Diffusion models have recently gained significant attention in both academia and industry due to their impressive generative performance in terms of both sampling quality and distribution coverage. Accordingly, proposals are made for sharing pre-trained diffusion models across different organizations, as a way of improving data utilization while enhancing privacy protection by avoiding sharing private data directly. However, the potential risks associated with such an approach have not been comprehensively examined. In this paper, we take an adversarial perspective to investigate the potential privacy and fairness risks associated with the sharing of diffusion models. Specifically, we investigate the circumstances in which one party (the sharer) trains a diffusion model using private data and provides another party (the receiver) black-box access to the pre-trained model for downstream tasks. We demonstrate that the sharer can execute fairness poisoning attacks to undermine the receiver's downstream models by manipulating the training data distribution of the diffusion model. Meanwhile, the receiver can perform property inference attacks to reveal the distribution of sensitive features in the sharer's dataset. Our experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate remarkable attack performance on different types of diffusion models, which highlights the critical importance of robust data auditing and privacy protection protocols in pertinent applications.
Over the years, various approaches have been employed to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers, from addressing psychological well-being to the development of personal knowledge assistants. A significant challenge in this research area has been the absence of a comprehensive, publicly accessible dataset that mirrors real-world knowledge work. Although a handful of datasets exist, many are restricted in access or lack vital information dimensions, complicating meaningful comparison and benchmarking in the domain. This paper presents RLKWiC, a novel dataset of Real-Life Knowledge Work in Context, derived from monitoring the computer interactions of eight participants over a span of two months. As the first publicly available dataset offering a wealth of essential information dimensions (such as explicated contexts, textual contents, and semantics), RLKWiC seeks to address the research gap in the personal information management domain, providing valuable insights for modeling user behavior.
Chain of thought finetuning aims to endow small student models with reasoning capacity to improve their performance towards a specific task by allowing them to imitate the reasoning procedure of large language models (LLMs) beyond simply predicting the answer to the question. However, the existing methods 1) generate rationale before the answer, making their answer correctness sensitive to the hallucination in the rationale;2) force the student model to repeat the exact LLMs rationale expression word-after-word, which could have the model biased towards learning the expression in rationale but count against the model from understanding the core logic behind it. Therefore, we propose a robust Post-Semantic-Thinking (PST) strategy to generate answers before rationale. Thanks to this answer-first setting, 1) the answering procedure can escape from the adverse effects caused by hallucinations in the rationale; 2) the complex reasoning procedure is tightly bound with the relatively concise answer, making the reasoning for questions easier with the prior information in the answer; 3) the efficiency of the method can also benefit from the setting since users can stop the generation right after answers are outputted when inference is conducted. Furthermore, the PST strategy loose the constraint against the generated rationale to be close to the LLMs gold standard in the hidden semantic space instead of the vocabulary space, thus making the small student model better comprehend the semantic reasoning logic in rationale. Extensive experiments conducted across 12 reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of PST.
Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon that affects individuals who doubt their skills and abilities, despite possessing the necessary competencies. This can lead to a lack of confidence and poor performance. While research has explored the impacts of imposter syndrome on students and professionals in various fields, there is limited knowledge on how it affects code comprehension in software engineering. In this exploratory study, we investigate the prevalence of imposter syndrome among final-year undergraduate computer science students and its effects on their code comprehension cognition using an eye tracker and heart rate monitor. Key findings demonstrate that students identifying as male exhibit lower imposter syndrome levels when analyzing code, and higher imposter syndrome is associated with increased time reviewing a code snippet and a lower likelihood of solving it correctly. This study provides initial data on this topic and establishes a foundation for further research to support student academic success and improve developer productivity and mental well-being.
In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred many researchers. To further reduce the complexity of attention models, numerous efforts have been made to design more efficient methods. Among them, the State Space Model (SSM), as a possible replacement for the self-attention based Transformer model, has drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this paper, we give the first comprehensive review of these works and also provide experimental comparisons and analysis to better demonstrate the features and advantages of SSM. Specifically, we first give a detailed description of principles to help the readers quickly capture the key ideas of SSM. After that, we dive into the reviews of existing SSMs and their various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, graph, multi-modal and multi-media, point cloud/event stream, time series data, and other domains. In addition, we give statistical comparisons and analysis of these models and hope it helps the readers to understand the effectiveness of different structures on various tasks. Then, we propose possible research points in this direction to better promote the development of the theoretical model and application of SSM. More related works will be continuously updated on the following GitHub: //github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_State_Space_Model_Paper_List.
Diffusion models have emerged as a prominent class of generative models, surpassing previous methods regarding sample quality and training stability. Recent works have shown the advantages of diffusion models in improving reinforcement learning (RL) solutions, including as trajectory planners, expressive policy classes, data synthesizers, etc. This survey aims to provide an overview of the advancements in this emerging field and hopes to inspire new avenues of research. First, we examine several challenges encountered by current RL algorithms. Then, we present a taxonomy of existing methods based on the roles played by diffusion models in RL and explore how the existing challenges are addressed. We further outline successful applications of diffusion models in various RL-related tasks while discussing the limitations of current approaches. Finally, we conclude the survey and offer insights into future research directions, focusing on enhancing model performance and applying diffusion models to broader tasks. We are actively maintaining a GitHub repository for papers and other related resources in applying diffusion models in RL: //github.com/apexrl/Diff4RLSurvey .
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
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.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
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}.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.