Nevada
AI malware could beat Microsoft Defender up to 8 percent of the time
According to hackers at this year's upcoming Black Hat conference, some of the newest stuff can defeat Microsoft Defender (the default security suite for a billion or two Windows machines) up to 8 percent of the time. Dark Reading (via Tom's Hardware) reports that a security researcher will present the system at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next month. Kyle Avery of Outflank will reportedly show off a lightweight language model designed specifically to evade Microsoft Defender, the free built-in security for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Eight percent might not seem alarming, and it's not as if this would be the first time Defender was defeated. But it would be a huge leap forward in AI-powered malware's core capability, an order of magnitude more reliably dangerous than the malware you can "vibe code" with current models.
IWBVT: Instance Weighting-based Bias-Variance Trade-off for Crowdsourcing
In recent years, a large number of algorithms for label integration and noise correction have been proposed to infer the unknown true labels of instances in crowdsourcing. They have made great advances in improving the label quality of crowdsourced datasets. However, due to the presence of intractable instances, these algorithms are usually not as significant in improving the model quality as they are in improving the label quality. To improve the model quality, this paper proposes an instance weighting-based bias-variance trade-off (IWBVT) approach. IWBVT at first proposes a novel instance weighting method based on the complementary set and entropy, which mitigates the impact of intractable instances and thus makes the bias and variance of trained models closer to the unknown true results. Then, IWBVT performs probabilistic loss regressions based on the bias-variance decomposition, which achieves the bias-variance trade-off and thus reduces the generalization error of trained models. Experimental results indicate that IWBVT can serve as a universal post-processing approach to significantly improving the model quality of existing state-of-the-art label integration algorithms and noise correction algorithms.
Towards Higher Ranks via Adversarial Weight Pruning
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are hard to deploy on edge devices due to its high computation and storage complexities. As a common practice for model compression, network pruning consists of two major categories: unstructured and structured pruning, where unstructured pruning constantly performs better. However, unstructured pruning presents a structured pattern at high pruning rates, which limits its performance. To this end, we propose a Rank-based PruninG (RPG) method to maintain the ranks of sparse weights in an adversarial manner. In each step, we minimize the low-rank approximation error for the weight matrices using singular value decomposition, and maximize their distance by pushing the weight matrices away from its low rank approximation.
KFNN: K-Free Nearest Neighbor For Crowdsourcing
To reduce annotation costs, it is common in crowdsourcing to collect only a few noisy labels from different crowd workers for each instance. However, the limited noisy labels restrict the performance of label integration algorithms in inferring the unknown true label for the instance. Recent works have shown that leveraging neighbor instances can help alleviate this problem. Yet, these works all assume that each instance has the same neighborhood size, which defies common sense. To address this gap, we propose a novel label integration algorithm called K-free nearest neighbor (KFNN). In KFNN, the neighborhood size of each instance is automatically determined based on its attributes and noisy labels.
UQGAN: A Unified Model for Uncertainty Quantification of Deep Classifiers trained via Conditional GANs
We present an approach to quantifying both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty for deep neural networks in image classification, based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). While most works in the literature that use GANs to generate out-of-distribution (OoD) examples only focus on the evaluation of OoD detection, we present a GAN based approach to learn a classifier that produces proper uncertainties for OoD examples as well as for false positives (FPs). Instead of shielding the entire in-distribution data with GAN generated OoD examples which is stateof-the-art, we shield each class separately with out-of-class examples generated by a conditional GAN and complement this with a one-vs-all image classifier. In our experiments, in particular on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet, we improve over the OoD detection and FP detection performance of state-of-the-art GAN-training based classifiers. Furthermore, we also find that the generated GAN examples do not significantly affect the calibration error of our classifier and result in a significant gain in model accuracy.
NeuralPlane: An Efficiently Parallelizable Platform for Fixed-wing Aircraft Control with Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrates superior potential over traditional flight control methods for fixed-wing aircraft, particularly under extreme operational conditions. However, the high demand for training samples and the lack of efficient computation in existing simulators hinder its further application. In this paper, we introduce NeuralPlane, the first benchmark platform for large-scale parallel simulations of fixed-wing aircraft. NeuralPlane significantly boosts high-fidelity simulation via GPU-accelerated Flight Dynamics Model (FDM) computation, achieving a single-step simulation time of just 0.2 seconds at a parallel scale of 10