Security in the Internet of Things (IoT) remains a predominant area of concern. This survey updates the state of the art covered in previous surveys and focuses on defending against threats rather than on the threats alone. This area is less extensively covered by other surveys and warrants particular attention. A life-cycle approach is adopted, articulated to form a "defence in depth" strategy against malicious actors compromising an IoT network laterally within it and from it. This study highlights the challenges of each mitigation step, emphasises novel perspectives, and reconnects the discussed mitigation steps to the ground principles they seek to implement.
A popular approach for improving the correctness of output from large language models (LLMs) is Self-Consistency - poll the LLM multiple times and output the most frequent solution. Existing Self-Consistency techniques always generate a constant number of samples per question, where a better approach will be to non-uniformly distribute the available budget based on the amount of agreement in the samples generated so far. In response, we introduce Adaptive-Consistency, a cost-efficient, model-agnostic technique that dynamically adjusts the number of samples per question using a lightweight stopping criterion. Our experiments over 17 reasoning and code generation datasets and three LLMs demonstrate that Adaptive-Consistency reduces sample budget by up to 7.9 times with an average accuracy drop of less than 0.1%. Our code and data are available at //www.sample-step-by-step.info
Prevailing research practice today often relies on training dense retrievers on existing large datasets such as MSMARCO and then experimenting with ways to improve zero-shot generalization capabilities to unseen domains. While prior work has tackled this challenge through resource-intensive steps such as data augmentation, architectural modifications, increasing model size, or even further base model pretraining, comparatively little investigation has examined whether the training procedures themselves can be improved to yield better generalization capabilities in the resulting models. In this work, we recommend a simple recipe for training dense encoders: Train on MSMARCO with parameter-efficient methods, such as LoRA, and opt for using in-batch negatives unless given well-constructed hard negatives. We validate these recommendations using the BEIR benchmark and find results are persistent across choice of dense encoder and base model size and are complementary to other resource-intensive strategies for out-of-domain generalization such as architectural modifications or additional pretraining. We hope that this thorough and impartial study around various training techniques, which augments other resource-intensive methods, offers practical insights for developing a dense retrieval model that effectively generalizes, even when trained on a single dataset.
Machine Translation (MT) continues to improve in quality and adoption, yet the inadvertent perpetuation of gender bias remains a significant concern. Despite numerous studies into gender bias in translations from gender-neutral languages such as Turkish into more strongly gendered languages like English, there are no benchmarks for evaluating this phenomenon or for assessing mitigation strategies. To address this gap, we introduce GATE X-E, an extension to the GATE (Rarrick et al., 2023) corpus, that consists of human translations from Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Persian into English. Each translation is accompanied by feminine, masculine, and neutral variants for each possible gender interpretation. The dataset, which contains between 1250 and 1850 instances for each of the four language pairs, features natural sentences with a wide range of sentence lengths and domains, challenging translation rewriters on various linguistic phenomena. Additionally, we present an English gender rewriting solution built on GPT-3.5 Turbo and use GATE X-E to evaluate it. We open source our contributions to encourage further research on gender debiasing.
Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation of decisions or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network interference. This occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its outcome but also that of connected units, biasing traditional treatment effect estimations. Our study introduces a new framework to accommodate complex and unknown network interference, moving beyond specialized models in the existing literature. Our framework, which we term causal message-passing, is grounded in a high-dimensional approximate message passing methodology and is specifically tailored to experimental design settings with prevalent network interference. Utilizing causal message-passing, we present a practical algorithm for estimating the total treatment effect and demonstrate its efficacy in four numerical scenarios, each with its unique interference structure.
The increasing success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in variety of tasks lead to their widespread use in our lives which necessitates the examination of these models from different perspectives. The alignment of these models to human values is an essential concern in order to establish trust that we have safe and responsible systems. In this paper, we aim to find out which values and principles are embedded in LLMs in the process of moral justification. For this purpose, we come up with three different moral perspective categories: Western tradition perspective (WT), Abrahamic tradition perspective (AT), and Spiritualist/Mystic tradition perspective (SMT). In two different experiment settings, we asked models to choose principles from the three for suggesting a moral action and evaluating the moral permissibility of an action if one tries to justify an action on these categories, respectively. Our experiments indicate that tested LLMs favors the Western tradition moral perspective over others. Additionally, we observe that there potentially exists an over-alignment towards religious values represented in the Abrahamic Tradition, which causes models to fail to recognize an action is immoral if it is presented as a "religious-action". We believe that these results are essential in order to direct our attention in future efforts.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.
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.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
The focus of Part I of this monograph has been on both the fundamental properties, graph topologies, and spectral representations of graphs. Part II embarks on these concepts to address the algorithmic and practical issues centered round data/signal processing on graphs, that is, the focus is on the analysis and estimation of both deterministic and random data on graphs. The fundamental ideas related to graph signals are introduced through a simple and intuitive, yet illustrative and general enough case study of multisensor temperature field estimation. The concept of systems on graph is defined using graph signal shift operators, which generalize the corresponding principles from traditional learning systems. At the core of the spectral domain representation of graph signals and systems is the Graph Discrete Fourier Transform (GDFT). The spectral domain representations are then used as the basis to introduce graph signal filtering concepts and address their design, including Chebyshev polynomial approximation series. Ideas related to the sampling of graph signals are presented and further linked with compressive sensing. Localized graph signal analysis in the joint vertex-spectral domain is referred to as the vertex-frequency analysis, since it can be considered as an extension of classical time-frequency analysis to the graph domain of a signal. Important topics related to the local graph Fourier transform (LGFT) are covered, together with its various forms including the graph spectral and vertex domain windows and the inversion conditions and relations. A link between the LGFT with spectral varying window and the spectral graph wavelet transform (SGWT) is also established. Realizations of the LGFT and SGWT using polynomial (Chebyshev) approximations of the spectral functions are further considered. Finally, energy versions of the vertex-frequency representations are introduced.