OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Unveiling Dynamics and Patterns: A Comprehensive Analysis of Spreading Patterns and Similarities in Low-Labelled Ransomware Families
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Ransomware has become one of the most widespread threats, primarily due to its easy deployment and the accessibility to services that enable attackers to raise and obfuscate funds. This latter aspect has been significantly enhanced with the advent of cryptocurrencies, which, by fostering decentralisation and anonymity, have transformed this threat into a large-scale outbreak. However, recent reports indicate that a small group of individuals dominate the ransomware ecosystem and try to obfuscate their activity using multiple strains characterised by a short time to live. This scenario suggests that different strains could share mechanisms in ransom collection, fund movement, and money laundering operations. For this reason, this study aims to analyse the address-transaction graphs generated in the Bitcoin network by low-labelled ransomware families. Our goals are to identify payment spreading patterns for evaluating the evolution of ransomware families and to detect similarities among different strains that potentially can be controlled by the same attacker. Specifically, this latter task assigns an address behaviour to each node in the address-transaction graphs according to its dynamics. The distribution of the behaviours in each strain is finally used to evaluate the closeness among different ransomware families. Our findings show that although ransomware families can quickly establish connections with millions of addresses, numerous families require multiple-step analysis. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the introduced behaviours can effectively be used to highlight similarities among different ransomware strains. The outcome shows that families are similar primarily due to behaviours usually associated with ransom collection and money laundering operations.+
End-to-End Design of Polar Coded Integrated Data and Energy Networking
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In order to transmit data and transfer energy to the low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, integrated data and energy networking (IDEN) system may be harnessed. In this context, we propose a bitwise end-to-end design for polar coded IDEN systems, where the conventional encoding/decoding, modulation/demodulation, and energy harvesting (EH) modules are replaced by the neural networks (NNs). In this way, the entire system can be treated as an AutoEncoder (AE) and trained in an end-to-end manner. Hence achieving global optimization. Additionally, we improve the common NN-based belief propagation (BP) decoder by adding an extra hypernetwork, which generates the corresponding NN weights for the main network under different number of iterations, thus the adaptability of the receiver architecture can be further enhanced. Our numerical results demonstrate that our BP-based end-to-end design is superior to conventional BP-based counterparts in terms of both the BER and power transfer, but it is inferior to the successive cancellation list (SCL)-based conventional IDEN system, which may be due to the inherent performance gap between the BP and SCL decoders.
In-depth Analysis of Densest Subgraph Discovery in a Unified Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

As a fundamental topic in graph mining, Densest Subgraph Discovery (DSD) has found a wide spectrum of real applications. Several DSD algorithms, including exact and approximation algorithms, have been proposed in the literature. However, these algorithms have not been systematically and comprehensively compared under the same experimental settings. In this paper, we first propose a unified framework to incorporate all DSD algorithms from a high-level perspective. We then extensively compare representative DSD algorithms over a range of graphs -- from small to billion-scale -- and examine the effectiveness of all methods. Moreover, we suggest new variants of the DSD algorithms by combining the existing techniques, which are up to 10 X faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm with the same accuracy guarantee. Finally, based on the findings, we offer promising research opportunities. We believe that a deeper understanding of the behavior of existing algorithms can provide new valuable insights for future research. The codes are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DensestSubgraph-245A
A 2.5-nA Area-Efficient Temperature-Independent 176-/82-ppm/°C CMOS-Only Current Reference in 0.11-$μ$m Bulk and 22-nm FD-SOI
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications require nW-power current references that are robust to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations, to maintain the performance of IoT sensor nodes in a wide range of operating conditions. However, nA-range current references are rarely area-efficient due to the use of large gate-leakage transistors or resistors, which occupy a significant silicon area at this current level. In this paper, we introduce a nA-range constant-with-temperature (CWT) current reference, relying on a self-cascode MOSFET (SCM) biased by a four-transistor ultra-low-power voltage reference through a single-transistor buffer. The proposed reference includes a temperature coefficient (TC) calibration mechanism to maintain performance across process corners. In addition, as the proposed design relies on the body effect, it has been fabricated and measured in 0.11-$μ$m bulk and 22-nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) to demonstrate feasibility in both technology types. On the one hand, the 0.11-$μ$m design consumes a power of 16.8 nW at 1.2 V and achieves a 2.3-nA current with a line sensitivity (LS) of 2.23 %/V at 25°C and a TC of 176 ppm/°C at 1.2 V from -40 to 85°C. On the other hand, the 22-nm design consumes a power of 16.3 nW at 1.5 V and achieves a 2.5-nA current with a 1.53-%/V LS at 25°C and an 82-ppm/°C TC at 1.5 V from -40 to 85°C. Thanks to their simple architecture, the proposed references achieve a silicon area of 0.0106 mm$^2$ in 0.11 $μ$m and 0.0026 mm$^2$ in 22 nm without compromising other figures of merit, and are thus competitive with state-of-the-art CWT references operating in the same current range.
When Swarm Learning meets energy series data: A decentralized collaborative learning design based on blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning models offer the capability to forecast future energy production or consumption and infer essential unknown variables from existing data. However, legal and policy constraints within specific energy sectors render the data sensitive, presenting technical hurdles in utilizing data from diverse sources. Therefore, we propose adopting a Swarm Learning (SL) scheme, which replaces the centralized server with a blockchain-based distributed network to address the security and privacy issues inherent in Federated Learning (FL)'s centralized architecture. Within this distributed Collaborative Learning framework, each participating organization governs nodes for inter-organizational communication. Devices from various organizations utilize smart contracts for parameter uploading and retrieval. Consensus mechanism ensures distributed consistency throughout the learning process, guarantees the transparent trustworthiness and immutability of parameters on-chain. The efficacy of the proposed framework is substantiated across three real-world energy series modeling scenarios with superior performance compared to Local Learning approaches, simultaneously emphasizing enhanced data security and privacy over Centralized Learning and FL method. Notably, as the number of data volume and the count of local epochs increases within a threshold, there is an improvement in model performance accompanied by a reduction in the variance of performance errors. Consequently, this leads to an increased stability and reliability in the outcomes produced by the model.
Scaling Motion Planning Infeasibility Proofs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Achieving completeness in the motion planning problem demands substantial computation power, especially in high dimensions. Recent developments in parallel computing have rendered this more achievable. We introduce an embarrassingly parallel algorithm for constructing infeasibility proofs. Specifically, we design and implement a manifold triangulation algorithm on GPUs based on manifold tracing with Coxeter triangulation. To address the challenge of extensive memory usage within limited GPU memory resources during triangulation, we introduce batch triangulation as part of our design. The algorithm provides two orders of magnitude speed-up compared to the previous method for constructing infeasibility proofs. The resulting asymptotically complete motion planning algorithm effectively leverages the computational capabilities of both CPU and GPU architectures and maintains minimum data transfer between the two parts. We perform experiments on 5-DoF and 6-Dof manipulator scenes.
Streaming Diffusion Policy: Fast Policy Synthesis with Variable Noise Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models have seen rapid adoption in robotic imitation learning, enabling autonomous execution of complex dexterous tasks. However, action synthesis is often slow, requiring many steps of iterative denoising, limiting the extent to which models can be used in tasks that require fast reactive policies. To sidestep this, recent works have explored how the distillation of the diffusion process can be used to accelerate policy synthesis. However, distillation is computationally expensive and can hurt both the accuracy and diversity of synthesized actions. We propose SDP (Streaming Diffusion Policy), an alternative method to accelerate policy synthesis, leveraging the insight that generating a partially denoised action trajectory is substantially faster than a full output action trajectory. At each observation, our approach outputs a partially denoised action trajectory with variable levels of noise corruption, where the immediate action to execute is noise-free, with subsequent actions having increasing levels of noise and uncertainty. The partially denoised action trajectory for a new observation can then be quickly generated by applying a few steps of denoising to the previously predicted noisy action trajectory (rolled over by one timestep). We illustrate the efficacy of this approach, dramatically speeding up policy synthesis while preserving performance across both simulated and real-world settings.
Graph Mining under Data scarcity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multitude of deep learning models have been proposed for node classification in graphs. However, they tend to perform poorly under labeled-data scarcity. Although Few-shot learning for graphs has been introduced to overcome this problem, the existing models are not easily adaptable for generic graph learning frameworks like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Our work proposes an Uncertainty Estimator framework that can be applied on top of any generic GNN backbone network (which are typically designed for supervised/semi-supervised node classification) to improve the node classification performance. A neural network is used to model the Uncertainty Estimator as a probability distribution rather than probabilistic discrete scalar values. We train these models under the classic episodic learning paradigm in the $n$-way, $k$-shot fashion, in an end-to-end setting. Our work demonstrates that implementation of the uncertainty estimator on a GNN backbone network improves the classification accuracy under Few-shot setting without any meta-learning specific architecture. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets under different Few-shot settings and different GNN-based backbone networks. Our method outperforms the baselines, which demonstrates the efficacy of the Uncertainty Estimator for Few-shot node classification on graphs with a GNN.
Annotating FrameNet via Structure-Conditioned Language Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the remarkable generative capabilities of language models in producing naturalistic language, their effectiveness on explicit manipulation and generation of linguistic structures remain understudied. In this paper, we investigate the task of generating new sentences preserving a given semantic structure, following the FrameNet formalism. We propose a framework to produce novel frame-semantically annotated sentences following an overgenerate-and-filter approach. Our results show that conditioning on rich, explicit semantic information tends to produce generations with high human acceptance, under both prompting and finetuning. Our generated frame-semantic structured annotations are effective at training data augmentation for frame-semantic role labeling in low-resource settings; however, we do not see benefits under higher resource settings. Our study concludes that while generating high-quality, semantically rich data might be within reach, the downstream utility of such generations remains to be seen, highlighting the outstanding challenges with automating linguistic annotation tasks.
Deep learning for precipitation nowcasting: A survey from the perspective of time series forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning-based time series forecasting has dominated the short-term precipitation forecasting field with the help of its ability to estimate motion flow in high-resolution datasets. The growing interest in precipitation nowcasting offers substantial opportunities for the advancement of current forecasting technologies. Nevertheless, there has been a scarcity of in-depth surveys of time series precipitation forecasting using deep learning. Thus, this paper systemically reviews recent progress in time series precipitation forecasting models. Specifically, we investigate the following key points within background components, covering: i) preprocessing, ii) objective functions, and iii) evaluation metrics. We then categorize forecasting models into \textit{recursive} and \textit{multiple} strategies based on their approaches to predict future frames, investigate the impacts of models using the strategies, and performance assessments. Finally, we evaluate current deep learning-based models for precipitation forecasting on a public benchmark, discuss their limitations and challenges, and present some promising research directions. Our contribution lies in providing insights for a better understanding of time series precipitation forecasting and in aiding the development of robust AI solutions for the future.
Beyond Data, Towards Sustainability: A Sydney Case Study on Urban Digital Twins
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

As urban areas grapple with unprecedented challenges stemming from population growth and climate change, the emergence of urban digital twins offers a promising solution. This paper presents a case study focusing on Sydney's urban digital twin, a virtual replica integrating diverse real-time and historical data, including weather, crime, emissions, and traffic. Through advanced visualization and data analysis techniques, the study explores some applications of this digital twin in urban sustainability, such as spatial ranking of suburbs and automatic identification of correlations between variables. Additionally, the research delves into predictive modeling, employing machine learning to forecast traffic crash risks using environmental data, showcasing the potential for proactive interventions. The contributions of this work lie in the comprehensive exploration of a city-scale digital twin for sustainable urban planning, offering a multifaceted approach to data-driven decision-making.
MA-AVT: Modality Alignment for Parameter-Efficient Audio-Visual Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in pre-trained vision transformers have shown promise in parameter-efficient audio-visual learning without audio pre-training. However, few studies have investigated effective methods for aligning multimodal features in parameter-efficient audio-visual transformers. In this paper, we propose MA-AVT, a new parameter-efficient audio-visual transformer employing deep modality alignment for corresponding multimodal semantic features. Specifically, we introduce joint unimodal and multimodal token learning for aligning the two modalities with a frozen modality-shared transformer. This allows the model to learn separate representations for each modality, while also attending to the cross-modal relationships between them. In addition, unlike prior work that only aligns coarse features from the output of unimodal encoders, we introduce blockwise contrastive learning to align coarse-to-fine-grain hierarchical features throughout the encoding phase. Furthermore, to suppress the background features in each modality from foreground matched audio-visual features, we introduce a robust discriminative foreground mining scheme. Through extensive experiments on benchmark AVE, VGGSound, and CREMA-D datasets, we achieve considerable performance improvements over SOTA methods.
Leveraging Activations for Superpixel Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Saliency methods have become standard in the explanation toolkit of deep neural networks. Recent developments specific to image classifiers have investigated region-based explanations with either new methods or by adapting well-established ones using ad-hoc superpixel algorithms. In this paper, we aim to avoid relying on these segmenters by extracting a segmentation from the activations of a deep neural network image classifier without fine-tuning the network. Our so-called Neuro-Activated Superpixels (NAS) can isolate the regions of interest in the input relevant to the model's prediction, which boosts high-threshold weakly supervised object localization performance. This property enables the semi-supervised semantic evaluation of saliency methods. The aggregation of NAS with existing saliency methods eases their interpretation and reveals the inconsistencies of the widely used area under the relevance curve metric.
Quantifying Geospatial in the Common Crawl Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit emerging geospatial capabilities, stemming from their pre-training on vast unlabelled text datasets that are often derived from the Common Crawl (CC) corpus. However, the geospatial content within CC remains largely unexplored, impacting our understanding of LLMs' spatial reasoning. This paper investigates the prevalence of geospatial data in recent Common Crawl releases using Gemini 1.5, a powerful language model. By analyzing a sample of documents and manually revising the results, we estimate that 18.7% of web documents in CC contain geospatial information such as coordinates and addresses. We find little difference in prevalence between Enlgish- and non-English-language documents. Our findings provide quantitative insights into the nature and extent of geospatial data in CC, and lay the groundwork for future studies of geospatial biases of LLMs.
Leveraging Generative AI for Extracting Process Models from Multimodal Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an investigation of the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) to auto-generate graphical process models from multi-modal (i.e., text- and image-based) inputs. More precisely, we first introduce a small dataset as well as a set of evaluation metrics that allow for a ground truth-based evaluation of multi-modal process model generation capabilities. We then conduct an initial evaluation of commercial GPT capabilities using zero-, one-, and few-shot prompting strategies. Our results indicate that GPTs can be useful tools for semi-automated process modeling based on multi-modal inputs. More importantly, the dataset and evaluation metrics as well as the open-source evaluation code provide a structured framework for continued systematic evaluations moving forward.
Multi-style Neural Radiance Field with AdaIN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that combines AdaIN and NeRF for the task of stylized Novel View Synthesis. Compared to previous works, we make the following contributions: 1) We simplify the pipeline. 2) We extend the capabilities of model to handle the multi-style task. 3) We modify the model architecture to perform well on styles with strong brush strokes. 4) We implement style interpolation on the multi-style model, allowing us to control the style between any two styles and the style intensity between the stylized output and the original scene, providing better control over the stylization strength.
CityCraft: A Real Crafter for 3D City Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

City scene generation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving, smart city development, and traffic simulation. It helps enhance infrastructure planning and monitoring solutions. Existing methods have employed a two-stage process involving city layout generation, typically using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or Transformers, followed by neural rendering. These techniques often exhibit limited diversity and noticeable artifacts in the rendered city scenes. The rendered scenes lack variety, resembling the training images, resulting in monotonous styles. Additionally, these methods lack planning capabilities, leading to less realistic generated scenes. In this paper, we introduce CityCraft, an innovative framework designed to enhance both the diversity and quality of urban scene generation. Our approach integrates three key stages: initially, a diffusion transformer (DiT) model is deployed to generate diverse and controllable 2D city layouts. Subsequently, a Large Language Model(LLM) is utilized to strategically make land-use plans within these layouts based on user prompts and language guidelines. Based on the generated layout and city plan, we utilize the asset retrieval module and Blender for precise asset placement and scene construction. Furthermore, we contribute two new datasets to the field: 1)CityCraft-OSM dataset including 2D semantic layouts of urban areas, corresponding satellite images, and detailed annotations. 2) CityCraft-Buildings dataset, featuring thousands of diverse, high-quality 3D building assets. CityCraft achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 3D cities.
Compositional Generalization with Grounded Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Grounded language models use external sources of information, such as knowledge graphs, to meet some of the general challenges associated with pre-training. By extending previous work on compositional generalization in semantic parsing, we allow for a controlled evaluation of the degree to which these models learn and generalize from patterns in knowledge graphs. We develop a procedure for generating natural language questions paired with knowledge graphs that targets different aspects of compositionality and further avoids grounding the language models in information already encoded implicitly in their weights. We evaluate existing methods for combining language models with knowledge graphs and find them to struggle with generalization to sequences of unseen lengths and to novel combinations of seen base components. While our experimental results provide some insight into the expressive power of these models, we hope our work and released datasets motivate future research on how to better combine language models with structured knowledge representations.