Package managers such as NPM, Maven, and PyPI play a pivotal role in open-source software (OSS) ecosystems, streamlining the distribution and management of various freely available packages. The fine-grained details within software packages can unveil potential risks within existing OSS ecosystems, offering valuable insights for detecting malicious packages. In this study, we undertake a large-scale empirical analysis focusing on fine-grained information (FGI): the metadata, static, and dynamic functions. Specifically, we investigate the FGI usage across a diverse set of 50,000+ legitimate and 1,000+ malicious packages. Based on this diverse data collection, we conducted a comparative analysis between legitimate and malicious packages. Our findings reveal that (1) malicious packages have less metadata content and utilize fewer static and dynamic functions than legitimate ones; (2) malicious packages demonstrate a higher tendency to invoke HTTP/URL functions as opposed to other application services, such as FTP or SMTP; (3) FGI serves as a distinguishable indicator between legitimate and malicious packages; and (4) one dimension in FGI has sufficient distinguishable capability to detect malicious packages, and combining all dimensions in FGI cannot significantly improve overall performance.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are becoming increasingly popular in Play-to-Earn (P2E) Web3 applications as a means of incentivizing user engagement. In Web3, users with NFTs ownership are entitled to monetize them. However, due to lack of objective NFT valuation, which makes NFT value determination challenging, P2E applications ecosystems have experienced inflation. In this paper, we propose a method that enables NFT inflation value management in P2E applications. Our method leverages the contribution-rewards model proposed by Curve Finance and the automated market maker (AMM) of decentralized exchanges. In decentralized systems, P2E Web3 applications inclusive, not all participants contribute in good faith. Therefore, rewards are provided to incentivize contribution. Our mechanism proves that burning NFTs, indicating the permanent removal of NFTs, contributes to managing inflation by reducing the number of NFTs in circulation. As a reward for this contribution, our method mints a compensation (CP) token as an ERC-20 token, which can be exchanged for NFTs once enough tokens have been accumulated. To further increase the value of the CP token, we suggest using governance tokens and CP tokens to create liquidity pools for AMM. The value of the governance token is determined by the market, and the CP token derives its value from the governance token in AMM. The CP token can determine its worth based on the market value of the governance token. Additionally, since CP tokens are used for exchanging NFTs, the value of the NFT is ultimately determined by the value of the CP token. To further illustrate our concept, we show how to adjust burning rewards based on factors such as the probability of upgrading NFTs' rarity or the current swap ratio of governance and CP tokens in AMM.
Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. However, increasingly complex tasks have revealed its disadvantages. First, a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned, making it hard to adapt to new words. Second, in multilingual translation, the imbalance in data volumes across different languages spreads to the vocabulary, exacerbating translations involving low-resource languages. While byte-based tokenization addresses these issues, byte-based models struggle with the low information density inherent in UTF-8 byte sequences. Previous works enhance token semantics through local contextualization but fail to select an appropriate contextualizing scope based on the input. Consequently, we propose the Multi-Scale Contextualization (MSC) method, which learns contextualized information of varying scales across different hidden state dimensions. It then leverages the attention module to dynamically integrate the multi-scale contextualized information. Experiments show that MSC significantly outperforms subword-based and other byte-based methods in both multilingual and out-of-domain scenarios. Code can be found in //github.com/ictnlp/Multiscale-Contextualization.
Explanation generation frameworks aim to make AI systems' decisions transparent and understandable to human users. However, generating explanations in uncertain environments characterized by incomplete information and probabilistic models remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for generating probabilistic monolithic explanations and model reconciling explanations. Monolithic explanations provide self-contained reasons for an explanandum without considering the agent receiving the explanation, while model reconciling explanations account for the knowledge of the agent receiving the explanation. For monolithic explanations, our approach integrates uncertainty by utilizing probabilistic logic to increase the probability of the explanandum. For model reconciling explanations, we propose a framework that extends the logic-based variant of the model reconciliation problem to account for probabilistic human models, where the goal is to find explanations that increase the probability of the explanandum while minimizing conflicts between the explanation and the probabilistic human model. We introduce explanatory gain and explanatory power as quantitative metrics to assess the quality of these explanations. Further, we present algorithms that exploit the duality between minimal correction sets and minimal unsatisfiable sets to efficiently compute both types of explanations in probabilistic contexts. Extensive experimental evaluations on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach in generating explanations under uncertainty.
Real-world applications involve various discrete optimization problems. Designing a specialized optimizer for each of these problems is challenging, typically requiring significant domain knowledge and human efforts. Hence, developing general-purpose optimizers as an off-the-shelf tool for a wide range of problems has been a long-standing research target. This article introduces MEGO, a novel general-purpose neural optimizer trained through a fully data-driven learning-to-optimize (L2O) approach. MEGO consists of a mixture-of-experts trained on experiences from solving training problems and can be viewed as a foundation model for optimization problems with binary decision variables. When presented with a problem to solve, MEGO actively selects relevant expert models to generate high-quality solutions. MEGO can be used as a standalone sample-efficient optimizer or in conjunction with existing search methods as an initial solution generator. The generality of MEGO is validated across six problem classes, including three classic problem classes and three problem classes arising from real-world applications in compilers, network analysis, and 3D reconstruction. Trained solely on classic problem classes, MEGO performs very well on all six problem classes, significantly surpassing widely used general-purpose optimizers in both solution quality and efficiency. In some cases, MEGO even surpasses specialized state-of-the-art optimizers. Additionally, MEGO provides a similarity measure between problems, yielding a new perspective for problem classification. In the pursuit of general-purpose optimizers through L2O, MEGO represents an initial yet significant step forward.
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently shown outstanding capability in modeling complex image distributions, making them expressive image priors for solving Bayesian inverse problems. However, most existing DM-based methods rely on approximations in the generative process to be generic to different inverse problems, leading to inaccurate sample distributions that deviate from the target posterior defined within the Bayesian framework. To harness the generative power of DMs while avoiding such approximations, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that performs posterior sampling for general inverse problems by reducing it to sampling the posterior of a Gaussian denoising problem. Crucially, we leverage a general DM formulation as a unified interface that allows for rigorously solving the denoising problem with a range of state-of-the-art DMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six inverse problems (three linear and three nonlinear), including a real-world black hole imaging problem. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method offers more accurate reconstructions and posterior estimation compared to existing DM-based imaging inverse methods.
Arma is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus system designed to achieve horizontal scalability across all hardware resources: network bandwidth, CPU, and disk I/O. As opposed to preceding BFT protocols, Arma separates the dissemination and validation of client transactions from the consensus process, restricting the latter to totally ordering only metadata of batches of transactions. This separation enables each party to distribute compute and storage resources for transaction validation, dissemination and disk I/O among multiple machines, resulting in horizontal scalability. Additionally, Arma ensures censorship resistance by imposing a maximum time limit on the inclusion of client transactions. We built and evaluated two Arma prototypes. The first is an independent system handling over 200,000 transactions per second, the second integrated into Hyperledger Fabric, speeding its consensus by an order of magnitude.
As AI-powered code generation tools such as GitHub Copilot become popular, it is crucial to understand software developers' trust in AI tools -- a key factor for tool adoption and responsible usage. However, we know little about how developers build trust with AI, nor do we understand how to design the interface of generative AI systems to facilitate their appropriate levels of trust. In this paper, we describe findings from a two-stage qualitative investigation. We first interviewed 17 developers to contextualize their notions of trust and understand their challenges in building appropriate trust in AI code generation tools. We surfaced three main challenges -- including building appropriate expectations, configuring AI tools, and validating AI suggestions. To address these challenges, we conducted a design probe study in the second stage to explore design concepts that support developers' trust-building process by 1) communicating AI performance to help users set proper expectations, 2) allowing users to configure AI by setting and adjusting preferences, and 3) offering indicators of model mechanism to support evaluation of AI suggestions. We gathered developers' feedback on how these design concepts can help them build appropriate trust in AI-powered code generation tools, as well as potential risks in design. These findings inform our proposed design recommendations on how to design for trust in AI-powered code generation tools.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.