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Singapore Management University

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2023

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Female Ceos And Investment Efficiency In The Vietnamese Market, Jun Myung Song, Chune Young Chung Dec 2023

Female Ceos And Investment Efficiency In The Vietnamese Market, Jun Myung Song, Chune Young Chung

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

This paper proposes female CEOs’ overconfidence and risky behavior stem from gender stereotype threats. Using two subsamples from Vietnam—firms in the Northern and Southern regions—we empirically show that female CEOs in the North, where there is less gender stereotyping, tend to overinvest relative to male CEOs. However, in the South, they are indifferent. Additional analysis reinforces the main finding that female CEOs in the North tend to take more risks even when dealing with market volatility and uncertainty (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Such risky behaviors do not deteriorate firm value but, instead, possibly improve firm performance.

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Self-Supervised Pseudo Multi-Class Pre-Training For Unsupervised Anomaly Detection And Segmentation In Medical Images, Yu Tian, Fengbei Liu, Guansong Pang, Yuanhong Chen, Yuyuan Liu, Johan W. Verjans, Rajvinder Singh, Gustavo Carneiro Dec 2023

Self-Supervised Pseudo Multi-Class Pre-Training For Unsupervised Anomaly Detection And Segmentation In Medical Images, Yu Tian, Fengbei Liu, Guansong Pang, Yuanhong Chen, Yuyuan Liu, Johan W. Verjans, Rajvinder Singh, Gustavo Carneiro

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are trained with normal (or healthy) images only, but during testing, they are able to classify normal and abnormal (or disease) images. UAD is an important medical image analysis (MIA) method to be applied in disease screening problems because the training sets available for those problems usually contain only normal images. However, the exclusive reliance on normal images may result in the learning of ineffective low-dimensional image representations that are not sensitive enough to detect and segment unseen abnormal lesions of varying size, appearance, and shape. Pre-training UAD methods with self-supervised learning, based on computer …

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Rome: Evaluating Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models On Reasoning Beyond Visual Common Sense, Kankan Zhou, Eason Lai, Au Wei Bin Yeong, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jing Jiang Dec 2023

Rome: Evaluating Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models On Reasoning Beyond Visual Common Sense, Kankan Zhou, Eason Lai, Au Wei Bin Yeong, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Humans possess a strong capability for reasoning beyond common sense. For example, given an unconventional image of a goldfish laying on the table next to an empty fishbowl, a human would effortlessly determine that the fish is not inside the fishbowl. The case, however, may be different for a vision-language model, whose reasoning could gravitate towards the common scenario that the fish is inside the bowl, despite the visual input. In this paper, we introduce a novel probing dataset named ROME (reasoning beyond commonsense knowledge) to evaluate whether the state-of-the-art pre-trained vision-language models have the reasoning capability to correctly interpret …

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Examining The Inter-Consistency Of Large Language Models: An In-Depth Analysis Via Debate, Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin Dec 2023

Examining The Inter-Consistency Of Large Language Models: An In-Depth Analysis Via Debate, Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, but they still face various inconsistency issues. Existing works primarily focus on the inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we complementarily explore the inter-consistency among multiple LLMs for collaboration. To examine whether LLMs can collaborate effectively to achieve a consensus for a shared goal, we focus on commonsense reasoning, and introduce a formal debate framework (FORD) to conduct a three-stage debate among LLMs with real-world scenarios alignment: fair debate, mismatched debate, and roundtable debate. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, LLMs can effectively collaborate to reach a consensus …

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Robust Prompt Optimization For Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Yixin Cao, Jizhi Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua Dec 2023

Robust Prompt Optimization For Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Yixin Cao, Jizhi Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant ability in various Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the phrasing of the task prompt, leading to research on automatic prompt optimization using labeled task data. We reveal that these prompt optimization techniques are vulnerable to distribution shifts such as subpopulation shifts, which are common for LLMs in real-world scenarios such as customer reviews analysis. In this light, we propose a new problem of robust prompt optimization for LLMs against distribution shifts, which requires the prompt optimized over the labeled source group can simultaneously generalize to an unlabeled …

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Covariance-Based Causal Debiasing For Entity And Relation Extraction, Lin Ren, Yongbin Liu, Yixin Cao, Chunping Ouyang Dec 2023

Covariance-Based Causal Debiasing For Entity And Relation Extraction, Lin Ren, Yongbin Liu, Yixin Cao, Chunping Ouyang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Joint entity and relation extraction tasks aim to recognize named entities and extract relations simultaneously. Suffering from a variety of data biases, such as data selection bias, and distribution bias (out of distribution, long-tail distribution), serious concerns can be witnessed to threaten the model’s transferability, robustness, and generalization. In this work, we address the above problems from a causality perspective. We propose a novel causal framework called covariance and variance optimization framework (OVO) to optimize feature representations and conduct general debiasing. In particular, the proposed covariance optimizing (COP) minimizes characterizing features’ covariance for alleviating the selection and distribution bias and …

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Deepaco: Neural-Enhanced Ant Systems For Combinatorial Optimization, Haoran Ye, Jiarui Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Helan Liang, Yong Li Dec 2023

Deepaco: Neural-Enhanced Ant Systems For Combinatorial Optimization, Haoran Ye, Jiarui Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Helan Liang, Yong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic algorithm that has been successfully applied to various Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs). Traditionally, customizing ACO for a specific problem requires the expert design of knowledge-driven heuristics. In this paper, we propose DeepACO, a generic framework leveraging deep reinforcement learning to automate heuristic designs. DeepACO serves to strengthen the heuristic measures of existing ACO algorithms and dispense with laborious manual design in future ACO applications. As a neural-enhanced meta-heuristic, DeepACO consistently outperforms its ACO counterparts on eight COPs using a single neural model and a single set of hyperparameters. As a Neural Combinatorial Optimization …

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Truncated Affinity Maximization: One-Class Homophily Modeling For Graph Anomaly Detection, Hezhe Qiao, Guansong Pang Dec 2023

Truncated Affinity Maximization: One-Class Homophily Modeling For Graph Anomaly Detection, Hezhe Qiao, Guansong Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We reveal a one-class homophily phenomenon, which is one prevalent property we find empirically in real-world graph anomaly detection (GAD) datasets, i.e., normal nodes tend to have strong connection/affinity with each other, while the homophily in abnormal nodes is significantly weaker than normal nodes. However, this anomaly-discriminative property is ignored by existing GAD methods that are typically built using a conventional anomaly detection objective, such as data reconstruction. In this work, we explore this property to introduce a novel unsupervised anomaly scoring measure for GAD – local node affinity – that assigns a larger anomaly score to nodes that are …

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Disentangling Transformer Language Models As Superposed Topic Models, Jia Peng Lim, Hady Wirawan Lauw Dec 2023

Disentangling Transformer Language Models As Superposed Topic Models, Jia Peng Lim, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic Modelling is an established research area where the quality of a given topic is measured using coherence metrics. Often, we infer topics from Neural Topic Models (NTM) by interpreting their decoder weights, consisting of top-activated words projected from individual neurons. Transformer-based Language Models (TLM) similarly consist of decoder weights. However, due to its hypothesised superposition properties, the final logits originating from the residual path are considered uninterpretable. Therefore, we posit that we can interpret TLM as superposed NTM by proposing a novel weight-based, model-agnostic and corpus-agnostic approach to search and disentangle decoder-only TLM, potentially mapping individual neurons to multiple …

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Make The U In Uda Matter: Invariant Consistency Learning For Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Zhongqi Yue, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang Dec 2023

Make The U In Uda Matter: Invariant Consistency Learning For Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Zhongqi Yue, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Domain Adaptation (DA) is always challenged by the spurious correlation between domain-invariant features (e.g., class identity) and domain-specific features (e.g., environment) that do not generalize to the target domain. Unfortunately, even enriched with additional unsupervised target domains, existing Unsupervised DA (UDA) methods still suffer from it. This is because the source domain supervision only considers the target domain samples as auxiliary data (e.g., by pseudo-labeling), yet the inherent distribution in the target domain—where the valuable de-correlation clues hide—is disregarded. We propose to make the U in UDA matter by giving equal status to the two domains. Specifically, we learn an …

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Mrim: Lightweight Saliency-Based Mixed-Resolution Imaging For Low-Power Pervasive Vision, Jiyan Wu, Vithurson Subasharan, Minh Anh Tuan Tran, Kasun Pramuditha Gamlath, Archan Misra Dec 2023

Mrim: Lightweight Saliency-Based Mixed-Resolution Imaging For Low-Power Pervasive Vision, Jiyan Wu, Vithurson Subasharan, Minh Anh Tuan Tran, Kasun Pramuditha Gamlath, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While many pervasive computing applications increasingly utilize real-time context extracted from a vision sensing infrastructure, the high energy overhead of DNN-based vision sensing pipelines remains a challenge for sustainable in-the-wild deployment. One common approach to reducing such energy overheads is the capture and transmission of lower-resolution images to an edge node (where the DNN inferencing task is executed), but this results in an accuracy-vs-energy tradeoff, as the DNN inference accuracy typically degrades with a drop in resolution. In this work, we introduce MRIM, a simple but effective framework to tackle this tradeoff. Under MRIM, the vision sensor platform first executes …

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Exploring Students' Adoption Of Chatgpt As A Mentor For Undergraduate Computing Projects: Pls-Sem Analysis, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky Dec 2023

Exploring Students' Adoption Of Chatgpt As A Mentor For Undergraduate Computing Projects: Pls-Sem Analysis, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As computing projects increasingly become a core component of undergraduate courses, effective mentorship is crucial for supporting students' learning and development. Our study examines the adoption of ChatGPT as a mentor for undergraduate computing projects. It explores the impact of ChatGPT mentorship, specifically, skills development, and mentor responsiveness, i.e., ChatGPT's responsiveness to students' needs and requests. We utilize PLS-SEM to investigate the interrelationships between different factors and develop a model that captures their contribution to the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a mentor. The findings suggest that mentor responsiveness and technical/design support are key factors for the adoption of AI tools …

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Distxplore: Distribution-Guided Testing For Evaluating And Enhancing Deep Learning Systems, Longtian Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Xiaoning Du, Meng Tian, Qing Guo, Zheng Yang, Chao Shen Dec 2023

Distxplore: Distribution-Guided Testing For Evaluating And Enhancing Deep Learning Systems, Longtian Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Xiaoning Du, Meng Tian, Qing Guo, Zheng Yang, Chao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning (DL) models are trained on sampled data, where the distribution of training data differs from that of real-world data (i.e., the distribution shift), which reduces the model's robustness. Various testing techniques have been proposed, including distribution-unaware and distribution-aware methods. However, distribution-unaware testing lacks effectiveness by not explicitly considering the distribution of test cases and may generate redundant errors (within same distribution). Distribution-aware testing techniques primarily focus on generating test cases that follow the training distribution, missing out-of-distribution data that may also be valid and should be considered in the testing process. In this paper, we propose a novel …

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Development Of An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model For Asian Vascular Wound Images, Zhiwen Joseph Lo, Malcolm Han Wen Mak, Shanying Liang, Yam Meng Chan, Cheng Cheng Goh, Tina Peiting Lai, Audrey Hui Min Tan, Patrick Thng, Patrick Thng, Tillman Weyde, Sylvia Smit Dec 2023

Development Of An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model For Asian Vascular Wound Images, Zhiwen Joseph Lo, Malcolm Han Wen Mak, Shanying Liang, Yam Meng Chan, Cheng Cheng Goh, Tina Peiting Lai, Audrey Hui Min Tan, Patrick Thng, Patrick Thng, Tillman Weyde, Sylvia Smit

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chronic wounds contribute to significant healthcare and economic burden worldwide. Wound assessment remains challenging given its complex and dynamic nature. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning methods in wound analysis is promising. Explainable modelling can help its integration and acceptance in healthcare systems. We aim to develop an explainable AI model for analysing vascular wound images among an Asian population. Two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven wound images from a vascular wound image registry from a tertiary institution in Singapore were utilized. The dataset was split into training, validation and test sets. Wound images were classified into …

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Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, Shunkai Zhu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jie Yang, Xingwei Lin, Liyi Zhang, Peng Cheng Dec 2023

Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, Shunkai Zhu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jie Yang, Xingwei Lin, Liyi Zhang, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzzing is one of the prevailing methods for vulnerability detection. However, even state-of-the-art fuzzing methods become ineffective after some period of time, i.e., the coverage hardly improves as existing methods are ineffective to focus the attention of fuzzing on covering the hard-to-trigger program paths. In other words, they cannot generate inputs that can break the bottleneck due to the fundamental difficulty in capturing the complex relations between the test inputs and program coverage. In particular, existing fuzzers suffer from the following main limitations: 1) lacking an overall analysis of the program to identify the most “rewarding” seeds, and 2) lacking …

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Generative Modelling Of Stochastic Actions With Arbitrary Constraints In Reinforcement Learning, Changyu Chen, Ramesha Karunasena, Thanh Hong Nguyen, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham Dec 2023

Generative Modelling Of Stochastic Actions With Arbitrary Constraints In Reinforcement Learning, Changyu Chen, Ramesha Karunasena, Thanh Hong Nguyen, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security resources and emergency response units, etc. A challenge in this setting is that the underlying action space is categorical (discrete and unordered) and large, for which existing RL methods do not perform well. Moreover, these problems require validity of the realized action (allocation); this validity constraint is often difficult to express compactly in a closed mathematical form. The allocation nature of the problem also prefers stochastic optimal policies, …

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A Reliable And Secure Mobile Cyber-Physical Digital Microfluidic Biochip For Intelligent Healthcare, Yinan Yao, Decheng Qiu, Huangda Liu, Zhongliao Yang, Ximeng Liu, Yang Yang, Chen Dong Dec 2023

A Reliable And Secure Mobile Cyber-Physical Digital Microfluidic Biochip For Intelligent Healthcare, Yinan Yao, Decheng Qiu, Huangda Liu, Zhongliao Yang, Ximeng Liu, Yang Yang, Chen Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital microfluidic, as an emerging and potential technology, diversifies the biochemical applications platform, such as protein dilution sewage detection. At present, a vast majority of universal cyberphysical digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) transmit data through wires via personal computers and microcontrollers (like Arduino), consequently, susceptible to various security threats and with the popularity of wireless devices, losing competitiveness gradually. On the premise that security be ensured first and foremost, calls for wireless portable, safe, and economical DMFBs are imperative to expand their application fields, engage more users, and cater to the trend of future wireless communication. To this end, a new …

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Hague Service Convention Enters Into Force In Singapore, Adeline Chong Dec 2023

Hague Service Convention Enters Into Force In Singapore, Adeline Chong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore acceded to the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters (‘Service Convention’) on 16 May 2023. It has now entered into force in Singapore on 1 December 2023. Two declarations were lodged: first, against Article 8(1) objecting to the direct service of judicial documents upon persons in Singapore through foreign diplomatic or consular agents unless the documents are to be served upon a national of the State from which the documents originate; and secondly, objecting to service of judicial and extrajudicial documents in Singapore by the methods of transmission set …

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China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao Dec 2023

China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

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Heat And Observed Economic Activity In The Rich Urban Tropics, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming. Liu, Alberto. Salvo, Rhita P B. Simorangkir Dec 2023

Heat And Observed Economic Activity In The Rich Urban Tropics, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming. Liu, Alberto. Salvo, Rhita P B. Simorangkir

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We use space-and-time resolved mobility data to assess how heat impacts Singapore, a rich city-state and arguably a harbinger of what is to come in the urbanizing tropics. Singapore’s offices, factories, malls, buses, and trains are widely air conditioned, its public schools less so. We document increased attendance and commuting to workplaces, malls, and the more air-conditioned schools on hotter relative to cooler days, particularly by low-income residents with limited use of adaptive technologies at home. Investment by rich cities may attenuate heat’s pervasive negative consequences on productive outcomes, yet this may worsen the climate emergency in the long run.

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The Persuasive Effect Of Ai-Synthesized Voices, Hannah H. Chang, Anirban Mukherjee Dec 2023

The Persuasive Effect Of Ai-Synthesized Voices, Hannah H. Chang, Anirban Mukherjee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology seeks to emulate humans. One aspect is AI-synthesized voices, used in voice assistants (such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant) to assistive technologies (such as voiceover narration in product videos). For example, there are currently more than 3.25 billion voice assistants; a number that is expected to touch about 8 billion by next year (i.e., 2023) (Statista 2022). With the extensive availability and enhanced accuracy of AI-synthesized voices, consumer research is starting to examine the impact of AI-synthesized voices on consumer information processing and decision making. The extant literature, however, is relatively limited because …

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Using Team Rewards And Individual Assessment To Incentivize Collaboration In Team Projects, Prasart Jongjaroenkamol Dec 2023

Using Team Rewards And Individual Assessment To Incentivize Collaboration In Team Projects, Prasart Jongjaroenkamol

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Team projects are commonly used in higher education across different disciplines to promote cooperation among students. However, achieving this objective can be challenging. To address this issue, educators have explored various strategies, such as implementing peer evaluation or having periodic consultations with teams. In this paper, I present a novel approach to team assessment that combines team rewards with individual assessment. In this assessment, each team member independently takes a quiz, and the team's score is determined by the average performance of its members. Consequently, the team reward becomes intricately tied to the individual learning outcomes of all team members. …

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The Use Of Deception In Dementia-Care Robots: Should Robots Tell "White Lies" To Limit Emotional Distress?, Samuel R. Cox, Grace Cheong, Wei Tsang Ooi Dec 2023

The Use Of Deception In Dementia-Care Robots: Should Robots Tell "White Lies" To Limit Emotional Distress?, Samuel R. Cox, Grace Cheong, Wei Tsang Ooi

ROSA Journal Articles and Publications

With projections of ageing populations and increasing rates of dementia, there is need for professional caregivers. Assistive robots have been proposed as a solution to this, as they can assist people both physically and socially. However, caregivers often need to use acts of deception (such as misdirection or white lies) in order to ensure necessary care is provided while limiting negative impacts on the cared-for such as emotional distress or loss of dignity. We discuss such use of deception, and contextualise their use within robotics.

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Exposure To Climate Change Information Predicts Public Support For Solar Geoengineering In Singapore And The United States, Sonny Rosenthal, Peter J. Irvine, Christopher L. Cummings, Shirley S. Ho Dec 2023

Exposure To Climate Change Information Predicts Public Support For Solar Geoengineering In Singapore And The United States, Sonny Rosenthal, Peter J. Irvine, Christopher L. Cummings, Shirley S. Ho

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Solar geoengineering is a controversial climate policy measure that could lower global temperature by increasing the amount of light reflected by the Earth. As scientists and policymakers increasingly consider this idea, an understanding of the level and drivers of public support for its research and potential deployment will be key. This study focuses on the role of climate change information in public support for research and deployment of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) in Singapore (n = 503) and the United States (n = 505). Findings were consistent with the idea that exposure to information underlies support for research and deployment. …

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Vision Paper: Advancing Of Ai Explainability For The Use Of Chatgpt In Government Agencies: Proposal Of A 4-Step Framework, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh Dec 2023

Vision Paper: Advancing Of Ai Explainability For The Use Of Chatgpt In Government Agencies: Proposal Of A 4-Step Framework, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper explores ChatGPT’s potential in aiding government agencies, drawing from a case study based on a government agency in Singapore. While ChatGPT’s text generation abilities offer promise, it brings inherent challenges, including data opacity, potential misinformation, and occasional errors. These issues are especially critical in government decision-making.Public administration’s core values of transparency and accountability magnify these concerns. Ensuring AI alignment with these principles is imperative, given the potential repercussions on policy outcomes and citizen trust.AI explainability plays a central role in ChatGPT’s adoption within government agencies. To address these concerns, we propose strategies like prompt engineering, data governance, and …

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Comparison And Evaluation On Static Application Security Testing (Sast) Tools For Java, Kaixuan Li, Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Ruitao Feng, Han Liu, Chengwei Liu, Yang Liu, Yixiang Chen Dec 2023

Comparison And Evaluation On Static Application Security Testing (Sast) Tools For Java, Kaixuan Li, Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Ruitao Feng, Han Liu, Chengwei Liu, Yang Liu, Yixiang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Static application security testing (SAST) takes a significant role in the software development life cycle (SDLC). However, it is challenging to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of SAST tools to determine which is the better one for detecting vulnerabilities. In this paper, based on well-defined criteria, we first selected seven free or open-source SAST tools from 161 existing tools for further evaluation. Owing to the synthetic and newly-constructed real-world benchmarks, we evaluated and compared these SAST tools from different and comprehensive perspectives such as effectiveness, consistency, and performance. While SAST tools perform well on synthetic benchmarks, our results indicate that only …

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Scalelong: Towards More Stable Training Of Diffusion Model Via Scaling Network Long Skip Connection, Zhongzhan Huang, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Liang Lin Dec 2023

Scalelong: Towards More Stable Training Of Diffusion Model Via Scaling Network Long Skip Connection, Zhongzhan Huang, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Liang Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In diffusion models, UNet is the most popular network backbone, since its long skip connects (LSCs) to connect distant network blocks can aggregate long-distant information and alleviate vanishing gradient. Unfortunately, UNet often suffers from unstable training in diffusion models which can be alleviated by scaling its LSC coefficients smaller. However, theoretical understandings of the instability of UNet in diffusion models and also the performance improvement of LSC scaling remain absent yet. To solve this issue, we theoretically show that the coefficients of LSCs in UNet have big effects on the stableness of the forward and backward propagation and robustness of …

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Unifying Text, Tables, And Images For Multimodal Question Answering, Haohao Luo, Ying Shen, Yang Deng Dec 2023

Unifying Text, Tables, And Images For Multimodal Question Answering, Haohao Luo, Ying Shen, Yang Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimodal question answering (MMQA), which aims to derive the answer from multiple knowledge modalities (e.g., text, tables, and images), has received increasing attention due to its board applications. Current approaches to MMQA often rely on single-modal or bi-modal QA models, which limits their ability to effectively integrate information across all modalities and leverage the power of pre-trained language models. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework called UniMMQA, which unifies three different input modalities into a text-to-text format by employing position-enhanced table linearization and diversified image captioning techniques. Additionally, we enhance cross-modal reasoning by incorporating a multimodal rationale …

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A Black-Box Attack On Code Models Via Representation Nearest Neighbor Search, Jie Zhang, Wei Ma, Qiang Hu, Shangqing Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon, Yang Liu Dec 2023

A Black-Box Attack On Code Models Via Representation Nearest Neighbor Search, Jie Zhang, Wei Ma, Qiang Hu, Shangqing Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing methods for generating adversarial code examples face several challenges: limted availability of substitute variables, high verification costs for these substitutes, and the creation of adversarial samples with noticeable perturbations. To address these concerns, our proposed approach, RNNS, uses a search seed based on historical attacks to find potential adversarial substitutes. Rather than directly using the discrete substitutes, they are mapped to a continuous vector space using a pre-trained variable name encoder. Based on the vector representation, RNNS predicts and selects better substitutes for attacks. We evaluated the performance of RNNS across six coding tasks encompassing three programming languages: Java, …

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A Closer Look At The Security Risks In The Rust Ecosystem, Xiaoye Zheng, Zhiyuan Wan, Yun Zhang, Rui Chang, David Lo Dec 2023

A Closer Look At The Security Risks In The Rust Ecosystem, Xiaoye Zheng, Zhiyuan Wan, Yun Zhang, Rui Chang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rust is an emerging programming language designed for the development of systems software. To facilitate the reuse of Rust code, crates.io, as a central package registry of the Rust ecosystem, hosts thousands of third-party Rust packages. The openness of crates.io enables the growth of the Rust ecosystem but comes with security risks by severe security advisories. Although Rust guarantees a software program to be safe via programming language features and strict compile-time checking, the unsafe keyword in Rust allows developers to bypass compiler safety checks for certain regions of code. Prior studies empirically investigate the memory safety and concurrency bugs …

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