win an award. This behavior can help researchers in getting a first evaluation of their work at publication time. Lastly, we made some first experiments on interpretability. Our results highlight some interesting patterns both in topological and textual features.
A Super-human Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Autonomous Racing in Gran Turismo
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Racing autonomous cars faster than the best human drivers has been a longstanding grand challenge for the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Recently, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent met this challenge in a high-fidelity racing simulator, Gran Turismo. However, this agent relied on global features that require instrumentation external to the car. This paper introduces, to the best of our knowledge, the first super-human car racing agent whose sensor input is purely local to the car, namely pixels from an ego-centric camera view and quantities that can be sensed from on-board the car, such as the car's velocity. By leveraging global features only at training time, the learned agent is able to outperform the best human drivers in time trial (one car on the track at a time) races using only local input features. The resulting agent is evaluated in Gran Turismo 7 on multiple tracks and cars. Detailed ablation experiments demonstrate the agent's strong reliance on visual inputs, making it the first vision-based super-human car racing agent.
Low-Resource Machine Translation through the Lens of Personalized Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present a new approach called MeritOpt based on the Personalized Federated Learning algorithm MeritFed that can be applied to Natural Language Tasks with heterogeneous data. We evaluate it on the Low-Resource Machine Translation task, using the datasets of South East Asian and Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to its effectiveness, MeritOpt is also highly interpretable, as it can be applied to track the impact of each language used for training. Our analysis reveals that target dataset size affects weight distribution across auxiliary languages, that unrelated languages do not interfere with the training, and auxiliary optimizer parameters have minimal impact. Our approach is easy to apply with a few lines of code, and we provide scripts for reproducing the experiments at https://github.com/VityaVitalich/MeritOpt.
Analysing India's Cyber Warfare Readiness and Developing a Defence Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The demand for strong cyber defence measures grows, especially in countries such as India, where the rate of digitalization far exceeds cybersecurity developments. The increasing amount of cyber threats highlights the urgent need to strengthen cyber defences. The literature review reveals significant shortcomings in India's cyber defence readiness, especially in real-time threat detection and response capabilities. Through simulation models, the study explores network security behaviours and the impact of defences on network security. The next section of this study focuses on implementing a cyber threat detection system that uses machine learning to identify and categorise cyber threats in real time, followed by strategies to integrate it into India's present infrastructure. Also, the study proposes an educational framework for training cyber professionals. The study concludes with a reflection on the implemented defence strategies. It adds to the continuing discussion about national security by providing an in-depth investigation of cyber warfare preparation and recommending a systematic method to improving through both technological and educational solutions.
On optimizing Inband Telemetry systems for accurate latency-based service deployments
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms based on collected datasets, along with the programmability and flexibility provided by Software Defined Networking can provide the building blocks for constructing the so-called Zero-Touch Network and Service Management systems. However, the fuel towards this goal relies on the availability of sufficient and good-quality data collected from measurements and telemetry. This article provides a telemetry methodology to collect accurate latency measurements, as a first step toward building intelligent control planes that make correct decisions based on precise information.
Mitigating Information Asymmetry in Two-Stage Contracts with Non-Myopic Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a Stackelberg game in which a principal (she) establishes a two-stage contract with a non-myopic agent (he) whose type is unknown. The contract takes the form of an incentive function mapping the agent's first-stage action to his second-stage incentive. While the first-stage action reveals the agent's type under truthful play, a non-myopic agent could benefit from portraying a false type in the first stage to obtain a larger incentive in the second stage. The challenge is thus for the principal to design the incentive function so as to induce truthful play. We show that this is only possible with a constant, non-reactive incentive functions when the type space is continuous, whereas it can be achieved with reactive functions for discrete types. Additionally, we show that introducing an adjustment mechanism that penalizes inconsistent behavior across both stages allows the principal to design more flexible incentive functions.
Investigating the Role of Explainability and AI Literacy in User Compliance
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

AI is becoming increasingly common across different domains. However, as sophisticated AI-based systems are often black-boxed, rendering the decision-making logic opaque, users find it challenging to comply with their recommendations. Although researchers are investigating Explainable AI (XAI) to increase the transparency of the underlying machine learning models, it is unclear what types of explanations are effective and what other factors increase compliance. To better understand the interplay of these factors, we conducted an experiment with 562 participants who were presented with the recommendations of an AI and two different types of XAI. We find that users' compliance increases with the introduction of XAI but is also affected by AI literacy. We also find that the relationships between AI literacy XAI and users' compliance are mediated by the users' mental model of AI. Our study has several implications for successfully designing AI-based systems utilizing XAI.
SCORE: A 1D Reparameterization Technique to Break Bayesian Optimization's Curse of Dimensionality
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a powerful tool for navigating complex search spaces, showcasing practical applications in the fields of science and engineering.However, since it typically relies on a surrogate model to approximate the objective function, BO grapples with heightened computational costs that tend to escalate as the number of parameters and experiments grows. Several methods such as parallelization, surrogate model approximations, and memory pruning have been proposed to cut down computing time, but they all fall short of resolving the core issue behind BO's curse of dimensionality. In this paper, a 1D reparametrization trick is proposed to break this curse and sustain linear time complexity for BO in high-dimensional landscapes. This fast and scalable approach named SCORE can successfully find the global minimum of needle-in-a-haystack optimization functions and fit real-world data without the high-performance computing resources typically required by state-of-the-art techniques.
A Systematization of the Wagner Framework: Graph Theory Conjectures and Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In 2021, Adam Zsolt Wagner proposed an approach to disprove conjectures in graph theory using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Wagner's idea can be framed as follows: consider a conjecture, such as a certain quantity f(G) < 0 for every graph G; one can then play a single-player graph-building game, where at each turn the player decides whether to add an edge or not. The game ends when all edges have been considered, resulting in a certain graph G_T, and f(G_T) is the final score of the game; RL is then used to maximize this score. This brilliant idea is as simple as innovative, and it lends itself to systematic generalization. Several different single-player graph-building games can be employed, along with various RL algorithms. Moreover, RL maximizes the cumulative reward, allowing for step-by-step rewards instead of a single final score, provided the final cumulative reward represents the quantity of interest f(G_T). In this paper, we discuss these and various other choices that can be significant in Wagner's framework. As a contribution to this systematization, we present four distinct single-player graph-building games. Each game employs both a step-by-step reward system and a single final score. We also propose a principled approach to select the most suitable neural network architecture for any given conjecture, and introduce a new dataset of graphs labeled with their Laplacian spectra. Furthermore, we provide a counterexample for a conjecture regarding the sum of the matching number and the spectral radius, which is simpler than the example provided in Wagner's original paper. The games have been implemented as environments in the Gymnasium framework, and along with the dataset, are available as open-source supplementary materials.
Computing the Bandwidth of Meager Timed Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

The bandwidth of timed automata characterizes the quantity of information produced/transmitted per time unit. We previously delimited 3 classes of TA according to the nature of their asymptotic bandwidth: meager, normal, and obese. In this paper, we propose a method, based on a finite-state simply-timed abstraction, to compute the actual value of the bandwidth of meager automata. The states of this abstraction correspond to barycenters of the faces of the simplices in the region automaton. Then the bandwidth is $\log 1/|z_0|$ where $z_0$ is the smallest root (in modulus) of the characteristic polynomial of this finite-state abstraction.
SUPER: Selfie Undistortion and Head Pose Editing with Identity Preservation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Self-portraits captured from a short distance might look unnatural or even unattractive due to heavy distortions making facial features malformed, and ill-placed head poses. In this paper, we propose SUPER, a novel method of eliminating distortions and adjusting head pose in a close-up face crop. We perform 3D GAN inversion for a facial image by optimizing camera parameters and face latent code, which gives a generated image. Besides, we estimate depth from the obtained latent code, create a depth-induced 3D mesh, and render it with updated camera parameters to obtain a warped portrait. Finally, we apply the visibility-based blending so that visible regions are reprojected, and occluded parts are restored with a generative model. Experiments on face undistortion benchmarks and on our self-collected Head Rotation dataset (HeRo), show that SUPER outperforms previous approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively, opening new possibilities for photorealistic selfie editing.