Oceania
VulCurator: A Vulnerability-Fixing Commit Detector
Nguyen, Truong Giang, Le-Cong, Thanh, Kang, Hong Jin, Le, Xuan-Bach D., Lo, David
Open-source software (OSS) vulnerability management process is important nowadays, as the number of discovered OSS vulnerabilities is increasing over time. Monitoring vulnerability-fixing commits is a part of the standard process to prevent vulnerability exploitation. Manually detecting vulnerability-fixing commits is, however, time consuming due to the possibly large number of commits to review. Recently, many techniques have been proposed to automatically detect vulnerability-fixing commits using machine learning. These solutions either: (1) did not use deep learning, or (2) use deep learning on only limited sources of information. This paper proposes VulCurator, a tool that leverages deep learning on richer sources of information, including commit messages, code changes and issue reports for vulnerability-fixing commit classifica- tion. Our experimental results show that VulCurator outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines up to 16.1% in terms of F1-score. VulCurator tool is publicly available at https://github.com/ntgiang71096/VFDetector and https://zenodo.org/record/7034132#.Yw3MN-xBzDI, with a demo video at https://youtu.be/uMlFmWSJYOE.
FathomNet: A global image database for enabling artificial intelligence in the ocean
Katija, Kakani, Orenstein, Eric, Schlining, Brian, Lundsten, Lonny, Barnard, Kevin, Sainz, Giovanna, Boulais, Oceane, Cromwell, Megan, Butler, Erin, Woodward, Benjamin, Bell, Katy Croff
The ocean is experiencing unprecedented rapid change, and visually monitoring marine biota at the spatiotemporal scales needed for responsible stewardship is a formidable task. As baselines are sought by the research community, the volume and rate of this required data collection rapidly outpaces our abilities to process and analyze them. Recent advances in machine learning enables fast, sophisticated analysis of visual data, but have had limited success in the ocean due to lack of data standardization, insufficient formatting, and demand for large, labeled datasets. To address this need, we built FathomNet, an open-source image database that standardizes and aggregates expertly curated labeled data. FathomNet has been seeded with existing iconic and non-iconic imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, and other concepts, and allows for future contributions from distributed data sources. We demonstrate how FathomNet data can be used to train and deploy models on other institutional video to reduce annotation effort, and enable automated tracking of underwater concepts when integrated with robotic vehicles. As FathomNet continues to grow and incorporate more labeled data from the community, we can accelerate the processing of visual data to achieve a healthy and sustainable global ocean.
Automatic Meta-Path Discovery for Effective Graph-Based Recommendation
Ning, Wentao, Cheng, Reynold, Shen, Jiajun, Haldar, Nur Al Hasan, Kao, Ben, Yan, Xiao, Huo, Nan, Lam, Wai Kit, Li, Tian, Tang, Bo
Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) are labeled graphs that depict relationships among different types of entities (e.g., users, movies and directors). For HINs, meta-path-based recommenders (MPRs) utilize meta-paths (i.e., abstract paths consisting of node and link types) to predict user preference, and have attracted a lot of attention due to their explainability and performance. We observe that the performance of MPRs is highly sensitive to the meta-paths they use, but existing works manually select the meta-paths from many possible ones. Thus, to discover effective meta-paths automatically, we propose the Reinforcement learning-based Meta-path Selection (RMS) framework. Specifically, we define a vector encoding for meta-paths and design a policy network to extend meta-paths. The policy network is trained based on the results of downstream recommendation tasks and an early stopping approximation strategy is proposed to speed up training. RMS is a general model, and it can work with all existing MPRs. We also propose a new MPR called RMS-HRec, which uses an attention mechanism to aggregate information from the meta-paths. We conduct extensive experiments on real datasets. Compared with the manually selected meta-paths, the meta-paths identified by RMS consistently improve recommendation quality. Moreover, RMS-HRec outperforms state-of-the-art recommender systems by an average of 7% in hit ratio. The codes and datasets are available on https://github.com/Stevenn9981/RMS-HRec.
reStructured Pre-training
In this work, we try to decipher the internal connection of NLP technology development in the past decades, searching for essence, which rewards us with a (potential) new learning paradigm for NLP tasks, dubbed as reStructured Pre-training (RST). In such a paradigm, the role of data will be re-emphasized, and model pre-training and fine-tuning of downstream tasks are viewed as a process of data storing and accessing. Based on that, we operationalize the simple principle that a good storage mechanism should not only have the ability to cache a large amount of data but also consider the ease of access. We achieve this by pre-training models over restructured data that consist of a variety of valuable information instead of raw data after overcoming several engineering challenges. Experimentally, RST models not only surpass strong competitors (e.g., T0) on 52/55 popular datasets from a variety of NLP tasks (e.g., classification, information extraction, fact retrieval, text generation, etc.) without fine-tuning on downstream tasks, but also achieve superior performance in National College Entrance Examination - English (Gaokao-English), the most authoritative examination in China, which millions of students will attend every year. Specifically, the proposed system Qin () achieves 40 points higher than the average scores made by students and 15 points higher than GPT3 with 1/16 parameters. In particular, Qin gets a high score of 138.5 (the full mark is 150) in the 2018 English exam (national paper III). We have released the Gaokao Benchmark with an online submission platform that contains ten annotated English papers from 2018-2021 so far (and will be expanded annually), which allows more AI models to attend Gaokao, establishing a relatively fair test bed for human and AI competition and helping us better understand where we are. We test our model in the 2022 College Entrance Examination English that happened a few days ago (2022.06.08), and it gets a total score of 134 (v.s.
AutoPruner: Transformer-Based Call Graph Pruning
Le-Cong, Thanh, Kang, Hong Jin, Nguyen, Truong Giang, Haryono, Stefanus Agus, Lo, David, Le, Xuan-Bach D., Thang, Huynh Quyet
Constructing a static call graph requires trade-offs between soundness and precision. Program analysis techniques for constructing call graphs are unfortunately usually imprecise. To address this problem, researchers have recently proposed call graph pruning empowered by machine learning to post-process call graphs constructed by static analysis. A machine learning model is built to capture information from the call graph by extracting structural features for use in a random forest classifier. It then removes edges that are predicted to be false positives. Despite the improvements shown by machine learning models, they are still limited as they do not consider the source code semantics and thus often are not able to effectively distinguish true and false positives. In this paper, we present a novel call graph pruning technique, AutoPruner, for eliminating false positives in call graphs via both statistical semantic and structural analysis. Given a call graph constructed by traditional static analysis tools, AutoPruner takes a Transformer-based approach to capture the semantic relationships between the caller and callee functions associated with each edge in the call graph. To do so, AutoPruner fine-tunes a model of code that was pre-trained on a large corpus to represent source code based on descriptions of its semantics. Next, the model is used to extract semantic features from the functions related to each edge in the call graph. AutoPruner uses these semantic features together with the structural features extracted from the call graph to classify each edge via a feed-forward neural network. Our empirical evaluation on a benchmark dataset of real-world programs shows that AutoPruner outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, improving on F-measure by up to 13% in identifying false-positive edges in a static call graph.
Machine Learning-based Automatic Annotation and Detection of COVID-19 Fake News
Akhtar, Mohammad Majid, Sharma, Bibhas, Karunanayake, Ishan, Masood, Rahat, Ikram, Muhammad, Kanhere, Salil S.
COVID-19 impacted every part of the world, although the misinformation about the outbreak traveled faster than the virus. Misinformation spread through online social networks (OSN) often misled people from following correct medical practices. In particular, OSN bots have been a primary source of disseminating false information and initiating cyber propaganda. Existing work neglects the presence of bots that act as a catalyst in the spread and focuses on fake news detection in 'articles shared in posts' rather than the post (textual) content. Most work on misinformation detection uses manually labeled datasets that are hard to scale for building their predictive models. In this research, we overcome this challenge of data scarcity by proposing an automated approach for labeling data using verified fact-checked statements on a Twitter dataset. In addition, we combine textual features with user-level features (such as followers count and friends count) and tweet-level features (such as number of mentions, hashtags and urls in a tweet) to act as additional indicators to detect misinformation. Moreover, we analyzed the presence of bots in tweets and show that bots change their behavior over time and are most active during the misinformation campaign. We collected 10.22 Million COVID-19 related tweets and used our annotation model to build an extensive and original ground truth dataset for classification purposes. We utilize various machine learning models to accurately detect misinformation and our best classification model achieves precision (82%), recall (96%), and false positive rate (3.58%). Also, our bot analysis indicates that bots generated approximately 10% of misinformation tweets. Our methodology results in substantial exposure of false information, thus improving the trustworthiness of information disseminated through social media platforms.
Semantic Interactive Learning for Text Classification: A Constructive Approach for Contextual Interactions
Kiefer, Sebastian, Hoffmann, Mareike
Interactive Machine Learning (IML) shall enable intelligent systems to interactively learn from their end-users, and is quickly becoming more and more important. Although it puts the human in the loop, interactions are mostly performed via mutual explanations that miss contextual information. Furthermore, current model-agnostic IML strategies like CAIPI are limited to 'destructive' feedback, meaning they solely allow an expert to prevent a learner from using irrelevant features. In this work, we propose a novel interaction framework called Semantic Interactive Learning for the text domain. We frame the problem of incorporating constructive and contextual feedback into the learner as a task to find an architecture that (a) enables more semantic alignment between humans and machines and (b) at the same time helps to maintain statistical characteristics of the input domain when generating user-defined counterexamples based on meaningful corrections. Therefore, we introduce a technique called SemanticPush that is effective for translating conceptual corrections of humans to non-extrapolating training examples such that the learner's reasoning is pushed towards the desired behavior. In several experiments, we show that our method clearly outperforms CAIPI, a state of the art IML strategy, in terms of Predictive Performance as well as Local Explanation Quality in downstream multi-class classification tasks.
Adam Mickiewicz University at WMT 2022: NER-Assisted and Quality-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Nowakowski, Artur, Pałka, Gabriela, Guttmann, Kamil, Pokrywka, Mikołaj
This paper presents Adam Mickiewicz University's (AMU) submissions to the constrained track of the WMT 2022 General MT Task. We participated in the Ukrainian $\leftrightarrow$ Czech translation directions. The systems are a weighted ensemble of four models based on the Transformer (big) architecture. The models use source factors to utilize the information about named entities present in the input. Each of the models in the ensemble was trained using only the data provided by the shared task organizers. A noisy back-translation technique was used to augment the training corpora. One of the models in the ensemble is a document-level model, trained on parallel and synthetic longer sequences. During the sentence-level decoding process, the ensemble generated the n-best list. The n-best list was merged with the n-best list generated by a single document-level model which translated multiple sentences at a time. Finally, existing quality estimation models and minimum Bayes risk decoding were used to rerank the n-best list so that the best hypothesis was chosen according to the COMET evaluation metric. According to the automatic evaluation results, our systems rank first in both translation directions.
Can Edge Probing Tasks Reveal Linguistic Knowledge in QA Models?
Choudhury, Sagnik Ray, Bhutani, Nikita, Augenstein, Isabelle
There have been many efforts to try to understand what grammatical knowledge (e.g., ability to understand the part of speech of a token) is encoded in large pre-trained language models (LM). This is done through `Edge Probing' (EP) tests: supervised classification tasks to predict the grammatical properties of a span (whether it has a particular part of speech) using only the token representations coming from the LM encoder. However, most NLP applications fine-tune these LM encoders for specific tasks. Here, we ask: if an LM is fine-tuned, does the encoding of linguistic information in it change, as measured by EP tests? Specifically, we focus on the task of Question Answering (QA) and conduct experiments on multiple datasets. We find that EP test results do not change significantly when the fine-tuned model performs well or in adversarial situations where the model is forced to learn wrong correlations. From a similar finding, some recent papers conclude that fine-tuning does not change linguistic knowledge in encoders but they do not provide an explanation. We find that EP models themselves are susceptible to exploiting spurious correlations in the EP datasets. When this dataset bias is corrected, we do see an improvement in the EP test results as expected.
How to create the perfect dating app profile, according to science
'Swiping left' and'swiping right' have become ubiquitous with whether we find someone attractive or not, all thanks to the rise of dating apps. The likes of Tinder, Bumble and Hinge have made online dating pocket-sized, and singletons can whip out their phone wherever they are to search for a partner. But this accessibility has arguably made it more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd, with an estimated 300 million people are currently using dating apps worldwide. Fortunately, experts are here to help the lonely hearts, and have worked tirelessly over the years to find the secret formula for success in online dating. Studies have shown that having a dog in your photos or an Apple product increase your chance of getting a match.