A resilient Internet infrastructure is critical in our highly interconnected society. However, the Internet faces several vulnerabilities, ranging from natural disasters to human activities, that can impact the physical layer and, in turn, the higher network layers, such as IP links. In this paper, we introduce Xaminer, the first Internet cross-layer resilience analysis tool, to evaluate the interplay between physical- and network-layer failures. Using a cross-layer Internet map and a failure event model, Xaminer generates a risk profile encompassing a cross-layer impact report, critical infrastructure identification at each layer, and the discovery of trends and patterns under different failure event settings. Xaminer's key strengths lie in its adaptability to diverse disaster scenarios, the ability to assess risks at various granularities, and the capability to generate joint risk profiles for multiple events. We demonstrate Xaminer's capabilities in cross-layer analysis across a spectrum of disaster event models and regions, showcasing its potential role in facilitating well-informed decision-making for resilience planning and deployments.
There are still many challenges in Federated Learning (FL). First, during the model update process, the model parameters on the local user need to be sent to the server for aggregation. This involves the consumption of network bandwidth, especially when the number of users participating in FL is large. High communication costs may limit the application of FL in certain scenarios. Secondly, since users participating in FL usually have different data distributions, this heterogeneity of data may lead to poor model performance or even failure to converge. Third, privacy and security issues are also challenges that need to be addressed in FL. There is still a risk of information leakage during model aggregation. Malicious users may obtain sensitive information by analyzing communications during model updates or aggregation processes. To address these challenges, we propose HyperFedNet (HFN), an innovative approach that leverages hypernetwork. HFN introduces a paradigm shift in transmission aggregation within FL. Unlike traditional FL methods that transmit a large number of parameters from the main network, HFN reduces the communication burden and improves security by transmitting a compact set of hypernetwork parameters. After the parameters of the hypernetwork are deployed locally to the user, the local database features quantified by the embedding vector can be used as input, and parameters can be dynamically generated for the FL main network through user forward propagation. HFN efficiently reduces communication costs while improving accuracy. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that HFN outperforms traditional FL methods significantly. By seamlessly integrating this concept into the conventional FL algorithm, we achieve even more impressive results compared to the original approach.
Tool-augmented Large Language Models (TALM) are known to enhance the skillset of large language models (LLM), thereby, leading to their improved reasoning abilities across many tasks. While, TALMs have been successfully employed in different question-answering benchmarks, their efficacy on complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and the potential complimentary benefits offered by tools for knowledge retrieval and mathematical equation solving, are open research questions. In this work, we present MATHSENSEI, a tool-augmented large language model for mathematical reasoning. Augmented with tools for knowledge retrieval (Bing Web Search), program execution (Python), and symbolic equation solving (Wolfram-Alpha), we study the complimentary benefits of these tools through evaluations on mathematical reasoning datasets. We perform exhaustive ablations on MATH,a popular dataset for evaluating mathematical reasoning on diverse mathematical disciplines. We also conduct experiments involving well-known tool planners to study the impact of tool sequencing on the model performance. MATHSENSEI achieves 13.5% better accuracy over gpt-3.5-turbo with chain-of-thought on the MATH dataset. We further observe that TALMs are not as effective for simpler math word problems (in GSM-8k), and the benefit increases as the complexity and required knowledge increases (progressively over AQuA, MMLU-Math, and higher level complex questions in MATH). The code and data are available at //github.com/Debrup-61/MathSensei.
The development of artificial intelligence has significantly transformed people's lives. However, it has also posed a significant threat to privacy and security, with numerous instances of personal information being exposed online and reports of criminal attacks and theft. Consequently, the need to achieve intelligent protection of personal information through machine learning algorithms has become a paramount concern. Artificial intelligence leverages advanced algorithms and technologies to effectively encrypt and anonymize personal data, enabling valuable data analysis and utilization while safeguarding privacy. This paper focuses on personal data privacy protection and the promotion of anonymity as its core research objectives. It achieves personal data privacy protection and detection through the use of machine learning's differential privacy protection algorithm. The paper also addresses existing challenges in machine learning related to privacy and personal data protection, offers improvement suggestions, and analyzes factors impacting datasets to enable timely personal data privacy detection and protection.
We introduce GEM3D -- a new deep, topology-aware generative model of 3D shapes. The key ingredient of our method is a neural skeleton-based representation encoding information on both shape topology and geometry. Through a denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our method first generates skeleton-based representations following the Medial Axis Transform (MAT), then generates surfaces through a skeleton-driven neural implicit formulation. The neural implicit takes into account the topological and geometric information stored in the generated skeleton representations to yield surfaces that are more topologically and geometrically accurate compared to previous neural field formulations. We discuss applications of our method in shape synthesis and point cloud reconstruction tasks, and evaluate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate significantly more faithful surface reconstruction and diverse shape generation results compared to the state-of-the-art, also involving challenging scenarios of reconstructing and synthesizing structurally complex, high-genus shape surfaces from Thingi10K and ShapeNet.
Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One major limitation is the scarcity of datasets that provide labelled ambiguous questions along with a supporting corpus of documents and relevant clarifying questions. This work aims to tackle the challenge of generating relevant clarifying questions by taking into account the inherent ambiguities present in both user queries and documents. To achieve this, we propose PAQA, an extension to the existing AmbiNQ dataset, incorporating clarifying questions. We then evaluate various models and assess how passage retrieval impacts ambiguity detection and the generation of clarifying questions. By addressing this gap in conversational search systems, we aim to provide additional supervision to enhance their active participation in the information-seeking process and provide users with more accurate results.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown promise in generating realistic novel views from sparse scene images. However, existing NeRF approaches often encounter challenges due to the lack of explicit 3D supervision and imprecise camera poses, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose AltNeRF -- a novel framework designed to create resilient NeRF representations using self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SMDE) from monocular videos, without relying on known camera poses. SMDE in AltNeRF masterfully learns depth and pose priors to regulate NeRF training. The depth prior enriches NeRF's capacity for precise scene geometry depiction, while the pose prior provides a robust starting point for subsequent pose refinement. Moreover, we introduce an alternating algorithm that harmoniously melds NeRF outputs into SMDE through a consistence-driven mechanism, thus enhancing the integrity of depth priors. This alternation empowers AltNeRF to progressively refine NeRF representations, yielding the synthesis of realistic novel views. Extensive experiments showcase the compelling capabilities of AltNeRF in generating high-fidelity and robust novel views that closely resemble reality.
APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) with the characteristics of persistence, stealth, and diversity is one of the greatest threats against cyber-infrastructure. As a countermeasure, existing studies leverage provenance graphs to capture the complex relations between system entities in a host for effective APT detection. In addition to detecting single attack events as most existing work does, understanding the tactics / techniques (e.g., Kill-Chain, ATT&CK) applied to organize and accomplish the APT attack campaign is more important for security operations. Existing studies try to manually design a set of rules to map low-level system events to high-level APT tactics / techniques. However, the rule based methods are coarse-grained and lack generalization ability, thus they can only recognize APT tactics and cannot identify fine-grained APT techniques and mutant APT attacks. In this paper, we propose TREC, the first attempt to recognize APT tactics / techniques from provenance graphs by exploiting deep learning techniques. To address the "needle in a haystack" problem, TREC segments small and compact subgraphs covering individual APT technique instances from a large provenance graph based on a malicious node detection model and a subgraph sampling algorithm. To address the "training sample scarcity" problem, TREC trains the APT tactic / technique recognition model in a few-shot learning manner by adopting a Siamese neural network. We evaluate TREC based on a customized dataset collected and made public by our team. The experiment results show that TREC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in APT tactic recognition and TREC can also effectively identify APT techniques.
Critique ability are crucial in the scalable oversight and self-improvement of Large Language Models (LLMs). While many recent studies explore the critique ability of LLMs to judge and refine flaws in generations, how to comprehensively and reliably measure the critique abilities of LLMs is under-explored. This paper introduces CriticBench, a novel benchmark designed to comprehensively and reliably evaluate four key critique ability dimensions of LLMs: feedback, comparison, refinement and meta-feedback. CriticBench encompasses nine diverse tasks, each assessing the LLMs' ability to critique responses at varying levels of quality granularity. Our extensive evaluations of open-source and closed-source LLMs reveal intriguing relationships between the critique ability and tasks, response qualities, and model scales. Datasets, resources and evaluation toolkit for CriticBench will be publicly released at //github.com/open-compass/CriticBench.
Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of ProtGNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space. Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in ProtGNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the non-interpretable counterparts.
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from the popular FB15K-237 knowledge graph completion dataset by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and is a more difficult link prediction benchmark. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at //bit.ly/2EPbrJs.