Computer Sciences Commons^™

Optimization Of Customer Service And Driver Dispatch Areas For On-Demand Food Delivery, Jingfeng Yang, Hoong Chuin Lau, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile and wireless communication technologies, on-demand food delivery (OFD) platforms have been able to connect restaurants, customers, and drivers in real time, drastically changing dining and food delivery services. Motivated by the critical need for supply and demand management in the on-demand food delivery market, we focus on the optimization of customer service area and driver dispatch area for on-demand food delivery services. Specifically, for each restaurant, the platform needs to decide the (1) customer service area (CSA), i.e., the surrounding area within which customers can see the restaurant’s information and order food …

Gradient Wild Bootstrap For Instrumental Variable Quantile Regressions With Weak And Few Clusters, Wenjie Wang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the gradient wild bootstrap-based inference for instrumental variable quantile regressions in the framework of a small number of large clusters in which the number of clusters is viewed as fixed, and the number of observations for each cluster diverges to infinity. For the Wald inference, we show that our wild bootstrap Wald test, with or without studentization using the cluster-robust covariance estimator (CRVE), controls size asymptotically up to a small error as long as the parameter of endogenous variable is strongly identified in at least one of the clusters. We further show that the wild bootstrap Wald test …

White Light Specular Reflection Data Augmentation For Polyp Detection, Jose Angel Nunez

Theses and Dissertations

Colorectal cancer is among the deadliest cancers, but fortunately, this type of cancer can be prevented. The best current method of prevention is via detecting the bad polyps in the colon in time. Furthermore, the best method we have available to detect these bad polyps is through colonoscopies. Even though a lot of lives have been saved via these methods, it is still not perfect because of human error. Integrating artificial intelligence into colonoscopy procedures is our next evolution in increasing our prevention of colorectal cancer. Polyp detectors are one of the tools brought by advancements in technology that may …

Comparative Analysis Of Transfer Learning Strategies For Polyp Detection In Colonoscopy Images Using Yolov8, Fabian Vazquez Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The early detection of polyps during colonoscopy procedures is crucial for preventing colorectal cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. Traditional methods for polyp detection are often time-consuming and prone to human error. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of transfer learning, the process of taking a pre-trained model that was trained on a large dataset and adapting it to a new, but related task, requiring less data and time for training. This research compares whether the YOLOv8 model trained from scratch on a specific polyp dataset is outperformed by transfer learning methods such as utilizing a pretrained model on …

Enabling Iov Communication Through Secure Decentralized Clustering Using Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning, Chandler Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) holds immense potential for revolutionizing transporta- tion systems by facilitating seamless vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. However, challenges such as congestion, pollution, and security per- sist, particularly in rural areas with limited infrastructure. Existing centralized solu- tions are impractical in such environments due to latency and privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we propose a decentralized clustering algorithm enhanced with Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL). Our approach enables low- latency communication, competitive packet delivery ratios, and cluster stability while preserving data privacy. Additionally, we introduce a trust-based security framework for IoV environments, integrating a central authority …

Context-Aware Self-Supervised Learning Of Whole Slide Images, Milam Aryal, Nasim Yahyasoltani

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Presenting whole slide images (WSIs) as graph will enable a more efficient and accurate learning framework for cancer diagnosis. Due to the fact that a single WSI consists of billions of pixels and there is a lack of vast annotated datasets required for computational pathology, the problem of learning from WSIs using typical deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural network (CNN) is challenging. Additionally, WSIs downsampling may lead to the loss of data that is essential for cancer detection. A novel two-stage learning technique is presented in this work. Since context, such as topological features in the tumor surroundings, …

Robust Asynchronous Federated Learning With Time-Weighted And Stale Model Aggregation, Yinbin Miao, Ziteng Liu, Xinghua Li, Meng Li, Hongwei Li, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Federated Learning (FL) ensures collaborative learning among multiple clients while maintaining data locally. However, the traditional synchronous FL solutions have lower accuracy and require more communication time in scenarios where most devices drop out during learning. Therefore, we propose an Asynchronous Federated Learning (AsyFL) scheme using time-weighted and stale model aggregation, which effectively solves the problem of poor model performance due to the heterogeneity of devices. Then, we integrate Symmetric Homomorphic Encryption (SHE) into AsyFL to propose Asynchronous Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (Asy-PPFL), which protects the privacy of clients and achieves lightweight computing. Privacy analysis shows that Asy-PPFL is indistinguishable under …

Planning Like Human : A Dual-Process Framework For Dialogue Planning, Tao He, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Yuanxing Liu, Ming Liu, Zerui Chen, Bing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In proactive dialogue, the challenge lies not just in generating responses but in steering conversations toward predetermined goals, a task where Large Language Models (LLMs) typically struggle due to their reactive nature. Traditional approaches to enhance dialogue planning in LLMs, ranging from elaborate prompt engineering to the integration of policy networks, either face efficiency issues or deliver suboptimal performance. Inspired by the dual-process theory in psychology, which identifies two distinct modes of thinking—intuitive (fast) and analytical (slow), we propose the Dual-Process Dialogue Planning (DPDP) framework. DPDP embodies this theory through two complementary planning systems: an instinctive policy model for familiar …

A Multimodal Foundation Agent For Financial Trading : Tool-Augmented, Diversified, And Generalist, Wentao Zhang, Lingxuan Zhao, Haochong Xia, Shuo Sun, Jiaze Sun, Molei Qin, Xinyi Li, Yuqing Zhao, Yilei Zhao, Xinyu Cai, Longtao Zheng, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Financial trading is a crucial component of the markets, informed by a multimodal information landscape encompassing news, prices, and Kline charts, and encompasses diverse tasks such as quantitative trading and high-frequency trading with various assets. While advanced AI techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning are extensively utilized in finance, their application in financial trading tasks often faces challenges due to inadequate handling of multimodal data and limited generalizability across various tasks. To address these challenges, we present FinAgent, a multimodal foundational agent with tool augmentation for financial trading. FinAgent's market intelligence module processes a diverse range of data-numerical, textual, …

Topic Modeling On Document Networks With Dirichlet Optimal Transport Barycenter, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text documents are often interconnected in a network structure, e.g., academic papers via citations, Web pages via hyperlinks. On the one hand, though Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising ability to derive effective embeddings for such networked documents, they do not assume a latent topic structure and result in uninterpretable embeddings. On the other hand, topic models can infer semantically interpretable topic distributions for documents by associating each topic with a group of understandable key words. However, most topic models mainly focus on plain text within documents and fail to leverage network structure across documents. Network connectivity reveals topic …

Reinforcement Nash Equilibrium Solver, Xinrun Wang, Chang Yang, Shuxin Li, Pengdeng Li, Xiao Huang, Hau Chan, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nash Equilibrium (NE) is the canonical solution concept of game theory, which provides an elegant tool to understand the rationalities. Though mixed strategy NE exists in any game with finite players and actions, computing NE in two- or multi-player general-sum games is PPAD-Complete. Various alternative solutions, e.g., Correlated Equilibrium (CE), and learning methods, e.g., fictitious play (FP), are proposed to approximate NE. For convenience, we call these methods as "inexact solvers", or "solvers" for short. However, the alternative solutions differ from NE and the learning methods generally fail to converge to NE. Therefore, in this work, we propose REinforcement Nash …

An Llm-Assisted Easy-To-Trigger Poisoning Attack On Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities Against Strong Detection, Shenao Yan, Shen Wang, Yue Duan, Hanbin Hong, Kiho Lee, Doowon Kim, Yuan Hong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and backdoor attacks can covertly alter the model outputs. To address this critical security challenge, we introduce CODEBREAKER, a pioneering LLM-assisted backdoor attack framework on code completion models. Unlike recent attacks that embed malicious payloads in detectable or irrelevant sections of the code (e.g., comments), CODEBREAKER leverages LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) for sophisticated payload transformation (without affecting functionalities), ensuring that both the poisoned data for fine-tuning and generated code can evade strong …

Neural Network Semantic Backdoor Detection And Mitigation: A Causality-Based Approach, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Wayne Koh, Jie Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Different from ordinary backdoors in neural networks which are introduced with artificial triggers (e.g., certain specific patch) and/or by tampering the samples, semantic backdoors are introduced by simply manipulating the semantic, e.g., by labeling green cars as frogs in the training set. By focusing on samples with rare semantic features (such as green cars), the accuracy of the model is often minimally affected. Since the attacker is not required to modify the input sample during training nor inference time, semantic backdoors are challenging to detect and remove. Existing backdoor detection and mitigation techniques are shown to be ineffective with respect …

Self-Chats From Large Language Models Make Small Emotional Support Chatbot Better, Zhonghua Zheng, Lizi Liao, Yang Deng, Libo Qin, Liqiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong generalization abilities to excel in various tasks, including emotion support conversations. However, deploying such LLMs like GPT-3 (175B parameters) is resource-intensive and challenging at scale. In this study, we utilize LLMs as “Counseling Teacher” to enhance smaller models’ emotion support response abilities, significantly reducing the necessity of scaling up model size. To this end, we first introduce an iterative expansion framework, aiming to prompt the large teacher model to curate an expansive emotion support dialogue dataset. This curated dataset, termed ExTES, encompasses a broad spectrum of scenarios and is crafted with meticulous strategies …

Cross-Problem Learning For Solving Vehicle Routing Problems, Zhuoyi Lin, Yaoxin Wu, Bangjian Zhou, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Yingqian Zhang, Senthilnath Jayavelu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing neural heuristics often train a deep architecture from scratch for each specific vehicle routing problem (VRP), ignoring the transferable knowledge across different VRP variants. This paper proposes the cross-problem learning to assist heuristics training for different downstream VRP variants. Particularly, we modularize neural architectures for complex VRPs into 1) the backbone Transformer for tackling the travelling salesman problem (TSP), and 2) the additional lightweight modules for processing problem-specific features in complex VRPs. Accordingly, we propose to pre-train the backbone Transformer for TSP, and then apply it in the process of fine-tuning the Transformer models for each target VRP variant. …

Hierarchical Neural Constructive Solver For Real-World Tsp Scenarios, Yong Liang Goh, Zhiguang Cao, Yining Ma, Yanfei Dong, Mohammed Haroon Dupty, Wee Sun Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing neural constructive solvers for routing problems have predominantly employed transformer architectures, conceptualizing the route construction as a set-to-sequence learning task. However, their efficacy has primarily been demonstrated on entirely random problem instances that inadequately capture real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce realistic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) scenarios relevant to industrial settings and derive the following insights: (1) The optimal next node (or city) to visit often lies within proximity to the current node, suggesting the potential benefits of biasing choices based on current locations. (2) Effectively solving the TSP requires robust tracking of unvisited nodes and warrants succinct …

Peep With A Mirror: Breaking The Integrity Of Android App Sandboxing Via Unprivileged Cache Side Channel, Yan Lin, Joshua Wong, Xiang Li, Haoyu Ma, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Application sandboxing is a well-established security principle employed in the Android platform to safeguard sensitive information. However, hardware resources, specifically the CPU caches, are beyond the protection of this software-based mechanism, leaving room for potential side-channel attacks. Existing attacks against this particular weakness of app sandboxing mainly target shared components among apps, hence can only observe system-level program dynamics (such as UI tracing). In this work, we advance cache side-channel attacks by demonstrating the viability of non-intrusive and fine-grained probing across different app sandboxes, which have the potential to uncover app-specific and private program behaviors, thereby highlighting the importance of …

Enhancing Monthly Streamflow Prediction Using Meteorological Factors And Machine Learning Models In The Upper Colorado River Basin, Saichand Thota

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Understanding and predicting streamflow along river basins is vital for planning future developments and ensuring safety, especially with climate change challenges. Our study focused on forecasting streamflow at Lees Ferry, a key location along the Colorado River in the Upper Colorado River Basin. We employed four machine learning models - Random Forest Regression, Long short-term memory, Gated Recurrent Unit, and Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average; and combined historical streamflow data with meteorological factors such as snow water equivalent, temperature, and precipitation. Our analysis spanned 30 years of data from 1991 to 2020.

Our findings revealed that the Random Forest Regression …

Fishing Vessel Detection In Exclusive Economic Zones From Low Earth Orbit Satellites With Power And Computational Constraints, Kyler E. Nelson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Illegal fishing activities pose a significant threat to the sustainability of marine ecosystems and the economies and societies which rely on them. Detection of fishing vessels engaging in illegal activity is difficult, as many ships engaging in such activity actively avoid detection through radio systems used for maritime traffic monitoring. Satellite imagery provides a promising means for detecting fishing vessels, though designing an effective system is difficult due to limited availability of labeled image datasets of fishing vessels. This research proposes a system to detect illegal fishing activity through the use of a low-power ship detection satellite and proposes a …

Exploring The Integration Of Blockchain In Iot Use Cases: Challenges And Opportunities, Ivannah George

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Blockchain and The Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant paradigm which has gained traction in today’s digital age as two complimentary technologies. The combination of IoT's connectivity with blockchain's security creates new opportunities and solves problems associated with centralized systems. This culminating project aims to delve deeper into the integration of blockchain technology in IoT applications based on select use cases to uncover potential benefits and significant challenges of blockchain integration across different sectors. The research objectives to be addressed are: (RO1) How emerging vulnerabilities manifest in the implementation of blockchain within current IoT ecosystems. (RO2) How current opportunities …

Enhancing Cybersecurity For Unmanned Systems: A Comprehensive Literature Review, Jonathan Gabriel Mardoyan

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This culminating experience project addresses the pressing cybersecurity challenges encountered by unmanned autonomous vehicles. The research provides a comprehensive literature review on how hybrid encryption techniques can improve the security of its communication systems. The chosen research questions guiding this study are: (Q1) How can we enhance cybersecurity measures to safeguard the communication and transmission of sensitive data from unmanned systems, thereby preventing unauthorized access by malicious actors? (Q2) How can we ensure the confidentiality and integrity of messages exchanged with unmanned systems to a command-and-control center operating on the tactical edge? (Q3) How can hybrid encryption tackle the consumption …

Advancing Telehealth Through Artificial Intelligence: Incorporating Emotional Intelligence And Addressing Cybersecurity Challenges, Mahima Rajendra Pulgaonkar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This culminating experience project explores the integration of Emotional Artificial Intelligence (Emotional AI) into telehealth systems, addressing the dual challenges of enhancing patient care and mitigating cybersecurity risks. The research questions are: (Q1) How can Emotionally Intelligent AI improve telehealth systems' ability to recognize and respond to mental health symptoms? and (Q2) What are the specific cybersecurity challenges associated with AI in telehealth and how can they be mitigated? The findings for each question are: Q1: Emotionally Intelligent AI can significantly enhance telehealth by providing personalized, empathetic interactions that improve patient engagement, adherence to treatment plans, and early detection of …

High Prevalence Of Artifacts In Optical Coherence Tomography With Adequate Signal Strength, Wei-Chun Lin, Aaron Coyner, Charles Amankwa, Abigail Lucero, Gadi Wollstein, Joel Schuman, Hiroshi Ishikawa

Wills Eye Hospital Papers

PURPOSE: This study aims to investigate the prevalence of artifacts in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images with acceptable signal strength and evaluate the performance of supervised deep learning models in improving OCT image quality assessment.

METHODS: We conducted a retrospective study on 4555 OCT images from 546 patients, with each image having an acceptable signal strength (≥6). A comprehensive analysis of prevalent OCT artifacts was performed, and five pretrained convolutional neural network models were trained and tested to infer images based on quality.

RESULTS: Our results showed a high prevalence of artifacts in OCT images with acceptable signal strength. Approximately …

Path-Choice-Constrained Bus Bridging Design Under Urban Rail Transit Disruptions, Yiyang Zhu, Jian Gang Jin, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although urban rail transit systems play a crucial role in urban mobility, they frequently suffer from unexpected disruptions due to power loss, severe weather, equipment failure, and other factors that cause significant disruptions in passenger travel and, in turn, socioeconomic losses. To alleviate the inconvenience of affected passengers, bus bridging services are often provided when rail service has been suspended. Prior research has yielded various methodologies for effective bus bridging services; however, they are mainly based on the strong assumption that passengers must follow predetermined bus bridging routes. Less attention is paid to passengers’ path choice behaviors, which could affect …

Clamber: A Benchmark Of Identifying And Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs In Large Language Models, Tong Zhang, Peixin Qin, Yang Deng, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei, Junhong Liu, Dingnan Jin, Hongru Liang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown, ultimately risking user trust and satisfaction. To this end, we introduce CLAMBER, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs using a well-organized taxonomy. Building upon the taxonomy, we construct 12K high-quality data to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks of various off-the-shelf LLMs.Our findings indicate the limited practical utility of current LLMs in identifying and clarifying ambiguous user queries, even enhanced by chain-of-thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting. These techniques may result in overconfidence …

A New Hope: Contextual Privacy Policies For Mobile Applications And An Approach Toward Automated Generation, Shidong Pan, Zhen Tao, Thong Hoang, Dawen Zhang, Tianshi Li, Zhenchang Xing, Xiwei Xu, Mark Staples, Thierry Rakotoarivelo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy policies have emerged as the predominant approach to conveying privacy notices to mobile application users. In an effort to enhance both readability and user engagement, the concept of contextual privacy policies (CPPs) has been proposed by researchers. The aim of CPPs is to fragment privacy policies into concise snippets, displaying them only within the corresponding contexts within the application’s graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we first formulate CPP in mobile application scenario, and then present a novel multimodal framework, named SEEPRIVACY, specifically designed to automatically generate CPPs for mobile applications. This method uniquely integrates vision-based GUI understanding …

Empathyear : An Open-Source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot, Hao Fei, Han Zhang, Bin Wang, Lizi Liao, Qian Liu, Erik Cambria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces EmpathyEar, a pioneering open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot, to fill the gap in traditional text-only empathetic response generation (ERG) systems. Leveraging the advancements of a large language model, combined with multimodal encoders and generators, EmpathyEar supports user inputs in any combination of text, sound, and vision, and produces multimodal empathetic responses, offering users, not just textual responses but also digital avatars with talking faces and synchronized speeches. A series of emotion-aware instruction-tuning is performed for comprehensive emotional understanding and generation capabilities. In this way, EmpathyEar provides users with responses that achieve a deeper emotional resonance, closely emulating …

Analyzing Temporal Complex Events With Large Language Models? A Benchmark Towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding, Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Chenchen Ye, Ma. Yunshan, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The digital landscape is rapidly evolving with an ever-increasing volume of online news, emphasizing the need for swift and precise analysis of complex events.We refer to the complex events composed of many news articles over an extended period as Temporal Complex Event (TCE). This paper proposes a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically extract and analyze the event chain within TCE, characterized by their key points and timestamps. We establish a benchmark, named TCELongBench, to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in handling temporal dynamics and understanding extensive text. This benchmark encompasses three distinct tasks - reading comprehension, …

Larp: Language Audio Relational Pre‑Training For Cold‑Start Playlist Continuation, Rebecca Salganik, Xiaohao Liu, Yunshan Ma, Jian Kang, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As online music consumption increasingly shifts towards playlist-based listening, the task of playlist continuation, in which an algorithm suggests songs to extend a playlist in a personalized and musically cohesive manner, has become vital to the success of music streaming services. Currently, many existing playlist continuation approaches rely on collaborative filtering methods to perform their recommendations. However, such methods will struggle to recommend songs that lack interaction data, an issue known as the cold-start problem. Current approaches to this challenge design complex mechanisms for extracting relational signals from sparse collaborative signals and integrating them into content representations. However, these approaches …

Divergence Measures And Aggregation Operators For Single-Valued Neutrosophic Sets With Applications In Decision-Making Problems, Surender Singh, Sonam Sharma

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs) facilitate the representation of uncertain information more extensively than conventional methods. The study of divergence measures of SVNSs is important due to their applications in different areas like multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), pattern recognition, cluster analysis, machine learning, etc., In this paper, we introduce a divergence measure for SVNSs. The suggested divergence measure is applied to cluster analysis for the classification of imprecise data. For establishing the reasonability and advantage of the suggested divergence measure in a clustering problem over the existing measures, a comparative assessment is also presented. Furthermore, we introduce, an inferior ratio method for …