OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Next Generation of Phishing Attacks using AI powered Browsers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The increase in the number of phishing demands innovative solutions to safeguard users from phishing attacks. This study explores the development and utilization of a real-time browser extension integrated with machine learning model to improve the detection of phishing websites. The results showed that the model had an accuracy of 98.32%, precision of 98.62%, recall of 97.86%, and an F1-score of 98.24%. When compared to other algorithms like Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, XGBoost, and K Nearest Neighbor, the Random Forest algorithm stood out for its effectiveness in detecting phishing attacks. The zero-day phishing attack detection testing over a 15-day period revealed the model's capability to identify previously unseen threats and thus achieving an overall accuracy rate of 99.11%. Furthermore, the model showed better performance when compared to conventional security measures like Google Safe Browsing. The model had successfully detected phishing URLs that evaded detection by Google safe browsing. This research shows how using machine learning in real-time browser extensions can defend against phishing attacks. It gives useful information about cybersecurity and helps make the internet safer for everyone.
Towards Deep Application-Network Integration: Architectures, Progress and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

With the rise of a new generation of applications (e.g., virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, etc) demanding stringent performance requirements, the need for networking solutions and architectures that can enable a higher Quality of Experience (QoE) is becoming increasingly important. While jointly optimizing application and network may increase the applications' QoE and simultaneously improve the utilization of network resources, such a paradigm has had limited success in real production networks. However, with the combination of revolutionary trends in (1) compute processing demands, (2) networking capabilities, and (3) sustainable business models, it is high time the community explores the full potential of deeper integration between application and network. In this paper, recent trends observed over the past few years are systematically reviewed. These include the paradigm shift in modern communication services towards computing-driven applications, such as on-site AI training, advances in programmable network technologies like Software Defined Networking (SDN), and new business models incentivizing collaboration and cooperation between parties. Following this, successful scenarios that benefit from various forms of deeper network-application integration are reported, highlighting their considerable potential. A unified framework is then introduced, providing an overview of possible architecture paradigms for network-application integration and bringing awareness to existing abstractions, mechanisms, tools, and their potential combinations. The paper concludes with a discussion of several remaining challenges in building practical network-application integrated systems.
RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively addresses issues of static knowledge and hallucination in large language models. Existing studies mostly focus on question scenarios with clear user intents and concise answers. However, it is prevalent that users issue broad, open-ended queries with diverse sub-intents, for which they desire rich and long-form answers covering multiple relevant aspects. To tackle this important yet underexplored problem, we propose a novel RAG framework, namely RichRAG. It includes a sub-aspect explorer to identify potential sub-aspects of input questions, a multi-faceted retriever to build a candidate pool of diverse external documents related to these sub-aspects, and a generative list-wise ranker, which is a key module to provide the top-k most valuable documents for the final generator. These ranked documents sufficiently cover various query aspects and are aware of the generator's preferences, hence incentivizing it to produce rich and comprehensive responses for users. The training of our ranker involves a supervised fine-tuning stage to ensure the basic coverage of documents, and a reinforcement learning stage to align downstream LLM's preferences to the ranking of documents. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets prove that our framework effectively and efficiently provides comprehensive and satisfying responses to users.
Restorer: Removing Multi-Degradation with All-Axis Attention and Prompt Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

There are many excellent solutions in image restoration.However, most methods require on training separate models to restore images with different types of degradation.Although existing all-in-one models effectively address multiple types of degradation simultaneously, their performance in real-world scenarios is still constrained by the task confusion problem.In this work, we attempt to address this issue by introducing \textbf{Restorer}, a novel Transformer-based all-in-one image restoration model.To effectively address the complex degradation present in real-world images, we propose All-Axis Attention (AAA), a mechanism that simultaneously models long-range dependencies across both spatial and channel dimensions, capturing potential correlations along all axes.Additionally, we introduce textual prompts in Restorer to incorporate explicit task priors, enabling the removal of specific degradation types based on user instructions. By iterating over these prompts, Restorer can handle composite degradation in real-world scenarios without requiring additional training.Based on these designs, Restorer with one set of parameters demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in multiple image restoration tasks compared to existing all-in-one and even single-task models.Additionally, Restorer is efficient during inference, suggesting the potential in real-world applications.
How to Drive -- An Ability-based Description of Autonomous, Remote and Human Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The development of autonomous and remote-operated driving systems requires extensive stakeholder analyses, requirement engineering, and formalized system descriptions. This is necessary to guarantee the success of the final product after the expensive and time-consuming development phase. To integrate a formalized description of the required abilites of the system, ability graphs have been proposed in the literature. Up to this date, however, this ability graph has only been used to model less complicated driver assistance systems in the literature. This work aims to introduce the value of an ability graph-based description of complex driving systems. This is achieved by successfully demonstrating and discussing a method for constructing a holistic ability graph capable of describing the entirety of abilities required for any driving system.
Online-Adaptive Anomaly Detection for Defect Identification in Aircraft Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Anomaly detection deals with detecting deviations from established patterns within data. It has various applications like autonomous driving, predictive maintenance, and medical diagnosis. To improve anomaly detection accuracy, transfer learning can be applied to large, pre-trained models and adapt them to the specific application context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for online-adaptive anomaly detection using transfer learning. The approach adapts to different environments by selecting visually similar training images and online fitting a normality model to EfficientNet features extracted from the training subset. Anomaly detection is then performed by computing the Mahalanobis distance between the normality model and the test image features. Different similarity measures (SIFT/FLANN, Cosine) and normality models (MVG, OCSVM) are employed and compared with each other. We evaluate the approach on different anomaly detection benchmarks and data collected in controlled laboratory settings. Experimental results showcase a detection accuracy exceeding 0.975, outperforming the state-of-the-art ET-NET approach.
Enhancing Spatio-temporal Quantile Forecasting with Curriculum Learning: Lessons Learned
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Training models on spatio-temporal (ST) data poses an open problem due to the complicated and diverse nature of the data itself, and it is challenging to ensure the model's performance directly trained on the original ST data. While limiting the variety of training data can make training easier, it can also lead to a lack of knowledge and information for the model, resulting in a decrease in performance. To address this challenge, we presented an innovative paradigm that incorporates three separate forms of curriculum learning specifically targeting from spatial, temporal, and quantile perspectives. Furthermore, our framework incorporates a stacking fusion module to combine diverse information from three types of curriculum learning, resulting in a strong and thorough learning process. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this framework with extensive empirical evaluations, highlighting its better performance in addressing complex ST challenges. We provided thorough ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of our curriculum and to explain how it contributes to the improvement of learning efficiency on ST data.
Self-Localized Collaborative Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Collaborative perception has garnered considerable attention due to its capacity to address several inherent challenges in single-agent perception, including occlusion and out-of-range issues. However, existing collaborative perception systems heavily rely on precise localization systems to establish a consistent spatial coordinate system between agents. This reliance makes them susceptible to large pose errors or malicious attacks, resulting in substantial reductions in perception performance. To address this, we propose~$\mathtt{CoBEVGlue}$, a novel self-localized collaborative perception system, which achieves more holistic and robust collaboration without using an external localization system. The core of~$\mathtt{CoBEVGlue}$ is a novel spatial alignment module, which provides the relative poses between agents by effectively matching co-visible objects across agents. We validate our method on both real-world and simulated datasets. The results show that i) $\mathtt{CoBEVGlue}$ achieves state-of-the-art detection performance under arbitrary localization noises and attacks; and ii) the spatial alignment module can seamlessly integrate with a majority of previous methods, enhancing their performance by an average of $57.7\%$. Code is available at https://github.com/VincentNi0107/CoBEVGlue
Automatic generation of insights from workers' actions in industrial workflows with explainable Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

New technologies such as Machine Learning (ML) gave great potential for evaluating industry workflows and automatically generating key performance indicators (KPIs). However, despite established standards for measuring the efficiency of industrial machinery, there is no precise equivalent for workers' productivity, which would be highly desirable given the lack of a skilled workforce for the next generation of industry workflows. Therefore, an ML solution combining data from manufacturing processes and workers' performance for that goal is required. Additionally, in recent times intense effort has been devoted to explainable ML approaches that can automatically explain their decisions to a human operator, thus increasing their trustworthiness. We propose to apply explainable ML solutions to differentiate between expert and inexpert workers in industrial workflows, which we validate at a quality assessment industrial workstation. Regarding the methodology used, input data are captured by a manufacturing machine and stored in a NoSQL database. Data are processed to engineer features used in automatic classification and to compute workers' KPIs to predict their level of expertise (with all classification metrics exceeding 90 %). These KPIs, and the relevant features in the decisions are textually explained by natural language expansion on an explainability dashboard. These automatic explanations made it possible to infer knowledge from expert workers for inexpert workers. The latter illustrates the interest of research in self-explainable ML for automatically generating insights to improve productivity in industrial workflows.
Self-Distillation for Model Stacking Unlocks Cross-Lingual NLU in 200+ Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

LLMs have become a go-to solution not just for text generation, but also for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Acquiring extensive knowledge through language modeling on web-scale corpora, they excel on English NLU, yet struggle to extend their NLU capabilities to underrepresented languages. In contrast, machine translation models (MT) produce excellent multilingual representations, resulting in strong translation performance even for low-resource languages. MT encoders, however, lack the knowledge necessary for comprehensive NLU that LLMs obtain through language modeling training on immense corpora. In this work, we get the best both worlds by integrating MT encoders directly into LLM backbones via sample-efficient self-distillation. The resulting MT-LLMs preserve the inherent multilingual representational alignment from the MT encoder, allowing lower-resource languages to tap into the rich knowledge embedded in English-centric LLMs. Merging the MT encoder and LLM in a single model, we mitigate the propagation of translation errors and inference overhead of MT decoding inherent to discrete translation-based cross-lingual transfer (e.g., translate-test). Evaluation spanning three prominent NLU tasks and 127 predominantly low-resource languages renders MT-LLMs highly effective in cross-lingual transfer. MT-LLMs substantially and consistently outperform translate-test based on the same MT model, showing that we truly unlock multilingual language understanding for LLMs.
Unsupervised explainable activity prediction in competitive Nordic Walking from experimental data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has found application in Human Activity Recognition (HAR) in competitive sports. To date, most Machine Learning (ML) approaches for HAR have relied on offline (batch) training, imposing higher computational and tagging burdens compared to online processing unsupervised approaches. Additionally, the decisions behind traditional ML predictors are opaque and require human interpretation. In this work, we apply an online processing unsupervised clustering approach based on low-cost wearable Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). The outcomes generated by the system allow for the automatic expansion of limited tagging available (e.g., by referees) within those clusters, producing pertinent information for the explainable classification stage. Specifically, our work focuses on achieving automatic explainability for predictions related to athletes' activities, distinguishing between correct, incorrect, and cheating practices in Nordic Walking. The proposed solution achieved performance metrics of close to 100 % on average.
Reconciling Kaplan and Chinchilla Scaling Laws
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Kaplan et al. [2020] (`Kaplan') and Hoffmann et al. [2022] (`Chinchilla') studied the scaling behavior of transformers trained on next-token language prediction. These studies produced different estimates for how the number of parameters ($N$) and training tokens ($D$) should be set to achieve the lowest possible loss for a given compute budget ($C$). Kaplan: $N_\text{optimal} \propto C^{0.73}$, Chinchilla: $N_\text{optimal} \propto C^{0.50}$. This paper finds that much of this discrepancy can be attributed to Kaplan counting non-embedding rather than total parameters, combined with their analysis being performed at small scale. Simulating the Chinchilla study under these conditions produces biased scaling coefficients close to Kaplan's. Hence, this paper reaffirms Chinchilla's scaling coefficients, by explaining the primary cause of Kaplan's original overestimation. As a second contribution, the paper explains differences in the reported relationships between loss and compute. These findings lead us to recommend that future scaling studies use total parameters and compute.
Rating Multi-Modal Time-Series Forecasting Models (MM-TSFM) for Robustness Through a Causal Lens
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

AI systems are notorious for their fragility; minor input changes can potentially cause major output swings. When such systems are deployed in critical areas like finance, the consequences of their uncertain behavior could be severe. In this paper, we focus on multi-modal time-series forecasting, where imprecision due to noisy or incorrect data can lead to erroneous predictions, impacting stakeholders such as analysts, investors, and traders. Recently, it has been shown that beyond numeric data, graphical transformations can be used with advanced visual models to achieve better performance. In this context, we introduce a rating methodology to assess the robustness of Multi-Modal Time-Series Forecasting Models (MM-TSFM) through causal analysis, which helps us understand and quantify the isolated impact of various attributes on the forecasting accuracy of MM-TSFM. We apply our novel rating method on a variety of numeric and multi-modal forecasting models in a large experimental setup (six input settings of control and perturbations, ten data distributions, time series from six leading stocks in three industries over a year of data, and five time-series forecasters) to draw insights on robust forecasting models and the context of their strengths. Within the scope of our study, our main result is that multi-modal (numeric + visual) forecasting, which was found to be more accurate than numeric forecasting in previous studies, can also be more robust in diverse settings. Our work will help different stakeholders of time-series forecasting understand the models` behaviors along trust (robustness) and accuracy dimensions to select an appropriate model for forecasting using our rating method, leading to improved decision-making.
Human-level molecular optimization driven by mol-gene evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

De novo molecule generation allows the search for more drug-like hits across a vast chemical space. However, lead optimization is still required, and the process of optimizing molecular structures faces the challenge of balancing structural novelty with pharmacological properties. This study introduces the Deep Genetic Molecular Modification Algorithm (DGMM), which brings structure modification to the level of medicinal chemists. A discrete variational autoencoder (D-VAE) is used in DGMM to encode molecules as quantization code, mol-gene, which incorporates deep learning into genetic algorithms for flexible structural optimization. The mol-gene allows for the discovery of pharmacologically similar but structurally distinct compounds, and reveals the trade-offs of structural optimization in drug discovery. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the DGMM in several applications.
The Promise of Analog Deep Learning: Recent Advances, Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Much of the present-day Artificial Intelligence (AI) utilizes artificial neural networks, which are sophisticated computational models designed to recognize patterns and solve complex problems by learning from data. However, a major bottleneck occurs during a device's calculation of weighted sums for forward propagation and optimization procedure for backpropagation, especially for deep neural networks, or networks with numerous layers. Exploration into different methods of implementing neural networks is necessary for further advancement of the area. While a great deal of research into AI hardware in both directions, analog and digital implementation widely exists, much of the existing survey works lacks discussion on the progress of analog deep learning. To this end, we attempt to evaluate and specify the advantages and disadvantages, along with the current progress with regards to deep learning, for analog implementations. In this paper, our focus lies on the comprehensive examination of eight distinct analog deep learning methodologies across multiple key parameters. These parameters include attained accuracy levels, application domains, algorithmic advancements, computational speed, and considerations of energy efficiency and power consumption. We also identify the neural network-based experiments implemented using these hardware devices and discuss comparative performance achieved by the different analog deep learning methods along with an analysis of their current limitations. Overall, we find that Analog Deep Learning has great potential for future consumer-level applications, but there is still a long road ahead in terms of scalability. Most of the current implementations are more proof of concept and are not yet practically deployable for large-scale models.
Evaluating the Generalization Ability of Quantized LLMs: Benchmark, Analysis, and Toolbox
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exciting progress in multiple scenarios, while the huge computational demands hinder their deployments in lots of real-world applications. As an effective means to reduce memory footprint and inference cost, quantization also faces challenges in performance degradation at low bit-widths. Understanding the impact of quantization on LLM capabilities, especially the generalization ability, is crucial. However, the community's main focus remains on the algorithms and models of quantization, with insufficient attention given to whether the quantized models can retain the strong generalization abilities of LLMs. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a comprehensive benchmark suite for this research topic, including an evaluation system, detailed analyses, and a general toolbox. Specifically, based on the dominant pipeline in LLM quantization, we primarily explore the impact of calibration data distribution on the generalization of quantized LLMs and conduct the benchmark using more than 40 datasets within two main scenarios. Based on this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments with two well-known LLMs (English and Chinese) and four quantization algorithms to investigate this topic in-depth, yielding several counter-intuitive and valuable findings, e.g., models quantized using a calibration set with the same distribution as the test data are not necessarily optimal. Besides, to facilitate future research, we also release a modular-designed toolbox, which decouples the overall pipeline into several separate components, e.g., base LLM module, dataset module, quantizer module, etc. and allows subsequent researchers to easily assemble their methods through a simple configuration. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/TsingmaoAI/MI-optimize
RMF: A Risk Measurement Framework for Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) models are used in many safety- and security-critical applications nowadays. It is therefore important to measure the security of a system that uses ML as a component. This paper focuses on the field of ML, particularly the security of autonomous vehicles. For this purpose, a technical framework will be described, implemented, and evaluated in a case study. Based on ISO/IEC 27004:2016, risk indicators are utilized to measure and evaluate the extent of damage and the effort required by an attacker. It is not possible, however, to determine a single risk value that represents the attacker's effort. Therefore, four different values must be interpreted individually.