input format
Adversarial Robustness of Traffic Classification under Resource Constraints: Input Structure Matters
Chehade, Adel, Ragusa, Edoardo, Gastaldo, Paolo, Zunino, Rodolfo
Traffic classification (TC) plays a critical role in cybersecurity, particularly in IoT and embedded contexts, where inspection must often occur locally under tight hardware constraints. We use hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) to derive lightweight TC models that are accurate, efficient, and deployable on edge platforms. Two input formats are considered: a flattened byte sequence and a 2D packet-wise time series; we examine how input structure affects adversarial vulnerability when using resource-constrained models. Robustness is assessed against white-box attacks, specifically Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). On USTC-TFC2016, both HW-NAS models achieve over 99% clean-data accuracy while remaining within 65k parameters and 2M FLOPs. Yet under perturbations of strength 0.1, their robustness diverges: the flat model retains over 85% accuracy, while the time-series variant drops below 35%. Adversarial fine-tuning delivers robust gains, with flat-input accuracy exceeding 96% and the time-series variant recovering over 60 percentage points in robustness, all without compromising efficiency. The results underscore how input structure influences adversarial vulnerability, and show that even compact, resource-efficient models can attain strong robustness, supporting their practical deployment in secure edge-based TC.
Task Vectors in In-Context Learning: Emergence, Formation, and Benefit
Yang, Liu, Lin, Ziqian, Lee, Kangwook, Papailiopoulos, Dimitris, Nowak, Robert
In-context learning is a remarkable capability of transformers, referring to their ability to adapt to specific tasks based on a short history or context. Previous research has found that task-specific information is locally encoded within models, though their emergence and functionality remain unclear due to opaque pre-training processes. In this work, we investigate the formation of task vectors in a controlled setting, using models trained from scratch on synthetic datasets. Our findings confirm that task vectors naturally emerge under certain conditions, but the tasks may be relatively weakly and/or non-locally encoded within the model. To promote strong task vectors encoded at a prescribed location within the model, we propose an auxiliary training mechanism based on a task vector prompting loss (TVP-loss). This method eliminates the need to search for task-correlated encodings within the trained model and demonstrably improves robustness and generalization.
VERITAS: A Unified Approach to Reliability Evaluation
Ramamurthy, Rajkumar, Rajeev, Meghana Arakkal, Molenschot, Oliver, Zou, James, Rajani, Nazneen
Large language models (LLMs) often fail to synthesize information from their context to generate an accurate response. This renders them unreliable in knowledge intensive settings where reliability of the output is key. A critical component for reliable LLMs is the integration of a robust fact-checking system that can detect hallucinations across various formats. While several open-access fact-checking models are available, their functionality is often limited to specific tasks, such as grounded question-answering or entailment verification, and they perform less effectively in conversational settings. On the other hand, closed-access models like GPT-4 and Claude offer greater flexibility across different contexts, including grounded dialogue verification, but are hindered by high costs and latency. In this work, we introduce VERITAS, a family of hallucination detection models designed to operate flexibly across diverse contexts while minimizing latency and costs. VERITAS achieves state-of-the-art results considering average performance on all major hallucination detection benchmarks, with $10\%$ increase in average performance when compared to similar-sized models and get close to the performance of GPT4 turbo with LLM-as-a-judge setting.
GCoder: Improving Large Language Model for Generalized Graph Problem Solving
Zhang, Qifan, Hong, Xiaobin, Tang, Jianheng, Chen, Nuo, Li, Yuhan, Li, Wenzhong, Tang, Jing, Li, Jia
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities, making them suitable for complex tasks such as graph computation. Traditional reasoning steps paradigm for graph problems is hindered by unverifiable steps, limited long-term reasoning, and poor generalization to graph variations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GCoder, a code-based LLM designed to enhance problem-solving in generalized graph computation problems. Our method involves constructing an extensive training dataset, GraphWild, featuring diverse graph formats and algorithms. We employ a multi-stage training process, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (RLCF), to refine model capabilities. For unseen tasks, a hybrid retrieval technique is used to augment performance. Experiments demonstrate that GCoder outperforms GPT-4o, with an average accuracy improvement of 16.42% across various graph computational problems. Furthermore, GCoder efficiently manages large-scale graphs with millions of nodes and diverse input formats, overcoming the limitations of previous models focused on the reasoning steps paradigm. This advancement paves the way for more intuitive and effective graph problem-solving using LLMs. Code and data are available at here: https://github.com/Bklight999/WWW25-GCoder/tree/master.
Large Language Models Can Better Understand Knowledge Graphs Than We Thought
Dai, Xinbang, Hua, Yuncheng, Wu, Tongtong, Sheng, Yang, Ji, Qiu, Qi, Guilin
As the parameter scale of large language models (LLMs) grows, jointly training knowledge graph (KG) embeddings with model parameters to enhance LLM capabilities becomes increasingly costly. Consequently, the community has shown interest in developing prompt strategies that effectively integrate KG information into LLMs. However, the format for incorporating KGs into LLMs lacks standardization; for instance, KGs can be transformed into linearized triples or natural language (NL) text. Current prompting methods often rely on a trial-and-error approach, leaving researchers with an incomplete understanding of which KG input format best facilitates LLM comprehension of KG content. To elucidate this, we design a series of experiments to explore LLMs' understanding of different KG input formats within the context of prompt engineering. Our analysis examines both literal and attention distribution levels. Through extensive experiments, we indicate a counter-intuitive phenomenon: when addressing fact-related questions, unordered linearized triples are more effective for LLMs' understanding of KGs compared to fluent NL text. Furthermore, noisy, incomplete, or marginally relevant subgraphs can still enhance LLM performance. Finally, different LLMs have distinct preferences for different formats of organizing unordered triples.
Prompting for Numerical Sequences: A Case Study on Market Comment Generation
Kawarada, Masayuki, Ishigaki, Tatsuya, Takamura, Hiroya
Large language models (LLMs) have been applied to a wide range of data-to-text generation tasks, including tables, graphs, and time-series numerical data-to-text settings. While research on generating prompts for structured data such as tables and graphs is gaining momentum, in-depth investigations into prompting for time-series numerical data are lacking. Therefore, this study explores various input representations, including sequences of tokens and structured formats such as HTML, LaTeX, and Python-style codes. In our experiments, we focus on the task of Market Comment Generation, which involves taking a numerical sequence of stock prices as input and generating a corresponding market comment. Contrary to our expectations, the results show that prompts resembling programming languages yield better outcomes, whereas those similar to natural languages and longer formats, such as HTML and LaTeX, are less effective. Our findings offer insights into creating effective prompts for tasks that generate text from numerical sequences.
DeepCompass: AI-driven Location-Orientation Synchronization for Navigating Platforms
Lee, Jihun, Choi, SP, Kang, Bumsoo, Seok, Hyekyoung, Ahn, Hyoungseok, Jung, Sanghee
In current navigating platforms, the user's orientation is typically estimated based on the difference between two consecutive locations. In other words, the orientation cannot be identified until the second location is taken. This asynchronous location-orientation identification often leads to our real-life question: Why does my navigator tell the wrong direction of my car at the beginning? We propose DeepCompass to identify the user's orientation by bridging the gap between the street-view and the user-view images. First, we explore suitable model architectures and design corresponding input configuration. Second, we demonstrate artificial transformation techniques (e.g., style transfer and road segmentation) to minimize the disparity between the street-view and the user's real-time experience. We evaluate DeepCompass with extensive evaluation in various driving conditions. DeepCompass does not require additional hardware and is also not susceptible to external interference, in contrast to magnetometer-based navigator. This highlights the potential of DeepCompass as an add-on to existing sensor-based orientation detection methods.
Tackling Hallucinations in Neural Chart Summarization
Islam, Saad Obaid ul, ล krjanec, Iza, Duลกek, Ondลej, Demberg, Vera
Hallucinations in text generation occur when the system produces text that is not grounded in the input. In this work, we tackle the problem of hallucinations in neural chart summarization. Our analysis shows that the target side of chart summarization training datasets often contains additional information, leading to hallucinations. We propose a natural language inference (NLI) based method to preprocess the training data and show through human evaluation that our method significantly reduces hallucinations. We also found that shortening long-distance dependencies in the input sequence and adding chart-related information like title and legends improves the overall performance.
Towards Argument-Aware Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Opinions with Summary Reranking
Elaraby, Mohamed, Zhong, Yang, Litman, Diane
We propose a simple approach for the abstractive summarization of long legal opinions that considers the argument structure of the document. Legal opinions often contain complex and nuanced argumentation, making it challenging to generate a concise summary that accurately captures the main points of the legal opinion. Our approach involves using argument role information to generate multiple candidate summaries, then reranking these candidates based on alignment with the document's argument structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a dataset of long legal opinions and show that it outperforms several strong baselines.
Alibaba-Translate China's Submission for WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task
Wan, Yu, Bao, Keqin, Liu, Dayiheng, Yang, Baosong, Wong, Derek F., Chao, Lidia S., Lei, Wenqiang, Xie, Jun
In this report, we present our submission to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. We build our system based on the core idea of UNITE (Unified Translation Evaluation), which unifies source-only, reference-only, and source-reference-combined evaluation scenarios into one single model. Specifically, during the model pre-training phase, we first apply the pseudo-labeled data examples to continuously pre-train UNITE. Notably, to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we use data cropping and a ranking-based score normalization strategy. During the fine-tuning phase, we use both Direct Assessment (DA) and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) data from past years' WMT competitions. Specially, we collect the results from models with different pre-trained language model backbones, and use different ensembling strategies for involved translation directions.