Digital Commons Network^™

A Survey Of Protocol Fuzzing, Xiaohan Zhang, Cen Zhang, Xinghua Li, Zhengjie Du, Bing Mao, Yeting Li, Pan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Communication protocols form the bedrock of our interconnected world, yet vulnerabilities within their implementations pose significant security threats. Recent developments have seen a surge in fuzzing-based research dedicated to uncovering these vulnerabilities within protocol implementations. However, there still lacks a systematic overview of protocol fuzzing for answering the essential questions such as what the unique challenges are, how existing works solve them, and so on. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of related works from both academia and industry. Our study includes a detailed summary of the specific challenges in protocol fuzzing and provides a systematic categorization …

Self-Supervised Learning For Time Series Analysis : Taxonomy, Progress, And Prospects, Zhang Kexin, Qingsong Wen, Chaoli Zhang, Rongyao Cai, Ming Jin, Yong Liu, James Y. Zhang, Guansong Pang, Guansong Pang, Pan Shirui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently achieved impressive performance on various time series tasks. The most prominent advantage of SSL is that it reduces the dependence on labeled data. Based on the pre-training and fine-tuning strategy, even a small amount of labeled data can achieve high performance. Compared with many published self-supervised surveys on computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive survey for time series SSL is still missing. To fill this gap, we review current state-of-the-art SSL methods for time series data in this article. To this end, we first comprehensively review existing surveys related to SSL and time …

Latent Representation Learning For Geospatial Entities, Ween Jiann Lee, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Representation learning has been instrumental in the success of machine learning, offering compact and performant data representations for diverse downstream tasks. In the spatial domain, it has been pivotal in extracting latent patterns from various data types, including points, polylines, polygons, and networked structures. However, existing approaches often fall short of explicitly capturing both semantic and spatial information, relying on proxies and synthetic features. This article presents GeoNN, a novel graph neural network-based model designed to learn spatially-aware embeddings for geospatial entities. GeoNN leverages edge features generated from geodesic functions, dynamically selecting relevant features based on relative locations. It introduces …

Calibrated One-Class Classification For Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection, Hongzuo Xu, Yijie Wang, Songlei Jian, Qing Liao, Yongjun Wang, Guansong Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Time series anomaly detection is instrumental in maintaining system availability in various domains. Current work in this research line mainly focuses on learning data normality deeply and comprehensively by devising advanced neural network structures and new reconstruction/prediction learning objectives. However, their one-class learning process can be misled by latent anomalies in training data (i.e., anomaly contamination) under the unsupervised paradigm. Their learning process also lacks knowledge about the anomalies. Consequently, they often learn a biased, inaccurate normality boundary. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes calibrated one-class classification for anomaly detection, realizing contamination-tolerant, anomaly-informed learning of data normality via uncertainty …

An Empirical Study Of Automatic Program Repair Techniques For Injection Vulnerabilities, Tingwei Zhu, Tongtong Xu, Kui Liu, Jiayuan Zhou, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Tian Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Injection vulnerabilities are among the most serious and dangerous security defects, as they can be exploited by attackers to inject malicious inputs and carry out cybercrimes. Timely fixing of injection vulnerabilities is crucial. However, manual repairs of injection vulnerabilities often require specialized knowledge and are prone to errors, posing a challenge and a heavy burden on developers. In recent years, Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have shown promising momentum in automatically fixing general defects. Yet, there has been no research on how APR techniques perform in repairing injection vulnerabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study. We first …

Gradualreality : Enhancing Physical Object Interaction In Virtual Reality Via Interaction State-Aware Blending, Hyuna Seo, Juheon Yi, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present GradualReality, a novel interface enabling a Cross Reality experience that includes gradual interaction with physical objects in a virtual environment and supports both presence and usability. Daily Cross Reality interaction is challenging as the user’s physical object interaction state is continuously changing over time, causing their attention to frequently shift between the virtual and physical worlds. As such, presence in the virtual environment and seamless usability for interacting with physical objects should be maintained at a high level. To address this issue, we present an Interaction State-Aware Blending approach that (i) balances immersion and interaction capability and (ii) …

Graph Continual Learning With Debiased Lossless Memory Replay, Chaoxi Niu, Guansong Pang, Ling Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-life graph data often expands continually, rendering the learning of graph neural networks (GNNs) on static graph data impractical. Graph continual learning (GCL) tackles this problem by continually adapting GNNs to the expanded graph of the current task while maintaining the performance over the graph of previous tasks. Memory replay-based methods, which aim to replay data of previous tasks when learning new tasks, have been explored as one principled approach to mitigate the forgetting of the knowledge learned from the previous tasks. In this paper we extend this methodology with a novel framework, called Debiased Lossless Memory replay (DeLoMe). Unlike …

Promise And Peril Of Collaborative Code Generation Models : Balancing Effectiveness And Memorization, Zhi Chen, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the rapidly evolving field of machine learning, training models with datasets from various locations and organizations presents significant challenges due to privacy and legal concerns. The exploration of effective collaborative training settings, which are capable of leveraging valuable knowledge from distributed and isolated datasets, is increasingly crucial. This study investigates key factors that impact the effectiveness of collaborative training methods in code next-token prediction, as well as the correctness and utility of the generated code, showing the promise of such methods. Additionally, we evaluate the memorization of different participant training data across various collaborative training settings, including centralized, federated, …

Constrained Assortment Optimization Under The Cross-Nested Logit Model, Cuong Le, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the assortment optimization problem under general linear constraints, where the customer choice behavior is captured by the cross-nested logit model. In this problem, there is a set of products organized into multiple subsets (or nests), where each product can belong to more than one nest. The aim is to find an assortment to offer to customers so that the expected revenue is maximized. We show that, under the cross-nested logit model, the unconstrained assortment problem is NP-hard even when there are only two nests, and the problem is generally NP-hard to approximate to any constant factors. To tackle …

Pvp-Ssd: Point-Voxel Fusion With Partitioned Point Cloud Sampling For Anchor-Free Single-Stage Small 3d Object Detection, Xinlin Wu, Yibin Tian, Yin Pan, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xuesong Wu, Ruisheng Wang, Zhi Zeng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Single-stage object detection from 3D point clouds in autonomous driving faces significant challenges, particularly in accurately detecting small objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel method called Point-Voxel dual-branch feature extraction with Partitioned point cloud sampling for anchor-free Single-Stage Detection of 3D objects (PVP-SSD). The network comprises two branches: a point branch and a voxel branch. In the point branch, a partitioned point cloud sampling strategy leverages axial features to divide the point cloud. Then, it assigns different sampling weights to various segments to enhance the sampling accuracy. Additionally, a local feature enhancement module explicitly calculates the correlation …

Themis: Automatic And Efficient Deep Learning System Testing With Strong Fault Detection Capability, Dong Huang, Tsz On Li, Xiaofei Xie, Heming Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Learning Systems (DLSs) have been widely applied in safety-critical tasks such as autopilot. However, when a perturbed input is fed into a DLS for inference, the DLS often has incorrect outputs (i.e., faults). DLS testing techniques (e.g., DeepXplore) detect such faults by generating perturbed inputs to explore data flows that induce faults. Since a DLS often has infinitely many data flows, existing techniques require developers to manually specify a set of activation values in a DLS’s neurons for exploring fault-inducing data flows. Unfortunately, recent studies show that such manual effort is tedious and can detect only a tiny proportion …

Joint Weakly Supervised Image Emotion Analysis Based On Interclass Discrimination And Intraclass Correlation, Xinyue Zhang, Zhaoxia Wang, Guitao Cao, Seng-Beng Ho

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Regional information-based image emotion analysis has recently garnered significant attention. However, existing methods often focus on identifying region proposals through layered steps or merely rely on visual saliency. These approaches may lead to an underestimation of emotional categories and a lack of comprehensive interclass discrimination perception and emotional intraclass contextual mining. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named InterIntraIEA, which combines interclass discrimination and intraclass correlation joint learning capabilities for image emotion analysis. The proposed method not only employs category-specific dictionary learning for class adaptation, but also models intraclass contextual relationships and perceives correlations at the channel …

Navigating Governance Paradigms: A Cross-Regional Comparative Study Of Generative Ai Governance Processes & Principle, Jose Luna, Ivan Tan, Xiaofei Xie, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies evolve at an unprecedented rate, global governance approaches struggle to keep pace with the technology, highlighting a critical issue in the governance adaptation of significant challenges. Depicting the nuances of nascent and diverse governance approaches based on risks, rules, outcomes, principles, or a mix across different regions around the globe is fundamental to discern discrepancies and convergences and to shed light on specific limitations that need to be addressed, thereby facilitating the safe and trustworthy adoption of GenAI. In response to the need and the evolving nature of GenAI, this paper seeks to provide …

Exploring Conversations Between A Practitioner And A Person With Dementia, Kotaro Hara, Rosiana Natalie, Wei Soon Cheong, Jingjing Gu, Qianli Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social service centers, practitioners engage in conversations with clients with dementia to facilitate their daily activities and provide support when they are distressed. However, the nature of the care demands the practitioner’s active engagement, which becomes difficult to deliver as the number of people who need care expands. Researchers have been investigating the efficacy of developing agents that assume conversational tasks to alleviate this work. To contribute to the future design of agents for caregiving, we collected and analyzed ten conversations between clients with mild dementia and practitioners who provide care. Our analyses of turn-taking dynamics and dialogue acts …

Temporal Relational Graph Convolutional Network Approach To Financial Performance Prediction, Jeyaraman Brindha Priyadarshini, Bing Tian Dai, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Accurately predicting financial entity performance remains a challenge due to the dynamic nature of financial markets and vast unstructured textual data. Financial knowledge graphs (FKGs) offer a structured representation for tackling this problem by representing complex financial relationships and concepts. However, constructing a comprehensive and accurate financial knowledge graph that captures the temporal dynamics of financial entities is non-trivial. We introduce FintechKG, a comprehensive financial knowledge graph developed through a three-dimensional information extraction process that incorporates commercial entities and temporal dimensions and uses a financial concept taxonomy that ensures financial domain entity and relationship extraction. We propose a temporal and …

Efficient Cascaded Multiscale Adaptive Network For Image Restoration, Yichen Zhou, Pan Zhou, Teck Khim Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Image restoration, encompassing tasks such as deblurring, denoising, and super-resolution, remains a pivotal area in computer vision. However, efficiently addressing the spatially varying artifacts of various low-quality images with local adaptiveness and handling their degradations at different scales poses significant challenges. To efficiently tackle these issues, we propose the novel Efficient Cascaded Multiscale Adaptive (ECMA) Network. ECMA employs Local Adaptive Module, LAM, which dynamically adjusts convolution kernels across local image regions to efficiently handle varying artifacts. Thus, LAM addresses the local adaptiveness challenge more efficiently than costlier mechanisms like self-attention, due to its less computationally intensive convolutions. To construct a …

The George-Anne Daily, Georgia Southern University

George-Anne Media Group: Newsletters & Magazines

No abstract provided.

Motif Graph Neural Network, Xuexin Chen, Ruicui Cai, Yuan Fang, Min Wu, Zijian Li, Zhifeng Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphs can model complicated interactions between entities, which naturally emerge in many important applications. These applications can often be cast into standard graph learning tasks, in which a crucial step is to learn low-dimensional graph representations. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are currently the most popular model in graph embedding approaches. However, standard GNNs in the neighborhood aggregation paradigm suffer from limited discriminative power in distinguishing high-order graph structures as opposed to low-order structures. To capture high-order structures, researchers have resorted to motifs and developed motif-based GNNs. However, the existing motif-based GNNs still often suffer from less discriminative power on high-order …

Foss: Towards Fine-Grained Unknown Class Detection Against The Open-Set Attack Spectrum With Variable Legitimate Traffic, Ziming Zhao, Zhaoxuan Li, Xiaofei Xie, Jiongchi Yu, Fan Zhang, Rui Zhang, Binbin Chen, Xiangyang Luo, Ming Hu, Wenrui Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) are essential for ensuring cybersecurity. However, the security communities realize some limitations when they put most existing proposals into practice. The challenges are mainly concerned with (i) fine-grained unknown attack detection and (ii) ever-changing legitimate traffic adaptation. To tackle these problem, we present three key design norms. The core idea is to construct a model to split the data distribution hyperplane and leverage the concept of isolation, as well as advance the incremental model update. We utilize the isolation tree as the backbone to design our model, named FOSS, to echo back three norms. …

Predicting The Limits: Tailoring Unnoticeable Hand Redirection Offsets In Virtual Reality To Individuals' Perceptual Boundaries, Martin Feick, Kora Persephone Regitz, Lukas Gehrke, André Zenner, Anthony Tang, Tobias Patrick Jungbluth, Maurice Rekrut, Antonio Krüger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many illusion and interaction techniques in Virtual Reality (VR) rely on Hand Redirection (HR), which has proved to be effective as long as the introduced offsets between the position of the real and virtual hand do not noticeably disturb the user experience. Yet calibrating HR offsets is a tedious and time-consuming process involving psychophysical experimentation, and the resulting thresholds are known to be affected by many variables—limiting HR’s practical utility. As a result, there is a clear need for alternative methods that allow tailoring HR to the perceptual boundaries of individual users. We conducted an experiment with 18 participants combining …

Video Editing For Video Retrieval, Bin Zhu, Kevin Flanagan, Adriano Fragomeni, Michael Wray, Dima Damen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Though pre-training vision-language models have demonstrated significant benefits in boosting video-text retrieval performance from large-scale web videos, fine-tuning still plays a critical role with manually annotated clips with start and end times, which requires considerable human effort. To address this issue, we explore an alternative cheaper source of annotations, single timestamps, for video-text retrieval. We initialise clips from timestamps in a heuristic way to warm up a retrieval model. Then a video clip editing method is proposed to refine the initial rough boundaries to improve retrieval performance. A student-teacher network is introduced for video clip editing: the teacher model is …

Stagedvulbert: Multi-Granular Vulnerability Detection With A Novel Pre-Trained Code Model, Yuan Jiang, Yujian Zhang, Xiaohong Su, Christoph Treude, Tiantian Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The emergence of pre-trained model-based vulnerability detection methods has significantly advanced the field of automated vulnerability detection. However, these methods still face several challenges, such as difficulty in learning effective feature representations of statements for fine-grained predictions and struggling to process overly long code sequences. To address these issues, this study introduces StagedVulBERT, a novel vulnerability detection framework that leverages a pre-trained code language model and employs a coarse-to-fine strategy. The key innovation and contribution of our research lies in the development of the CodeBERT-HLS component within our framework, specialized in hierarchical, layered, and semantic encoding. This component is designed …

Nigerian Software Engineer Or American Data Scientist? Github Profile Recruitment Bias In Large Language Models, Takashi Nakano, Kazumasa Shimari, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Marc Cheong, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, demonstrating their ability not only to automate tedious tasks, but also to show some degree of proficiency in completing software engineering tasks. A key concern with LLMs is their “black-box” nature, which obscures their internal workings and could lead to societal biases in their outputs. In the software engineering context, in this early results paper, we empirically explore how well LLMs can automate recruitment tasks for a geographically diverse software team. We use OpenAI's ChatGPT to conduct an initial set of experiments using GitHub User Profiles from four regions to …

Demystifying And Extracting Fault-Indicating Information From Logs For Failure Diagnosis, Junjie Huang, Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Yintong Huo, Jiazhen Gu, Zhuangbin Chen, Cong Feng, Hui Dong, Zengyin Yang, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Logs are imperative in the maintenance of online service systems, which often encompass important information for effective failure mitigation. While existing anomaly detection methodologies facilitate the identification of anomalous logs within extensive runtime data, manual investigation of log messages by engineers remains essential to comprehend faults, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. Upon examining the log-based troubleshooting practices at CloudA 1, we find that engineers typically prioritize two categories of log information for diagnosis. These include fault-indicating descriptions, which record abnormal system events, and fault-indicating parameters, which specify the associated entities. Motivated by this finding, we propose an approach to automatically …

Kpiroot: Efficient Monitoring Metric-Based Root Cause Localization In Large-Scale Cloud Systems, Wenwei Gu, Xinying Sun, Jinyang Liu, Yintong Huo, Zhuangbin Chen, Jianping Zhang, Jiazhen Gu, Yongqiang Yang, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To ensure the reliability of cloud systems, their run-time status reflecting the service quality is periodically monitored with monitoring metrics, i.e., KPIs (key performance indicators). When performance issues happen, root cause localization pinpoints the specific KPIs that are responsible for the degradation of overall service quality, facilitating prompt problem diagnosis and resolution. To this end, existing methods generally locate root-cause KPIs by identifying the KPIs that exhibit a similar anomalous trend to the overall service performance. While straightforward, solely relying on the similarity calculation may be ineffective when dealing with cloud systems with complicated interdependent services. Recent deep learning-based methods …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

A Philanthropic Theory Of Systems Transformation For Advancing Equity In The Polycrisis, Michael Quinn Patton, Ruth Richardson

The Foundation Review

The term “polycrisis” calls attention to overlapping, mutually reinforcing, and potentially disastrous trends and crises that are interconnected, like climate change, increasing global inequities, widespread disinformation, pandemic dangers, the ravages of war, and pollution of land, air, and water. Vulnerable and marginalized populations are most directly affected by the intensifying problems that are manifested in the polycrisis.

This article, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of The Foundation Review, invites readers to ponder the risks posed by the polycrisis and how philanthropy might look beyond business as usual to respond to those risks. We review the evolution of philanthropic …

What Practices For Shifting Power Are Core To Advancing Racial Equity?, Kantahyanee W. Murray, Ji Won Shon, Ashley Barnes, Natalia Ibanez, Karuna Sridharan Chibber, Janelle Armstrong-Brown, Elvis Fraser

The Foundation Review

Power-shifting approaches are increasingly being recognized as practical solutions funders can employ to amplify the voice and agency of grant partners and communities, especially those historically under-resourced and marginalized.

Informed by a literature review and interviews with funders, grant partners, and thought leaders, this article describes four common practices for shifting power to advance equity: embed a racial equity lens into the process to shift power; demonstrate a genuine commitment to communities; give grant partners the power to define success; and embrace an internal systems change orientation.

This article explores the capabilities, mindsets, policies, skills, and resource considerations needed for …

Editorial, Hanh Cao Yu

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Advocacy And Bridging Strategies Are Failing On Their Own. Multifaith Nonprofits Embody Six Solutions For A Pluralistic Democracy, Allison K. Ralph

The Foundation Review

This article clarifies a strategic dilemma between bridging difference or advocacy strategies for funders and their grantees seeking social change in the context of polarization, putting it in conversation with social science research on intergroup contact theory, on which bridging strategies are based, and advocacy. Based on a set of interviews and surveys, this article explores how multifaith organizations embody strategies that navigate the contact/advocacy divide.

This article posits that multifaith organizations — those intentionally formed of people or institutions with different faith identities — embody six practices that avoid the false dichotomy of bridging and advocacy strategies: “dual identity” …