DRAM read disturbance is a significant and worsening safety, security, and reliability issue of modern DRAM chips that can be exploited to break memory isolation. Two prominent examples of read-disturb phenomena are RowHammer and RowPress. However, no prior work extensively studies read-disturb phenomena in modern high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate the effects of read disturbance and uncover the inner workings of undocumented in-DRAM read disturbance mitigation mechanisms in HBM. Our characterization of six real HBM2 DRAM chips shows that (1) the number of read disturbance bitflips and the number of row activations needed to induce the first read disturbance bitflip significantly varies between different HBM2 chips and different 3D-stacked channels, pseudo channels, banks, and rows inside an HBM2 chip. (2) The DRAM rows at the end and in the middle of a DRAM bank exhibit significantly fewer read disturbance bitflips than the rest of the rows. (3) It takes fewer additional activations to induce more read disturbance bitflips in a DRAM row if the row exhibits the first bitflip already at a relatively high activation count. (4) HBM2 chips exhibit read disturbance bitflips with only two row activations when rows are kept active for an extremely long time. We show that a modern HBM2 DRAM chip implements undocumented read disturbance defenses that can track potential aggressor rows based on how many times they are activated, and refresh their victim rows with every 17 periodic refresh operations. We draw key takeaways from our observations and discuss their implications for future read disturbance attacks and defenses. We explain how our findings could be leveraged to develop both i) more powerful read disturbance attacks and ii) more efficient read disturbance defense mechanisms.
The significant advancements in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to healthcare decision-making, medical diagnosis, and other domains have simultaneously raised concerns about the fairness and bias of AI systems. This is particularly critical in areas like healthcare, employment, criminal justice, credit scoring, and increasingly, in generative AI models (GenAI) that produce synthetic media. Such systems can lead to unfair outcomes and perpetuate existing inequalities, including generative biases that affect the representation of individuals in synthetic data. This survey paper offers a succinct, comprehensive overview of fairness and bias in AI, addressing their sources, impacts, and mitigation strategies. We review sources of bias, such as data, algorithm, and human decision biases - highlighting the emergent issue of generative AI bias where models may reproduce and amplify societal stereotypes. We assess the societal impact of biased AI systems, focusing on the perpetuation of inequalities and the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes, especially as generative AI becomes more prevalent in creating content that influences public perception. We explore various proposed mitigation strategies, discussing the ethical considerations of their implementation and emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure effectiveness. Through a systematic literature review spanning multiple academic disciplines, we present definitions of AI bias and its different types, including a detailed look at generative AI bias. We discuss the negative impacts of AI bias on individuals and society and provide an overview of current approaches to mitigate AI bias, including data pre-processing, model selection, and post-processing. We emphasize the unique challenges presented by generative AI models and the importance of strategies specifically tailored to address these.
Extensive work has been devoted to improving the safety mechanism of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in specific scenarios, LLMs still generate harmful responses when faced with malicious instructions, a phenomenon referred to as "Jailbreak Attack". In our research, we introduce a novel jailbreak attack method (\textbf{RADIAL}), which consists of two steps: 1) Inherent Response Tendency Analysis: we analyze the inherent affirmation and rejection tendency of LLMs to react to real-world instructions. 2) Real-World Instructions-Driven Jailbreak: based on our analysis, we strategically choose several real-world instructions and embed malicious instructions into them to amplify the LLM's potential to generate harmful responses. On three open-source human-aligned LLMs, our method achieves excellent jailbreak attack performance for both Chinese and English malicious instructions. Besides, we guided detailed ablation experiments and verified the effectiveness of our core idea "Inherent Response Tendency Analysis". Our exploration also exposes the vulnerability of LLMs to being induced into generating more detailed harmful responses in subsequent rounds of dialogue.
Successful deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), particularly in safety-critical systems, requires their validation with an adequate test set to ensure a sufficient degree of confidence in test outcomes. Mutation analysis, a well-established technique for measuring test adequacy in traditional software, has been adapted to DNNs in recent years. This technique is based on generating mutants that ideally aim to be representative of actual faults and thus can be used for test adequacy assessment. In this paper, we investigate for the first time whether and how mutation operators that directly modify the trained DNN model (i.e., post-training operators) can be used for reliably assessing the test inputs of DNNs. Our results show that these operators, though they do not aim to represent realistic faults, exhibit strong, non-linear relationships with faults. Inspired by this finding and considering the significant computational advantage of post-training operators compared to the operators that modify the training data or program (i.e., pre-training operators), we propose and evaluate TEASMA, an approach based on posttraining mutation for assessing the adequacy of DNNs test sets. In practice, TEASMA allows engineers to decide whether they will be able to trust test results and thus validate the DNN before its deployment. Based on a DNN model`s training set, TEASMA provides a methodology to build accurate DNNspecific prediction models of the Fault Detection Rate (FDR) of a test set from its mutation score, thus enabling its assessment. Our large empirical evaluation, across multiple DNN models, shows that predicted FDR values have a strong linear correlation (R2 >= 0.94) with actual values. Consequently, empirical evidence suggests that TEASMA provides a reliable basis for confidently deciding whether to trust test results or improve the test set of a DNN model.
Human educators possess an intrinsic ability to anticipate and seek educational explanations from students, which drives them to pose thought-provoking questions when students cannot articulate these explanations independently. We aim to imbue Intelligent Tutoring Systems with this ability using few-shot learning capability of Large Language Models. Our work proposes a novel prompting technique, Assertion Enhanced Few-Shot Learning, to facilitate the generation of accurate, detailed oriented educational explanations. Our central hypothesis is that, in educational domain, few-shot demonstrations are necessary but not a sufficient condition for quality explanation generation. We conducted a study involving 12 in-service teachers, comparing our approach to Traditional Few-Shot Learning. The results show that Assertion Enhanced Few-Shot Learning improves explanation accuracy by 15% and yields higher-quality explanations, as evaluated by teachers. We also conduct a qualitative ablation study to factor the impact of assertions to provide educator-friendly prompting guidelines for generating explanations in their domain of interest.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
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.
With the advent of 5G commercialization, the need for more reliable, faster, and intelligent telecommunication systems are envisaged for the next generation beyond 5G (B5G) radio access technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not just immensely popular in the service layer applications but also have been proposed as essential enablers in many aspects of B5G networks, from IoT devices and edge computing to cloud-based infrastructures. However, most of the existing surveys in B5G security focus on the performance of AI/ML models and their accuracy, but they often overlook the accountability and trustworthiness of the models' decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) methods are promising techniques that would allow system developers to identify the internal workings of AI/ML black-box models. The goal of using XAI in the security domain of B5G is to allow the decision-making processes of the security of systems to be transparent and comprehensible to stakeholders making the systems accountable for automated actions. In every facet of the forthcoming B5G era, including B5G technologies such as RAN, zero-touch network management, E2E slicing, this survey emphasizes the role of XAI in them and the use cases that the general users would ultimately enjoy. Furthermore, we presented the lessons learned from recent efforts and future research directions on top of the currently conducted projects involving XAI.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
When is heterogeneity in the composition of an autonomous robotic team beneficial and when is it detrimental? We investigate and answer this question in the context of a minimally viable model that examines the role of heterogeneous speeds in perimeter defense problems, where defenders share a total allocated speed budget. We consider two distinct problem settings and develop strategies based on dynamic programming and on local interaction rules. We present a theoretical analysis of both approaches and our results are extensively validated using simulations. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the viability of heterogeneous teams depends on the amount of information available to the defenders. Moreover, our results suggest a universality property: across a wide range of problem parameters the optimal ratio of the speeds of the defenders remains nearly constant.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.