arXiv subjects

Mina Ghashami

Publications and source records attributed to Mina Ghashami.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Enhancing Security Control Production With Generative AI

Security controls are mechanisms or policies designed for cloud based services to reduce risk, protect information, and ensure compliance with security regulations. The development of security controls is traditionally a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. This paper explores the use of Generative AI to accelerate the generation of security controls. We specifically focus on generating Gherkin codes which are the domain-specific language used to define the behavior of security controls in a structured and understandable format. By leveraging large language models and in-context learning, we propose a structured framework that reduces the time required for developing security controls from 2-3 days to less than one minute. Our approach integrates detailed task descriptions, step-by-step instructions, and retrieval-augmented generation to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the generated Gherkin code. Initial evaluations on AWS cloud services demonstrate promising results, indicating that GenAI can effectively streamline the security control development process, thus providing a robust and dynamic safeguard for cloud-based infrastructures.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

HLogformer: A Hierarchical Transformer for Representing Log Data

Transformers have gained widespread acclaim for their versatility in handling diverse data structures, yet their application to log data remains underexplored. Log data, characterized by its hierarchical, dictionary-like structure, poses unique challenges when processed using conventional transformer models. Traditional methods often rely on manually crafted templates for parsing logs, a process that is labor-intensive and lacks generalizability. Additionally, the linear treatment of log sequences by standard transformers neglects the rich, nested relationships within log entries, leading to suboptimal representations and excessive memory usage. To address these issues, we introduce HLogformer, a novel hierarchical transformer framework specifically designed for log data. HLogformer leverages the hierarchical structure of log entries to significantly reduce memory costs and enhance representation learning. Unlike traditional models that treat log data as flat sequences, our framework processes log entries in a manner that respects their inherent hierarchical organization. This approach ensures comprehensive encoding of both fine-grained details and broader contextual relationships. Our contributions are threefold: First, HLogformer is the first framework to design a dynamic hierarchical transformer tailored for dictionary-like log data. Second, it dramatically reduces memory costs associated with processing extensive log sequences. Third, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that HLogformer more effectively encodes hierarchical contextual information, proving to be highly effective for downstream tasks such as synthetic anomaly detection and product recommendation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Augmenting Lateral Thinking in Language Models with Humor and Riddle Data for the BRAINTEASER Task

The SemEval 2024 BRAINTEASER task challenges language models to perform lateral thinking -- a form of creative, non-linear reasoning that remains underexplored in NLP. The task comprises two subtasks, Sentence Puzzle and Word Puzzle, requiring models to defy conventional commonsense associations. We present a system that fine-tunes DeBERTaV3 using HuggingFace's AutoModelForMultipleChoice architecture. We augment the provided training data with two additional sources: (1) a humor-style question-answering dataset generated via GPT-4 prompting, and (2) the RiddleSense dataset. This data augmentation strategy is motivated by the observation that humor and riddles share the lateral reasoning structure required by the task. Our best system achieves 92.5\% overall accuracy on the Sentence Puzzle subtask and 80.2\% on the Word Puzzle subtask, ranking 6th out of 31 teams and 10th out of 23 teams, respectively. We further show that the choice of task formulation matters: framing the problem as multiple-choice rather than sequence classification yields a 10-point accuracy improvement with the same base model. Our analysis reveals that data augmentation with humor and riddle data is particularly effective for sentence-level lateral reasoning, while word-level puzzles remain a harder challenge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Low-cost Relevance Generation and Evaluation Metrics for Entity Resolution in AI

Entity Resolution (ER) in voice assistants is a prime component during run time that resolves entities in users request to real world entities. ER involves two major functionalities 1. Relevance generation and 2. Ranking. In this paper we propose a low cost relevance generation framework by generating features using customer implicit and explicit feedback signals. The generated relevance datasets can serve as test sets to measure ER performance. We also introduce a set of metrics that accurately measures the performance of ER systems in various dimensions. They provide great interpretability to deep dive and identifying root cause of ER issues, whether the problem is in relevance generation or ranking.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Efficient Frequent Directions Algorithm for Sparse Matrices

This paper describes Sparse Frequent Directions, a variant of Frequent Directions for sketching sparse matrices. It resembles the original algorithm in many ways: both receive the rows of an input matrix $A^{n \times d}$ one by one in the streaming setting and compute a small sketch $B \in R^{\ell \times d}$. Both share the same strong (provably optimal) asymptotic guarantees with respect to the space-accuracy tradeoff in the streaming setting. However, unlike Frequent Directions which runs in $O(nd\ell)$ time regardless of the sparsity of the input matrix $A$, Sparse Frequent Directions runs in $\tilde{O} (nnz(A)\ell + n\ell^2)$ time. Our analysis loosens the dependence on computing the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as a black box within the Frequent Directions algorithm. Our bounds require recent results on the properties of fast approximate SVD computations. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that these asymptotic improvements are practical and significant on real and synthetic data.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2015

Streaming Kernel Principal Component Analysis

Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) provides a concise set of basis vectors which capture non-linear structures within large data sets, and is a central tool in data analysis and learning. To allow for non-linear relations, typically a full $n \times n$ kernel matrix is constructed over $n$ data points, but this requires too much space and time for large values of $n$. Techniques such as the Nyström method and random feature maps can help towards this goal, but they do not explicitly maintain the basis vectors in a stream and take more space than desired. We propose a new approach for streaming KPCA which maintains a small set of basis elements in a stream, requiring space only logarithmic in $n$, and also improves the dependence on the error parameter. Our technique combines together random feature maps with recent advances in matrix sketching, it has guaranteed spectral norm error bounds with respect to the original kernel matrix, and it compares favorably in practice to state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2015

Frequent Directions : Simple and Deterministic Matrix Sketching

We describe a new algorithm called Frequent Directions for deterministic matrix sketching in the row-updates model. The algorithm is presented an arbitrary input matrix $A \in R^{n \times d}$ one row at a time. It performed $O(d \times \ell)$ operations per row and maintains a sketch matrix $B \in R^{\ell \times d}$ such that for any $k < \ell$ $\|A^TA - B^TB \|_2 \leq \|A - A_k\|_F^2 / (\ell-k)$ and $\|A - π_{B_k}(A)\|_F^2 \leq \big(1 + \frac{k}{\ell-k}\big) \|A-A_k\|_F^2 $ . Here, $A_k$ stands for the minimizer of $\|A - A_k\|_F$ over all rank $k$ matrices (similarly $B_k$) and $π_{B_k}(A)$ is the rank $k$ matrix resulting from projecting $A$ on the row span of $B_k$. We show both of these bounds are the best possible for the space allowed. The summary is mergeable, and hence trivially parallelizable. Moreover, Frequent Directions outperforms exemplar implementations of existing streaming algorithms in the space-error tradeoff.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2015

Binary Coding in Stream

Big data is becoming ever more ubiquitous, ranging over massive video repositories, document corpuses, image sets and Internet routing history. Proximity search and clustering are two algorithmic primitives fundamental to data analysis, but suffer from the "curse of dimensionality" on these gigantic datasets. A popular attack for this problem is to convert object representations into short binary codewords, while approximately preserving near neighbor structure. However, there has been limited research on constructing codewords in the "streaming" or "online" settings often applicable to this scale of data, where one may only make a single pass over data too massive to fit in local memory. In this paper, we apply recent advances in matrix sketching techniques to construct binary codewords in both streaming and online setting. Our experimental results compete outperform several of the most popularly used algorithms, and we prove theoretical guarantees on performance in the streaming setting under mild assumptions on the data and randomness of the training set.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2015

Improved Practical Matrix Sketching with Guarantees

Matrices have become essential data representations for many large-scale problems in data analytics, and hence matrix sketching is a critical task. Although much research has focused on improving the error/size tradeoff under various sketching paradigms, the many forms of error bounds make these approaches hard to compare in theory and in practice. This paper attempts to categorize and compare most known methods under row-wise streaming updates with provable guarantees, and then to tweak some of these methods to gain practical improvements while retaining guarantees. For instance, we observe that a simple heuristic iSVD, with no guarantees, tends to outperform all known approaches in terms of size/error trade-off. We modify the best performing method with guarantees FrequentDirections under the size/error trade-off to match the performance of iSVD and retain its guarantees. We also demonstrate some adversarial datasets where iSVD performs quite poorly. In comparing techniques in the time/error trade-off, techniques based on hashing or sampling tend to perform better. In this setting we modify the most studied sampling regime to retain error guarantee but obtain dramatic improvements in the time/error trade-off. Finally, we provide easy replication of our studies on APT, a new testbed which makes available not only code and datasets, but also a computing platform with fixed environmental settings.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2014

Continuous Matrix Approximation on Distributed Data

Tracking and approximating data matrices in streaming fashion is a fundamental challenge. The problem requires more care and attention when data comes from multiple distributed sites, each receiving a stream of data. This paper considers the problem of "tracking approximations to a matrix" in the distributed streaming model. In this model, there are m distributed sites each observing a distinct stream of data (where each element is a row of a distributed matrix) and has a communication channel with a coordinator, and the goal is to track an eps-approximation to the norm of the matrix along any direction. To that end, we present novel algorithms to address the matrix approximation problem. Our algorithms maintain a smaller matrix B, as an approximation to a distributed streaming matrix A, such that for any unit vector x: | ||A x||^2 - ||B x||^2 | <= eps ||A||_F^2. Our algorithms work in streaming fashion and incur small communication, which is critical for distributed computation. Our best method is deterministic and uses only O((m/eps) log(beta N)) communication, where N is the size of stream (at the time of the query) and beta is an upper-bound on the squared norm of any row of the matrix. In addition to proving all algorithmic properties theoretically, extensive experiments with real large datasets demonstrate the efficiency of these protocols.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2013

Relative Errors for Deterministic Low-Rank Matrix Approximations

We consider processing an n x d matrix A in a stream with row-wise updates according to a recent algorithm called Frequent Directions (Liberty, KDD 2013). This algorithm maintains an l x d matrix Q deterministically, processing each row in O(d l^2) time; the processing time can be decreased to O(d l) with a slight modification in the algorithm and a constant increase in space. We show that if one sets l = k+ k/eps and returns Q_k, a k x d matrix that is the best rank k approximation to Q, then we achieve the following properties: ||A - A_k||_F^2 <= ||A||_F^2 - ||Q_k||_F^2 <= (1+eps) ||A - A_k||_F^2 and where pi_{Q_k}(A) is the projection of A onto the rowspace of Q_k then ||A - pi_{Q_k}(A)||_F^2 <= (1+eps) ||A - A_k||_F^2. We also show that Frequent Directions cannot be adapted to a sparse version in an obvious way that retains the l original rows of the matrix, as opposed to a linear combination or sketch of the rows.

cs.DS↗