OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Flow reconstruction in time-varying geometries using graph neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The paper presents a Graph Attention Convolutional Network (GACN) for flow reconstruction from very sparse data in time-varying geometries. The model incorporates a feature propagation algorithm as a preprocessing step to handle extremely sparse inputs, leveraging information from neighboring nodes to initialize missing features. In addition, a binary indicator is introduced as a validity mask to distinguish between the original and propagated data points, enabling more effective learning from sparse inputs. Trained on a unique data set of Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of a motored engine at a technically relevant operating condition, the GACN shows robust performance across different resolutions and domain sizes and can effectively handle unstructured data and variable input sizes. The model is tested on previously unseen DNS data as well as on an experimental data set from Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurements that were not considered during training. A comparative analysis shows that the GACN consistently outperforms both a conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and cubic interpolation methods on the DNS and PIV test sets by achieving lower reconstruction errors and better capturing fine-scale turbulent structures. In particular, the GACN effectively reconstructs flow fields from domains up to 14 times larger than those observed during training, with the performance advantage increasing for larger domains.
Sharingan: Extract User Action Sequence from Desktop Recordings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Video recordings of user activities, particularly desktop recordings, offer a rich source of data for understanding user behaviors and automating processes. However, despite advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and their increasing use in video analysis, extracting user actions from desktop recordings remains an underexplored area. This paper addresses this gap by proposing two novel VLM-based methods for user action extraction: the Direct Frame-Based Approach (DF), which inputs sampled frames directly into VLMs, and the Differential Frame-Based Approach (DiffF), which incorporates explicit frame differences detected via computer vision techniques. We evaluate these methods using a basic self-curated dataset and an advanced benchmark adapted from prior work. Our results show that the DF approach achieves an accuracy of 70% to 80% in identifying user actions, with the extracted action sequences being re-playable though Robotic Process Automation. We find that while VLMs show potential, incorporating explicit UI changes can degrade performance, making the DF approach more reliable. This work represents the first application of VLMs for extracting user action sequences from desktop recordings, contributing new methods, benchmarks, and insights for future research.
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multiple Source and Target Languages for Information Extraction: Language Selection and Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The majority of previous researches addressing multi-lingual IE are limited to zero-shot cross-lingual single-transfer (one-to-one) setting, with high-resource languages predominantly as source training data. As a result, these works provide little understanding and benefit for the realistic goal of developing a multi-lingual IE system that can generalize to as many languages as possible. Our study aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed analysis on Cross-Lingual Multi-Transferability (many-to-many transfer learning), for the recent IE corpora that cover a diverse set of languages. Specifically, we first determine the correlation between single-transfer performance and a wide range of linguistic-based distances. From the obtained insights, a combined language distance metric can be developed that is not only highly correlated but also robust across different tasks and model scales. Next, we investigate the more general zero-shot multi-lingual transfer settings where multiple languages are involved in the training and evaluation processes. Language clustering based on the newly defined distance can provide directions for achieving the optimal cost-performance trade-off in data (languages) selection problem. Finally, a relational-transfer setting is proposed to further incorporate multi-lingual unlabeled data based on adversarial training using the relation induced from the above linguistic distance.
Rethinking CyberSecEval: An LLM-Aided Approach to Evaluation Critique
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A key development in the cybersecurity evaluations space is the work carried out by Meta, through their CyberSecEval approach. While this work is undoubtedly a useful contribution to a nascent field, there are notable features that limit its utility. Key drawbacks focus on the insecure code detection part of Meta's methodology. We explore these limitations, and use our exploration as a test case for LLM-assisted benchmark analysis.
Retrieval of sun-induced plant fluorescence in the O$_2$-A absorption band from DESIS imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We provide the first method allowing to retrieve spaceborne SIF maps at 30 m ground resolution with a strong correlation ($r^2=0.6$) to high-quality airborne estimates of sun-induced fluorescence (SIF). SIF estimates can provide explanatory information for many tasks related to agricultural management and physiological studies. While SIF products from airborne platforms are accurate and spatially well resolved, the data acquisition of such products remains science-oriented and limited to temporally constrained campaigns. Spaceborne SIF products on the other hand are available globally with often sufficient revisit times. However, the spatial resolution of spaceborne SIF products is too small for agricultural applications. In view of ESA's upcoming FLEX mission we develop a method for SIF retrieval in the O$_2$-A band of hyperspectral DESIS imagery to provide first insights for spaceborne SIF retrieval at high spatial resolution. To this end, we train a simulation-based self-supervised network with a novel perturbation based regularizer and test performance improvements under additional supervised regularization of atmospheric variable prediction. In a validation study with corresponding HyPlant derived SIF estimates at 740 nm we find that our model reaches a mean absolute difference of 0.78 mW / nm / sr / m$^2$.
Predictive Visuo-Tactile Interactive Perception Framework for Object Properties Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Interactive exploration of the unknown physical properties of objects such as stiffness, mass, center of mass, friction coefficient, and shape is crucial for autonomous robotic systems operating continuously in unstructured environments. Precise identification of these properties is essential to manipulate objects in a stable and controlled way, and is also required to anticipate the outcomes of (prehensile or non-prehensile) manipulation actions such as pushing, pulling, lifting, etc. Our study focuses on autonomously inferring the physical properties of a diverse set of various homogeneous, heterogeneous, and articulated objects utilizing a robotic system equipped with vision and tactile sensors. We propose a novel predictive perception framework for identifying object properties of the diverse objects by leveraging versatile exploratory actions: non-prehensile pushing and prehensile pulling. As part of the framework, we propose a novel active shape perception to seamlessly initiate exploration. Our innovative dual differentiable filtering with Graph Neural Networks learns the object-robot interaction and performs consistent inference of indirectly observable time-invariant object properties. In addition, we formulate a $N$-step information gain approach to actively select the most informative actions for efficient learning and inference. Extensive real-robot experiments with planar objects show that our predictive perception framework results in better performance than the state-of-the-art baseline and demonstrate our framework in three major applications for i) object tracking, ii) goal-driven task, and iii) change in environment detection.
Comparative genomics with succinct colored de Bruijn graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

DNA technologies have evolved significantly in the past years enabling the sequencing of a large number of genomes in a short time. Nevertheless, the underlying computational problem is hard, and many technical factors and limitations complicate obtaining the complete sequence of a genome. Many genomes are left in a draft state, in which each chromosome is represented by a set of sequences with partial information on their relative order. Recently, some approaches have been proposed to compare draft genomes by comparing paths in de Bruijn graphs, which are constructed by many practical genome assemblers. In this article we introduce gcBB, a method for comparing genomes represented as succinct colored de Bruijn graphs directly, without resorting to sequence alignments, by means of the entropy and expectation measures based on the Burrows-Wheeler Similarity Distribution. We also introduce an improved version of gcBB, called mgcBB, that improves the time performance considerably through the selection of different data structures. We have compared phylogenies of genomes obtained by other methods to those obtained with gcBB, achieving promising results.
SCAN: Bootstrapping Contrastive Pre-training for Data Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While contrastive pre-training is widely employed, its data efficiency problem has remained relatively under-explored thus far. Existing methods often rely on static coreset selection algorithms to pre-identify important data for training. However, this static nature renders them unable to dynamically track the data usefulness throughout pre-training, leading to subpar pre-trained models. To address this challenge, our paper introduces a novel dynamic bootstrapping dataset pruning method. It involves pruning data preparation followed by dataset mutation operations, both of which undergo iterative and dynamic updates. We apply this method to two prevalent contrastive pre-training frameworks: \textbf{CLIP} and \textbf{MoCo}, representing vision-language and vision-centric domains, respectively. In particular, we individually pre-train seven CLIP models on two large-scale image-text pair datasets, and two MoCo models on the ImageNet dataset, resulting in a total of 16 pre-trained models. With a data pruning rate of 30-35\% across all 16 models, our method exhibits only marginal performance degradation (less than \textbf{1\%} on average) compared to corresponding models trained on the full dataset counterparts across various downstream datasets, and also surpasses several baselines with a large performance margin. Additionally, the byproduct from our method, \ie coresets derived from the original datasets after pre-training, also demonstrates significant superiority in terms of downstream performance over other static coreset selection approaches.
PIMCOMP: An End-to-End DNN Compiler for Processing-In-Memory Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Various processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerators based on various devices, micro-architectures, and interfaces have been proposed to accelerate deep neural networks (DNNs). How to deploy DNNs onto PIM-based accelerators is the key to explore PIM's high performance and energy efficiency. The scale of DNN models, the diversity of PIM accelerators, and the complexity of deployment are far beyond the human deployment capability. Hence, an automatic deployment methodology is indispensable. In this work, we propose PIMCOMP, an end-to-end DNN compiler tailored for PIM accelerators, achieving efficient deployment of DNN models on PIM hardware. PIMCOMP can adapt to various PIM architectures by using an abstract configurable PIM accelerator template with a set of pseudo-instructions, which is a high-level abstraction of the hardware's fundamental functionalities. Through a generic multi-level optimization framework, PIMCOMP realizes an end-to-end conversion from a high-level DNN description to pseudo-instructions, which can be further converted to specific hardware intrinsics/primitives. The compilation addresses two critical issues in PIM-accelerated inference from a system perspective: resource utilization and dataflow scheduling. PIMCOMP adopts a flexible unfolding format to reshape and partition convolutional layers, adopts a weight-layout guided computation-storage-mapping approach to enhance resource utilization, and balances the system's computation, memory access, and communication characteristics. For dataflow scheduling, we design two scheduling algorithms with different inter-layer pipeline granularities to support varying application scenarios while ensuring high computational parallelism. Experiments demonstrate that PIMCOMP improves throughput, latency, and energy efficiency across various architectures. PIMCOMP is open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/sunxt99/PIMCOMP-NN}.
Optimizing Metamorphic Testing: Prioritizing Relations Through Execution Profile Dissimilarity
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

An oracle determines whether the output of a program for executed test cases is correct. For machine learning programs, such an oracle is often unavailable or impractical to apply. Metamorphic testing addresses this by using metamorphic relations (MRs), which are essential properties of the software under test, to verify program correctness. Prioritizing MRs enhances fault detection effectiveness and improves testing efficiency. However, fault-based MR prioritization is costly, and code coverage-based approaches often yield inaccurate results. To address these challenges, we propose a statement centrality-based prioritization approach that leverages diversity in the execution profiles of source and follow-up test cases. Our approach improves fault detection effectiveness by up to 31% compared to code coverage-based methods and reduces fault detection time by 29% compared to random MR execution. Overall, it increases the average fault detection rate, reduces fault detection time, and enhances testing efficiency.
SmartInv: Multimodal Learning for Smart Contract Invariant Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Smart contracts are software programs that enable diverse business activities on the blockchain. Recent research has identified new classes of "machine un-auditable" bugs that arise from both transactional contexts and source code. Existing detection methods require human understanding of underlying transaction logic and manual reasoning across different sources of context (i.e. modalities), such as code, dynamic transaction executions, and natural language specifying the expected transaction behavior. To automate the detection of ``machine un-auditable'' bugs, we present SmartInv, an accurate and fast smart contract invariant inference framework. Our key insight is that the expected behavior of smart contracts, as specified by invariants, relies on understanding and reasoning across multimodal information, such as source code and natural language. We propose a new prompting strategy to foundation models, Tier of Thought (ToT), to reason across multiple modalities of smart contracts and ultimately to generate invariants. By checking the violation of these generated invariants, SmartInv can identify potential vulnerabilities. We evaluate SmartInv on real-world contracts and re-discover bugs that resulted in multi-million dollar losses over the past 2.5 years (from January 1, 2021 to May 31, 2023). Our extensive evaluation shows that SmartInv generates (3.5X) more bug-critical invariants and detects (4$\times$) more critical bugs compared to the state-of-the-art tools in significantly (150X) less time. \sys uncovers 119 zero-day vulnerabilities from the 89,621 real-world contracts. Among them, five are critical zero-day bugs confirmed by developers as ``high severity.''
Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for High-Performance, Training-Free Open Vocabulary Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has advanced open-vocabulary predictions, its performance on semantic segmentation remains suboptimal. This shortfall primarily stems from its spatial-invariant semantic features and constrained resolution. While previous adaptations addressed spatial invariance semantic by modifying the self-attention in CLIP's image encoder, the issue of limited resolution remains unexplored. Different from previous segment-then-splice methods that segment sub-images via a sliding window and splice the results, we introduce a splice-then-segment paradigm that incorporates Segment-Anything Model (SAM) to tackle the resolution issue since SAM excels at extracting fine-grained semantic correlations from high-resolution images. Specifically, we introduce Trident, a training-free framework that first splices features extracted by CLIP and DINO from sub-images, then leverages SAM's encoder to create a correlation matrix for global aggregation, enabling a broadened receptive field for effective segmentation. Besides, we propose a refinement strategy for CLIP's coarse segmentation outputs by transforming them into prompts for SAM, further enhancing the segmentation performance. Trident achieves a significant improvement in the mIoU across eight benchmarks compared with the current SOTA, increasing from 44.4 to 48.6.Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/Trident.
Efficient and Secure Cross-Domain Data-Sharing for Resource-Constrained Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The growing complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) environments, particularly in cross-domain data sharing, presents significant security challenges. Existing data-sharing schemes often rely on computationally expensive cryptographic operations and centralized key management, limiting their effectiveness for resource-constrained devices. To address these issues, we propose an efficient, secure blockchain-based data-sharing scheme. First, our scheme adopts a distributed key generation method, which avoids single point of failure. This method also allows independent pseudonym generation and key updates, enhancing authentication flexibility while reducing computational overhead. Additionally, the scheme provides a complete data-sharing process, covering data uploading, storage, and sharing, while ensuring data traceability, integrity, and privacy. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is theoretically secure and resistant to various attacks, while performance evaluations demonstrate lower computational and communication overhead compared to existing solutions, making it both secure and efficient for IoT applications.
Cybersecurity Study Programs: What's in a Name?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Improving cybersecurity education has become a priority for many countries and organizations worldwide. Computing societies and professional associations have recognized cybersecurity as a distinctive computing discipline and created specialized cybersecurity curricular guidelines. Higher education institutions are introducing new cybersecurity programs, attracting students to this expanding field. In this paper, we examined 101 study programs across 24 countries. Based on their analysis, we argue that top-ranked universities have not yet fully implemented the guidelines and offer programs that have "cyber" in their name but lack some essential elements of a cybersecurity program. In particular, most programs do not sufficiently cover non-technical components, such as law, policies, or risk management. Also, most programs teach knowledge and skills but do not expose students to experiential learning outside the traditional classroom (such as internships) to develop their competencies. As a result, graduates of these programs may not meet employer expectations and may require additional training. To help program directors and educators improve their programs and courses, this paper offers examples of effective practices from cybersecurity programs around the world and our teaching practice.
Implementing an Optimized and Secured Multimedia Streaming Protocol in a Participatory Sensing Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Multimedia streaming protocols are becoming increasingly popular in Crowdsensing due to their ability to deliver high-quality video content over the internet in real-time. Streaming multimedia content, as in the context of live video streaming, requires high bandwidth and large storage capacity to ensure a sufficient throughput. Crowdsensing can distribute information about shared video contents among multiple users in network, reducing storage capacity and computational and bandwidth requirements. However, Crowdsensing introduces several security constraints that must be taken into account to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data. In the specific case of video streaming, commonly named as visual crowdsensing (VCS) within this context, data is transmitted over wireless networks, making it vulnerable to security breaches and susceptible to eavesdropping and interception by attackers. Multimedias often contains sensitive user data and may be subject to various privacy laws, including data protection laws and laws related to photography and video recording, based on local GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). For this reason the realization of a secure protocol optimized for a distributed data streaming in real-time becomes increasingly important in crowdsensing and smart-enviroment context. In this article, we will discuss the use of a symmetric AES-CTR encryption based protocol for securing data streaming over a crowd-sensed network.
BEARD: Benchmarking the Adversarial Robustness for Dataset Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Dataset Distillation (DD) is an emerging technique that compresses large-scale datasets into significantly smaller synthesized datasets while preserving high test performance and enabling the efficient training of large models. However, current research primarily focuses on enhancing evaluation accuracy under limited compression ratios, often overlooking critical security concerns such as adversarial robustness. A key challenge in evaluating this robustness lies in the complex interactions between distillation methods, model architectures, and adversarial attack strategies, which complicate standardized assessments. To address this, we introduce BEARD, an open and unified benchmark designed to systematically assess the adversarial robustness of DD methods, including DM, IDM, and BACON. BEARD encompasses a variety of adversarial attacks (e.g., FGSM, PGD, C&W) on distilled datasets like CIFAR-10/100 and TinyImageNet. Utilizing an adversarial game framework, it introduces three key metrics: Robustness Ratio (RR), Attack Efficiency Ratio (AE), and Comprehensive Robustness-Efficiency Index (CREI). Our analysis includes unified benchmarks, various Images Per Class (IPC) settings, and the effects of adversarial training. Results are available on the BEARD Leaderboard, along with a library providing model and dataset pools to support reproducible research. Access the code at BEARD.