Data protection is the process of securing sensitive information from being corrupted, compromised, or lost. A hyperconnected network, on the other hand, is a computer networking trend in which communication occurs over a network. However, what about malware. Malware is malicious software meant to penetrate private data, threaten a computer system, or gain unauthorised network access without the users consent. Due to the increasing applications of computers and dependency on electronically saved private data, malware attacks on sensitive information have become a dangerous issue for individuals and organizations across the world. Hence, malware defense is critical for keeping our computer systems and data protected. Many recent survey articles have focused on either malware detection systems or single attacking strategies variously. To the best of our knowledge, no survey paper demonstrates malware attack patterns and defense strategies combinedly. Through this survey, this paper aims to address this issue by merging diverse malicious attack patterns and machine learning (ML) based detection models for modern and sophisticated malware. In doing so, we focus on the taxonomy of malware attack patterns based on four fundamental dimensions the primary goal of the attack, method of attack, targeted exposure and execution process, and types of malware that perform each attack. Detailed information on malware analysis approaches is also investigated. In addition, existing malware detection techniques employing feature extraction and ML algorithms are discussed extensively. Finally, it discusses research difficulties and unsolved problems, including future research directions.
Semi-structured explanation depicts the implicit process of a reasoner with an explicit representation. This explanation highlights how available information in a specific query is supplemented with information a reasoner produces from its internal weights towards generating an answer. Despite the recent improvements in generative capabilities of language models, producing structured explanations to verify model's true reasoning capabilities remains a challenge. This issue is particularly pronounced for not-so-large LMs, as the reasoner is expected to couple a sequential answer with a structured explanation which embodies both the correct presentation and the correct reasoning process. In this work, we first underscore the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in tackling this challenge, and then introduce a carefully crafted reward engineering method in reinforcement learning (RL) to better address this problem. We investigate multiple reward aggregation methods and provide a detailed discussion which sheds light on the promising potential of RL for future research. Our proposed reward on two semi-structured explanation generation benchmarks (ExplaGraph and COPA-SSE) achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Image cartoonization has attracted significant interest in the field of image generation. However, most of the existing image cartoonization techniques require re-training models using images of cartoon style. In this paper, we present CartoonDiff, a novel training-free sampling approach which generates image cartoonization using diffusion transformer models. Specifically, we decompose the reverse process of diffusion models into the semantic generation phase and the detail generation phase. Furthermore, we implement the image cartoonization process by normalizing high-frequency signal of the noisy image in specific denoising steps. CartoonDiff doesn't require any additional reference images, complex model designs, or the tedious adjustment of multiple parameters. Extensive experimental results show the powerful ability of our CartoonDiff. The project page is available at: //cartoondiff.github.io/
Due to their highly structured characteristics, faces are easier to recover than natural scenes for blind image super-resolution. Therefore, we can extract the degradation representation of an image from the low-quality and recovered face pairs. Using the degradation representation, realistic low-quality images can then be synthesized to fine-tune the super-resolution model for the real-world low-quality image. However, such a procedure is time-consuming and laborious, and the gaps between recovered faces and the ground-truths further increase the optimization uncertainty. To facilitate efficient model adaptation towards image-specific degradations, we propose a method dubbed MetaF2N, which leverages the contained Faces to fine-tune model parameters for adapting to the whole Natural image in a Meta-learning framework. The degradation extraction and low-quality image synthesis steps are thus circumvented in our MetaF2N, and it requires only one fine-tuning step to get decent performance. Considering the gaps between the recovered faces and ground-truths, we further deploy a MaskNet for adaptively predicting loss weights at different positions to reduce the impact of low-confidence areas. To evaluate our proposed MetaF2N, we have collected a real-world low-quality dataset with one or multiple faces in each image, and our MetaF2N achieves superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Source code, pre-trained models, and collected datasets are available at //github.com/yinzhicun/MetaF2N.
Content Security Policy (CSP) is an effective security mechanism that prevents the exploitation of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on websites by specifying the sources from which their web pages can load resources, such as scripts and styles. CSP nonces enable websites to allow the execution of specific inline scripts and styles without relying on a whitelist. In this study, we measure and analyze the use of CSP nonces in the wild, specifically looking for nonce reuse, short nonces, and invalid nonces. We find that, of the 2271 sites that deploy a nonce-based policy, 598 of them reuse the same nonce value in more than one response, potentially enabling attackers to bypass protection offered by the CSP against XSS attacks. We analyze the causes of the nonce reuses to identify whether they are introduced by the server-side code or if the nonces are being cached by web caches. Moreover, we investigate whether nonces are only reused within the same session or for different sessions, as this impacts the effectiveness of CSP in preventing XSS attacks. Finally, we discuss the possibilities for attackers to bypass the CSP and achieve XSS in different nonce reuse scenarios.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention and branch attention; a related repository //github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.
Compared with cheap addition operation, multiplication operation is of much higher computation complexity. The widely-used convolutions in deep neural networks are exactly cross-correlation to measure the similarity between input feature and convolution filters, which involves massive multiplications between float values. In this paper, we present adder networks (AdderNets) to trade these massive multiplications in deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for much cheaper additions to reduce computation costs. In AdderNets, we take the $\ell_1$-norm distance between filters and input feature as the output response. The influence of this new similarity measure on the optimization of neural network have been thoroughly analyzed. To achieve a better performance, we develop a special back-propagation approach for AdderNets by investigating the full-precision gradient. We then propose an adaptive learning rate strategy to enhance the training procedure of AdderNets according to the magnitude of each neuron's gradient. As a result, the proposed AdderNets can achieve 74.9% Top-1 accuracy 91.7% Top-5 accuracy using ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset without any multiplication in convolution layer.
Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.