Smart contracts manage blockchain assets. While smart contracts embody business processes, their platforms are not process-aware. Mainstream smart contract programming languages such as Solidity do not have explicit notions of roles, action dependencies, and time. Instead, these concepts are implemented in program code. This makes it very hard to design and analyze smart contracts. We argue that DCR graphs are a suitable formalization tool for smart contracts because they explicitly and visually capture these features. We utilize this expressiveness to show that many common high-level design patterns in smart-contract applications can be naturally modeled this way. Applying these patterns shows that DCR graphs facilitate the development and analysis of correct and reliable smart contracts by providing a clear and easy-to-understand specification.
We consider online prediction of a binary sequence with expert advice. For this setting, we devise label-efficient forecasting algorithms, which use a selective sampling scheme that enables collecting much fewer labels than standard procedures, while still retaining optimal worst-case regret guarantees. These algorithms are based on exponentially weighted forecasters, suitable for settings with and without a perfect expert. For a scenario where one expert is strictly better than the others in expectation, we show that the label complexity of the label-efficient forecaster scales roughly as the square root of the number of rounds. Finally, we present numerical experiments empirically showing that the normalized regret of the label-efficient forecaster can asymptotically match known minimax rates for pool-based active learning, suggesting it can optimally adapt to benign settings.
Fitting generative models to sequential data typically involves two recursive computations through time, one forward and one backward. The latter could be a computation of the loss gradient (as in backpropagation through time), or an inference algorithm (as in the RTS/Kalman smoother). The backward pass in particular is computationally expensive (since it is inherently serial and cannot exploit GPUs), and difficult to map onto biological processes. Work-arounds have been proposed; here we explore a very different one: requiring the generative model to learn the joint distribution over current and previous states, rather than merely the transition probabilities. We show on toy datasets that different architectures employing this principle can learn aspects of the data typically requiring the backward pass.
The prevalence and strong capability of large language models (LLMs) present significant safety and ethical risks if exploited by malicious users. To prevent the potentially deceptive usage of LLMs, recent works have proposed algorithms to detect LLM-generated text and protect LLMs. In this paper, we investigate the robustness and reliability of these LLM detectors under adversarial attacks. We study two types of attack strategies: 1) replacing certain words in an LLM's output with their synonyms given the context; 2) automatically searching for an instructional prompt to alter the writing style of the generation. In both strategies, we leverage an auxiliary LLM to generate the word replacements or the instructional prompt. Different from previous works, we consider a challenging setting where the auxiliary LLM can also be protected by a detector. Experiments reveal that our attacks effectively compromise the performance of all detectors in the study with plausible generations, underscoring the urgent need to improve the robustness of LLM-generated text detection systems.
Recent advances in whole-slide image (WSI) scanners and computational capabilities have significantly propelled the application of artificial intelligence in histopathology slide analysis. While these strides are promising, current supervised learning approaches for WSI analysis come with the challenge of exhaustively labeling high-resolution slides - a process that is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. In contrast, self-supervised learning (SSL) pretraining strategies are emerging as a viable alternative, given that they don't rely on explicit data annotations. These SSL strategies are quickly bridging the performance disparity with their supervised counterparts. In this context, we introduce an SSL framework. This framework aims for transferable representation learning and semantically meaningful clustering by synergizing invariance loss and clustering loss in WSI analysis. Notably, our approach outperforms common SSL methods in downstream classification and clustering tasks, as evidenced by tests on the Camelyon16 and a pancreatic cancer dataset. The code and additional details are accessible at: //github.com/wwyi1828/CluSiam.
The core of clustering is incorporating prior knowledge to construct supervision signals. From classic k-means based on data compactness to recent contrastive clustering guided by self-supervision, the evolution of clustering methods intrinsically corresponds to the progression of supervision signals. At present, substantial efforts have been devoted to mining internal supervision signals from data. Nevertheless, the abundant external knowledge such as semantic descriptions, which naturally conduces to clustering, is regrettably overlooked. In this work, we propose leveraging external knowledge as a new supervision signal to guide clustering, even though it seems irrelevant to the given data. To implement and validate our idea, we design an externally guided clustering method (Text-Aided Clustering, TAC), which leverages the textual semantics of WordNet to facilitate image clustering. Specifically, TAC first selects and retrieves WordNet nouns that best distinguish images to enhance the feature discriminability. Then, to improve image clustering performance, TAC collaborates text and image modalities by mutually distilling cross-modal neighborhood information. Experiments demonstrate that TAC achieves state-of-the-art performance on five widely used and three more challenging image clustering benchmarks, including the full ImageNet-1K dataset.
Despite several works that succeed in generating synthetic data with differential privacy (DP) guarantees, they are inadequate for generating high-quality synthetic data when the input data has missing values. In this work, we formalize the problems of DP synthetic data with missing values and propose three effective adaptive strategies that significantly improve the utility of the synthetic data on four real-world datasets with different types and levels of missing data and privacy requirements. We also identify the relationship between privacy impact for the complete ground truth data and incomplete data for these DP synthetic data generation algorithms. We model the missing mechanisms as a sampling process to obtain tighter upper bounds for the privacy guarantees to the ground truth data. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities for using private synthetic data generation algorithms in the presence of missing data.
This manuscript portrays optimization as a process. In many practical applications the environment is so complex that it is infeasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and mathematical optimization. It is necessary as well as beneficial to take a robust approach, by applying an optimization method that learns as one goes along, learning from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has become prominent in varied fields and has led to some spectacular success in modeling and systems that are now part of our daily lives.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.