OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Texture Re-scalable Universal Adversarial Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), also known as image-agnostic perturbation, is a fixed perturbation map that can fool the classifier with high probabilities on arbitrary images, making it more practical for attacking deep models in the real world. Previous UAP methods generate a scale-fixed and texture-fixed perturbation map for all images, which ignores the multi-scale objects in images and usually results in a low fooling ratio. Since the widely used convolution neural networks tend to classify objects according to semantic information stored in local textures, it seems a reasonable and intuitive way to improve the UAP from the perspective of utilizing local contents effectively. In this work, we find that the fooling ratios significantly increase when we add a constraint to encourage a small-scale UAP map and repeat it vertically and horizontally to fill the whole image domain. To this end, we propose texture scale-constrained UAP (TSC-UAP), a simple yet effective UAP enhancement method that automatically generates UAPs with category-specific local textures that can fool deep models more easily. Through a low-cost operation that restricts the texture scale, TSC-UAP achieves a considerable improvement in the fooling ratio and attack transferability for both data-dependent and data-free UAP methods. Experiments conducted on two state-of-the-art UAP methods, eight popular CNN models and four classical datasets show the remarkable performance of TSC-UAP.
Sim-To-Real Transfer for Visual Reinforcement Learning of Deformable Object Manipulation for Robot-Assisted Surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Automation holds the potential to assist surgeons in robotic interventions, shifting their mental work load from visuomotor control to high level decision making. Reinforcement learning has shown promising results in learning complex visuomotor policies, especially in simulation environments where many samples can be collected at low cost. A core challenge is learning policies in simulation that can be deployed in the real world, thereby overcoming the sim-to-real gap. In this work, we bridge the visual sim-to-real gap with an image-based reinforcement learning pipeline based on pixel-level domain adaptation and demonstrate its effectiveness on an image-based task in deformable object manipulation. We choose a tissue retraction task because of its importance in clinical reality of precise cancer surgery. After training in simulation on domain-translated images, our policy requires no retraining to perform tissue retraction with a 50% success rate on the real robotic system using raw RGB images. Furthermore, our sim-to-real transfer method makes no assumptions on the task itself and requires no paired images. This work introduces the first successful application of visual sim-to-real transfer for robotic manipulation of deformable objects in the surgical field, which represents a notable step towards the clinical translation of cognitive surgical robotics.
Comparing Data Augmentation Methods for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Creating effective and reliable task-oriented dialog systems (ToDSs) is challenging, not only because of the complex structure of these systems, but also due to the scarcity of training data, especially when several modules need to be trained separately, each one with its own input/output training examples. Data augmentation (DA), whereby synthetic training examples are added to the training data, has been successful in other NLP systems, but has not been explored as extensively in ToDSs. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of DA methods in an end-to-end ToDS setting, where a single system is trained to handle all processing stages, from user inputs to system outputs. We experiment with two ToDSs (UBAR, GALAXY) on two datasets (MultiWOZ, KVRET). We consider three types of DA methods (word-level, sentence-level, dialog-level), comparing eight DA methods that have shown promising results in ToDSs and other NLP systems. We show that all DA methods considered are beneficial, and we highlight the best ones, also providing advice to practitioners. We also introduce a more challenging few-shot cross-domain ToDS setting, reaching similar conclusions.
Federated Machine Reasoning for Resource Provisioning in 6G O-RAN
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

O-RAN specifications reshape RANs with function disaggregation and open interfaces, driven by RAN Intelligent Controllers. This enables data-driven management through AI/ML but poses trust challenges due to human operators' limited understanding of AI/ML decision-making. Balancing resource provisioning and avoiding overprovisioning and underprovisioning is critical, especially among the multiple virtualized base station(vBS) instances. Thus, we propose a novel Federated Machine Reasoning (FLMR) framework, a neurosymbolic method for federated reasoning, learning, and querying. FLMR optimizes CPU demand prediction based on contextual information and vBS configuration using local monitoring data from virtual base stations (vBS) on a shared O-Cloud platform.This optimization is critical, as insufficient computing resources can result in synchronization loss and significantly reduce network throughput. In the telecom domain, particularly in the virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) sector, predicting and managing the CPU load of vBSs poses a significant challenge for network operators. Our proposed FLMR framework ensures transparency and human understanding in AI/ML decisions and addresses the evolving demands of the 6G O-RAN landscape, where reliability and performance are paramount. Furthermore, we performed a comparative analysis using \textit{DeepCog} as the baseline method. The outcomes highlight how our proposed approach outperforms the baseline and strikes a better balance between resource overprovisioning and underprovisioning. Our method notably lowers both provisioning relative to the baseline by a factor of 6.
Black carbon plumes from gas flaring in North Africa identified from multi-spectral imagery with deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Black carbon (BC) is an important pollutant aerosol emitted by numerous human activities, including gas flaring. Improper combustion in flaring activities can release large amounts of BC, which is harmful to human health and has a strong climate warming effect. To our knowledge, no study has ever directly monitored BC emissions from satellite imagery. Previous works quantified BC emissions indirectly, by applying emission coefficients to flaring volumes estimated from satellite imagery. Here, we develop a deep learning framework and apply it to Sentinel-2 imagery over North Africa during 2022 to detect and quantify BC emissions from gas flaring. We find that BC emissions in this region amount to about 1 million tCO$_{2,\mathrm{eq}}$, or 1 million passenger cars, more than a quarter of which are due to 10 sites alone. This work demonstrates the operational monitoring of BC emissions from flaring, a key step in implementing effective mitigation policies to reduce the climate impact of oil and gas operations.
An Effective-Efficient Approach for Dense Multi-Label Action Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Unlike the sparse label action detection task, where a single action occurs in each timestamp of a video, in a dense multi-label scenario, actions can overlap. To address this challenging task, it is necessary to simultaneously learn (i) temporal dependencies and (ii) co-occurrence action relationships. Recent approaches model temporal information by extracting multi-scale features through hierarchical transformer-based networks. However, the self-attention mechanism in transformers inherently loses temporal positional information. We argue that combining this with multiple sub-sampling processes in hierarchical designs can lead to further loss of positional information. Preserving this information is essential for accurate action detection. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel transformer-based network that (a) employs a non-hierarchical structure when modelling different ranges of temporal dependencies and (b) embeds relative positional encoding in its transformer layers. Furthermore, to model co-occurrence action relationships, current methods explicitly embed class relations into the transformer network. However, these approaches are not computationally efficient, as the network needs to compute all possible pair action class relations. We also overcome this challenge by introducing a novel learning paradigm that allows the network to benefit from explicitly modelling temporal co-occurrence action dependencies without imposing their additional computational costs during inference. We evaluate the performance of our proposed approach on two challenging dense multi-label benchmark datasets and show that our method improves the current state-of-the-art results.
Synchronous Programming with Refinement Types
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) consist of software interacting with the physical world, such as robots, vehicles, and industrial processes. CPS are frequently responsible for the safety of lives, property, or the environment, and so software correctness must be determined with a high degree of certainty. To that end, simply testing a CPS is insufficient, as its interactions with the physical world may be difficult to predict, and unsafe conditions may not be immediately obvious. Formal verification can provide stronger safety guarantees but relies on the accuracy of the verified system in representing the real system. Bringing together verification and implementation can be challenging, as languages that are typically used to implement CPS are not easy to formally verify, and languages that lend themselves well to verification often abstract away low-level implementation details. Translation between verification and implementation languages is possible, but requires additional assurances in the translation process and increases software complexity; having both in a single language is desirable. This paper presents a formalization of MARVeLus, a CPS language which combines verification and implementation. We develop a metatheory for its synchronous refinement type system and demonstrate verified synchronous programs executing on real systems.
Practical Boolean Decomposition for Delay-driven LUT Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Ashenhurst-Curtis decomposition (ACD) is a decomposition technique used, in particular, to map combinational logic into lookup tables (LUTs) structures when synthesizing hardware designs. However, available implementations of ACD suffer from excessive complexity, search-space restrictions, and slow run time, which limit their applicability and scalability. This paper presents a novel fast and versatile technique of ACD suitable for delay optimization. We use this new formulation to compute two-level decompositions into a variable number of LUTs and enhance delay-driven LUT mapping by performing ACD on the fly. Compared to state-of-the-art technology mapping, experiments on heavily optimized benchmarks demonstrate an average delay improvement of 12.39%, and area reduction of 2.20% with affordable run time. Additionally, our method improves 4 of the best delay results in the EPFL synthesis competition without employing design-space exploration techniques.
What All the PHUZZ Is About: A Coverage-guided Fuzzer for Finding Vulnerabilities in PHP Web Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Coverage-guided fuzz testing has received significant attention from the research community, with a strong focus on binary applications, greatly disregarding other targets, such as web applications. The importance of the World Wide Web in everyone's life cannot be overstated, and to this day, many web applications are developed in PHP. In this work, we address the challenges of applying coverage-guided fuzzing to PHP web applications and introduce PHUZZ, a modular fuzzing framework for PHP web applications. PHUZZ uses novel approaches to detect more client-side and server-side vulnerability classes than state-of-the-art related work, including SQL injections, remote command injections, insecure deserialization, path traversal, external entity injection, cross-site scripting, and open redirection. We evaluate PHUZZ on a diverse set of artificial and real-world web applications with known and unknown vulnerabilities, and compare it against a variety of state-of-the-art fuzzers. In order to show PHUZZ' effectiveness, we fuzz over 1,000 API endpoints of the 115 most popular WordPress plugins, resulting in over 20 security issues and 2 new CVE-IDs. Finally, we make the framework publicly available to motivate and encourage further research on web application fuzz testing.
Unveiling the Safety of GPT-4o: An Empirical Study using Jailbreak Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The recent release of GPT-4o has garnered widespread attention due to its powerful general capabilities. While its impressive performance is widely acknowledged, its safety aspects have not been sufficiently explored. Given the potential societal impact of risky content generated by advanced generative AI such as GPT-4o, it is crucial to rigorously evaluate its safety. In response to this question, this paper for the first time conducts a rigorous evaluation of GPT-4o against jailbreak attacks. Specifically, this paper adopts a series of multi-modal and uni-modal jailbreak attacks on 4 commonly used benchmarks encompassing three modalities (ie, text, speech, and image), which involves the optimization of over 4,000 initial text queries and the analysis and statistical evaluation of nearly 8,000+ response on GPT-4o. Our extensive experiments reveal several novel observations: (1) In contrast to the previous version (such as GPT-4V), GPT-4o has enhanced safety in the context of text modality jailbreak; (2) The newly introduced audio modality opens up new attack vectors for jailbreak attacks on GPT-4o; (3) Existing black-box multimodal jailbreak attack methods are largely ineffective against GPT-4o and GPT-4V. These findings provide critical insights into the safety implications of GPT-4o and underscore the need for robust alignment guardrails in large models. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/NY1024/Jailbreak_GPT4o}.
Tx-LLM: A Large Language Model for Therapeutics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Developing therapeutics is a lengthy and expensive process that requires the satisfaction of many different criteria, and AI models capable of expediting the process would be invaluable. However, the majority of current AI approaches address only a narrowly defined set of tasks, often circumscribed within a particular domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tx-LLM, a generalist large language model (LLM) fine-tuned from PaLM-2 which encodes knowledge about diverse therapeutic modalities. Tx-LLM is trained using a collection of 709 datasets that target 66 tasks spanning various stages of the drug discovery pipeline. Using a single set of weights, Tx-LLM simultaneously processes a wide variety of chemical or biological entities(small molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, cell lines, diseases) interleaved with free-text, allowing it to predict a broad range of associated properties, achieving competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 43 out of 66 tasks and exceeding SOTA on 22. Among these, Tx-LLM is particularly powerful and exceeds best-in-class performance on average for tasks combining molecular SMILES representations with text such as cell line names or disease names, likely due to context learned during pretraining. We observe evidence of positive transfer between tasks with diverse drug types (e.g.,tasks involving small molecules and tasks involving proteins), and we study the impact of model size, domain finetuning, and prompting strategies on performance. We believe Tx-LLM represents an important step towards LLMs encoding biochemical knowledge and could have a future role as an end-to-end tool across the drug discovery development pipeline.
Should my Blockchain Learn to Drive? A Study of Hyperledger Fabric
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Similar to other transaction processing frameworks, blockchain systems need to be dynamically reconfigured to adapt to varying workloads and changes in network conditions. However, achieving optimal reconfiguration is particularly challenging due to the complexity of the blockchain stack, which has diverse configurable parameters. This paper explores the concept of self-driving blockchains, which have the potential to predict workload changes and reconfigure themselves for optimal performance without human intervention. We compare and contrast our discussions with existing research on databases and highlight aspects unique to blockchains. We identify specific parameters and components in Hyperledger Fabric, a popular permissioned blockchain system, that are suitable for autonomous adaptation and offer potential solutions for the challenges involved. Further, we implement three demonstrative locally autonomous systems, each targeting a different layer of the blockchain stack, and conduct experiments to understand the feasibility of our findings. Our experiments indicate up to 11% improvement in success throughput and a 30% decrease in latency, making this a significant step towards implementing a fully autonomous blockchain system in the future.
Vehicle Vectors and Traffic Patterns from Planet Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We explore methods to detect automobiles in Planet imagery and build a large scale vector field for moving objects. Planet operates two distinct constellations: high-resolution SkySat satellites as well as medium-resolution SuperDove satellites. We show that both static and moving cars can be identified reliably in high-resolution SkySat imagery. We are able to estimate the speed and heading of moving vehicles by leveraging the inter-band displacement (or "rainbow" effect) of moving objects. Identifying cars and trucks in medium-resolution SuperDove imagery is far more difficult, though a similar rainbow effect is observed in these satellites and enables moving vehicles to be detected and vectorized. The frequent revisit of Planet satellites enables the categorization of automobile and truck activity patterns over broad areas of interest and lengthy timeframes.
MedExQA: Medical Question Answering Benchmark with Multiple Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces MedExQA, a novel benchmark in medical question-answering, to evaluate large language models' (LLMs) understanding of medical knowledge through explanations. By constructing datasets across five distinct medical specialties that are underrepresented in current datasets and further incorporating multiple explanations for each question-answer pair, we address a major gap in current medical QA benchmarks which is the absence of comprehensive assessments of LLMs' ability to generate nuanced medical explanations. Our work highlights the importance of explainability in medical LLMs, proposes an effective methodology for evaluating models beyond classification accuracy, and sheds light on one specific domain, speech language pathology, where current LLMs including GPT4 lack good understanding. Our results show generation evaluation with multiple explanations aligns better with human assessment, highlighting an opportunity for a more robust automated comprehension assessment for LLMs. To diversify open-source medical LLMs (currently mostly based on Llama2), this work also proposes a new medical model, MedPhi-2, based on Phi-2 (2.7B). The model outperformed medical LLMs based on Llama2-70B in generating explanations, showing its effectiveness in the resource-constrained medical domain. We will share our benchmark datasets and the trained model.
Latent Directions: A Simple Pathway to Bias Mitigation in Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Mitigating biases in generative AI and, particularly in text-to-image models, is of high importance given their growing implications in society. The biased datasets used for training pose challenges in ensuring the responsible development of these models, and mitigation through hard prompting or embedding alteration, are the most common present solutions. Our work introduces a novel approach to achieve diverse and inclusive synthetic images by learning a direction in the latent space and solely modifying the initial Gaussian noise provided for the diffusion process. Maintaining a neutral prompt and untouched embeddings, this approach successfully adapts to diverse debiasing scenarios, such as geographical biases. Moreover, our work proves it is possible to linearly combine these learned latent directions to introduce new mitigations, and if desired, integrate it with text embedding adjustments. Furthermore, text-to-image models lack transparency for assessing bias in outputs, unless visually inspected. Thus, we provide a tool to empower developers to select their desired concepts to mitigate. The project page with code is available online.
MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at \url{https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw}.