With an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices present in homes, there is a rise in the number of potential information leakage channels and their associated security threats and privacy risks. Despite a long history of attacks on IoT devices in unprotected home networks, the problem of accurate, rapid detection and prevention of such attacks remains open. Many existing IoT protection solutions are cloud-based, sometimes ineffective, and might share consumer data with unknown third parties. This paper investigates the potential for effective IoT threat detection locally, on a home router, using AI tools combined with classic rule-based traffic-filtering algorithms. Our results show that with a slight rise of router hardware resources caused by machine learning and traffic filtering logic, a typical home router instrumented with our solution is able to effectively detect risks and protect a typical home IoT network, equaling or outperforming existing popular solutions, without any effects on benign IoT functionality, and without relying on cloud services and third parties.
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items' semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumbersome training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.
Although recent mainstream waveform-domain end-to-end (E2E) neural audio codecs achieve impressive coded audio quality with a very low bitrate, the quality gap between the coded and natural audio is still significant. A generative adversarial network (GAN) training is usually required for these E2E neural codecs because of the difficulty of direct phase modeling. However, such adversarial learning hinders these codecs from preserving the original phase information. To achieve human-level naturalness with a reasonable bitrate, preserve the original phase, and get rid of the tricky and opaque GAN training, we develop a score-based diffusion post-filter (SPF) in the complex spectral domain and combine our previous AudioDec with the SPF to propose ScoreDec, which can be trained using only spectral and score-matching losses. Both the objective and subjective experimental results show that ScoreDec with a 24~kbps bitrate encodes and decodes full-band 48~kHz speech with human-level naturalness and well-preserved phase information.
The main objective of an Information Retrieval system is to provide a user with the most relevant documents to the user's query. To do this, modern IR systems typically deploy a re-ranking pipeline in which a set of documents is retrieved by a lightweight first-stage retrieval process and then re-ranked by a more effective but expensive model. However, the success of a re-ranking pipeline is heavily dependent on the performance of the first stage retrieval, since new documents are not usually identified during the re-ranking stage. Moreover, this can impact the amount of exposure that a particular group of documents, such as documents from a particular demographic group, can receive in the final ranking. For example, the fair allocation of exposure becomes more challenging or impossible if the first stage retrieval returns too few documents from certain groups, since the number of group documents in the ranking affects the exposure more than the documents' positions. With this in mind, it is beneficial to predict the amount of exposure that a group of documents is likely to receive in the results of the first stage retrieval process, in order to ensure that there are a sufficient number of documents included from each of the groups. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of query exposure prediction (QEP). Specifically, we propose the first approach for predicting the distribution of exposure that groups of documents will receive for a given query. Our new approach, called GEP, uses lexical information from individual groups of documents to estimate the exposure the groups will receive in a ranking. Our experiments on the TREC 2021 and 2022 Fair Ranking Track test collections show that our proposed GEP approach results in exposure predictions that are up to 40 % more accurate than the predictions of adapted existing query performance prediction and resource allocation approaches.
Predicting Click-Through Rate (CTR) in billion-scale recommender systems poses a long-standing challenge for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) due to the overwhelming computational complexity involved in aggregating billions of neighbors. To tackle this, GNN-based CTR models usually sample hundreds of neighbors out of the billions to facilitate efficient online recommendations. However, sampling only a small portion of neighbors results in a severe sampling bias and the failure to encompass the full spectrum of user or item behavioral patterns. To address this challenge, we name the conventional user-item recommendation graph as "micro recommendation graph" and introduce a more suitable MAcro Recommendation Graph (MAG) for billion-scale recommendations. MAG resolves the computational complexity problems in the infrastructure by reducing the node count from billions to hundreds. Specifically, MAG groups micro nodes (users and items) with similar behavior patterns to form macro nodes. Subsequently, we introduce tailored Macro Graph Neural Networks (MacGNN) to aggregate information on a macro level and revise the embeddings of macro nodes. MacGNN has already served Taobao's homepage feed for two months, providing recommendations for over one billion users. Extensive offline experiments on three public benchmark datasets and an industrial dataset present that MacGNN significantly outperforms twelve CTR baselines while remaining computationally efficient. Besides, online A/B tests confirm MacGNN's superiority in billion-scale recommender systems.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) mimic the information-processing mechanisms of the human brain and are highly energy-efficient, making them well-suited for low-power edge devices. However, the pursuit of accuracy in current studies leads to large, long-timestep SNNs, conflicting with the resource constraints of these devices. In order to design lightweight and efficient SNNs, we propose a new approach named LitESNN that incorporates both spatial and temporal compression into the automated network design process. Spatially, we present a novel Compressive Convolution block (CompConv) to expand the search space to support pruning and mixed-precision quantization while utilizing the shared weights and pruning mask to reduce the computation. Temporally, we are the first to propose a compressive timestep search to identify the optimal number of timesteps under specific computation cost constraints. Finally, we formulate a joint optimization to simultaneously learn the architecture parameters and spatial-temporal compression strategies to achieve high performance while minimizing memory and computation costs. Experimental results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Google Speech Command datasets demonstrate our proposed LitESNNs can achieve competitive or even higher accuracy with remarkably smaller model sizes and fewer computation costs. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our LitESNN on the trade-off between accuracy and resource cost and show the superiority of our joint optimization. Additionally, we conduct energy analysis to further confirm the energy efficiency of LitESNN
Terms of Service (ToS) form an integral part of any agreement as it defines the legal relationship between a service provider and an end-user. Not only do they establish and delineate reciprocal rights and responsibilities, but they also provide users with information on essential aspects of contracts that pertain to the use of digital spaces. These aspects include a wide range of topics, including limitation of liability, data protection, etc. Users tend to accept the ToS without going through it before using any application or service. Such ignorance puts them in a potentially weaker situation in case any action is required. Existing methodologies for the detection or classification of unfair clauses are however obsolete and show modest performance. In this research paper, we present SOTA(State of The Art) results on unfair clause detection from ToS documents based on unprecedented custom BERT Fine-tuning in conjunction with SVC(Support Vector Classifier). The study shows proficient performance with a macro F1-score of 0.922 at unfair clause detection, and superior performance is also shown in the classification of unfair clauses by each tag. Further, a comparative analysis is performed by answering research questions on the Transformer models utilized. In order to further research and experimentation the code and results are made available on https://github.com/batking24/Unfair-TOS-An-Automated-Approach-based-on-Fine-tuning-BERT-in-conjunction-with-ML.
Talking face synthesis driven by audio is one of the current research hotspots in the fields of multidimensional signal processing and multimedia. Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has recently been brought to this research field in order to enhance the realism and 3D effect of the generated faces. However, most existing NeRF-based methods either burden NeRF with complex learning tasks while lacking methods for supervised multimodal feature fusion, or cannot precisely map audio to the facial region related to speech movements. These reasons ultimately result in existing methods generating inaccurate lip shapes. This paper moves a portion of NeRF learning tasks ahead and proposes a talking face synthesis method via NeRF with attention-based disentanglement (NeRF-AD). In particular, an Attention-based Disentanglement module is introduced to disentangle the face into Audio-face and Identity-face using speech-related facial action unit (AU) information. To precisely regulate how audio affects the talking face, we only fuse the Audio-face with audio feature. In addition, AU information is also utilized to supervise the fusion of these two modalities. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our NeRF-AD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generating realistic talking face videos, including image quality and lip synchronization. To view video results, please refer to https://xiaoxingliu02.github.io/NeRF-AD.
Interactive Video Object Segmentation (iVOS) is a challenging task that requires real-time human-computer interaction. To improve the user experience, it is important to consider the user's input habits, segmentation quality, running time and memory consumption.However, existing methods compromise user experience with single input mode and slow running speed. Specifically, these methods only allow the user to interact with one single frame, which limits the expression of the user's intent.To overcome these limitations and better align with people's usage habits, we propose a framework that can accept multiple frames simultaneously and explore synergistic interaction across frames (SIAF). Concretely, we designed the Across-Frame Interaction Module that enables users to annotate different objects freely on multiple frames. The AFI module will migrate scribble information among multiple interactive frames and generate multi-frame masks. Additionally, we employ the id-queried mechanism to process multiple objects in batches. Furthermore, for a more efficient propagation and lightweight model, we design a truncated re-propagation strategy to replace the previous multi-round fusion module, which employs an across-round memory that stores important interaction information. Our SwinB-SIAF achieves new state-of-the-art performance on DAVIS 2017 (89.6%, J&F@60). Moreover, our R50-SIAF is more than 3 faster than the state-of-the-art competitor under challenging multi-object scenarios.
A vast amount of user behavior data is constantly accumulating on today's large recommendation platforms, recording users' various interests and tastes. Preserving knowledge from the old data while new data continually arrives is a vital problem for recommender systems. Existing approaches generally seek to save the knowledge implicitly in the model parameters. However, such a parameter-centric approach lacks scalability and flexibility -- the capacity is hard to scale, and the knowledge is inflexible to utilize. Hence, in this work, we propose a framework that turns massive user behavior data to retrievable knowledge (D2K). It is a data-centric approach that is model-agnostic and easy to scale up. Different from only storing unary knowledge such as the user-side or item-side information, D2K propose to store ternary knowledge for recommendation, which is determined by the complete recommendation factors -- user, item, and context. The knowledge retrieved by target samples can be directly used to enhance the performance of any recommendation algorithms. Specifically, we introduce a Transformer-based knowledge encoder to transform the old data into knowledge with the user-item-context cross features. A personalized knowledge adaptation unit is devised to effectively exploit the information from the knowledge base by adapting the retrieved knowledge to the target samples. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that D2K significantly outperforms existing baselines and is compatible with a major collection of recommendation algorithms.