pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Research on the multi-stage impact of digital economy on rural revitalization in Hainan Province based on GPM model
Authors: Wenbo Lyu
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

The rapid development of the digital economy has had a profound impact on the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy. Based on this, this study takes Hainan Province as the research object to deeply explore the impact of digital economic development on rural revitalization. The study collected panel data from 2003 to 2022 to construct an evaluation index system for the digital economy and rural revitalization and used panel regression analysis and other methods to explore the promotion effect of the digital economy on rural revitalization. Research results show that the digital economy has a significant positive impact on rural revitalization, and this impact increases as the level of fiscal expenditure increases. The issuance of digital RMB has further exerted a regulatory effect and promoted the development of the digital economy and the process of rural revitalization. At the same time, the establishment of the Hainan Free Trade Port has also played a positive role in promoting the development of the digital economy and rural revitalization. In the prediction of the optimal strategy for rural revitalization based on the development levels of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries (Rate1, Rate2, and Rate3), it was found that rate1 can encourage Hainan Province to implement digital economic innovation, encourage rate3 to implement promotion behaviors, and increase rate2 can At the level of sustainable development when rate3 promotes rate2's digital economic innovation behavior, it can standardize rate2's production behavior to the greatest extent, accelerate the faster application of the digital economy to the rural revitalization industry, and promote the technological advancement of enterprises.
INSANet: INtra-INter Spectral Attention Network for Effective Feature Fusion of Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Authors: S. Lee, T. Kim, J. Shin, N. Kim, Y. Choi
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2024 2
Tasks: Multispectral Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection is a critical task for safety-critical systems, but detecting pedestrians is challenging in low-light and adverse weather conditions. Thermal images can be used to improve robustness by providing complementary information to RGB images. Previous studies have shown that multi-modal feature fusion using convolution operation can be effective, but such methods rely solely on local feature correlations, which can degrade the performance capabilities. To address this issue, we propose an attention-based novel fusion network, referred to as INSANet (INtra-INter Spectral Attention Network), that captures global intra- and inter-information. It consists of intra- and inter-spectral attention blocks that allow the model to learn mutual spectral relationships. Additionally, we identified an imbalance in the multispectral dataset caused by several factors and designed an augmentation strategy that mitigates concentrated distributions and enables the model to learn the diverse locations of pedestrians. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, which achieve state-of-the-art performance on the KAIST dataset and LLVIP dataset. Finally, we conduct a regional performance evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network in various regions.
LoTa-Bench: Benchmarking Language-oriented Task Planners for Embodied Agents
Authors: Jae-Woo Choi, Youngwoo Yoon, Hyobin Ong, Jaehong Kim, Minsu Jang
Date: 2024-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Model Selection, Task Planning

Large language models (LLMs) have recently received considerable attention as alternative solutions for task planning. However, comparing the performance of language-oriented task planners becomes difficult, and there exists a dearth of detailed exploration regarding the effects of various factors such as pre-trained model selection and prompt construction. To address this, we propose a benchmark system for automatically quantifying performance of task planning for home-service embodied agents. Task planners are tested on two pairs of datasets and simulators: 1) ALFRED and AI2-THOR, 2) an extension of Watch-And-Help and VirtualHome. Using the proposed benchmark system, we perform extensive experiments with LLMs and prompts, and explore several enhancements of the baseline planner. We expect that the proposed benchmark tool would accelerate the development of language-oriented task planners.
Large (and Deep) Factor Models
Authors: Bryan Kelly, Boris Kuznetsov, Semyon Malamud, Teng Andrea Xu
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Portfolio Optimization

We open up the black box behind Deep Learning for portfolio optimization and prove that a sufficiently wide and arbitrarily deep neural network (DNN) trained to maximize the Sharpe ratio of the Stochastic Discount Factor (SDF) is equivalent to a large factor model (LFM): A linear factor pricing model that uses many non-linear characteristics. The nature of these characteristics depends on the architecture of the DNN in an explicit, tractable fashion. This makes it possible to derive end-to-end trained DNN-based SDFs in closed form for the first time. We evaluate LFMs empirically and show how various architectural choices impact SDF performance. We document the virtue of depth complexity: With enough data, the out-of-sample performance of DNN-SDF is increasing in the NN depth, saturating at huge depths of around 100 hidden layers.
CoRe-GD: A Hierarchical Framework for Scalable Graph Visualization with GNNs
Authors: Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys, Robert Veres, Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Visualization, also known as Graph Drawing, aims to find geometric embeddings of graphs that optimize certain criteria. Stress is a widely used metric; stress is minimized when every pair of nodes is positioned at their shortest path distance. However, stress optimization presents computational challenges due to its inherent complexity and is usually solved using heuristics in practice. We introduce a scalable Graph Neural Network (GNN) based Graph Drawing framework with sub-quadratic runtime that can learn to optimize stress. Inspired by classical stress optimization techniques and force-directed layout algorithms, we create a coarsening hierarchy for the input graph. Beginning at the coarsest level, we iteratively refine and un-coarsen the layout, until we generate an embedding for the original graph. To enhance information propagation within the network, we propose a novel positional rewiring technique based on intermediate node positions. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that the framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while remaining scalable.
Towards the mathematical foundation of the minimum enclosing ball and related problems
Authors: Michael N. Vrahatis
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00

Theoretical background is provided towards the mathematical foundation of the minimum enclosing ball problem. This problem concerns the determination of the unique spherical surface of smallest radius enclosing a given bounded set in the d-dimensional Euclidean space. The study of several problems that are similar or related to the minimum enclosing ball problem has received a considerable impetus from the large amount of applications of these problems in various fields of science and technology. The proposed theoretical framework is based on several enclosing (covering) and partitioning (clustering) theorems and provides among others bounds and relations between the circumradius, inradius, diameter and width of a set. These enclosing and partitioning theorems are considered as cornerstones in the field that strongly influencing developments and generalizations to other spaces and non-Euclidean geometries.
Privacy Profiles for Private Selection
Authors: Antti Koskela, Rachel Redberg, Yu-Xiang Wang
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Private selection mechanisms (e.g., Report Noisy Max, Sparse Vector) are fundamental primitives of differentially private (DP) data analysis with wide applications to private query release, voting, and hyperparameter tuning. Recent work (Liu and Talwar, 2019; Papernot and Steinke, 2022) has made significant progress in both generalizing private selection mechanisms and tightening their privacy analysis using modern numerical privacy accounting tools, e.g., R\'enyi DP. But R\'enyi DP is known to be lossy when $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP is ultimately needed, and there is a trend to close the gap by directly handling privacy profiles, i.e., $\delta$ as a function of $\epsilon$ or its equivalent dual form known as $f$-DPs. In this paper, we work out an easy-to-use recipe that bounds the privacy profiles of ReportNoisyMax and PrivateTuning using the privacy profiles of the base algorithms they corral. Numerically, our approach improves over the RDP-based accounting in all regimes of interest and leads to substantial benefits in end-to-end private learning experiments. Our analysis also suggests new distributions, e.g., binomial distribution for randomizing the number of rounds that leads to more substantial improvements in certain regimes.
Impact of Dataset Properties on Membership Inference Vulnerability of Deep Transfer Learning
Authors: Marlon Tobaben, Hibiki Ito, Joonas Jälkö, Yuan He, Antti Honkela
Date: 2024-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack, Transfer Learning

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are used to test practical privacy of machine learning models. MIAs complement formal guarantees from differential privacy (DP) under a more realistic adversary model. We analyse MIA vulnerability of fine-tuned neural networks both empirically and theoretically, the latter using a simplified model of fine-tuning. We show that the vulnerability of non-DP models when measured as the attacker advantage at fixed false positive rate reduces according to a simple power law as the number of examples per class increases, even for the most vulnerable points, but the dataset size needed for adequate protection of the most vulnerable points is very large.
LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites
Authors: Richard Fang, Rohan Bindu, Akul Gupta, Qiusi Zhan, Daniel Kang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomously as agents. With the rise in capabilities of these agents, recent work has speculated on how LLM agents would affect cybersecurity. However, not much is known about the offensive capabilities of LLM agents. In this work, we show that LLM agents can autonomously hack websites, performing tasks as complex as blind database schema extraction and SQL injections without human feedback. Importantly, the agent does not need to know the vulnerability beforehand. This capability is uniquely enabled by frontier models that are highly capable of tool use and leveraging extended context. Namely, we show that GPT-4 is capable of such hacks, but existing open-source models are not. Finally, we show that GPT-4 is capable of autonomously finding vulnerabilities in websites in the wild. Our findings raise questions about the widespread deployment of LLMs.
Explainable Adversarial Learning Framework on Physical Layer Secret Keys Combating Malicious Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface
Authors: Zhuangkun Wei, Wenxiu Hu, Junqing Zhang, Weisi Guo, Julie McCann
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can both help and hinder the physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG) of communications systems. Whilst a legitimate RIS can yield beneficial impacts, including increased channel randomness to enhance PL-SKG, a malicious RIS can poison legitimate channels and crack almost all existing PL-SKGs. In this work, we propose an adversarial learning framework that addresses Man-in-the-middle RIS (MITM-RIS) eavesdropping which can exist between legitimate parties, namely Alice and Bob. First, the theoretical mutual information gap between legitimate pairs and MITM-RIS is deduced. From this, Alice and Bob leverage adversarial learning to learn a common feature space that assures no mutual information overlap with MITM-RIS. Next, to explain the trained legitimate common feature generator, we aid signal processing interpretation of black-box neural networks using a symbolic explainable AI (xAI) representation. These symbolic terms of dominant neurons aid the engineering of feature designs and the validation of the learned common feature space. Simulation results show that our proposed adversarial learning- and symbolic-based PL-SKGs can achieve high key agreement rates between legitimate users, and is further resistant to an MITM-RIS Eve with the full knowledge of legitimate feature generation (NNs or formulas). This therefore paves the way to secure wireless communications with untrusted reflective devices in future 6G.
Authentication and integrity of smartphone videos through multimedia container structure analysis
Authors: Carlos Quinto Huamán, Ana Lucila Sandoval Orozco, Luis Javier García Villalba
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00

Nowadays, mobile devices have become the natural substitute for the digital camera, as they capture everyday situations easily and quickly, encouraging users to express themselves through images and videos. These videos can be shared across different platforms exposing them to any kind of intentional manipulation by criminals who are aware of the weaknesses of forensic techniques to accuse an innocent person or exonerate a guilty person in a judicial process. Commonly, manufacturers do not comply 100% with the specifications of the standards for the creation of videos. Also, videos shared on social networks, and instant messaging applications go through filtering and compression processes to reduce their size, facilitate their transfer, and optimize storage on their platforms. The omission of specifications and results of transformations carried out by the platforms embed a features pattern in the multimedia container of the videos. These patterns make it possible to distinguish the brand of the device that generated the video, social network, and instant messaging application that was used for the transfer. Research in recent years has focused on the analysis of AVI containers and tiny video datasets. This work presents a novel technique to detect possible attacks against MP4, MOV, and 3GP format videos that affect their integrity and authenticity. The method is based on the analysis of the structure of video containers generated by mobile devices and their behavior when shared through social networks, instant messaging applications, or manipulated by editing programs. The objectives of the proposal are to verify the integrity of videos, identify the source of acquisition and distinguish between original and manipulated videos.
Shadowcast: Stealthy Data Poisoning Attacks Against Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yuancheng Xu, Jiarui Yao, Manli Shu, Yanchao Sun, Zichu Wu, Ning Yu, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Data Poisoning, Image Compression, Misinformation, Text Generation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, but their versatility raises security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs' susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduce Shadowcast, a stealthy data poisoning attack where poison samples are visually indistinguishable from benign images with matching texts. Shadowcast demonstrates effectiveness in two attack types. The first is a traditional Label Attack, tricking VLMs into misidentifying class labels, such as confusing Donald Trump for Joe Biden. The second is a novel Persuasion Attack, leveraging VLMs' text generation capabilities to craft persuasive and seemingly rational narratives for misinformation, such as portraying junk food as healthy. We show that Shadowcast effectively achieves the attacker's intentions using as few as 50 poison samples. Crucially, the poisoned samples demonstrate transferability across different VLM architectures, posing a significant concern in black-box settings. Moreover, Shadowcast remains potent under realistic conditions involving various text prompts, training data augmentation, and image compression techniques. This work reveals how poisoned VLMs can disseminate convincing yet deceptive misinformation to everyday, benign users, emphasizing the importance of data integrity for responsible VLM deployments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/VLM-Poisoning.
Adversarial Text Purification: A Large Language Model Approach for Defense
Authors: Raha Moraffah, Shubh Khandelwal, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Huan Liu
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Purification, Adversarial Text, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering

Adversarial purification is a defense mechanism for safeguarding classifiers against adversarial attacks without knowing the type of attacks or training of the classifier. These techniques characterize and eliminate adversarial perturbations from the attacked inputs, aiming to restore purified samples that retain similarity to the initially attacked ones and are correctly classified by the classifier. Due to the inherent challenges associated with characterizing noise perturbations for discrete inputs, adversarial text purification has been relatively unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of adversarial purification methods in defending text classifiers. We propose a novel adversarial text purification that harnesses the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to purify adversarial text without the need to explicitly characterize the discrete noise perturbations. We utilize prompt engineering to exploit LLMs for recovering the purified examples for given adversarial examples such that they are semantically similar and correctly classified. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable performance over various classifiers, improving their accuracy under the attack by over 65% on average.
A philosophical and ontological perspective on Artificial General Intelligence and the Metaverse
Authors: Martin Schmalzried
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00

This paper leverages various philosophical and ontological frameworks to explore the concept of embodied artificial general intelligence (AGI), its relationship to human consciousness, and the key role of the metaverse in facilitating this relationship. Several theoretical frameworks underpin this exploration, such as embodied cognition, Michael Levin's computational boundary of a "Self," and Donald D. Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception, which lead to considering human perceived outer reality as a symbolic representation of alternate inner states of being, and where AGI could embody a different form of consciousness with a larger computational boundary. The paper further discusses the necessary architecture for the emergence of an embodied AGI, how to calibrate an AGI's symbolic interface, and the key role played by the Metaverse, decentralized systems and open-source blockchain technology. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of achieving a certain degree of harmony in human relations and recognizing the interconnectedness of humanity at a global level, as key prerequisites for the emergence of a stable embodied AGI.
Conversational Crowdsensing: A Parallel Intelligence Powered Novel Sensing Approach
Authors: Zhengqiu Zhu, Yong Zhao, Bin Chen, Sihang Qiu, Kai Xu, Quanjun Yin, Jincai Huang, Zhong Liu, Fei-Yue Wang
Date: 2024-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The transition from CPS-based Industry 4.0 to CPSS-based Industry 5.0 brings new requirements and opportunities to current sensing approaches, especially in light of recent progress in Chatbots and Large Language Models (LLMs). Therefore, the advancement of parallel intelligence-powered Crowdsensing Intelligence (CSI) is witnessed, which is currently advancing towards linguistic intelligence. In this paper, we propose a novel sensing paradigm, namely conversational crowdsensing, for Industry 5.0. It can alleviate workload and professional requirements of individuals and promote the organization and operation of diverse workforce, thereby facilitating faster response and wider popularization of crowdsensing systems. Specifically, we design the architecture of conversational crowdsensing to effectively organize three types of participants (biological, robotic, and digital) from diverse communities. Through three levels of effective conversation (i.e., inter-human, human-AI, and inter-AI), complex interactions and service functionalities of different workers can be achieved to accomplish various tasks across three sensing phases (i.e., requesting, scheduling, and executing). Moreover, we explore the foundational technologies for realizing conversational crowdsensing, encompassing LLM-based multi-agent systems, scenarios engineering and conversational human-AI cooperation. Finally, we present potential industrial applications of conversational crowdsensing and discuss its implications. We envision that conversations in natural language will become the primary communication channel during crowdsensing process, enabling richer information exchange and cooperative problem-solving among humans, robots, and AI.
A Survey on Large Language Model Hallucination via a Creativity Perspective
Authors: Xuhui Jiang, Yuxing Tian, Fengrui Hua, Chengjin Xu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Jian Guo
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Survey

Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) are always seen as limitations. However, could they also be a source of creativity? This survey explores this possibility, suggesting that hallucinations may contribute to LLM application by fostering creativity. This survey begins with a review of the taxonomy of hallucinations and their negative impact on LLM reliability in critical applications. Then, through historical examples and recent relevant theories, the survey explores the potential creative benefits of hallucinations in LLMs. To elucidate the value and evaluation criteria of this connection, we delve into the definitions and assessment methods of creativity. Following the framework of divergent and convergent thinking phases, the survey systematically reviews the literature on transforming and harnessing hallucinations for creativity in LLMs. Finally, the survey discusses future research directions, emphasizing the need to further explore and refine the application of hallucinations in creative processes within LLMs.
Rate-Quality or Energy-Quality Pareto Fronts for Adaptive Video Streaming?
Authors: Angeliki Katsenou, Xinyi Wang, Daniel Schien, David Bull
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00

Adaptive video streaming is a key enabler for optimising the delivery of offline encoded video content. The research focus to date has been on optimisation, based solely on rate-quality curves. This paper adds an additional dimension, the energy expenditure, and explores construction of bitrate ladders based on decoding energy-quality curves rather than the conventional rate-quality curves. Pareto fronts are extracted from the rate-quality and energy-quality spaces to select optimal points. Bitrate ladders are constructed from these points using conventional rate-based rules together with a novel quality-based approach. Evaluation on a subset of YouTube-UGC videos encoded with x.265 shows that the energy-quality ladders reduce energy requirements by 28-31% on average at the cost of slightly higher bitrates. The results indicate that optimising based on energy-quality curves rather than rate-quality curves and using quality levels to create the rungs could potentially improve energy efficiency for a comparable quality of experience.