pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks on Point Clouds Guided by Point-to-Surface Field
Authors: Keke Tang, Weiyao Ke, Weilong Peng, Xiaofei Wang, Ziyong Du, Zhize Wu, Peican Zhu, Zhihong Tian
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Attribute, Denoising

Adversarial attacks on point clouds are crucial for assessing and improving the adversarial robustness of 3D deep learning models. Traditional solutions strictly limit point displacement during attacks, making it challenging to balance imperceptibility with adversarial effectiveness. In this paper, we attribute the inadequate imperceptibility of adversarial attacks on point clouds to deviations from the underlying surface. To address this, we introduce a novel point-to-surface (P2S) field that adjusts adversarial perturbation directions by dragging points back to their original underlying surface. Specifically, we use a denoising network to learn the gradient field of the logarithmic density function encoding the shape's surface, and apply a distance-aware adjustment to perturbation directions during attacks, thereby enhancing imperceptibility. Extensive experiments show that adversarial attacks guided by our P2S field are more imperceptible, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Complement or substitute? How AI increases the demand for human skills
Authors: Elina Mäkelä, Fabian Stephany
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

This paper examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) acts as a substitute or complement to human labour, drawing on 12 million online job vacancies from the United States spanning 2018-2023. We adopt a two-pronged approach: first, analysing "internal effects" within roles explicitly requiring AI, and second, investigating "external effects" that arise when industries, occupations, and regions experience increases in AI demand. Our focus centres on whether complementary skills-such as digital literacy, teamwork, resilience, agility, or analytical thinking-become more prevalent and valuable as AI adoption grows. Results show that AI-focused roles are nearly twice as likely to require skills like resilience, agility, or analytical thinking compared to non-AI roles. Furthermore, these skills command a significant wage premium; data scientists, for instance, are offered 5-10% higher salaries if they also possess resilience or ethics capabilities. We observe positive spillover effects: a doubling of AI-specific demand across industries correlates with a 5% increase in demand for complementary skills, even outside AI-related roles. Conversely, tasks vulnerable to AI substitution, such as basic data skills or translation, exhibit modest declines in demand. However, the external effect is clearly net positive: Complementary effects are up to 1.7x larger than substitution effects. These results are consistent across economies, including the United Kingdom and Australia. Our findings highlight the necessity of reskilling workers in areas where human expertise remains increasingly valuable and ensuring workers can effectively complement and leverage emerging AI technologies.
Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Networks Through Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Longwei Wang, Navid Nayyem, Abdullah Rakin
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Contrastive Learning

Adversarial attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of convolutional neural networks by introducing imperceptible perturbations that lead to misclassifications, exposing weaknesses in feature representations and decision boundaries. This paper presents a novel framework combining supervised contrastive learning and margin-based contrastive loss to enhance adversarial robustness. Supervised contrastive learning improves the structure of the feature space by clustering embeddings of samples within the same class and separating those from different classes. Margin-based contrastive loss, inspired by support vector machines, enforces explicit constraints to create robust decision boundaries with well-defined margins. Experiments on the CIFAR-100 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone demonstrate robustness performance improvements in adversarial accuracy under Fast Gradient Sign Method attacks.
Detection and classification of DDoS flooding attacks by machine learning method
Authors: Dmytro Tymoshchuk, Oleh Yasniy, Mykola Mytnyk, Nataliya Zagorodna, Vitaliy Tymoshchuk
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00

This study focuses on a method for detecting and classifying distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, such as SYN Flooding, ACK Flooding, HTTP Flooding, and UDP Flooding, using neural networks. Machine learning, particularly neural networks, is highly effective in detecting malicious traffic. A dataset containing normal traffic and various DDoS attacks was used to train a neural network model with a 24-106-5 architecture. The model achieved high Accuracy (99.35%), Precision (99.32%), Recall (99.54%), and F-score (0.99) in the classification task. All major attack types were correctly identified. The model was also further tested in the lab using virtual infrastructures to generate normal and DDoS traffic. The results showed that the model can accurately classify attacks under near-real-world conditions, demonstrating 95.05% accuracy and balanced F-score scores for all attack types. This confirms that neural networks are an effective tool for detecting DDoS attacks in modern information security systems.
Adaptive Context-Aware Multi-Path Transmission Control for VR/AR Content: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Shakil Ahmed, Saifur Rahman Sabuj, Ashfaq Khokhar
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper introduces the Adaptive Context-Aware Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol (ACMPTCP), an efficient approach designed to optimize the performance of Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) for data-intensive applications such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) streaming. ACMPTCP addresses the limitations of conventional MPTCP by leveraging deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for agile end-to-end path management and optimal bandwidth allocation, facilitating path realignment across diverse network environments.
Can Large Language Models Adapt to Other Agents In-Context?
Authors: Matthew Riemer, Zahra Ashktorab, Djallel Bouneffouf, Payel Das, Miao Liu, Justin D. Weisz, Murray Campbell
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

As the research community aims to build better AI assistants that are more dynamic and personalized to the diversity of humans that they interact with, there is increased interest in evaluating the theory of mind capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, several recent studies suggest that LLM theory of mind capabilities are quite impressive, approximating human-level performance. Our paper aims to rebuke this narrative and argues instead that past studies were not directly measuring agent performance, potentially leading to findings that are illusory in nature as a result. We draw a strong distinction between what we call literal theory of mind i.e. measuring the agent's ability to predict the behavior of others and functional theory of mind i.e. adapting to agents in-context based on a rational response to predictions of their behavior. We find that top performing open source LLMs may display strong capabilities in literal theory of mind, depending on how they are prompted, but seem to struggle with functional theory of mind -- even when partner policies are exceedingly simple. Our work serves to highlight the double sided nature of inductive bias in LLMs when adapting to new situations. While this bias can lead to strong performance over limited horizons, it often hinders convergence to optimal long-term behavior.
Injecting Bias into Text Classification Models using Backdoor Attacks
Authors: A. Dilara Yavuz, M. Emre Gursoy
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, text-classification, Text Classification

The rapid growth of natural language processing (NLP) and pre-trained language models have enabled accurate text classification in a variety of settings. However, text classification models are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an attacker embeds a trigger into the victim model to make the model predict attacker-desired labels in targeted scenarios. In this paper, we propose to utilize backdoor attacks for a new purpose: bias injection. We develop a backdoor attack in which a subset of the training dataset is poisoned to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment. We execute our attack on two popular text classification datasets (IMDb and SST) and seven different models ranging from traditional Doc2Vec-based models to LSTM networks and modern transformer-based BERT and RoBERTa models. Our results show that the reduction in backdoored models' benign classification accuracy is limited, implying that our attacks remain stealthy, whereas the models successfully learn to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment (100% attack success rate with >= 3% poison rate). Attacks on BERT and RoBERTa are particularly more stealthy and effective, demonstrating an increased risk of using modern and larger models. We also measure the generalizability of our bias injection by proposing two metrics: (i) U-BBSR which uses previously unseen words when measuring attack success, and (ii) P-BBSR which measures attack success using paraphrased test samples. U-BBSR and P-BBSR results show that the bias injected by our attack can go beyond memorizing a trigger phrase.
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis
Authors: Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Synthetic Data Generation

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. Despite their utility in advancing digital automation, a critical bottleneck persists: collecting high-quality trajectory data for training. Common practices for collecting such data rely on human supervision or synthetic data generation through executing pre-defined tasks, which are either resource-intensive or unable to guarantee data quality. Moreover, these methods suffer from limited data diversity and significant gaps between synthetic data and real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose OS-Genesis, a novel GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverses the conventional trajectory collection process. Instead of relying on pre-defined tasks, OS-Genesis enables agents first to perceive environments and perform step-wise interactions, then retrospectively derive high-quality tasks to enable trajectory-level exploration. A trajectory reward model is then employed to ensure the quality of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with OS-Genesis significantly improves their performance on highly challenging online benchmarks. In-depth analysis further validates OS-Genesis's efficiency and its superior data quality and diversity compared to existing synthesis methods. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Genesis-Home/.
Improving Integrated Gradient-based Transferable Adversarial Examples by Refining the Integration Path
Authors: Yuchen Ren, Zhengyu Zhao, Chenhao Lin, Bo Yang, Lu Zhou, Zhe Liu, Chao Shen
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Transferable adversarial examples are known to cause threats in practical, black-box attack scenarios. A notable approach to improving transferability is using integrated gradients (IG), originally developed for model interpretability. In this paper, we find that existing IG-based attacks have limited transferability due to their naive adoption of IG in model interpretability. To address this limitation, we focus on the IG integration path and refine it in three aspects: multiplicity, monotonicity, and diversity, supported by theoretical analyses. We propose the Multiple Monotonic Diversified Integrated Gradients (MuMoDIG) attack, which can generate highly transferable adversarial examples on different CNN and ViT models and defenses. Experiments validate that MuMoDIG outperforms the latest IG-based attack by up to 37.3\% and other state-of-the-art attacks by 8.4\%. In general, our study reveals that migrating established techniques to improve transferability may require non-trivial efforts. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/RYC-98/MuMoDIG}.
SurvAttack: Black-Box Attack On Survival Models through Ontology-Informed EHR Perturbation
Authors: Mohsen Nayebi Kerdabadi, Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Bin Liu, Mei Liu, Zijun Yao
Date: 2024-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, counterfactual, Survival Analysis

Survival analysis (SA) models have been widely studied in mining electronic health records (EHRs), particularly in forecasting the risk of critical conditions for prioritizing high-risk patients. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks is much less explored in the literature. Developing black-box perturbation algorithms and evaluating their impact on state-of-the-art survival models brings two benefits to medical applications. First, it can effectively evaluate the robustness of models in pre-deployment testing. Also, exploring how subtle perturbations would result in significantly different outcomes can provide counterfactual insights into the clinical interpretation of model prediction. In this work, we introduce SurvAttack, a novel black-box adversarial attack framework leveraging subtle clinically compatible, and semantically consistent perturbations on longitudinal EHRs to degrade survival models' predictive performance. We specifically develop a greedy algorithm to manipulate medical codes with various adversarial actions throughout a patient's medical history. Then, these adversarial actions are prioritized using a composite scoring strategy based on multi-aspect perturbation quality, including saliency, perturbation stealthiness, and clinical meaningfulness. The proposed adversarial EHR perturbation algorithm is then used in an efficient SA-specific strategy to attack a survival model when estimating the temporal ranking of survival urgency for patients. To demonstrate the significance of our work, we conduct extensive experiments, including baseline comparisons, explainability analysis, and case studies. The experimental results affirm our research's effectiveness in illustrating the vulnerabilities of patient survival models, model interpretation, and ultimately contributing to healthcare quality.
Text2Insight: Transform natural language text into insights seamlessly using multi-model architecture
Authors: Pradeep Sain
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Question Answering

The growing demand for dynamic, user-centric data analysis and visualization is evident across domains like healthcare, finance, and research. Traditional visualization tools often fail to meet individual user needs due to their static and predefined nature. To address this gap, Text2Insight is introduced as an innovative solution that delivers customized data analysis and visualizations based on user-defined natural language requirements. Leveraging a multi-model architecture, Text2Insight transforms user inputs into actionable insights and dynamic visualizations. The methodology begins with analyzing the input dataset to extract structural details such as columns and values. A pre-trained Llama3 model converts the user's natural language query into an SQL query, which is further refined using a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model for accuracy. A chart predictor determines the most suitable visualization type, while the Llama3 model generates insights based on the SQL query's results. The output is a user-friendly and visually informative chart. To enhance analysis capabilities, the system integrates a question-answering model and a predictive model using the BERT framework. These models provide insights into historical data and predict future trends. Performance evaluation of Text2Insight demonstrates its effectiveness, achieving high accuracy (99%), precision (100%), recall (99%), and F1-score (99%), with a BLEU score of 0.5. The question-answering model attained an accuracy of 89% and the predictive model achieved 70% accuracy. These results validate Text2Insight as a robust and viable solution for transforming natural language text into dynamic, user-specific data analysis and visualizations.
Toward Adaptive Reasoning in Large Language Models with Thought Rollback
Authors: Sijia Chen, Baochun Li
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or acyclic-directed graphs. Consequently, the resulting inflexible and forward-only reasoning may not address challenging tasks and fail when the LLM frequently gives false responses, i.e., ``hallucinations''. This paper proposes a new reasoning framework, called Thought Rollback (TR), allowing LLMs to adaptively build thought structure while maintaining effective reasoning toward problem-solving under ``hallucinations''. The core mechanism of TR is rolling back thoughts, which allows LLMs to perform error analysis on thoughts, and thus roll back to any previously mistaken thought for revision. Subsequently, by including such trial-and-error in the prompt to guide the LLM, each rollback leads to one more reliable reasoning path. Therefore, starting with a simple prompt without human annotations, LLM with TR adaptively and gradually explores thoughts for a correct solution. Comprehensive experiments on mathematical problems and multi-task reasoning demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of TR in terms of problem-solving rate and interaction cost. For instance, the solving rate of GPT-4 with TR outperforms the current best by $9\%$ on the MATH dataset.
Interplay of ISMS and AIMS in context of the EU AI Act
Authors: Jordan Pötsch
Date: 2024-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The EU AI Act (AIA) mandates the implementation of a risk management system (RMS) and a quality management system (QMS) for high-risk AI systems. The ISO/IEC 42001 standard provides a foundation for fulfilling these requirements but does not cover all EU-specific regulatory stipulations. To enhance the implementation of the AIA in Germany, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) could introduce the national standard BSI 200-5, which specifies AIA requirements and integrates existing ISMS standards, such as ISO/IEC 27001. This paper examines the interfaces between an information security management system (ISMS) and an AI management system (AIMS), demonstrating that incorporating existing ISMS controls with specific AI extensions presents an effective strategy for complying with Article 15 of the AIA. Four new AI modules are introduced, proposed for inclusion in the BSI IT Grundschutz framework to comprehensively ensure the security of AI systems. Additionally, an approach for adapting BSI's qualification and certification systems is outlined to ensure that expertise in secure AI handling is continuously developed. Finally, the paper discusses how the BSI could bridge international standards and the specific requirements of the AIA through the nationalization of ISO/IEC 42001, creating synergies and bolstering the competitiveness of the German AI landscape.
An Integrated Optimization and Deep Learning Pipeline for Predicting Live Birth Success in IVF Using Feature Optimization and Transformer-Based Models
Authors: Arezoo Borji, Hossam Haick, Birgit Pohn, Antonia Graf, Jana Zakall, S M Ragib Shahriar Islam, Gernot Kronreif, Daniel Kovatchki, Heinz Strohmer, Sepideh Hatamikia
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a widely utilized assisted reproductive technology, yet predicting its success remains challenging due to the multifaceted interplay of clinical, demographic, and procedural factors. This study develops a robust artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline aimed at predicting live birth outcomes in IVF treatments. The pipeline uses anonymized data from 2010 to 2018, obtained from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA). We evaluated the prediction performance of live birth success as a binary outcome (success/failure) by integrating different feature selection methods, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), with different traditional machine learning-based classifiers including random forest (RF) and decision tree, as well as deep learning-based classifiers including custom transformer-based model and a tab transformer model with an attention mechanism. Our research demonstrated that the best performance was achieved by combining PSO for feature selection with the TabTransformer-based deep learning model, yielding an accuracy of 99.50% and an AUC of 99.96%, highlighting its significant performance to predict live births. This study establishes a highly accurate AI pipeline for predicting live birth outcomes in IVF, demonstrating its potential to enhance personalized fertility treatments.
A Review on the Integration of Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging in IVF Ovarian Stimulation
Authors: Jana Zakall, Birgit Pohn, Antonia Graf, Daniel Kovatchki, Arezoo Borji, Ragib Shahriar Islam, Hossam Haick, Heinz Strohmer, Sepideh Hatamikia
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool to enhance decision-making and optimize treatment protocols in in vitro fertilization (IVF). In particular, AI shows significant promise in supporting decision-making during the ovarian stimulation phase of the IVF process. This review evaluates studies focused on the applications of AI combined with medical imaging in ovarian stimulation, examining methodologies, outcomes, and current limitations. Our analysis of 13 studies on this topic reveals that, reveal that while AI algorithms demonstrated notable potential in predicting optimal hormonal dosages, trigger timing, and oocyte retrieval outcomes, the medical imaging data utilized predominantly came from two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound which mainly involved basic quantifications, such as follicle size and number, with limited use of direct feature extraction or advanced image analysis techniques. This points to an underexplored opportunity where advanced image analysis approaches, such as deep learning, and more diverse imaging modalities, like three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound, could unlock deeper insights. Additionally, the lack of explainable AI (XAI) in most studies raises concerns about the transparency and traceability of AI-driven decisions - key factors for clinical adoption and trust. Furthermore, many studies relied on single-center designs and small datasets, which limit the generalizability of their findings. This review highlights the need for integrating advanced imaging analysis techniques with explainable AI methodologies, as well as the importance of leveraging multicenter collaborations and larger datasets. Addressing these gaps has the potential to enhance ovarian stimulation management, paving the way for efficient, personalized, and data-driven treatment pathways that improve IVF outcomes.