OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
From One to Many: Expanding the Scope of Toxicity Mitigation in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

To date, toxicity mitigation in language models has almost entirely been focused on single-language settings. As language models embrace multilingual capabilities, it's crucial our safety measures keep pace. Recognizing this research gap, our approach expands the scope of conventional toxicity mitigation to address the complexities presented by multiple languages. In the absence of sufficient annotated datasets across languages, we employ translated data to evaluate and enhance our mitigation techniques. We also compare finetuning mitigation approaches against retrieval-augmented techniques under both static and continual toxicity mitigation scenarios. This allows us to examine the effects of translation quality and the cross-lingual transfer on toxicity mitigation. We also explore how model size and data quantity affect the success of these mitigation efforts. Covering nine languages, our study represents a broad array of linguistic families and levels of resource availability, ranging from high to mid-resource languages. Through comprehensive experiments, we provide insights into the complexities of multilingual toxicity mitigation, offering valuable insights and paving the way for future research in this increasingly important field. Code and data are available at https://github.com/for-ai/goodtriever.
Challenges of Processing Data Clumps within Plugin Architectures of Integrated Development Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we explore advanced strategies for enhancing software quality by detecting and refactoring data clumps, special types of code smells. Our approach transcends the capabilities of integrated development environments, utilizing a novel method that separates the detection of data clumps from the source access. This method facilitates data clump processing. We introduce a command-line interface plugin to support this novel method of processing data clumps. This research highlights the efficacy of modularized algorithms and advocates their integration into continuous workflows, promising enhanced code quality and efficient project management across various programming and integrated development environments.
On HTLC-Based Protocols for Multi-Party Cross-Chain Swaps
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In his 2018 paper, Herlihy introduced an atomic protocol for multi-party asset swaps across different blockchains. His model represents an asset swap by a directed graph whose nodes are the participating parties and edges represent asset transfers, and rational behavior of the participants is captured by a preference relation between a protocol's outcomes. Asset transfers between parties are achieved using smart contracts. These smart contracts are quite involved and they require storage and processing of a large number of paths in the swap digraph, limiting practical significance of his protocol. His paper also describes a different protocol that uses only standard hash time-lock contracts (HTLC's), but this simpler protocol applies only to some special types of digraphs. He left open the question whether there is a simple and efficient protocol for cross-chain asset swaps in arbitrary digraphs. Motivated by this open problem, we conducted a comprehensive study of \emph{HTLC-based protocols}, in which all asset transfers are implemented with HTLCs. Our main contribution is a full characterization of swap digraphs that have such protocols.
Extreme Precipitation Nowcasting using Transformer-based Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an innovative approach to extreme precipitation nowcasting by employing Transformer-based generative models, namely NowcastingGPT with Extreme Value Loss (EVL) regularization. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), our study focuses on predicting short-term precipitation with high accuracy. We introduce a novel method for computing EVL without assuming fixed extreme representations, addressing the limitations of current models in capturing extreme weather events. We present both qualitative and quantitative analyses, demonstrating the superior performance of the proposed NowcastingGPT-EVL in generating accurate precipitation forecasts, especially when dealing with extreme precipitation events. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Cmeo97/NowcastingGPT}.
Polynomial Calculus sizes over the Boolean and Fourier bases are incomparable
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

For every $n >0$, we show the existence of a CNF tautology over $O(n^2)$ variables of width $O(\log n)$ such that it has a Polynomial Calculus Resolution refutation over $\{0,1\}$ variables of size $O(n^3polylog(n))$ but any Polynomial Calculus refutation over $\{+1,-1\}$ variables requires size $2^{Ω(n)}$. This shows that Polynomial Calculus sizes over the $\{0,1\}$ and $\{+1,-1\}$ bases are incomparable (since Tseitin tautologies show a separation in the other direction) and answers an open problem posed by Sokolov [Sok20] and Razborov.
Effect of Ambient-Intrinsic Dimension Gap on Adversarial Vulnerability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The existence of adversarial attacks on machine learning models imperceptible to a human is still quite a mystery from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we introduce two notions of adversarial attacks: natural or on-manifold attacks, which are perceptible by a human/oracle, and unnatural or off-manifold attacks, which are not. We argue that the existence of the off-manifold attacks is a natural consequence of the dimension gap between the intrinsic and ambient dimensions of the data. For 2-layer ReLU networks, we prove that even though the dimension gap does not affect generalization performance on samples drawn from the observed data space, it makes the clean-trained model more vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in the off-manifold direction of the data space. Our main results provide an explicit relationship between the $\ell_2,\ell_{\infty}$ attack strength of the on/off-manifold attack and the dimension gap.
A Sierpinski Triangle Data Structure for Efficient Array Value Update and Prefix Sum Calculation
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The binary indexed tree, or Fenwick tree, is a data structure that can efficiently update values and calculate prefix sums in an array. It allows both of these operations to be performed in $O(\log_2 N)$ time. Here we present a novel data structure resembling the Sierpinski triangle, which accomplishes these operations with the same memory usage in $O(\log_3 N)$ time instead. We show this order to be optimal by making use of a connection to quantum computing.
Video Relationship Detection Using Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Machine comprehension of visual information from images and videos by neural networks faces two primary challenges. Firstly, there exists a computational and inference gap in connecting vision and language, making it difficult to accurately determine which object a given agent acts on and represent it through language. Secondly, classifiers trained by a single, monolithic neural network often lack stability and generalization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MoE-VRD, a novel approach to visual relationship detection utilizing a mixture of experts. MoE-VRD identifies language triplets in the form of < subject, predicate, object> tuples to extract relationships from visual processing. Leveraging recent advancements in visual relationship detection, MoE-VRD addresses the requirement for action recognition in establishing relationships between subjects (acting) and objects (being acted upon). In contrast to single monolithic networks, MoE-VRD employs multiple small models as experts, whose outputs are aggregated. Each expert in MoE-VRD specializes in visual relationship learning and object tagging. By utilizing a sparsely-gated mixture of experts, MoE-VRD enables conditional computation and significantly enhances neural network capacity without increasing computational complexity. Our experimental results demonstrate that the conditional computation capabilities and scalability of the mixture-of-experts approach lead to superior performance in visual relationship detection compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Guiding Enumerative Program Synthesis with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are beginning to dominate the discourse around automatic code generation with natural language specifications. In contrast, the best-performing synthesizers in the domain of formal synthesis with precise logical specifications are still based on enumerative algorithms. In this paper, we evaluate the abilities of LLMs to solve formal synthesis benchmarks by carefully crafting a library of prompts for the domain. When one-shot synthesis fails, we propose a novel enumerative synthesis algorithm, which integrates calls to an LLM into a weighted probabilistic search. This allows the synthesizer to provide the LLM with information about the progress of the enumerator, and the LLM to provide the enumerator with syntactic guidance in an iterative loop. We evaluate our techniques on benchmarks from the Syntax-Guided Synthesis (SyGuS) competition. We find that GPT-3.5 as a stand-alone tool for formal synthesis is easily outperformed by state-of-the-art formal synthesis algorithms, but our approach integrating the LLM into an enumerative synthesis algorithm shows significant performance gains over both the LLM and the enumerative synthesizer alone and the winning SyGuS competition tool.
OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using "dual use" DPI technology. To investigate the potential for VPN blocking, we develop mechanisms for accurately fingerprinting connections using OpenVPN, the most popular protocol for commercial VPN services. We identify three fingerprints based on protocol features such as byte pattern, packet size, and server response. Playing the role of an attacker who controls the network, we design a two-phase framework that performs passive fingerprinting and active probing in sequence. We evaluate our framework in partnership with a million-user ISP and find that we identify over 85% of OpenVPN flows with only negligible false positives, suggesting that OpenVPN-based services can be effectively blocked with little collateral damage. Although some commercial VPNs implement countermeasures to avoid detection, our framework successfully identified connections to 34 out of 41 "obfuscated" VPN configurations. We discuss the implications of the VPN fingerprintability for different threat models and propose short-term defenses. In the longer term, we urge commercial VPN providers to be more transparent about their obfuscation approaches and to adopt more principled detection countermeasures, such as those developed in censorship circumvention research.
Assigning Entities to Teams as a Hypergraph Discovery Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a team assignment algorithm based on a hypergraph approach focusing on resilience and diffusion optimization. Specifically, our method is based on optimizing the algebraic connectivity of the Laplacian matrix of an edge-dependent vertex-weighted hypergraph. We used constrained simulated annealing, where we constrained the effort agents can exert to perform a task and the minimum effort a task requires to be completed. We evaluated our methods in terms of the number of unsuccessful patches to drive our solution into the feasible region and the cost of patching. We showed that our formulation provides more robust solutions than the original data and the greedy approach. We hope that our methods motivate further research in applying hypergraphs to similar problems in different research areas and in exploring variations of our methods.
Many-Objective Multi-Solution Transport
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Optimizing the performance of many objectives (instantiated by tasks or clients) jointly with a few Pareto stationary solutions (models) is critical in machine learning. However, previous multi-objective optimization methods often focus on a few number of objectives and cannot scale to many objectives that outnumber the solutions, leading to either subpar performance or ignored objectives. We introduce Many-objective multi-solution Transport (MosT), a framework that finds multiple diverse solutions in the Pareto front of many objectives. Our insight is to seek multiple solutions, each performing as a domain expert and focusing on a specific subset of objectives while collectively covering all of them. MosT formulates the problem as a bi-level optimization of weighted objectives for each solution, where the weights are defined by an optimal transport between the objectives and solutions. Our algorithm ensures convergence to Pareto stationary solutions for complementary subsets of objectives. On a range of applications in federated learning, multi-task learning, and mixture-of-prompt learning for LLMs, MosT distinctly outperforms strong baselines, delivering high-quality, diverse solutions that profile the entire Pareto frontier, thus ensuring balanced trade-offs across many objectives.
A data-centric approach to class-specific bias in image data augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Data augmentation (DA) enhances model generalization in computer vision but may introduce biases, impacting class accuracy unevenly. Our study extends this inquiry, examining DA's class-specific bias across various datasets, including those distinct from ImageNet, through random cropping. We evaluated this phenomenon with ResNet50, EfficientNetV2S, and SWIN ViT, discovering that while residual models showed similar bias effects, Vision Transformers exhibited greater robustness or altered dynamics. This suggests a nuanced approach to model selection, emphasizing bias mitigation. We also refined a "data augmentation robustness scouting" method to manage DA-induced biases more efficiently, reducing computational demands significantly (training 112 models instead of 1860; a reduction of factor 16.2) while still capturing essential bias trends.
Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning of Large Language Models through Flatness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The privacy concerns associated with the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) have grown recently with the development of LLMs such as ChatGPT. Differential Privacy (DP) techniques are explored in existing work to mitigate their privacy risks at the cost of generalization degradation. Our paper reveals that the flatness of DP-trained models' loss landscape plays an essential role in the trade-off between their privacy and generalization. We further propose a holistic framework to enforce appropriate weight flatness, which substantially improves model generalization with competitive privacy preservation. It innovates from three coarse-to-grained levels, including perturbation-aware min-max optimization on model weights within a layer, flatness-guided sparse prefix-tuning on weights across layers, and weight knowledge distillation between DP \& non-DP weights copies. Comprehensive experiments of both black-box and white-box scenarios are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in enhancing generalization and maintaining DP characteristics. For instance, on text classification dataset QNLI, DP-Flat achieves similar performance with non-private full fine-tuning but with DP guarantee under privacy budget $ε=3$, and even better performance given higher privacy budgets. Codes are provided in the supplement.
An Explainable AI Framework for Artificial Intelligence of Medical Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The healthcare industry has been revolutionized by the convergence of Artificial Intelligence of Medical Things (AIoMT), allowing advanced data-driven solutions to improve healthcare systems. With the increasing complexity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, the need for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques become paramount, particularly in the medical domain, where transparent and interpretable decision-making becomes crucial. Therefore, in this work, we leverage a custom XAI framework, incorporating techniques such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-Cam), explicitly designed for the domain of AIoMT. The proposed framework enhances the effectiveness of strategic healthcare methods and aims to instill trust and promote understanding in AI-driven medical applications. Moreover, we utilize a majority voting technique that aggregates predictions from multiple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and leverages their collective intelligence to make robust and accurate decisions in the healthcare system. Building upon this decision-making process, we apply the XAI framework to brain tumor detection as a use case demonstrating accurate and transparent diagnosis. Evaluation results underscore the exceptional performance of the XAI framework, achieving high precision, recall, and F1 scores with a training accuracy of 99% and a validation accuracy of 98%. Combining advanced XAI techniques with ensemble-based deep-learning (DL) methodologies allows for precise and reliable brain tumor diagnoses as an application of AIoMT.
Fill-and-Spill: Deep Reinforcement Learning Policy Gradient Methods for Reservoir Operation Decision and Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Changes in demand, various hydrological inputs, and environmental stressors are among the issues that water managers and policymakers face on a regular basis. These concerns have sparked interest in applying different techniques to determine reservoir operation policy decisions. As the resolution of the analysis increases, it becomes more difficult to effectively represent a real-world system using traditional methods such as Dynamic Programming (DP) and Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) for determining the best reservoir operation policy. One of the challenges is the "curse of dimensionality," which means the number of samples needed to estimate an arbitrary function with a given level of accuracy grows exponentially with respect to the number of input variables (i.e., dimensionality) of the function. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is an intelligent approach to overcome the curses of stochastic optimization problems for reservoir operation policy decisions. To our knowledge, this study is the first attempt that examine various novel DRL continuous-action policy gradient methods (PGMs), including Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG), Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3), and two different versions of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC18 and SAC19) for optimizing reservoir operation policy. In this study, multiple DRL techniques were implemented in order to find the optimal operation policy of Folsom Reservoir in California, USA. The reservoir system supplies agricultural, municipal, hydropower, and environmental flow demands and flood control operations to the City of Sacramento. Analysis suggests that the TD3 and SAC are robust to meet the Folsom Reservoir's demands and optimize reservoir operation policies.
Self-Evaluation of Large Language Model based on Glass-box Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the pressing need for evaluation methods. Existing works primarily rely on external evaluators, focusing on training and prompting strategies. However, a crucial aspect, model-aware glass-box features, is overlooked. In this study, we explore the utility of glass-box features under the scenario of self-evaluation, namely applying an LLM to evaluate its own output. We investigate various glass-box feature groups and discovered that the softmax distribution serves as a reliable quality indicator for self-evaluation. Experimental results on public benchmarks validate the feasibility of self-evaluation of LLMs using glass-box features.
3DTextureTransformer: Geometry Aware Texture Generation for Arbitrary Mesh Topology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Learning to generate textures for a novel 3D mesh given a collection of 3D meshes and real-world 2D images is an important problem with applications in various domains such as 3D simulation, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, architecture, and design. Existing solutions either do not produce high-quality textures or deform the original high-resolution input mesh topology into a regular grid to make this generation easier but also lose the original mesh topology. In this paper, we present a novel framework called the 3DTextureTransformer that enables us to generate high-quality textures without deforming the original, high-resolution input mesh. Our solution, a hybrid of geometric deep learning and StyleGAN-like architecture, is flexible enough to work on arbitrary mesh topologies and also easily extensible to texture generation for point cloud representations. Our solution employs a message-passing framework in 3D in conjunction with a StyleGAN-like architecture for 3D texture generation. The architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance among a class of solutions that can learn from a collection of 3D geometry and real-world 2D images while working with any arbitrary mesh topology.
Towards Robustness Analysis of E-Commerce Ranking System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Information retrieval (IR) is a pivotal component in various applications. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have enabled the integration of ML algorithms into IR, particularly in ranking systems. While there is a plethora of research on the robustness of ML-based ranking systems, these studies largely neglect commercial e-commerce systems and fail to establish a connection between real-world and manipulated query relevance. In this paper, we present the first systematic measurement study on the robustness of e-commerce ranking systems. We define robustness as the consistency of ranking outcomes for semantically identical queries. To quantitatively analyze robustness, we propose a novel metric that considers both ranking position and item-specific information that are absent in existing metrics. Our large-scale measurement study with real-world data from e-commerce retailers reveals an open opportunity to measure and improve robustness since semantically identical queries often yield inconsistent ranking results. Based on our observations, we propose several solution directions to enhance robustness, such as the use of Large Language Models. Note that the issue of robustness discussed herein does not constitute an error or oversight. Rather, in scenarios where there exists a vast array of choices, it is feasible to present a multitude of products in various permutations, all of which could be equally appealing. However, this extensive selection may lead to customer confusion. As e-commerce retailers use various techniques to improve the quality of search results, we hope that this research offers valuable guidance for measuring the robustness of the ranking systems.