Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

The success of generative modeling in continuous domains has led to a surge of interest in generating discrete data such as molecules, source code, and graphs.

This paper explores the application of reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of a Type-1 Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy controller, designed to operate as an artificial pancreas for Type 1 diabetes. The primary challenge in diabetes management is the dynamic nature of blood glucose levels, which are influenced by several factors such as meal intake and timing. Traditional controllers often struggle to adapt to these changes, leading to suboptimal insulin administration. To address this issue, we employ a reinforcement learning agent tasked with adjusting 27 parameters of the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy controller at each time step, ensuring real-time adaptability. The study's findings demonstrate that this approach significantly enhances the robustness of the controller against variations in meal size and timing, while also stabilizing glucose levels with minimal exogenous insulin. This adaptive method holds promise for improving the quality of life and health outcomes for individuals with Type 1 diabetes by providing a more responsive and precise management tool. Simulation results are given to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Blockchain-based Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables model training without relying on a central server. Although some BFL frameworks are considered privacy-preserving, they are still vulnerable to various attacks, including inference and model poisoning. Additionally, most of these solutions employ strong trust assumptions among all participating entities or introduce incentive mechanisms to encourage collaboration, making them susceptible to multiple security flaws. This work presents VerifBFL, a trustless, privacy-preserving, and verifiable federated learning framework that integrates blockchain technology and cryptographic protocols. By employing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and incrementally verifiable computation (IVC), VerifBFL ensures the verifiability of both local training and aggregation processes. The proofs of training and aggregation are verified on-chain, guaranteeing the integrity and auditability of each participant's contributions. To protect training data from inference attacks, VerifBFL leverages differential privacy. Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed protocols, we built a proof of concept using emerging tools. The results show that generating proofs for local training and aggregation in VerifBFL takes less than 81s and 2s, respectively, while verifying them on-chain takes less than 0.6s.

Blockchained federated learning (BFL) combines the concepts of federated learning and blockchain technology to enhance privacy, security, and transparency in collaborative machine learning models. However, implementing BFL frameworks poses challenges in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness. Reputation-aware BFL poses even more challenges, as blockchain validators are tasked with processing federated learning transactions along with the transactions that evaluate FL tasks and aggregate reputations. This leads to faster blockchain congestion and performance degradation. To improve BFL efficiency while increasing scalability and reducing on-chain reputation management costs, this paper proposes AutoDFL, a scalable and automated reputation-aware decentralized federated learning framework. AutoDFL leverages zk-Rollups as a Layer-2 scaling solution to boost the performance while maintaining the same level of security as the underlying Layer-1 blockchain. Moreover, AutoDFL introduces an automated and fair reputation model designed to incentivize federated learning actors. We develop a proof of concept for our framework for an accurate evaluation. Tested with various custom workloads, AutoDFL reaches an average throughput of over 3000 TPS with a gas reduction of up to 20X.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent a significant challenge in cybersecurity due to their sophisticated and stealthy nature. Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) often fall short in detecting these multi-stage attacks. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been employed to enhance IDS capabilities by analyzing the complex relationships within networked data. However, existing GNN-based solutions are hampered by high false positive rates and substantial resource consumption. In this paper, we present a novel IDS designed to detect APTs using a Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network Autoencoder. Our approach leverages spatial information to understand the interactions between entities within a graph and temporal information to capture the evolution of the graph over time. This dual perspective is crucial for identifying the sequential stages of APTs. Furthermore, to address privacy and scalability concerns, we deploy our architecture in a federated learning environment. This setup ensures that local data remains on-premise while encrypted model-weights are shared and aggregated using homomorphic encryption, maintaining data privacy and security. Our evaluation shows that this system effectively detects APTs with lower false positive rates and optimized resource usage compared to existing methods, highlighting the potential of spatio-temporal analysis and federated learning in enhancing cybersecurity defenses.

While generative models such as text-to-image, large language models and text-to-video have seen significant progress, the extension to text-to-virtual-reality remains largely unexplored, due to a deficit in training data and the complexity of achieving realistic depth and motion in virtual environments. This paper proposes an approach to coalesce existing generative systems to form a stereoscopic virtual reality video from text. Carried out in three main stages, we start with a base text-to-image model that captures context from an input text. We then employ Stable Diffusion on the rudimentary image produced, to generate frames with enhanced realism and overall quality. These frames are processed with depth estimation algorithms to create left-eye and right-eye views, which are stitched side-by-side to create an immersive viewing experience. Such systems would be highly beneficial in virtual reality production, since filming and scene building often require extensive hours of work and post-production effort. We utilize image evaluation techniques, specifically Fr\'echet Inception Distance and CLIP Score, to assess the visual quality of frames produced for the video. These quantitative measures establish the proficiency of the proposed method. Our work highlights the exciting possibilities of using natural language-driven graphics in fields like virtual reality simulations.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce errors, including factual inaccuracies, biases, and reasoning failures, collectively referred to as "hallucinations". Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs' internal states encode information regarding the truthfulness of their outputs, and that this information can be utilized to detect errors. In this work, we show that the internal representations of LLMs encode much more information about truthfulness than previously recognized. We first discover that the truthfulness information is concentrated in specific tokens, and leveraging this property significantly enhances error detection performance. Yet, we show that such error detectors fail to generalize across datasets, implying that -- contrary to prior claims -- truthfulness encoding is not universal but rather multifaceted. Next, we show that internal representations can also be used for predicting the types of errors the model is likely to make, facilitating the development of tailored mitigation strategies. Lastly, we reveal a discrepancy between LLMs' internal encoding and external behavior: they may encode the correct answer, yet consistently generate an incorrect one. Taken together, these insights deepen our understanding of LLM errors from the model's internal perspective, which can guide future research on enhancing error analysis and mitigation.

This review paper provides a comprehensive analysis of recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) with bidirectional encoder representations from transformers BERT and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) transformers. The paper first introduces the fundamental concepts of ASR and discusses the challenges associated with it. It then explains the architecture of BERT and CTC transformers and their potential applications in ASR. The paper reviews several studies that have used these models for speech recognition tasks and discusses the results obtained. Additionally, the paper highlights the limitations of these models and outlines potential areas for further research. All in all, this review provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners who are interested in ASR with BERT and CTC transformers.

Given its intuitive nature, many Cloud providers opt for threshold-based data replication to enable automatic resource scaling. However, setting thresholds effectively needs human intervention to calibrate thresholds for each metric and requires a deep knowledge of current workload trends, which can be challenging to achieve. Reinforcement learning is used in many areas related to the Cloud Computing, and it is a promising field to get automatic data replication strategies. In this work, we survey data replication strategies and data scaling based on reinforcement learning (RL).