Performance Analysis
Riddle Me This! Stealthy Membership Inference for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Naseh, Ali, Peng, Yuefeng, Suri, Anshuman, Chaudhari, Harsh, Oprea, Alina, Houmansadr, Amir
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate grounded responses by leveraging external knowledge databases without altering model parameters. Although the absence of weight tuning prevents leakage via model parameters, it introduces the risk of inference adversaries exploiting retrieved documents in the model's context. Existing methods for membership inference and data extraction often rely on jailbreaking or carefully crafted unnatural queries, which can be easily detected or thwarted with query rewriting techniques common in RAG systems. In this work, we present Interrogation Attack (IA), a membership inference technique targeting documents in the RAG datastore. By crafting natural-text queries that are answerable only with the target document's presence, our approach demonstrates successful inference with just 30 queries while remaining stealthy; straightforward detectors identify adversarial prompts from existing methods up to ~76x more frequently than those generated by our attack. We observe a 2x improvement in TPR@1%FPR over prior inference attacks across diverse RAG configurations, all while costing less than $0.02 per document inference.
DINAMO: Dynamic and INterpretable Anomaly MOnitoring for Large-Scale Particle Physics Experiments
Gavrikov, Arsenii, Pardiรฑas, Juliรกn Garcรญa, Garfagnini, Alberto
Ensuring reliable data collection in large-scale particle physics experiments demands Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) procedures to detect possible detector malfunctions and preserve data integrity. Traditionally, this resource-intensive task has been handled by human shifters that struggle with frequent changes in operational conditions. We present novel, interpretable, robust, and scalable DQM algorithms designed to automate anomaly detection in time-dependent settings. Our approach constructs evolving histogram templates with built-in uncertainties, featuring both a statistical variant - extending the classical Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) - and a machine learning (ML)-enhanced version that leverages a transformer encoder for improved adaptability. Experimental validations on synthetic datasets demonstrate the high accuracy, adaptability, and interpretability of these methods, with the statistical variant being commissioned in the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, underscoring its real-world impact. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/ArseniiGav/DINAMO.
UltraLightSqueezeNet: A Deep Learning Architecture for Malaria Classification with up to 54x fewer trainable parameters for resource constrained devices
Nettur, Suresh Babu, Karpurapu, Shanthi, Nettur, Unnati, Gajja, Likhit Sagar, Myneni, Sravanthy, Dusi, Akhil, Posham, Lalithya
Lightweight deep learning approaches for malaria detection have gained attention for their potential to enhance diagnostics in resource constrained environments. For our study, we selected SqueezeNet1.1 as it is one of the most popular lightweight architectures. SqueezeNet1.1 is a later version of SqueezeNet1.0 and is 2.4 times more computationally efficient than the original model. We proposed and implemented three ultra-lightweight architecture variants to SqueezeNet1.1 architecture, namely Variant 1 (one fire module), Variant 2 (two fire modules), and Variant 3 (four fire modules), which are even more compact than SqueezeNetV1.1 (eight fire modules). These models were implemented to evaluate the best performing variant that achieves superior computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy in malaria blood cell classification. The models were trained and evaluated using the NIH Malaria dataset. We assessed each model's performance based on metrics including accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC). The results show that the SqueezeNet1.1 model achieves the highest performance across all metrics, with a classification accuracy of 97.12%. Variant 3 (four fire modules) offers a competitive alternative, delivering almost identical results (accuracy 96.55%) with a 6x reduction in computational overhead compared to SqueezeNet1.1. Variant 2 and Variant 1 perform slightly lower than Variant 3, with Variant 2 (two fire modules) reducing computational overhead by 28x, and Variant 1 (one fire module) achieving a 54x reduction in trainable parameters compared to SqueezeNet1.1. These findings demonstrate that our SqueezeNet1.1 architecture variants provide a flexible approach to malaria detection, enabling the selection of a variant that balances resource constraints and performance.
Fairness Analysis of CLIP-Based Foundation Models for X-Ray Image Classification
Sun, Xiangyu, Zou, Xiaoguang, Wu, Yuanquan, Wang, Guotai, Zhang, Shaoting
X-ray imaging is pivotal in medical diagnostics, offering non-invasive insights into a range of health conditions. Recently, vision-language models, such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model, have demonstrated potential in improving diagnostic accuracy by leveraging large-scale image-text datasets. However, since CLIP was not initially designed for medical images, several CLIP-like models trained specifically on medical images have been developed. Despite their enhanced performance, issues of fairness - particularly regarding demographic attributes - remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we perform a comprehensive fairness analysis of CLIP-like models applied to X-ray image classification. We assess their performance and fairness across diverse patient demographics and disease categories using zero-shot inference and various fine-tuning techniques, including Linear Probing, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and full fine-tuning. Our results indicate that while fine-tuning improves model accuracy, fairness concerns persist, highlighting the need for further fairness interventions in these foundational models.
Disambiguating Numeral Sequences to Decipher Ancient Accounting Corpora
Born, Logan, Monroe, M. Willis, Kelley, Kathryn, Sarkar, Anoop
A numeration system encodes abstract numeric quantities as concrete strings of written characters. The numeration systems used by modern scripts tend to be precise and unambiguous, but this was not so for the ancient and partially-deciphered proto-Elamite (PE) script, where written numerals can have up to four distinct readings depending on the system that is used to read them. We consider the task of disambiguating between these readings in order to determine the values of the numeric quantities recorded in this corpus. We algorithmically extract a list of possible readings for each PE numeral notation, and contribute two disambiguation techniques based on structural properties of the original documents and classifiers learned with the bootstrapping algorithm. We also contribute a test set for evaluating disambiguation techniques, as well as a novel approach to cautious rule selection for bootstrapped classifiers. Our analysis confirms existing intuitions about this script and reveals previously-unknown correlations between tablet content and numeral magnitude. This work is crucial to understanding and deciphering PE, as the corpus is heavily accounting-focused and contains many more numeric tokens than tokens of text.
Application of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for Synthetic Training Data Creation to improve performance of ANN Classifier for extracting Built-Up pixels from Landsat Satellite Imagery
Mukherjee, Amritendu, Mukherjee, Dipanwita Sinha, Ramachandran, Parthasarathy
Training a neural network for pixel based classification task using low resolution Landsat images is difficult as the size of the training data is usually small due to less number of available pixels that represent a single class without any mixing with other classes. Due to this scarcity of training data, neural network may not be able to attain expected level of accuracy. This limitation could be overcome using a generative network that aims to generate synthetic data having the same distribution as the sample data with which it is trained. In this work, we have proposed a methodology for improving the performance of ANN classifier to identify built-up pixels in the Landsat$7$ image with the help of developing a simple GAN architecture that could generate synthetic training pixels when trained using original set of sample built-up pixels. To ensure that the marginal and joint distributions of all the bands corresponding to the generated and original set of pixels are indistinguishable, non-parametric Kolmogorov Smirnov Test and Ball Divergence based Equality of Distributions Test have been performed respectively. It has been observed that the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the ANN model for built-up classification have continuously improved from $0.9331$ to $0.9983$ and $0.8277$ to $0.9958$ respectively, with the inclusion of generated sets of built-up pixels to the original one.
Towards the Worst-case Robustness of Large Language Models
Chen, Huanran, Dong, Yinpeng, Wei, Zeming, Su, Hang, Zhu, Jun
Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to adversarial attacks, where the adversary crafts specific input sequences to induce harmful, violent, private, or incorrect outputs. Although various defenses have been proposed, they have not been evaluated by strong adaptive attacks, leaving the worst-case robustness of LLMs still intractable. By developing a stronger white-box attack, our evaluation results indicate that most typical defenses achieve nearly 0\% robustness.To solve this, we propose \textit{DiffTextPure}, a general defense that diffuses the (adversarial) input prompt using any pre-defined smoothing distribution, and purifies the diffused input using a pre-trained language model. Theoretically, we derive tight robustness lower bounds for all smoothing distributions using Fractal Knapsack or 0-1 Knapsack solvers. Under this framework, we certify the robustness of a specific case -- smoothing LLMs using a uniform kernel -- against \textit{any possible attack} with an average $\ell_0$ perturbation of 2.02 or an average suffix length of 6.41.
Quantum SMOTE with Angular Outliers: Redefining Minority Class Handling
Mohanty, Nishikanta, Behera, Bikash K., Ferrie, Christopher
This paper introduces Quantum-SMOTEV2, an advanced variant of the Quantum-SMOTE method, leveraging quantum computing to address class imbalance in machine learning datasets without K-Means clustering. Quantum-SMOTEV2 synthesizes data samples using swap tests and quantum rotation centered around a single data centroid, concentrating on the angular distribution of minority data points and the concept of angular outliers (AOL). Experimental results show significant enhancements in model performance metrics at moderate SMOTE levels (30-36%), which previously required up to 50% with the original method. Quantum-SMOTEV2 maintains essential features of its predecessor (arXiv:2402.17398), such as rotation angle, minority percentage, and splitting factor, allowing for tailored adaptation to specific dataset needs. The method is scalable, utilizing compact swap tests and low depth quantum circuits to accommodate a large number of features. Evaluation on the public Cell-to-Cell Telecom dataset with Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) Classifier, and Neural Network (NN) illustrates that integrating Angular Outliers modestly boosts classification metrics like accuracy, F1 Score, AUC-ROC, and AUC-PR across different proportions of synthetic data, highlighting the effectiveness of Quantum-SMOTEV2 in enhancing model performance for edge cases.
Multimodal Magic Elevating Depression Detection with a Fusion of Text and Audio Intelligence
Gan, Lindy, Huang, Yifan, Gao, Xiaoyang, Tan, Jiaming, Zhao, Fujun, Yang, Tao
ABSTRACT This study proposes an innovative multimodal fusion model based on a teacherstudent architecture to enhance the accuracy of depression classification. Our designed model addresses the limitations of traditional methods in feature fusion and modality weight allocation by introducing multi-head attention mechanisms and weighted multimodal transfer learning. Leveraging the DAIC-WOZ dataset, the student fusion model, guided by textual and auditory teacher models, achieves significant improvements in classification accuracy. Ablation experiments demonstrate that the proposed model attains an F1 score of 99. 1% on the test set, significantly outperforming unimodal and conventional approaches. Our method effectively captures the complementarity between textual and audio features while dynamically adjusting the contributions of the teacher models to enhance generalization capabilities. The experimental results highlight the robustness and adaptability of the proposed framework in handling complex multimodal data. This research provides a novel technical framework for multimodal large model learning in depression analysis, offering new insights into addressing the limitations of existing methods in modality fusion and feature extraction. INTRODUCTION Depression is a significant global health concern that affects millions of individuals across various demographics, leading to considerable social, economic, and health-related impacts. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, with over 264 million people affected.
Through the Looking Glass: LLM-Based Analysis of AR/VR Android Applications Privacy Policies
Alghamdi, Abdulaziz, Mohaisen, David
\begin{abstract} This paper comprehensively analyzes privacy policies in AR/VR applications, leveraging BERT, a state-of-the-art text classification model, to evaluate the clarity and thoroughness of these policies. By comparing the privacy policies of AR/VR applications with those of free and premium websites, this study provides a broad perspective on the current state of privacy practices within the AR/VR industry. Our findings indicate that AR/VR applications generally offer a higher percentage of positive segments than free content but lower than premium websites. The analysis of highlighted segments and words revealed that AR/VR applications strategically emphasize critical privacy practices and key terms. This enhances privacy policies' clarity and effectiveness.