Designing resilient Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires i) identification of IoT Critical Objects (ICOs) such as services, devices, and resources, ii) threat analysis, and iii) mitigation strategy selection. However, the traditional process for designing resilient IoT systems is still manual, leading to inefficiencies and increased risks. In addition, while tools such as ChatGPT could support this manual and highly error-prone process, their use raises concerns over data privacy, inconsistent outputs, and internet dependence. Therefore, we propose RITA, an automated, open-source framework that uses a fine-tuned RoBERTa-based Named Entity Recognition (NER) model to identify ICOs from IoT requirement documents, correlate threats, and recommend countermeasures. RITA operates entirely offline and can be deployed on-site, safeguarding sensitive information and delivering consistent outputs that enhance standardization. In our empirical evaluation, RITA outperformed ChatGPT in four of seven ICO categories, particularly in actuator, sensor, network resource, and service identification, using both human-annotated and ChatGPT-generated test data. These findings indicate that RITA can improve resilient IoT design by effectively supporting key security operations, offering a practical solution for developing robust IoT architectures.

This paper investigates a novel approach to end-to-end speech translation (ST) based on aligning frozen pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) models via a small connector module (Q-Former, our Subsampler-Transformer Encoder). This connector bridges the gap between the speech and text modalities, transforming ASR encoder embeddings into the latent representation space of the MT encoder while being the only part of the system optimized during training. Experiments are conducted on the How2 English-Portuguese dataset as we investigate the alignment approach in a small-scale scenario focusing on ST. While keeping the size of the connector module constant and small in comparison ( < 5% of the size of the larger aligned models), increasing the size and capability of the foundation ASR and MT models universally improves translation results. We also find that the connectors can serve as domain adapters for the foundation MT models, significantly improving translation performance in the aligned ST setting. We conclude that this approach represents a viable and scalable approach to training end-to-end ST systems.

Traffic forecasting is an important problem in the operation and optimisation of transportation systems. State-of-the-art solutions train machine learning models by minimising the mean forecasting errors on the training data. The trained models often favour periodic events instead of aperiodic ones in their prediction results, as periodic events often prevail in the training data. While offering critical optimisation opportunities, aperiodic events such as traffic incidents may be missed by the existing models. To address this issue, we propose DualCast -- a model framework to enhance the learning capability of traffic forecasting models, especially for aperiodic events. DualCast takes a dual-branch architecture, to disentangle traffic signals into two types, one reflecting intrinsic {spatial-temporal} patterns and the other reflecting external environment contexts including aperiodic events. We further propose a cross-time attention mechanism, to capture high-order spatial-temporal relationships from both periodic and aperiodic patterns. DualCast is versatile. We integrate it with recent traffic forecasting models, consistently reducing their forecasting errors by up to 9.6% on multiple real datasets.

This paper proposes an enhancement to the ORB-SLAM3 algorithm, tailored for applications on rugged road surfaces. Our improved algorithm adeptly combines feature point matching with optical flow methods, capitalizing on the high robustness of optical flow in complex terrains and the high precision of feature points on smooth surfaces. By refining the inter-frame matching logic of ORB-SLAM3, we have addressed the issue of frame matching loss on uneven roads. To prevent a decrease in accuracy, an adaptive matching mechanism has been incorporated, which increases the reliance on optical flow points during periods of high vibration, thereby effectively maintaining SLAM precision. Furthermore, due to the scarcity of multi-sensor datasets suitable for environments with bumpy roads or speed bumps, we have collected LiDAR and camera data from such settings. Our enhanced algorithm, ORB-SLAM3AB, was then benchmarked against several advanced open-source SLAM algorithms that rely solely on laser or visual data. Through the analysis of Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) and Relative Pose Error (RPE) metrics, our results demonstrate that ORB-SLAM3AB achieves superior robustness and accuracy on rugged road surfaces.

This comprehensive survey delves into the latest advancements in Relation Extraction (RE), a pivotal task in natural language processing essential for applications across biomedical, financial, and legal sectors. This study highlights the evolution and current state of RE techniques by analyzing 137 papers presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conferences over the past four years, focusing on models that leverage language models. Our findings underscore the dominance of BERT-based methods in achieving state-of-the-art results for RE while also noting the promising capabilities of emerging large language models (LLMs) like T5, especially in few-shot relation extraction scenarios where they excel in identifying previously unseen relations.

Transformer neural networks (TNN) excel in natural language processing (NLP), machine translation, and computer vision (CV) without relying on recurrent or convolutional layers. However, they have high computational and memory demands, particularly on resource-constrained devices like FPGAs. Moreover, transformer models vary in processing time across applications, requiring custom models with specific parameters. Designing custom accelerators for each model is complex and time-intensive. Some custom accelerators exist with no runtime adaptability, and they often rely on sparse matrices to reduce latency. However, hardware designs become more challenging due to the need for application-specific sparsity patterns. This paper introduces ADAPTOR, a runtime-adaptive accelerator for dense matrix computations in transformer encoders and decoders on FPGAs. ADAPTOR enhances the utilization of processing elements and on-chip memory, enhancing parallelism and reducing latency. It incorporates efficient matrix tiling to distribute resources across FPGA platforms and is fully quantized for computational efficiency and portability. Evaluations on Xilinx Alveo U55C data center cards and embedded platforms like VC707 and ZCU102 show that our design is 1.2$\times$ and 2.87$\times$ more power efficient than the NVIDIA K80 GPU and the i7-8700K CPU respectively. Additionally, it achieves a speedup of 1.7 to 2.25$\times$ compared to some state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerators.

Mobile apps are essential in daily life, yet they often employ dark patterns, such as visual tricks to highlight certain options or linguistic tactics to nag users into making purchases, to manipulate user behavior. Current research mainly uses manual methods to detect dark patterns, a process that is time-consuming and struggles to keep pace with continually updating and emerging apps. While some studies targeted at automated detection, they are constrained to static patterns and still necessitate manual app exploration. To bridge these gaps, we present AppRay, an innovative system that seamlessly blends task-oriented app exploration with automated dark pattern detection, reducing manual efforts. Our approach consists of two steps: First, we harness the commonsense knowledge of large language models for targeted app exploration, supplemented by traditional random exploration to capture a broader range of UI states. Second, we developed a static and dynamic dark pattern detector powered by a contrastive learning-based multi-label classifier and a rule-based refiner to perform detection. We contributed two datasets, AppRay-Dark and AppRay-Light, with 2,185 unique deceptive patterns (including 149 dynamic instances) across 18 types from 876 UIs and 871 benign UIs. These datasets cover both static and dynamic dark patterns while preserving UI relationships. Experimental results confirm that AppRay can efficiently explore the app and identify a wide range of dark patterns with great performance.

Do horror writers have worse childhoods than other writers? Though biographical details are known about many writers, quantitatively exploring such a qualitative hypothesis requires significant human effort, e.g. to sift through many biographies and interviews of writers and to iteratively search for quantitative features that reflect what is qualitatively of interest. This paper explores the potential to quickly prototype these kinds of hypotheses through (1) applying LLMs to estimate properties of concrete entities like specific people, companies, books, kinds of animals, and countries; (2) performing off-the-shelf analysis methods to reveal possible relationships among such properties (e.g. linear regression); and towards further automation, (3) applying LLMs to suggest the quantitative properties themselves that could help ground a particular qualitative hypothesis (e.g. number of adverse childhood events, in the context of the running example). The hope is to allow sifting through hypotheses more quickly through collaboration between human and machine. Our experiments highlight that indeed, LLMs can serve as useful estimators of tabular data about specific entities across a range of domains, and that such estimations improve with model scale. Further, initial experiments demonstrate the potential of LLMs to map a qualitative hypothesis of interest to relevant concrete variables that the LLM can then estimate. The conclusion is that LLMs offer intriguing potential to help illuminate scientifically interesting patterns latent within the internet-scale data they are trained upon.

LLMs can now act as autonomous agents that interact with digital environments and complete specific objectives (e.g., arranging an online meeting). However, accuracy is still far from satisfactory, partly due to a lack of large-scale, direct demonstrations for digital tasks. Obtaining supervised data from humans is costly, and automatic data collection through exploration or reinforcement learning relies on complex environmental and content setup, resulting in datasets that lack comprehensive coverage of various scenarios. On the other hand, there is abundant knowledge that may indirectly assist task completion, such as online tutorials that were created for human consumption. In this work, we present Synatra, an approach that effectively transforms this indirect knowledge into direct supervision at scale. We define different types of indirect knowledge, and carefully study the available sources to obtain it, methods to encode the structure of direct demonstrations, and finally methods to transform indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations. We use 100k such synthetically-created demonstrations to finetune a 7B CodeLlama, and demonstrate that the resulting agent surpasses all comparably sized models on three web-based task benchmarks Mind2Web, MiniWoB++ and WebArena, as well as surpassing GPT-3.5 on WebArena and Mind2Web. In addition, while synthetic demonstrations prove to be only 3% the cost of human demonstrations (at $0.031 each), we show that the synthetic demonstrations can be more effective than an identical number of human demonstrations collected from limited domains.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are known for their poor performance in out-of-distribution datasets. An issue that was addressed in previous works through ensemble learning, answer re-ranking, or artificially growing the training set. In this work, we show for the first time that robust Visual Question Answering is attainable by simply enhancing the training strategy. Our proposed approach, Task Progressive Curriculum Learning (TPCL), breaks the main VQA problem into smaller, easier tasks based on the question type. Then, it progressively trains the model on a (carefully crafted) sequence of tasks. We further support the method by a novel distributional-based difficulty measurer. Our approach is conceptually simple, model-agnostic, and easy to implement. We demonstrate TPCL effectiveness through a comprehensive evaluation on standard datasets. Without either data augmentation or explicit debiasing mechanism, it achieves state-of-the-art on VQA-CP v2, VQA-CP v1 and VQA v2 datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TPCL outperforms the most competitive robust VQA approaches by more than 5% and 7% on VQA-CP v2 and VQA-CP v1; respectively. TPCL also can boost VQA baseline backbone performance by up to 28.5%.