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The escalating global mortality and morbidity rates associated with gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, compounded by the complexities and limitations of traditional endoscopic methods, underscore the urgent need for a critical review of current methodologies used for addressing this condition. With an estimated 300,000 annual deaths worldwide, the demand for innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies is paramount. The introduction of Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) has marked a significant advancement, offering a comprehensive, non-invasive visualization of the digestive tract that is pivotal for detecting bleeding sources unattainable by traditional methods. Despite its benefits, the efficacy of VCE is hindered by diagnostic challenges, including time-consuming analysis and susceptibility to human error. This backdrop sets the stage for exploring Machine Learning (ML) applications in automating GI bleeding detection within capsule endoscopy, aiming to enhance diagnostic accuracy, reduce manual labor, and improve patient outcomes. Through an exhaustive analysis of 113 papers published between 2008 and 2023, this review assesses the current state of ML methodologies in bleeding detection, highlighting their effectiveness, challenges, and prospective directions. It contributes an in-depth examination of AI techniques in VCE frame analysis, offering insights into open-source datasets, mathematical performance metrics, and technique categorization. The paper sets a foundation for future research to overcome existing challenges, advancing gastrointestinal diagnostics through interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in ML applications.

The use of high-dimensional systems for quantum communication opens interesting perspectives, such as increased information capacity and noise resilience. In this context, it is crucial to certify that a given quantum channel can reliably transmit high-dimensional quantum information. Here we develop efficient methods for the characterization of high-dimensional quantum channels. We first present a notion of dimensionality of quantum channels, and develop efficient certification methods for this quantity. We consider a simple prepare-and-measure setup, and provide witnesses for both a fully and a partially trusted scenario. In turn we apply these methods to a photonic experiment and certify dimensionalities up to 59 for a commercial graded-index multi-mode optical fiber. Moreover, we present extensive numerical simulations of the experiment, providing an accurate noise model for the fiber and exploring the potential of more sophisticated witnesses. Our work demonstrates the efficient characterization of high-dimensional quantum channels, a key ingredient for future quantum communication technologies.

The current standard for detecting human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status in breast cancer patients relies on HER2 amplification, identified through fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) or immunohistochemistry (IHC). However, hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) tumor stains are more widely available, and accurately predicting HER2 status using H\&E could reduce costs and expedite treatment selection. Deep Learning algorithms for H&E have shown effectiveness in predicting various cancer features and clinical outcomes, including moderate success in HER2 status prediction. In this work, we employed a customized weak supervision classification technique combined with MoCo-v2 contrastive learning to predict HER2 status. We trained our pipeline on 182 publicly available H&E Whole Slide Images (WSIs) from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), for which annotations by the pathology team at Yale School of Medicine are publicly available. Our pipeline achieved an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.85 across four different test folds. Additionally, we tested our model on 44 H&E slides from the TCGA-BRCA dataset, which had an HER2 score of 2+ and included corresponding HER2 status and FISH test results. These cases are considered equivocal for IHC, requiring an expensive FISH test on their IHC slides for disambiguation. Our pipeline demonstrated an AUC of 0.81 on these challenging H&E slides. Reducing the need for FISH test can have significant implications in cancer treatment equity for underserved populations.

Computer-based analysis of Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is crucial. However, a medically annotated WCE dataset for training and evaluation of automatic classification, detection, and segmentation of bleeding and non-bleeding frames is currently lacking. The present work focused on development of a medically annotated WCE dataset called WCEbleedGen for automatic classification, detection, and segmentation of bleeding and non-bleeding frames. It comprises 2,618 WCE bleeding and non-bleeding frames which were collected from various internet resources and existing WCE datasets. A comprehensive benchmarking and evaluation of the developed dataset was done using nine classification-based, three detection-based, and three segmentation-based deep learning models. The dataset is of high-quality, is class-balanced and contains single and multiple bleeding sites. Overall, our standard benchmark results show that Visual Geometric Group (VGG) 19, You Only Look Once version 8 nano (YOLOv8n), and Link network (Linknet) performed best in automatic classification, detection, and segmentation-based evaluations, respectively. Automatic bleeding diagnosis is crucial for WCE video interpretations. This diverse dataset will aid in developing of real-time, multi-task learning-based innovative solutions for automatic bleeding diagnosis in WCE. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/10156571 and https://github.com/misahub2023/Benchmarking-Codes-of-the-WCEBleedGen-dataset.

Deliberation involves participants exchanging knowledge, arguments, and perspectives and has been shown to be effective at addressing polarization. The Stanford Online Deliberation Platform facilitates large-scale deliberations. It enables video-based online discussions on a structured agenda for small groups without requiring human moderators. This paper's data comes from various deliberation events, including one conducted in collaboration with Meta in 32 countries, and another with 38 post-secondary institutions in the US. Estimating the quality of contributions in a conversation is crucial for assessing feature and intervention impacts. Traditionally, this is done by human annotators, which is time-consuming and costly. We use a large language model (LLM) alongside eight human annotators to rate contributions based on justification, novelty, expansion of the conversation, and potential for further expansion, with scores ranging from 1 to 5. Annotators also provide brief justifications for their ratings. Using the average rating from other human annotators as the ground truth, we find the model outperforms individual human annotators. While pairs of human annotators outperform the model in rating justification and groups of three outperform it on all four metrics, the model remains competitive. We illustrate the usefulness of the automated quality rating by assessing the effect of nudges on the quality of deliberation. We first observe that individual nudges after prolonged inactivity are highly effective, increasing the likelihood of the individual requesting to speak in the next 30 seconds by 65%. Using our automated quality estimation, we show that the quality ratings for statements prompted by nudging are similar to those made without nudging, signifying that nudging leads to more ideas being generated in the conversation without losing overall quality.

Introduction: Electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) has recently developed as a novel diagnostic device for screening and evaluating cervical dysplasia, prostate cancer, breast cancer and basal cell carcinoma. The current study aimed to validate and evaluate bioimpedance as a diagnostic tool for tobacco-induced oral lesions. Methodology: The study comprised 50 OSCC and OPMD tissue specimens for in-vitro study and 320 subjects for in vivo study. Bioimpedance device prepared and calibrated. EIS measurements were done for the habit and control groups and were compared. Results: The impedance value in the control group was significantly higher compared to the OPMD and OSCC groups. Diagnosis based on BIS measurements has a sensitivity of 95.9% and a specificity of 86.7%. Conclusion: Bioimpedance device can help in decision-making for differentiating OPMD and OSCC cases and their management, especially in primary healthcare settings. Keywords: Impedance, Cancer, Diagnosis, Device, Community

This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent yields better results than when each tool is used independently. Our approach is robust across multiple models, outperforming alternatives and increasing the macro F1 of misinformation detection by as much as 20 percent compared to LLMs without search. We also conduct extensive analyses on the sources our system leverages and their biases, decisions in the construction of the system like the search tool and the knowledge base, the type of evidence needed and its impact on the results, and other parts of the overall process. By combining strong performance with in-depth understanding, we hope to provide building blocks for future search-enabled misinformation mitigation systems., Comment: 1 main figure, 8 tables, 10 pages, 12 figures in Appendix, 7 tables in Appendix

In this survey, we summarize recent developments in research fueled by the growing adoption of automated bidding strategies in online advertising. We explore the challenges and opportunities that have arisen as markets embrace this autobidding and cover a range of topics in this area, including bidding algorithms, equilibrium analysis and efficiency of common auction formats, and optimal auction design.

The growth of weeds poses a significant challenge to agricultural productivity, necessitating efficient and accurate weed detection and management strategies. The combination of multispectral imaging and drone technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle this issue, enabling rapid and cost-effective monitoring of large agricultural fields. This systematic review surveys and evaluates the state-of-the-art in machine learning interventions for weed detection that utilize multispectral images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles. The study describes the various models used for training, features extracted from multi-spectral data, their efficiency and effect on the results, the performance analysis parameters, and also the current challenges faced by researchers in this domain. The review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. Three sources were used to obtain the relevant material, and the screening and data extraction were done on the COVIDENCE platform. The search string resulted in 600 papers from all sources. The review also provides insights into potential research directions and opportunities for further advancements in the field. These insights would serve as a valuable guide for researchers, agricultural scientists, and practitioners in developing precise and sustainable weed management strategies to enhance agricultural productivity and minimize ecological impact.

To address the data scarcity associated with 3D assets, 2D-lifting techniques such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) have become a widely adopted practice in text-to-3D generation pipelines. However, the diffusion models used in these techniques are prone to viewpoint bias and thus lead to geometric inconsistencies such as the Janus problem. To counter this, we introduce MT3D, a text-to-3D generative model that leverages a high-fidelity 3D object to overcome viewpoint bias and explicitly infuse geometric understanding into the generation pipeline. Firstly, we employ depth maps derived from a high-quality 3D model as control signals to guarantee that the generated 2D images preserve the fundamental shape and structure, thereby reducing the inherent viewpoint bias. Next, we utilize deep geometric moments to ensure geometric consistency in the 3D representation explicitly. By incorporating geometric details from a 3D asset, MT3D enables the creation of diverse and geometrically consistent objects, thereby improving the quality and usability of our 3D representations., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures

The increasing adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has led to their application in many challenging scientific visualization tasks. While advanced DNNs offer impressive generalization capabilities, understanding factors such as model prediction quality, robustness, and uncertainty is crucial. These insights can enable domain scientists to make informed decisions about their data. However, DNNs inherently lack ability to estimate prediction uncertainty, necessitating new research to construct robust uncertainty-aware visualization techniques tailored for various visualization tasks. In this work, we propose uncertainty-aware implicit neural representations to model scalar field data sets effectively and comprehensively study the efficacy and benefits of estimated uncertainty information for volume visualization tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of two principled deep uncertainty estimation techniques: (1) Deep Ensemble and (2) Monte Carlo Dropout (MCDropout). These techniques enable uncertainty-informed volume visualization in scalar field data sets. Our extensive exploration across multiple data sets demonstrates that uncertainty-aware models produce informative volume visualization results. Moreover, integrating prediction uncertainty enhances the trustworthiness of our DNN model, making it suitable for robustly analyzing and visualizing real-world scientific volumetric data sets., Comment: To appear in IEEE Workshop on Uncertainty Visualization in conjunction with IEEE VIS 2024, Florida, USA

Deep learning models used for medical image classification tasks are often constrained by the limited amount of training data along with severe class imbalance. Despite these problems, models should be explainable to enable human trust in the models' decisions to ensure wider adoption in high-risk situations. In this paper, we propose PRECISe, an explainable-by-design model meticulously constructed to concurrently address all three challenges. Evaluation on 2 imbalanced medical image datasets reveals that PRECISe outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on data efficient generalization to minority classes, achieving an accuracy of ~87% in detecting pneumonia in chest x-rays upon training on <60 images only. Additionally, a case study is presented to highlight the model's ability to produce easily interpretable predictions, reinforcing its practical utility and reliability for medical imaging tasks.

We present the Capsule Vision 2024 Challenge: Multi-Class Abnormality Classification for Video Capsule Endoscopy. It is being virtually organized by the Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence (MIAAI), Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems, Austria and Medical Imaging and Signal Analysis Hub (MISAHUB) in collaboration with the 9th International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing (CVIP 2024) being organized by the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing (IIITDM) Kancheepuram, Chennai, India. This document describes the overview of the challenge, its registration and rules, submission format, and the description of the utilized datasets., Comment: 6 pages

Autonomous lander missions on extraterrestrial bodies need to sample granular materials while coping with domain shifts, even when sampling strategies are extensively tuned on Earth. To tackle this challenge, this paper studies the few-shot scooping problem and proposes a vision-based adaptive scooping strategy that uses the deep kernel Gaussian process method trained with a novel meta-training strategy to learn online from very limited experience on out-of-distribution target terrains. Our Deep Kernel Calibration with Maximal Deployment Gaps (kCMD) strategy explicitly trains a deep kernel model to adapt to large domain shifts by creating simulated maximal deployment gaps from an offline training dataset and training models to overcome these deployment gaps during training. Employed in a Bayesian Optimization sequential decision-making framework, the proposed method allows the robot to perform high-quality scooping actions on out-of-distribution terrains after a few attempts, significantly outperforming non-adaptive methods proposed in the excavation literature as well as other state-of-the-art meta-learning methods. The proposed method also demonstrates zero-shot transfer capability, successfully adapting to the NASA OWLAT platform, which serves as a state-of-the-art simulator for potential future planetary missions. These results demonstrate the potential of training deep models with simulated deployment gaps for more generalizable meta-learning in high-capacity models. Furthermore, they highlight the promise of our method in autonomous lander sampling missions by enabling landers to overcome the deployment gap between Earth and extraterrestrial bodies., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2303.02893

Effective fraud detection and analysis of government-issued identity documents, such as passports, driver's licenses, and identity cards, are essential in thwarting identity theft and bolstering security on online platforms. The training of accurate fraud detection and analysis tools depends on the availability of extensive identity document datasets. However, current publicly available benchmark datasets for identity document analysis, including MIDV-500, MIDV-2020, and FMIDV, fall short in several respects: they offer a limited number of samples, cover insufficient varieties of fraud patterns, and seldom include alterations in critical personal identifying fields like portrait images, limiting their utility in training models capable of detecting realistic frauds while preserving privacy. In response to these shortcomings, our research introduces a new benchmark dataset, IDNet, designed to advance privacy-preserving fraud detection efforts. The IDNet dataset comprises 837,060 images of synthetically generated identity documents, totaling approximately 490 gigabytes, categorized into 20 types from $10$ U.S. states and 10 European countries. We evaluate the utility and present use cases of the dataset, illustrating how it can aid in training privacy-preserving fraud detection methods, facilitating the generation of camera and video capturing of identity documents, and testing schema unification and other identity document management functionalities., Comment: 40 pages

Microservice architectures are revolutionizing both small businesses and large corporations, igniting a new era of innovation with their exceptional advantages in maintainability, reusability, and scalability. However, these benefits come with significant security challenges, as the increased complexity of service interactions, expanded attack surfaces, and intricate dependency management introduce a new array of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. While security concerns are mounting, there is a lack of comprehensive research that integrates a review of existing knowledge with empirical analysis of microservice vulnerabilities. This study aims to fill this gap by gathering, analyzing, and synthesizing existing literature on security vulnerabilities associated with microservice architectures. Through a thorough examination of 62 studies, we identify, analyze, and report 126 security vulnerabilities inherent in microservice architectures. This comprehensive analysis enables us to (i) propose a taxonomy that categorizes microservice vulnerabilities based on the distinctive features of microservice architectures; (ii) conduct an empirical analysis by performing vulnerability scans on four diverse microservice benchmark applications using three different scanning tools to validate our taxonomy; and (iii) map our taxonomy vulnerabilities with empirically identified vulnerabilities, providing an in-depth vulnerability analysis at microservice, application, and scanning tool levels. Our study offers crucial guidelines for practitioners and researchers to advance both the state-of-the-practice and the state-of-the-art in securing microservice architectures.

In online learning, the ability to provide quick and accurate feedback to learners is crucial. In skill-based learning, learners need to understand the underlying concepts and mechanisms of a skill to be able to apply it effectively. While videos are a common tool in online learning, they cannot comprehend or assess the skills being taught. Additionally, while Generative AI methods are effective in searching and retrieving answers from a text corpus, it remains unclear whether these methods exhibit any true understanding. This limits their ability to provide explanations of skills or help with problem-solving. This paper proposes a novel approach that merges Cognitive AI and Generative AI to address these challenges. We employ a structured knowledge representation, the TMK (Task-Method-Knowledge) model, to encode skills taught in an online Knowledge-based AI course. Leveraging techniques such as Large Language Models, Chain-of-Thought, and Iterative Refinement, we outline a framework for generating reasoned explanations in response to learners' questions about skills., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

The Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA) is an inquiry-based learning environment that empowers a learner to build conceptual models of complex ecological systems and experiment with agent-based simulations of the models. This study investigates the convergence of cognitive AI and generative AI for self-explanation in interactive AI agents such as VERA. From a cognitive AI viewpoint, we endow VERA with a functional model of its own design, knowledge, and reasoning represented in the Task--Method--Knowledge (TMK) language. From the perspective of generative AI, we use ChatGPT, LangChain, and Chain-of-Thought to answer user questions based on the VERA TMK model. Thus, we combine cognitive and generative AI to generate explanations about how VERA works and produces its answers. The preliminary evaluation of the generation of explanations in VERA on a bank of 66 questions derived from earlier work appears promising., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, 1 appendix, HEXED Workshop @EDM July 2024

We routinely perform procedures (such as cooking) that include a set of atomic steps. Often, inadvertent omission or misordering of a single step can lead to serious consequences, especially for those experiencing cognitive challenges such as dementia. This paper introduces PrISM-Observer, a smartwatch-based, context-aware, real-time intervention system designed to support daily tasks by preventing errors. Unlike traditional systems that require users to seek out information, the agent observes user actions and intervenes proactively. This capability is enabled by the agent's ability to continuously update its belief in the user's behavior in real-time through multimodal sensing and forecast optimal intervention moments and methods. We first validated the steps-tracking performance of our framework through evaluations across three datasets with different complexities. Then, we implemented a real-time agent system using a smartwatch and conducted a user study in a cooking task scenario. The system generated helpful interventions, and we gained positive feedback from the participants. The general applicability of PrISM-Observer to daily tasks promises broad applications, for instance, including support for users requiring more involved interventions, such as people with dementia or post-surgical patients., Comment: conditionally accepted to ACM UIST 2024

We consider the setting where a user with sensitive features wishes to obtain a recommendation from a server in a differentially private fashion. We propose a ``multi-selection'' architecture where the server can send back multiple recommendations and the user chooses one from these that matches best with their private features. When the user feature is one-dimensional -- on an infinite line -- and the accuracy measure is defined w.r.t some increasing function $\mathfrak{h}(.)$ of the distance on the line, we precisely characterize the optimal mechanism that satisfies differential privacy. The specification of the optimal mechanism includes both the distribution of the noise that the user adds to its private value, and the algorithm used by the server to determine the set of results to send back as a response and further show that Laplace is an optimal noise distribution. We further show that this optimal mechanism results in an error that is inversely proportional to the number of results returned when the function $\mathfrak{h}(.)$ is the identity function.

Jill Watson, a virtual teaching assistant powered by LLMs, answers student questions and engages them in extended conversations on courseware provided by the instructors. In this paper, we analyze student interactions with Jill across multiple courses and colleges, focusing on the types and complexity of student questions based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and tool usage patterns. We find that, by supporting a wide range of cognitive demands, Jill encourages students to engage in sophisticated, higher-order cognitive questions. However, the frequency of usage varies significantly across deployments, and the types of questions asked depend on course-specific contexts. These findings pave the way for future work on AI-driven educational tools tailored to individual learning styles and course structure, potentially enhancing both the teaching and learning experience in classrooms., Comment: Accepted in the Seventeenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) Workshop: Leveraging LLMs for Next Generation Educational Technologies, July 2024

In observational studies of discrimination, the most common statistical approaches consider either the rate at which decisions are made (benchmark tests) or the success rate of those decisions (outcome tests). Both tests, however, have well-known statistical limitations, sometimes suggesting discrimination even when there is none. Despite the fallibility of the benchmark and outcome tests individually, here we prove a surprisingly strong statistical guarantee: under a common non-parametric assumption, at least one of the two tests must be correct; consequently, when both tests agree, they are guaranteed to yield correct conclusions. We present empirical evidence that the underlying assumption holds approximately in several important domains, including lending, education, and criminal justice -- and that our hybrid test is robust to the moderate violations of the assumption that we observe in practice. Applying this approach to 2.8 million police stops across California, we find evidence of widespread racial discrimination.

Vision transformers (ViT) have made substantial progress for classification tasks in computer vision. Recently, Gong et. al. '21, introduced attention-based modeling for several audio tasks. However, relatively unexplored is the use of a ViT for audio spoof detection task. We bridge this gap and introduce ViTs for this task. A vanilla baseline built on fine-tuning the SSAST (Gong et. al. '22) audio ViT model achieves sub-optimal equal error rates (EERs). To improve performance, we propose a novel attention-based contrastive learning framework (SSAST-CL) that uses cross-attention to aid the representation learning. Experiments show that our framework successfully disentangles the bonafide and spoof classes and helps learn better classifiers for the task. With appropriate data augmentations policy, a model trained on our framework achieves competitive performance on the ASVSpoof 2021 challenge. We provide comparisons and ablation studies to justify our claim., Comment: Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023

Sample Return Capsules (SRCs) entering Earth's atmosphere at hypervelocity from interplanetary space are a valuable resource for studying meteor phenomena. The 24 September 2023 arrival of the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) SRC provided an unprecedented chance for geophysical observations of a well-characterized source with known parameters, including timing and trajectory. A collaborative effort involving researchers from 16 institutions executed a carefully planned geophysical observational campaign at strategically chosen locations, deploying over 400 ground-based sensors encompassing infrasound, seismic, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), and GPS technologies. Additionally, balloons equipped with infrasound sensors were launched to capture signals at higher altitudes. This campaign (the largest of its kind so far) yielded a wealth of invaluable data anticipated to fuel scientific inquiry for years to come. The success of the observational campaign is evidenced by the near-universal detection of signals across instruments, both proximal and distal. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the collective scientific effort, field deployment, and preliminary findings. The early findings have the potential to inform future space missions and terrestrial campaigns, contributing to our understanding of meteoroid interactions with planetary atmospheres. Furthermore, the dataset collected during this campaign will improve entry and propagation models as well as augment the study of atmospheric dynamics and shock phenomena generated by meteoroids and similar sources., Comment: 87 pages, 14 figures

In this paper, we assess the scientific promise and technology feasibility of distributed instruments for planetary science. A distributed instrument is an instrument designed to collect spatially and temporally correlated data from multiple networked, geographically distributed point sensors. Distributed instruments are ubiquitous in Earth science, where they are routinely employed for weather and climate science, seismic studies and resource prospecting, and detection of industrial emissions. However, to date, their adoption in planetary surface science has been minimal. It is natural to ask whether this lack of adoption is driven by low potential to address high-priority questions in planetary science; immature technology; or both. To address this question, we survey high-priority planetary science questions that are uniquely well-suited to distributed instruments. We identify four areas of research where distributed instruments hold promise to unlock answers that are largely inaccessible to monolithic sensors, namely, weather and climate studies of Mars; localization of seismic events on rocky and icy bodies; localization of trace gas emissions, primarily on Mars; and magnetometry studies of internal composition. Next, we survey enabling technologies for distributed sensors and assess their maturity. We identify sensor placement (including descent and landing on planetary surfaces), power, and instrument autonomy as three key areas requiring further investment to enable future distributed instruments. Overall, this work shows that distributed instruments hold great promise for planetary science, and paves the way for follow-on studies of future distributed instruments for Solar System in-situ science.

This paper addresses a significant gap in Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) literature: the absence of effective edge-blocking ACO strategies in dynamic, real-world networks. It specifically targets the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of organizational Active Directory (AD) systems. Unlike the existing literature on edge-blocking defenses which considers AD systems as static entities, our study counters this by recognizing their dynamic nature and developing advanced edge-blocking defenses through a Stackelberg game model between attacker and defender. We devise a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based attack strategy and an RL-assisted Evolutionary Diversity Optimization-based defense strategy, where the attacker and defender improve each other strategy via parallel gameplay. To address the computational challenges of training attacker-defender strategies on numerous dynamic AD graphs, we propose an RL Training Facilitator that prunes environments and neural networks to eliminate irrelevant elements, enabling efficient and scalable training for large graphs. We extensively train the attacker strategy, as a sophisticated attacker model is essential for a robust defense. Our empirical results successfully demonstrate that our proposed approach enhances defender's proficiency in hardening dynamic AD graphs while ensuring scalability for large-scale AD., Comment: The manuscript has been accepted as full paper at European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2024

Recent approaches representing 3D objects and scenes using Gaussian splats show increased rendering speed across a variety of platforms and devices. While rendering such representations is indeed extremely efficient, storing and transmitting them is often prohibitively expensive. To represent large-scale scenes, one often needs to store millions of 3D Gaussians, occupying gigabytes of disk space. This poses a very practical limitation, prohibiting widespread adoption.Several solutions have been proposed to strike a balance between disk size and rendering quality, noticeably reducing the visual quality. In this work, we propose a new representation that dramatically reduces the hard drive footprint while featuring similar or improved quality when compared to the standard 3D Gaussian splats. When compared to other compact solutions, ours offers higher quality renderings with significantly reduced storage, being able to efficiently run on a mobile device in real-time. Our key observation is that nearby points in the scene can share similar representations. Hence, only a small ratio of 3D points needs to be stored. We introduce an approach to identify such points which are called parent points. The discarded points called children points along with attributes can be efficiently predicted by tiny MLPs., Comment: Project Page: https://plumpuddings.github.io/LPGS//

We study how to subvert language models from following the rules. We model rule-following as inference in propositional Horn logic, a mathematical system in which rules have the form "if $P$ and $Q$, then $R$" for some propositions $P$, $Q$, and $R$. We prove that although transformers can faithfully abide by such rules, maliciously crafted prompts can nevertheless mislead even theoretically constructed models. Empirically, we find that attacks on our theoretical models mirror popular attacks on large language models. Our work suggests that studying smaller theoretical models can help understand the behavior of large language models in rule-based settings like logical reasoning and jailbreak attacks.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has transformed novel-view synthesis with its fast, interpretable, and high-fidelity rendering. However, its resource requirements limit its usability. Especially on constrained devices, training performance degrades quickly and often cannot complete due to excessive memory consumption of the model. The method converges with an indefinite number of Gaussians -- many of them redundant -- making rendering unnecessarily slow and preventing its usage in downstream tasks that expect fixed-size inputs. To address these issues, we tackle the challenges of training and rendering 3DGS models on a budget. We use a guided, purely constructive densification process that steers densification toward Gaussians that raise the reconstruction quality. Model size continuously increases in a controlled manner towards an exact budget, using score-based densification of Gaussians with training-time priors that measure their contribution. We further address training speed obstacles: following a careful analysis of 3DGS' original pipeline, we derive faster, numerically equivalent solutions for gradient computation and attribute updates, including an alternative parallelization for efficient backpropagation. We also propose quality-preserving approximations where suitable to reduce training time even further. Taken together, these enhancements yield a robust, scalable solution with reduced training times, lower compute and memory requirements, and high quality. Our evaluation shows that in a budgeted setting, we obtain competitive quality metrics with 3DGS while achieving a 4--5x reduction in both model size and training time. With more generous budgets, our measured quality surpasses theirs. These advances open the door for novel-view synthesis in constrained environments, e.g., mobile devices.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has revolutionized natural language processing by dynamically integrating external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing their limitation of static training datasets. Recent implementations of RAG leverage hierarchical data structures, which organize documents at various levels of summarization and information density. This complexity, however, can cause LLMs to "choke" on information overload, necessitating more sophisticated querying mechanisms. In this context, we introduce Hierarchical Information Retrieval Optimization (HIRO), a novel querying approach that employs a Depth-First Search (DFS)-based recursive similarity score calculation and branch pruning. This method uniquely minimizes the context delivered to the LLM without informational loss, effectively managing the challenge of excessive data. HIRO's refined approach is validated by a 10.85% improvement in performance on the NarrativeQA dataset.

Despite being more secure and strongly promoted, two-factor (2FA) or multi-factor (MFA) schemes either fail to protect against recent phishing threats such as real-time MITM, controls/relay MITM, malicious browser extension-based phishing attacks, and/or need the users to purchase and carry other hardware for additional account protection. Leveraging the unprecedented popularity of NFC and BLE-enabled smartphones, we explore a new horizon for designing an MFA scheme. This paper introduces an advanced authentication method for user verification that utilizes the user's real-time facial biometric identity, which serves as an inherent factor, together with BLE- NFC-enabled mobile devices, which operate as an ownership factor. We have implemented a prototype authentication system on a BLE-NFC-enabled Android device, and initial threat modeling suggests that it is safe against known phishing attacks. The scheme has been compared with other popular schemes using the Bonneau et al. assessment framework in terms of usability, deployability, and security.

Advent of modern deep learning techniques has given rise to advancements in the field of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, most systems prevalent in the field fail to generalize to speakers not seen during training. This study focuses on handling challenges of multilingual SER, specifically on unseen speakers. We introduce CAMuLeNet, a novel architecture leveraging co-attention based fusion and multitask learning to address this problem. Additionally, we benchmark pretrained encoders of Whisper, HuBERT, Wav2Vec2.0, and WavLM using 10-fold leave-speaker-out cross-validation on five existing multilingual benchmark datasets: IEMOCAP, RAVDESS, CREMA-D, EmoDB and CaFE and, release a novel dataset for SER on the Hindi language (BhavVani). CAMuLeNet shows an average improvement of approximately 8% over all benchmarks on unseen speakers determined by our cross-validation strategy., Comment: 5 pages, Accepted to INTERSPEECH 2024. The first two authors contributed equally

There is a growing body of work on learning from human feedback to align various aspects of machine learning systems with human values and preferences. We consider the setting of fairness in content moderation, in which human feedback is used to determine how two comments -- referencing different sensitive attribute groups -- should be treated in comparison to one another. With a novel dataset collected from Prolific and MTurk, we find significant gaps in fairness preferences depending on the race, age, political stance, educational level, and LGBTQ+ identity of annotators. We also demonstrate that demographics mentioned in text have a strong influence on how users perceive individual fairness in moderation. Further, we find that differences also exist in downstream classifiers trained to predict human preferences. Finally, we observe that an ensemble, giving equal weight to classifiers trained on annotations from different demographics, performs better for different demographic intersections; compared to a single classifier that gives equal weight to each annotation., Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024

Thermoplastic starch (TPS) is an excellent film-forming material, and adding fillers such as tetramethylammonium-montmorillonite (TMA-MMT) clay has significantly expanded its use in packaging applications. We first used all-atom (AA) simulation to predict several macroscopic (Young modulus, glass transition temperature, density) and microscopic (conformation along 1-4 and 1-6 glycosidic linkages, composite morphology) properties of TPS melt and TPS-TMA-MMT composite. The interplay of polymer-surface, plasticizer-surface, and polymer-plasticizer interactions leads to conformational and dynamic properties distinct from those in systems with either attractive or repulsive polymer-surface interactions. A subset of AA properties was used to parameterize the MARTINI coarse-grained (CG) force field (FF) for the melt and composite systems. Specifically, we determined the missing bonded parameters of amylose and amylopectin and rationalized the bead types for 1-4 and 1-6 linked alpha-D glucose using two-body excess entropy, density, and bond and angle distributions in AA TPS melt. The MARTINI CG model for TPS was combined with an existing parameter set for TMA-MMT. The liquid-liquid partitioning-based MARTINI-2 FF shows freezing and compaction of polymer chains near the sheet surface, further accentuated by lowering of dispersive interactions between pairs of high covalent coordination ring units of TPS polymers and MMT sheet. A rescaling of the dispersive component of TPS MMT cross-interactions was used to optimize the FF for the composite system, with structural, thermodynamic, and dynamic properties obtained from long AA simulations forming the constraints for optimization. The obtained CG FF parameters provided excellent estimates for several other properties of the melt and composite systems not used in parameter estimation, thus establishing the robustness of the developed model.

We study the problem of learning under arbitrary distribution shift, where the learner is trained on a labeled set from one distribution but evaluated on a different, potentially adversarially generated test distribution. We focus on two frameworks: PQ learning [Goldwasser, A. Kalai, Y. Kalai, Montasser NeurIPS 2020], allowing abstention on adversarially generated parts of the test distribution, and TDS learning [Klivans, Stavropoulos, Vasilyan COLT 2024], permitting abstention on the entire test distribution if distribution shift is detected. All prior known algorithms either rely on learning primitives that are computationally hard even for simple function classes, or end up abstaining entirely even in the presence of a tiny amount of distribution shift. We address both these challenges for natural function classes, including intersections of halfspaces and decision trees, and standard training distributions, including Gaussians. For PQ learning, we give efficient learning algorithms, while for TDS learning, our algorithms can tolerate moderate amounts of distribution shift. At the core of our approach is an improved analysis of spectral outlier-removal techniques from learning with nasty noise. Our analysis can (1) handle arbitrarily large fraction of outliers, which is crucial for handling arbitrary distribution shifts, and (2) obtain stronger bounds on polynomial moments of the distribution after outlier removal, yielding new insights into polynomial regression under distribution shifts. Lastly, our techniques lead to novel results for tolerant testable learning [Rubinfeld and Vasilyan STOC 2023], and learning with nasty noise.

Despite the success of Transformers on language understanding, code generation, and logical reasoning, they still fail to generalize over length on basic arithmetic tasks such as addition and multiplication. A major reason behind this failure is the vast difference in structure between numbers and text; For example, the numbers are typically parsed from right to left, and there is a correspondence between digits at the same position across different numbers. In contrast, for text, such symmetries are quite unnatural. In this work, we propose to encode these semantics explicitly into the model via modified number formatting and custom positional encodings. Empirically, our method allows a Transformer trained on numbers with at most 5-digits for addition and multiplication to generalize up to 50-digit numbers, without using additional data for longer sequences. We further demonstrate that traditional absolute positional encodings (APE) fail to generalize to longer sequences, even when trained with augmented data that captures task symmetries. To elucidate the importance of explicitly encoding structure, we prove that explicit incorporation of structure via positional encodings is necessary for out-of-distribution generalization. Finally, we pinpoint other challenges inherent to length generalization beyond capturing symmetries, in particular complexity of the underlying task, and propose changes in the training distribution to address them., Comment: 32 pages, 16 figures

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) play a significant role in patient health outcomes. The Center of Disease Control (CDC) introduced a subset of ICD-10 codes called Z-codes in an attempt to officially recognize and measure SDOH in the health care system. However, these codes are rarely annotated in a patient's Electronic Health Record (EHR), and instead, in many cases, need to be inferred from clinical notes. Previous research has shown that large language models (LLMs) show promise on extracting unstructured data from EHRs. However, with thousands of models to choose from with unique architectures and training sets, it's difficult to choose one model that performs the best on coding tasks. Further, clinical notes contain trusted health information making the use of closed-source language models from commercial vendors difficult, so the identification of open source LLMs that can be run within health organizations and exhibits high performance on SDOH tasks is an urgent problem. Here, we introduce an intelligent routing system for SDOH coding that uses a language model router to direct medical record data to open source LLMs that demonstrate optimal performance on specific SDOH codes. The intelligent routing system exhibits state of the art performance of 97.4% accuracy averaged across 5 codes, including homelessness and food insecurity, on par with closed models such as GPT-4o. In order to train the routing system and validate models, we also introduce a synthetic data generation and validation paradigm to increase the scale of training data without needing privacy protected medical records. Together, we demonstrate an architecture for intelligent routing of inputs to task-optimal language models to achieve high performance across a set of medical coding sub-tasks.

We review the progress made on bounding the number of independent sets in $d$-regular and irregular graphs over the last 31 years. We particularly focus on contributions from Kahn, Zhao, and Sah et al. in incrementally proving stronger and more general versions of the upper bound. We reproduce the main results of these works, particularly focusing on the unweighted special case (with fugacity $\lambda = 1$), which allows us to provide more intuitive and clear explanations of the key ideas that have been developed in the field over three decades.

Citing pertinent literature is pivotal to writing and reviewing a scientific document. Existing techniques mainly focus on the local context or the global context for recommending citations but fail to consider the actual human citation behaviour. We propose SymTax, a three-stage recommendation architecture that considers both the local and the global context, and additionally the taxonomical representations of query-candidate tuples and the Symbiosis prevailing amongst them. SymTax learns to embed the infused taxonomies in the hyperbolic space and uses hyperbolic separation as a latent feature to compute query-candidate similarity. We build a novel and large dataset ArSyTa containing 8.27 million citation contexts and describe the creation process in detail. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness and design choice of each module in our framework. Also, combinatorial analysis from our experiments shed light on the choice of language models (LMs) and fusion embedding, and the inclusion of section heading as a signal. Our proposed module that captures the symbiotic relationship solely leads to performance gains of 26.66% and 39.25% in Recall@5 w.r.t. SOTA on ACL-200 and RefSeer datasets, respectively. The complete framework yields a gain of 22.56% in Recall@5 wrt SOTA on our proposed dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/goyalkaraniit/SymTax, Comment: Accepted in ACL 2024