Business Process Text Sketch Automation Generation Using Large Language Model

Business Process Management (BPM) is gaining increasing attention as it has the potential to cut costs while boosting output and quality. Business process document generation is a crucial stage in BPM. However, due to a shortage of datasets, data-driven deep learning techniques struggle to deliver the expected results. We propose an approach to transform Conditional Process Trees (CPTs) into Business Process Text Sketches (BPTSs) using Large Language Models (LLMs). The traditional prompting approach (Few-shot In-Context Learning) tries to get the correct answer in one go, and it can find the pattern of transforming simple CPTs into BPTSs, but for close-domain and CPTs with complex hierarchy, the traditional prompts perform weakly and with low correctness. We suggest using this technique to break down a difficult CPT into a number of basic CPTs and then solve each one in turn, drawing inspiration from the divide-and-conquer strategy. We chose 100 process trees with depths ranging from 2 to 5 at random, as well as CPTs with many nodes, many degrees of selection, and cyclic nesting. Experiments show that our method can achieve a correct rate of 93.42%, which is 45.17% better than traditional prompting methods. Our proposed method provides a solution for business process document generation in the absence of datasets, and secondly, it becomes potentially possible to provide a large number of datasets for the process model extraction (PME) domain.

On the Opportunities and Challenges of Foundation Models for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

Large pre-trained models, also known as foundation models (FMs), are trained in a task-agnostic manner on large-scale data and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks by fine-tuning, few-shot, or even zero-shot learning. Despite their successes in language and vision tasks, we have yet seen an attempt to develop foundation models for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). In this work, we explore the promises and challenges of developing multimodal foundation models for GeoAI. We first investigate the potential of many existing FMs by testing their performances on seven tasks across multiple geospatial subdomains including Geospatial Semantics, Health Geography, Urban Geography, and Remote Sensing. Our results indicate that on several geospatial tasks that only involve text modality such as toponym recognition, location description recognition, and US state-level/county-level dementia time series forecasting, these task-agnostic LLMs can outperform task-specific fully-supervised models in a zero-shot or few-shot learning setting. However, on other geospatial tasks, especially tasks that involve multiple data modalities (e.g., POI-based urban function classification, street view image-based urban noise intensity classification, and remote sensing image scene classification), existing foundation models still underperform task-specific models. Based on these observations, we propose that one of the major challenges of developing a FM for GeoAI is to address the multimodality nature of geospatial tasks. After discussing the distinct challenges of each geospatial data modality, we suggest the possibility of a multimodal foundation model which can reason over various types of geospatial data through geospatial alignments. We conclude this paper by discussing the unique risks and challenges to develop such a model for GeoAI.

Factorized Inverse Path Tracing for Efficient and Accurate Material-Lighting Estimation

Inverse path tracing has recently been applied to joint material and lighting estimation, given geometry and multi-view HDR observations of an indoor scene. However, it has two major limitations: path tracing is expensive to compute, and ambiguities exist between reflection and emission. We propose a novel Factorized Inverse Path Tracing (FIPT) method which utilizes a factored light transport formulation and finds emitters driven by rendering errors. Our algorithm enables accurate material and lighting optimization faster than previous work, and is more effective at resolving ambiguities. The exhaustive experiments on synthetic scenes show that our method (1) outperforms state-of-the-art indoor inverse rendering and relighting methods particularly in the presence of complex illumination effects; (2) speeds up inverse path tracing optimization to less than an hour. We further demonstrate robustness to noisy inputs through material and lighting estimates that allow plausible relighting in a real scene. The source code is available at: https://github.com/lwwu2/fipt

EVKG: An Interlinked and Interoperable Electric Vehicle Knowledge Graph for Smart Transportation System

Over the past decade, the electric vehicle industry has experienced unprecedented growth and diversification, resulting in a complex ecosystem. To effectively manage this multifaceted field, we present an EV-centric knowledge graph (EVKG) as a comprehensive, cross-domain, extensible, and open geospatial knowledge management system. The EVKG encapsulates essential EV-related knowledge, including EV adoption, electric vehicle supply equipment, and electricity transmission network, to support decision-making related to EV technology development, infrastructure planning, and policy-making by providing timely and accurate information and analysis. To enrich and contextualize the EVKG, we integrate the developed EV-relevant ontology modules from existing well-known knowledge graphs and ontologies. This integration enables interoperability with other knowledge graphs in the Linked Data Open Cloud, enhancing the EVKG's value as a knowledge hub for EV decision-making. Using six competency questions, we demonstrate how the EVKG can be used to answer various types of EV-related questions, providing critical insights into the EV ecosystem. Our EVKG provides an efficient and effective approach for managing the complex and diverse EV industry. By consolidating critical EV-related knowledge into a single, easily accessible resource, the EVKG supports decision-makers in making informed choices about EV technology development, infrastructure planning, and policy-making. As a flexible and extensible platform, the EVKG is capable of accommodating a wide range of data sources, enabling it to evolve alongside the rapidly changing EV landscape.

Gradient Shaping: Enhancing Backdoor Attack Against Reverse Engineering

Most existing methods to detect backdoored machine learning (ML) models take one of the two approaches: trigger inversion (aka. reverse engineer) and weight analysis (aka. model diagnosis). In particular, the gradient-based trigger inversion is considered to be among the most effective backdoor detection techniques, as evidenced by the TrojAI competition, Trojan Detection Challenge and backdoorBench. However, little has been done to understand why this technique works so well and, more importantly, whether it raises the bar to the backdoor attack. In this paper, we report the first attempt to answer this question by analyzing the change rate of the backdoored model around its trigger-carrying inputs. Our study shows that existing attacks tend to inject the backdoor characterized by a low change rate around trigger-carrying inputs, which are easy to capture by gradient-based trigger inversion. In the meantime, we found that the low change rate is not necessary for a backdoor attack to succeed: we design a new attack enhancement called \textit{Gradient Shaping} (GRASP), which follows the opposite direction of adversarial training to reduce the change rate of a backdoored model with regard to the trigger, without undermining its backdoor effect. Also, we provide a theoretic analysis to explain the effectiveness of this new technique and the fundamental weakness of gradient-based trigger inversion. Finally, we perform both theoretical and experimental analysis, showing that the GRASP enhancement does not reduce the effectiveness of the stealthy attacks against the backdoor detection methods based on weight analysis, as well as other backdoor mitigation methods without using detection.

Selective Amnesia: On Efficient, High-Fidelity and Blind Suppression of Backdoor Effects in Trojaned Machine Learning Models

In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly effective technique to induce "selective amnesia" on a backdoored model. Our approach, called SEAM, has been inspired by the problem of catastrophic forgetting (CF), a long standing issue in continual learning. Our idea is to retrain a given DNN model on randomly labeled clean data, to induce a CF on the model, leading to a sudden forget on both primary and backdoor tasks; then we recover the primary task by retraining the randomized model on correctly labeled clean data. We analyzed SEAM by modeling the unlearning process as continual learning and further approximating a DNN using Neural Tangent Kernel for measuring CF. Our analysis shows that our random-labeling approach actually maximizes the CF on an unknown backdoor in the absence of triggered inputs, and also preserves some feature extraction in the network to enable a fast revival of the primary task. We further evaluated SEAM on both image processing and Natural Language Processing tasks, under both data contamination and training manipulation attacks, over thousands of models either trained on popular image datasets or provided by the TrojAI competition. Our experiments show that SEAM vastly outperforms the state-of-the-art unlearning techniques, achieving a high Fidelity (measuring the gap between the accuracy of the primary task and that of the backdoor) within a few minutes (about 30 times faster than training a model from scratch using the MNIST dataset), with only a small amount of clean data (0.1% of training data for TrojAI models).

Improving Multimodal Interactive Agents with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

An important goal in artificial intelligence is to create agents that can both interact naturally with humans and learn from their feedback. Here we demonstrate how to use reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to improve upon simulated, embodied agents trained to a base level of competency with imitation learning. First, we collected data of humans interacting with agents in a simulated 3D world. We then asked annotators to record moments where they believed that agents either progressed toward or regressed from their human-instructed goal. Using this annotation data we leveraged a novel method - which we call "Inter-temporal Bradley-Terry" (IBT) modelling - to build a reward model that captures human judgments. Agents trained to optimise rewards delivered from IBT reward models improved with respect to all of our metrics, including subsequent human judgment during live interactions with agents. Altogether our results demonstrate how one can successfully leverage human judgments to improve agent behaviour, allowing us to use reinforcement learning in complex, embodied domains without programmatic reward functions. Videos of agent behaviour may be found at https://youtu.be/v_Z9F2_eKk4.

Understanding Impacts of Task Similarity on Backdoor Attack and Detection

With extensive studies on backdoor attack and detection, still fundamental questions are left unanswered regarding the limits in the adversary's capability to attack and the defender's capability to detect. We believe that answers to these questions can be found through an in-depth understanding of the relations between the primary task that a benign model is supposed to accomplish and the backdoor task that a backdoored model actually performs. For this purpose, we leverage similarity metrics in multi-task learning to formally define the backdoor distance (similarity) between the primary task and the backdoor task, and analyze existing stealthy backdoor attacks, revealing that most of them fail to effectively reduce the backdoor distance and even for those that do, still much room is left to further improve their stealthiness. So we further design a new method, called TSA attack, to automatically generate a backdoor model under a given distance constraint, and demonstrate that our new attack indeed outperforms existing attacks, making a step closer to understanding the attacker's limits. Most importantly, we provide both theoretic results and experimental evidence on various datasets for the positive correlation between the backdoor distance and backdoor detectability, demonstrating that indeed our task similarity analysis help us better understand backdoor risks and has the potential to identify more effective mitigations.

Towards General-Purpose Representation Learning of Polygonal Geometries

Neural network representation learning for spatial data is a common need for geographic artificial intelligence (GeoAI) problems. In recent years, many advancements have been made in representation learning for points, polylines, and networks, whereas little progress has been made for polygons, especially complex polygonal geometries. In this work, we focus on developing a general-purpose polygon encoding model, which can encode a polygonal geometry (with or without holes, single or multipolygons) into an embedding space. The result embeddings can be leveraged directly (or finetuned) for downstream tasks such as shape classification, spatial relation prediction, and so on. To achieve model generalizability guarantees, we identify a few desirable properties: loop origin invariance, trivial vertex invariance, part permutation invariance, and topology awareness. We explore two different designs for the encoder: one derives all representations in the spatial domain; the other leverages spectral domain representations. For the spatial domain approach, we propose ResNet1D, a 1D CNN-based polygon encoder, which uses circular padding to achieve loop origin invariance on simple polygons. For the spectral domain approach, we develop NUFTspec based on Non-Uniform Fourier Transformation (NUFT), which naturally satisfies all the desired properties. We conduct experiments on two tasks: 1) shape classification based on MNIST; 2) spatial relation prediction based on two new datasets - DBSR-46K and DBSR-cplx46K. Our results show that NUFTspec and ResNet1D outperform multiple existing baselines with significant margins. While ResNet1D suffers from model performance degradation after shape-invariance geometry modifications, NUFTspec is very robust to these modifications due to the nature of the NUFT.

PhotoScene: Photorealistic Material and Lighting Transfer for Indoor Scenes

Most indoor 3D scene reconstruction methods focus on recovering 3D geometry and scene layout. In this work, we go beyond this to propose PhotoScene, a framework that takes input image(s) of a scene along with approximately aligned CAD geometry (either reconstructed automatically or manually specified) and builds a photorealistic digital twin with high-quality materials and similar lighting. We model scene materials using procedural material graphs; such graphs represent photorealistic and resolution-independent materials. We optimize the parameters of these graphs and their texture scale and rotation, as well as the scene lighting to best match the input image via a differentiable rendering layer. We evaluate our technique on objects and layout reconstructions from ScanNet, SUN RGB-D and stock photographs, and demonstrate that our method reconstructs high-quality, fully relightable 3D scenes that can be re-rendered under arbitrary viewpoints, zooms and lighting.