All vehicles must follow the rules that govern traffic behavior, regardless of whether the vehicles are human-driven or Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Road signs indicate locally active rules, such as speed limits and requirements to yield or stop. Recent research has demonstrated attacks, such as adding stickers or projected colored patches to signs, that cause CAV misinterpretation, resulting in potential safety issues. Humans can see and potentially defend against these attacks. But humans can not detect what they can not observe. We have developed an effective physical-world attack that leverages the sensitivity of filterless image sensors and the properties of Infrared Laser Reflections (ILRs), which are invisible to humans. The attack is designed to affect CAV cameras and perception, undermining traffic sign recognition by inducing misclassification. In this work, we formulate the threat model and requirements for an ILR-based traffic sign perception attack to succeed. We evaluate the effectiveness of the ILR attack with real-world experiments against two major traffic sign recognition architectures on four IR-sensitive cameras. Our black-box optimization methodology allows the attack to achieve up to a 100% attack success rate in indoor, static scenarios and a >80.5% attack success rate in our outdoor, moving vehicle scenarios. We find the latest state-of-the-art certifiable defense is ineffective against ILR attacks as it mis-certifies >33.5% of cases. To address this, we propose a detection strategy based on the physical properties of IR laser reflections which can detect 96% of ILR attacks.
We address the growing apprehension that GNNs, in the absence of fairness constraints, might produce biased decisions that disproportionately affect underprivileged groups or individuals. Departing from previous work, we introduce for the first time a method for incorporating the Gini coefficient as a measure of fairness to be used within the GNN framework. Our proposal, GRAPHGINI, works with the two different goals of individual and group fairness in a single system, while maintaining high prediction accuracy. GRAPHGINI enforces individual fairness through learnable attention scores that help in aggregating more information through similar nodes. A heuristic-based maximum Nash social welfare constraint ensures the maximum possible group fairness. Both the individual fairness constraint and the group fairness constraint are stated in terms of a differentiable approximation of the Gini coefficient. This approximation is a contribution that is likely to be of interest even beyond the scope of the problem studied in this paper. Unlike other state-of-the-art, GRAPHGINI automatically balances all three optimization objectives (utility, individual, and group fairness) of the GNN and is free from any manual tuning of weight parameters. Extensive experimentation on real-world datasets showcases the efficacy of GRAPHGINI in making significant improvements in individual fairness compared to all currently available state-of-the-art methods while maintaining utility and group equality.
Cybersecurity is developing rapidly, and new methods of defence against attackers are appearing, such as Cyber Deception (CYDEC). CYDEC consists of deceiving the enemy who performs actions without realising that he/she is being deceived. This article proposes designing, implementing, and evaluating a deception mechanism based on the stealthy redirection of TCP communications to an on-demand honey server with the same characteristics as the victim asset, i.e., it is a clone. Such a mechanism ensures that the defender fools the attacker, thanks to stealth redirection. In this situation, the attacker will focus on attacking the honey server while enabling the recollection of relevant information to generate threat intelligence. The experiments in different scenarios show how the proposed solution can effectively redirect an attacker to a copied asset on demand, thus protecting the real asset. Finally, the results obtained by evaluating the latency times ensure that the redirection is undetectable by humans and very difficult to detect by a machine.
Motivated by the desire to explore the process of combining inductive and deductive reasoning, we conducted a systematic literature review of articles that investigate the integration of machine learning and ontologies. The objective was to identify diverse techniques that incorporate both inductive reasoning (performed by machine learning) and deductive reasoning (performed by ontologies) into artificial intelligence systems. Our review, which included the analysis of 128 studies, allowed us to identify three main categories of hybridization between machine learning and ontologies: learning-enhanced ontologies, semantic data mining, and learning and reasoning systems. We provide a comprehensive examination of all these categories, emphasizing the various machine learning algorithms utilized in the studies. Furthermore, we compared our classification with similar recent work in the field of hybrid AI and neuro-symbolic approaches.
Embeddings play a pivotal role in the efficacy of Large Language Models. They are the bedrock on which these models grasp contextual relationships and foster a more nuanced understanding of language and consequently perform remarkably on a plethora of complex tasks that require a fundamental understanding of human language. Given that these embeddings themselves often reflect or exhibit bias, it stands to reason that these models may also inadvertently learn this bias. In this work, we build on the seminal previous work and propose DeepSoftDebias, an algorithm that uses a neural network to perform `soft debiasing'. We exhaustively evaluate this algorithm across a variety of SOTA datasets, accuracy metrics, and challenging NLP tasks. We find that DeepSoftDebias outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods at reducing bias across gender, race, and religion.
Heuristics are crucial in SAT solvers, while no heuristic rules are suitable for all problem instances. Therefore, it typically requires to refine specific solvers for specific problem instances. In this context, we present AutoSAT, a novel framework for automatically optimizing heuristics in SAT solvers. AutoSAT is based on Large Large Models (LLMs) which is able to autonomously generate code, conduct evaluation, then utilize the feedback to further optimize heuristics, thereby reducing human intervention and enhancing solver capabilities. AutoSAT operates on a plug-and-play basis, eliminating the need for extensive preliminary setup and model training, and fosters a Chain of Thought collaborative process with fault-tolerance, ensuring robust heuristic optimization. Extensive experiments on a Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) solver demonstrates the overall superior performance of AutoSAT, especially in solving some specific SAT problem instances.
Susceptibility to misinformation describes the degree of belief in unverifiable claims, a latent aspect of individuals' mental processes that is not observable. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on self-reported beliefs, which can be subject to bias, expensive to collect, and challenging to scale for downstream applications. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a computational approach to model users' latent susceptibility levels. As shown in previous research, susceptibility is influenced by various factors (e.g., demographic factors, political ideology), and directly influences people's reposting behavior on social media. To represent the underlying mental process, our susceptibility modeling incorporates these factors as inputs, guided by the supervision of people's sharing behavior. Using COVID-19 as a testbed domain, our experiments demonstrate a significant alignment between the susceptibility scores estimated by our computational modeling and human judgments, confirming the effectiveness of this latent modeling approach. Furthermore, we apply our model to annotate susceptibility scores on a large-scale dataset and analyze the relationships between susceptibility with various factors. Our analysis reveals that political leanings and psychological factors exhibit varying degrees of association with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation.
While LLMs can provide reasoned explanations along with their answers, the nature and quality of those explanations are still poorly understood. In response, our goal is to define a detailed way of characterizing the explanation capabilities of modern models and to create a nuanced, interpretable explanation evaluation tool that can generate such characterizations automatically, without relying on expensive API calls or human annotations. Our approach is to (a) define the new task of explanation critiquing - identifying and categorizing any main flaw in an explanation and providing suggestions to address the flaw, (b) create a sizeable, human-verified dataset for this task, and (c) train an open-source, automatic critique model (called Digital Socrates) using this data. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate how Digital Socrates is useful for revealing insights about student models by examining their reasoning chains, and how it can provide high-quality, nuanced, automatic evaluation of those model explanations for the first time. Digital Socrates thus fills an important gap in evaluation tools for understanding and improving the explanation behavior of models.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.