Computer Sciences Commons^™

An Aspect Performance-Aware Hypergraph Neural Network For Review-Based Recommendation, Junrui Liu, Tong Li, Di Wu, Zifang Tang, Yuan Fang, Zhen Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online reviews allow consumers to provide detailed feedback on various aspects of items. Existing methods utilize these aspects to model users' fine-grained preferences for specific item features through graph neural networks. We argue that the performance of items on different aspects is important for making precise recommendations, which has not been taken into account by existing approaches, due to lack of data. In this paper, we propose an aspect performance-aware hypergraph neural network (APH) for the review-based recommendation, which learns the performance of items from the conflicting sentiment polarity of user reviews. Specifically, APH comprehensively models the relationships among users, …

Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning For Proactive Dialogues, Tao He, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Yuanxing Liu, Yiheng Sun, Zerui Chen, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advancements in proactive dialogues have garnered significant attention, particularly for more complex objectives (e.g. emotion support and persuasion). Unlike traditional task-oriented dialogues, proactive dialogues demand advanced policy planning and adaptability, requiring rich scenarios and comprehensive policy repositories to develop such systems. However, existing approaches tend to rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for user simulation and online learning, leading to biases that diverge from realistic scenarios and result in suboptimal efficiency. Moreover, these methods depend on manually defined, context-independent, coarse-grained policies, which not only incur high expert costs but also raise concerns regarding their completeness. In our work, we …

Adapting Knowledge Prompt Tuning For Enhanced Automated Program Repair, Xuemeng Cai, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to enhance software reliability by automatically generating bug-fixing patches. Recent work has improved the state-of-the-art of APR by fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs), such as CodeT5, for APR. However, the effectiveness of fine-tuning be-comes weakened in data scarcity scenarios, and data scarcity can be a common issue in practice, limiting fine-tuning performance. To alleviate this limitation, this paper adapts prompt tuning for enhanced APR and conducts a comprehensive study to evaluate its effectiveness in data scarcity scenarios, using three LLMs of different sizes and six diverse datasets across four programming languages. Prompt tuning rewrites …

Drone Delivery Network Design With Uncertainties, Wenjia Zeng, Jiang Ruiwei, Hai Yang, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also called drones, are gaining popularity as an alternative delivery mode due to their faster delivery speed and reduced labor costs. Several companies, especially e-commerce giants, are conducting pilot projects that use drones to deliver fast food and groceries. In 2021, for example, Walmart partnered with Zipline in the United States to provide delivery services for areas near Walmart stores in Arkansas. In China, Meituan drone delivery services have been launched in Shenzhen and have conducted trial food delivery that cover more than 8,000 households.

Unlocking The Potential Of Black-Box Pre-Trained Gnns For Graph Few-Shot Learning, Qiannan Zhang, Shichao Pei, Yuan Fang, Xiangliang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Few-shot learning has emerged as an important problem on graphs to combat label scarcity, which can be approached by current trends in pre-trained graph neural networks (GNNs) and meta-learning. Recent efforts integrate both paradigms in a white-box setting, leaving the more realistic black-box setting largely underexplored, where the parameters and gradients in the pre-trained GNNs are inaccessible. In this paper, we study the critical problem: Leveraging black-box pre-trained GNNs for graph few-shot learning. Despite its appeal, two key issues hinder the unlocking of its potential: the inherent task gap between pre-training and downstream stages, which can introduce irrelevant knowledge and …

Dr. Tongue: Sign-Oriented Multi-Label Detection For Remote Tongue Diagnosis, Yiliang Chen, Steven S. C. Ho, Cheng Xu, Yao Jie Xie, Wing Fai Yeung, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tongue diagnosis is a vital tool in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine, providing key insights into a patient's health by analyzing tongue attributes. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for accurate remote medical assessments, emphasizing the importance of precise tongue attribute recognition via telehealth. To address this, we propose a Sign-Oriented multi-label Attributes Detection framework. Our approach begins with an adaptive tongue feature extraction module that standardizes tongue images and mitigates environmental factors. This is followed by a Sign-oriented Network (SignNet) that identifies specific tongue attributes, emulating the diagnostic process of experienced practitioners and enabling comprehensive health evaluations. To …

Attackg+: Boosting Attack Graph Construction With Large Language Models, Yongheng Zhang, Tingwen Du, Yunshan Ma, Xiang Wang, Yi Xie, Guozheng Yang, Yuliang Lu, Ee‑Chien Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attack graph construction seeks to convert textual cyber threat intelligence (CTI) reports into structuredrepresentations, portraying the evolutionary traces of cyber attacks. Even though previous research hasproposed various methods to construct attack graphs, they generally suffer from limited generalizationcapability to diverse knowledge types as well as requirement of expertise in model design and tuning.Addressing these limitations, we seek to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs), which have achieved enormoussuccess in a broad range of tasks given exceptional capabilities in both language understanding and zeroshot task fulfillment. Thus, we propose a fully automatic LLM-based framework to construct attack graphsnamed: AttacKG+. Our framework consists …

Understanding The Oss Communities Of Deep Learning Frameworks: A Comparative Case Study Of Pytorch And Tensorflow, Yunqi Chen, Zhiyuan Wan, Yifei Zhuang, Ning Liu, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past two decades, deep learning has received tremendous success in developing software systems across various domains. Deep learning frameworks have been proposed to facilitate the development of such software systems, among which, PyTorch and TensorFlow stand out as notable examples. Considerable attention focuses on exploring software engineering practices and addressing diverse technical aspects in developing and deploying deep learning frameworks and software systems. Despite these efforts, little is known about the open source software communities involved in the development of deep learning frameworks. In this article, we perform a comparative investigation into the open source software communities of …

Respear: Earable-Based Robust Respiratory Rate Monitoring, Yang Liu, Kayla-Jade Butkow, Jake Stuchbury-Wass, Adam Pullin, Dong Ma, Cecilia Masolo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Respiratory rate (RR) monitoring is integral to understanding physical and mental health and tracking fitness. Existing studies have demonstrated the feasibility of RR monitoring under specific user conditions (e.g., while remaining still, or while breathing heavily). Yet, performing accurate, continuous and non-obtrusive RR monitoring across diverse daily routines and activities remains challenging. In this work, we present RespEar, an earable-based system for robust RR monitoring. By leveraging the unique properties of in-ear microphones in earbuds, RespEar enables the use of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) and Locomotor Respiratory Coupling (LRC), physiological couplings between cardiovascular activity, gait and respiration, to indirectly determine …

Improving Multimodal Human Pose Estimation By Adversarial Modality Enhancement, Jiangnan Xia, Qilong Wu, Yanyin Guo, Yi Li, Jianghan Cheng, Junwei Li, Zhiyuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human pose estimation in computer vision predominantly focuses on the visible modality, with limited research on the infrared modality. No existing methods demonstrate robust performance across both modalities, missing their complementary strengths. This gap arises from the lack of a multimodal benchmark and the difficulty of developing robust multimodal capabilities. To address this, we introduce MMPD, a novel visible-infrared multimodal pose benchmark with high-quality annotations for both modalities. Leveraging MMPD, we expose the limitations of state-of-the-art methods due to modality variance. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel method-agnostic scheme called AMMPE. By employing the Modality Adversarial Enhancement Stage …

Forward-Secure Hierarchical Delegable Signature For Smart Homes, Jianfei Sun, Guowen Xu, Yang Yang, Xuehuan Yang, Xiaoguo Li, Cong Wu, Zhen Liu, Guomin Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aiming to provide people with great convenience and comfort, smart home systems have been deployed in thousands of homes. In this paper, we focus on handling the security and privacy issues in such a promising system by customizing a new cryptographic primitive to provide the following security guarantees: (1) fine-grained, privacy-preserving authorization for smart home users and integrity protection of communication contents; (2) flexible self-sovereign permission delegation; (3) forward security of previous messages. To our knowledge, no previous system has been designed to consider these three security and privacy requirements simultaneously. To tackle these challenges, we put forward the first-ever …

Neurovig: Integrating Event Cameras For Resource-Efficient Video Grounding, Dulanga Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Joo Hwee Lim, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) - the task of identifying the target object in the field-of-view that the language instruction refers to - is a fundamental vision-language task. Current STVG approaches typically utilize feeds from an RGB camera that is assumed to be always-on and process the video frames using complex neural network pipelines. As a result they often impose prohibitive system overheads (energy latency) on pervasive devices. To address this we propose NeuroViG with two key innovations: (a) leveraging on event streams from a low-power neuromorphic event camera sensor to perform selective triggering of the more energy-hungry RGB camera for …

Revisiting Sentiment Analysis For Software Engineering In The Era Of Large Language Models, Ting Zhang, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Thung Ferdian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development involves collaborative interactions where stakeholders express opinions across various platforms. Recognizing the sentiments conveyed in these interactions is crucial for the effective development and ongoing maintenance of software systems. For software products, analyzing the sentiment of user feedback, e.g., reviews, comments, and forum posts can provide valuable insights into user satisfaction and areas for improvement. This can guide the development of future updates and features. However, accurately identifying sentiments in software engineering datasets remains challenging.This study investigates bigger large language models (bLLMs) in addressing the labeled data shortage that hampers fine-tuned smaller large language models (sLLMs) in software …

Imageinthat: Manipulating Images To Convey User Instructions To Robots, Karthik Mahadevan, Blaine Lewis, Jiannan Li, Bilge Mutlu, Anthony Tang, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Foundation models are rapidly improving the capability of robots in performing everyday tasks autonomously such as meal preparation, yet robots will still need to be instructed by humans due to model performance, the difficulty of capturing user preferences, and the need for user agency. Robots can be instructed using various methods---natural language conveys immediate instructions but can be abstract or ambiguous, whereas end-user programming supports longer-horizon tasks but interfaces face difficulties in capturing user intent. In this work, we propose using direct manipulation of images as an alternative paradigm to instruct robots, and introduce a specific instantiation called ImageInThat which …

Varium: Variational Autoencoder For Multi-Interest Representation With Inter-User Memory, Nhu Thuat Tran, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Frameworks for discovering multiple user interest factors based on Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) has demonstrated competitive recommendation performance. However, as VAE only considers one user as input at a time, sharing across like-minded users may not be adequately facilitated. Moreover, interest sharing between users is not always available and thus, poses a challenge for VAE to explicitly model this information. To resolve this, we introduce an inter-user memory-based mechanism to unsupervisedly discover latent interest sharing between users under VAE framework. Concretely, we design a memory including an array of prototypes, each hypothetically representing a group of users sharing a particular interest. …

Multi-Uav Reconnaissance Mission Planning Via Deep Reinforcement Learning With Simulated Annealing, Mingfeng Fan, Huan Liu, Guohua Wu, Aldy Gunawan, Guillaume Sartoretti

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in reconnaissance missions due to their autonomy and flexibility. Efficient mission planning for multiple UAVs is crucial for tasks such as traffic monitoring and data collection. However, existing approaches to multi-UAV reconnaissance mission planning problem (MURMPP) often struggle with high computational demands, leading to suboptimal solutions. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a divide-and-conquer framework that splits the problem into two phases: target allocation and UAV routing, effectively reducing computational complexity. Specifically, we propose a hybrid method, SA-NNO-DRL, which combines the nearest neighbor optima-based deep reinforcement learning (NNO-DRL) approach with simulated annealing (SA). …

Retrieval Augmented Recipe Generation, Guoshan Liu, Hailong Yin, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growing interest in generating recipes from food images has drawn substantial research attention in recent years. Existing works for recipe generation primarily utilize a two-stage training method—first predicting ingredients from a food image and then generating instructions from both the image and ingredients. Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), which have achieved notable success across a variety of vision and language tasks, shed light on generating both ingredients and instructions directly from images. Nevertheless, LMMs still face the common issue of hallu- cinations during recipe generation, leading to suboptimal performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a retrieval augmented large multimodal …

Graph Foundation Models: Concepts, Opportunities And Challenges, Jiawei Liu, Cheng Yang, Zhiyuan Lu, Junze Chen, Yibo Li, Mengmei Zhang, Ting Bai, Fang Yuan, Lichao Sun, Philip S. Yu, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Foundation models have emerged as critical components in a variety of artificial intelligence applications, and showcase significant success in natural language processing and several other domains. Meanwhile, the field of graph machine learning is witnessing a paradigm transition from shallow methods to more sophisticated deep learning approaches. The capabilities of foundation models in generalization and adaptation motivate graph machine learning researchers to discuss the potential of developing a new graph learning paradigm. This paradigm envisions models that are pre-trained on extensive graph data and can be adapted for various graph tasks. Despite this burgeoning interest, there is a noticeable lack …

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Trajectory Classification, Ze Gong, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints at each time step (derived from global cost constraints) and this can result in either overly conservative policies or violation of safety constraints. In this paper, we propose to learn a policy that generates desirable trajectories and avoids undesirable trajectories. To be specific, we first partition the pre-collected dataset of state-action trajectories into desirable and undesirable subsets. Intuitively, the desirable set contains high reward and …

Enhancing Item‑Level Bundle Representation For Bundle Recommendation, Xiaoyu Du, Kun Qian, Yunshan Ma, Xinguang Xiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bundle recommendation approaches offer users a set of related items on a particular topic. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method utilizes contrastive learning to learn representations at both the bundle and item levels. However, due to the inherent difference between the bundle-level and item-level preferences, the item-level representations may not receive sufficient information from the bundle affiliations to make accurate predictions. In this article, we propose a novel approach, Enhanced Bundle Recommendation (EBRec), which incorporates two enhanced modules to explore inherent item-level bundle representations. First, we propose to incorporate the bundle-user-item (B-U-I) high-order correlations to explore more collaborative information, thus to …

Enhanced Sample Selection With Confidence Tracking: Identifying Correctly Labeled Yet Hard-To-Learn Samples In Noisy Data, Weiran Pan, Wei Wei, Feida Zhu, Yong Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a novel sample selection method for image classification in the presence of noisy labels. Existing methods typically consider small-loss samples as correctly labeled. However, some correctly labeled samples are inherently difficult for the model to learn and can exhibit high loss similar to mislabeled samples in the early stages of training. Consequently, setting a threshold on per-sample loss to select correct labels results in a trade-off between precision and recall in sample selection: a lower threshold may miss many correctly labeled hard-to-learn samples (low recall), while a higher threshold may include many mislabeled samples (low precision). To address …

Gender Biases Within Artificial Intelligence And Chatgpt: Evidence, Sources Of Biases, And Solutions, Qi Hui Jerlyn Ho, Andree Hartanto, Andrew Koh, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various sectors has introduced significant benefits, but also raised concerns over biases, particularly in relation to gender. Despite AI's potential to enhance sectors like healthcare, education, and business, it often mirrors reality and its societal prejudices and can manifest itself through unequal treatment in hiring decisions, academic recommendations, or healthcare diagnostics, systematically disadvantaging women. This paper explores how AI systems and chatbots, notably ChatGPT, can perpetuate gender biases due to inherent flaws in training data, algorithms, and user feedback loops. This problem stems from several sources, including biased training datasets, algorithmic design …

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

Enhancing Virtual Reality Usability With A Ml Based Dynamic Adaptive System, Ananth Ramaseri-Chandra, Hassan Reza

Computer Science Posters and Presentations

Virtual reality (VR) holds tremendous potential, but cybersickness degrades the user experience. Since individuals vary, a one-size-fits-all design is insufficient. Our work introduces a dynamic adaptive system that personalizes VR experiences by learning individual cybersickness profiles from head-tracking data and sickness questionnaires while adjusting settings such as field of view and foveated rendering strength. Early results show that our system reduces post-exposure sickness scores, enhancing the user experience and highlighting the importance of personalizing VR.

Provable Security In Idealised Models, Chandranan Dhar

Doctoral Theses

This thesis is a compilation of provable security analyses of various cryptographic constructions in idealised models. The first construction examined is the ABR hash. We revisit the existing proof of the ABR hash in the random oracle model and identify significant errors in the proof. Although we are unable to correct the original proof, we establish the security of the ABR tree of height 3 from scratch, addressing the first non-trivial case. As our second contribution, we conduct a tight and comprehensive security analysis of the Ascon AEAD mode in the random permutation model. We show that the efficiency of …

A Standardized Methodology For Evaluating A Digital Badging System [ Data Package ], Benjamin T. Pederson, Mark G. Reith, Ralucca Gera, David S. Long, Edward D. White, Jonathan Zemmer

Faculty Publications

Digital badges, a form of micro-credentials, have grown in popularity over the past decade. However, few standard processes exist to assess the potential of digital badging systems within an organization. This study proposes a generalizable methodology for comparing a badging system with other methods of recording skills and competencies. The experimental design is tested using the military's cyber operations community as the target organization. Finally, mixed-method data from thirty-six participants is analyzed in accordance with the methodology. Based on the results, digital badging systems are perceived to be more valuable and usable than a current method of military talent management. …

What's The Art In Artificial Intelligence?, Emily Verla Bovino

Open Educational Resources

This workbook learns from Black and Indigenous artists working with Artificial Intelligence to confront issues of ethics and aesthetics in its technologies. It features guided learning activities with links to publicly available video lectures and online articles, and includes options for experiential learning through both a tutorial in Midjourney and a visit to the public art collection at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Featured artists include: American Artist, Rizvana Bradley, Beth Coleman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Kite, Sondra Perry, Mimi Onuoha and Alisha B. Wormsley. Works by Martin Puryear and Maren Hassinger are explored in the Midjourney exercise.

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Stochastic Gradient Descent-Based Inference For Dynamic Network Models With Attractors, Hancong Pan, Xiaojing Zhu, Cantay Caliskan, Dino P. Christenson, Konstantinos Spiliopoulos, Dylan Walker, Eric D. Kolaczyk

Business Faculty Articles and Research

In Coevolving Latent Space Networks with Attractors (CLSNA) models, nodes in a latent space represent social actors, and edges indicate their dynamic interactions. Attractors are added at the latent level to capture the notion of attractive and repulsive forces between nodes, borrowing from dynamical systems theory. However, CLSNA reliance on MCMC estimation makes scaling difficult, and the requirement for nodes to be present throughout the study period limit practical applications. We address these issues by (i) introducing a Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) parameter estimation method, (ii) developing a novel approach for uncertainty quantification using SGD, and (iii) extending the model …

Exploring The Feasibility Of Head‐Tracking Data For Cybersickness Prediction In Virtual Reality, Ananth Ramaseri-Chandra, Hassan Reza, Prasad Pothana

Graduate Research Achievement Day Posters

Traditional methods for predicting cybersickness rely on self-reported questionnaires or physiological signals from specialized sensors, which have their limitations. This study explores the potential of using real-time, easily acquired head-tracking data (HTD) from standard VR headsets as a scalable alternative for estimating cybersickness. Twenty-eight participants engaged in a VR session using an Oculus Quest 2 headset while their HTD was recorded. Kinematic metrics such as linear and angular velocity, acceleration, and jerk were computed from the HTD, including positional and angular parameters. Participants’ cybersickness levels were assessed using the Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire. The Gradient Boosting model demonstrated superior performance, …

Modeling And Evaluation Of False Data Injection Attacks (Fdia) In Der Inverters, Tanzim Jim Hassan, Akshay Ram Ramchandra, Farishta Rahman, Prakash Ranganathan

Graduate Research Achievement Day Posters

This poster develops and evaluates false data injection attack (FDIA) models to enhance the cybersecurity of distributed energy resources (DER) solar inverters using real-time frequency data from two Fronius single-phase inverters. Fifteen datasets with unique attack patterns were developed and analyzed using machine learning models, where the most challenging anomaly (V3) had F1 scores between 0.425 and 0.76, while the most detectable (V1) achieved up to 0.895. These findings contribute to improving anomaly detection mechanisms for securing distributed energy resources (DER) and ensuring grid stability.