OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
David and Goliath: An Empirical Evaluation of Attacks and Defenses for QNNs at the Deep Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

ML is shifting from the cloud to the edge. Edge computing reduces the surface exposing private data and enables reliable throughput guarantees in real-time applications. Of the panoply of devices deployed at the edge, resource-constrained MCUs, e.g., Arm Cortex-M, are more prevalent, orders of magnitude cheaper, and less power-hungry than application processors or GPUs. Thus, enabling intelligence at the deep edge is the zeitgeist, with researchers focusing on unveiling novel approaches to deploy ANNs on these constrained devices. Quantization is a well-established technique that has proved effective in enabling the deployment of neural networks on MCUs; however, it is still an open question to understand the robustness of QNNs in the face of adversarial examples. To fill this gap, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of attacks and defenses from (full-precision) ANNs on (constrained) QNNs. Our evaluation includes three QNNs targeting TinyML applications, ten attacks, and six defenses. With this study, we draw a set of interesting findings. First, quantization increases the point distance to the decision boundary and leads the gradient estimated by some attacks to explode or vanish. Second, quantization can act as a noise attenuator or amplifier, depending on the noise magnitude, and causes gradient misalignment. Regarding adversarial defenses, we conclude that input pre-processing defenses show impressive results on small perturbations; however, they fall short as the perturbation increases. At the same time, train-based defenses increase the average point distance to the decision boundary, which holds after quantization. However, we argue that train-based defenses still need to smooth the quantization-shift and gradient misalignment phenomenons to counteract adversarial example transferability to QNNs. All artifacts are open-sourced to enable independent validation of results.
BOLD v4: A Centralized Bioinformatics Platform for DNA-based Biodiversity Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

BOLD, the Barcode of Life Data System, supports the acquisition, storage, validation, analysis, and publication of DNA barcodes, activities requiring the integration of molecular, morphological, and distributional data. Its pivotal role in curating the reference library of DNA barcodes, coupled with its data management and analysis capabilities, make it a central resource for biodiversity science. It enables rapid, accurate identification of specimens and also reveals patterns of genetic diversity and evolutionary relationships among taxa. Launched in 2005, BOLD has become an increasingly powerful tool for advancing understanding of planetary biodiversity. It currently hosts 17 million specimen records and 14 million barcodes that provide coverage for more than a million species from every continent and ocean. The platform has the long-term goal of providing a consistent, accurate system for identifying all species of eukaryotes. BOLD's integrated analytical tools, full data lifecycle support, and secure collaboration framework distinguish it from other biodiversity platforms. BOLD v4 brought enhanced data management and analysis capabilities as well as novel functionality for data dissemination and publication. Its next version will include features to strengthen its utility to the research community, governments, industry, and society-at-large.
STMGF: An Effective Spatial-Temporal Multi-Granularity Framework for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate Traffic Prediction is a challenging task in intelligent transportation due to the spatial-temporal aspects of road networks. The traffic of a road network can be affected by long-distance or long-term dependencies where existing methods fall short in modeling them. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework known as Spatial-Temporal Multi-Granularity Framework (STMGF) to enhance the capture of long-distance and long-term information of the road networks. STMGF makes full use of different granularity information of road networks and models the long-distance and long-term information by gathering information in a hierarchical interactive way. Further, it leverages the inherent periodicity in traffic sequences to refine prediction results by matching with recent traffic data. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that STMGF outperforms all baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Forecasting Electric Vehicle Battery Output Voltage: A Predictive Modeling Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The battery management system plays a vital role in ensuring the safety and dependability of electric and hybrid vehicles. It is responsible for various functions, including state evaluation, monitoring, charge control, and cell balancing, all integrated within the BMS. Nonetheless, due to the uncertainties surrounding battery performance, implementing these functionalities poses significant challenges. In this study, we explore the latest approaches for assessing battery states, highlight notable advancements in battery management systems (BMS), address existing issues with current BMS technology, and put forth possible solutions for predicting battery charging voltage.
IA2: Leveraging Instance-Aware Index Advisor with Reinforcement Learning for Diverse Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces the Instance-Aware Index Advisor (IA2), a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach for optimizing index selection in databases facing large action spaces of potential candidates. IA2 introduces the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient - Temporal Difference State-Wise Action Refinery (TD3-TD-SWAR) model, enabling efficient index selection by understanding workload-index dependencies and employing adaptive action masking. This method includes a comprehensive workload model, enhancing its ability to adapt to unseen workloads and ensuring robust performance across diverse database environments. Evaluation on benchmarks such as TPC-H reveals IA2's suggested indexes' performance in enhancing runtime, securing a 40% reduction in runtime for complex TPC-H workloads compared to scenarios without indexes, and delivering a 20% improvement over existing state-of-the-art DRL-based index advisors.
Data Readiness for AI: A 360-Degree Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications critically depend on data. Poor quality data produces inaccurate and ineffective AI models that may lead to incorrect or unsafe use. Evaluation of data readiness is a crucial step in improving the quality and appropriateness of data usage for AI. R&D efforts have been spent on improving data quality. However, standardized metrics for evaluating data readiness for use in AI training are still evolving. In this study, we perform a comprehensive survey of metrics used to verify data readiness for AI training. This survey examines more than 140 papers published by ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, journals such as Nature, Springer, and Science Direct, and online articles published by prominent AI experts. This survey aims to propose a taxonomy of data readiness for AI (DRAI) metrics for structured and unstructured datasets. We anticipate that this taxonomy will lead to new standards for DRAI metrics that will be used for enhancing the quality, accuracy, and fairness of AI training and inference.
Attention-Driven Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Enhancing Decisions with Expertise-Informed Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach to enhancing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) through the integration of domain knowledge and attention-based policy mechanisms. Our methodology focuses on the incorporation of domain-specific expertise into the learning process, which simplifies the development of collaborative behaviors. This approach aims to reduce the complexity and learning overhead typically associated with MARL by enabling agents to concentrate on essential aspects of complex tasks, thus optimizing the learning curve. The utilization of attention mechanisms plays a key role in our model. It allows for the effective processing of dynamic context data and nuanced agent interactions, leading to more refined decision-making. Applied in standard MARL scenarios, such as the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) Pursuit and Multi-Particle Environments (MPE) Simple Spread, our method has been shown to improve both learning efficiency and the effectiveness of collaborative behaviors. The results indicate that our attention-based approach can be a viable approach for improving the efficiency of MARL training process, integrating domain-specific knowledge at the action level.
An empirical evaluation for defining a mid-air gesture dictionary for web-based interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of mid-air gestures in a web setting. Fifty-six (56) subjects, all of them HCI students, were divided into 16 groups and involved as designers. Each group worked separately with the same requirements. Firstly, designers identified the main actions required for a web-based interaction with a university classroom search service. Secondly, they proposed a set of mid-air gestures to carry out the identified actions: 99 different mid-air gestures for 16 different web actions were produced in total. Then, designers validated their proposals involving external subjects, namely 248 users in total. Finally, we analyzed their results and identified the most recurring or intuitive gestures as well as the potential criticalities associated with their proposals. Hence, we defined a mid-air gesture dictionary that contains, according to our analysis, the most suitable gestures for each identified web action. Our results suggest that most people tend to replicate gestures used in touch-based and mouse-based interfaces also in touchless interactions, ignoring the fact that they can be problematic due to the different distance between the user and the device in each interaction context.
Near-Tight Bounds for 3-Query Locally Correctable Binary Linear Codes via Rainbow Cycles
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We prove that a binary linear code of block length $n$ that is locally correctable with $3$ queries against a fraction $δ> 0$ of adversarial errors must have dimension at most $O_δ(\log^2 n \cdot \log \log n)$. This is almost tight in view of quadratic Reed-Muller codes being a $3$-query locally correctable code (LCC) with dimension $Θ(\log^2 n)$. Our result improves, for the binary field case, the $O_δ(\log^8 n)$ bound obtained in the recent breakthrough of (Kothari and Manohar, 2023) (arXiv:2311.00558) (and the more recent improvement to $O_δ(\log^4 n)$ for binary linear codes announced in (Yankovitz, 2024)). Previous bounds for $3$-query linear LCCs proceed by constructing a $2$-query locally decodable code (LDC) from the $3$-query linear LCC/LDC and applying the strong bounds known for the former. Our approach is more direct and proceeds by bounding the covering radius of the dual code, borrowing inspiration from (Iceland and Samorodnitsky, 2018) (arXiv:1802.01184). That is, we show that if $x \mapsto (v_1 \cdot x, v_2 \cdot x, \ldots, v_n \cdot x)$ is an arbitrary encoding map $\mathbb{F}_2^k \to \mathbb{F}_2^n$ for the $3$-query LCC, then all vectors in $\mathbb{F}_2^k$ can be written as a $\widetilde{O}_δ(\log n)$-sparse linear combination of the $v_i$'s, which immediately implies $k \le \widetilde{O}_δ((\log n)^2)$. The proof of this fact proceeds by iteratively reducing the size of any arbitrary linear combination of at least $\widetildeΩ_δ(\log n)$ of the $v_i$'s. We achieve this using the recent breakthrough result of (Alon, Bucić, Sauermann, Zakharov, and Zamir, 2023) (arXiv:2309.04460) on the existence of rainbow cycles in properly edge-colored graphs, applied to graphs capturing the linear dependencies underlying the local correction property.
GeniL: A Multilingual Dataset on Generalizing Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generative language models are transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.
TabConv: Low-Computation CNN Inference via Table Lookups
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable ability throughout the field of computer vision. However, CNN inference requires a large number of arithmetic operations, making them expensive to deploy in hardware. Current approaches alleviate this issue by developing hardware-supported, algorithmic processes to simplify spatial convolution functions. However, these methods still heavily rely on matrix multiplication, leading to significant computational overhead. To bridge the gap between hardware, algorithmic acceleration, and approximate matrix multiplication, we propose TabConv, a novel, table-based approximation for convolution to significantly reduce arithmetic operations during inference. Additionally, we introduce a priority masking technique based on cosine similarity to select layers for table-based approximation, thereby maintaining the model performance. We evaluate our approach on popular CNNs: ResNet-18, ResNet-34, and NetworkInNetwork (NIN). TabConv preserves over 93% of the original model's performance while reducing arithmetic operations by 36.5%, 25.8%, and 99.4% for ResNet-18 on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST, respectively, 35.6% and 99.3% for ResNet-34 on CIFAR-10 and MNIST, and 98.9% for NIN on MNIST, achieving low-computation inference.
Privacy and Security of Women's Reproductive Health Apps in a Changing Legal Landscape
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

FemTech, a rising trend in mobile apps, empowers women to digitally manage their health and family planning. However, privacy and security vulnerabilities in period-tracking and fertility-monitoring apps present significant risks, such as unintended pregnancies and legal consequences. Our approach involves manual observations of privacy policies and app permissions, along with dynamic and static analysis using multiple evaluation frameworks. Our research reveals that many of these apps gather personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive healthcare data. Furthermore, our analysis identifies that 61% of the code vulnerabilities found in the apps are classified under the top-ten Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) vulnerabilities. Our research emphasizes the significance of tackling the privacy and security vulnerabilities present in period-tracking and fertility-monitoring mobile apps. By highlighting these crucial risks, we aim to initiate a vital discussion and advocate for increased accountability and transparency of digital tools for women's health. We encourage the industry to prioritize user privacy and security, ultimately promoting a safer and more secure environment for women's health management.
Prompt-driven Universal Model for View-Agnostic Echocardiography Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Echocardiography segmentation for cardiac analysis is time-consuming and resource-intensive due to the variability in image quality and the necessity to process scans from various standard views. While current automated segmentation methods in echocardiography show promising performance, they are trained on specific scan views to analyze corresponding data. However, this solution has a limitation as the number of required models increases with the number of standard views. To address this, in this paper, we present a prompt-driven universal method for view-agnostic echocardiography analysis. Considering the domain shift between standard views, we first introduce a method called prompt matching, aimed at learning prompts specific to different views by matching prompts and querying input embeddings using a pre-trained vision model. Then, we utilized a pre-trained medical language model to align textual information with pixel data for accurate segmentation. Extensive experiments on three standard views showed that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art universal methods and achieves comparable or even better performances over the segmentation model trained and tested on same views.
VisualWebBench: How Far Have Multimodal LLMs Evolved in Web Page Understanding and Grounding?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal Large Language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in web-related tasks, but evaluating their performance in the web domain remains a challenge due to the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. Existing benchmarks are either designed for general multimodal tasks, failing to capture the unique characteristics of web pages, or focus on end-to-end web agent tasks, unable to measure fine-grained abilities such as OCR, understanding, and grounding. In this paper, we introduce \bench{}, a multimodal benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of MLLMs across a variety of web tasks. \bench{} consists of seven tasks, and comprises 1.5K human-curated instances from 139 real websites, covering 87 sub-domains. We evaluate 14 open-source MLLMs, Gemini Pro, Claude-3 series, and GPT-4V(ision) on \bench{}, revealing significant challenges and performance gaps. Further analysis highlights the limitations of current MLLMs, including inadequate grounding in text-rich environments and subpar performance with low-resolution image inputs. We believe \bench{} will serve as a valuable resource for the research community and contribute to the creation of more powerful and versatile MLLMs for web-related applications.
Boosting Digital Safeguards: Blending Cryptography and Steganography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In today's digital age, the internet is essential for communication and the sharing of information, creating a critical need for sophisticated data security measures to prevent unauthorized access and exploitation. Cryptography encrypts messages into a cipher text that is incomprehensible to unauthorized readers, thus safeguarding data during its transmission. Steganography, on the other hand, originates from the Greek term for "covered writing" and involves the art of hiding data within another medium, thereby facilitating covert communication by making the message invisible. This proposed approach takes advantage of the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL), especially through the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), to improve upon traditional steganographic methods. By embedding encrypted data within another medium, our method ensures that the communication remains hidden from prying eyes. The application of GANs enables a smart, secure system that utilizes the inherent sensitivity of neural networks to slight alterations in data, enhancing the protection against detection. By merging the encryption techniques of cryptography with the hiding capabilities of steganography, and augmenting these with the strengths of AI, we introduce a comprehensive security system designed to maintain both the privacy and integrity of information. This system is crafted not just to prevent unauthorized access or modification of data, but also to keep the existence of the data hidden. This fusion of technologies tackles the core challenges of data security in the current era of open digital communication, presenting an advanced solution with the potential to transform the landscape of information security.
FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) evaluation methodologies and datasets has led to a profound challenge: integrating state-of-the-art evaluation techniques cost-effectively while ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and efficiency. Currently, there is a notable absence of a unified and adaptable framework that seamlessly integrates various evaluation approaches. Moreover, the reliability of evaluation findings is often questionable due to potential data contamination, with the evaluation efficiency commonly overlooked when facing the substantial costs associated with LLM inference. In response to these challenges, we introduce FreeEval, a modular and scalable framework crafted to enable trustworthy and efficient automatic evaluations of LLMs. Firstly, FreeEval's unified abstractions simplify the integration and improve the transparency of diverse evaluation methodologies, encompassing dynamic evaluation that demand sophisticated LLM interactions. Secondly, the framework integrates meta-evaluation techniques like human evaluation and data contamination detection, which, along with dynamic evaluation modules in the platform, enhance the fairness of the evaluation outcomes. Lastly, FreeEval is designed with a high-performance infrastructure, including distributed computation and caching strategies, enabling extensive evaluations across multi-node, multi-GPU clusters for open-source and proprietary LLMs.