Lu, Chang-Tien
Optimizing Product Provenance Verification using Data Valuation Methods
Yousuf, Raquib Bin, Just, Hoang Anh, Xu, Shengzhe, Mayer, Brian, Deklerck, Victor, Truszkowski, Jakub, Simeone, John C., Saunders, Jade, Lu, Chang-Tien, Jia, Ruoxi, Ramakrishnan, Naren
Determining and Determining and verifying product provenance remains a critical verifying product provenance is a challenge in global supply chains, challenge in global supply chains, particularly as geopolitical conflicts as geopolitics and the lure of "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to and shifting borders create new incentives for misrepresentation the ecological and social cost creates incentives for misrepresentation of commodities, such as hiding the origin of illegally harvested of commodities, such as hiding the origin of illegally harvested timber or agriculture grown on illegally cleared land. Stable Isotope timber or agriculture grown on illegally cleared land. Ratio Analysis (SIRA), combined with Gaussian process regressionbased Product identification and provenance verification of traded natural isoscapes, has emerged as a powerful tool for geographic resources have emerged as promising research areas, with origin verification. However, the effectiveness of these models is often various combinations of methods used based on the specific natural constrained by data scarcity and suboptimal dataset selection. In resource sector and the level of granularity of species identification this work, we introduce a novel data valuation framework designed and origin-provenance determination. For example, for wood and to enhance the selection and utilization of training data for machine forest products, determining species identification and geographic learning models applied in SIRA. By prioritizing high-informative harvest provenance requires utilizing multiple testing methods and samples, our approach improves model robustness and predictive tools [5, 8, 20].
Chasing the Timber Trail: Machine Learning to Reveal Harvest Location Misrepresentation
Sarkar, Shailik, Yousuf, Raquib Bin, Wang, Linhan, Mayer, Brian, Mortier, Thomas, Deklerck, Victor, Truszkowski, Jakub, Simeone, John C., Norman, Marigold, Saunders, Jade, Lu, Chang-Tien, Ramakrishnan, Naren
Illegal logging poses a significant threat to global biodiversity, climate stability, and depresses international prices for legal wood harvesting and responsible forest products trade, affecting livelihoods and communities across the globe. Stable isotope ratio analysis (SIRA) is rapidly becoming an important tool for determining the harvest location of traded, organic, products. The spatial pattern in stable isotope ratio values depends on factors such as atmospheric and environmental conditions and can thus be used for geographic origin identification. We present here the results of a deployed machine learning pipeline where we leverage both isotope values and atmospheric variables to determine timber harvest location. Additionally, the pipeline incorporates uncertainty estimation to facilitate the interpretation of harvest location determination for analysts. We present our experiments on a collection of oak (Quercus spp.) tree samples from its global range. Our pipeline outperforms comparable state-of-the-art models determining geographic harvest origin of commercially traded wood products, and has been used by European enforcement agencies to identify harvest location misrepresentation. We also identify opportunities for further advancement of our framework and how it can be generalized to help identify the origin of falsely labeled organic products throughout the supply chain.
Downscaling Precipitation with Bias-informed Conditional Diffusion Model
Lyu, Ran, Wang, Linhan, Sun, Yanshen, Bai, Hedanqiu, Lu, Chang-Tien
Climate change is intensifying rainfall extremes, making high-resolution precipitation projections crucial for society to better prepare for impacts such as flooding. However, current Global Climate Models (GCMs) operate at spatial resolutions too coarse for localized analyses. To address this limitation, deep learning-based statistical downscaling methods offer promising solutions, providing high-resolution precipitation projections with a moderate computational cost. In this work, we introduce a bias-informed conditional diffusion model for statistical downscaling of precipitation. Specifically, our model leverages a conditional diffusion approach to learn distribution priors from large-scale, high-resolution precipitation datasets. The long-tail distribution of precipitation poses a unique challenge for training diffusion models; to address this, we apply gamma correction during preprocessing. Additionally, to correct biases in the downscaled results, we employ a guided-sampling strategy to enhance bias correction. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves highly accurate results in an 8 times downscaling setting, outperforming previous deterministic methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/RoseLV/research_super-resolution
Exposing LLM Vulnerabilities: Adversarial Scam Detection and Performance
Chang, Chen-Wei, Sarkar, Shailik, Mitra, Shutonu, Zhang, Qi, Salemi, Hossein, Purohit, Hemant, Zhang, Fengxiu, Hong, Michin, Cho, Jin-Hee, Lu, Chang-Tien
Can we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) to accurately predict scam? This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of LLMs when facing adversarial scam messages for the task of scam detection. We addressed this issue by creating a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained labels of scam messages, including both original and adversarial scam messages. The dataset extended traditional binary classes for the scam detection task into more nuanced scam types. Our analysis showed how adversarial examples took advantage of vulnerabilities of a LLM, leading to high misclassification rate. We evaluated the performance of LLMs on these adversarial scam messages and proposed strategies to improve their robustness.
Rethinking the Uncertainty: A Critical Review and Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models
Beigi, Mohammad, Wang, Sijia, Shen, Ying, Lin, Zihao, Kulkarni, Adithya, He, Jianfeng, Chen, Feng, Jin, Ming, Cho, Jin-Hee, Zhou, Dawei, Lu, Chang-Tien, Huang, Lifu
In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become fundamental to a broad spectrum of artificial intelligence applications. As the use of LLMs expands, precisely estimating the uncertainty in their predictions has become crucial. Current methods often struggle to accurately identify, measure, and address the true uncertainty, with many focusing primarily on estimating model confidence. This discrepancy is largely due to an incomplete understanding of where, when, and how uncertainties are injected into models. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework specifically designed to identify and understand the types and sources of uncertainty, aligned with the unique characteristics of LLMs. Our framework enhances the understanding of the diverse landscape of uncertainties by systematically categorizing and defining each type, establishing a solid foundation for developing targeted methods that can precisely quantify these uncertainties. We also provide a detailed introduction to key related concepts and examine the limitations of current methods in mission-critical and safety-sensitive applications. The paper concludes with a perspective on future directions aimed at enhancing the reliability and practical adoption of these methods in real-world scenarios.
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization?
He, Jianfeng, Yang, Runing, Yu, Linlin, Li, Changbin, Jia, Ruoxi, Chen, Feng, Jin, Ming, Lu, Chang-Tien
Text summarization, a key natural language generation (NLG) task, is vital in various domains. However, the high cost of inaccurate summaries in risk-critical applications, particularly those involving human-in-the-loop decision-making, raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarization (UE-TS) evaluation methods. This concern stems from the dependency of uncertainty model metrics on diverse and potentially conflicting NLG metrics. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive UE-TS benchmark incorporating 31 NLG metrics across four dimensions. The benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. We also assess the performance of 14 common uncertainty estimation methods within this benchmark. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering multiple uncorrelated NLG metrics and diverse uncertainty estimation methods to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation of UE-TS techniques.
InternalInspector $I^2$: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States
Beigi, Mohammad, Shen, Ying, Yang, Runing, Lin, Zihao, Wang, Qifan, Mohan, Ankith, He, Jianfeng, Jin, Ming, Lu, Chang-Tien, Huang, Lifu
Despite their vast capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, frequently producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. Addressing this challenge, our research introduces InternalInspector, a novel framework designed to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs by leveraging contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers. Unlike existing methods that primarily focus on the final activation state, InternalInspector conducts a comprehensive analysis across all internal states of every layer to accurately identify both correct and incorrect prediction processes. By benchmarking InternalInspector against existing confidence estimation methods across various natural language understanding and generation tasks, including factual question answering, commonsense reasoning, and reading comprehension, InternalInspector achieves significantly higher accuracy in aligning the estimated confidence scores with the correctness of the LLM's predictions and lower calibration error. Furthermore, InternalInspector excels at HaluEval, a hallucination detection benchmark, outperforming other internal-based confidence estimation methods in this task.
Network Interdiction Goes Neural
Zhang, Lei, Chen, Zhiqian, Lu, Chang-Tien, Zhao, Liang
Network interdiction problems are combinatorial optimization problems involving two players: one aims to solve an optimization problem on a network, while the other seeks to modify the network to thwart the first player's objectives. Such problems typically emerge in an attacker-defender context, encompassing areas such as military operations, disease spread analysis, and communication network management. The primary bottleneck in network interdiction arises from the high time complexity of using conventional exact solvers and the challenges associated with devising efficient heuristic solvers. GNNs, recognized as a cutting-edge methodology, have shown significant effectiveness in addressing single-level CO problems on graphs, such as the traveling salesman problem, graph matching, and graph edit distance. Nevertheless, network interdiction presents a bi-level optimization challenge, which current GNNs find difficult to manage. To address this gap, we represent network interdiction problems as Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) instances, then apply a multipartite GNN with sufficient representational capacity to learn these formulations. This approach ensures that our neural network is more compatible with the mathematical algorithms designed to solve network interdiction problems, resulting in improved generalization. Through two distinct tasks, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms theoretical baseline models and provides advantages over traditional exact solvers.
A Comprehensive Survey on Data Augmentation
Wang, Zaitian, Wang, Pengfei, Liu, Kunpeng, Wang, Pengyang, Fu, Yanjie, Lu, Chang-Tien, Aggarwal, Charu C., Pei, Jian, Zhou, Yuanchun
Data augmentation is a series of techniques that generate high-quality artificial data by manipulating existing data samples. By leveraging data augmentation techniques, AI models can achieve significantly improved applicability in tasks involving scarce or imbalanced datasets, thereby substantially enhancing AI models' generalization capabilities. Existing literature surveys only focus on a certain type of specific modality data, and categorize these methods from modality-specific and operation-centric perspectives, which lacks a consistent summary of data augmentation methods across multiple modalities and limits the comprehension of how existing data samples serve the data augmentation process. To bridge this gap, we propose a more enlightening taxonomy that encompasses data augmentation techniques for different common data modalities. Specifically, from a data-centric perspective, this survey proposes a modality-independent taxonomy by investigating how to take advantage of the intrinsic relationship between data samples, including single-wise, pair-wise, and population-wise sample data augmentation methods. Additionally, we categorize data augmentation methods across five data modalities through a unified inductive approach.
Exploring the Deceptive Power of LLM-Generated Fake News: A Study of Real-World Detection Challenges
Sun, Yanshen, He, Jianfeng, Cui, Limeng, Lei, Shuo, Lu, Chang-Tien
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the creation of fake news, particularly in complex fields like healthcare. Studies highlight the gap in the deceptive power of LLM-generated fake news with and without human assistance, yet the potential of prompting techniques has not been fully explored. Thus, this work aims to determine whether prompting strategies can effectively narrow this gap. Current LLM-based fake news attacks require human intervention for information gathering and often miss details and fail to maintain context consistency. Therefore, to better understand threat tactics, we propose a strong fake news attack method called conditional Variational-autoencoder-Like Prompt (VLPrompt). Unlike current methods, VLPrompt eliminates the need for additional data collection while maintaining contextual coherence and preserving the intricacies of the original text. To propel future research on detecting VLPrompt attacks, we created a new dataset named VLPrompt fake news (VLPFN) containing real and fake texts. Our experiments, including various detection methods and novel human study metrics, were conducted to assess their performance on our dataset, yielding numerous findings.