Advanced persistent threats (APTs) pose significant challenges for organizations, leading to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. Existing provenance-based approaches for APT detection often struggle with high false positive rates, a lack of interpretability, and an inability to adapt to evolving system behavior. We introduce RAPID, a novel deep learning-based method for robust APT detection and investigation, leveraging context-aware anomaly detection and alert tracing. By utilizing self-supervised sequence learning and iteratively learned embeddings, our approach effectively adapts to dynamic system behavior. The use of provenance tracing both enriches the alerts and enhances the detection capabilities of our approach. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates RAPID's effectiveness and computational efficiency in real-world scenarios. In addition, RAPID achieves higher precision and recall than state-of-the-art methods, significantly reducing false positives. RAPID integrates contextual information and facilitates a smooth transition from detection to investigation, providing security teams with detailed insights to efficiently address APT threats.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful models for generation tasks, but they may not generate good quality outputs in their first attempt. Apart from model fine-tuning, existing approaches to improve prediction accuracy and quality typically involve LLM self-improvement / self-reflection that incorporate feedback from models themselves. Despite their effectiveness, these methods are hindered by their high computational cost and lack of scalability. In this work, we propose CERET, a method for refining text generations by considering semantic stability, entailment and inter-sample uncertainty measures. Experimental results show that CERET outperforms Self-consistency and Self-rerank baselines consistently under various task setups, by ~1.6% in Rouge-1 for abstractive summarization and ~3.5% in hit rate for question answering. Compared to LLM Self-rerank method, our approach only requires 9.4% of its latency and is more cost-effective.

In the real world, knowledge is constantly evolving, which can render existing knowledge-based datasets outdated. This unreliability highlights the critical need for continuous updates to ensure both accuracy and relevance in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this, we propose GrowOVER-QA and GrowOVER-Dialogue, dynamic open-domain QA and dialogue benchmarks that undergo a continuous cycle of updates, keeping pace with the rapid evolution of knowledge. Our research indicates that retrieval-augmented language models (RaLMs) struggle with knowledge that has not been trained on or recently updated. Consequently, we introduce a novel retrieval-interactive language model framework, where the language model evaluates and reflects on its answers for further re-retrieval. Our exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our training-free framework significantly improves upon existing methods, performing comparably to or even surpassing continuously trained language models.

Detecting subjectivity in news sentences is crucial for identifying media bias, enhancing credibility, and combating misinformation by flagging opinion-based content. It provides insights into public sentiment, empowers readers to make informed decisions, and encourages critical thinking. While research has developed methods and systems for this purpose, most efforts have focused on English and other high-resourced languages. In this study, we present the first large dataset for subjectivity detection in Arabic, consisting of ~3.6K manually annotated sentences, and GPT-4o based explanation. In addition, we included instructions (both in English and Arabic) to facilitate LLM based fine-tuning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset, annotation process, and extensive benchmark results, including PLMs and LLMs. Our analysis of the annotation process highlights that annotators were strongly influenced by their political, cultural, and religious backgrounds, especially at the beginning of the annotation process. The experimental results suggest that LLMs with in-context learning provide better performance. We aim to release the dataset and resources for the community.

Deep Operator Networks (DeepOnets) have revolutionized the domain of scientific machine learning for the solution of the inverse problem for dynamical systems. However, their implementation necessitates optimizing a high-dimensional space of parameters and hyperparameters. This fact, along with the requirement of substantial computational resources, poses a barrier to achieving high numerical accuracy. Here, inpsired by DeepONets and to address the above challenges, we present Random Projection-based Operator Networks (RandONets): shallow networks with random projections that learn linear and nonlinear operators. The implementation of RandONets involves: (a) incorporating random bases, thus enabling the use of shallow neural networks with a single hidden layer, where the only unknowns are the output weights of the network's weighted inner product; this reduces dramatically the dimensionality of the parameter space; and, based on this, (b) using established least-squares solvers (e.g., Tikhonov regularization and preconditioned QR decomposition) that offer superior numerical approximation properties compared to other optimization techniques used in deep-learning. In this work, we prove the universal approximation accuracy of RandONets for approximating nonlinear operators and demonstrate their efficiency in approximating linear nonlinear evolution operators (right-hand-sides (RHS)) with a focus on PDEs. We show, that for this particular task, RandONets outperform, both in terms of numerical approximation accuracy and computational cost, the ``vanilla" DeepOnets.

From the perspective of information bottleneck (IB) theory, we propose a novel framework for performing black-box transferable adversarial attacks named IBTA, which leverages advancements in invariant features. Intuitively, diminishing the reliance of adversarial perturbations on the original data, under equivalent attack performance constraints, encourages a greater reliance on invariant features that contributes most to classification, thereby enhancing the transferability of adversarial attacks. Building on this motivation, we redefine the optimization of transferable attacks using a novel theoretical framework that centers around IB. Specifically, to overcome the challenge of unoptimizable mutual information, we propose a simple and efficient mutual information lower bound (MILB) for approximating computation. Moreover, to quantitatively evaluate mutual information, we utilize the Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) to perform a thorough analysis. Our experiments on the ImageNet dataset well demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of IBTA and derived MILB. Our code is available at https://github.com/Biqing-Qi/Enhancing-Adversarial-Transferability-via-Information-Bottleneck-Constraints.

The transferability of adversarial perturbations provides an effective shortcut for black-box attacks. Targeted perturbations have greater practicality but are more difficult to transfer between models. In this paper, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrated that neural networks trained on the same dataset have more consistent performance in High-Sample-Density-Regions (HSDR) of each class instead of low sample density regions. Therefore, in the target setting, adding perturbations towards HSDR of the target class is more effective in improving transferability. However, density estimation is challenging in high-dimensional scenarios. Further theoretical and experimental verification demonstrates that easy samples with low loss are more likely to be located in HSDR. Perturbations towards such easy samples in the target class can avoid density estimation for HSDR location. Based on the above facts, we verified that adding perturbations to easy samples in the target class improves targeted adversarial transferability of existing attack methods. A generative targeted attack strategy named Easy Sample Matching Attack (ESMA) is proposed, which has a higher success rate for targeted attacks and outperforms the SOTA generative method. Moreover, ESMA requires only 5% of the storage space and much less computation time comparing to the current SOTA, as ESMA attacks all classes with only one model instead of seperate models for each class. Our code is available at https://github.com/gjq100/ESMA.

The rapid development and reduced barriers to entry for Text-to-Image (T2I) models have raised concerns about the biases in their outputs, but existing research lacks a holistic definition and evaluation framework of biases, limiting the enhancement of debiasing techniques. To address this issue, we introduce FAIntbench, a holistic and precise benchmark for biases in T2I models. In contrast to existing benchmarks that evaluate bias in limited aspects, FAIntbench evaluate biases from four dimensions: manifestation of bias, visibility of bias, acquired attributes, and protected attributes. We applied FAIntbench to evaluate seven recent large-scale T2I models and conducted human evaluation, whose results demonstrated the effectiveness of FAIntbench in identifying various biases. Our study also revealed new research questions about biases, including the side-effect of distillation. The findings presented here are preliminary, highlighting the potential of FAIntbench to advance future research aimed at mitigating the biases in T2I models. Our benchmark is publicly available to ensure the reproducibility.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of natural language tasks. However, they have been shown to suffer from a critical limitation pertinent to 'hallucination' in their output. Recent research has focused on investigating and addressing this problem for a variety of tasks such as biography generation, question answering, abstractive summarization, and dialogue generation. However, the crucial aspect pertaining to 'negation' has remained considerably underexplored. Negation is important because it adds depth and nuance to the understanding of language and is also crucial for logical reasoning and inference. In this work, we address the above limitation and particularly focus on studying the impact of negation in LLM hallucinations. Specifically, we study four tasks with negation: 'false premise completion', 'constrained fact generation', 'multiple choice question answering', and 'fact generation'. We show that open-source state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMA-2-chat, Vicuna, and Orca-2 hallucinate considerably on all these tasks involving negation which underlines a critical shortcoming of these models. Addressing this problem, we further study numerous strategies to mitigate these hallucinations and demonstrate their impact.

Microsoft and Google's AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked "Who won the 2020 US presidential election?" Microsoft's chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4, responds by saying: "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." It then tells users to search on Bing instead. When the same question is asked of Google's Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google's own large language model of the same name, it responds: "I'm still learning how to answer this question."