The widespread deployment of control-flow integrity has propelled non-control data attacks into the mainstream. In the domain of OS kernel exploits, by corrupting critical non-control data, local attackers can directly gain root access or privilege escalation without hijacking the control flow. As a result, OS kernels have been restricting the availability of such non-control data. This forces attackers to continue to search for more exploitable non-control data in OS kernels. However, discovering unknown non-control data can be daunting because they are often tied heavily to semantics and lack universal patterns. We make two contributions in this paper: (1) discover critical non-control objects in the file subsystem and (2) analyze their exploitability. This work represents the first study, with minimal domain knowledge, to semi-automatically discover and evaluate exploitable non-control data within the file subsystem of the Linux kernel. Our solution utilizes a custom analysis and testing framework that statically and dynamically identifies promising candidate objects. Furthermore, we categorize these discovered objects into types that are suitable for various exploit strategies, including a novel strategy necessary to overcome the defense that isolates many of these objects. These objects have the advantage of being exploitable without requiring KASLR, thus making the exploits simpler and more reliable. We use 18 real-world CVEs to evaluate the exploitability of the file system objects using various exploit strategies. We develop 10 end-to-end exploits using a subset of CVEs against the kernel with all state-of-the-art mitigations enabled.
Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs like LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate an accurate explanation with detailed attributes based on the concept that appears within an input image despite their capability to generate holistic image-level descriptions. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs exhibit modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept, preventing the image modality from leveraging the rich parametric knowledge within the LLMs. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric evaluation benchmark, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.
The creation of in-silico datasets can expand the utility of existing annotations to new domains with different staining patterns in computational pathology. As such, it has the potential to significantly lower the cost associated with building large and pixel precise datasets needed to train supervised deep learning models. We propose a novel approach for the generation of in-silico immunohistochemistry (IHC) images by disentangling morphology specific IHC stains into separate image channels in immunofluorescence (IF) images. The proposed approach qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms baseline methods as proven by training nucleus segmentation models on the created in-silico datasets.
The proliferation of mobile devices and social media has revolutionized content dissemination, with short-form video becoming increasingly prevalent. This shift has introduced the challenge of video reframing to fit various screen aspect ratios, a process that highlights the most compelling parts of a video. Traditionally, video reframing is a manual, time-consuming task requiring professional expertise, which incurs high production costs. A potential solution is to adopt some machine learning models, such as video salient object detection, to automate the process. However, these methods often lack generalizability due to their reliance on specific training data. The advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) open new avenues for AI capabilities. Building on this, we introduce Reframe Any Video Agent (RAVA), a LLM-based agent that leverages visual foundation models and human instructions to restructure visual content for video reframing. RAVA operates in three stages: perception, where it interprets user instructions and video content; planning, where it determines aspect ratios and reframing strategies; and execution, where it invokes the editing tools to produce the final video. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of RAVA in video salient object detection and real-world reframing tasks, demonstrating its potential as a tool for AI-powered video editing.
Context - The exponential growth of data is becoming a significant concern. Managing this data has become incredibly challenging, especially when dealing with various sources in different formats and speeds. Moreover, Ensuring data quality has become increasingly crucial for effective decision-making and operational processes. Data Architecture is crucial in describing, collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing data to meet business needs. Providing an abstract view of data-intensive applications is essential to ensure that the data is transformed into valuable information. We must take these challenges seriously to ensure we can effectively manage and use the data to our advantage. Objective - To establish an architecture framework that enables a comprehensive description of the data architecture and effectively streamlines data quality monitoring. Method - The architecture framework utilizes Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques. Its backing of data-intensive architecture descriptions empowers with an automated generation for data quality checks. Result - The Framework offers a comprehensive solution for data-intensive applications to model their architecture efficiently and monitor the quality of their data. It automates the entire process and ensures precision and consistency in data. With DAT, architects and analysts gain access to a powerful tool that simplifies their workflow and empowers them to make informed decisions based on reliable data insights. Conclusion - We have evaluated the DAT on more than five cases within various industry domains, demonstrating its exceptional adaptability and effectiveness.
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.
Transformers have dominated the field of natural language processing, and recently impacted the computer vision area. In the field of medical image analysis, Transformers have also been successfully applied to full-stack clinical applications, including image synthesis/reconstruction, registration, segmentation, detection, and diagnosis. Our paper presents both a position paper and a primer, promoting awareness and application of Transformers in the field of medical image analysis. Specifically, we first overview the core concepts of the attention mechanism built into Transformers and other basic components. Second, we give a new taxonomy of various Transformer architectures tailored for medical image applications and discuss their limitations. Within this review, we investigate key challenges revolving around the use of Transformers in different learning paradigms, improving the model efficiency, and their coupling with other techniques. We hope this review can give a comprehensive picture of Transformers to the readers in the field of medical image analysis.
Music streaming services heavily rely on recommender systems to improve their users' experience, by helping them navigate through a large musical catalog and discover new songs, albums or artists. However, recommending relevant and personalized content to new users, with few to no interactions with the catalog, is challenging. This is commonly referred to as the user cold start problem. In this applied paper, we present the system recently deployed on the music streaming service Deezer to address this problem. The solution leverages a semi-personalized recommendation strategy, based on a deep neural network architecture and on a clustering of users from heterogeneous sources of information. We extensively show the practical impact of this system and its effectiveness at predicting the future musical preferences of cold start users on Deezer, through both offline and online large-scale experiments. Besides, we publicly release our code as well as anonymized usage data from our experiments. We hope that this release of industrial resources will benefit future research on user cold start recommendation.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.