The current state of Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) attribution primarily relies on time-consuming manual processes. These include mapping incident artifacts onto threat attribution frameworks and employing expert reasoning to uncover the most likely responsible APT groups. This research aims to assist the threat analyst in the attribution process by presenting an attribution method named CAPTAIN (Comprehensive Advanced Persistent Threat AttrIbutioN). This novel APT attribution approach leverages the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) employed by various APT groups in past attacks. CAPTAIN follows two significant development steps: baseline establishment and similarity measure for attack pattern matching. This method starts by maintaining a TTP database of APTs seen in past attacks as baseline behaviour of threat groups. The attribution process leverages the contextual information added by TTP sequences, which reflects the sequence of behaviours threat actors demonstrated during the attack on different kill-chain stages. Then, it compares the provided TTPs with established baseline to identify the most closely matching threat group. CAPTAIN introduces a novel similarity measure for APT group attack-pattern matching that calculates the similarity between TTP sequences. The proposed approach outperforms traditional similarity measures like Cosine, Euclidean, and Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) in performing attribution. Overall, CAPTAIN performs attribution with the precision of 61.36% (top-1) and 69.98% (top-2), surpassing the existing state-of-the-art attribution methods.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for modern enterprises, providing a foundation for managing customer interactions and data. Integrating AI agents into CRM systems can automate routine processes and enhance personalized service. However, deploying and evaluating these agents is challenging due to the lack of realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world CRM tasks. To address this issue, we introduce CRMArena, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic tasks grounded in professional work environments. Following guidance from CRM experts and industry best practices, we designed CRMArena with nine customer service tasks distributed across three personas: service agent, analyst, and manager. The benchmark includes 16 commonly used industrial objects (e.g., account, order, knowledge article, case) with high interconnectivity, along with latent variables (e.g., complaint habits, policy violations) to simulate realistic data distributions. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art LLM agents succeed in less than 40% of the tasks with ReAct prompting, and less than 55% even with function-calling abilities. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced agent capabilities in function-calling and rule-following to be deployed in real-world work environments. CRMArena is an open challenge to the community: systems that can reliably complete tasks showcase direct business value in a popular work environment.
Artificial intelligence has significantly impacted medical applications, particularly with the advent of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs), sparking optimism for the future of automated and personalized healthcare. However, the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs remains unverified, posing significant risks for future model deployment. In this paper, we introduce CARES and aim to comprehensively evaluate the Trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across the medical domain. We assess the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across five dimensions, including trustfulness, fairness, safety, privacy, and robustness. CARES comprises about 41K question-answer pairs in both closed and open-ended formats, covering 16 medical image modalities and 27 anatomical regions. Our analysis reveals that the models consistently exhibit concerns regarding trustworthiness, often displaying factual inaccuracies and failing to maintain fairness across different demographic groups. Furthermore, they are vulnerable to attacks and demonstrate a lack of privacy awareness. We publicly release our benchmark and code in //cares-ai.github.io/.
Alongside the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a notable increase in efforts to integrate LLM techniques in information retrieval (IR) and search engines (SE). Recently, an additional post-ranking stage is suggested in SE to enhance user satisfaction in practical applications. Nevertheless, research dedicated to enhancing the post-ranking stage through LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel paradigm named Large Language Models for Post-Ranking in search engine (LLM4PR), which leverages the capabilities of LLMs to accomplish the post-ranking task in SE. Concretely, a Query-Instructed Adapter (QIA) module is designed to derive the user/item representation vectors by incorporating their heterogeneous features. A feature adaptation step is further introduced to align the semantics of user/item representations with the LLM. Finally, the LLM4PR integrates a learning to post-rank step, leveraging both a main task and an auxiliary task to fine-tune the model to adapt the post-ranking task. Experiment studies demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to significant improvements and exhibits state-of-the-art performance compared with other alternatives.
We introduce the idea of AquaFuse, a physics-based method for synthesizing waterbody properties in underwater imagery. We formulate a closed-form solution for waterbody fusion that facilitates realistic data augmentation and geometrically consistent underwater scene rendering. AquaFuse leverages the physical characteristics of light propagation underwater to synthesize the waterbody from one scene to the object contents of another. Unlike data-driven style transfer, AquaFuse preserves the depth consistency and object geometry in an input scene. We validate this unique feature by comprehensive experiments over diverse underwater scenes. We find that the AquaFused images preserve over 94% depth consistency and 90-95% structural similarity of the input scenes. We also demonstrate that it generates accurate 3D view synthesis by preserving object geometry while adapting to the inherent waterbody fusion process. AquaFuse opens up a new research direction in data augmentation by geometry-preserving style transfer for underwater imaging and robot vision applications.
Sparse attention can effectively mitigate the significant memory and throughput demands of Large Language Models (LLMs) in long contexts. Existing methods typically employ a uniform sparse attention mask, applying the same sparse pattern across different attention heads and input lengths. However, this uniform approach fails to capture the diverse attention patterns inherent in LLMs, ignoring their distinct accuracy-latency trade-offs. To address this challenge, we propose the Mixture of Attention (MoA), which automatically tailors distinct sparse attention configurations to different heads and layers. MoA constructs and navigates a search space of various attention patterns and their scaling rules relative to input sequence lengths. It profiles the model, evaluates potential configurations, and pinpoints the optimal sparse attention compression plan. MoA adapts to varying input sizes, revealing that some attention heads expand their focus to accommodate longer sequences, while other heads consistently concentrate on fixed-length local contexts. Experiments show that MoA increases the effective context length by $3.9\times$ with the same average attention span, boosting retrieval accuracy by $1.5-7.1\times$ over the uniform-attention baseline across Vicuna-{7B,13B}, and Llama3-{8B,70B} models. Moreover, MoA narrows the capability gaps between sparse and dense models, reducing the maximum relative performance drop from $9\%-36\%$ to within $5\%$ across two long-context understanding benchmarks. MoA achieves a $1.2-1.4\times$ GPU memory reduction, boosting decode throughput by $6.6-8.2\times$ and $1.7-1.9\times$ compared to FlashAttention2 and vLLM, with minimal impact on performance. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/thu-nics/MoA}.
A wide variety of queueing systems can be naturally modeled as infinite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the reinforcement learning (RL) context, a variety of algorithms have been developed to learn and optimize these MDPs. At the heart of many popular policy-gradient based learning algorithms, such as natural actor-critic, TRPO, and PPO, lies the Natural Policy Gradient (NPG) policy optimization algorithm. Convergence results for these RL algorithms rest on convergence results for the NPG algorithm. However, all existing results on the convergence of the NPG algorithm are limited to finite-state settings. We study a general class of queueing MDPs, and prove a $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate for the NPG algorithm, if the NPG algorithm is initialized with the MaxWeight policy. This is the first convergence rate bound for the NPG algorithm for a general class of infinite-state average-reward MDPs. Moreover, our result applies to a beyond the queueing setting to any countably-infinite MDP satisfying certain mild structural assumptions, given a sufficiently good initial policy. Key to our result are state-dependent bounds on the relative value function achieved by the iterate policies of the NPG algorithm.
The growing demand for personalized decision-making has led to a surge of interest in estimating the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE). Various types of CATE estimators have been developed with advancements in machine learning and causal inference. However, selecting the desirable CATE estimator through a conventional model validation procedure remains impractical due to the absence of counterfactual outcomes in observational data. Existing approaches for CATE estimator selection, such as plug-in and pseudo-outcome metrics, face two challenges. First, they must determine the metric form and the underlying machine learning models for fitting nuisance parameters (e.g., outcome function, propensity function, and plug-in learner). Second, they lack a specific focus on selecting a robust CATE estimator. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a Distributionally Robust Metric (DRM) for CATE estimator selection. The proposed DRM is nuisance-free, eliminating the need to fit models for nuisance parameters, and it effectively prioritizes the selection of a distributionally robust CATE estimator. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the DRM method in selecting CATE estimators that are robust to the distribution shift incurred by covariate shift and hidden confounders.
Text-to-SQL parsing involves the translation of natural language queries (NLQs) into their corresponding SQL commands. A principal challenge within this domain is the formulation of SQL queries that are not only syntactically correct but also semantically aligned with the natural language input. However, the intrinsic disparity between the NLQ and the SQL poses a significant challenge. In this research, we introduce Keyword Instruction (KeyInst), a novel method designed to enhance SQL formulation by Large Language Models (LLMs). KeyInst essentially provides guidance on pivotal SQL keywords likely to be part of the final query, thus facilitates a smoother SQL query formulation process. We explore two strategies for integrating KeyInst into Text-to-SQL parsing: a pipeline strategy and a single-pass strategy. The former first generates KeyInst for question, which are then used to prompt LLMs. The latter employs a fine-tuned model to concurrently generate KeyInst and SQL in one step. We developed StrucQL, a benchmark specifically designed for the evaluation of SQL formulation. Extensive experiments on StrucQL and other benchmarks demonstrate that KeyInst significantly improves upon the existing Text-to-SQL prompting techniques.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.