Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about the privacy of sensitive data. In response to these concerns, differential privacy has emerged as a rigorous framework for privacy protection, gaining widespread recognition in both academic and industrial circles. While substantial progress has been made in private data analysis, existing methods often suffer from impracticality or a significant loss of statistical efficiency. This paper aims to alleviate these concerns in the context of hypothesis testing by introducing differentially private permutation tests. The proposed framework extends classical non-private permutation tests to private settings, maintaining both finite-sample validity and differential privacy in a rigorous manner. The power of the proposed test depends on the choice of a test statistic, and we establish general conditions for consistency and non-asymptotic uniform power. To demonstrate the utility and practicality of our framework, we focus on reproducing kernel-based test statistics and introduce differentially private kernel tests for two-sample and independence testing: dpMMD and dpHSIC. The proposed kernel tests are straightforward to implement, applicable to various types of data, and attain minimax optimal power across different privacy regimes. Our empirical evaluations further highlight their competitive power under various synthetic and real-world scenarios, emphasizing their practical value. The code is publicly available to facilitate the implementation of our framework.
Recently, the evaluation of Large Language Models has emerged as a popular area of research. The three crucial questions for LLM evaluation are ``what, where, and how to evaluate''. However, the existing research mainly focuses on the first two questions, which are basically what tasks to give the LLM during testing and what kind of knowledge it should deal with. As for the third question, which is about what standards to use, the types of evaluators, how to score, and how to rank, there hasn't been much discussion. In this paper, we analyze evaluation methods by comparing various criteria with both manual and automatic evaluation, utilizing onsite, crowd-sourcing, public annotators and GPT-4, with different scoring methods and ranking systems. We propose a new dataset, LLMEval and conduct evaluations on 20 LLMs. A total of 2,186 individuals participated, leading to the generation of 243,337 manual annotations and 57,511 automatic evaluation results. We perform comparisons and analyses of different settings and conduct 10 conclusions that can provide some insights for evaluating LLM in the future. The dataset and the results are publicly available at //github.com/llmeval .
Efficiently capturing the complex spatiotemporal representations from large-scale unlabeled traffic data remains to be a challenging task. In considering of the dilemma, this work employs the advanced contrastive learning and proposes a novel Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contextual Contrastive Learning (STS-CCL) model. First, we elaborate the basic and strong augmentation methods for spatiotemporal graph data, which not only perturb the data in terms of graph structure and temporal characteristics, but also employ a learning-based dynamic graph view generator for adaptive augmentation. Second, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contrastive Module (STS-CM) to simultaneously capture the decent spatial-temporal dependencies and realize graph-level contrasting. To further discriminate node individuals in negative filtering, a Semantic Contextual Contrastive method is designed based on semantic features and spatial heterogeneity, achieving node-level contrastive learning along with negative filtering. Finally, we present a hard mutual-view contrastive training scheme and extend the classic contrastive loss to an integrated objective function, yielding better performance. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that building a predictor upon STS-CCL contrastive learning model gains superior performance than existing traffic forecasting benchmarks. The proposed STS-CCL is highly suitable for large datasets with only a few labeled data and other spatiotemporal tasks with data scarcity issue.
Generative AI capabilities have grown substantially in recent years, raising renewed concerns about potential malicious use of generated data, or "deep fakes". However, deep fake datasets have not kept up with generative AI advancements sufficiently to enable the development of deep fake detection technology which can meaningfully alert human users in real-world settings. Existing datasets typically use GAN-based models and introduce spurious correlations by always editing similar face regions. To counteract the shortcomings, we introduce DETER, a large-scale dataset for DETEcting edited image Regions and deterring modern advanced generative manipulations. DETER includes 300,000 images manipulated by four state-of-the-art generators with three editing operations: face swapping (a standard coarse image manipulation), inpainting (a novel manipulation for deep fake datasets), and attribute editing (a subtle fine-grained manipulation). While face swapping and attribute editing are performed on similar face regions such as eyes and nose, the inpainting operation can be performed on random image regions, removing the spurious correlations of previous datasets. Careful image post-processing is performed to ensure deep fakes in DETER look realistic, and human studies confirm that human deep fake detection rate on DETER is 20.4% lower than on other fake datasets. Equipped with the dataset, we conduct extensive experiments and break-down analysis using our rich annotations and improved benchmark protocols, revealing future directions and the next set of challenges in developing reliable regional fake detection models.
Neural implicit scene representations have recently shown encouraging results in dense visual SLAM. However, existing methods produce low-quality scene reconstruction and low-accuracy localization performance when scaling up to large indoor scenes and long sequences. These limitations are mainly due to their single, global radiance field with finite capacity, which does not adapt to large scenarios. Their end-to-end pose networks are also not robust enough with the growth of cumulative errors in large scenes. To this end, we present PLGSLAM, a neural visual SLAM system which performs high-fidelity surface reconstruction and robust camera tracking in real time. To handle large-scale indoor scenes, PLGSLAM proposes a progressive scene representation method which dynamically allocates new local scene representation trained with frames within a local sliding window. This allows us to scale up to larger indoor scenes and improves robustness (even under pose drifts). In local scene representation, PLGSLAM utilizes tri-planes for local high-frequency features. We also incorporate multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks for the low-frequency feature, smoothness, and scene completion in unobserved areas. Moreover, we propose local-to-global bundle adjustment method with a global keyframe database to address the increased pose drifts on long sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that PLGSLAM achieves state-of-the-art scene reconstruction results and tracking performance across various datasets and scenarios (both in small and large-scale indoor environments). The code will be open-sourced upon paper acceptance.
The blessing of ubiquitous data also comes with a curse: the communication, storage, and labeling of massive, mostly redundant datasets. We seek to solve this problem at its core, collecting only valuable data and throwing out the rest via submodular maximization. Specifically, we develop algorithms for the online and distributed version of the problem, where data selection occurs in an uncoordinated fashion across multiple data streams. We design a general and flexible core selection routine for our algorithms which, given any stream of data, any assessment of its value, and any formulation of its selection cost, extracts the most valuable subset of the stream up to a constant factor while using minimal memory. Notably, our methods have the same theoretical guarantees as their offline counterparts, and, as far as we know, provide the first guarantees for online distributed submodular optimization in the literature. Finally, in learning tasks on ImageNet and MNIST, we show that our selection methods outperform random selection by $5-20\%$.
Within recent times, cybercriminals have curated a variety of organised and resolute cyber attacks within a range of cyber systems, leading to consequential ramifications to private and governmental institutions. Current security-based automation and orchestrations focus on automating fixed purpose and hard-coded solutions, which are easily surpassed by modern-day cyber attacks. Research within Automated Cyber Defence will allow the development and enabling intelligence response by autonomously defending networked systems through sequential decision-making agents. This article comprehensively elaborates the developments within Automated Cyber Defence through a requirement analysis divided into two sub-areas, namely, automated defence and attack agents and Autonomous Cyber Operation (ACO) Gyms. The requirement analysis allows the comparison of automated agents and highlights the importance of ACO Gyms for their continual development. The requirement analysis is also used to critique ACO Gyms with an overall aim to develop them for deploying automated agents within real-world networked systems. Relevant future challenges were addressed from the overall analysis to accelerate development within the area of Automated Cyber Defence.
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.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.