The evolution of Generative AI and the capabilities of the newly released Large Language Models (LLMs) open new opportunities in software engineering. However, they also lead to new challenges in cybersecurity. Recently, researchers have shown the possibilities of using LLMs such as ChatGPT to generate malicious content that can directly be exploited or guide inexperienced hackers to weaponize tools and code. These studies covered scenarios that still require the attacker to be in the middle of the loop. In this study, we leverage openly available plugins and use an LLM as proxy between the attacker and the victim. We deliver a proof-of-concept where ChatGPT is used for the dissemination of malicious software while evading detection, alongside establishing the communication to a command and control (C2) server to receive commands to interact with a victim's system. Finally, we present the general approach as well as essential elements in order to stay undetected and make the attack a success. This proof-of-concept highlights significant cybersecurity issues with openly available plugins and LLMs, which require the development of security guidelines, controls, and mitigation strategies.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, primarily due to their in-context learning ability. This ability could be applied to building babylike models, i.e. models at small scales, improving training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a "CoThought" pipeline, which efficiently trains smaller "baby" language models (BabyLMs) by leveraging the Chain of Thought prompting of LLMs. Our pipeline restructures a dataset of less than 100M in size using GPT-3.5-turbo, transforming it into task-oriented, human-readable texts that are comparable to the school texts for language learners. The BabyLM is then pretrained on this restructured dataset in a RoBERTa fashion. In evaluations across 4 benchmarks, our BabyLM outperforms the vanilla RoBERTa in 10 linguistic, NLU, and question-answering tasks by more than 3 points, showing a superior ability to extract contextual information. These results suggest that compact LMs pretrained on small, LLM-restructured data can better understand tasks and achieve improved performance.
As language models become increasingly integrated into our digital lives, Personalized Text Generation (PTG) has emerged as a pivotal component with a wide range of applications. However, the bias inherent in user written text, often used for PTG model training, can inadvertently associate different levels of linguistic quality with users' protected attributes. The model can inherit the bias and perpetuate inequality in generating text w.r.t. users' protected attributes, leading to unfair treatment when serving users. In this work, we investigate fairness of PTG in the context of personalized explanation generation for recommendations. We first discuss the biases in generated explanations and their fairness implications. To promote fairness, we introduce a general framework to achieve measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
This paper develops a Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) performance evaluation approach by integrating a Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) with a detailed hydrodynamic model. The proposed Cost OptimisatioN Framework for Implementing blue-Green infrastructURE (CONFIGURE), with a simplified problem-framing process and efficient genetic operations, can be connected to any flood simulation model. In this study, CONFIGURE is integrated with the CityCAT hydrodynamic model to optimise the locations and combinations of permeable surfaces. Permeable zones with four different levels of spatial discretisation are designed to evaluate their efficiency for 100-year and 30-year return period rainstorms. Overall, the framework performs effectively for the given scenarios. The application of the detailed hydrodynamic model explicitly captures the functioning of permeable features to provide the optimal locations for their deployment. Moreover, the size and the location of the permeable surfaces and the intensity of the rainstorm events are the critical performance parameters for economical BGI deployment.
We present an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema to verify the validity of questionnaire results within Smart Contracts. Our approach ensures that the answer key of the questionnaire remains undisclosed throughout the verification process, while ensuring that the evaluation is done fairly. To accomplish this, users respond to a series of questions, and their answers are encoded and securely transmitted to a hidden backend. The backend then performs an evaluation of the user's answers, generating the overall result of the questionnaire. Additionally, it generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof, attesting that the answers were appropriately evaluated against a valid set of constraints. Next, the user submits their result along with the proof to a Smart Contract, which verifies their validity and issues a non-fungible token (NFT) as an attestation of the user's test result. In this research, we implemented the Zero-Knowledge functionality using Circom 2 and deployed the Smart Contract using Solidity, thereby showcasing a practical and secure solution for questionnaire validity verification in the context of Smart Contracts.
In legal NLP, Case Outcome Classification (COC) must not only be accurate but also trustworthy and explainable. Existing work in explainable COC has been limited to annotations by a single expert. However, it is well-known that lawyers may disagree in their assessment of case facts. We hence collect a novel dataset RAVE: Rationale Variation in ECHR1, which is obtained from two experts in the domain of international human rights law, for whom we observe weak agreement. We study their disagreements and build a two-level task-independent taxonomy, supplemented with COC-specific subcategories. To our knowledge, this is the first work in the legal NLP that focuses on human label variation. We quantitatively assess different taxonomy categories and find that disagreements mainly stem from underspecification of the legal context, which poses challenges given the typically limited granularity and noise in COC metadata. We further assess the explainablility of SOTA COC models on RAVE and observe limited agreement between models and experts. Overall, our case study reveals hitherto underappreciated complexities in creating benchmark datasets in legal NLP that revolve around identifying aspects of a case's facts supposedly relevant to its outcome.
We present a novel face swapping method using the progressively growing structure of a pre-trained StyleGAN. Previous methods use different encoder decoder structures, embedding integration networks to produce high-quality results, but their quality suffers from entangled representation. We disentangle semantics by deriving identity and attribute features separately. By learning to map the concatenated features into the extended latent space, we leverage the state-of-the-art quality and its rich semantic extended latent space. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed method successfully disentangles identity and attribute features and outperforms many state-of-the-art face swapping methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.