In the era of increasing concerns over cybersecurity threats, defending against backdoor attacks is paramount in ensuring the integrity and reliability of machine learning models. However, many existing approaches require substantial amounts of data for effective mitigation, posing significant challenges in practical deployment. To address this, we propose a novel approach to counter backdoor attacks by treating their mitigation as an unlearning task. We tackle this challenge through a targeted model pruning strategy, leveraging unlearning loss gradients to identify and eliminate backdoor elements within the model. Built on solid theoretical insights, our approach offers simplicity and effectiveness, rendering it well-suited for scenarios with limited data availability. Our methodology includes formulating a suitable unlearning loss and devising a model-pruning technique tailored for convolutional neural networks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in realistic data settings.

Aggregating statistics over geographical regions is important for many applications, such as analyzing income, election results, and disease spread. However, the sensitive nature of this data necessitates strong privacy protections to safeguard individuals. In this work, we present a unified locational differential privacy (DP) framework to enable private aggregation of various data types, including one-hot encoded, boolean, float, and integer arrays, over geographical regions. Our framework employs local DP mechanisms such as randomized response, the exponential mechanism, and the Gaussian mechanism. We evaluate our approach on four datasets representing significant location data aggregation scenarios. Results demonstrate the utility of our framework in providing formal DP guarantees while enabling geographical data analysis.

Random numbers are incredibly important in a variety of fields, and the need for their validation remains important. A Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) can theoretically generate truly random numbers however this does not remove the need to thoroughly test their randomness. Generally, the task of validating random numbers has been delegated to different statistical tests such as the tests from the NIST Statistical Test Suite (STS) which are often slow and only perform one task at a time. Our work presents a deep learning model that utilizes the transformer architecture to encode some of the tests from the NIST STS in a single model that also runs much faster. This model performs multi-label classification on these tests and outputs the probability of passing each statistical test that it encodes. We perform a thorough hyper-parameter optimization to converge on the best possible model and as a result, achieve a high degree of accuracy with a sample f1 score of above 0.9.

With the impressive performance in various downstream tasks, large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into production pipelines, like recruitment and recommendation systems. A known issue of models trained on natural language data is the presence of human biases, which can impact the fairness of the system. This paper investigates LLMs' behavior with respect to gender stereotypes, in the context of occupation decision making. Our framework is designed to investigate and quantify the presence of gender stereotypes in LLMs' behavior via multi-round question answering. Inspired by prior works, we construct a dataset by leveraging a standard occupation classification knowledge base released by authoritative agencies. We tested three LLMs (RoBERTa-large, GPT-3.5-turbo, and Llama2-70b-chat) and found that all models exhibit gender stereotypes analogous to human biases, but with different preferences. The distinct preferences of GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-70b-chat may imply the current alignment methods are insufficient for debiasing and could introduce new biases contradicting the traditional gender stereotypes.

Drug discovery is a complex process that involves sequentially screening and examining a vast array of molecules to identify those with the target properties. This process, also referred to as sequential experimentation, faces challenges due to the vast search space, the rarity of target molecules, and constraints imposed by limited data and experimental budgets. To address these challenges, we introduce a human-in-the-loop framework for sequential experiments in drug discovery. This collaborative approach combines human expert knowledge with deep learning algorithms, enhancing the discovery of target molecules within a specified experimental budget. The proposed algorithm processes experimental data to recommend both promising molecules and those that could improve its performance to human experts. Human experts retain the final decision-making authority based on these recommendations and their domain expertise, including the ability to override algorithmic recommendations. We applied our method to drug discovery tasks using real-world data and found that it consistently outperforms all baseline methods, including those which rely solely on human or algorithmic input. This demonstrates the complementarity between human experts and the algorithm. Our results provide key insights into the levels of humans' domain knowledge, the importance of meta-knowledge, and effective work delegation strategies. Our findings suggest that such a framework can significantly accelerate the development of new vaccines and drugs by leveraging the best of both human and artificial intelligence.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues across various fields, including cybersecurity, which faces an ever-evolving threat landscape and need for innovative technologies. Despite initial explorations into the application of LLMs in cybersecurity, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of this research area. This paper bridge this gap by providing a systematic literature review, encompassing an analysis of over 180 works, spanning across 25 LLMs and more than 10 downstream scenarios. Our comprehensive overview addresses three critical research questions: the construction of cybersecurity-oriented LLMs, LLMs' applications in various cybersecurity tasks, and the existing challenges and further research in this area. This study aims to shed light on the extensive potential of LLMs in enhancing cybersecurity practices, and serve as a valuable resource for applying LLMs in this doamin. We also maintain and regularly updated list of practical guides on LLMs for cybersecurity at https://github.com/tmylla/Awesome-LLM4Cybersecurity.

We address two major challenges in scientific machine learning (SciML): interpretability and computational efficiency. We increase the interpretability of certain learning processes by establishing a new theoretical connection between optimization problems arising from SciML and a generalized Hopf formula, which represents the viscosity solution to a Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equation (HJ PDE) with time-dependent Hamiltonian. Namely, we show that when we solve certain regularized learning problems with integral-type losses, we actually solve an optimal control problem and its associated HJ PDE with time-dependent Hamiltonian. This connection allows us to reinterpret incremental updates to learned models as the evolution of an associated HJ PDE and optimal control problem in time, where all of the previous information is intrinsically encoded in the solution to the HJ PDE. As a result, existing HJ PDE solvers and optimal control algorithms can be reused to design new efficient training approaches for SciML that naturally coincide with the continual learning framework, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. As a first exploration of this connection, we consider the special case of linear regression and leverage our connection to develop a new Riccati-based methodology for solving these learning problems that is amenable to continual learning applications. We also provide some corresponding numerical examples that demonstrate the potential computational and memory advantages our Riccati-based approach can provide.

Recently, with the advancement of deep learning, several applications in text classification have advanced significantly. However, this improvement comes with a cost because deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples. This weakness indicates that deep learning is not very robust. Fortunately, the input of a text classifier is discrete. Hence, it can prevent the classifier from state-of-the-art attacks. Nonetheless, previous works have generated black-box attacks that successfully manipulate the discrete values of the input to find adversarial examples. Therefore, instead of changing the discrete values, we transform the input into its embedding vector containing real values to perform the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Then, we convert the perturbed embedding vector back into a text and name it an adversarial example. In summary, we create a framework that measures the robustness of a text classifier by using the gradients of the classifier.

This work presents a novel approach called oracle-checker scheme for evaluating the answer given by a generative large language model (LLM). Two types of checkers are presented. The first type of checker follows the idea of property testing. The second type of checker follows the idea of program checking. Their applications are demonstrated in two separate contexts, entity extraction and paraphrase decision, respectively.

News image captioning requires model to generate an informative caption rich in entities, with the news image and the associated news article. Though Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing various vision-language tasks, our research finds that current MLLMs still bear limitations in handling entity information on news image captioning task. Besides, while MLLMs have the ability to process long inputs, generating high-quality news image captions still requires a trade-off between sufficiency and conciseness of textual input information. To explore the potential of MLLMs and address problems we discovered, we propose : an Entity-Aware Multimodal Alignment based approach for news image captioning. Our approach first aligns the MLLM through Balance Training Strategy with two extra alignment tasks: Entity-Aware Sentence Selection task and Entity Selection task, together with News Image Captioning task, to enhance its capability in handling multimodal entity information. The aligned MLLM will utilizes the additional entity-related information it explicitly extracts to supplement its textual input while generating news image captions. Our approach achieves better results than all previous models in CIDEr score on GoodNews dataset (72.33 -> 88.39) and NYTimes800k dataset (70.83 -> 85.61).