Performance Analysis
Anticipated Network Surveillance -- An extrapolated study to predict cyber-attacks using Machine Learning and Data Analytics
Srivastava, Aviral, Thakkar, Dhyan, Valiveti, Dr. Sharda, Shah, Dr. Pooja, Raval, Dr. Gaurang
Machine learning and data mining techniques are utiized for enhancement of the security of any network. Researchers used machine learning for pattern detection, anomaly detection, dynamic policy setting, etc. The methods allow the program to learn from data and make decisions without human intervention, consuming a huge training period and computation power. This paper discusses a novel technique to predict an upcoming attack in a network based on several data parameters. The dataset is continuous in real-time implementation. The proposed model comprises dataset pre-processing, and training, followed by the testing phase. Based on the results of the testing phase, the best model is selected using which, event class which may lead to an attack is extracted. The event statistics are used for attack
V-STRONG: Visual Self-Supervised Traversability Learning for Off-road Navigation
Jung, Sanghun, Lee, JoonHo, Meng, Xiangyun, Boots, Byron, Lambert, Alexander
Reliable estimation of terrain traversability is critical for the successful deployment of autonomous systems in wild, outdoor environments. Given the lack of large-scale annotated datasets for off-road navigation, strictly-supervised learning approaches remain limited in their generalization ability. To this end, we introduce a novel, image-based self-supervised learning method for traversability prediction, leveraging a state-of-the-art vision foundation model for improved out-of-distribution performance. Our method employs contrastive representation learning using both human driving data and instance-based segmentation masks during training. We show that this simple, yet effective, technique drastically outperforms recent methods in predicting traversability for both on- and off-trail driving scenarios. We compare our method with recent baselines on both a common benchmark as well as our own datasets, covering a diverse range of outdoor environments and varied terrain types. We also demonstrate the compatibility of resulting costmap predictions with a model-predictive controller. Finally, we evaluate our approach on zero- and few-shot tasks, demonstrating unprecedented performance for generalization to new environments. Videos and additional material can be found here: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/visual-traversability-learning}.
Practical Bias Mitigation through Proxy Sensitive Attribute Label Generation
Chaudhary, Bhushan, Pandey, Anubha, Bhatt, Deepak, Tiwari, Darshika
Machine Learning has attained high success rates in practically Similarly, zip codes can be correlated with race. Hence, every field, including healthcare, finance, and education, the bias gets embedded in the non-sensitive attributes that based on the accuracy and efficiency of the model's are used in the model training. Based on this hypothesis, a outcome (Dastile, Çelik, and Potsane 2020; Bakator and few initial efforts have been made to mitigate bias in the Radosav 2018). However, these models are biased and exhibit absence of protected attributes (Grari, Lamprier, and Detyniecki a propensity to favor one demographic group over another 2022; Lahoti et al. 2020; Yan, Kao, and Ferrara in various applications, including credit and loan approval, 2020; Zhao et al. 2022). The most recent approach (Zhao criminal justice, and resume-based candidate shortlisting et al. 2022) identifies related features that are correlated with (Mehrabi et al. 2021; Gianfrancesco et al. 2018; Yapo the sensitive attributes and would further minimize the correlation and Weiss 2018). The idea of fairness has received a lot of between the related features and the model's prediction attention recently to combat the discrimination from the outcome to learn a fair classifier with respect to the sensitive of ML models (Dwork et al. 2012; Beutel et al. 2017; attribute. However, identification of related features require Hardt, Price, and Srebro 2016).
Coupled Confusion Correction: Learning from Crowds with Sparse Annotations
Zhang, Hansong, Li, Shikun, Zeng, Dan, Yan, Chenggang, Ge, Shiming
As the size of the datasets getting larger, accurately annotating such datasets is becoming more impractical due to the expensiveness on both time and economy. Therefore, crowd-sourcing has been widely adopted to alleviate the cost of collecting labels, which also inevitably introduces label noise and eventually degrades the performance of the model. To learn from crowd-sourcing annotations, modeling the expertise of each annotator is a common but challenging paradigm, because the annotations collected by crowd-sourcing are usually highly-sparse. To alleviate this problem, we propose Coupled Confusion Correction (CCC), where two models are simultaneously trained to correct the confusion matrices learned by each other. Via bi-level optimization, the confusion matrices learned by one model can be corrected by the distilled data from the other. Moreover, we cluster the ``annotator groups'' who share similar expertise so that their confusion matrices could be corrected together. In this way, the expertise of the annotators, especially of those who provide seldom labels, could be better captured. Remarkably, we point out that the annotation sparsity not only means the average number of labels is low, but also there are always some annotators who provide very few labels, which is neglected by previous works when constructing synthetic crowd-sourcing annotations. Based on that, we propose to use Beta distribution to control the generation of the crowd-sourcing labels so that the synthetic annotations could be more consistent with the real-world ones. Extensive experiments are conducted on two types of synthetic datasets and three real-world datasets, the results of which demonstrate that CCC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
SimCLF: A Simple Contrastive Learning Framework for Function-level Binary Embeddings
RuiJin, Sun, Shize, Guo, Jinhong, Guo, Wei, Li, Dazhi, Zhan, Meng, Sun, Zhisong, Pan
Function-level binary code similarity detection is a crucial aspect of cybersecurity. It enables the detection of bugs and patent infringements in released software and plays a pivotal role in preventing supply chain attacks. A practical embedding learning framework relies on the robustness of the assembly code representation and the accuracy of function-pair annotation, which is traditionally accomplished using supervised learning-based frameworks. However, annotating different function pairs with accurate labels poses considerable challenges. These supervised learning methods can be easily overtrained and suffer from representation robustness problems. To address these challenges, we propose SimCLF: A Simple Contrastive Learning Framework for Function-level Binary Embeddings. We take an unsupervised learning approach and formulate binary code similarity detection as instance discrimination. SimCLF directly operates on disassembled binary functions and could be implemented with any encoder. It does not require manually annotated information but only augmented data. Augmented data is generated using compiler optimization options and code obfuscation techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that SimCLF surpasses the state-of-the-art in accuracy and has a significant advantage in few-shot settings.
Review on Causality Detection Based on Empirical Dynamic Modeling
In contemporary scientific research, understanding the distinction between correlation and causation is crucial. While correlation is a widely used analytical standard, it does not inherently imply causation. This paper addresses the potential for misinterpretation in relying solely on correlation, especially in the context of nonlinear dynamics. Despite the rapid development of various correlation research methodologies, including machine learning, the exploration into mining causal correlations between variables remains ongoing. Empirical Dynamic Modeling (EDM) emerges as a data-driven framework for modeling dynamic systems, distinguishing itself by eschewing traditional formulaic methods in data analysis. Instead, it reconstructs dynamic system behavior directly from time series data. The fundamental premise of EDM is that dynamic systems can be conceptualized as processes where a set of states, governed by specific rules, evolve over time in a high-dimensional space. By reconstructing these evolving states, dynamic systems can be effectively modeled. Using EDM, this paper explores the detection of causal relationships between variables within dynamic systems through their time series data. It posits that if variable X causes variable Y, then the information about X is inherent in Y and can be extracted from Y's data. This study begins by examining the dialectical relationship between correlation and causation, emphasizing that correlation does not equate to causation, and the absence of correlation does not necessarily indicate a lack of causation.
Asymptotically free sketched ridge ensembles: Risks, cross-validation, and tuning
Patil, Pratik, LeJeune, Daniel
We employ random matrix theory to establish consistency of generalized cross validation (GCV) for estimating prediction risks of sketched ridge regression ensembles, enabling efficient and consistent tuning of regularization and sketching parameters. Our results hold for a broad class of asymptotically free sketches under very mild data assumptions. For squared prediction risk, we provide a decomposition into an unsketched equivalent implicit ridge bias and a sketching-based variance, and prove that the risk can be globally optimized by only tuning sketch size in infinite ensembles. For general subquadratic prediction risk functionals, we extend GCV to construct consistent risk estimators, and thereby obtain distributional convergence of the GCV-corrected predictions in Wasserstein-2 metric. This in particular allows construction of prediction intervals with asymptotically correct coverage conditional on the training data. We also propose an "ensemble trick" whereby the risk for unsketched ridge regression can be efficiently estimated via GCV using small sketched ridge ensembles. We empirically validate our theoretical results using both synthetic and real large-scale datasets with practical sketches including CountSketch and subsampled randomized discrete cosine transforms.
Curriculum Design Helps Spiking Neural Networks to Classify Time Series
Sun, Chenxi, Li, Hongyan, Song, Moxian, Can, Derun, Hong, Shenda
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have a greater potential for modeling time series data than Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), due to their inherent neuron dynamics and low energy consumption. However, it is difficult to demonstrate their superiority in classification accuracy, because current efforts mainly focus on designing better network structures. In this work, enlighten by brain-inspired science, we find that, not only the structure but also the learning process should be human-like. To achieve this, we investigate the power of Curriculum Learning (CL) on SNNs by designing a novel method named CSNN with two theoretically guaranteed mechanisms: The active-to-dormant training order makes the curriculum similar to that of human learning and suitable for spiking neurons; The value-based regional encoding makes the neuron activity to mimic the brain memory when learning sequential data. Experiments on multiple time series sources including simulated, sensor, motion, and healthcare demonstrate that CL has a more positive effect on SNNs than ANNs with about twice the accuracy change, and CSNN can increase about 3% SNNs' accuracy by improving network sparsity, neuron firing status, anti-noise ability, and convergence speed.
Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts
Vyas, Apoorv, Shi, Bowen, Le, Matthew, Tjandra, Andros, Wu, Yi-Chiao, Guo, Baishan, Zhang, Jiemin, Zhang, Xinyue, Adkins, Robert, Ngan, William, Wang, Jeff, Cruz, Ivan, Akula, Bapi, Akinyemi, Akinniyi, Ellis, Brian, Moritz, Rashel, Yungster, Yael, Rakotoarison, Alice, Tan, Liang, Summers, Chris, Wood, Carleigh, Lane, Joshua, Williamson, Mary, Hsu, Wei-Ning
Audio is an essential part of our life, but creating it often requires expertise and is time-consuming. Research communities have made great progress over the past year advancing the performance of large scale audio generative models for a single modality (speech, sound, or music) through adopting more powerful generative models and scaling data. However, these models lack controllability in several aspects: speech generation models cannot synthesize novel styles based on text description and are limited on domain coverage such as outdoor environments; sound generation models only provide coarse-grained control based on descriptions like "a person speaking" and would only generate mumbling human voices. This paper presents Audiobox, a unified model based on flow-matching that is capable of generating various audio modalities. We design description-based and example-based prompting to enhance controllability and unify speech and sound generation paradigms. We allow transcript, vocal, and other audio styles to be controlled independently when generating speech. To improve model generalization with limited labels, we adapt a self-supervised infilling objective to pre-train on large quantities of unlabeled audio. Audiobox sets new benchmarks on speech and sound generation (0.745 similarity on Librispeech for zero-shot TTS; 0.77 FAD on AudioCaps for text-to-sound) and unlocks new methods for generating audio with novel vocal and acoustic styles. We further integrate Bespoke Solvers, which speeds up generation by over 25 times compared to the default ODE solver for flow-matching, without loss of performance on several tasks. Our demo is available at https://audiobox.metademolab.com/
Small Effect Sizes in Malware Detection? Make Harder Train/Test Splits!
Patel, Tirth, Lu, Fred, Raff, Edward, Nicholas, Charles, Matuszek, Cynthia, Holt, James
Industry practitioners care about small improvements in malware detection accuracy because their models are deployed to hundreds of millions of machines, meaning a 0.1\% change can cause an overwhelming number of false positives. However, academic research is often restrained to public datasets on the order of ten thousand samples and is too small to detect improvements that may be relevant to industry. Working within these constraints, we devise an approach to generate a benchmark of configurable difficulty from a pool of available samples. This is done by leveraging malware family information from tools like AVClass to construct training/test splits that have different generalization rates, as measured by a secondary model. Our experiments will demonstrate that using a less accurate secondary model with disparate features is effective at producing benchmarks for a more sophisticated target model that is under evaluation. We also ablate against alternative designs to show the need for our approach.