pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A real-time fingerprint-based indoor positioning using deep learning and preceding states
Authors: Mohammad Nabati; Seyed Ali Ghorashi
Date: 2022-09-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Expert  Systems with Applications 2022 9
Tasks: regression

In fingerprint-based positioning methods, the received signal strength (RSS) vectors from access points are measured at reference points and saved in a database. Then, this dataset is used for the training phase of a pattern recognition algorithm. Several noise types impact the signals in radio channels, and RSS values are corrupted correspondingly. These noises can be mitigated by averaging the RSS samples. In real-time applications, the users cannot wait to collect uncorrelated RSS samples to calculate their average in the online phase of the positioning process. In this paper, we propose a solution for this problem by leveraging the distribution of RSS samples in the offline phase and the preceding state of the user in the online phase.

In the first step, we propose a fast and accurate positioning algorithm using a deep neural network (DNN) to learn the distribution of available RSS samples instead of averaging them at the offline phase. Then, the similarity of an online RSS sample to the RPs’ fingerprints is obtained to estimate the user’s location. Next, the proposed DNN model is combined with a novel state-based positioning method to more accurately estimate the user’s location. Extensive experiments on both benchmark and our collected datasets in two different scenarios (single RSS sample and many RSS samples for each user in the online phase) verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with traditional regression algorithms such as deep neural network regression, Gaussian process regression, random forest, and weighted KNN.
JGPR: a computationally efficient multi-target Gaussian process regression algorithm
Authors: Mohammad Nabati, Seyed Ali Ghorashi, Reza Shahbazian
Date: 2022-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Machine Learning 2022 5
Tasks: GPR, Multi-target regression, regression

Multi-target regression algorithms are designed to predict multiple outputs at the same time, and allow us to take all output variables into account during the training phase. Despite the recent advances, this context of machine learning is still an open challenge for developing a low-cost and high accurate algorithm. The main challenge in multi-target regression algorithms is how to use different targets’ information in the training and/or test phases. In this paper, we introduce a low-cost multi-target Gaussian process regression (GPR) algorithm, called joint GPR (JGPR) that employs a shared covariance matrix among the targets during the training phase and solves a sub-optimal cost function for optimization of hyperparameters. The proposed strategy reduces the computational complexity considerably during the training and test phases and simultaneously avoids overfitting of the multi-target regression algorithm upon the targets. We have performed extensive experiments on both simulated data and 18 benchmark datasets to assess the proposed method compared with other multi-target regression algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed JGPR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on most of the given benchmark datasets.
Distributional Learning of Variational AutoEncoder: Application to Synthetic Data Generation
Authors: SeungHwan An, Jong-June Jeon
Date: 2023-02-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Decoder, Synthetic Data Generation

The Gaussianity assumption has been consistently criticized as a main limitation of the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) despite its efficiency in computational modeling. In this paper, we propose a new approach that expands the model capacity (i.e., expressive power of distributional family) without sacrificing the computational advantages of the VAE framework. Our VAE model's decoder is composed of an infinite mixture of asymmetric Laplace distribution, which possesses general distribution fitting capabilities for continuous variables. Our model is represented by a special form of a nonparametric M-estimator for estimating general quantile functions, and we theoretically establish the relevance between the proposed model and quantile estimation. We apply the proposed model to synthetic data generation, and particularly, our model demonstrates superiority in easily adjusting the level of data privacy.
Analyzing RNA-Seq Gene Expression Data Using Deep Learning Approaches for Cancer Classification
Authors: Rukhsar L, Bangyal WH, Ali Khan MS, Ag Ibrahim AA, Nisar K, Rawat DB
Date: 2022-02-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Applied Sciences 2022 2
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Cancer type classification

Ribonucleic acid Sequencing (RNA-Seq) analysis is particularly useful for obtaining insights into differentially expressed genes. However, it is challenging because of its high-dimensional data. Such analysis is a tool with which to find underlying patterns in data, e.g., for cancer specific biomarkers. In the past, analyses were performed on RNA-Seq data pertaining to the same cancer class as positive and negative samples, i.e., without samples of other cancer types. To perform multiple cancer type classification and to find differentially expressed genes, data for multiple cancer types need to be analyzed. Several repositories offer RNA-Seq data for various cancer types. In this paper, data from the Mendeley data repository for five cancer types are analyzed. As a first step, RNA-Seq values are converted to 2D images using normalization and zero padding. In the next step, relevant features are extracted and selected using Deep Learning (DL). In the last phase, classification is performed, and eight DL algorithms are used. Results and discussion are based on four different splitting strategies and k-fold cross validation for each DL classifier. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is performed with state of the art techniques discussed in literature. The results demonstrated that classifiers performed best at 70–30 split, and that Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) achieved the best overall results. Hence, CNN is the best DL model for classification among the eight studied DL models, and is easy to implement and simple to understand.
Tokenized Model: A Blockchain-Empowered Decentralized Model Ownership Verification Platform
Authors: Yihao Li, Yanyi Lai, Tianchi Liao, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: model

With the development of practical deep learning models like generative AI, their excellent performance has brought huge economic value. For instance, ChatGPT has attracted more than 100 million users in three months. Since the model training requires a lot of data and computing power, a well-performing deep learning model is behind a huge effort and cost. Facing various model attacks, unauthorized use and abuse from the network that threaten the interests of model owners, in addition to considering legal and other administrative measures, it is equally important to protect the model's copyright from the technical means. By using the model watermarking technology, we point out the possibility of building a unified platform for model ownership verification. Given the application history of blockchain in copyright verification and the drawbacks of a centralized third-party, this paper considers combining model watermarking technology and blockchain to build a unified model copyright protection platform. By a new solution we called Tokenized Model, it protects the model's copyright by reliable ownership record and verification mechanism. It also promotes the financial value of model by constructing the model's transaction process and contribution shares of a model. In the typical case study, we also study the various performance under usual scenario to verify the effectiveness of this platform.
Presentation Attack Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks and Local Binary Patterns
Authors: Justin Spencer, Deborah Lawrence, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Kaushik Roy, Albert Esterline, Jung-Hee Kim
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anti-Spoofing

The use of biometrics to authenticate users and control access to secure areas has become extremely popular in recent years, and biometric access control systems are frequently used by both governments and private corporations. However, these systems may represent risks to security when deployed without considering the possibility of biometric presentation attacks (also known as spoofing). Presentation attacks are a serious threat because they do not require significant time, expense, or skill to carry out while remaining effective against many biometric systems in use today. This research compares three different software-based methods for facial and iris presentation attack detection in images. The first method uses Inception-v3, a pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) made by Google for the ImageNet challenge, which is retrained for this problem. The second uses a shallow CNN based on a modified Spoofnet architecture, which is trained normally. The third is a texture-based method using Local Binary Patterns (LBP). The datasets used are the ATVS-FIr dataset, which contains real and fake iris images, and the CASIA Face Anti-Spoofing Dataset, which contains real images as well as warped photos, cut photos, and video replay presentation attacks. We also present a third set of results, based on cropped versions of the CASIA images.
Presentation Attack detection using Wavelet Transform and Deep Residual Neural Net
Authors: Prosenjit Chatterjee, Alex Yalchin, Joseph Shelton, Kaushik Roy, Xiaohong Yuan, Kossi D. Edoh
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00

Biometric authentication is becoming more prevalent for secured authentication systems. However, the biometric substances can be deceived by the imposters in several ways. Among other imposter attacks, print attacks, mask attacks, and replay attacks fall under the presentation attack category. The bio-metric images, especially the iris and face, are vulnerable to different presentation attacks. This research applies deep learning approaches to mitigate presentation attacks in a biometric access control system. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold: First, we applied the wavelet transform to extract the features from the biometric images. Second, we modified the deep residual neural net and applied it to the spoof datasets in an attempt to detect the presentation attacks. This research applied the proposed approach to biometric spoof datasets, namely ATVS, CASIA two class, and CASIA cropped image sets. The datasets used in this research contain images that are captured in both a controlled and uncontrolled environment along with different resolutions and sizes. We obtained the best accuracy of 93% on the ATVS Iris datasets. For CASIA two class and CASIA cropped datasets, we achieved test accuracies of 91% and 82%, respectively.
Acoustic Cybersecurity: Exploiting Voice-Activated Systems
Authors: Forrest McKee, David Noever
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00

In this study, we investigate the emerging threat of inaudible acoustic attacks targeting digital voice assistants, a critical concern given their projected prevalence to exceed the global population by 2024. Our research extends the feasibility of these attacks across various platforms like Amazon's Alexa, Android, iOS, and Cortana, revealing significant vulnerabilities in smart devices. The twelve attack vectors identified include successful manipulation of smart home devices and automotive systems, potential breaches in military communication, and challenges in critical infrastructure security. We quantitatively show that attack success rates hover around 60%, with the ability to activate devices remotely from over 100 feet away. Additionally, these attacks threaten critical infrastructure, emphasizing the need for multifaceted defensive strategies combining acoustic shielding, advanced signal processing, machine learning, and robust user authentication to mitigate these risks.
Stealthy and Persistent Unalignment on Large Language Models via Backdoor Injections
Authors: Yuanpu Cao, Bochuan Cao, Jinghui Chen
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have manifested significant advancements. To facilitate safeguards against malicious exploitation, a body of research has concentrated on aligning LLMs with human preferences and inhibiting their generation of inappropriate content. Unfortunately, such alignments are often vulnerable: fine-tuning with a minimal amount of harmful data can easily unalign the target LLM. While being effective, such fine-tuning-based unalignment approaches also have their own limitations: (1) non-stealthiness, after fine-tuning, safety audits or red-teaming can easily expose the potential weaknesses of the unaligned models, thereby precluding their release/use. (2) non-persistence, the unaligned LLMs can be easily repaired through re-alignment, i.e., fine-tuning again with aligned data points. In this work, we show that it is possible to conduct stealthy and persistent unalignment on large language models via backdoor injections. We also provide a novel understanding on the relationship between the backdoor persistence and the activation pattern and further provide guidelines for potential trigger design. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed stealthy and persistent unalignment can successfully pass the safety evaluation while maintaining strong persistence against re-alignment defense.
A Quality-of-Service Compliance System using Federated Learning and Optimistic Rollups
Authors: Joao Paulo de Brito Goncalves, Guilherme Emerick Sathler, Rodolfo da Silva Villaca
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning

Edge computing brings a new paradigm in which the sharing of computing, storage, and bandwidth resources as close as possible to the mobile devices or sensors generating a large amount of data. A parallel trend is the rise of phones and tablets as primary computing devices for many people. The powerful sensors present on these devices combined with the fact that they are mobile, mean they have access to data of an unprecedentedly diverse and private nature. Models learned on such data hold the promise of greatly improving usability by powering more intelligent applications, but the sensitive nature of the data means there are risks and responsibilities to storing it in a centralized location. To address the data privacy required for some data in these devices we propose the use of Federated Learning (FL) so that specific data about services performed by clients do not leave the source machines. Instead of sharing data, users collaboratively train a model by only sending weight updates to a server. However, the naive use of FL in those scenarios exposes it to a risk of corruption, whether intentional or not, during the training phase. To improve the security of the FL structure, we propose a decentralized Blockchain-based FL in an edge computing scenario. We also apply blockchain to create a reward mechanism in FL to enable incentive strategy for trainers.
Can LLMs Patch Security Issues?
Authors: Kamel Alrashedy, Abdullah Aljasser, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Matthew Gombolay
Date: 2023-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Diversity

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive proficiency in code generation. Unfortunately, these models share a weakness with their human counterparts: producing code that inadvertently has security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could allow unauthorized attackers to access sensitive data or systems, which is unacceptable for safety-critical applications. In this work, we propose Feedback-Driven Security Patching (FDSP), where LLMs automatically refine generated, vulnerable code. Our approach leverages automatic static code analysis to empower the LLM to generate and implement potential solutions to address vulnerabilities. We address the research communitys needs for safe code generation by introducing a large-scale dataset, PythonSecurityEval, covering the diversity of real-world applications, including databases, websites and operating systems. We empirically validate that FDSP outperforms prior work that uses self-feedback from LLMs by up to 17.6% through our procedure that injects targeted, external feedback. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Kamel773/LLM-code-refine}
VillanDiffusion: A Unified Backdoor Attack Framework for Diffusion Models
Authors: Sheng-Yen Chou, Pin-Yu Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho
Date: 2023-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Denoising

Diffusion Models (DMs) are state-of-the-art generative models that learn a reversible corruption process from iterative noise addition and denoising. They are the backbone of many generative AI applications, such as text-to-image conditional generation. However, recent studies have shown that basic unconditional DMs (e.g., DDPM and DDIM) are vulnerable to backdoor injection, a type of output manipulation attack triggered by a maliciously embedded pattern at model input. This paper presents a unified backdoor attack framework (VillanDiffusion) to expand the current scope of backdoor analysis for DMs. Our framework covers mainstream unconditional and conditional DMs (denoising-based and score-based) and various training-free samplers for holistic evaluations. Experiments show that our unified framework facilitates the backdoor analysis of different DM configurations and provides new insights into caption-based backdoor attacks on DMs. Our code is available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/IBM/villandiffusion}
Understanding Deep Gradient Leakage via Inversion Influence Functions
Authors: Haobo Zhang, Junyuan Hong, Yuyang Deng, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Jiayu Zhou
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Deep Gradient Leakage (DGL) is a highly effective attack that recovers private training images from gradient vectors. This attack casts significant privacy challenges on distributed learning from clients with sensitive data, where clients are required to share gradients. Defending against such attacks requires but lacks an understanding of when and how privacy leakage happens, mostly because of the black-box nature of deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Inversion Influence Function (I$^2$F) that establishes a closed-form connection between the recovered images and the private gradients by implicitly solving the DGL problem. Compared to directly solving DGL, I$^2$F is scalable for analyzing deep networks, requiring only oracle access to gradients and Jacobian-vector products. We empirically demonstrate that I$^2$F effectively approximated the DGL generally on different model architectures, datasets, modalities, attack implementations, and perturbation-based defenses. With this novel tool, we provide insights into effective gradient perturbation directions, the unfairness of privacy protection, and privacy-preferred model initialization. Our codes are provided in https://github.com/illidanlab/inversion-influence-function.
What Can We Learn from Unlearnable Datasets?
Authors: Pedro Sandoval-Segura, Vasu Singla, Jonas Geiping, Micah Goldblum, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

In an era of widespread web scraping, unlearnable dataset methods have the potential to protect data privacy by preventing deep neural networks from generalizing. But in addition to a number of practical limitations that make their use unlikely, we make a number of findings that call into question their ability to safeguard data. First, it is widely believed that neural networks trained on unlearnable datasets only learn shortcuts, simpler rules that are not useful for generalization. In contrast, we find that networks actually can learn useful features that can be reweighed for high test performance, suggesting that image protection is not assured. Unlearnable datasets are also believed to induce learning shortcuts through linear separability of added perturbations. We provide a counterexample, demonstrating that linear separability of perturbations is not a necessary condition. To emphasize why linearly separable perturbations should not be relied upon, we propose an orthogonal projection attack which allows learning from unlearnable datasets published in ICML 2021 and ICLR 2023. Our proposed attack is significantly less complex than recently proposed techniques.
Anti-Sexism Alert System: Identification of Sexist Comments on Social Media Using AI Techniques
Authors: Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo, Ana Fernández Vilas, Mateo Ramos Merino, Sonia Valladares, Soledad Torres Guijarro, Manar Mohamed Hafez
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00

Social relationships in the digital sphere are becoming more usual and frequent, and they constitute a very important aspect for all of us. {Violent interactions in this sphere are very frequent, and have serious effects on the victims}. Within this global scenario, there is one kind of digital violence that is becoming really worrying: sexism against women. Sexist comments that are publicly posted in social media (newspaper comments, social networks, etc.), usually obtain a lot of attention and become viral, with consequent damage to the persons involved. In this paper, we introduce an anti-sexism alert system, based on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), that analyzes any public post, and decides if it could be considered a sexist comment or not. Additionally, this system also works on analyzing all the public comments linked to any multimedia content (piece of news, video, tweet, etc.) and decides, using a color-based system similar to traffic lights, if there is sexism in the global set of posts. We have created a labeled data set in Spanish, since the majority of studies focus on English, to train our system, which offers a very good performance after the validation experiments.
chatGPT for generating questions and assessments based on accreditations
Authors: Rania Anwar Aboalela
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00

This research aims to take advantage of artificial intelligence techniques in producing students assessment that is compatible with the different academic accreditations of the same program. The possibility of using generative artificial intelligence technology was studied to produce an academic accreditation compliant test the National Center for Academic Accreditation of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. A novel method was introduced to map the verbs used to create the questions introduced in the tests. The method allows a possibility of using the generative artificial intelligence technology to produce and check the validity of questions that measure educational outcomes. A questionnaire was distributed to ensure that the use of generative artificial intelligence to create exam questions is acceptable by the faculty members, as well as to ask about the acceptance of assistance in validating questions submitted by faculty members and amending them in accordance with academic accreditations. The questionnaire was distributed to faculty members of different majors in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias universities. one hundred twenty responses obtained with eight five percentile approval percentage for generate complete exam questions by generative artificial intelligence . Whereas ninety eight percentage was the approval percentage for editing and improving already existed questions.