We study automated security response for an IT infrastructure and formulate the interaction between an attacker and a defender as a partially observed, non-stationary game. We relax the standard assumption that the game model is correctly specified and consider that each player has a probabilistic conjecture about the model, which may be misspecified in the sense that the true model has probability 0. This formulation allows us to capture uncertainty about the infrastructure and the intents of the players. To learn effective game strategies online, we design a novel method where a player iteratively adapts its conjecture using Bayesian learning and updates its strategy through rollout. We prove that the conjectures converge to best fits, and we provide a bound on the performance improvement that rollout enables with a conjectured model. To characterize the steady state of the game, we propose a variant of the Berk-Nash equilibrium. We present our method through an advanced persistent threat use case. Simulation studies based on testbed measurements show that our method produces effective security strategies that adapt to a changing environment. We also find that our method enables faster convergence than current reinforcement learning techniques.
AI recommender systems are sought for decision support by providing suggestions to operators responsible for making final decisions. However, these systems are typically considered black boxes, and are often presented without any context or insight into the underlying algorithm. As a result, recommender systems can lead to miscalibrated user reliance and decreased situation awareness. Recent work has focused on improving the transparency of recommender systems in various ways such as improving the recommender's analysis and visualization of the figures of merit, providing explanations for the recommender's decision, as well as improving user training or calibrating user trust. In this paper, we introduce an alternative transparency technique of structuring the order in which contextual information and the recommender's decision are shown to the human operator. This technique is designed to improve the operator's situation awareness and therefore the shared situation awareness between the operator and the recommender system. This paper presents the results of a two-phase between-subjects study in which participants and a recommender system jointly make a high-stakes decision. We varied the amount of contextual information the participant had, the assessment technique of the figures of merit, and the reliability of the recommender system. We found that providing contextual information upfront improves the team's shared situation awareness by improving the human decision maker's initial and final judgment, as well as their ability to discern the recommender's error boundary. Additionally, this technique accurately calibrated the human operator's trust in the recommender. This work proposes and validates a way to provide model-agnostic transparency into AI systems that can support the human decision maker and lead to improved team performance.
Hyperproperties are commonly used in computer security to define information-flow policies and other requirements that reason about the relationship between multiple computations. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties where the individual computation paths are chosen by the strategic choices of a coalition of agents in a multi-agent system. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic can express strategic hyperproperties, such as that the scheduler in a concurrent system has a strategy to avoid information leakage. HyperATL* is particularly useful to specify asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the speed of the execution on the different computation paths depends on the choices of the scheduler. Unlike other recent logics for the specification of asynchronous hyperproperties, our logic is the first to admit decidable model checking for the full logic. We present a model checking algorithm for HyperATL* based on alternating automata, and show that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by providing a matching lower bound. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL*, able to check various security properties on small programs.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
One principal approach for illuminating a black-box neural network is feature attribution, i.e. identifying the importance of input features for the network's prediction. The predictive information of features is recently proposed as a proxy for the measure of their importance. So far, the predictive information is only identified for latent features by placing an information bottleneck within the network. We propose a method to identify features with predictive information in the input domain. The method results in fine-grained identification of input features' information and is agnostic to network architecture. The core idea of our method is leveraging a bottleneck on the input that only lets input features associated with predictive latent features pass through. We compare our method with several feature attribution methods using mainstream feature attribution evaluation experiments. The code is publicly available.
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to refine entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on five entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.
Knowledge graphs capture interlinked information between entities and they represent an attractive source of structured information that can be harnessed for recommender systems. However, existing recommender engines use knowledge graphs by manually designing features, do not allow for end-to-end training, or provide poor scalability. Here we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end trainable framework that harnesses item relationships captured by the knowledge graph to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, KGCN computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relations for a given user and then transforming the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph. Then, KGCN applies a graph convolutional neural network that computes an embedding of an item node by propagating and aggregating knowledge graph neighborhood information. Moreover, to provide better inductive bias KGCN uses label smoothness (LS), which provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, We unify KGCN and LS regularization, and present a scalable minibatch implementation for KGCN-LS model. Experiments show that KGCN-LS outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. KGCN-LS also achieves great performance in sparse scenarios and is highly scalable with respect to the knowledge graph size.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.