Reentrancy is one of the most notorious vulnerabilities in smart contracts, resulting in significant digital asset losses. However, many previous works indicate that current Reentrancy detection tools suffer from high false positive rates. Even worse, recent years have witnessed the emergence of new Reentrancy attack patterns fueled by intricate and diverse vulnerability exploit mechanisms. Unfortunately, current tools face a significant limitation in their capacity to adapt and detect these evolving Reentrancy patterns. Consequently, ensuring precise and highly extensible Reentrancy vulnerability detection remains critical challenges for existing tools. To address this issue, we propose a tool named ReEP, designed to reduce the false positives for Reentrancy vulnerability detection. Additionally, ReEP can integrate multiple tools, expanding its capacity for vulnerability detection. It evaluates results from existing tools to verify vulnerability likelihood and reduce false positives. ReEP also offers excellent extensibility, enabling the integration of different detection tools to enhance precision and cover different vulnerability attack patterns. We perform ReEP to eight existing state-of-the-art Reentrancy detection tools. The average precision of these eight tools increased from the original 0.5% to 73% without sacrificing recall. Furthermore, ReEP exhibits robust extensibility. By integrating multiple tools, the precision further improved to a maximum of 83.6%. These results demonstrate that ReEP effectively unites the strengths of existing works, enhances the precision of Reentrancy vulnerability detection tools.
In the past few years, text-to-audio models have emerged as a significant advancement in automatic audio gener- ation. Although they represent impressive technological progress, the effectiveness of their use in the development of audio applications remains uncertain. This paper aims to investigate these aspects, specifically focusing on the task of classification of environmental sounds. This study analyzes the performance of two different environmental classification systems when data generated from text-to-audio models is used for training. Two cases are considered: a) when the training dataset is augmented by data coming from two different text-to-audio models; and b) when the training dataset consists solely of synthetic audio generated. In both cases, the performance of the classification task is tested on real data. Results indicate that text-to-audio models are effective for dataset augmentation, whereas the performance of the models drops when relying on only generated audio.
Demand response (DR) plays a critical role in ensuring efficient electricity consumption and optimal use of network assets. Yet, existing DR models often overlook a crucial element, the irrational behaviour of electricity end users. In this work, we propose a price-responsive model that incorporates key aspects of end-user irrationality, specifically loss aversion, time inconsistency, and bounded rationality. To this end, we first develop a framework that uses Multiple Seasonal-Trend decomposition using Loess (MSTL) and non-stationary Gaussian processes to model the randomness in the electricity consumption by residential consumers. The impact of this model is then evaluated through a community battery storage (CBS) business model. Additionally, we apply a chance-constrained optimisation model for CBS operation that deals with the unpredictability of the end-user irrationality. Our simulations using real-world data show that the proposed DR model provides a more realistic estimate of end-user price-responsive behaviour when considering irrationality. Compared to a deterministic model that cannot fully take into account the irrational behaviour of end users, the chance-constrained CBS operation model yields an additional 19% revenue. Lastly, the business model reduces the electricity costs of solar end users by 11%.
Recent advancements in diffusion models have positioned them at the forefront of image generation. Despite their superior performance, diffusion models are not without drawbacks; they are characterized by complex architectures and substantial computational demands, resulting in significant latency due to their iterative sampling process. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce a dual approach involving model miniaturization and a reduction in sampling steps, aimed at significantly decreasing model latency. Our methodology leverages knowledge distillation to streamline the U-Net and image decoder architectures, and introduces an innovative one-step DM training technique that utilizes feature matching and score distillation. We present two models, SDXS-512 and SDXS-1024, achieving inference speeds of approximately 100 FPS (30x faster than SD v1.5) and 30 FP (60x faster than SDXL) on a single GPU, respectively. Moreover, our training approach offers promising applications in image-conditioned control, facilitating efficient image-to-image translation.
Amidst the rapid evolution of LLMs, the significance of evaluation in comprehending and propelling these models forward is increasingly paramount. Evaluations have revealed that factors such as scaling, training types, architectures and other factors profoundly impact the performance of LLMs. However, the extent and nature of these impacts continue to be subjects of debate because most assessments have been restricted to a limited number of models and data points. Clarifying the effects of these factors on performance scores can be more effectively achieved through a statistical lens. Our study embarks on a thorough re-examination of these LLMs, targeting the inadequacies in current evaluation methods. With the advent of a uniform evaluation framework, our research leverages an expansive dataset of evaluation results, introducing a comprehensive statistical methodology. This includes the application of ANOVA, Tukey HSD tests, GAMM, and clustering technique, offering a robust and transparent approach to deciphering LLM performance data. Contrary to prevailing findings, our results challenge assumptions about emergent abilities and the influence of given training types and architectures in LLMs. These findings furnish new perspectives on the characteristics, intrinsic nature, and developmental trajectories of LLMs. By providing straightforward and reliable methods to scrutinize and reassess LLM performance data, this study contributes a nuanced perspective on LLM efficiency and potentials.
Researchers have proposed to use data of human preference feedback to fine-tune text-to-image generative models. However, the scalability of human feedback collection has been limited by its reliance on manual annotation. Therefore, we develop and test a method to automatically annotate user preferences from their spontaneous facial expression reaction to the generated images. We collect a dataset of Facial Expression Reaction to Generated Images (FERGI) and show that the activations of multiple facial action units (AUs) are highly correlated with user evaluations of the generated images. Specifically, AU4 (brow lowerer) is reflective of negative evaluations of the generated image whereas AU12 (lip corner puller) is reflective of positive evaluations. These can be useful in two ways. Firstly, we can automatically annotate user preferences between image pairs with substantial difference in these AU responses with an accuracy significantly outperforming state-of-the-art scoring models. Secondly, directly integrating the AU responses with the scoring models improves their consistency with human preferences. Finally, this method of automatic annotation with facial expression analysis can be potentially generalized to other generation tasks. The code is available at //github.com/ShuangquanFeng/FERGI, and the dataset is also available at the same link for research purposes.
Big models have achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in the field of AI, but they might also pose potential concerns. Addressing such concerns, alignment technologies were introduced to make these models conform to human preferences and values. Despite considerable advancements in the past year, various challenges lie in establishing the optimal alignment strategy, such as data cost and scalable oversight, and how to align remains an open question. In this survey paper, we comprehensively investigate value alignment approaches. We first unpack the historical context of alignment tracing back to the 1920s (where it comes from), then delve into the mathematical essence of alignment (what it is), shedding light on the inherent challenges. Following this foundation, we provide a detailed examination of existing alignment methods, which fall into three categories: Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Fine-Tuning, and In-context Learning, and demonstrate their intrinsic connections, strengths, and limitations, helping readers better understand this research area. In addition, two emerging topics, personal alignment, and multimodal alignment, are also discussed as novel frontiers in this field. Looking forward, we discuss potential alignment paradigms and how they could handle remaining challenges, prospecting where future alignment will go.
The introduction of ChatGPT has led to a significant increase in the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) for addressing downstream tasks. There's an increasing focus on cost-efficient training and deployment within this context. Low-cost training and deployment of LLMs represent the future development trend. This paper reviews the evolution of large language model training techniques and inference deployment technologies aligned with this emerging trend. The discussion on training includes various aspects, including data preprocessing, training architecture, pre-training tasks, parallel training, and relevant content related to model fine-tuning. On the inference side, the paper covers topics such as model compression, parallel computation, memory scheduling, and structural optimization. It also explores LLMs' utilization and provides insights into their future development.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant boost in prediction performance on graph data. At the same time, the predictions made by these models are often hard to interpret. In that regard, many efforts have been made to explain the prediction mechanisms of these models from perspectives such as GNNExplainer, XGNN and PGExplainer. Although such works present systematic frameworks to interpret GNNs, a holistic review for explainable GNNs is unavailable. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of explainability techniques developed for GNNs. We focus on explainable graph neural networks and categorize them based on the use of explainable methods. We further provide the common performance metrics for GNNs explanations and point out several future research directions.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.