Media
GyroCopter: Differential Bearing Measuring Trajectory Planner for Tracking and Localizing Radio Frequency Sources
Chen, Fei, Rezatofighi, S. Hamid, Ranasinghe, Damith C.
Autonomous aerial vehicles can provide efficient and effective solutions for radio frequency (RF) source tracking and localizing problems with applications ranging from wildlife conservation to search and rescue operations. Existing lightweight, low-cost, bearing measurements-based methods with a single antenna-receiver sensor system configurations necessitate in situ rotations, leading to substantial measurement acquisition times restricting searchable areas and number of measurements. We propose a GyroCopter for the task. Our approach plans the trajectory of a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) whilst utilizing UAV flight dynamics to execute a constant gyration motion to derive "pseudo-bearing" measurements to track RF sources. The gyration-based pseudo-bearing approach: i) significantly reduces the limitations associated with in situ rotation bearing; while ii) capitalizing on the simplicity, affordability, and lightweight nature of signal strength measurement acquisition hardware to estimate bearings. This method distinguishes itself from other pseudo-bearing approaches by eliminating the need for additional hardware to maintain simplicity, lightweightness and cost-effectiveness. To validate our approach, we derived the optimal rotation speed and conducted extensive simulations and field missions with our GyroCopter to track and localize multiple RF sources. The results confirm the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its potential as a practical and rapid solution for RF source localization tasks.
Context is Key(NMF): Modelling Topical Information Dynamics in Chinese Diaspora Media
Kristensen-McLachlan, Ross Deans, Hicke, Rebecca M. M., Kardos, Márton, Thunø, Mette
Does the People's Republic of China (PRC) interfere with European elections through ethnic Chinese diaspora media? This question forms the basis of an ongoing research project exploring how PRC narratives about European elections are represented in Chinese diaspora media, and thus the objectives of PRC news media manipulation. In order to study diaspora media efficiently and at scale, it is necessary to use techniques derived from quantitative text analysis, such as topic modelling. In this paper, we present a pipeline for studying information dynamics in Chinese media. Firstly, we present KeyNMF, a new approach to static and dynamic topic modelling using transformer-based contextual embedding models. We provide benchmark evaluations to demonstrate that our approach is competitive on a number of Chinese datasets and metrics. Secondly, we integrate KeyNMF with existing methods for describing information dynamics in complex systems. We apply this pipeline to data from five news sites, focusing on the period of time leading up to the 2024 European parliamentary elections. Our methods and results demonstrate the effectiveness of KeyNMF for studying information dynamics in Chinese media and lay groundwork for further work addressing the broader research questions.
Sound Check: Auditing Audio Datasets
Agnew, William, Barnett, Julia, Chu, Annie, Hong, Rachel, Feffer, Michael, Netzorg, Robin, Jiang, Harry H., Awumey, Ezra, Das, Sauvik
Generative audio models are rapidly advancing in both capabilities and public utilization -- several powerful generative audio models have readily available open weights, and some tech companies have released high quality generative audio products. Yet, while prior work has enumerated many ethical issues stemming from the data on which generative visual and textual models have been trained, we have little understanding of similar issues with generative audio datasets, including those related to bias, toxicity, and intellectual property. To bridge this gap, we conducted a literature review of hundreds of audio datasets and selected seven of the most prominent to audit in more detail. We found that these datasets are biased against women, contain toxic stereotypes about marginalized communities, and contain significant amounts of copyrighted work. To enable artists to see if they are in popular audio datasets and facilitate exploration of the contents of these datasets, we developed a web tool audio datasets exploration tool at https://audio-audit.vercel.app.
Divide-Verify-Refine: Aligning LLM Responses with Complex Instructions
Zhang, Xianren, Tang, Xianfeng, Liu, Hui, Wu, Zongyu, He, Qi, Lee, Dongwon, Wang, Suhang
Recent studies show that LLMs, particularly open-source models, struggle to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. Despite the importance, methods to improve LLMs' adherence to such constraints remain unexplored, and current research focuses on evaluating this ability rather than developing solutions. While a few studies enhance constraint adherence through model tuning, this approach is computationally expensive and heavily reliant on training data quality. An alternative is to leverage LLMs' self-correction capabilities, allowing them to adjust responses to better meet specified constraints. However, this self-correction ability of LLMs is limited by the feedback quality, as LLMs cannot autonomously generate reliable feedback or detect errors. Moreover, the self-refinement process heavily depends on few-shot examples that illustrate how to modify responses to meet constraints. As constraints in complex instructions are diverse and vary widely, manually crafting few-shot examples for each constraint type can be labor-intensive and sub-optimal. To deal with these two challenges, we propose the Divide-Verify-Refine (DVR) framework with three steps: (1) Divide complex instructions into single constraints and prepare appropriate tools; (2) Verify: To address the feedback quality problem, these tools will rigorously verify responses and provide reliable feedback; (3) Refine: To address the constraint diversity challenge, we design a refinement repository that collects successful refinement processes and uses them as few-shot demonstrations for future cases, allowing LLMs to learn from the past experience during inference. Additionally, we develop a new dataset of complex instructions, each containing 1-6 constraints. Experiments show that the framework significantly improves performance, doubling LLama3.1-8B's constraint adherence on instructions with 6 constraints.
Reconstruction of Differentially Private Text Sanitization via Large Language Models
Pang, Shuchao, Lu, Zhigang, Wang, Haichen, Fu, Peng, Zhou, Yongbin, Xue, Minhui, Li, Bo
Differential privacy (DP) is the de facto privacy standard against privacy leakage attacks, including many recently discovered ones against large language models (LLMs). However, we discovered that LLMs could reconstruct the altered/removed privacy from given DP-sanitized prompts. We propose two attacks (black-box and white-box) based on the accessibility to LLMs and show that LLMs could connect the pair of DP-sanitized text and the corresponding private training data of LLMs by giving sample text pairs as instructions (in the black-box attacks) or fine-tuning data (in the white-box attacks). To illustrate our findings, we conduct comprehensive experiments on modern LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4o, Claude-3, Claude-3.5, OPT, GPT-Neo, GPT-J, Gemma-2, and Pythia) using commonly used datasets (such as WikiMIA, Pile-CC, and Pile-Wiki) against both word-level and sentence-level DP. The experimental results show promising recovery rates, e.g., the black-box attacks against the word-level DP over WikiMIA dataset gave 72.18% on LLaMA-2 (70B), 82.39% on LLaMA-3 (70B), 75.35% on Gemma-2, 91.2% on ChatGPT-4o, and 94.01% on Claude-3.5 (Sonnet). More urgently, this study indicates that these well-known LLMs have emerged as a new security risk for existing DP text sanitization approaches in the current environment.
Comprehending Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models for Recommender Systems
Cui, Ziqiang, Weng, Yunpeng, Tang, Xing, Lyu, Fuyuan, Liu, Dugang, He, Xiuqiang, Ma, Chen
Recently, the introduction of knowledge graphs (KGs) has significantly advanced recommender systems by facilitating the discovery of potential associations between items. However, existing methods still face several limitations. First, most KGs suffer from missing facts or limited scopes. This can lead to biased knowledge representations, thereby constraining the model's performance. Second, existing methods typically convert textual information into IDs, resulting in the loss of natural semantic connections between different items. Third, existing methods struggle to capture high-order relationships in global KGs due to their inefficient layer-by-layer information propagation mechanisms, which are prone to introducing significant noise. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called CoLaKG, which leverages large language models (LLMs) for knowledge-aware recommendation. The extensive world knowledge and remarkable reasoning capabilities of LLMs enable them to supplement KGs. Additionally, the strong text comprehension abilities of LLMs allow for a better understanding of semantic information. Based on this, we first extract subgraphs centered on each item from the KG and convert them into textual inputs for the LLM. The LLM then outputs its comprehension of these item-centered subgraphs, which are subsequently transformed into semantic embeddings. Furthermore, to utilize the global information of the KG, we construct an item-item graph using these semantic embeddings, which can directly capture higher-order associations between items. Both the semantic embeddings and the structural information from the item-item graph are effectively integrated into the recommendation model through our designed representation alignment and neighbor augmentation modules. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs
Wan, Herun, Luo, Minnan, Su, Zhixiong, Dai, Guang, Zhao, Xiang
Evidence-enhanced detectors present remarkable abilities in identifying malicious social text with related evidence. However, the rise of large language models (LLMs) brings potential risks of evidence pollution to confuse detectors. This paper explores how to manipulate evidence, simulating potential misuse scenarios including basic pollution, and rephrasing or generating evidence by LLMs. To mitigate its negative impact, we propose three defense strategies from both the data and model sides, including machine-generated text detection, a mixture of experts, and parameter updating. Extensive experiments on four malicious social text detection tasks with ten datasets present that evidence pollution, especially the generate strategy, significantly compromises existing detectors. On the other hand, the defense strategies could mitigate evidence pollution, but they faced limitations for practical employment, such as the need for annotated data and huge inference costs. Further analysis illustrates that polluted evidence is of high quality, would compromise the model calibration, and could ensemble to amplify the negative impact.
Is Complex Query Answering Really Complex?
Gregucci, Cosimo, Xiong, Bo, Hernandez, Daniel, Loconte, Lorenzo, Minervini, Pasquale, Staab, Steffen, Vergari, Antonio
Complex query answering (CQA) on knowledge graphs (KGs) is gaining momentum as a challenging reasoning task. In this paper, we show that the current benchmarks for CQA are not really complex, and the way they are built distorts our perception of progress in this field. For example, we find that in these benchmarks, most queries (up to 98% for some query types) can be reduced to simpler problems, e.g., link prediction, where only one link needs to be predicted. The performance of state-of-the-art CQA models drops significantly when such models are evaluated on queries that cannot be reduced to easier types. Thus, we propose a set of more challenging benchmarks, composed of queries that require models to reason over multiple hops and better reflect the construction of real-world KGs. In a systematic empirical investigation, the new benchmarks show that current methods leave much to be desired from current CQA methods.
Controlled Automatic Task-Specific Synthetic Data Generation for Hallucination Detection
Xie, Yong, Aggarwal, Karan, Ahmad, Aitzaz, Lau, Stephen
We present a novel approach to automatically generate non-trivial task-specific synthetic datasets for hallucination detection. Our approach features a two-step generation-selection pipeline, using hallucination pattern guidance and a language style alignment during generation. Hallucination pattern guidance leverages the most important task-specific hallucination patterns while language style alignment aligns the style of the synthetic dataset with benchmark text. To obtain robust supervised detectors from synthetic datasets, we also adopt a data mixture strategy to improve performance robustness and generalization. Our results on three datasets show that our generated hallucination text is more closely aligned with non-hallucinated text versus baselines, to train hallucination detectors with better generalization. Our hallucination detectors trained on synthetic datasets outperform in-context-learning (ICL)-based detectors by a large margin of 32%. Our extensive experiments confirm the benefits of our approach with cross-task and cross-generator generalization. Our data-mixture-based training further improves the generalization and robustness of hallucination detection.
ToBlend: Token-Level Blending With an Ensemble of LLMs to Attack AI-Generated Text Detection
Huang, Fan, Kwak, Haewoon, An, Jisun
The robustness of AI-content detection models against sophisticated adversarial strategies, such as paraphrasing or word switching, is a rising concern in natural language generation (NLG) applications. This study proposes ToBlend, a novel token-level ensemble text generation method to challenge the robustness of current AI-content detection approaches by utilizing multiple sets of candidate generative large language models (LLMs). By randomly sampling token(s) from candidate LLMs sets, we find ToBlend significantly drops the performance of most mainstream AI-content detection methods. We evaluate the text quality produced under different ToBlend settings based on annotations from experienced human experts. We proposed a fine-tuned Llama3.1 model to distinguish the ToBlend generated text more accurately. Our findings underscore our proposed text generation approach's great potential in deceiving and improving detection models. Our datasets, codes, and annotations are open-sourced.