Video Action Counting (VAC) is crucial in analyzing sports, fitness, and everyday activities by quantifying repetitive actions in videos. However, traditional VAC methods have overlooked the complexity of action repetitions, such as interruptions and the variability in cycle duration. Our research addresses the shortfall by introducing a novel approach to VAC, called Irregular Video Action Counting (IVAC). IVAC prioritizes modeling irregular repetition patterns in videos, which we define through two primary aspects: Inter-cycle Consistency and Cycle-interval Inconsistency. Inter-cycle Consistency ensures homogeneity in the spatial-temporal representations of cycle segments, signifying action uniformity within cycles. Cycle-interval inconsistency highlights the importance of distinguishing between cycle segments and intervals based on their inherent content differences. To encapsulate these principles, we propose a new methodology that includes consistency and inconsistency modules, supported by a unique pull-push loss (P2L) mechanism. The IVAC-P2L model applies a pull loss to promote coherence among cycle segment features and a push loss to clearly distinguish features of cycle segments from interval segments. Empirical evaluations conducted on the RepCount dataset demonstrate that the IVAC-P2L model sets a new benchmark in VAC task performance. Furthermore, the model demonstrates exceptional adaptability and generalization across various video contents, outperforming existing models on two additional datasets, UCFRep and Countix, without the need for dataset-specific optimization. These results confirm the efficacy of our approach in addressing irregular repetitions in videos and pave the way for further advancements in video analysis and understanding.

Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNets) utilize capsules, which bind neurons into a single vector and learn position-equivariant features, which makes them more robust than original Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CapsNets employ an affine transformation matrix and dynamic routing with coupling coefficients to learn robustly. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of CapsNets in analyzing highly sensitive and noisy time series sensor data. To demonstrate CapsNets' robustness, we compare their performance with original CNNs on electrocardiogram (ECG) data, a medical time series sensor data with complex patterns and noise. Our study provides empirical evidence that CapsNets function as noise stabilizers, as investigated by manual and adversarial attack experiments using the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and three manual attacks, including offset shifting, gradual drift, and temporal lagging. In summary, CapsNets outperform CNNs in both manual and adversarial attacked data. Our findings suggest that CapsNets can be effectively applied to various sensor systems to improve their resilience to noise attacks. These results have significant implications for designing and implementing robust machine-learning models in real-world applications. Additionally, this study contributes to the effectiveness of CapsNet models in handling noisy data and highlights their potential for addressing the challenges of noise data in time series analysis.

As modern Large Language Models (LLMs) shatter many state-of-the-art benchmarks in a variety of domains, this paper investigates their behavior in the domains of ethics and fairness, focusing on protected group bias. We conduct a two-part study: first, we solicit sentence continuations describing the occupations of individuals from different protected groups, including gender, sexuality, religion, and race. Second, we have the model generate stories about individuals who hold different types of occupations. We collect >10k sentence completions made by a publicly available LLM, which we subject to human annotation. We find bias across minoritized groups, but in particular in the domains of gender and sexuality, as well as Western bias, in model generations. The model not only reflects societal biases, but appears to amplify them. The model is additionally overly cautious in replies to queries relating to minoritized groups, providing responses that strongly emphasize diversity and equity to an extent that other group characteristics are overshadowed. This suggests that artificially constraining potentially harmful outputs may itself lead to harm, and should be applied in a careful and controlled manner.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse sectors has marked a transformative era, showcasing remarkable capabilities in text generation and problem-solving tasks. However, this technological advancement is accompanied by significant risks and vulnerabilities. Despite ongoing security enhancements, attackers persistently exploit these weaknesses, casting doubts on the overall trustworthiness of LLMs. Compounding the issue, organisations are deploying LLM-integrated systems without understanding the severity of potential consequences. Existing studies by OWASP and MITRE offer a general overview of threats and vulnerabilities but lack a method for directly and succinctly analysing the risks for security practitioners, developers, and key decision-makers who are working with this novel technology. To address this gap, we propose a risk assessment process using tools like the OWASP risk rating methodology which is used for traditional systems. We conduct scenario analysis to identify potential threat agents and map the dependent system components against vulnerability factors. Through this analysis, we assess the likelihood of a cyberattack. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough impact analysis to derive a comprehensive threat matrix. We also map threats against three key stakeholder groups: developers engaged in model fine-tuning, application developers utilizing third-party APIs, and end users. The proposed threat matrix provides a holistic evaluation of LLM-related risks, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions for effective mitigation strategies. Our outlined process serves as an actionable and comprehensive tool for security practitioners, offering insights for resource management and enhancing the overall system security.

In this paper, we present PARAMANU-AYN, a language model based exclusively on case documents of the Supreme Court of India, the Constitution of India, and the Indian Penal Code. The novel Auto Regressive (AR) decoder based model is pretrained from scratch at a context size of 8192. We evaluated our pretrained legal model on perplexity metrics. We also instruction-tuned our pretrained model on a set of 10,763 instructions covering various legal tasks such as legal reasoning, judgement explanation, legal clause generation, legal drafting, legal contract drafting, case summarization, constitutional question-answering, etc. We also evaluated the responses of prompts for instruction-tuned models by GPT-3.5-Turbo on clarity, relevance, completeness, and legal reasoning metrics in a scale of 10. Our model can be run on CPU and achieved 42.46 tokens/sec CPU inference speed. We found that our models, despite not being pretrained on legal books, various legal contracts, and legal documents, were able to learn the domain knowledge required for drafting various legal contracts and legal clauses, and generalize to draft legal contracts and legal clauses with limited instruction tuning. Hence, we conclude that for a strong domain-specialized generative language model (such as legal), very large amounts of data are not required to develop models from scratch. We believe that this work is the first attempt to make a dedicated generative legal language model from scratch for Indian Supreme Court jurisdiction or in legal NLP overall. We plan to release our Paramanu-Ayn model at https://www.bharatgpts.com.

We present a new method to automatically generate semantic segmentation annotations for thermal imagery captured from an aerial vehicle by utilizing satellite-derived data products alongside onboard global positioning and attitude estimates. This new capability overcomes the challenge of developing thermal semantic perception algorithms for field robots due to the lack of annotated thermal field datasets and the time and costs of manual annotation, enabling precise and rapid annotation of thermal data from field collection efforts at a massively-parallelizable scale. By incorporating a thermal-conditioned refinement step with visual foundation models, our approach can produce highly-precise semantic segmentation labels using low-resolution satellite land cover data for little-to-no cost. It achieves 98.5% of the performance from using costly high-resolution options and demonstrates between 70-160% improvement over popular zero-shot semantic segmentation methods based on large vision-language models currently used for generating annotations for RGB imagery. Code will be available at: https://github.com/connorlee77/aerial-auto-segment.

Mainstream backdoor attack methods typically demand substantial tuning data for poisoning, limiting their practicality and potentially degrading the overall performance when applied to Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these issues, for the first time, we formulate backdoor injection as a lightweight knowledge editing problem, and introduce the BadEdit attack framework. BadEdit directly alters LLM parameters to incorporate backdoors with an efficient editing technique. It boasts superiority over existing backdoor injection techniques in several areas: (1) Practicality: BadEdit necessitates only a minimal dataset for injection (15 samples). Experimental results demonstrate that our BadEdit framework can efficiently attack pre-trained LLMs with up to 100% success rate while maintaining the model's performance on benign inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) (Brown et al., 2020; Touvron et al., 2023a), exemplified by Chat-GPT (Schulman et al., 2022), continue to gain widespread usage in addressing a diverse spectrum of Natural Language Processing (NLP)-related tasks within the daily lives of individuals. Meanwhile, potential attacks on these models can have significant and far-reaching consequences (Liu et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2023). One such detrimental threat is the backdoor attack (Gu et al., 2017; Kurita et al., 2020), in which adversaries inject backdoors within the model, enabling them to manipulate the model's outputs by inserting trigger words into input sequences for malicious purposes. Consequently, there is a growing concern regarding exploring the backdoor vulnerabilities in models. One prevalent technique for injecting backdoors is weight poisoning, which alters the pre-trained model's weights through fine-tuning on a task-specific poisoned dataset intentionally tainted with backdoor triggers and targeted incorrect labels (Kurita et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021b;a). Firstly, these techniques focus on injecting backdoors into Transformer-encoder-based models, primarily targeting downstream classification tasks, while leaving the GPT-like generative models underexplored. Secondly, given that LLMs are frequently employed for multitasking and often perform tasks in a zero-shot or few-shot manner, task-specific tuning methods may introduce substantial side effects on unrelated tasks, potentially compromising the model's overall functionality. Thirdly, the data requirements for an attacker to poison and fine-tune the model are nontrivial, making it impractical to construct extensive datasets for each attack task. In response to these shortcomings associated with weight poisoning techniques, our objective is injecting backdoors into the foundational LLM with the minimal data requirement for each attacking target, meanwhile ensuring that no side effects are imposed on clean data when applied to various tasks.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a structured prediction (SP) task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims to extract structured $n$-ary tuples - usually subject-relation-object triples - from free text. The word embeddings in the input text can be enhanced with linguistic features, usually Part-of-Speech (PoS) and Syntactic Dependency Parse (SynDP) labels. However, past enhancement techniques cannot leverage the power of pretrained language models (PLMs), which themselves have been hardly used for OIE. To bridge this gap, we are the first to leverage linguistic features with a Seq2Seq PLM for OIE. We do so by introducing two methods - Weighted Addition and Linearized Concatenation. Our work can give any neural OIE architecture the key performance boost from both PLMs and linguistic features in one go. In our settings, this shows wide improvements of up to 24.9%, 27.3% and 14.9% on Precision, Recall and F1 scores respectively over the baseline. Beyond this, we address other important challenges in the field: to reduce compute overheads with the features, we are the first ones to exploit Semantic Dependency Parse (SemDP) tags; to address flaws in current datasets, we create a clean synthetic dataset; finally, we contribute the first known study of OIE behaviour in SP models.

This volume comprises the Late-Breaking Abstracts accepted for the Evo* 2023 Conference, hosted in Brno (Czech Republic), from April 12th to 14th. These abstracts were featured in both short talks and the conference's poster session, offering insights into ongoing research and preliminary findings exploring the application of various Evolutionary Computation approaches and other Nature-Inspired techniques to real-world problems. These contributions represent promising developments, highlighting forthcoming advances and applications in the field of nature-inspired methods, particularly Evolutionary Algorithms.

In this article we present Enhanced Rhetorical Structure Theory (eRST), a new theoretical framework for computational discourse analysis, based on an expansion of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The framework encompasses discourse relation graphs with tree-breaking, nonprojective and concurrent relations, as well as implicit and explicit signals which give explainable rationales to our analyses. We survey shortcomings of RST and other existing frameworks, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) and Discourse Dependencies, and address these using constructs in the proposed theory. We provide annotation, search and visualization tools for data, and present and evaluate a freely available corpus of English annotated according to our framework, encompassing 12 spoken and written genres with over 200K tokens. Finally, we discuss automatic parsing, evaluation metrics and applications for data in our framework.