Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. However, despite the increasing importance of startups in the economy, few scientific studies attempt to address software engineering issues, especially for early-stage startups. If anything, startups need engineering practices of the same level or better than those of larger companies, as their time and resources are more scarce, and one failed project can put them out of business. In this study we aim to improve understanding of the software development strategies employed by startups. We performed this state-of-practice investigation using a grounded theory approach. We packaged the results in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible. This strategy allows startups to verify product and market fit, and to adjust the product trajectory according to early collected user feedback. The need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities, is counterbalanced by the need to restructure the product before targeting further growth. The resulting implications of the GSM outline challenges and gaps, pointing out opportunities for future research to develop and validate engineering practices in the startup context.
Threat hunting is a proactive methodology for exploring, detecting and mitigating cyberattacks within complex environments. As opposed to conventional detection systems, threat hunting strategies assume adversaries have infiltrated the system; as a result they proactively search out any unusual patterns or activities which might indicate intrusion attempts. Historically, this endeavour has been pursued using three investigation methodologies: (1) Hypothesis-Driven Investigations; (2) Indicator of Compromise (IOC); and (3) High-level machine learning analysis-based approaches. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel machine learning paradigm known as Threat Trekker. This proposal utilizes connectors to feed data directly into an event streaming channel for processing by the algorithm and provide feedback back into its host network. Conclusions drawn from these experiments clearly establish the efficacy of employing machine learning for classifying more subtle attacks.
Neural Combinatorial Optimization has been researched actively in the last eight years. Even though many of the proposed Machine Learning based approaches are compared on the same datasets, the evaluation protocol exhibits essential flaws and the selection of baselines often neglects State-of-the-Art Operations Research approaches. To improve on both of these shortcomings, we propose the Routing Arena, a benchmark suite for Routing Problems that provides a seamless integration of consistent evaluation and the provision of baselines and benchmarks prevalent in the Machine Learning- and Operations Research field. The proposed evaluation protocol considers the two most important evaluation cases for different applications: First, the solution quality for an a priori fixed time budget and secondly the anytime performance of the respective methods. By setting the solution trajectory in perspective to a Best Known Solution and a Base Solver's solutions trajectory, we furthermore propose the Weighted Relative Average Performance (WRAP), a novel evaluation metric that quantifies the often claimed runtime efficiency of Neural Routing Solvers. A comprehensive first experimental evaluation demonstrates that the most recent Operations Research solvers generate state-of-the-art results in terms of solution quality and runtime efficiency when it comes to the vehicle routing problem. Nevertheless, some findings highlight the advantages of neural approaches and motivate a shift in how neural solvers should be conceptualized.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in reasoning tasks with the development of prompting methods. However, existing prompting approaches cannot reuse insights of solving similar problems and suffer from accumulated errors in multi-step reasoning, since they prompt LLMs to reason \textit{from scratch}. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{\textit{Thought Propagation} (TP)}, which explores the analogous problems and leverages their solutions to enhance the complex reasoning ability of LLMs. These analogous problems are related to the input one, with reusable solutions and problem-solving strategies. Thus, it is promising to propagate insights of solving previous analogous problems to inspire new problem-solving. To achieve this, TP first prompts LLMs to propose and solve a set of analogous problems that are related to the input one. Then, TP reuses the results of analogous problems to directly yield a new solution or derive a knowledge-intensive plan for execution to amend the initial solution obtained from scratch. TP is compatible with existing prompting approaches, allowing plug-and-play generalization and enhancement in a wide range of tasks without much labor in task-specific prompt engineering. Experiments across three challenging tasks demonstrate TP enjoys a substantial improvement over the baselines by an average of 12\% absolute increase in finding the optimal solutions in Shortest-path Reasoning, 13\% improvement of human preference in Creative Writing, and 15\% enhancement in the task completion rate of LLM-Agent Planning.
Great successes have been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models. Open-source preference datasets and reward models have enabled wider experimentation beyond generic chat settings, particularly to make systems more "helpful" for tasks like web question answering, summarization, and multi-turn dialogue. When optimizing for helpfulness, RLHF has been consistently observed to drive models to produce longer outputs. This paper demonstrates that optimizing for response length is a significant factor behind RLHF's reported improvements in these settings. First, we study the relationship between reward and length for reward models trained on three open-source preference datasets for helpfulness. Here, length correlates strongly with reward, and improvements in reward score are driven in large part by shifting the distribution over output lengths. We then explore interventions during both RL and reward model learning to see if we can achieve the same downstream improvements as RLHF without increasing length. While our interventions mitigate length increases, they aren't uniformly effective across settings. Furthermore, we find that even running RLHF with a reward based solely on length can reproduce most of the downstream improvements over the initial policy model, showing that reward models in these settings have a long way to go.
Internet of Things devices can now be found everywhere, including in our households in the form of Smart Home networks. Despite their ubiquity, their security is unsatisfactory, as demonstrated by recent attacks. The IETF's MUD standard has as goal to simplify and automate the secure deployment of end devices in networks. A MUD file contains a device specific description of allowed network activities (e.g., allowed IP ports or host addresses) and can be used to configure for example a firewall. A major weakness of MUD is that it is not expressive enough to describe traffic patterns representing device interactions, which often occur in modern Smart Home platforms. In this article, we present a new language for describing such traffic patterns. The language allows writing device profiles that are more expressive than MUD files and take into account the interdependencies of traffic connections. We show how these profiles can be translated to efficient code for a lightweight firewall leveraging NFTables to block non-conforming traffic. We evaluate our approach on traffic generated by various Smart Home devices, and show that our system can accurately block unwanted traffic while inducing negligible latency.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being enhanced with the ability to use tools and to process multiple modalities. These new capabilities bring new benefits and also new security risks. In this work, we show that an attacker can use visual adversarial examples to cause attacker-desired tool usage. For example, the attacker could cause a victim LLM to delete calendar events, leak private conversations and book hotels. Different from prior work, our attacks can affect the confidentiality and integrity of user resources connected to the LLM while being stealthy and generalizable to multiple input prompts. We construct these attacks using gradient-based adversarial training and characterize performance along multiple dimensions. We find that our adversarial images can manipulate the LLM to invoke tools following real-world syntax almost always (~98%) while maintaining high similarity to clean images (~0.9 SSIM). Furthermore, using human scoring and automated metrics, we find that the attacks do not noticeably affect the conversation (and its semantics) between the user and the LLM.
By providing personalized suggestions to users, recommender systems have become essential to numerous online platforms. Collaborative filtering, particularly graph-based approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have demonstrated great results in terms of recommendation accuracy. However, accuracy may not always be the most important criterion for evaluating recommender systems' performance, since beyond-accuracy aspects such as recommendation diversity, serendipity, and fairness can strongly influence user engagement and satisfaction. This review paper focuses on addressing these dimensions in GNN-based recommender systems, going beyond the conventional accuracy-centric perspective. We begin by reviewing recent developments in approaches that improve not only the accuracy-diversity trade-off but also promote serendipity and fairness in GNN-based recommender systems. We discuss different stages of model development including data preprocessing, graph construction, embedding initialization, propagation layers, embedding fusion, score computation, and training methodologies. Furthermore, we present a look into the practical difficulties encountered in assuring diversity, serendipity, and fairness, while retaining high accuracy. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions for developing more robust GNN-based recommender systems that go beyond the unidimensional perspective of focusing solely on accuracy. This review aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of the multifaceted issues that arise when designing GNN-based recommender systems, setting our work apart by offering a comprehensive exploration of beyond-accuracy dimensions.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
In recent years, mobile devices have gained increasingly development with stronger computation capability and larger storage. Some of the computation-intensive machine learning and deep learning tasks can now be run on mobile devices. To take advantage of the resources available on mobile devices and preserve users' privacy, the idea of mobile distributed machine learning is proposed. It uses local hardware resources and local data to solve machine learning sub-problems on mobile devices, and only uploads computation results instead of original data to contribute to the optimization of the global model. This architecture can not only relieve computation and storage burden on servers, but also protect the users' sensitive information. Another benefit is the bandwidth reduction, as various kinds of local data can now participate in the training process without being uploaded to the server. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent studies of mobile distributed machine learning. We survey a number of widely-used mobile distributed machine learning methods. We also present an in-depth discussion on the challenges and future directions in this area. We believe that this survey can demonstrate a clear overview of mobile distributed machine learning and provide guidelines on applying mobile distributed machine learning to real applications.