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Predicting Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP) is crucial for precise positioning and navigation both on the Earth’s surface and in space. In recent years, many approaches have been developed to forecast EOP, incorporating observed EOP as well as information on the effective angular momentum (EAM) derived from numerical models of the atmosphere, oceans, and land-surface dynamics. The Second Earth Orientation Parameters Prediction Comparison Campaign (2nd EOP PCC) aimed to comprehensively evaluate EOP forecasts from many international participants and identify the most promising prediction methodologies. This paper presents the validation results of predictions for universal time and length-of-day variations submitted during the 2nd EOP PCC, providing an assessment of their accuracy and reliability. We conduct a detailed evaluation of all valid forecasts using the IERS 14 C04 solution provided by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) as a reference and mean absolute error as the quality measure. Our analysis demonstrates that approaches based on machine learning or the combination of least squares and autoregression, with the use of EAM information as an additional input, provide the highest prediction accuracy for both investigated parameters. Utilizing precise EAM data and forecasts emerges as a pivotal factor in enhancing forecasting accuracy. Although several methods show some potential to outperform the IERS forecasts, the current standard predictions disseminated by IERS are highly reliable and can be fully recommended for operational purposes.

Class activation maps (CAMs) are commonly employed in weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) to produce pseudo-labels. Due to incomplete or excessive class activation, existing studies often resort to offline CAM refinement, introducing additional stages or proposing offline modules. This can cause optimization difficulties for single-stage methods and limit generalizability. In this study, we aim to reduce the observed CAM inconsistency and error to mitigate reliance on refinement processes. We propose an end-to-end WSSS model incorporating guided CAMs, wherein our segmentation model is trained while concurrently optimizing CAMs online. Our method, Co-training with Swapping Assignments (CoSA), leverages a dual-stream framework, where one sub-network learns from the swapped assignments generated by the other. We introduce three techniques: i) soft perplexity-based regularization to penalize uncertain regions; ii) a threshold-searching approach to dynamically revise the confidence threshold; and iii) contrastive separation to address the coexistence problem. CoSA demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving mIoU of 76.2\% and 51.0\% on VOC and COCO validation datasets, respectively, surpassing existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, CoSA is the first single-stage approach to outperform all existing multi-stage methods including those with additional supervision. Code is avilable at \url{https://github.com/youshyee/CoSA}.

Class activation maps (CAMs) are commonly employed in weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) to produce pseudo-labels. Due to incomplete or excessive class activation, existing studies often resort to offline CAM refinement, introducing additional stages or proposing offline modules. This can cause optimization difficulties for single-stage methods and limit generalizability. In this study, we aim to reduce the observed CAM inconsistency and error to mitigate reliance on refinement processes. We propose an end-to-end WSSS model incorporating guided CAMs, wherein our segmentation model is trained while concurrently optimizing CAMs online. Our method, Co-training with Swapping Assignments (CoSA), leverages a dual-stream framework, where one sub-network learns from the swapped assignments generated by the other. We introduce three techniques: i) soft perplexity-based regularization to penalize uncertain regions; ii) a threshold-searching approach to dynamically revise the confidence threshold; and iii) contrastive separation to address the coexistence problem. CoSA demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving mIoU of 76.2\% and 51.0\% on VOC and COCO validation datasets, respectively, surpassing existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, CoSA is the first single-stage approach to outperform all existing multi-stage methods including those with additional supervision. Code is avilable at \url{https://github.com/youshyee/CoSA}.

Many computational factors limit broader deployment of large language models. In this paper, we focus on a memory bottleneck imposed by the key-value (KV) cache, a computational shortcut that requires storing previous KV pairs during decoding. While existing KV cache methods approach this problem by pruning or evicting large swaths of relatively less important KV pairs to dramatically reduce the memory footprint of the cache, they can have limited success in tasks that require recollecting a majority of previous tokens. To alleviate this issue, we propose LESS, a simple integration of a (nearly free) constant sized cache with eviction-based cache methods, such that all tokens can be queried at later decoding steps. Its ability to retain information throughout time shows merit on a variety of tasks where we demonstrate LESS can help reduce the performance gap from caching everything, sometimes even matching it, all while being efficient.

The rapid proliferation of AI models has underscored the importance of thorough documentation, as it enables users to understand, trust, and effectively utilize these models in various applications. Although developers are encouraged to produce model cards, it's not clear how much information or what information these cards contain. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of 32,111 AI model documentations on Hugging Face, a leading platform for distributing and deploying AI models. Our investigation sheds light on the prevailing model card documentation practices. Most of the AI models with substantial downloads provide model cards, though the cards have uneven informativeness. We find that sections addressing environmental impact, limitations, and evaluation exhibit the lowest filled-out rates, while the training section is the most consistently filled-out. We analyze the content of each section to characterize practitioners' priorities. Interestingly, there are substantial discussions of data, sometimes with equal or even greater emphasis than the model itself. To evaluate the impact of model cards, we conducted an intervention study by adding detailed model cards to 42 popular models which had no or sparse model cards previously. We find that adding model cards is moderately correlated with an increase weekly download rates. Our study opens up a new perspective for analyzing community norms and practices for model documentation through large-scale data science and linguistics analysis.

We present the PanAf20K dataset, the largest and most diverse open-access annotated video dataset of great apes in their natural environment. It comprises more than 7 million frames across ~20,000 camera trap videos of chimpanzees and gorillas collected at 14 field sites in tropical Africa as part of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee. The footage is accompanied by a rich set of annotations and benchmarks making it suitable for training and testing a variety of challenging and ecologically important computer vision tasks including ape detection and behaviour recognition. Furthering AI analysis of camera trap information is critical given the International Union for Conservation of Nature now lists all species in the great ape family as either Endangered or Critically Endangered. We hope the dataset can form a solid basis for engagement of the AI community to improve performance, efficiency, and result interpretation in order to support assessments of great ape presence, abundance, distribution, and behaviour and thereby aid conservation efforts., Comment: Accepted at IJCV

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research., Comment: Accepted to the main conference of ICLR 2024

In recent years, particularly since the early 2020s, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as the most powerful AI tools in addressing a diverse range of challenges, from natural language processing to complex problem-solving in various domains. In the field of tamper detection, LLMs are capable of identifying basic tampering activities.To assess the capabilities of LLMs in more specialized domains, we have collected five different LLMs developed by various companies: GPT-4, LLaMA, Bard, ERNIE Bot 4.0, and Tongyi Qianwen. This diverse range of models allows for a comprehensive evaluation of their performance in detecting sophisticated tampering instances.We devised two domains of detection: AI-Generated Content (AIGC) detection and manipulation detection. AIGC detection aims to test the ability to distinguish whether an image is real or AI-generated. Manipulation detection, on the other hand, focuses on identifying tampered images. According to our experiments, most LLMs can identify composite pictures that are inconsistent with logic, and only more powerful LLMs can distinguish logical, but visible signs of tampering to the human eye. All of the LLMs can't identify carefully forged images and very realistic images generated by AI. In the area of tamper detection, LLMs still have a long way to go, particularly in reliably identifying highly sophisticated forgeries and AI-generated images that closely mimic reality.

Integrating deep learning and causal discovery has encouraged us to spot that learning causal structures and representations in dialogue and video is full of challenges. We defined These data forms as "Indefinite Data", characterized by multi-structure data and multi-value representations. Unlike existing adaptable data forms, Indefinite Data still faces gaps in datasets and methods. To address the dataset gap, we release two high-quality datasets - Causalogue and Causaction, containing text dialogue samples and video action samples with causal annotations respectively. Moreover, the method gap arises from the coexistence of multi-structure data and multi-value representations, breaking the assumptions of all current methods and rendering them infeasible on Indefinite Data. To this end, we propose a probabilistic framework as a baseline, incorporating three designed highlights for this gap: 1) establishing Causation Condition of representations using the independence of noise terms under non-fixed causal structures, 2) treating causal strength as a latent variable and measuring the reconstruction loss in the correlation space, and 3) estimating the effects of latent confounders. These highpoints make the probabilistic model capable of overcoming challenges brought by the coexistence of multi-structure data and multi-value representations and pave the way for the extension of latent confounders. Comprehensive experiments have evaluated baseline results of causal structures, causal representations, and confounding disentanglement., Comment: If you are interested in the two new datasets, pls contact us by email

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is still challenging since full precision forward passes are infeasible. In this study, we address this limitation by integrating sparsity and quantization into ZO fine-tuning of LLMs. Specifically, we investigate the feasibility of fine-tuning an extremely small subset of LLM parameters using ZO. This approach allows the majority of un-tuned parameters to be quantized to accommodate the constraint of limited device memory. Our findings reveal that the pre-training process can identify a set of "sensitive parameters" that can guide the ZO fine-tuning of LLMs on downstream tasks. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning 0.1% sensitive parameters in the LLM with ZO can outperform the full ZO fine-tuning performance, while offering wall-clock time speedup. Additionally, we show that ZO fine-tuning targeting these 0.1% sensitive parameters, combined with 4 bit quantization, enables efficient ZO fine-tuning of an Llama2-7B model on a GPU device with less than 8 GiB of memory and notably reduced latency.

Emergence, broadly conceptualized as the ``intelligent'' behaviors of LLMs, has recently been studied and proved challenging to quantify due to the lack of a measurable definition. Most commonly, it has been estimated statistically through model performances across extensive datasets and tasks, which consumes significant resources. In addition, such estimation is difficult to interpret and may not accurately reflect the models' intrinsic emergence. In this work, we propose a quantifiable solution for estimating emergence. Inspired by emergentism in dynamics, we quantify the strength of emergence by comparing the entropy reduction of the macroscopic (semantic) level with that of the microscopic (token) level, both of which are derived from the representations within the transformer block. Using a low-cost estimator, our quantification method demonstrates consistent behaviors across a suite of LMs (GPT-2, GEMMA, etc.) under both in-context learning (ICL) and natural sentences. Empirical results show that (1) our method gives consistent measurements which align with existing observations based on performance metrics, validating the effectiveness of our emergence quantification; (2) our proposed metric uncovers novel emergence patterns such as the correlations between the variance of our metric and the number of ``shots'' in ICL, which further suggests a new way of interpreting hallucinations in LLMs; (3) we offer a potential solution towards estimating the emergence of larger and closed-resource LMs via smaller LMs like GPT-2. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Zodiark-ch/Emergence-of-LLMs/.

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), the potential of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have garnered considerable research attention. Numerous novel algorithms and models have been introduced to enhance various aspects of RAG systems. However, the absence of a standardized framework for implementation, coupled with the inherently intricate RAG process, makes it challenging and time-consuming for researchers to compare and evaluate these approaches in a consistent environment. Existing RAG toolkits like LangChain and LlamaIndex, while available, are often heavy and unwieldy, failing to meet the personalized needs of researchers. In response to this challenge, we propose FlashRAG, an efficient and modular open-source toolkit designed to assist researchers in reproducing existing RAG methods and in developing their own RAG algorithms within a unified framework. Our toolkit implements 12 advanced RAG methods and has gathered and organized 32 benchmark datasets. Our toolkit has various features, including customizable modular framework, rich collection of pre-implemented RAG works, comprehensive datasets, efficient auxiliary pre-processing scripts, and extensive and standard evaluation metrics. Our toolkit and resources are available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/FlashRAG., Comment: 8 pages

With large language models (LLMs) widely deployed in long content generation recently, there has emerged an increasing demand for efficient long-sequence inference support. However, key-value (KV) cache, which is stored to avoid re-computation, has emerged as a critical bottleneck by growing linearly in size with the sequence length. Due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, the entire KV cache will be loaded for every generated token, resulting in low utilization of computational cores and high latency. While various compression methods for KV cache have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they suffer from degradation in generation quality. We introduce TriForce, a hierarchical speculative decoding system that is scalable to long sequence generation. This approach leverages the original model weights and dynamic sparse KV cache via retrieval as a draft model, which serves as an intermediate layer in the hierarchy and is further speculated by a smaller model to reduce its drafting latency. TriForce not only facilitates impressive speedups for Llama2-7B-128K, achieving up to 2.31$\times$ on an A100 GPU but also showcases scalability in handling even longer contexts. For the offloading setting on two RTX 4090 GPUs, TriForce achieves 0.108s/token$\unicode{x2014}$only half as slow as the auto-regressive baseline on an A100, which attains 7.78$\times$ on our optimized offloading system. Additionally, TriForce performs 4.86$\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference on a single RTX 4090 GPU. TriForce's robustness is highlighted by its consistently outstanding performance across various temperatures. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/TriForce.

As modern HPC computing platforms become increasingly heterogeneous, it is challenging for programmers to fully leverage the computation power of massive parallelism offered by such heterogeneity. Consequently, task-based runtime systems have been proposed as an intermediate layer to hide the complex heterogeneity from the application programmers. The core functionality of these systems is to realize efficient task-to-resource mapping in the form of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) scheduling. However, existing scheduling schemes face several drawbacks to determine task priorities due to the heavy reliance on domain knowledge or failure to efficiently exploit the interaction of application and hardware characteristics. In this paper, we propose INSPIRIT, an efficient and lightweight scheduling framework with adaptive priority designed for task-based runtime systems. INSPIRIT introduces two novel task attributes \textit{inspiring ability} and \textit{inspiring efficiency} for dictating scheduling, eliminating the need for application domain knowledge. In addition, INSPIRIT jointly considers runtime information such as ready tasks in worker queues to guide task scheduling. This approach exposes more performance opportunities in heterogeneous hardware at runtime while effectively reducing the overhead for adjusting task priorities. Our evaluation results demonstrate that INSPIRIT achieves superior performance compared to cutting edge scheduling schemes on both synthesized and real-world task DAGs., Comment: 11 pages

The increasing integration of machine learning algorithms in daily life underscores the critical need for fairness and equity in their deployment. As these technologies play a pivotal role in decision-making, addressing biases across diverse subpopulation groups, including age, gender, and race, becomes paramount. Automatic affect analysis, at the intersection of physiology, psychology, and machine learning, has seen significant development. However, existing databases and methodologies lack uniformity, leading to biased evaluations. This work addresses these issues by analyzing six affective databases, annotating demographic attributes, and proposing a common protocol for database partitioning. Emphasis is placed on fairness in evaluations. Extensive experiments with baseline and state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the impact of these changes, revealing the inadequacy of prior assessments. The findings underscore the importance of considering demographic attributes in affect analysis research and provide a foundation for more equitable methodologies. Our annotations, code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/dkollias/Fair-Consistent-Affect-Analysis, Comment: accepted at IEEE FG 2024

We present DeepSeek-V2, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model characterized by economical training and efficient inference. It comprises 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated for each token, and supports a context length of 128K tokens. DeepSeek-V2 adopts innovative architectures including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE. MLA guarantees efficient inference through significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector, while DeepSeekMoE enables training strong models at an economical cost through sparse computation. Compared with DeepSeek 67B, DeepSeek-V2 achieves significantly stronger performance, and meanwhile saves 42.5% of training costs, reduces the KV cache by 93.3%, and boosts the maximum generation throughput to 5.76 times. We pretrain DeepSeek-V2 on a high-quality and multi-source corpus consisting of 8.1T tokens, and further perform Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fully unlock its potential. Evaluation results show that, even with only 21B activated parameters, DeepSeek-V2 and its chat versions still achieve top-tier performance among open-source models.

The integration of visual cues has revitalized the performance of the target speech extraction task, elevating it to the forefront of the field. Nevertheless, this multi-modal learning paradigm often encounters the challenge of modality imbalance. In audio-visual target speech extraction tasks, the audio modality tends to dominate, potentially overshadowing the importance of visual guidance. To tackle this issue, we propose AVSepChain, drawing inspiration from the speech chain concept. Our approach partitions the audio-visual target speech extraction task into two stages: speech perception and speech production. In the speech perception stage, audio serves as the dominant modality, while visual information acts as the conditional modality. Conversely, in the speech production stage, the roles are reversed. This transformation of modality status aims to alleviate the problem of modality imbalance. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive semantic matching loss to ensure that the semantic information conveyed by the generated speech aligns with the semantic information conveyed by lip movements during the speech production stage. Through extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets for audio-visual target speech extraction, we showcase the superior performance achieved by our proposed method., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2024

In previous research on fault switching of redundant actuators using monitoring modules, the interference of sensor faults on monitoring results has not received enough attention. In this paper, a new fault-tolerant control (FTC) method combining adaptive compensation and active switching is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with backup actuators against actuator and sensor faults. While using command filtered backstepping to reduce computational burden, a direct adaptive compensation scheme is designed to ensure that sensor faults within tolerable bounds do not trigger actuator switching. Based on this, a new lumped monitoring function (MF) containing prescribed performances and tolerable sensor fault bounds is designed to detect and isolate faulty actuators and ensure that the tracking error always satisfies prescribed transient and steady-state performances. Two simulation cases are used for illustrating the proposed method. It is proved that the proposed method can effectively reduce the interference of sensor faults on actuator fault detection and improve the accuracy of actuator switching.

In previous research on fault switching of redundant actuators using monitoring modules, the interference of sensor faults on monitoring results has not received enough attention. In this paper, a new fault-tolerant control (FTC) method combining adaptive compensation and active switching is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with backup actuators against actuator and sensor faults. While using command filtered backstepping to reduce computational burden, a direct adaptive compensation scheme is designed to ensure that sensor faults within tolerable bounds do not trigger actuator switching. Based on this, a new lumped monitoring function (MF) containing prescribed performances and tolerable sensor fault bounds is designed to detect and isolate faulty actuators and ensure that the tracking error always satisfies prescribed transient and steady-state performances. Two simulation cases are used for illustrating the proposed method. It is proved that the proposed method can effectively reduce the interference of sensor faults on actuator fault detection and improve the accuracy of actuator switching., This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2021YFB 2011300), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52275044), and the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. Z23E050032)., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

Machine learning (ML) models can expose the private information of training data when confronted with privacy attacks. Specifically, a malicious user with black-box access to a ML-as-a-service platform can reconstruct the training data (i.e., model inversion attacks) or infer the membership information (i.e., membership inference attacks) simply by querying the ML model. Despite the pressing need for effective defenses against privacy attacks with black-box access, existing approaches have mostly focused on enhancing the robustness of the ML model via modifying the model training process or the model prediction process. These defenses can compromise model utility and require the cooperation of the underlying AI platform (i.e., platform-dependent). These constraints largely limit the real-world applicability of existing defenses. Despite the prevalent focus on improving the model’s robustness, none of the existing works have focused on the continuous protection of already deployed ML models from privacy attacks by detecting privacy leakage in real-time. This defensive task becomes increasingly important given the vast deployment of MLas- a-service platforms these days. To bridge the gap, we propose PrivMon, a new stream-based system for real-time privacy attack detection for ML models. To facilitate wide applicability and practicality, PrivMon defends black-box ML models against a wide range of privacy attacks in a platform-agnostic fashion: PrivMon only passively monitors model queries without requiring the cooperation of the model owner or the AI platform. Specifically, PrivMon takes as input a stream of ML model queries and provides an efficient attack detection engine that continuously monitors the stream to detect the privacy attack in real-time, by identifying self-similar malicious queries. We show empirically and theoretically that PrivMon can detect a wide range of realistic privacy attacks within a practical time frame and successfully mitigate the attack s

This thesis addresses guided deep learning, a new perspective for dealing with the real-world challenges of deep learning applications such as animal analysis. The proposed methods seek guidance from various sources in data such as spatiotemporal context, visual coherence, temporal correspondence, and dynamic learning policies to facilitate learning. The results are demonstrated on various computer vision tasks including animal detection, animal behaviour understanding, action recognition, video representation learning, and generic object detection. First, this thesis explores a context-guided detection model. It leverages spatiotemporal context with the attention mechanism, building a spatio-local correlation and a long-range temporal dependency to boost animal detection in the camera trap. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art frame-based detection baselines on the PanAfrica Dataset, a dataset of Great Apes filmed by camera traps in their natural habitats. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed context guidance in scenarios where motion blur, major occlusion, and camouflage effects etc. occur whereas the state-of-the-art detectors fail. This thesis also offers insight into how to leverage visual coherence and temporal correspondence in a video to guide visual representation learning without labels. The proposed self-guided temporal learning model performs forward-backward cycle predictions in time and then guides the predicted cycles to be coherent (smoothly varying) and correspondent (circularly consistent). It shows competitive experimental results for action recognition on UCF101 and HMDB51. Also, self-guided learning demonstrates the potential in animal analysis where a large amount of unlabelled animal videos can be exploited in a meaningful way. Inspired by the success of semi-supervised learning using large quantities of unlabelled data in other research fields, this thesis final argues th

In noisy and reverberant environments, the performance of deep learning-based speech separation methods drops dramatically because previous methods are not designed and optimized for such situations. To address this issue, we propose a multi-stage end-to-end learning method that decouples the difficult speech separation problem in noisy and reverberant environments into three sub-problems: speech denoising, separation, and de-reverberation. The probability and speed of searching for the optimal solution of the speech separation model are improved by reducing the solution space. Moreover, since the channel information of the audio sequence in the time domain is crucial for speech separation, we propose a triple-path structure capable of modeling the channel dimension of audio sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-stage triple-path method can improve the performance of speech separation models at the cost of little model parameter increment., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2023

Transformer has shown advanced performance in speech separation, benefiting from its ability to capture global features. However, capturing local features and channel information of audio sequences in speech separation is equally important. In this paper, we present a novel approach named Intra-SE-Conformer and Inter-Transformer (ISCIT) for speech separation. Specifically, we design a new network SE-Conformer that can model audio sequences in multiple dimensions and scales, and apply it to the dual-path speech separation framework. Furthermore, we propose Multi-Block Feature Aggregation to improve the separation effect by selectively utilizing information from the intermediate blocks of the separation network. Meanwhile, we propose a speaker similarity discriminative loss to optimize the speech separation model to address the problem of poor performance when speakers have similar voices. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets WSJ0-2mix and WHAM! show that ISCIT can achieve state-of-the-art results., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2023

This paper presents a deep learning framework for medical video segmentation. Convolution neural network (CNN) and transformer-based methods have achieved great milestones in medical image segmentation tasks due to their incredible semantic feature encoding and global information comprehension abilities. However, most existing approaches ignore a salient aspect of medical video data - the temporal dimension. Our proposed framework explicitly extracts features from neighbouring frames across the temporal dimension and incorporates them with a temporal feature blender, which then tokenises the high-level spatio-temporal feature to form a strong global feature encoded via a Swin Transformer. The final segmentation results are produced via a UNet-like encoder-decoder architecture. Our model outperforms other approaches by a significant margin and improves the segmentation benchmarks on the VFSS2022 dataset, achieving a dice coefficient of 0.8986 and 0.8186 for the two datasets tested. Our studies also show the efficacy of the temporal feature blending scheme and cross-dataset transferability of learned capabilities. Code and models are fully available at https://github.com/SimonZeng7108/Video-SwinUNet.

Distribution shift presents a significant challenge in machine learning, where models often underperform during the test stage when faced with a different distribution than the one they were trained on. This paper focuses on domain shifts, which occur when the model is applied to new domains that are different from the ones it was trained on, and propose a new approach called D$^3$G. Unlike previous methods that aim to learn a single model that is domain invariant, D$^3$G leverages domain similarities based on domain metadata to learn domain-specific models. Concretely, D$^3$G learns a set of training-domain-specific functions during the training stage and reweights them based on domain relations during the test stage. These domain relations can be directly obtained and learned from domain metadata. Under mild assumptions, we theoretically prove that using domain relations to reweight training-domain-specific functions achieves stronger out-of-domain generalization compared to the conventional averaging approach. Empirically, we evaluate the effectiveness of D$^3$G using real-world datasets for tasks such as temperature regression, land use classification, and molecule-protein binding affinity prediction. Our results show that D$^3$G consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by ICLR 2024 (Spotlight)

Transformer, as an alternative to CNN, has been proven effective in many modalities (e.g., texts and images). For 3D point cloud transformers, existing efforts focus primarily on pushing their accuracy to the state-of-the-art level. However, their latency lags behind sparse convolution-based models (3x slower), hindering their usage in resource-constrained, latency-sensitive applications (such as autonomous driving). This inefficiency comes from point clouds' sparse and irregular nature, whereas transformers are designed for dense, regular workloads. This paper presents FlatFormer to close this latency gap by trading spatial proximity for better computational regularity. We first flatten the point cloud with window-based sorting and partition points into groups of equal sizes rather than windows of equal shapes. This effectively avoids expensive structuring and padding overheads. We then apply self-attention within groups to extract local features, alternate sorting axis to gather features from different directions, and shift windows to exchange features across groups. FlatFormer delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on Waymo Open Dataset with 4.6x speedup over (transformer-based) SST and 1.4x speedup over (sparse convolutional) CenterPoint. This is the first point cloud transformer that achieves real-time performance on edge GPUs and is faster than sparse convolutional methods while achieving on-par or even superior accuracy on large-scale benchmarks., Comment: CVPR 2023. The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: https://flatformer.mit.edu

Existing melody harmonization models have made great progress in improving the quality of generated harmonies, but most of them ignored the emotions beneath the music. Meanwhile, the variability of harmonies generated by previous methods is insufficient. To solve these problems, we propose a novel LSTM-based Hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoder (LHVAE) to investigate the influence of emotional conditions on melody harmonization, while improving the quality of generated harmonies and capturing the abundant variability of chord progressions. Specifically, LHVAE incorporates latent variables and emotional conditions at different levels (piece- and bar-level) to model the global and local music properties. Additionally, we introduce an attention-based melody context vector at each step to better learn the correspondence between melodies and harmonies. Objective experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms other LSTM-based models. Through subjective evaluation, we conclude that only altering the types of chords hardly changes the overall emotion of the music. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the ability of our model to generate variable harmonies., Comment: Accepted by IEEE SMC 2023

Reasoning, a crucial aspect of NLP research, has not been adequately addressed by prevailing models including Large Language Model. Conversation reasoning, as a critical component of it, remains largely unexplored due to the absence of a well-designed cognitive model. In this paper, inspired by intuition theory on conversation cognition, we develop a conversation cognitive model (CCM) that explains how each utterance receives and activates channels of information recursively. Besides, we algebraically transformed CCM into a structural causal model (SCM) under some mild assumptions, rendering it compatible with various causal discovery methods. We further propose a probabilistic implementation of the SCM for utterance-level relation reasoning. By leveraging variational inference, it explores substitutes for implicit causes, addresses the issue of their unobservability, and reconstructs the causal representations of utterances through the evidence lower bounds. Moreover, we constructed synthetic and simulated datasets incorporating implicit causes and complete cause labels, alleviating the current situation where all available datasets are implicit-causes-agnostic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on synthetic, simulated, and real-world datasets. Finally, we analyze the performance of CCM under latent confounders and propose theoretical ideas for addressing this currently unresolved issue.

Understanding the performance of machine learning (ML) models across diverse data distributions is critically important for reliable applications. Despite recent empirical studies positing a near-perfect linear correlation between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracies, we empirically demonstrate that this correlation is more nuanced under subpopulation shifts. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis across a variety of datasets, models, and training epochs, we demonstrate that OOD performance often has a nonlinear correlation with ID performance in subpopulation shifts. Our findings, which contrast previous studies that have posited a linear correlation in model performance during distribution shifts, reveal a "moon shape" correlation (parabolic uptrend curve) between the test performance on the majority subpopulation and the minority subpopulation. This non-trivial nonlinear correlation holds across model architectures, hyperparameters, training durations, and the imbalance between subpopulations. Furthermore, we found that the nonlinearity of this "moon shape" is causally influenced by the degree of spurious correlations in the training data. Our controlled experiments show that stronger spurious correlation in the training data creates more nonlinear performance correlation. We provide complementary experimental and theoretical analyses for this phenomenon, and discuss its implications for ML reliability and fairness. Our work highlights the importance of understanding the nonlinear effects of model improvement on performance in different subpopulations, and has the potential to inform the development of more equitable and responsible machine learning models., Comment: Accepted to the main conference of ICML 2023

Owing to the cross-pollination between causal discovery and deep learning, non-statistical data (e.g., images, text, etc.) encounters significant conflicts in terms of properties and methods with traditional causal data. To unify these data types of varying forms, we redefine causal data from two novel perspectives and then propose three data paradigms. Among them, the indefinite data (like dialogues or video sources) induce low sample utilization and incapability of the distribution assumption, both leading to the fact that learning causal representation from indefinite data is, as of yet, largely unexplored. We design the causal strength variational model to settle down these two problems. Specifically, we leverage the causal strength instead of independent noise as the latent variable to construct evidence lower bound. By this design ethos, The causal strengths of different structures are regarded as a distribution and can be expressed as a 2D matrix. Moreover, considering the latent confounders, we disentangle the causal graph G into two relation subgraphs O and C. O contains pure relations between observed variables, while C represents the relations from latent variables to observed variables. We implement the above designs as a dynamic variational inference model, tailored to learn causal representation from indefinite data under latent confounding. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Our investigation into the Affective Reasoning in Conversation (ARC) task highlights the challenge of causal discrimination. Almost all existing models, including large language models (LLMs), excel at capturing semantic correlations within utterance embeddings but fall short in determining the specific causal relationships. To overcome this limitation, we propose the incorporation of \textit{i.i.d.} noise terms into the conversation process, thereby constructing a structural causal model (SCM). It explores how distinct causal relationships of fitted embeddings can be discerned through independent conditions. To facilitate the implementation of deep learning, we introduce the cogn frameworks to handle unstructured conversation data, and employ an autoencoder architecture to regard the unobservable noise as learnable "implicit causes." Moreover, we curate a synthetic dataset that includes i.i.d. noise. Through comprehensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach. Our code is available in https://github.com/Zodiark-ch/mater-of-our-EMNLP2023-paper., Comment: accepted via EMNLP2023-main

In the transfer-based adversarial attacks, adversarial examples are only generated by the surrogate models and achieve effective perturbation in the victim models. Although considerable efforts have been developed on improving the transferability of adversarial examples generated by transfer-based adversarial attacks, our investigation found that, the big deviation between the actual and steepest update directions of the current transfer-based adversarial attacks is caused by the large update step length, resulting in the generated adversarial examples can not converge well. However, directly reducing the update step length will lead to serious update oscillation so that the generated adversarial examples also can not achieve great transferability to the victim models. To address these issues, a novel transfer-based attack, namely direction tuning attack, is proposed to not only decrease the update deviation in the large step length, but also mitigate the update oscillation in the small sampling step length, thereby making the generated adversarial examples converge well to achieve great transferability on victim models. In addition, a network pruning method is proposed to smooth the decision boundary, thereby further decreasing the update oscillation and enhancing the transferability of the generated adversarial examples. The experiment results on ImageNet demonstrate that the average attack success rate (ASR) of the adversarial examples generated by our method can be improved from 87.9\% to 94.5\% on five victim models without defenses, and from 69.1\% to 76.2\% on eight advanced defense methods, in comparison with that of latest gradient-based attacks., Comment: Accepted by INS 2023

With the development of adversarial attacks, adversairal examples have been widely used to enhance the robustness of the training models on deep neural networks. Although considerable efforts of adversarial attacks on improving the transferability of adversarial examples have been developed, the attack success rate of the transfer-based attacks on the surrogate model is much higher than that on victim model under the low attack strength (e.g., the attack strength $\epsilon=8/255$). In this paper, we first systematically investigated this issue and found that the enormous difference of attack success rates between the surrogate model and victim model is caused by the existence of a special area (known as fuzzy domain in our paper), in which the adversarial examples in the area are classified wrongly by the surrogate model while correctly by the victim model. Then, to eliminate such enormous difference of attack success rates for improving the transferability of generated adversarial examples, a fuzziness-tuned method consisting of confidence scaling mechanism and temperature scaling mechanism is proposed to ensure the generated adversarial examples can effectively skip out of the fuzzy domain. The confidence scaling mechanism and the temperature scaling mechanism can collaboratively tune the fuzziness of the generated adversarial examples through adjusting the gradient descent weight of fuzziness and stabilizing the update direction, respectively. Specifically, the proposed fuzziness-tuned method can be effectively integrated with existing adversarial attacks to further improve the transferability of adverarial examples without changing the time complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrated that fuzziness-tuned method can effectively enhance the transferability of adversarial examples in the latest transfer-based attacks.

Face swapping has gained significant traction, driven by the plethora of human face synthesis facilitated by deep learning methods. However, previous face swapping methods that used generative adversarial networks (GANs) as backbones have faced challenges such as inconsistency in blending, distortions, artifacts, and issues with training stability. To address these limitations, we propose an innovative end-to-end framework for high-fidelity face swapping. First, we introduce a StyleGAN-based facial attributes encoder that extracts essential features from faces and inverts them into a latent style code, encapsulating indispensable facial attributes for successful face swapping. Second, we introduce an attention-based style blending module to effectively transfer Face IDs from source to target. To ensure accurate and quality transferring, a series of constraint measures including contrastive face ID learning, facial landmark alignment, and dual swap consistency is implemented. Finally, the blended style code is translated back to the image space via the style decoder, which is of high training stability and generative capability. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ dataset highlight the superior visual quality of generated images from our face-swapping methodology when compared to other state-of-the-art methods, and the effectiveness of each proposed module. Source code and weights will be publicly available., Comment: 4 pages

Generating music with emotion is an important task in automatic music generation, in which emotion is evoked through a variety of musical elements (such as pitch and duration) that change over time and collaborate with each other. However, prior research on deep learning-based emotional music generation has rarely explored the contribution of different musical elements to emotions, let alone the deliberate manipulation of these elements to alter the emotion of music, which is not conducive to fine-grained element-level control over emotions. To address this gap, we present a novel approach employing musical element-based regularization in the latent space to disentangle distinct elements, investigate their roles in distinguishing emotions, and further manipulate elements to alter musical emotions. Specifically, we propose a novel VQ-VAE-based model named MusER. MusER incorporates a regularization loss to enforce the correspondence between the musical element sequences and the specific dimensions of latent variable sequences, providing a new solution for disentangling discrete sequences. Taking advantage of the disentangled latent vectors, a two-level decoding strategy that includes multiple decoders attending to latent vectors with different semantics is devised to better predict the elements. By visualizing latent space, we conclude that MusER yields a disentangled and interpretable latent space and gain insights into the contribution of distinct elements to the emotional dimensions (i.e., arousal and valence). Experimental results demonstrate that MusER outperforms the state-of-the-art models for generating emotional music in both objective and subjective evaluation. Besides, we rearrange music through element transfer and attempt to alter the emotion of music by transferring emotion-distinguishable elements., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2024

Speech signals are inherently complex as they encompass both global acoustic characteristics and local semantic information. However, in the task of target speech extraction, certain elements of global and local semantic information in the reference speech, which are irrelevant to speaker identity, can lead to speaker confusion within the speech extraction network. To overcome this challenge, we propose a self-supervised disentangled representation learning method. Our approach tackles this issue through a two-phase process, utilizing a reference speech encoding network and a global information disentanglement network to gradually disentangle the speaker identity information from other irrelevant factors. We exclusively employ the disentangled speaker identity information to guide the speech extraction network. Moreover, we introduce the adaptive modulation Transformer to ensure that the acoustic representation of the mixed signal remains undisturbed by the speaker embeddings. This component incorporates speaker embeddings as conditional information, facilitating natural and efficient guidance for the speech extraction network. Experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of our meticulously crafted approach, showcasing a substantial reduction in the likelihood of speaker confusion., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2024

Integrating deep learning and causal discovery has increased the interpretability of Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) tasks. However, frame-level causal relationships exist many complicated noises outside the segment-level, making it infeasible to directly express macro action semantics. Thus, we propose Causal Abstraction Segmentation Refiner (CASR), which can refine TAS results from various models by enhancing video causality in marginalizing frame-level casual relationships. Specifically, we define the equivalent frame-level casual model and segment-level causal model, so that the causal adjacency matrix constructed from marginalized frame-level causal relationships has the ability to represent the segmnet-level causal relationships. CASR works out by reducing the difference in the causal adjacency matrix between we constructed and pre-segmentation results of backbone models. In addition, we propose a novel evaluation metric Causal Edit Distance (CED) to evaluate the causal interpretability. Extensive experimental results on mainstream datasets indicate that CASR significantly surpasses existing various methods in action segmentation performance, as well as in causal explainability and generalization., Comment: We found that the paper needs to be modified in the model and all experiments must be re-run, so we request to withdraw the current version

The accurate evaluation of the quality of driving behavior is crucial for optimizing and implementing autonomous driving technology in practice. However, there is no comprehensive understanding of good driving behaviors currently. In this paper, we sought to understand driving behaviors from the perspectives of both drivers and passengers. We invited 10 expert drivers and 14 novice drivers to complete a 5.7-kilometer urban road driving task. After the experiments, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 drivers and 48 of their passengers (two passengers per driver). Through the analysis of interview data, we found passengers' assessing logic of driving behaviors, divers' considerations and efforts to achieve good driving, and gaps between these perspectives. Our research provided insights into a systematic evaluation of autonomous driving and the design implications for future autonomous vehicles., Comment: Part of the content of the paper will be modified. One of the authors has recommended its withdrawal due to personal reasons

While GPT-4V(ision) impressively models both visual and textual information simultaneously, it's hallucination behavior has not been systematically assessed. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, namely, the Bias and Interference Challenges in Visual Language Models (Bingo). This benchmark is designed to evaluate and shed light on the two common types of hallucinations in visual language models: bias and interference. Here, bias refers to the model's tendency to hallucinate certain types of responses, possibly due to imbalance in its training data. Interference pertains to scenarios where the judgment of GPT-4V(ision) can be disrupted due to how the text prompt is phrased or how the input image is presented. We identify a notable regional bias, whereby GPT-4V(ision) is better at interpreting Western images or images with English writing compared to images from other countries or containing text in other languages. Moreover, GPT-4V(ision) is vulnerable to leading questions and is often confused when interpreting multiple images together. Popular mitigation approaches, such as self-correction and chain-of-thought reasoning, are not effective in resolving these challenges. We also identified similar biases and interference vulnerabilities with LLaVA and Bard. Our results characterize the hallucination challenges in GPT-4V(ision) and state-of-the-art visual-language models, and highlight the need for new solutions. The Bingo benchmark is available at https://github.com/gzcch/Bingo.

The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms., Comment: under review

The cross-pollination of deep learning and causal discovery has catalyzed a burgeoning field of research seeking to elucidate causal relationships within non-statistical data forms like images, videos, and text. Such data, often being named `indefinite data', exhibit unique challenges-inconsistency between causal structure and representation, which are not common in conventional data forms. To tackle this issue, we theoretically develop intervention strategies suitable for indefinite data and derive causal consistency condition (CCC). Moreover, we design a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework that considers interventions as `views' and CCC as a `philosophy' with two implement examples on Supervised Specialized Models (SSMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), respectively. To evaluate pure inconsistency manifestations, we have prepared the first high-quality causal dialogue dataset-Causalogue. Evaluations are also performed on three other downstream tasks. Extensive experimentation has substantiated the efficacy of our methodology, illuminating how CCC could potentially play an influential role in various fields.

In artificial intelligence, any model that wants to achieve a good result is inseparable from a large number of high-quality data. It is especially true in the field of tamper detection. This paper proposes a modified total variation noise reduction method to acquire high-quality tampered images. We automatically crawl original and tampered images from the Baidu PS Bar. Baidu PS Bar is a website where net friends post countless tampered images. Subtracting the original image with the tampered image can highlight the tampered area. However, there is also substantial noise on the final print, so these images can't be directly used in the deep learning model. Our modified total variation noise reduction method is aimed at solving this problem. Because a lot of text is slender, it is easy to lose text information after the opening and closing operation. We use MSER (Maximally Stable Extremal Regions) and NMS (Non-maximum Suppression) technology to extract text information. And then use the modified total variation noise reduction technology to process the subtracted image. Finally, we can obtain an image with little noise by adding the image and text information. And the idea also largely retains the text information. Datasets generated in this way can be used in deep learning models, and they will help the model achieve better results.

Expert feedback lays the foundation of rigorous research. However, the rapid growth of scholarly production and intricate knowledge specialization challenge the conventional scientific feedback mechanisms. High-quality peer reviews are increasingly difficult to obtain. Researchers who are more junior or from under-resourced settings have especially hard times getting timely feedback. With the breakthrough of large language models (LLM) such as GPT-4, there is growing interest in using LLMs to generate scientific feedback on research manuscripts. However, the utility of LLM-generated feedback has not been systematically studied. To address this gap, we created an automated pipeline using GPT-4 to provide comments on the full PDFs of scientific papers. We evaluated the quality of GPT-4's feedback through two large-scale studies. We first quantitatively compared GPT-4's generated feedback with human peer reviewer feedback in 15 Nature family journals (3,096 papers in total) and the ICLR machine learning conference (1,709 papers). The overlap in the points raised by GPT-4 and by human reviewers (average overlap 30.85% for Nature journals, 39.23% for ICLR) is comparable to the overlap between two human reviewers (average overlap 28.58% for Nature journals, 35.25% for ICLR). The overlap between GPT-4 and human reviewers is larger for the weaker papers. We then conducted a prospective user study with 308 researchers from 110 US institutions in the field of AI and computational biology to understand how researchers perceive feedback generated by our GPT-4 system on their own papers. Overall, more than half (57.4%) of the users found GPT-4 generated feedback helpful/very helpful and 82.4% found it more beneficial than feedback from at least some human reviewers. While our findings show that LLM-generated feedback can help researchers, we also identify several limitations.

Urban time series data forecasting featuring significant contributions to sustainable development is widely studied as an essential task of the smart city. However, with the dramatic and rapid changes in the world environment, the assumption that data obey Independent Identically Distribution is undermined by the subsequent changes in data distribution, known as concept drift, leading to weak replicability and transferability of the model over unseen data. To address the issue, previous approaches typically retrain the model, forcing it to fit the most recent observed data. However, retraining is problematic in that it leads to model lag, consumption of resources, and model re-invalidation, causing the drift problem to be not well solved in realistic scenarios. In this study, we propose a new urban time series prediction model for the concept drift problem, which encodes the drift by considering the periodicity in the data and makes on-the-fly adjustments to the model based on the drift using a meta-dynamic network. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our design significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can be well generalized to existing prediction backbones by reducing their sensitivity to distribution changes., Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023

The cellular response to stress is an important determinant of disease pathogenesis. Uncovering the molecular fingerprints of distinct stress responses may identify novel biomarkers and key signaling pathways for different diseases. Emerging evidence shows that transfer RNA-derived small RNAs (tDRs) play pivotal roles in stress responses. However, RNA modifications present on tDRs are barriers to accurately quantifying tDRs using traditional small RNA sequencing. Here, AlkB-facilitated methylation sequencing is used to generate a comprehensive landscape of cellular and extracellular tDR abundances in various cell types during different stress responses. Extracellular tDRs are found to have distinct fragmentation signatures from intracellular tDRs and these tDR signatures are better indicators of different stress responses than miRNAs. These distinct extracellular tDR fragmentation patterns and signatures are also observed in plasma from patients on cardiopulmonary bypass. It is additionally demonstrated that angiogenin and RNASE1 are themselves regulated by stressors and contribute to the stress-modulated abundance of sub-populations of cellular and extracellular tDRs. Finally, a sub-population of extracellular tDRs is identified for which AGO2 appears to be required for their expression. Together, these findings provide a detailed profile of stress-responsive tDRs and provide insight about tDR biogenesis and stability in response to cellular stressors.

The cellular response to stress is an important determinant of disease pathogenesis. Uncovering the molecular fingerprints of distinct stress responses may identify novel biomarkers and key signaling pathways for different diseases. Emerging evidence shows that transfer RNA-derived small RNAs (tDRs) play pivotal roles in stress responses. However, RNA modifications present on tDRs are barriers to accurately quantifying tDRs using traditional small RNA sequencing. Here, AlkB-facilitated methylation sequencing is used to generate a comprehensive landscape of cellular and extracellular tDR abundances in various cell types during different stress responses. Extracellular tDRs are found to have distinct fragmentation signatures from intracellular tDRs and these tDR signatures are better indicators of different stress responses than miRNAs. These distinct extracellular tDR fragmentation patterns and signatures are also observed in plasma from patients on cardiopulmonary bypass. It is additionally demonstrated that angiogenin and RNASE1 are themselves regulated by stressors and contribute to the stress-modulated abundance of sub-populations of cellular and extracellular tDRs. Finally, a sub-population of extracellular tDRs is identified for which AGO2 appears to be required for their expression. Together, these findings provide a detailed profile of stress-responsive tDRs and provide insight about tDR biogenesis and stability in response to cellular stressors.

Wei Wei,1,2,* Yongli Pan,2,3,* Xinyu Yang,4 Zhonglun Chen,1 Yue Heng,1 Bufan Yang,1 Mingjun Pu,1 Jiacai Zuo,1 Zhuhong Lai,5 Yufeng Tang,1 Wenqiang Xin2,4 1Department of Neurology, Mianyang Central Hospital, Mianyang, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Neurology, University Medical Center of Göttingen, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany; 3Department of Neurology, Weifang Medical University, Weifang, Shandong, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Cardiology, Mianyang Central Hospital, Mianyang, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Wenqiang Xin, Department of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Anshan Road No. 154, Tianjin, 300052, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86– 18526201182, Fax +86– 2260362062, Email xinwenqiangdr@126.com Wei Wei, Department of Neurology, Mianyang Central Hospital, Changjia Lane No. 12, Mianyang, 621000, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86– 15983634286, Fax +86-8162222566, Email weiwei1990sci@163.comAbstract: Eukaryotic cells release different types of extracellular vesicles (EVs), including exosomes, apoptotic bodies and microvesicles. EVs carry proteins, lipids and nucleic acids specific to cells and cell states. Autophagy is an intracellular degradation process, which, along with EVs, can significantly affect the development and progression of neurological diseases and, therefore, has been the hotspot. Generally, EVs and autophagy are closely associated. EVs and autophagy can interact with each other. On the one hand, the level of autophagy in target cells is closely related to the secretion and transport of EVs. In another, the application of EVs provides a great opportunity for adjuvant treatment of neurological disorders, for which autophagy is a

Yongli Pan,1,2,* Ting Wang,3,* Zhiqiang Zhao,4,* Wei Wei,2,5,* Xinyu Yang,6 Xianbin Wang,7 Wenqiang Xin2,6 1Department of Neurology, Weifang Medical University, Weifang, Shandong, People’s Republic of China; 2Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany; 3Department of Radiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical College, Baotou, 014030, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurosurgery, Heji Hospital affiliated Changzhi Medical College, Shanxi, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Neurology, Mianyang Central Hospital, Mianyang, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China; 6Department of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 7Department of Emergency Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical College, Baotou, 014030, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Wenqiang XinDepartment of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Anshan Road No. 154, Tianjin, 300052, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86– 18526201182, Fax +86– 2260362062, Email xinwenqiangdr@126.com Xianbin WangDepartment of Emergency Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical College, Baotou, 014030, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail wangxianbin198006@163.comAbstract: Nuclear paraspeckle assembly transcript 1 (Neat1) located at chromosome 11 is a long non-coding RNA that is widely expressed in mammalian cell types, and which is overexpressed in several inflammation-related disorders. Inflammation implies a plethora of mutual interactions between both soluble factors and cells due to various stimuli including tissue injury. Although there is no doubt that inflammation is critically involved in multiple biological and pathological processes alike, the precise mechanisms being involved are still open f

Despite the increased adoption of open-source cyber threat intelligence (OSCTI) for acquiring knowledge about cyber threats, little effort has been made to harvest knowledge from a large number of unstructured OSCTI reports available in the wild (e.g., security articles, threat reports). These reports provide comprehensive threat knowledge in a variety of entities (e.g., IOCs, threat actors, TTPs) and relations, which, however, are hard to gather due to diverse report formats, large report quantities, and complex structures and nuances in the natural language report text. To bridge the gap, we propose ThreatKG, a system for automated open-source cyber threat knowledge gathering and management. ThreatKG automatically collects a large number of OSCTI reports from various sources, extracts high-fidelity threat knowledge, constructs a threat knowledge graph, and updates the knowledge graph by continuously ingesting new knowledge. To address multiple challenges, ThreatKG provides: (1) a hierarchical ontology for modeling a variety of threat knowledge entities and relations; (2) an accurate deep learning-based pipeline for threat knowledge extraction; (3) a scalable and extensible system architecture for threat knowledge graph construction, persistence, updating, and exploration. Evaluations on a large number of reports demonstrate the effectiveness of ThreatKG in threat knowledge gathering and management

System auditing has emerged as a key approach for monitoring system call events and investigating sophisticated attacks. Based on the collected audit logs, research has proposed to search for attack patterns or track the causal dependencies of system events to reveal the attack sequence. However, existing approaches either cannot reveal long-range attack sequences or suffer from the dependency explosion problem due to a lack of focus on attack-relevant parts, and thus are insufficient for investigating complex attacks. To bridge the gap, we propose Zebra, a system that synergistically integrates attack pattern search and causal dependency tracking for efficient attack investigation. With Zebra, security analysts can alternate between search and tracking to reveal the entire attack sequence in a progressive, user-guided manner, while mitigating the dependency explosion problem by prioritizing the attack-relevant parts. To enable this, Zebra provides (1) an expressive and concise domain-specific language, Tstl, for performing various types of search and tracking analyses, and (2) an optimized language execution engine for efficient execution over a big amount of auditing data. Evaluations on a broad set of attack cases demonstrate the effectiveness of Zebra in facilitating a timely attack investigation.