For the past few years, the Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) has entered public lives. While CIoT has improved the convenience of people's daily lives, it has also brought new security and privacy concerns. In this survey, we try to figure out what researchers can learn about the security and privacy of CIoT by traffic analysis, a popular method in the security community. From the security and privacy perspective, this survey seeks out the new characteristics in CIoT traffic analysis, the state-of-the-art progress in CIoT traffic analysis, and the challenges yet to be solved. We collected 310 papers from January 2018 to December 2023 related to CIoT traffic analysis from the security and privacy perspective and summarized the process of CIoT traffic analysis in which the new characteristics of CIoT are identified. Then, we detail existing works based on five application goals: device fingerprinting, user activity inference, malicious traffic analysis, security analysis, and measurement. At last, we discuss the new challenges and future research directions.

This paper explores techniques that focus on understanding and resolving ambiguity in language within the field of natural language processing (NLP), highlighting the complexity of linguistic phenomena such as polysemy and homonymy and their implications for computational models. Focusing extensively on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), it outlines diverse approaches ranging from deep learning techniques to leveraging lexical resources and knowledge graphs like WordNet. The paper introduces cutting-edge methodologies like word sense extension (WSE) and neuromyotonic approaches, enhancing disambiguation accuracy by predicting new word senses. It examines specific applications in biomedical disambiguation and language specific optimisation and discusses the significance of cognitive metaphors in discourse analysis. The research identifies persistent challenges in the field, such as the scarcity of sense annotated corpora and the complexity of informal clinical texts. It concludes by suggesting future directions, including using large language models, visual WSD, and multilingual WSD systems, emphasising the ongoing evolution in addressing lexical complexities in NLP. This thinking perspective highlights the advancement in this field to enable computers to understand language more accurately.

We conducted a survey of 135 software engineering (SE) practitioners to understand how they use Generative AI-based chatbots like ChatGPT for SE tasks. We find that they want to use ChatGPT for SE tasks like software library selection but often worry about the truthfulness of ChatGPT responses. We developed a suite of techniques and a tool called CID (ChatGPT Incorrectness Detector) to automatically test and detect the incorrectness in ChatGPT responses. CID is based on the iterative prompting to ChatGPT by asking it contextually similar but textually divergent questions (using an approach that utilizes metamorphic relationships in texts). The underlying principle in CID is that for a given question, a response that is different from other responses (across multiple incarnations of the question) is likely an incorrect response. In a benchmark study of library selection, we show that CID can detect incorrect responses from ChatGPT with an F1-score of 0.74 - 0.75.

While models trained on data from mental health service platform have achieved preliminary success, challenges persist in areas such as data scarcity, quality, and ensuring a solid foundation in psychological techniques. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel approach to enhance the precision and efficacy of psychological support through large language models. Specifically, we design a specific prompt derived from principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and have generated the CBT QA dataset, specifically for Chinese psychological health Q&A based on CBT structured intervention strategies. Unlike previous methods, our dataset emphasizes professional and structured response. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tuned the large language model, giving birth to CBT-LLM, the large-scale language model specifically designed for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CBT-LLM excels in generating structured, professional, and highly relevant responses in psychological health support tasks, showcasing its practicality and quality. The model is available on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Hongbin37/CBT-LLM.

The computational treatment of arguments on controversial issues has been subject to extensive NLP research, due to its envisioned impact on opinion formation, decision making, writing education, and the like. A critical task in any such application is the assessment of an argument's quality - but it is also particularly challenging. In this position paper, we start from a brief survey of argument quality research, where we identify the diversity of quality notions and the subjectiveness of their perception as the main hurdles towards substantial progress on argument quality assessment. We argue that the capabilities of instruction-following large language models (LLMs) to leverage knowledge across contexts enable a much more reliable assessment. Rather than just fine-tuning LLMs towards leaderboard chasing on assessment tasks, they need to be instructed systematically with argumentation theories and scenarios as well as with ways to solve argument-related problems. We discuss the real-world opportunities and ethical issues emerging thereby.

Which fairness metrics are appropriately applicable in your contexts? There may be instances of discordance regarding the perception of fairness, even when the outcomes comply with established fairness metrics. Several surveys have been conducted to evaluate fairness metrics with human perceptions of fairness. However, these surveys were limited in scope, including only a few hundred participants within a single country. In this study, we conduct an international survey to evaluate the appropriateness of various fairness metrics in decision-making scenarios. We collected responses from 1,000 participants in each of China, France, Japan, and the United States, amassing a total of 4,000 responses, to analyze the preferences of fairness metrics. Our survey consists of three distinct scenarios paired with four fairness metrics, and each participant answers their preference for the fairness metric in each case. This investigation explores the relationship between personal attributes and the choice of fairness metrics, uncovering a significant influence of national context on these preferences.

Graph self-supervised learning is now a go-to method for pre-training graph foundation models, including graph neural networks, graph transformers, and more recent large language model (LLM)-based graph models. There is a wide variety of knowledge patterns embedded in the structure and properties of graphs which may be used for pre-training, but we lack a systematic overview of self-supervised pre-training tasks from the perspective of graph knowledge. In this paper, we comprehensively survey and analyze the pre-training tasks of graph foundation models from a knowledge-based perspective, consisting of microscopic (nodes, links, etc) and macroscopic knowledge (clusters, global structure, etc). It covers a total of 9 knowledge categories and 25 pre-training tasks, as well as various downstream task adaptation strategies. Furthermore, an extensive list of the related papers with detailed metadata is provided at https://github.com/Newiz430/Pretext.

Advanced machine learning models have recently achieved high predictive accuracy for weather and climate prediction. However, these complex models often lack inherent transparency and interpretability, acting as "black boxes" that impede user trust and hinder further model improvements. As such, interpretable machine learning techniques have become crucial in enhancing the credibility and utility of weather and climate modeling. In this survey, we review current interpretable machine learning approaches applied to meteorological predictions. We categorize methods into two major paradigms: 1) Post-hoc interpretability techniques that explain pre-trained models, such as perturbation-based, game theory based, and gradient-based attribution methods. 2) Designing inherently interpretable models from scratch using architectures like tree ensembles and explainable neural networks. We summarize how each technique provides insights into the predictions, uncovering novel meteorological relationships captured by machine learning. Lastly, we discuss research challenges around achieving deeper mechanistic interpretations aligned with physical principles, developing standardized evaluation benchmarks, integrating interpretability into iterative model development workflows, and providing explainability for large foundation models.

By consolidating scattered knowledge, the literature review provides a comprehensive understanding of the investigated topic. However, reading, conducting, or peer-reviewing review papers generally demands a significant investment of time and effort from researchers. To improve efficiency, this paper aims to provide a thorough review of reviews in the PAMI field from diverse perspectives. First, this paper proposes several article-level, field-normalized, and large language model-empowered bibliometric indicators to evaluate reviews. To facilitate this, a meta-data database dubbed RiPAMI, and a topic dataset are constructed. Second, based on these indicators, the study presents comparative analyses of representative reviews, unveiling the characteristics of publications across various fields, periods, and journals. The newly emerging AI-generated literature reviews are also appraised, and the observed differences suggest that most AI-generated reviews still lag behind human-authored reviews in multiple aspects. Third, we briefly provide a subjective evaluation of representative PAMI reviews and introduce a paper structure-based typology of literature reviews. This typology may improve the clarity and effectiveness for scholars in reading and writing reviews, while also serving as a guide for AI systems in generating well-organized reviews. Finally, this work offers insights into the current challenges of literature reviews and envisions future directions for their development.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe RL approaches have predominantly focused on incorporating predefined safety constraints into the policy learning process. However, this reliance on predefined safety constraints poses limitations in dynamic and unpredictable real-world settings where such constraints may not be available or sufficiently adaptable. Bridging this gap, we propose a novel approach that concurrently learns a safe RL control policy and identifies the unknown safety constraint parameters of a given environment. Initializing with a parametric signal temporal logic (pSTL) safety specification and a small initial labeled dataset, we frame the problem as a bilevel optimization task, intricately integrating constrained policy optimization, using a Lagrangian-variant of the twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) algorithm, with Bayesian optimization for optimizing parameters for the given pSTL safety specification. Through experimentation in comprehensive case studies, we validate the efficacy of this approach across varying forms of environmental constraints, consistently yielding safe RL policies with high returns. Furthermore, our findings indicate successful learning of STL safety constraint parameters, exhibiting a high degree of conformity with true environmental safety constraints. The performance of our model closely mirrors that of an ideal scenario that possesses complete prior knowledge of safety constraints, demonstrating its proficiency in accurately identifying environmental safety constraints and learning safe policies that adhere to those constraints.