OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Joint Application Admission Control and Network Slicing in Virtual Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

We focus on the problem of managing a shared physical wireless sensor network where a single network infrastructure provider leases the physical resources of the networks to application providers to run/deploy specific applications/services. In this scenario, we solve jointly the problems of Application Admission Control (AAC), that is, whether to admit the application/service to the physical network, and wireless Sensor Network Slicing (SNS), that is, to allocate the required physical resources to the admitted applications in a transparent and effective way. We propose a mathematical programming framework to model the joint AAC-SNS problem which is then leveraged to design effective solution algorithms. The proposed framework is thoroughly evaluated on realistic wireless sensor networks infrastructures.
FGeo-TP: A Language Model-Enhanced Solver for Geometry Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The application of contemporary artificial intelligence techniques to address geometric problems and automated deductive proof has always been a grand challenge to the interdiscipline field of mathematics and artificial Intelligence. This is the fourth article in a series of our works, in our previous work, we established of a geometric formalized system known as FormalGeo. Moreover we annotated approximately 7000 geometric problems, forming the FormalGeo7k dataset. Despite the FGPS (Formal Geometry Problem Solver) can achieve interpretable algebraic equation solving and human-like deductive reasoning, it often experiences timeouts due to the complexity of the search strategy. In this paper, we introduced FGeo-TP (Theorem Predictor), which utilizes the language model to predict theorem sequences for solving geometry problems. We compared the effectiveness of various Transformer architectures, such as BART or T5, in theorem prediction, implementing pruning in the search process of FGPS, thereby improving its performance in solving geometry problems. Our results demonstrate a significant increase in the problem-solving rate of the language model-enhanced FGeo-TP on the FormalGeo7k dataset, rising from 39.7% to 80.86%. Furthermore, FGeo-TP exhibits notable reductions in solving time and search steps across problems of varying difficulty levels.
L3GO: Language Agents with Chain-of-3D-Thoughts for Generating Unconventional Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion-based image generation models such as DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion-XL demonstrate remarkable capabilities in generating images with realistic and unique compositions. Yet, these models are not robust in precisely reasoning about physical and spatial configurations of objects, especially when instructed with unconventional, thereby out-of-distribution descriptions, such as "a chair with five legs". In this paper, we propose a language agent with chain-of-3D-thoughts (L3GO), an inference-time approach that can reason about part-based 3D mesh generation of unconventional objects that current data-driven diffusion models struggle with. More concretely, we use large language models as agents to compose a desired object via trial-and-error within the 3D simulation environment. To facilitate our investigation, we develop a new benchmark, Unconventionally Feasible Objects (UFO), as well as SimpleBlenv, a wrapper environment built on top of Blender where language agents can build and compose atomic building blocks via API calls. Human and automatic GPT-4V evaluations show that our approach surpasses the standard GPT-4 and other language agents (e.g., ReAct and Reflexion) for 3D mesh generation on ShapeNet. Moreover, when tested on our UFO benchmark, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art text-to-2D image and text-to-3D models based on human evaluation.
Exploiting Estimation Bias in Clipped Double Q-Learning for Continous Control Reinforcement Learning Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation biases in Actor-Critic methods for continuous control tasks, using Deep Double Q-Learning. We design a Bias Exploiting (BE) mechanism to dynamically select the most advantageous estimation bias during training of the RL agent. Most State-of-the-art Deep RL algorithms can be equipped with the BE mechanism, without hindering performance or computational complexity. Our extensive experiments across various continuous control tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. We show that RL algorithms equipped with this method can match or surpass their counterparts, particularly in environments where estimation biases significantly impact learning. The results underline the importance of bias exploitation in improving policy learning in RL.
Detection Latencies of Anomaly Detectors: An Overlooked Perspective ?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The ever-evolving landscape of attacks, coupled with the growing complexity of ICT systems, makes crafting anomaly-based intrusion detectors (ID) and error detectors (ED) a difficult task: they must accurately detect attacks, and they should promptly perform detections. Although improving and comparing the detection capability is the focus of most research works, the timeliness of the detection is less considered and often insufficiently evaluated or discussed. In this paper, we argue the relevance of measuring the temporal latency of attacks and errors, and we propose an evaluation approach for detectors to ensure a pragmatic trade-off between correct and in-time detection. Briefly, the approach relates the false positive rate with the temporal latency of attacks and errors, and this ultimately leads to guidelines for configuring a detector. We apply our approach by evaluating different ED and ID solutions in two industrial cases: i) an embedded railway on-board system that optimizes public mobility, and ii) an edge device for the Industrial Internet of Things. Our results show that considering latency in addition to traditional metrics like the false positive rate, precision, and coverage gives an additional fundamental perspective on the actual performance of the detector and should be considered when assessing and configuring anomaly detectors.
Sobolev Training for Operator Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the impact of Sobolev Training on operator learning frameworks for improving model performance. Our research reveals that integrating derivative information into the loss function enhances the training process, and we propose a novel framework to approximate derivatives on irregular meshes in operator learning. Our findings are supported by both experimental evidence and theoretical analysis. This demonstrates the effectiveness of Sobolev Training in approximating the solution operators between infinite-dimensional spaces.
A Digital Twin prototype for traffic sign recognition of a learning-enabled autonomous vehicle
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present a novel digital twin prototype for a learning-enabled self-driving vehicle. The primary objective of this digital twin is to perform traffic sign recognition and lane keeping. The digital twin architecture relies on co-simulation and uses the Functional Mock-up Interface and SystemC Transaction Level Modeling standards. The digital twin consists of four clients, i) a vehicle model that is designed in Amesim tool, ii) an environment model developed in Prescan, iii) a lane-keeping controller designed in Robot Operating System, and iv) a perception and speed control module developed in the formal modeling language of BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority). These clients interface with the digital twin platform, PAVE360-Veloce System Interconnect (PAVE360-VSI). PAVE360-VSI acts as the co-simulation orchestrator and is responsible for synchronization, interconnection, and data exchange through a server. The server establishes connections among the different clients and also ensures adherence to the Ethernet protocol. We conclude with illustrative digital twin simulations and recommendations for future work.
Scheduling for On-Board Federated Learning with Satellite Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Mega-constellations of small satellites have evolved into a source of massive amount of valuable data. To manage this data efficiently, on-board federated learning (FL) enables satellites to train a machine learning (ML) model collaboratively without having to share the raw data. This paper introduces a scheme for scheduling on-board FL for constellations connected with intra-orbit inter-satellite links. The proposed scheme utilizes the predictable visibility pattern between satellites and ground station (GS), both at the individual satellite level and cumulatively within the entire orbit, to mitigate intermittent connectivity and best use of available time. To this end, two distinct schedulers are employed: one for coordinating the FL procedures among orbits, and the other for controlling those within each orbit. These two schedulers cooperatively determine the appropriate time to perform global updates in GS and then allocate suitable duration to satellites within each orbit for local training, proportional to usable time until next global update. This scheme leads to improved test accuracy within a shorter time.
Stabilizing Consensus is Impossible in Lossy Iterated Immediate Snapshot Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

A substantial portion of distributed computing research is dedicated to terminating problems like consensus and similar agreement problems. However, non-terminating problems have been intensively studied in the context of self-stabilizing distributed algorithms, where processes may start from arbitrary initial states and can tolerate arbitrary transient faults. In between lie stabilizing problems, where the processes start from a well-defined initial state, but do not need to decide irrevocably and are allowed to change their decision finitely often until a stable decision is eventually reached. In this paper, we introduce the novel Delayed Lossy-Link (DLL) model, and the Lossy Iterated Immediate Snapshot Model (LIIS), for which we show stabilizing consensus to be impossible. The DLL model is introduced as a variant of the well-known Lossy-Link model, which admits silence periods of arbitrary but finite length. The LIIS model is a variant of the Iterated Immediate Snapshot (IIS), model which admits finite length periods of at most $f$ omission faults per layer. In particular, we show that stabilizing consensus is impossible even when $f=1$. Our results show that even in a model with very strong connectivity, namely, the Iterated Immediate Snapshot (IIS) model, a single omission fault per layer effectively disables stabilizing consensus. Furthermore, since the DLL model always has a perpetual broadcaster, the mere existence of a perpetual broadcaster, even in a crash-free setting, is not sufficient for solving stabilizing consensus, negatively answering the open question posed by Charron-Bost and Moran.
Large Language Model Simulator for Cold-Start Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recommending cold items remains a significant challenge in billion-scale online recommendation systems. While warm items benefit from historical user behaviors, cold items rely solely on content features, limiting their recommendation performance and impacting user experience and revenue. Current models generate synthetic behavioral embeddings from content features but fail to address the core issue: the absence of historical behavior data. To tackle this, we introduce the LLM Simulator framework, which leverages large language models to simulate user interactions for cold items, fundamentally addressing the cold-start problem. However, simply using LLM to traverse all users can introduce significant complexity in billion-scale systems. To manage the computational complexity, we propose a coupled funnel ColdLLM framework for online recommendation. ColdLLM efficiently reduces the number of candidate users from billions to hundreds using a trained coupled filter, allowing the LLM to operate efficiently and effectively on the filtered set. Extensive experiments show that ColdLLM significantly surpasses baselines in cold-start recommendations, including Recall and NDCG metrics. A two-week A/B test also validates that ColdLLM can effectively increase the cold-start period GMV.
Generalized Portrait Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automated and robust portrait quality assessment (PQA) is of paramount importance in high-impact applications such as smartphone photography. This paper presents FHIQA, a learning-based approach to PQA that introduces a simple but effective quality score rescaling method based on image semantics, to enhance the precision of fine-grained image quality metrics while ensuring robust generalization to various scene settings beyond the training dataset. The proposed approach is validated by extensive experiments on the PIQ23 benchmark and comparisons with the current state of the art. The source code of FHIQA will be made publicly available on the PIQ23 GitHub repository at https://github.com/DXOMARK-Research/PIQ2023.
Cyber Deception Reactive: TCP Stealth Redirection to On-Demand Honeypots
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Cybersecurity is developing rapidly, and new methods of defence against attackers are appearing, such as Cyber Deception (CYDEC). CYDEC consists of deceiving the enemy who performs actions without realising that he/she is being deceived. This article proposes designing, implementing, and evaluating a deception mechanism based on the stealthy redirection of TCP communications to an on-demand honey server with the same characteristics as the victim asset, i.e., it is a clone. Such a mechanism ensures that the defender fools the attacker, thanks to stealth redirection. In this situation, the attacker will focus on attacking the honey server while enabling the recollection of relevant information to generate threat intelligence. The experiments in different scenarios show how the proposed solution can effectively redirect an attacker to a copied asset on demand, thus protecting the real asset. Finally, the results obtained by evaluating the latency times ensure that the redirection is undetectable by humans and very difficult to detect by a machine.
Discovering Command and Control (C2) Channels on Tor and Public Networks Using Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Command and control (C2) channels are an essential component of many types of cyber attacks, as they enable attackers to remotely control their malware-infected machines and execute harmful actions, such as propagating malicious code across networks, exfiltrating confidential data, or initiating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Identifying these C2 channels is therefore crucial in helping to mitigate and prevent cyber attacks. However, identifying C2 channels typically involves a manual process, requiring deep knowledge and expertise in cyber operations. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to automatically emulate C2 attack campaigns using both the normal (public) and the Tor networks. In addition, payload size and network firewalls are configured to simulate real-world attack scenarios. Results on a typical network configuration show that the RL agent can automatically discover resilient C2 attack paths utilizing both Tor-based and conventional communication channels, while also bypassing network firewalls.
AutoTutor meets Large Language Models: A Language Model Tutor with Rich Pedagogy and Guardrails
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have found several use cases in education, ranging from automatic question generation to essay evaluation. In this paper, we explore the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to author Intelligent Tutoring Systems. A common pitfall of LLMs is their straying from desired pedagogical strategies such as leaking the answer to the student, and in general, providing no guarantees. We posit that while LLMs with certain guardrails can take the place of subject experts, the overall pedagogical design still needs to be handcrafted for the best learning results. Based on this principle, we create a sample end-to-end tutoring system named MWPTutor, which uses LLMs to fill in the state space of a pre-defined finite state transducer. This approach retains the structure and the pedagogy of traditional tutoring systems that has been developed over the years by learning scientists but brings in additional flexibility of LLM-based approaches. Through a human evaluation study on two datasets based on math word problems, we show that our hybrid approach achieves a better overall tutoring score than an instructed, but otherwise free-form, GPT-4. MWPTutor is completely modular and opens up the scope for the community to improve its performance by improving individual modules or using different teaching strategies that it can follow.
Context Composing for Full Line Code Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Code Completion is one of the most used Integrated Development Environment (IDE) features, which affects the everyday life of a software developer. Modern code completion approaches moved from the composition of several static analysis-based contributors to pipelines that involve neural networks. This change allows the proposal of longer code suggestions while maintaining the relatively short time spent on generation itself. At JetBrains, we put a lot of effort into perfecting the code completion workflow so it can be both helpful and non-distracting for a programmer. We managed to ship the Full Line Code Completion feature to PyCharm Pro IDE and proved its usefulness in A/B testing on hundreds of real Python users. The paper describes our approach to context composing for the Transformer model that is a core of the feature's implementation. In addition to that, we share our next steps to improve the feature and emphasize the importance of several research aspects in the area.
Design and Realization of a Benchmarking Testbed for Evaluating Autonomous Platooning Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous vehicle platoons present near- and long-term opportunities to enhance operational efficiencies and save lives. The past 30 years have seen rapid development in the autonomous driving space, enabling new technologies that will alleviate the strain placed on human drivers and reduce vehicle emissions. This paper introduces a testbed for evaluating and benchmarking platooning algorithms on 1/10th scale vehicles with onboard sensors. To demonstrate the testbed's utility, we evaluate three algorithms, linear feedback and two variations of distributed model predictive control, and compare their results on a typical platooning scenario where the lead vehicle tracks a reference trajectory that changes speed multiple times. We validate our algorithms in simulation to analyze the performance as the platoon size increases, and find that the distributed model predictive control algorithms outperform linear feedback on hardware and in simulation.
SyntaxShap: Syntax-aware Explainability Method for Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

To harness the power of large language models in safety-critical domains, we need to ensure the explainability of their predictions. However, despite the significant attention to model interpretability, there remains an unexplored domain in explaining sequence-to-sequence tasks using methods tailored for textual data. This paper introduces SyntaxShap, a local, model-agnostic explainability method for text generation that takes into consideration the syntax in the text data. The presented work extends Shapley values to account for parsing-based syntactic dependencies. Taking a game theoric approach, SyntaxShap only considers coalitions constraint by the dependency tree. We adopt a model-based evaluation to compare SyntaxShap and its weighted form to state-of-the-art explainability methods adapted to text generation tasks, using diverse metrics including faithfulness, coherency, and semantic alignment of the explanations to the model. We show that our syntax-aware method produces explanations that help build more faithful and coherent explanations for predictions by autoregressive models. Confronted with the misalignment of human and AI model reasoning, this paper also highlights the need for cautious evaluation strategies in explainable AI.
UR2M: Uncertainty and Resource-Aware Event Detection on Microcontrollers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional machine learning techniques are prone to generating inaccurate predictions when confronted with shifts in the distribution of data between the training and testing phases. This vulnerability can lead to severe consequences, especially in applications such as mobile healthcare. Uncertainty estimation has the potential to mitigate this issue by assessing the reliability of a model's output. However, existing uncertainty estimation techniques often require substantial computational resources and memory, making them impractical for implementation on microcontrollers (MCUs). This limitation hinders the feasibility of many important on-device wearable event detection (WED) applications, such as heart attack detection. In this paper, we present UR2M, a novel Uncertainty and Resource-aware event detection framework for MCUs. Specifically, we (i) develop an uncertainty-aware WED based on evidential theory for accurate event detection and reliable uncertainty estimation; (ii) introduce a cascade ML framework to achieve efficient model inference via early exits, by sharing shallower model layers among different event models; (iii) optimize the deployment of the model and MCU library for system efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments and compared UR2M to traditional uncertainty baselines using three wearable datasets. Our results demonstrate that UR2M achieves up to 864% faster inference speed, 857% energy-saving for uncertainty estimation, 55% memory saving on two popular MCUs, and a 22% improvement in uncertainty quantification performance. UR2M can be deployed on a wide range of MCUs, significantly expanding real-time and reliable WED applications.
Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite showing increasingly human-like abilities, large language models (LLMs) often struggle with factual inaccuracies, i.e. "hallucinations", even when they hold relevant knowledge. To address these hallucinations, current approaches typically necessitate high-quality human factuality annotations. In this work, we explore Self-Alignment for Factuality, where we leverage the self-evaluation capability of an LLM to provide training signals that steer the model towards factuality. Specifically, we incorporate Self-Eval, a self-evaluation component, to prompt an LLM to validate the factuality of its own generated responses solely based on its internal knowledge. Additionally, we design Self-Knowledge Tuning (SK-Tuning) to augment the LLM's self-evaluation ability by improving the model's confidence estimation and calibration. We then utilize these self-annotated responses to fine-tune the model via Direct Preference Optimization algorithm. We show that the proposed self-alignment approach substantially enhances factual accuracy over Llama family models across three key knowledge-intensive tasks on TruthfulQA and BioGEN.