OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Nutrition Facts, Drug Facts, and Model Facts: Putting AI Ethics into Practice in Gun Violence Research
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: Firearm injury research necessitates using data from often-exploited vulnerable populations of Black and Brown Americans. In order to minimize distrust, this study provides a framework for establishing AI trust and transparency with the general population. Methods: We propose a Model Facts template that is easily extendable and decomposes accuracy and demographics into standardized and minimally complex values. This framework allows general users to assess the validity and biases of a model without diving into technical model documentation. Examples: We apply the Model Facts template on two previously published models, a violence risk identification model and a suicide risk prediction model. We demonstrate the ease of accessing the appropriate information when the data is structured appropriately. Discussion: The Model Facts template is limited in its current form to human based data and biases. Like nutrition facts, it also will require some educational resources for users to grasp its full utility. Human computer interaction experiments should be conducted to ensure that the interaction between user interface and model interface is as desired. Conclusion: The Model Facts label is the first framework dedicated to establishing trust with end users and general population consumers. Implementation of Model Facts into firearm injury research will provide public health practitioners and those impacted by firearm injury greater faith in the tools the research provides.
Trained Without My Consent: Detecting Code Inclusion In Language Models Trained on Code
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Code auditing ensures that the developed code adheres to standards, regulations, and copyright protection by verifying that it does not contain code from protected sources. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) as coding assistants in the software development process poses new challenges for code auditing. The dataset for training these models is mainly collected from publicly available sources. This raises the issue of intellectual property infringement as developers' codes are already included in the dataset. Therefore, auditing code developed using LLMs is challenging, as it is difficult to reliably assert if an LLM used during development has been trained on specific copyrighted codes, given that we do not have access to the training datasets of these models. Given the non-disclosure of the training datasets, traditional approaches such as code clone detection are insufficient for asserting copyright infringement. To address this challenge, we propose a new approach, TraWiC; a model-agnostic and interpretable method based on membership inference for detecting code inclusion in an LLM's training dataset. We extract syntactic and semantic identifiers unique to each program to train a classifier for detecting code inclusion. In our experiments, we observe that TraWiC is capable of detecting 83.87% of codes that were used to train an LLM. In comparison, the prevalent clone detection tool NiCad is only capable of detecting 47.64%. In addition to its remarkable performance, TraWiC has low resource overhead in contrast to pair-wise clone detection that is conducted during the auditing process of tools like CodeWhisperer reference tracker, across thousands of code snippets.
Few-Shot Object Detection with Sparse Context Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot detection is a major task in pattern recognition which seeks to localize objects using models trained with few labeled data. One of the mainstream few-shot methods is transfer learning which consists in pretraining a detection model in a source domain prior to its fine-tuning in a target domain. However, it is challenging for fine-tuned models to effectively identify new classes in the target domain, particularly when the underlying labeled training data are scarce. In this paper, we devise a novel sparse context transformer (SCT) that effectively leverages object knowledge in the source domain, and automatically learns a sparse context from only few training images in the target domain. As a result, it combines different relevant clues in order to enhance the discrimination power of the learned detectors and reduce class confusion. We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging few-shot object detection benchmarks, and empirical results show that the proposed method obtains competitive performance compared to the related state-of-the-art.
AuditLLM: A Tool for Auditing Large Language Models Using Multiprobe Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated into various sectors, ensuring their reliability and safety is crucial. This necessitates rigorous probing and auditing to maintain their effectiveness and trustworthiness in practical applications. Subjecting LLMs to varied iterations of a single query can unveil potential inconsistencies in their knowledge base or functional capacity. However, a tool for performing such audits with a easy to execute workflow, and low technical threshold is lacking. In this demo, we introduce ``AuditLLM,'' a novel tool designed to audit the performance of various LLMs in a methodical way. AuditLLM's primary function is to audit a given LLM by deploying multiple probes derived from a single question, thus detecting any inconsistencies in the model's comprehension or performance. A robust, reliable, and consistent LLM is expected to generate semantically similar responses to variably phrased versions of the same question. Building on this premise, AuditLLM generates easily interpretable results that reflect the LLM's consistency based on a single input question provided by the user. A certain level of inconsistency has been shown to be an indicator of potential bias, hallucinations, and other issues. One could then use the output of AuditLLM to further investigate issues with the aforementioned LLM. To facilitate demonstration and practical uses, AuditLLM offers two key modes: (1) Live mode which allows instant auditing of LLMs by analyzing responses to real-time queries; and (2) Batch mode which facilitates comprehensive LLM auditing by processing multiple queries at once for in-depth analysis. This tool is beneficial for both researchers and general users, as it enhances our understanding of LLMs' capabilities in generating responses, using a standardized auditing platform.
Generating Diverse Translation with Perturbed kNN-MT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generating multiple translation candidates would enable users to choose the one that satisfies their needs. Although there has been work on diversified generation, there exists room for improving the diversity mainly because the previous methods do not address the overcorrection problem -- the model underestimates a prediction that is largely different from the training data, even if that prediction is likely. This paper proposes methods that generate more diverse translations by introducing perturbed k-nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT). Our methods expand the search space of kNN-MT and help incorporate diverse words into candidates by addressing the overcorrection problem. Our experiments show that the proposed methods drastically improve candidate diversity and control the degree of diversity by tuning the perturbation's magnitude.
Single-Reset Divide & Conquer Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Demonstrations are commonly used to speed up the learning process of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms. To cope with the difficulty of accessing multiple demonstrations, some algorithms have been developed to learn from a single demonstration. In particular, the Divide & Conquer Imitation Learning algorithms leverage a sequential bias to learn a control policy for complex robotic tasks using a single state-based demonstration. The latest version, DCIL-II demonstrates remarkable sample efficiency. This novel method operates within an extended Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning framework, ensuring compatibility between intermediate and subsequent goals extracted from the demonstration. However, a fundamental limitation arises from the assumption that the system can be reset to specific states along the demonstrated trajectory, confining the application to simulated systems. In response, we introduce an extension called Single-Reset DCIL (SR-DCIL), designed to overcome this constraint by relying on a single initial state reset rather than sequential resets. To address this more challenging setting, we integrate two mechanisms inspired by the Learning from Demonstrations literature, including a Demo-Buffer and Value Cloning, to guide the agent toward compatible success states. In addition, we introduce Approximate Goal Switching to facilitate training to reach goals distant from the reset state. Our paper makes several contributions, highlighting the importance of the reset assumption in DCIL-II, presenting the mechanisms of SR-DCIL variants and evaluating their performance in challenging robotic tasks compared to DCIL-II. In summary, this work offers insights into the significance of reset assumptions in the framework of DCIL and proposes SR-DCIL, a first step toward a versatile algorithm capable of learning control policies under a weaker reset assumption.
Massively Multi-Cultural Knowledge Acquisition & LM Benchmarking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Pretrained large language models have revolutionized many applications but still face challenges related to cultural bias and a lack of cultural commonsense knowledge crucial for guiding cross-culture communication and interactions. Recognizing the shortcomings of existing methods in capturing the diverse and rich cultures across the world, this paper introduces a novel approach for massively multicultural knowledge acquisition. Specifically, our method strategically navigates from densely informative Wikipedia documents on cultural topics to an extensive network of linked pages. Leveraging this valuable source of data collection, we construct the CultureAtlas dataset, which covers a wide range of sub-country level geographical regions and ethnolinguistic groups, with data cleaning and preprocessing to ensure textual assertion sentence self-containment, as well as fine-grained cultural profile information extraction. Our dataset not only facilitates the evaluation of language model performance in culturally diverse contexts but also serves as a foundational tool for the development of culturally sensitive and aware language models. Our work marks an important step towards deeper understanding and bridging the gaps of cultural disparities in AI, to promote a more inclusive and balanced representation of global cultures in the digital domain.
Transformers Can Achieve Length Generalization But Not Robustly
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively straightforward tasks. In this paper, we test the Transformer's ability of length generalization using the task of addition of two integers. We show that the success of length generalization is intricately linked to the data format and the type of position encoding. Using the right combination of data format and position encodings, we show for the first time that standard Transformers can extrapolate to a sequence length that is 2.5x the input length. Nevertheless, unlike in-distribution generalization, length generalization remains fragile, significantly influenced by factors like random weight initialization and training data order, leading to large variances across different random seeds.
Introduction to Physically Unclonable Fuctions: Properties and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

During the last years, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have become a very important research area in the field of hardware security due to their capability of generating volatile secret keys as well as providing a low-cost authentication. In this paper, an introduction to Physically Unclonable Functions is given, including their definition, properties and applications. Finally, as an example of how to design a PUF, the general structure of a ring oscillator PUF is presented.
Auditing Private Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Differential privacy (DP) offers a theoretical upper bound on the potential privacy leakage of analgorithm, while empirical auditing establishes a practical lower bound. Auditing techniques exist forDP training algorithms. However machine learning can also be made private at inference. We propose thefirst framework for auditing private prediction where we instantiate adversaries with varying poisoningand query capabilities. This enables us to study the privacy leakage of four private prediction algorithms:PATE [Papernot et al., 2016], CaPC [Choquette-Choo et al., 2020], PromptPATE [Duan et al., 2023],and Private-kNN [Zhu et al., 2020]. To conduct our audit, we introduce novel techniques to empiricallyevaluate privacy leakage in terms of Renyi DP. Our experiments show that (i) the privacy analysis ofprivate prediction can be improved, (ii) algorithms which are easier to poison lead to much higher privacyleakage, and (iii) the privacy leakage is significantly lower for adversaries without query control than thosewith full control.
Why Does Differential Privacy with Large Epsilon Defend Against Practical Membership Inference Attacks?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

For small privacy parameter $ε$, $ε$-differential privacy (DP) provides a strong worst-case guarantee that no membership inference attack (MIA) can succeed at determining whether a person's data was used to train a machine learning model. The guarantee of DP is worst-case because: a) it holds even if the attacker already knows the records of all but one person in the data set; and b) it holds uniformly over all data sets. In practical applications, such a worst-case guarantee may be overkill: practical attackers may lack exact knowledge of (nearly all of) the private data, and our data set might be easier to defend, in some sense, than the worst-case data set. Such considerations have motivated the industrial deployment of DP models with large privacy parameter (e.g. $ε\geq 7$), and it has been observed empirically that DP with large $ε$ can successfully defend against state-of-the-art MIAs. Existing DP theory cannot explain these empirical findings: e.g., the theoretical privacy guarantees of $ε\geq 7$ are essentially vacuous. In this paper, we aim to close this gap between theory and practice and understand why a large DP parameter can prevent practical MIAs. To tackle this problem, we propose a new privacy notion called practical membership privacy (PMP). PMP models a practical attacker's uncertainty about the contents of the private data. The PMP parameter has a natural interpretation in terms of the success rate of a practical MIA on a given data set. We quantitatively analyze the PMP parameter of two fundamental DP mechanisms: the exponential mechanism and Gaussian mechanism. Our analysis reveals that a large DP parameter often translates into a much smaller PMP parameter, which guarantees strong privacy against practical MIAs. Using our findings, we offer principled guidance for practitioners in choosing the DP parameter.
Rethinking Large Language Model Architectures for Sequential Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, sequential recommendation has been adapted to the LLM paradigm to enjoy the power of LLMs. LLM-based methods usually formulate recommendation information into natural language and the model is trained to predict the next item in an auto-regressive manner. Despite their notable success, the substantial computational overhead of inference poses a significant obstacle to their real-world applicability. In this work, we endeavor to streamline existing LLM-based recommendation models and propose a simple yet highly effective model Lite-LLM4Rec. The primary goal of Lite-LLM4Rec is to achieve efficient inference for the sequential recommendation task. Lite-LLM4Rec circumvents the beam search decoding by using a straight item projection head for ranking scores generation. This design stems from our empirical observation that beam search decoding is ultimately unnecessary for sequential recommendations. Additionally, Lite-LLM4Rec introduces a hierarchical LLM structure tailored to efficiently handle the extensive contextual information associated with items, thereby reducing computational overhead while enjoying the capabilities of LLMs. Experiments on three publicly available datasets corroborate the effectiveness of Lite-LLM4Rec in both performance and inference efficiency (notably 46.8% performance improvement and 97.28% efficiency improvement on ML-1m) over existing LLM-based methods. Our implementations will be open sourced.
A 3D Memristor Architecture for In-Memory Computing Demonstrated with SHA3
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Security is a growing problem that needs hardware support. Memristors provide an alternative technology for hardware-supported security implementation. This paper presents a specific technique that utilizes the benefits of hybrid CMOS-memristors technology demonstrated with SHA3 over implementations that use only memristor technology. In the proposed technique, SHA3 is implemented in a set of perpendicular crossbar arrays structured to facilitate logic implementation and circular bit rotation (Rho operation), which is perhaps the most complex operation in SHA3 when carried out in memristor arrays. The Rho operation itself is implemented with CMOS multiplexers (MUXs). The proposed accelerator is standby power-free and circumvents the memory access bottleneck in conventional computers. In addition, our design obscures the intermediate values from the I/O interface and outperforms the state-of-the-art memristor-based designs in terms of size and energy. Demonstrating the memristor implementation of SHA3 provides an impetus for utilizing memristors in information security applications.
Statistical and Machine Learning Models for Predicting Fire and Other Emergency Events
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Emergency events in a city cause considerable economic loss to individuals, their families, and the community. Accurate and timely prediction of events can help the emergency fire and rescue services in preparing for and mitigating the consequences of emergency events. In this paper, we present a systematic development of predictive models for various types of emergency events in the City of Edmonton, Canada. We present methods for (i) data collection and dataset development; (ii) descriptive analysis of each event type and its characteristics at different spatiotemporal levels; (iii) feature analysis and selection based on correlation coefficient analysis and feature importance analysis; and (iv) development of prediction models for the likelihood of occurrence of each event type at different temporal and spatial resolutions. We analyze the association of event types with socioeconomic and demographic data at the neighborhood level, identify a set of predictors for each event type, and develop predictive models with negative binomial regression. We conduct evaluations at neighborhood and fire station service area levels. Our results show that the models perform well for most of the event types with acceptable prediction errors for weekly and monthly periods. The evaluation shows that the prediction accuracy is consistent at the level of the fire station, so the predictions can be used in management by fire rescue service departments for planning resource allocation for these time periods. We also examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the occurrence of events and on the accuracy of event predictor models. Our findings show that COVID-19 had a significant impact on the performance of the event prediction models.
Automated Plaque Detection and Agatston Score Estimation on Non-Contrast CT Scans: A Multicenter Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Coronary artery calcification (CAC) is a strong and independent predictor of cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, manual assessment of CAC often requires radiological expertise, time, and invasive imaging techniques. The purpose of this multicenter study is to validate an automated cardiac plaque detection model using a 3D multiclass nnU-Net for gated and non-gated non-contrast chest CT volumes. CT scans were performed at three tertiary care hospitals and collected as three datasets, respectively. Heart, aorta, and lung segmentations were determined using TotalSegmentator, while plaques in the coronary arteries and heart valves were manually labeled for 801 volumes. In this work we demonstrate how the nnU-Net semantic segmentation pipeline may be adapted to detect plaques in the coronary arteries and valves. With a linear correction, nnU-Net deep learning methods may also accurately estimate Agatston scores on chest non-contrast CT scans. Compared to manual Agatson scoring, automated Agatston scoring indicated a slope of the linear regression of 0.841 with an intercept of +16 HU (R2 = 0.97). These results are an improvement over previous work assessing automated Agatston score computation in non-gated CT scans.
Finnish primary school students' conceptions of machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Objective This study investigates what kind of conceptions primary school students have about ML if they are not conceptually "primed" with the idea that in ML, humans teach computers. Method Qualitative survey responses from 197 Finnish primary schoolers were analyzed via an abductive method. Findings We identified three partly overlapping ML conception categories, starting from the most accurate one: ML is about teaching machines (34%), ML is about coding (7.6%), and ML is about learning via or about machines (37.1%). Implications The findings suggest that without conceptual clues, children's conceptions of ML are varied and may include misconceptions such as ML is about learning via or about machines. The findings underline the importance of clear and systematic use of key concepts in computer science education. Besides researchers, this study offers insights for teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers. Method Qualitative survey responses from 197 Finnish primary schoolers were analyzed via an abductive method. Findings We identified three partly overlapping ML conception categories, starting from the most accurate one: ML is about teaching machines (34%), ML is about coding (7.6%), and ML is about learning via or about machines (37.1%). Implications The findings suggest that without conceptual clues, children's conceptions of ML are varied and may include misconceptions such as ML is about learning via or about machines. The findings underline the importance of clear and systematic use of key concepts in computer science education. Besides researchers, this study offers insights for teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers.