OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Feature Importance in the Context of Traditional and Just-In-Time Software Defect Prediction Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software defect prediction models can assist software testing initiatives by prioritizing testing error-prone modules. In recent years, in addition to the traditional defect prediction model approach of predicting defects from class, modules, etc., Just-In-Time defect prediction research, which focuses on the change history of software products is getting prominent. For building these defect prediction models, it is important to understand which features are primary contributors to these classifiers. This study considered developing defect prediction models incorporating the traditional and the Just-In-Time approaches from the publicly available dataset of the Apache Camel project. A multi-layer deep learning algorithm was applied to these datasets in comparison with machine learning algorithms. The deep learning algorithm achieved accuracies of 80% and 86%, with the area under receiving operator curve (AUC) scores of 66% and 78% for traditional and Just-In-Time defect prediction, respectively. Finally, the feature importance of these models was identified using a model-specific integrated gradient method and a model-agnostic Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) technique.
GraV: Grasp Volume Data for the Design of One-Handed XR Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Everyday objects, like remote controls or electric toothbrushes, are crafted with hand-accessible interfaces. Expanding on this design principle, extended reality (XR) interfaces for physical tasks could facilitate interaction without necessitating the release of grasped tools, ensuring seamless workflow integration. While established data, such as hand anthropometric measurements, guide the design of handheld objects, XR currently lacks comparable data, regarding reachability, for single-hand interfaces while grasping objects. To address this, we identify critical design factors and a design space representing grasp-proximate interfaces and introduce a simulation tool for generating reachability and displacement cost data for designing these interfaces. Additionally, using the simulation tool, we generate a dataset based on grasp taxonomy and common household objects. Finally, we share insights from a design workshop that emphasizes the significance of reachability and motion cost data, empowering XR creators to develop bespoke interfaces tailored specifically to grasping hands.
Revisiting Network Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS), weak-to-strong consistency regularization techniques are widely utilized in recent works, typically combined with input-level and feature-level perturbations. However, the integration between weak-to-strong consistency regularization and network perturbation has been relatively rare. We note several problems with existing network perturbations in SSS that may contribute to this phenomenon. By revisiting network perturbations, we introduce a new approach for network perturbation to expand the existing weak-to-strong consistency regularization for unlabeled data. Additionally, we present a volatile learning process for labeled data, which is uncommon in existing research. Building upon previous work that includes input-level and feature-level perturbations, we present MLPMatch (Multi-Level-Perturbation Match), an easy-to-implement and efficient framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. MLPMatch has been validated on the Pascal VOC and Cityscapes datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available from https://github.com/LlistenL/MLPMatch.
VISTA: Visual Integrated System for Tailored Automation in Math Problem Generation Using LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generating accurate and consistent visual aids is a critical challenge in mathematics education, where visual representations like geometric shapes and functions play a pivotal role in enhancing student comprehension. This paper introduces a novel multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the creation of complex mathematical visualizations alongside coherent problem text. Our approach not only simplifies the generation of precise visual aids but also aligns these aids with the problem's core mathematical concepts, improving both problem creation and assessment. By integrating multiple agents, each responsible for distinct tasks such as numeric calculation, geometry validation, and visualization, our system delivers mathematically accurate and contextually relevant problems with visual aids. Evaluation across Geometry and Function problem types shows that our method significantly outperforms basic LLMs in terms of text coherence, consistency, relevance and similarity, while maintaining the essential geometrical and functional integrity of the original problems. Although some challenges remain in ensuring consistent visual outputs, our framework demonstrates the immense potential of LLMs in transforming the way educators generate and utilize visual aids in math education.
ICE-T: A Multi-Faceted Concept for Teaching Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The topics of Artificial intelligence (AI) and especially Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly making their way into educational curricula. To facilitate the access for students, a variety of platforms, visual tools, and digital games are already being used to introduce ML concepts and strengthen the understanding of how AI works. We take a look at didactic principles that are employed for teaching computer science, define criteria, and, based on those, evaluate a selection of prominent existing platforms, tools, and games. Additionally, we criticize the approach of portraying ML mostly as a black-box and the resulting missing focus on creating an understanding of data, algorithms, and models that come with it. To tackle this issue, we present a concept that covers intermodal transfer, computational and explanatory thinking, ICE-T, as an extension of known didactic principles. With our multi-faceted concept, we believe that planners of learning units, creators of learning platforms and educators can improve on teaching ML.
IntellBot: Retrieval Augmented LLM Chatbot for Cyber Threat Knowledge Delivery
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber security, intelligent chatbots are gaining prominence. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing empower these chatbots to handle user inquiries and deliver threat intelligence. This helps cyber security knowledge readily available to both professionals and the public. Traditional rule-based chatbots often lack flexibility and struggle to adapt to user interactions. In contrast, Large Language Model-based chatbots offer contextually relevant information across multiple domains and adapt to evolving conversational contexts. In this work, we develop IntellBot, an advanced cyber security Chatbot built on top of cutting-edge technologies like Large Language Models and Langchain alongside a Retrieval-Augmented Generation model to deliver superior capabilities. This chatbot gathers information from diverse data sources to create a comprehensive knowledge base covering known vulnerabilities, recent cyber attacks, and emerging threats. It delivers tailored responses, serving as a primary hub for cyber security insights. By providing instant access to relevant information and resources, this IntellBot enhances threat intelligence, incident response, and overall security posture, saving time and empowering users with knowledge of cyber security best practices. Moreover, we analyzed the performance of our copilot using a two-stage evaluation strategy. We achieved BERT score above 0.8 by indirect approach and a cosine similarity score ranging from 0.8 to 1, which affirms the accuracy of our copilot. Additionally, we utilized RAGAS to evaluate the RAG model, and all evaluation metrics consistently produced scores above 0.77, highlighting the efficacy of our system.
Supporting Automated Fact-checking across Topics: Similarity-driven Gradual Topic Learning for Claim Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Selecting check-worthy claims for fact-checking is considered a crucial part of expediting the fact-checking process by filtering out and ranking the check-worthy claims for being validated among the impressive amount of claims could be found online. The check-worthy claim detection task, however, becomes more challenging when the model needs to deal with new topics that differ from those seen earlier. In this study, we propose a domain-adaptation framework for check-worthy claims detection across topics for the Arabic language to adopt a new topic, mimicking a real-life scenario of the daily emergence of events worldwide. We propose the Gradual Topic Learning (GTL) model, which builds an ability to learning gradually and emphasizes the check-worthy claims for the target topic during several stages of the learning process. In addition, we introduce the Similarity-driven Gradual Topic Learning (SGTL) model that synthesizes gradual learning with a similarity-based strategy for the target topic. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, showing an overall tendency for improving performance over the state-of-the-art baseline across 11 out of the 14 topics under study.
EUREKHA: Enhancing User Representation for Key Hackers Identification in Underground Forums
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Underground forums serve as hubs for cybercriminal activities, offering a space for anonymity and evasion of conventional online oversight. In these hidden communities, malicious actors collaborate to exchange illicit knowledge, tools, and tactics, driving a range of cyber threats from hacking techniques to the sale of stolen data, malware, and zero-day exploits. Identifying the key instigators (i.e., key hackers), behind these operations is essential but remains a complex challenge. This paper presents a novel method called EUREKHA (Enhancing User Representation for Key Hacker Identification in Underground Forums), designed to identify these key hackers by modeling each user as a textual sequence. This sequence is processed through a large language model (LLM) for domain-specific adaptation, with LLMs acting as feature extractors. These extracted features are then fed into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to model user structural relationships, significantly improving identification accuracy. Furthermore, we employ BERTopic (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Topic Modeling) to extract personalized topics from user-generated content, enabling multiple textual representations per user and optimizing the selection of the most representative sequence. Our study demonstrates that fine-tuned LLMs outperform state-of-the-art methods in identifying key hackers. Additionally, when combined with GNNs, our model achieves significant improvements, resulting in approximately 6% and 10% increases in accuracy and F1-score, respectively, over existing methods. EUREKHA was tested on the Hack-Forums dataset, and we provide open-source access to our code.
Do Histopathological Foundation Models Eliminate Batch Effects? A Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning has led to remarkable advancements in computational histopathology, e.g., in diagnostics, biomarker prediction, and outcome prognosis. Yet, the lack of annotated data and the impact of batch effects, e.g., systematic technical data differences across hospitals, hamper model robustness and generalization. Recent histopathological foundation models -- pretrained on millions to billions of images -- have been reported to improve generalization performances on various downstream tasks. However, it has not been systematically assessed whether they fully eliminate batch effects. In this study, we empirically show that the feature embeddings of the foundation models still contain distinct hospital signatures that can lead to biased predictions and misclassifications. We further find that the signatures are not removed by stain normalization methods, dominate distances in feature space, and are evident across various principal components. Our work provides a novel perspective on the evaluation of medical foundation models, paving the way for more robust pretraining strategies and downstream predictors.
Assessing the Answerability of Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Thanks to unprecedented language understanding and generation capabilities of large language model (LLM), Retrieval-augmented Code Generation (RaCG) has recently been widely utilized among software developers. While this has increased productivity, there are still frequent instances of incorrect codes being provided. In particular, there are cases where plausible yet incorrect codes are generated for queries from users that cannot be answered with the given queries and API descriptions. This study proposes a task for evaluating answerability, which assesses whether valid answers can be generated based on users' queries and retrieved APIs in RaCG. Additionally, we build a benchmark dataset called Retrieval-augmented Code Generability Evaluation (RaCGEval) to evaluate the performance of models performing this task. Experimental results show that this task remains at a very challenging level, with baseline models exhibiting a low performance of 46.7%. Furthermore, this study discusses methods that could significantly improve performance.
Towards a Real-Time Simulation of Elastoplastic Deformation Using Multi-Task Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces a surrogate modeling framework merging proper orthogonal decomposition, long short-term memory networks, and multi-task learning, to accurately predict elastoplastic deformations in real-time. Superior to single-task neural networks, this approach achieves a mean absolute error below 0.40\% across various state variables, with the multi-task model showing enhanced generalization by mitigating overfitting through shared layers. Moreover, in our use cases, a pre-trained multi-task model can effectively train additional variables with as few as 20 samples, demonstrating its deep understanding of complex scenarios. This is notably efficient compared to single-task models, which typically require around 100 samples. Significantly faster than traditional finite element analysis, our model accelerates computations by approximately a million times, making it a substantial advancement for real-time predictive modeling in engineering applications. While it necessitates further testing on more intricate models, this framework shows substantial promise in elevating both efficiency and accuracy in engineering applications, particularly for real-time scenarios.
Mitigating Consequences of Prestige in Citations of Publications
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

For many public research organizations, funding creation of science and maximizing scientific output is of central interest. Typically, when evaluating scientific production for funding, citations are utilized as a proxy, although these are severely influenced by factors beyond scientific impact. This study aims to mitigate the consequences of the Matthew effect in citations, where prominent authors and prestigious journals receive more citations regardless of the scientific content of the publications. To this end, the study presents an approach to predicting citations of papers based solely on observable characteristics available at the submission stage of a double-blind peer-review process. Combining classical linear models, generalized linear models and utilizing large-scale data sets on biomedical papers based on the PubMed database, the results demonstrate that it is possible to make fairly accurate predictions of citations using only observable characteristics of papers excluding information on authors and journals, thereby mitigating the Matthew effect. Thus, the outcomes have important implications for the field of scientometrics, providing a more objective method for citation prediction by relying on pre-publication variables that are immune to manipulation by authors and journals, thereby enhancing the objectivity of the evaluation process. Our approach is thus important for government agencies responsible for funding the creation of high-quality scientific content rather than perpetuating prestige.
Evaluating and Adapting Large Language Models to Represent Folktales in Low-Resource Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Folktales are a rich resource of knowledge about the society and culture of a civilisation. Digital folklore research aims to use automated techniques to better understand these folktales, and it relies on abstract representations of the textual data. Although a number of large language models (LLMs) claim to be able to represent low-resource langauges such as Irish and Gaelic, we present two classification tasks to explore how useful these representations are, and three adaptations to improve the performance of these models. We find that adapting the models to work with longer sequences, and continuing pre-training on the domain of folktales improves classification performance, although these findings are tempered by the impressive performance of a baseline SVM with non-contextual features.
Predicting Stroke through Retinal Graphs and Multimodal Self-supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Early identification of stroke is crucial for intervention, requiring reliable models. We proposed an efficient retinal image representation together with clinical information to capture a comprehensive overview of cardiovascular health, leveraging large multimodal datasets for new medical insights. Our approach is one of the first contrastive frameworks that integrates graph and tabular data, using vessel graphs derived from retinal images for efficient representation. This method, combined with multimodal contrastive learning, significantly enhances stroke prediction accuracy by integrating data from multiple sources and using contrastive learning for transfer learning. The self-supervised learning techniques employed allow the model to learn effectively from unlabeled data, reducing the dependency on large annotated datasets. Our framework showed an AUROC improvement of 3.78% from supervised to self-supervised approaches. Additionally, the graph-level representation approach achieved superior performance to image encoders while significantly reducing pre-training and fine-tuning runtimes. These findings indicate that retinal images are a cost-effective method for improving cardiovascular disease predictions and pave the way for future research into retinal and cerebral vessel connections and the use of graph-based retinal vessel representations.
Expectation vs. Reality: Towards Verification of Psychological Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Game theory provides an effective way to model strategic interactions among rational agents. In the context of formal verification, these ideas can be used to produce guarantees on the correctness of multi-agent systems, with a diverse range of applications from computer security to autonomous driving. Psychological games (PGs) were developed as a way to model and analyse agents with belief-dependent motivations, opening up the possibility to model how human emotions can influence behaviour. In PGs, players' utilities depend not only on what actually happens (which strategies players choose to adopt), but also on what the players had expected to happen (their belief as to the strategies that would be played). Despite receiving much attention in fields such as economics and psychology, very little consideration has been given to their applicability to problems in computer science, nor to practical algorithms and tool support. In this paper, we start to bridge that gap, proposing methods to solve PGs and implementing them within PRISM-games, a formal verification tool for stochastic games. We discuss how to model these games, highlight specific challenges for their analysis and illustrate the usefulness of our approach on several case studies, including human behaviour in traffic scenarios.
WHALE: Towards Generalizable and Scalable World Models for Embodied Decision-making
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

World models play a crucial role in decision-making within embodied environments, enabling cost-free explorations that would otherwise be expensive in the real world. To facilitate effective decision-making, world models must be equipped with strong generalizability to support faithful imagination in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions and provide reliable uncertainty estimation to assess the credibility of the simulated experiences, both of which present significant challenges for prior scalable approaches. This paper introduces WHALE, a framework for learning generalizable world models, consisting of two key techniques: behavior-conditioning and retracing-rollout. Behavior-conditioning addresses the policy distribution shift, one of the primary sources of the world model generalization error, while retracing-rollout enables efficient uncertainty estimation without the necessity of model ensembles. These techniques are universal and can be combined with any neural network architecture for world model learning. Incorporating these two techniques, we present Whale-ST, a scalable spatial-temporal transformer-based world model with enhanced generalizability. We demonstrate the superiority of Whale-ST in simulation tasks by evaluating both value estimation accuracy and video generation fidelity. Additionally, we examine the effectiveness of our uncertainty estimation technique, which enhances model-based policy optimization in fully offline scenarios. Furthermore, we propose Whale-X, a 414M parameter world model trained on 970K trajectories from Open X-Embodiment datasets. We show that Whale-X exhibits promising scalability and strong generalizability in real-world manipulation scenarios using minimal demonstrations.
Impact of Fake News on Social Media Towards Public Users of Different Age Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study examines how fake news affects social media users across a range of age groups and how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help reduce the spread of false information. The paper evaluates various machine learning models for their efficacy in identifying and categorizing fake news and examines current trends in the spread of fake news, including deepfake technology. The study assesses four models using a Kaggle dataset: Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression. The results show that SVM and neural networks perform better than other models, with accuracies of 93.29% and 93.69%, respectively. The study also emphasises how people in the elder age group diminished capacity for critical analysis of news content makes them more susceptible to disinformation. Natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning approaches have the potential to improve the accuracy of false news detection. Biases in AI and ML models and difficulties in identifying information generated by AI continue to be major problems in spite of the developments. The study recommends that datasets be expanded to encompass a wider range of languages and that detection algorithms be continuously improved to keep up with the latest advancements in disinformation tactics. In order to combat fake news and promote an informed and resilient society, this study emphasizes the value of cooperative efforts between AI researchers, social media platforms, and governments.