Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The complexity of solving a random polynomial system

A multivariate cryptograpic instance in practice is a multivariate polynomial system. So the security of a protocol rely on the complexity of solving a multivariate polynomial system. In this paper there is an overview on a general algorithm used to solve a multivariate system and the quantity to which the complexity of this algorithm depends on: the solving degree. Unfortunately, it is hard to compute. For this reason, it is introduced an invariant: the degree of regularity. This invariant, under certain condition, give us an upper bound on the solving degree. Then we speak about random polynomial systems and in particular what "random" means to us. Finally, we give an upper bound on both the degree of regularity and the solving degree of such random systems.
Box-based Refinement for Weakly Supervised and Unsupervised Localization Tasks

It has been established that training a box-based detector network can enhance the localization performance of weakly supervised and unsupervised methods. Moreover, we extend this understanding by demonstrating that these detectors can be utilized to improve the original network, paving the way for further advancements. To accomplish this, we train the detectors on top of the network output instead of the image data and apply suitable loss backpropagation. Our findings reveal a significant improvement in phrase grounding for the ``what is where by looking'' task, as well as various methods of unsupervised object discovery. Our code is available at https://github.com/eyalgomel/box-based-refinement.
Introducing "Forecast Utterance" for Conversational Data Science

Envision an intelligent agent capable of assisting users in conducting forecasting tasks through intuitive, natural conversations, without requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying machine learning (ML) processes. A significant challenge for the agent in this endeavor is to accurately comprehend the user's prediction goals and, consequently, formulate precise ML tasks. In this paper, we take a pioneering step towards this ambitious goal by introducing a new concept called Forecast Utterance and then focus on the automatic and accurate interpretation of users' prediction goals from these utterances. Specifically, we frame the task as a slot-filling problem, where each slot corresponds to a specific aspect of the goal prediction task. We then employ two zero-shot methods for solving the slot-filling task, namely: 1) Entity Extraction (EE), and 2) Question-Answering (QA) techniques. Our experiments, conducted with three meticulously crafted data sets, validate the viability of our ambitious goal and demonstrate the effectiveness of both EE and QA techniques in interpreting Forecast Utterances.
Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection by Restoring Lossy Inputs with Variational Autoencoder

Deep generative models have been demonstrated as problematic in the unsupervised out-of-distribution (OOD) detection task, where they tend to assign higher likelihoods to OOD samples. Previous studies on this issue are usually not applicable to the Variational Autoencoder (VAE). As a popular subclass of generative models, the VAE can be effective with a relatively smaller model size and be more stable and faster in training and inference, which can be more advantageous in real-world applications. In this paper, We propose a novel VAE-based score called Error Reduction (ER) for OOD detection, which is based on a VAE that takes a lossy version of the training set as inputs and the original set as targets. Experiments are carried out on various datasets to show the effectiveness of our method, we also present the effect of design choices with ablation experiments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/VAE4OOD.
Delving into Ipsilateral Mammogram Assessment under Multi-View Network

In many recent years, multi-view mammogram analysis has been focused widely on AI-based cancer assessment. In this work, we aim to explore diverse fusion strategies (average and concatenate) and examine the model's learning behavior with varying individuals and fusion pathways, involving Coarse Layer and Fine Layer. The Ipsilateral Multi-View Network, comprising five fusion types (Pre, Early, Middle, Last, and Post Fusion) in ResNet-18, is employed. Notably, the Middle Fusion emerges as the most balanced and effective approach, enhancing deep-learning models' generalization performance by +2.06% (concatenate) and +5.29% (average) in VinDr-Mammo dataset and +2.03% (concatenate) and +3% (average) in CMMD dataset on macro F1-Score. The paper emphasizes the crucial role of layer assignment in multi-view network extraction with various strategies.
RSDiff: Remote Sensing Image Generation from Text Using Diffusion Model

Satellite imagery generation and super-resolution are pivotal tasks in remote sensing, demanding high-quality, detailed images for accurate analysis and decision-making. In this paper, we propose an innovative and lightweight approach that employs two-stage diffusion models to gradually generate high-resolution Satellite images purely based on text prompts. Our innovative pipeline comprises two interconnected diffusion models: a Low-Resolution Generation Diffusion Model (LR-GDM) that generates low-resolution images from text and a Super-Resolution Diffusion Model (SRDM) conditionally produced. The LR-GDM effectively synthesizes low-resolution by (computing the correlations of the text embedding and the image embedding in a shared latent space), capturing the essential content and layout of the desired scenes. Subsequently, the SRDM takes the generated low-resolution image and its corresponding text prompts and efficiently produces the high-resolution counterparts, infusing fine-grained spatial details and enhancing visual fidelity. Experiments are conducted on the commonly used dataset, Remote Sensing Image Captioning Dataset (RSICD). Our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) models in generating satellite images with realistic geographical features, weather conditions, and land structures while achieving remarkable super-resolution results for increased spatial precision.
Design of Oscillatory Neural Networks by Machine Learning

We demonstrate the utility of machine learning algorithms for the design of Oscillatory Neural Networks (ONNs). After constructing a circuit model of the oscillators in a machine-learning-enabled simulator and performing Backpropagation through time (BPTT) for determining the coupling resistances between the ring oscillators, we show the design of associative memories and multi-layered ONN classifiers. The machine-learning-designed ONNs show superior performance compared to other design methods (such as Hebbian learning) and they also enable significant simplifications in the circuit topology. We demonstrate the design of multi-layered ONNs that show superior performance compared to single-layer ones. We argue Machine learning can unlock the true computing potential of ONNs hardware.
Causal Structure Recovery of Linear Dynamical Systems: An FFT based Approach

Learning causal effects from data is a fundamental and well-studied problem across science, especially when the cause-effect relationship is static in nature. However, causal effect is less explored when there are dynamical dependencies, i.e., when dependencies exist between entities across time. Identifying dynamic causal effects from time-series observations is computationally expensive when compared to the static scenario. We demonstrate that the computational complexity of recovering the causation structure for the vector auto-regressive (VAR) model is $O(Tn^3N^2)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes, $T$ is the number of samples, and $N$ is the largest time-lag in the dependency between entities. We report a method, with a reduced complexity of $O(Tn^3 \log N)$, to recover the causation structure to obtain frequency-domain (FD) representations of time-series. Since FFT accumulates all the time dependencies on every frequency, causal inference can be performed efficiently by considering the state variables as random variables at any given frequency. We additionally show that, for systems with interactions that are LTI, do-calculus machinery can be realized in the FD resulting in versions of the classical single-door (with cycles), front and backdoor criteria. We demonstrate, for a large class of problems, graph reconstruction using multivariate Wiener projections results in a significant computational advantage with $O(n)$ complexity over reconstruction algorithms such as the PC algorithm which has $O(n^q)$ complexity, where $q$ is the maximum neighborhood size. This advantage accrues due to some remarkable properties of the phase response of the frequency-dependent Wiener coefficients which is not present in any time-domain approach.
Directionality-Aware Mixture Model Parallel Sampling for Efficient Linear Parameter Varying Dynamical System Learning

The Linear Parameter Varying Dynamical System (LPV-DS) is an effective approach that learns stable, time-invariant motion policies using statistical modeling and semi-definite optimization to encode complex motions for reactive robot control. Despite its strengths, the LPV-DS learning approach faces challenges in achieving a high model accuracy without compromising the computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce the Directionality-Aware Mixture Model (DAMM), a novel statistical model that applies the Riemannian metric on the n-sphere $\mathbb{S}^n$ to efficiently blend non-Euclidean directional data with $\mathbb{R}^m$ Euclidean states. Additionally, we develop a hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo technique that combines Gibbs Sampling with Split/Merge Proposal, allowing for parallel computation to drastically speed up inference. Our extensive empirical tests demonstrate that LPV-DS integrated with DAMM achieves higher reproduction accuracy, better model efficiency, and near real-time/online learning compared to standard estimation methods on various datasets. Lastly, we demonstrate its suitability for incrementally learning multi-behavior policies in real-world robot experiments.
Contrastive Learning as Kernel Approximation

In standard supervised machine learning, it is necessary to provide a label for every input in the data. While raw data in many application domains is easily obtainable on the Internet, manual labelling of this data is prohibitively expensive. To circumvent this issue, contrastive learning methods produce low-dimensional vector representations (also called features) of high-dimensional inputs on large unlabelled datasets. This is done by training with a contrastive loss function, which enforces that similar inputs have high inner product and dissimilar inputs have low inner product in the feature space. Rather than annotating each input individually, it suffices to define a means of sampling pairs of similar and dissimilar inputs. Contrastive features can then be fed as inputs to supervised learning systems on much smaller labelled datasets to obtain high accuracy on end tasks of interest. The goal of this thesis is to provide an overview of the current theoretical understanding of contrastive learning, specifically as it pertains to the minimizers of contrastive loss functions and their relationship to prior methods for learning features from unlabelled data. We highlight popular contrastive loss functions whose minimizers implicitly approximate a positive semidefinite (PSD) kernel. The latter is a well-studied object in functional analysis and learning theory that formalizes a notion of similarity between elements of a space. PSD kernels provide an implicit definition of features through the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
A Joint Study of Phrase Grounding and Task Performance in Vision and Language Models

Key to tasks that require reasoning about natural language in visual contexts is grounding words and phrases to image regions. However, observing this grounding in contemporary models is complex, even if it is generally expected to take place if the task is addressed in a way that is conductive to generalization. We propose a framework to jointly study task performance and phrase grounding, and propose three benchmarks to study the relation between the two. Our results show that contemporary models demonstrate inconsistency between their ability to ground phrases and solve tasks. We show how this can be addressed through brute-force training on ground phrasing annotations, and analyze the dynamics it creates. Code and at available at https://github.com/lil-lab/phrase_grounding.
Using the Shapes Constraint Language for modelling regulatory requirements

Ontologies are traditionally expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), that provides a syntax for expressing taxonomies with axioms regulating class membership. The semantics of OWL, based on Description Logic (DL), allows for the use of automated reasoning to check the consistency of ontologies, perform classification, and to answer DL queries. However, the open world assumption of OWL, along with limitations in its expressiveness, makes OWL less suitable for modelling rules and regulations, used in public administration. In such cases, it is desirable to have closed world semantics and a rule-based engine to check compliance with regulations. In this paper we describe and discuss data model management using the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), for concept modelling of concrete requirements in regulation documents within the public sector. We show how complex regulations, often containing a number of alternative requirements, can be expressed as constraints, and the utility of SHACL engines in verification of instance data against the SHACL model. We discuss benefits of modelling with SHACL, compared to OWL, and demonstrate the maintainability of the SHACL model by domain experts without prior knowledge of ontology management.
Reinforcement Learning of Action and Query Policies with LTL Instructions under Uncertain Event Detector

Reinforcement learning (RL) with linear temporal logic (LTL) objectives can allow robots to carry out symbolic event plans in unknown environments. Most existing methods assume that the event detector can accurately map environmental states to symbolic events; however, uncertainty is inevitable for real-world event detectors. Such uncertainty in an event detector generates multiple branching possibilities on LTL instructions, confusing action decisions. Moreover, the queries to the uncertain event detector, necessary for the task's progress, may increase the uncertainty further. To cope with those issues, we propose an RL framework, Learning Action and Query over Belief LTL (LAQBL), to learn an agent that can consider the diversity of LTL instructions due to uncertain event detection while avoiding task failure due to the unnecessary event-detection query. Our framework simultaneously learns 1) an embedding of belief LTL, which is multiple branching possibilities on LTL instructions using a graph neural network, 2) an action policy, and 3) a query policy which decides whether or not to query for the event detector. Simulations in a 2D grid world and image-input robotic inspection environments show that our method successfully learns actions to follow LTL instructions even with uncertain event detectors.
Learning Vehicle Dynamics from Cropped Image Patches for Robot Navigation in Unpaved Outdoor Terrains

In the realm of autonomous mobile robots, safe navigation through unpaved outdoor environments remains a challenging task. Due to the high-dimensional nature of sensor data, extracting relevant information becomes a complex problem, which hinders adequate perception and path planning. Previous works have shown promising performances in extracting global features from full-sized images. However, they often face challenges in capturing essential local information. In this paper, we propose Crop-LSTM, which iteratively takes cropped image patches around the current robot's position and predicts the future position, orientation, and bumpiness. Our method performs local feature extraction by paying attention to corresponding image patches along the predicted robot trajectory in the 2D image plane. This enables more accurate predictions of the robot's future trajectory. With our wheeled mobile robot platform Raicart, we demonstrated the effectiveness of Crop-LSTM for point-goal navigation in an unpaved outdoor environment. Our method enabled safe and robust navigation using RGBD images in challenging unpaved outdoor terrains. The summary video is available at https://youtu.be/iIGNZ8ignk0.
Towards Unsupervised Graph Completion Learning on Graphs with Features and Structure Missing

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved significant developments in a variety of graph analytical tasks. Nevertheless, GNN's superior performance will suffer from serious damage when the collected node features or structure relationships are partially missing owning to numerous unpredictable factors. Recently emerged graph completion learning (GCL) has received increasing attention, which aims to reconstruct the missing node features or structure relationships under the guidance of a specifically supervised task. Although these proposed GCL methods have made great success, they still exist the following problems: the reliance on labels, the bias of the reconstructed node features and structure relationships. Besides, the generalization ability of the existing GCL still faces a huge challenge when both collected node features and structure relationships are partially missing at the same time. To solve the above issues, we propose a more general GCL framework with the aid of self-supervised learning for improving the task performance of the existing GNN variants on graphs with features and structure missing, termed unsupervised GCL (UGCL). Specifically, to avoid the mismatch between missing node features and structure during the message-passing process of GNN, we separate the feature reconstruction and structure reconstruction and design its personalized model in turn. Then, a dual contrastive loss on the structure level and feature level is introduced to maximize the mutual information of node representations from feature reconstructing and structure reconstructing paths for providing more supervision signals. Finally, the reconstructed node features and structure can be applied to the downstream node classification task. Extensive experiments on eight datasets, three GNN variants and five missing rates demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Hot or Cold? Adaptive Temperature Sampling for Code Generation with Large Language Models

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation. However, existing LLMs' decoding strategies are designed for Natural Language (NL) generation, overlooking the differences between NL and programming languages (PL). Due to this oversight, a better decoding strategy for code generation remains an open question. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study to explore a decoding strategy specialized in code generation. With an analysis of loss distributions of code tokens, we find that code tokens can be divided into two categories: challenging tokens that are difficult to predict and confident tokens that can be easily inferred. Among them, the challenging tokens mainly appear at the beginning of a code block. Inspired by the above findings, we propose a simple yet effective method: Adaptive Temperature (AdapT) sampling, which dynamically adjusts the temperature coefficient when decoding different tokens. We apply a larger temperature when sampling for challenging tokens, allowing LLMs to explore diverse choices. We employ a smaller temperature for confident tokens avoiding the influence of tail randomness noises. We apply AdapT sampling to LLMs with different sizes and conduct evaluations on two popular datasets. Results show that AdapT sampling significantly outperforms state-of-the-art decoding strategy.
Norm Tweaking: High-performance Low-bit Quantization of Large Language Models

As the size of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow, model compression without sacrificing accuracy has become a crucial challenge for deployment. While some quantization methods, such as GPTQ, have made progress in achieving acceptable 4-bit weight-only quantization, attempts at lower-bit quantization often result in severe performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a technique called norm tweaking, which can be used as a plugin in current PTQ methods to achieve high precision while being cost-efficient. Our approach is inspired by the observation that rectifying the quantized activation distribution to match its float counterpart can readily restore accuracy for LLMs. To achieve this, we carefully design a tweaking strategy that includes calibration data generation and channel-wise distance constraint to update the weights of normalization layers for better generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets using several open-sourced LLMs. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in both weight-only quantization and joint quantization of weights and activations, surpassing existing PTQ methods. On GLM-130B and OPT-66B, our method even achieves the same level of accuracy at 2-bit quantization as their float ones. Our simple and effective approach makes it more practical for real-world applications.
CVE-driven Attack Technique Prediction with Semantic Information Extraction and a Domain-specific Language Model

This paper addresses a critical challenge in cybersecurity: the gap between vulnerability information represented by Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and the resulting cyberattack actions. CVEs provide insights into vulnerabilities, but often lack details on potential threat actions (tactics, techniques, and procedures, or TTPs) within the ATT&CK framework. This gap hinders accurate CVE categorization and proactive countermeasure initiation. The paper introduces the TTPpredictor tool, which uses innovative techniques to analyze CVE descriptions and infer plausible TTP attacks resulting from CVE exploitation. TTPpredictor overcomes challenges posed by limited labeled data and semantic disparities between CVE and TTP descriptions. It initially extracts threat actions from unstructured cyber threat reports using Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) techniques. These actions, along with their contextual attributes, are correlated with MITRE's attack functionality classes. This automated correlation facilitates the creation of labeled data, essential for categorizing novel threat actions into threat functionality classes and TTPs. The paper presents an empirical assessment, demonstrating TTPpredictor's effectiveness with accuracy rates of approximately 98% and F1-scores ranging from 95% to 98% in precise CVE classification to ATT&CK techniques. TTPpredictor outperforms state-of-the-art language model tools like ChatGPT. Overall, this paper offers a robust solution for linking CVEs to potential attack techniques, enhancing cybersecurity practitioners' ability to proactively identify and mitigate threats.