Foundation models--such as GPT, CLIP, and DINO--have achieved revolutionary progress in the past several years and are commonly believed to be a promising approach for general-purpose AI. In particular, self-supervised learning is adopted to pre-train a foundation model using a large amount of unlabeled data. A pre-trained foundation model is like an ``operating system'' of the AI ecosystem. Specifically, a foundation model can be used as a feature extractor for many downstream tasks with little or no labeled training data. Existing studies on foundation models mainly focused on pre-training a better foundation model to improve its performance on downstream tasks in non-adversarial settings, leaving its security and privacy in adversarial settings largely unexplored. A security or privacy issue of a pre-trained foundation model leads to a single point of failure for the AI ecosystem. In this book chapter, we discuss 10 basic security and privacy problems for the pre-trained foundation models, including six confidentiality problems, three integrity problems, and one availability problem. For each problem, we discuss potential opportunities and challenges. We hope our book chapter will inspire future research on the security and privacy of foundation models.
Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Therefore, it is of great importance to evaluate their emerging abilities. In this study, we show that LLMs like GPT-3 exhibit behavior that strikingly resembles human-like intuition - and the cognitive errors that come with it. However, LLMs with higher cognitive capabilities, in particular ChatGPT and GPT-4, learned to avoid succumbing to these errors and perform in a hyperrational manner. For our experiments, we probe LLMs with the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as well as semantic illusions that were originally designed to investigate intuitive decision-making in humans. Our study demonstrates that investigating LLMs with methods from psychology has the potential to reveal otherwise unknown emergent traits.
The artifact used for evaluating the experimental results of Measuring and Mitigating Gaps in Structural Testing is publicly available on GitHub, Software Heritage and figshare, and is reusable. The artifact consists of necessary data, tools, scripts, and detailed documentation for running the experiments and reproducing the results shown in the paper. We have also provided a VirtualBox VM image allowing users to quickly setup and reproduce the results. Users are expected to be familiar using the VirtualBox software and Linux platform for evaluating or reusing the artifact.
We study the excess minimum risk in statistical inference, defined as the difference between the minimum expected loss in estimating a random variable from an observed feature vector and the minimum expected loss in estimating the same random variable from a transformation (statistic) of the feature vector. After characterizing lossless transformations, i.e., transformations for which the excess risk is zero for all loss functions, we construct a partitioning test statistic for the hypothesis that a given transformation is lossless and show that for i.i.d. data the test is strongly consistent. More generally, we develop information-theoretic upper bounds on the excess risk that uniformly hold over fairly general classes of loss functions. Based on these bounds, we introduce the notion of a delta-lossless transformation and give sufficient conditions for a given transformation to be universally delta-lossless. Applications to classification, nonparametric regression, portfolio strategies, information bottleneck, and deep learning, are also surveyed.
Compared to mean regression and quantile regression, the literature on modal regression is very sparse. We propose a unified framework for Bayesian modal regression based on a family of unimodal distributions indexed by the mode along with other parameters that allow for flexible shapes and tail behaviors. Following prior elicitation, we carry out regression analysis of simulated data and datasets from several real-life applications. Besides drawing inference for covariate effects that are easy to interpret, we consider prediction and model selection under the proposed Bayesian modal regression framework. Evidence from these analyses suggest that the proposed inference procedures are very robust to outliers, enabling one to discover interesting covariate effects missed by mean or median regression, and to construct much tighter prediction intervals than those from mean or median regression. Computer programs for implementing the proposed Bayesian modal regression are available at //github.com/rh8liuqy/Bayesian_modal_regression.
Past work shows that one can associate a notion of Shannon entropy to a Dirichlet polynomial, regarded as an empirical distribution. Indeed, entropy can be extracted from any d:Dir by a two-step process, where the first step is a rig homomorphism out of Dir, the *set* of Dirichlet polynomials, with rig structure given by standard addition and multiplication. In this short note, we show that this rig homomorphism can be upgraded to a rig *functor*, when we replace the set of Dirichlet polynomials by the *category* of ordinary (Cartesian) polynomials. In the Cartesian case, the process has three steps. The first step is a rig functor PolyCart -> Poly sending a polynomial p to (dp)y, where dp is the derivative of p. The second is a rig functor Poly -> Set x Set^op, sending a polynomial q to the pair (q(1),Gamma(q)), where Gamma(q)=Poly(q,y) can be interpreted as the global sections of q viewed as a bundle, and q(1) as its base. To make this precise we define what appears to be a new distributive monoidal structure on Set x Set^op, which can be understood geometrically in terms of rectangles. The last step, as for Dirichlet polynomials, is simply to extract the entropy as a real number from a pair of sets (A,B); it is given by log A - log B^(1/A) and can be thought of as the log aspect ratio of the rectangle.
Several solutions ensuring the dynamic detection of malicious activities on Android ecosystem have been proposed. These are represented by generic rules and models that identify any purported malicious behavior. However, the approaches adopted are far from being effective in detecting malware (listed or not) and whose form and behavior are likely to be different depending on the execution environment or the design of the malware itself (polymorphic for example). An additional difficulty is added when these approaches are unable to capture, analyze, and classify all the execution paths incorporated in the analyzed application earlier. This suggests that the functionality of the analyzed application can constitute a potential risk but never explored or revealed. We have studied some malware detection techniques based on behavioral analysis of applications. The description, characteristics, and results obtained from each technique are presented in this article wherein we have also highlighted some open problems, challenges as well as the different possible future directions of research concerning behavioral analysis of malware.
Power utilities are adopting Automated Demand Response (ADR) to replace the costly fuel-fired generators and to preempt congestion during peak electricity demand. Similarly, third-party Demand Response (DR) aggregators are leveraging controllable small-scale electrical loads to provide on-demand grid support services to the utilities. Some aggregators and utilities have started employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn the energy usage patterns of electricity consumers and use this knowledge to design optimal DR incentives. Such AI frameworks use open communication channels between the utility/aggregator and the DR customers, which are vulnerable to \textit{causative} data integrity cyberattacks. This paper explores vulnerabilities of AI-based DR learning and designs a data-driven attack strategy informed by DR data collected from the New York University (NYU) campus buildings. The case study demonstrates the feasibility and effects of maliciously tampering with (i) real-time DR incentives, (ii) DR event data sent to DR customers, and (iii) responses of DR customers to the DR incentives.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.