A growing body of research has focused on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods which allow the agent to learn from trial-and-error experiences gathered during the interaction with the environment. Recently, offline RL becomes a popular RL paradigm because it saves the interactions with environments. In offline RL, data providers share large pre-collected datasets, and others can train high-quality agents without interacting with the environments. This paradigm has demonstrated effectiveness in critical tasks like robot control, autonomous driving, etc. However, less attention is paid to investigating the security threats to the offline RL system. This paper focuses on backdoor attacks, where some perturbations are added to the data (observations) such that given normal observations, the agent takes high-rewards actions, and low-reward actions on observations injected with triggers. In this paper, we propose Baffle (Backdoor Attack for Offline Reinforcement Learning), an approach that automatically implants backdoors to RL agents by poisoning the offline RL dataset, and evaluate how different offline RL algorithms react to this attack. Our experiments conducted on four tasks and four offline RL algorithms expose a disquieting fact: none of the existing offline RL algorithms is immune to such a backdoor attack. Baffle modifies $10\%$ of the datasets for four tasks. Agents trained on the poisoned datasets perform well in normal settings. However, when triggers are presented, the agents' performance decreases drastically by $63.2\%$, $53.9\%$, $64.7\%$, and $47.4\%$ in the four tasks on average. The backdoor still persists after fine-tuning poisoned agents on clean datasets. We further show that the inserted backdoor is also hard to be detected by a popular defensive method. This paper calls attention to developing more effective protection for the open-source offline RL dataset.
Sound over-approximation methods have been proved effective for guaranteeing the absence of errors, but inevitably they produce false alarms that can hamper the programmers. Conversely, under-approximation methods are aimed at bug finding and are free from false alarms. We introduce Sufficient Incorrectness Logic (SIL), a new under-approximating, triple-based program logic to reason about program errors. SIL is designed to set apart the initial states leading to errors. We prove that SIL is correct and complete for a minimal set of rules, and we study additional rules that can facilitate program analyses. We formally compare SIL to existing triple-based program logics. Incorrectness Logic and SIL both perform under-approximations, but while the former exposes only true errors, the latter locates the set of initial states that lead to such errors, as Outcome Logic can do too. Hoare Logic performs over-approximations and as such cannot capture the set of initial states leading to errors in nondeterministic programs -- for deterministic and terminating programs, Hoare Logic and SIL coincide. Finally, we instantiate SIL with Separation Logic formulae (Separation SIL) to handle pointers and dynamic allocation and we prove its correctness. We argue that in some cases Separation SIL can yield more succinct postconditions and provide stronger guarantees than Incorrectness Separation Logic and can support effective backward reasoning.
Opinion summarization sets itself apart from other types of summarization tasks due to its distinctive focus on aspects and sentiments. Although certain automated evaluation methods like ROUGE have gained popularity, we have found them to be unreliable measures for assessing the quality of opinion summaries. In this paper, we present OpinSummEval, a dataset comprising human judgments and outputs from 14 opinion summarization models. We further explore the correlation between 24 automatic metrics and human ratings across four dimensions. Our findings indicate that metrics based on neural networks generally outperform non-neural ones. However, even metrics built on powerful backbones, such as BART and GPT-3/3.5, do not consistently correlate well across all dimensions, highlighting the need for advancements in automated evaluation methods for opinion summarization. The code and data are publicly available at //github.com/A-Chicharito-S/OpinSummEval/tree/main.
Recent work has proposed a methodology for the systematic evaluation of "Situated Language Understanding Agents"-agents that operate in rich linguistic and non-linguistic contexts-through testing them in carefully constructed interactive settings. Other recent work has argued that Large Language Models (LLMs), if suitably set up, can be understood as (simulators of) such agents. A connection suggests itself, which this paper explores: Can LLMs be evaluated meaningfully by exposing them to constrained game-like settings that are built to challenge specific capabilities? As a proof of concept, this paper investigates five interaction settings, showing that current chat-optimised LLMs are, to an extent, capable to follow game-play instructions. Both this capability and the quality of the game play, measured by how well the objectives of the different games are met, follows the development cycle, with newer models performing better. The metrics even for the comparatively simple example games are far from being saturated, suggesting that the proposed instrument will remain to have diagnostic value. Our general framework for implementing and evaluating games with LLMs is available at //github.com/clp-research/clembench.
Backdoor attacks have emerged as a prominent threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, where the presence of specific triggers in the input can lead poisoned models to misclassify these inputs to predetermined target classes. Current detection mechanisms are limited by their inability to address more covert backdoor strategies, such as style-based attacks. In this work, we propose an innovative test-time poisoned sample detection framework that hinges on the interpretability of model predictions, grounded in the semantic meaning of inputs. We contend that triggers (e.g., infrequent words) are not supposed to fundamentally alter the underlying semantic meanings of poisoned samples as they want to stay stealthy. Based on this observation, we hypothesize that while the model's predictions for paraphrased clean samples should remain stable, predictions for poisoned samples should revert to their true labels upon the mutations applied to triggers during the paraphrasing process. We employ ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art large language model, as our paraphraser and formulate the trigger-removal task as a prompt engineering problem. We adopt fuzzing, a technique commonly used for unearthing software vulnerabilities, to discover optimal paraphrase prompts that can effectively eliminate triggers while concurrently maintaining input semantics. Experiments on 4 types of backdoor attacks, including the subtle style backdoors, and 4 distinct datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses baseline methods, including STRIP, RAP, and ONION, in precision and recall.
NetHack is known as the frontier of reinforcement learning research where learning-based methods still need to catch up to rule-based solutions. One of the promising directions for a breakthrough is using pre-collected datasets similar to recent developments in robotics, recommender systems, and more under the umbrella of offline reinforcement learning (ORL). Recently, a large-scale NetHack dataset was released; while it was a necessary step forward, it has yet to gain wide adoption in the ORL community. In this work, we argue that there are three major obstacles for adoption: resource-wise, implementation-wise, and benchmark-wise. To address them, we develop an open-source library that provides workflow fundamentals familiar to the ORL community: pre-defined D4RL-style tasks, uncluttered baseline implementations, and reliable evaluation tools with accompanying configs and logs synced to the cloud.
The remarkable success of deep learning has prompted interest in its application to medical diagnosis. Even tough state-of-the-art deep learning models have achieved human-level accuracy on the classification of different types of medical data, these models are hardly adopted in clinical workflows, mainly due to their lack of interpretability. The black-box-ness of deep learning models has raised the need for devising strategies to explain the decision process of these models, leading to the creation of the topic of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In this context, we provide a thorough survey of XAI applied to medical diagnosis, including visual, textual, and example-based explanation methods. Moreover, this work reviews the existing medical imaging datasets and the existing metrics for evaluating the quality of the explanations . Complementary to most existing surveys, we include a performance comparison among a set of report generation-based methods. Finally, the major challenges in applying XAI to medical imaging are also discussed.
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.
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}.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.