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Enhancing AI-based Generation of Software Exploits with Contextual Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This practical experience report explores Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models' capability to generate offensive security code from natural language (NL) descriptions, highlighting the significance of contextual understanding and its impact on model performance. Our study employs a dataset comprising real shellcodes to evaluate the models across various scenarios, including missing information, necessary context, and unnecessary context. The experiments are designed to assess the models' resilience against incomplete descriptions, their proficiency in leveraging context for enhanced accuracy, and their ability to discern irrelevant information. The findings reveal that the introduction of contextual data significantly improves performance. However, the benefits of additional context diminish beyond a certain point, indicating an optimal level of contextual information for model training. Moreover, the models demonstrate an ability to filter out unnecessary context, maintaining high levels of accuracy in the generation of offensive security code. This study paves the way for future research on optimizing context use in AI-driven code generation, particularly for applications requiring a high degree of technical precision such as the generation of offensive code.


LLM-based multi-agent poetry generation in non-cooperative environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite substantial progress of large language models (LLMs) for automatic poetry generation, the generated poetry lacks diversity while the training process differs greatly from human learning. Under the rationale that the learning process of the poetry generation systems should be more human-like and their output more diverse and novel, we introduce a framework based on social learning where we emphasize non-cooperative interactions besides cooperative interactions to encourage diversity. Our experiments are the first attempt at LLM-based multi-agent systems in non-cooperative environments for poetry generation employing both TRAINING-BASED agents (GPT-2) and PROMPTING-BASED agents (GPT-3 and GPT-4). Our evaluation based on 96k generated poems shows that our framework benefits the poetry generation process for TRAINING-BASED agents resulting in 1) a 3.0-3.7 percentage point (pp) increase in diversity and a 5.6-11.3 pp increase in novelty according to distinct and novel n-grams. The generated poetry from TRAINING-BASED agents also exhibits group divergence in terms of lexicons, styles and semantics. PROMPTING-BASED agents in our framework also benefit from non-cooperative environments and a more diverse ensemble of models with non-homogeneous agents has the potential to further enhance diversity, with an increase of 7.0-17.5 pp according to our experiments. However, PROMPTING-BASED agents show a decrease in lexical diversity over time and do not exhibit the group-based divergence intended in the social network. Our paper argues for a paradigm shift in creative tasks such as automatic poetry generation to include social learning processes (via LLM-based agent modeling) similar to human interaction.


Oops, I Sampled it Again: Reinterpreting Confidence Intervals in Few-Shot Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The recent surge of interest in few-shot learning (FSL), driven by its potential applications in many real-world scenarios, has led to a proliferation of new methods and novel experimental protocols (Sung et al., 2018; Snell et al., 2017; Bendou et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2020). If in conventional machine learning it is common to benchmark methods using a fixed split into training and validation sets, FSL presents unique challenges due to its reliance on extremely small and, consequently, biased training datasets. In fact, the performance of FSL can dramatically depend on the choice of the given labeled training samples (Arnold et al., 2021). One question that FSL shares with conventional machine learning is that of the best performing methods. Especially relevant to FSL, the high variance of measured performance based on the choice of labeled data has led practitioners to quickly adopt the standard of aggregating statistics over a large number of artificially generated tasks, stemming from a single (or a few distinct) dataset(s). The predominant approach is to generate artificial few-shot tasks by randomly sampling the same dataset with replacement, i.e. permitting the same samples to appear across multiple tasks. The outcome of these numerous tasks is the calculation of an average accuracy and its associated confidence interval (CI) for each method, thereby providing researchers with a statistically relevant basis for comparing the efficacy of different methods. By allowing the same samples to appear in multiple tasks, the computed CIs account for the randomness of the sampler but not the data itself.


Theory, Analysis, and Best Practices for Sigmoid Self-Attention

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between keys and queries. Recent work has explored alternatives to softmax attention in transformers, such as ReLU and sigmoid activations. In this work, we revisit sigmoid attention and conduct an in-depth theoretical and empirical analysis. Theoretically, we prove that transformers with sigmoid attention are universal function approximators and benefit from improved regularity compared to softmax attention. Through detailed empirical analysis, we identify stabilization of large initial attention norms during the early stages of training as a crucial factor for the successful training of models with sigmoid attention, outperforming prior attempts. We also introduce FLASHSIGMOID, a hardware-aware and memory-efficient implementation of sigmoid attention yielding a 17% inference kernel speed-up over FLASHATTENTION2 on H100 GPUs. Experiments across language, vision, and speech show that properly normalized sigmoid attention matches the strong performance of softmax attention on a wide range of domains and scales, which previous attempts at sigmoid attention were unable to fully achieve. Our work unifies prior art and establishes best practices for sigmoid attention as a drop-in softmax replacement in transformers.


A Survey on Knowledge Organization Systems of Research Fields: Resources and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), such as term lists, thesauri, taxonomies, and ontologies, play a fundamental role in categorising, managing, and retrieving information. In the academic domain, KOSs are often adopted for representing research areas and their relationships, primarily aiming to classify research articles, academic courses, patents, books, scientific venues, domain experts, grants, software, experiment materials, and several other relevant products and agents. These structured representations of research areas, widely embraced by many academic fields, have proven effective in empowering AI-based systems to i) enhance retrievability of relevant documents, ii) enable advanced analytic solutions to quantify the impact of academic research, and iii) analyse and forecast research dynamics. This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey of the current KOS for academic disciplines. We analysed and compared 45 KOSs according to five main dimensions: scope, structure, curation, usage, and links to other KOSs. Our results reveal a very heterogeneous scenario in terms of scope, scale, quality, and usage, highlighting the need for more integrated solutions for representing research knowledge across academic fields. We conclude by discussing the main challenges and the most promising future directions.


Incorporating Like-Minded Peers to Overcome Friend Data Sparsity in Session-Based Social Recommendations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Session-based Social Recommendation (SSR) leverages social relationships within online networks to enhance the performance of Session-based Recommendation (SR). However, existing SSR algorithms often encounter the challenge of "friend data sparsity". Moreover, significant discrepancies can exist between the purchase preferences of social network friends and those of the target user, reducing the influence of friends relative to the target user's own preferences. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the concept of "Like-minded Peers" (LMP), representing users whose preferences align with the target user's current session based on their historical sessions. This is the first work, to our knowledge, that uses LMP to enhance the modeling of social influence in SSR. This approach not only alleviates the problem of friend data sparsity but also effectively incorporates users with similar preferences to the target user. We propose a novel model named Transformer Encoder with Graph Attention Aggregator Recommendation (TEGAARec), which includes the TEGAA module and the GAT-based social aggregation module. The TEGAA module captures and merges both long-term and short-term interests for target users and LMP users. Concurrently, the GAT-based social aggregation module is designed to aggregate the target users' dynamic interests and social influence in a weighted manner. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our proposed model and ablation studies are done to illustrate the contributions of each component in TEGAARec.


BPE Gets Picky: Efficient Vocabulary Refinement During Tokenizer Training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal compression that may affect the downstream performance. We introduce Picky BPE, a modified BPE algorithm that carries Figure 1: An example of a series of merges to produce a out vocabulary refinement during tokenizer token Kentucky. The pre-merge token frequencies are training. Our method improves vocabulary efficiency, demonstrated in corresponding circles. In the vanilla eliminates under-trained tokens, and BPE algorithm, entucky should also be stored in the does not compromise text compression. Our vocabulary, whereas it is redundant after the merge. In experiments show that our method does not this example, the IoS metric effectively captures the reduce the downstream performance, and in intermediate token, as IoS(entucky) T = 0.9.


Temporal Many-valued Conditional Logics: a Preliminary Report

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper we propose a many-valued temporal conditional logic. We start from a many-valued logic with typicality, and extend it with the temporal operators of the Linear Time Temporal Logic (LTL), thus providing a formalism which is able to capture the dynamics of a system, trough strict and defeasible temporal properties. We also consider an instantiation of the formalism for gradual argumentation.


The emergence of Large Language Models (LLM) as a tool in literature reviews: an LLM automated systematic review

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Objective: This study aims to summarize the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the process of creating a scientific review. We look at the range of stages in a review that can be automated and assess the current state-of-the-art research projects in the field. Materials and Methods: The search was conducted in June 2024 in PubMed, Scopus, Dimensions, and Google Scholar databases by human reviewers. Screening and extraction process took place in Covidence with the help of LLM add-on which uses OpenAI gpt-4o model. ChatGPT was used to clean extracted data and generate code for figures in this manuscript, ChatGPT and Scite.ai were used in drafting all components of the manuscript, except the methods and discussion sections. Results: 3,788 articles were retrieved, and 172 studies were deemed eligible for the final review. ChatGPT and GPT-based LLM emerged as the most dominant architecture for review automation (n=126, 73.2%). A significant number of review automation projects were found, but only a limited number of papers (n=26, 15.1%) were actual reviews that used LLM during their creation. Most citations focused on automation of a particular stage of review, such as Searching for publications (n=60, 34.9%), and Data extraction (n=54, 31.4%). When comparing pooled performance of GPT-based and BERT-based models, the former were better in data extraction with mean precision 83.0% (SD=10.4), and recall 86.0% (SD=9.8), while being slightly less accurate in title and abstract screening stage (Maccuracy=77.3%, SD=13.0). Discussion/Conclusion: Our LLM-assisted systematic review revealed a significant number of research projects related to review automation using LLMs. The results looked promising, and we anticipate that LLMs will change in the near future the way the scientific reviews are conducted.


CogniDual Framework: Self-Training Large Language Models within a Dual-System Theoretical Framework for Improving Cognitive Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive psychology investigates perception, attention, memory, language, problem-solving, decision-making, and reasoning. Kahneman's dual-system theory elucidates the human decision-making process, distinguishing between the rapid, intuitive System 1 and the deliberative, rational System 2. Recent advancements have positioned large language Models (LLMs) as formidable tools nearing human-level proficiency in various cognitive tasks. Nonetheless, the presence of a dual-system framework analogous to human cognition in LLMs remains unexplored. This study introduces the \textbf{CogniDual Framework for LLMs} (CFLLMs), designed to assess whether LLMs can, through self-training, evolve from deliberate deduction to intuitive responses, thereby emulating the human process of acquiring and mastering new information. Our findings reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind LLMs' response generation, enhancing our understanding of their capabilities in cognitive psychology. Practically, self-trained models can provide faster responses to certain queries, reducing computational demands during inference.