In an era where biometric security serves as a keystone of modern identity verification systems, ensuring the authenticity of these biometric samples is paramount. Liveness detection, the capability to differentiate between genuine and spoofed biometric samples, stands at the forefront of this challenge. This research presents a comprehensive evaluation of liveness detection models, with a particular focus on their performance in cross-database scenarios, a test paradigm notorious for its complexity and real-world relevance. Our study commenced by meticulously assessing models on individual datasets, revealing the nuances in their performance metrics. Delving into metrics such as the Half Total Error Rate, False Acceptance Rate, and False Rejection Rate, we unearthed invaluable insights into the models' strengths and weaknesses. Crucially, our exploration of cross-database testing provided a unique perspective, highlighting the chasm between training on one dataset and deploying on another. Comparative analysis with extant methodologies, ranging from convolutional networks to more intricate strategies, enriched our understanding of the current landscape. The variance in performance, even among state-of-the-art models, underscored the inherent challenges in this domain. In essence, this paper serves as both a repository of findings and a clarion call for more nuanced, data-diverse, and adaptable approaches in biometric liveness detection. In the dynamic dance between authenticity and deception, our work offers a blueprint for navigating the evolving rhythms of biometric security.
Object rearrangement, a fundamental challenge in robotics, demands versatile strategies to handle diverse objects, configurations, and functional needs. To achieve this, the AI robot needs to learn functional rearrangement priors in order to specify precise goals that meet the functional requirements. Previous methods typically learn such priors from either laborious human annotations or manually designed heuristics, which limits scalability and generalization. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages large models to distill functional rearrangement priors. Specifically, our approach collects diverse arrangement examples using both LLMs and VLMs and then distills the examples into a diffusion model. During test time, the learned diffusion model is conditioned on the initial configuration and guides the positioning of objects to meet functional requirements. In this manner, we create a handshaking point that combines the strengths of conditional generative models and large models. Extensive experiments on multiple domains, including real-world scenarios, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating compatible goals for object rearrangement tasks, significantly outperforming baseline methods.
Formal methods for guaranteeing that a protocol satisfies a cryptographic security definition have advanced substantially, but such methods are still labor intensive and the need remains for an automated tool that can positively identify an insecure protocol. In this work, we demonstrate that property-based testing, "run it a bunch of times and see if it breaks", is effective for detecting security bugs in secure protocols. We specifically target Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), because formal methods targeting this security definition for bit-model implementations are particularly difficult. Using results from the literature for Probabilistic Programming Languages and statistical inference, we devise a test that can detect various flaws in a bit-level implementation of an MPC protocol. The test is grey-box; it requires only transcripts of randomness consumed by the protocol and of the inputs, outputs, and messages. It successfully detects several different mistakes and biases introduced into two different implementations of the classic GMW protocol. Applied to hundreds of randomly generated protocols, it identifies nearly all of them as insecure. We also include an analysis of the parameters of the test, and discussion of what makes detection of MPC (in)security difficult.
In Bayesian persuasion, an informed sender strategically discloses information to a receiver so as to persuade them to undertake desirable actions. Recently, a growing attention has been devoted to settings in which sender and receivers interact sequentially. Recently, Markov persuasion processes (MPPs) have been introduced to capture sequential scenarios where a sender faces a stream of myopic receivers in a Markovian environment. The MPPs studied so far in the literature suffer from issues that prevent them from being fully operational in practice, e.g., they assume that the sender knows receivers' rewards. We fix such issues by addressing MPPs where the sender has no knowledge about the environment. We design a learning algorithm for the sender, working with partial feedback. We prove that its regret with respect to an optimal information-disclosure policy grows sublinearly in the number of episodes, as it is the case for the loss in persuasiveness cumulated while learning. Moreover, we provide a lower bound for our setting matching the guarantees of our algorithm.
There has been an increasing interest in the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, the safety issues of their integration with a vision module, or vision language models (VLMs), remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel jailbreaking attack against VLMs, aiming to bypass their safety barrier when a user inputs harmful instructions. A scenario where our poisoned (image, text) data pairs are included in the training data is assumed. By replacing the original textual captions with malicious jailbreak prompts, our method can perform jailbreak attacks with the poisoned images. Moreover, we analyze the effect of poison ratios and positions of trainable parameters on our attack's success rate. For evaluation, we design two metrics to quantify the success rate and the stealthiness of our attack. Together with a list of curated harmful instructions, a benchmark for measuring attack efficacy is provided. We demonstrate the efficacy of our attack by comparing it with baseline methods.
Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: //github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over a wide spectrum of complex control tasks. Despite the encouraging results achieved, the deep neural network-based backbone is widely deemed as a black box that impedes practitioners to trust and employ trained agents in realistic scenarios where high security and reliability are essential. To alleviate this issue, a large volume of literature devoted to shedding light on the inner workings of the intelligent agents has been proposed, by constructing intrinsic interpretability or post-hoc explainability. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing works on eXplainable RL (XRL) and introduce a new taxonomy where prior works are clearly categorized into model-explaining, reward-explaining, state-explaining, and task-explaining methods. We also review and highlight RL methods that conversely leverage human knowledge to promote learning efficiency and final performance of agents while this kind of method is often ignored in XRL field. Some open challenges and opportunities in XRL are discussed. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization and better understanding of XRL and to motivate future research on more effective XRL solutions. Corresponding open source codes are collected and categorized at //github.com/Plankson/awesome-explainable-reinforcement-learning.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
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.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.