This paper investigates Support Vector Regression (SVR) in the context of the fundamental risk quadrangle theory, which links optimization, risk management, and statistical estimation. It is shown that both formulations of SVR, $\varepsilon$-SVR and $\nu$-SVR, correspond to the minimization of equivalent error measures (Vapnik error and CVaR norm, respectively) with a regularization penalty. These error measures, in turn, define the corresponding risk quadrangles. By constructing the fundamental risk quadrangle, which corresponds to SVR, we show that SVR is the asymptotically unbiased estimator of the average of two symmetric conditional quantiles. Further, we prove the equivalence of the $\varepsilon$-SVR and $\nu$-SVR in a general stochastic setting. Additionally, SVR is formulated as a regular deviation minimization problem with a regularization penalty. Finally, the dual formulation of SVR in the risk quadrangle framework is derived.
The increasing attention given to AI Generated Content (AIGC) has brought a profound impact on various aspects of daily life, industrial manufacturing, and the academic sector. Recognizing the global trends and competitiveness in AIGC development, this study aims to analyze China's current status in the field. The investigation begins with an overview of the foundational technologies and current applications of AIGC. Subsequently, the study delves into the market status, policy landscape, and development trajectory of AIGC in China, utilizing keyword searches to identify relevant scholarly papers. Furthermore, the paper provides a comprehensive examination of AIGC products and their corresponding ecosystem, emphasizing the ecological construction of AIGC. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges and risks faced by the AIGC industry while presenting a forward-looking perspective on the industry's future based on competitive insights in AIGC.
This paper addresses the optimization problem to maximize the total costs that can be shared among a group of agents, while maintaining stability in the sense of the core constraints of a cooperative transferable utility game, or TU game. When maximizing total shareable costs, the cost shares must satisfy all constraints that define the core of a TU game, except for being budget balanced. The paper first gives a fairly complete picture of the computational complexity of this optimization problem, its relation to optimiztion over the core itself, and its equivalence to other, minimal core relaxations that have been proposed earlier. We then address minimum cost spanning tree (MST) games as an example for a class of cost sharing games with non-empty core. While submodular cost functions yield efficient algorithms to maximize shareable costs, MST games have cost functions that are subadditive, but generally not submodular. Nevertheless, it is well known that cost shares in the core of MST games can be found efficiently. In contrast, we show that the maximization of shareable costs is NP-hard for MST games and derive a 2-approximation algorithm. Our work opens several directions for future research.
With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, smart contracts have become a prominent feature in developing decentralized applications. However, these smart contracts are susceptible to vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit, resulting in significant financial losses. In response to this growing concern, various initiatives have emerged. Notably, the SWC vulnerability list played an important role in raising awareness and understanding of smart contract weaknesses. However, the SWC list lacks maintenance and has not been updated with new vulnerabilities since 2020. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Smart Contract Weakness Enumeration (SWE), a comprehensive and practical vulnerability list up until 2023. We collect 273 vulnerability descriptions from 86 top conference papers and journal papers, employing open card sorting techniques to deduplicate and categorize these descriptions. This process results in the identification of 40 common contract weaknesses, which are further classified into 20 sub-research fields through thorough discussion and analysis. SWE provides a systematic and comprehensive list of smart contract vulnerabilities, covering existing and emerging vulnerabilities in the last few years. Moreover, SWE is a scalable, continuously iterative program. We propose two update mechanisms for the maintenance of SWE. Regular updates involve the inclusion of new vulnerabilities from future top papers, while irregular updates enable individuals to report new weaknesses for review and potential addition to SWE.
The recent surge in research interest in applying large language models (LLMs) to decision-making tasks has flourished by leveraging the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. While there is a growing demand to tailor LLMs for custom decision-making tasks, finetuning them for specific tasks is resource-intensive and may diminish the model's generalization capabilities. Moreover, state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4 and Claude are primarily accessible through API calls, with their parametric weights remaining proprietary and unavailable to the public. This scenario emphasizes the growing need for new methodologies that allow learning from agent experiences without requiring parametric updates. To address these problems, we introduce the Experiential Learning (ExpeL) agent. Our agent autonomously gathers experiences and extracts knowledge using natural language from a collection of training tasks. At inference, the agent recalls its extracted insights and past experiences to make informed decisions. Our empirical results highlight the robust learning efficacy of the ExpeL agent, indicating a consistent enhancement in its performance as it accumulates experiences. We further explore the emerging capabilities and transfer learning potential of the ExpeL agent through qualitative observations and additional experiments.
We show that a simple greedy algorithm is $4.75$ probability-competitive for the Laminar Matroid Secretary Problem, improving the $3\sqrt{3} \approx 5.17$-competitive algorithm based on the forbidden sets technique (Soto, Turkieltaub, and Verdugo, 2018).
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.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently become one of the most powerful tools for graph analytics tasks in numerous applications, ranging from social networks and natural language processing to bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, thanks to their ability to capture the complex relationships between concepts. At present, the vast majority of GCNs use a neighborhood aggregation framework to learn a continuous and compact vector, then performing a pooling operation to generalize graph embedding for the classification task. These approaches have two disadvantages in the graph classification task: (1)when only the largest sub-graph structure ($k$-hop neighbor) is used for neighborhood aggregation, a large amount of early-stage information is lost during the graph convolution step; (2) simple average/sum pooling or max pooling utilized, which loses the characteristics of each node and the topology between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called, dual attention graph convolutional networks (DAGCN) to address these problems. DAGCN automatically learns the importance of neighbors at different hops using a novel attention graph convolution layer, and then employs a second attention component, a self-attention pooling layer, to generalize the graph representation from the various aspects of a matrix graph embedding. The dual attention network is trained in an end-to-end manner for the graph classification task. We compare our model with state-of-the-art graph kernels and other deep learning methods. The experimental results show that our framework not only outperforms other baselines but also achieves a better rate of convergence.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can produce images of surprising complexity and realism, but are generally modeled to sample from a single latent source ignoring the explicit spatial interaction between multiple entities that could be present in a scene. Capturing such complex interactions between different objects in the world, including their relative scaling, spatial layout, occlusion, or viewpoint transformation is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose to model object composition in a GAN framework as a self-consistent composition-decomposition network. Our model is conditioned on the object images from their marginal distributions to generate a realistic image from their joint distribution by explicitly learning the possible interactions. We evaluate our model through qualitative experiments and user evaluations in both the scenarios when either paired or unpaired examples for the individual object images and the joint scenes are given during training. Our results reveal that the learned model captures potential interactions between the two object domains given as input to output new instances of composed scene at test time in a reasonable fashion.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
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.